During my family’s visit, we cooked a delicious fall feast one night. I had never cooked rack of lamb, acorn squash, or butternut squash soup before, so a lot of the prep was new to me. All of the dishes turned out to be super easy!

Here is how the prep work leading up to dinner went:

• Turn on oven to 350.
• Cut acorn squash in half, seed, and place cut-side down in casserole dish with about 1 inch of water. Set timer for 30 min and put in oven.
• Run zucchini and yellow squash through food processor to slice. Sprinkle liberally with salt and let sit.
• Start a large skillet on low-medium heat with several (3 or 4) tablespoons of butter. Chop an onion and toss it in. Look in fridge for fresh garlic (none there); pull roasted head of garlic out of leftover roasted chicken from yesterday, pluck out the garlic cloves and add to pan. Leave to caramelize.
• Rinse meat and season both sides with salt and pepper.  Leave on counter so it can come to room temp before cooking. (Note: this may be against food safety recommendations, but I prefer to cook my meat from room temp.) I did not trim any fat or meat off the chops to make them into lollipop style – it seemed like a waste of meat and flavorful good fat.
• Peel, seed and chop butternut squash.

…Pour a glass of wine! I had to wait about 20 min for everything to cook, stir the onions occassionally, and think about dessert…

I got to chatting with my mom and suddenly everything was ready for the next steps!

• Put the butternut squash in the pan with the onions and garlic and add 6 cups of frozen homemade chicken stock (I meant to defrost it but forgot), put the lid on the pan and turn up to melt stock, then bring to boil gently.
• Take out the acorn squash, flip them over, fill each with about 1 tablespoon butter, 1 teaspoon muscovado, and sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper. Put back in the oven.
• Skim butternut squash soup if needed after chicken stock has come to a boil.
• Rinse the zucchini and yellow squash and lay on a towel to dry.

The final cooking and pulling things together was all done nearly simultaneously, alternately flipping, stirring, and blending as needed:

• Heat a skillet on medium and add 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter. When the skillet is heated through, add the lamb. Cook 5 min each side using the timer. I had 2 racks, or perhaps one rack cut in half? Each was about 5 by 6 inches. As each is finished cooking, place on a plate covered with foil to rest.
• Melt about 2 tablespoons butter in stainless steel wok. Add zucchini and cook on medium until cooked through. This took over 10 minutes – perhaps because there were 5 squash total and the wok was deep.
• Use hand blender to puree butternut squash soup.
• Repeat (Flip rack, stir zucchini, puree some more… Put second rack in pan, stir zucchini, puree some more…)

Finally, the soup was blended, the zucchini was cooked through, and the acorn squash was ready to come out of the oven. At the last moment, I added sour cream and mustard to the pan the lamb had been cooked in, and stirred it on medium heat for about 2 minutes to create a delicious sauce.

Butternut squash with lots of pepper and a spoonful of sourcream

Closeup of the acorn squash - these were divine!

Zucchini and yellow squash, a happy and colorful pairing

Rack of lamb, sliced into chops

Everything was delicious, with just a bit of zucchini and soup leftover. After clearing the plates and letting everyone rest for a bit, I pulled together a quick dessert. But that will have to be a different post.  In all, it was a fine fall feast!

Notes on ingredients for this meal:

Acorn, butternut, zucchini, and yellow squash were all local organic, purchased at the Saturday Austin Farmers Market. I’ll get better about getting vendor names to give them credit.
Rack of lamb is organic and grass-fed, also from the Farmer’s Market.
Muscovado is an unrefined sugar with a delicious flavor that I like to use in place of brown sugar. It should still be used in moderation, but is more of a whole food than commerical brown sugar.
The stick and a half of butter used on this meal was Organic Valley Pasture Butter
I prefer pink HimalaSalt in the grinder because of the flavor and the variety of the grind – some bits crunchy, others so small they dissolve
I’ll post about making homemade Chicken Stock on another day!

Recipe credits:

Acorn Squash – mom’s recipe
Butternut Squash Soup – adapted from Courtney’s vegan version
Zucchini – Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon
Rack of Lamb – adapted from Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon

Wow, I’ve been gone a while!  I had a nice long week of vacation with my mom, sister, and niece, who happens to be the cutest thing in the world! Despite my attempts to catch her smiling expressions, all my photos came out blurry and I’ve determined I need a faster shutter speed (?) and better lighting (?) to catch an almost-two-year-old in motion. She left me several surprises to discover today, in the form of sticky fingerprints, missing tv remotes, and this half-eaten apple perched in the step of my elliptical trainer. I didn’t realize a kid could carry around and eat a whole apple at her age, but I guess she has her front teeth so why not!?

