fall | strawberryplum

Kohlrabi & Apple Slaw

September 29, 2014 | posted by Sarah | 17 Comments

To be perfectly honest, kohlrabi is not a vegetable I have a lot of experience with. Sure, I’ve been seeing it at the farmer’s market for as long as I can remember, but its pale green, alien-ish appearance has always scared me away.

At some point, I had it in a restaurant and determined that’s its appearance is the only “weird” thing about it and its flavor couldn’t be more pedestrian–it tastes exactly like green cabbage you’ve been eating all your life. The advantage kohlrabi has over cabbage though is its intense crunch. When eaten raw, it’s amazingly crisp and refreshing, especially when paired with julienned apples and a zippy vinaigrette as it is in this slaw.

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Apple Walnut Cake with Maple-Brown Butter Glaze

September 25, 2014 | posted by Sarah | 5 Comments

If you recall, I spent last fall on the hunt for an apple cake recipe to call my own. I tried a French apple cake and served it with caramel sauce; I made another that was packed with apples and loaded with an obscene amount of crumb topping. And this September, as soon as the stone fruits and berries gave way to apples at the grocery store, I picked up right where I left off in my quest for apple cake perfection. This year I was thinking walnuts and cinnamon, butter and maple.

My persistence is paying off–this cake’s a keeper. It’s a lightly spiced tube cake, with a moist, tender crumb. You hit an apple chunk in most bites, a walnut in every other. All of that goodness is sealed in with a maple and brown butter glaze that is the literal and figurative icing on the cake. It’s decadent but homey, easy yet impressive, and definitely a cake I’ll make over and over.

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Roasted Chicken with Lemon, Caper & Parsley Sauce

September 19, 2014 | posted by Sarah | 3 Comments

Ever since we entered September, all I’ve wanted to do is lie in bed, wrapped up in a quilt with the breeze blowing through my open window, and read. Well, that and gorge on comfort foods (ahem, see that time I baked and ate way, way too many chocolate cookies).

My latest addition to my fall comfort food repertoire was these roasted chicken thighs. I baked the chicken with sliced red potatoes and made a 2-minute pan sauce with capers, lemon, parsley, and a few dots of butter. It ended up being exactly what I was looking for–minimal effort with big comfort food results and just the sort of thing I’d happily eat any night of the week.

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Zucchini Chèvre Soup with Basil-Mint Croutons

September 12, 2014 | posted by Sarah | 1 Comment

It feels like I did little more than blink and somehow summer came, went, and we’re back to the sort of days that are just meant for soup. Cloudy and drizzly outside always translates to chopping and stirring inside. It’s time to get back into my kitchen and back into my soup game.

This is a really simple zucchini soup that’s swirled with creamy goat cheese. Crunchy baguette croutons, smeared with fresh basil and mint oil, garnish the soup and distinguish one bite from the next. It’s a celebration of late summer produce, with a good dose of fall comfort.

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Plum Pecan Streusel Coffee Cake

September 2, 2014 | posted by Sarah | 1 Comment

When I’m driving home from work at the end of the night, I always find myself doing a mental inventory of my fridge. What little bits and pieces do I have on hand that can be thrown together? What can I come up with for dinner without buying any new ingredients?

This is what I was exhaustedly doing this past Saturday. It had been a late one so I wasn’t really thinking dinner or even a midnight snack. My head and belly were already on to Sunday brunch and, sadly, all I could picture in the refrigerator was a carton of questionably old yogurt, a couple of stale bread ends, and a few fuzzy strawberries. Ugh. Then panic really set in when I remembered I had scooped up the last of the coffee that morning. What good is a Sunday morning if you don’t get to linger over coffee with a decent breakfast?

So that’s why I found myself at the 24-hour grocer at 1:30 am, wandering bleary-eyed through the aisles, concocting my Sunday morning breakfast plan. I picked up a bag of plums, sour cream, pecans, and coffee, then went home and slept hard, dreaming of the plum coffee cake I’d make in the morning.

Thankfully, the coffee cake hit all the notes I was hoping it would and was totally worth subjecting myself to the other oddballs that do their grocery shopping in the middle of the night. The wedges of plum baked into the top are juicy and sing “summer’s not over yet” while the tender cinnamon-spiced cake warms you against the like-it-or-not fall briskness that has crept in to the mornings. And, of course, the pecan streusel. It’s the streusel that’ll having you reaching for your second (third?) piece.

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