Garlicky Green Beans with Almonds & Cranberries

I bring to you today the simplest side dish. Crisp steamed whole green beans tossed in garlicky olive oil, toasted almonds, and sweet yet tart cranberries.

Green beans are pretty standard fare, and almost everyone has their own version of a green bean dish for the holidays. Growing up, we always had traditional Green Bean Casserole with any turkey dinner, but in my older years I've really come to shy away from that gloppy dish and the usual canned ingredients that go into it. There are versions of whole food Green Bean Casserole out there, I just haven't had the interest to try them; I like green beans in their more pure form.

For the last few years, I've been in charge of green beans for our family Thanksgiving dinner. I brought them one year a while back, and after Matt's cousin ate two plates full and insisted on bringing home the leftovers, I was charged with forever bringing them again. I take that as a compliment? I've been making different versions of them for a while, but this one seems to be a real favorite. It has just enough color and flavor to feel like the holidays, but can be whipped together quickly and doesn't feel heavy like a Green Bean Casserole. It's festive, but healthy.

And of course, while I usually make them at Thanksgiving and Christmas, they by no means have to be served only at the holidays. I mean, green beans. Why not jazz them up for any time of year?

Garlicky Green Beans with Almonds and Cranberries

Serves 6-10 as a side dish

Ingredients
2 pounds frozen whole green beans (i.e., two 16-oz. bags)
2 tsp. sea salt
3 Tbsp. olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup raw sliced almonds
1/2 cup dried, unsweetened cranberries*
Salt & pepper to taste

In a large pot, place green beans, sea salt and a few tablespoons of water. Steam over medium heat until beans are tender yet still crisp. Drain and set aside. Do not overcook!

Meanwhile, heat a saucepan over medium low heat. Add oil and garlic, and cook just until fragrant (do not brown garlic). Add the almonds, and continue cooking for 3-4 minutes until the almonds are slightly toasted. Add the cooked green beans and toss to coat.

Finally, take off the heat and stir in the cranberries. Taste for seasoning and add salt & pepper to taste.

*Note: unsweetened cranberries can be tricky to find, but are so much better and healthier than sweetened versions like Craisins. I find mine in the raw nuts section of the grocery store, but you can also buy them online.

Carrot Ginger Soup

It's been a really fun and festive weekend, filled with costumes, parties and of course treats. My brother- and sister-in-law throw an annual Trick or Treat party at their house, which happened on Friday. Our town always does trick-or-treat the day before Halloween because the fire department hosts a big parade on Halloween day.

I love the Trick or Treat party because it makes Halloween feel like a real event. We eat, we drink, we sit by a fire in the front yard, and we tour the rest of the neighborhood to see all the festivities. And their neighborhood takes it very seriously. The whole area is filled with decorations, haunted houses you can walk through, spooky pumpkin patches, music, smoke machines, fog horns, lights - you name it. Missy and Corey's contribution to the fun is a Halloween Photo Booth, where the kids can get their pictures taken in their costumes. The theme changes every year, and this year was a "Forbidden Forest". They are so artistic - I love how creative the photo booth is!

Riker wanted to be Spiderman, and Carson and our niece Lianna were "Mary Had a Little Lamb." I can't stand how cute they all are.

P.S. If you're looking for ways to curb the insane amount of candy eating that goes on around Halloween, we use the "Switch Witch". Riker is allowed to eat as much candy as he wants on trick-or-treat day, but then when he goes to bed, he leaves the candy for the Switch Witch, who takes the candy and leaves him a small present instead. It works great. I will say that we didn't even need to do it this year, because he only wanted to go to about 5 houses before calling it quits. No complaints here! :)

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Since trick-or-treat happened on Friday, we were free to do some home celebrating on Saturday. Dinner, a family walk, and scary movies on the couch sounded perfect. I knew that I would want to make a mostly healthy dinner on Halloween since we'd be eating lots of snacks and treats at the party on Friday, so I had planned to make a Carrot Ginger Soup (healthy, yet festively orange) and see if I could draw some spiderwebs on them with sour cream. I had never tried it before, but it actually worked pretty well!

And bonus, I didn't even have to buy carrots. Matt pulled a huge bunch of them out of the garden yesterday, and they tasted sweeter and fresher than any carrots I could've bought. Having a fall garden is awesome.