My sister was (and still is) my inspiration to adopt a traditional approach to nutrition, to know where my food is coming from, and to pay attention to how I am fueling my body.  When we spend a week together, we spend the majority of our time talking about food, cooking, eating, and shopping for nutritious local whole organic foods. This week I’ll post about the way we snacked, the meals we prepared, our shopping expeditions, and our picnic lunch.

Today’s delicious semi-local and very nutritious breakfast:

• Sprouted sourdough toast with pasture butter
• Three local pastured eggs, scrambled in butter, and topped with yummy local artisan goat cheese – the Fiesta flavor is so good on scrambled eggs! (Farmers Market vendor: Maid in the Shade)
• 2 Cod Liver Oil / Butter Oil blend capsules from Green Pasture’s
• Sliced local cucumber with sea salt
• Fresh, whole, raw milk from Sand Creek Farm
• mug of Earl Grey with local Round Rock Honey and a splash of milk

The mug has a quote from Paper Source that I love: Do Something Creative Every Day

Time for a refill!

I love muffins and have been avoiding doing any baking because of the need to soak the flour. I had not found a recipe I wanted to try, and was not sure soaking would yield the texture of a fluffy but heavy muffin.  (What does soaking flour mean?)  Soaking flour overnight on a workday means that I usually forget about my batter in the morning, so I decided to try the recipe from Nourishing Traditions the weekend before last.

Start with:

3 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups yogurt

– soak overnight at room temperature–

This is what the batter looked like the night before.

The next morning I preheated the oven to 325, stirred in the remaining ingredients, and made muffins.

Remaining ingredients:

2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 cup maple syrup
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla
3 tbs melted butter

They smelled SO good. They have to cook for 1 hour, as per the recipe. So for the last half hour, they were smelling yummmmmmy.  But the stupid teasing muffins came out like little hockey pucks!  John and I were throwing them at each other, but they really hurt so we had to stop. I’m not sure what I did wrong with this recipe. Unfortunately, they didn’t taste very good either.  They just tasted like every other soaked recipe I have made with whole wheat flour and yogurt – toasty, mildly tart, and yogurty.  They went into the trashcan, all 24 of them.

I was going to set out to find another soaked flour muffin recipe, but at the same time, I decided to try to avoid wheat for a while. My skin has been itchy (sorry that’s a little gross in the middle of a muffin post), but really, it has. So I’m dodging all forms of wheat for about a month, maybe longer, to see if I have an intolerance. Enter a new discovery:  coconut flour.  I will save my “all hail the holy coconut” post for another day, but I love those things – shredded coconut, toasted coconut, coconut oil, milk, water, and now flour. It’s a miracle fruit. I should consider a way to pay homage. Perhaps a creative Halloween costume.

Two pints of huge fresh organic blueberries and a bag of coconut flour, and I was set to make these yummy muffins by Ann Marie at Cheeseslave. The recipe seems perfect, but I don’t think I followed it accurately. These muffins came out better than the hockey pucks, but had a bit of an eggy texture. They were really blue, and didn’t want to come out of the muffin cups despite their oiliness. I’m pretty sure I just used too many blueberries!

You can see this little muffin even has a bit of a grimace, sort of like a muffin jack-o-lantern.  These guys weren’t very happy.  Don’t get me wrong, I still ate them all, scraping the crumbly bits out of their muffin papers. I just wished mine had turned out as well as Ann Marie’s. (I’ll try again, the flavor was divine! Just … following the recipe exactly the next time around!)

A few days after I ran out of blueberry muffins, I was inspired by Kimi’s introduction to fall, Spiced Apple Muffins.  These muffins came out perfect!! I made a single batch of 10 and they were gone within 24 hours. So I went ahead and made a double batch for the second run – also perfect! I eat these gently warmed and spread with pasture butter. The butter is not needed, but I’m always looking for ways to get even more (and more and more!) butter into my diet. These muffins were great for a road trip I took on Saturday. I put them in the dash of the car so they were nice and warm when we wanted a snack!

Eight little muffins left from the twenty. I’ve been trying to resist eating the remainder of them in one sitting. I’m not sure if there would be any digestive effects from overindulging in coconut flour.

Just a little crock (of butter). I took this on my road trip, and now have refilled it and brought it to the office so I always have butter on hand.