My friends, I am deep down the rabbit hole of garden planning and recipe research and can’t bring myself to write an in-depth post this week. Instead I will offer you a handful of the meals we’ve enjoyed: a watermelon, mint, and feta salad which needs no real recipe; a spinach mint dip, with equal parts plain yogurt and spinach and smaller parts dried mint and walnuts; and Kulajda, a Czech mushroom soup we had with poached eggs. The first two especially have been helping with our mint problem!
Thus far, this has not been a recipe blog. However, this week I rediscovered a recipe I came up with in elementary school, made it for… probably the first time since writing it down, and found to my great delight that little Cassandra had excellent taste, so it seems only right to share! Behold, Random Geek Child’s first recipe, right in time for the autumn weather finally hitting the Midwest.
Ingredients:
2 sweet potatoes
2 tbsp butter
2 cups cranberries
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/8 cup orange juice
1/4 tsp allspice
1 tsp cinnamon
Walnuts, optional (Little Cassandra didn’t specify a quantity of these, so measure with your heart)
Method:
1) Halve the sweet potatoes and microwave on HIGH for 3 minutes.
2) Add butter to a glass baking dish (of appropriate surface area for your potato halves), put the dish in the oven and preheat to 350°F.
3) Add the cranberries, brown sugar, allspice, and orange juice to a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then lower heat to medium and simmer for 15 minutes.
4) When the oven reaches temperature, add the cinnamon followed by the potato halves – cut side down – to the baking dish and bake for 20 minutes.
5) Serve the sweet potatoes with the cranberry sauce and, if you’re using them, walnuts.
Recipe serves 4. As a bonus, I’ve found the cinnamon butter left in the pan goes well with a sliced apple for dessert! Happy autumn, Northern Hemisphere.