I served the soup with "Spider Pizzas" that I made on Ezekiel English muffins with Muir Glen Organic tomato sauce (my homemade sauce, which I keep in the freezer, is just too thin for pizza), Organic Valley mozzarella cheese and sliced up black olives. These are so fun and always a hit.

I'd say we might just have our annual Halloween dinner figured out. And of course this soup does not have to wait for Halloween night. It's incredibly easy to make, really budget friendly (only a few inexpensive ingredients), healthy, and has great flavor. It's smooth, sweet, a bit spicy from the ginger and has a nice herby finish. I ate a bowl of it for lunch today with a kale salad on the side, and I'm sure it would be a good dipper for a grilled cheese. It's a good basic fall/winter soup, especially when you have a bunch of carrots to use up.

 

Carrot Ginger Soup

Serves 4-6 as a meal

Adapted from this recipe

Ingredients

2 Tbsp. ghee (can substitute butter or olive oil)

1 yellow onion, chopped

6 cups vegetable broth (I use Organic Better Than Bouillon) 

2 pounds carrots, peeled and cut in large chunks

2 Tbsp. freshly grated ginger

1/2 cup half & half

1 Tbsp. sea salt

1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

1 tsp. ground ginger

1 tsp. dried thyme

Sour cream (optional)

In a large pot over medium high heat, add ghee or butter. When melted, add onions and cook until translucent. Add broth, carrots, and ginger. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until carrots are tender - about 20 minutes.

Once carrots are cooked, use an immersion blender to blend the soup until smooth. (If you don't have an immersion blender, transfer the soup to a blender and blend until smooth, then return to the pot). Add the half & half, salt, pepper, ground ginger and thyme. Stir until combined, and simmer 3-5 minutes more.

Serve with a dollop of sour cream, or make sour cream spiderwebs:

Sour Cream Spiderwebs

To make the spiderwebs, put about 1/4 cup sour cream into a Ziploc bag, then snip the corner. Draw a small circle in the center of the bowl, then a larger circle around that. Draw 5 diagonal lines across the circles. Then use a butter knife to pull sour cream from the center outward, all around the circle, until a "web" forms.

Fall Sangria

This past weekend we had our annual Fall Fest. I'm pretty sure fall is my favorite season, and this party is definitely one of my favorite nights of the year.

Not only do I love decorating the house with all things rustic and pumpkin, cooking up a storm of seasonal foods, lighting candles to make the house feel cozy, and putting on a new sweater and tall brown boots for the evening. What I really love is that it gets all our friends together after a few months of post-summer semi-hibernation. It's been a while since we've all gotten together as a group. And even longer since we all got together as adults only. We all love spending time with each others' children of course, but sometimes you just need to sip on a cocktail and nibble on a crostini chatting with your friends - or maybe even dancing in the living room to 90s hip hop? - without a toddler tugging at your pant leg.

While the event is not a "cocktail party" per se since the only real cocktail I serve is sangria, I do all the food cocktail party style. It encourages mingling rather than sitting and eating, makes the night feel a little different and special, and bonus - I get to make lots of fun little hors' d'ouvres.

There are a few must-haves, like the Jalapeno Corn Dip that everyone seems to love, and then there are new recipes I try every year. It's a learning experience figuring out what things go really fast and what things people don't seem to care for, so I keep a list of the menu each year with notes on each item, so next year I can look back and make adjustments based on what worked well and what didn't.

Among the favorites this year were the French Onion Soup Crostini, cheese fondue, these Spinach Artichoke Bites, and my sister's Blueberry & Peach Brie Bites. Matt also made homemade pretzels filled with home-smoked brisket and his spicy pickled garden peppers, which seemed to go over pretty well too.

The Butternut Squash Bruschetta (based on this recipe by Food Network's GZ) held much promise, but were a bit of a letdown. The filling tasted great when it was warm, but it got cold quickly and lost its luster. Maybe it's just me, but cold squash isn't very appetizing. I'd probably only make this again for a small dinner party of 6-8 people, where it would get eaten quickly while still warm.

I also made mini salad cups filled with mesclun greens, cranberries and candied walnuts because I felt the table needed something green amongst the sea of cheeses and breads. The salads looked nice, but only a few people ate them. People seemed to prefer grabbing finger foods as they walked by the table vs. eating something with a fork while balancing a drink in the other hand.

My sisters and a few close friends also brought some desserts and bar snacks, as well as garlic pull-apart bread, deviled eggs decorated as pumpkins, and fall-themed Jell-O shots. I don't like people to feel like they have to bring something to a party, but I'm not afraid to accept a dish from my family and bestest of friends - it's a big help.

Drinks included a plethora of pumpkin beers, of course, as well as a few new Baratta homebrews. Matt brewed a Black IPA with a ton of hops grown at our friend Forrest's house, as well as a Farmhouse Hard Cider. I'm not usually a fan of ciders, but the farmhouse yeast he used kept it tart and drinkable versus overly sweet. I actually loved it and ended up drinking a few glasses. 

My contribution to the libations was a Fall Sangria. Like the ciders, I'm not a big fan of most "fall sangrias". Most of the recipes I find call for very sweet ingredients like caramel vodka, ginger ale or Sprite, juice, and then sugar, honey and other sweeteners on top of all that. To me that spells a big fat ick. Last year I made a Caramel Apple Pie Punch that went mostly untouched because of the sweetness level, so this year I wanted to tone it way back and just serve a drink that offered the subtle flavors of fall without tasting like a dessert.

If you're looking for a less sweet but still festive cocktail or sangria this fall, I have the solution for you.

Fall Sangria

Ingredients
2 apples, sliced thin (I used Red Delicious)
2 pears, sliced thin
Juice of one lemon
1 Tbsp. honey
1 cup bourbon or whiskey
3 cups apple cider
2 bottles dry white wine (I used pinot grigio), chilled

Place apples and pears in a large bowl or pitcher, and squeeze the lemon juice over top of the fruit. Add honey, whiskey and apple cider. Stir to combine, cover and refrigerate for at least 2-3 hours (overnight is best). When ready to serve, add white wine and stir to combine.

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Fall, I'm so glad you're here.

(Special thanks to my brother-in-law Corey Howell for taking all the photos of the evening!)

Irish Recipe Roundup

So, next week is St. Patty's Day? I kind of totally forgot about it until a friend reminded me that Saturday was the annual Seaside St. Patrick's Day parade. Which on the one hand made me kind of sad because I used to love St. Patty's; we would go out with a huge group of friends all dressed in green, starting the festivities about 10 am and going all day on the boardwalk. But on the other hand, at the ripe age of 32 I really can't even imagine going out at 10 am and just the thought of the hangover that would surely follow (I can't hang for more than 2 glasses of wine these days) is enough to make me break out in a cold sweat. So, I guess I'm not really all that sad.

Matt was actually away snowboarding this weekend at a bachelor party, so my St. Patty's weekend consisted of baby & bridal shower planning, taking my little guy to see his first play (Puss In Boots, which he loved) and out to dinner, some backyard snow playing, and generally just hanging out with my babies and the family. Low key is all good with me.

BUT. Just because we don't do the all-day parade parties anymore doesn't mean we can't enjoy a Guinness or glass of good whiskey and a solid Irish meal. Clearly I myself won't be partaking in any corned beef & cabbage rituals, but Matt always picks some up at the butcher for him and Riker, and I usually whip up something green along with an Irish soda bread. Baked fish & chips also sometimes makes an appearance, since it's one of the things we ate the most when we went to Ireland a few years back and I love it.

If you're looking for a few ideas for your St. Patty's Day/week, here are a few of my favorites. I will say that my food philosophy has changed quite a bit in recent years as I learn more about food additives, pesticides, refining processes and the like, so these days I don't do much baking with refined ingredients - but you could always substitute coconut sugar for white sugar (it's a 1:1 ratio) and whole wheat flour for white flour. Use the recipes as-is or tweak to fit your life!

In order of courses:

Old Fashioned (Fluffy) Irish Soda Bread

Orange Bourbon Marmalade

Spaghetti with Caramelized Onions, Kale and Garlic 

(totally not Irish, but it's green so I sometimes make it anyway on St. Patty's)

Guinness Brownies with Irish Buttercream Frosting

If you have any good St. Patty's recipes, especially vegetarian ones, leave 'em in the comments!