This recipe was given to me years ago by a good friend. Unfortunately, we’ve fallen out of touch. Still, I remember her each year when I make this. It’s become a Thanksgiving staple. Here is the recipe in its original form…

Ingredients
One 18 ounce can sweet potatoes, drained
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon margarine or unsalted butter
1/4-1/2 cup miniature marshmallow (not colored)
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
One 8 3/4 ounce can peach slices

Directions

• Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
• In one bowl, stir ginger into brown sugar.
• Cut the butter up into tiny little squares on a separate plate.
• Drain and slice sweet potatoes into their own bowl.
• Drain and place peaches into yet another bowl.
• In a 1 quart casserole dish, layer half the potatoes, half the brown sugar mixture, and half the peaches.
• Repeat layering to use up remaining ingredients.
• Bake uncovered in 375 degree oven. Spoon liquid from bottom of dish over top of potatoes once or twice during cooking. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until potatoes are glazed.

To start with, I usually double this recipe into a 2 quart dish and use an equivalent amount of fresh boiled sweet potatoes cut into chunks. I also use Splenda brown in lieu of regular brown sugar. This year, I might try Whey Low Gold. Typically, I can find a can of peaches with a Splenda base instead of heavy syrup. Fresh sliced peaches also work. I never use the marshmallow option. In spite of them still being in the list of ingredients… what to do with them has disappeared from my archives. I assume you would just throw the marshmallows on top during the last 5 minutes of cooking. Honestly, though, I think marshmallows would just wreck the unique and subtle peachy ginger taste.   This year, I also may try an earlier suggestion from NanaLinda to swap out a portion of sweet potatoes with butternut squash.

This recipe is not in my SparkRecipes database yet. It is in my RecipeZaar repertoire though. I just put in a request to have it made public. Check back later for the URL! I will also be creating my own Thanksgiving menu on there and will make that URL public. In the meantime, here are 220 other public Thanksgiving menus on RecipeZaar. Remember to sort by rating. THESE ARE FULL THANKSGIVING MENUS… not individual recipes. If you don’t already have a set of favorites, have a look through these. It may save you immeasurable amounts of time.

The sweet roasty goodness of Autumn veggies. Yum!

Ingredients
3.5 cups cleaned and cut acorn squash, raw
1/2 cup onions, chopped
1 large portabella mushroom cap, sliced
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon pumpkin seed oil
morton lite salt and fresh ground pepper, to taste

Directions

• Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
• In a medium bowl, toss squash, onions, and mushrooms with salt, pepper, and olive oil.
• Place into shallow roasting dish or on baking sheet. Roast in oven for 25 to 30 minutes, until squash is tender and sweet.
• Drizzle with the pumpkin seed oil.  That’s it!!!!  Enjoy.

This is the ultimate comfort food. Sweet, healthy, and simple! A little bit of fiber, the benefits of olive oil, and just a hint of protein. Squash is a veggie that is a little higher in carbs, but you’re clocking in just 12g or so per serving with this fine dish.

As you read above, I bought the pumpkin seed oil at Wegmans. You should be able to find it in the same section as olive oil in your grocery store or among the gourmet foods.  If you’re lucky, you can access a Wegmans and buy some pre-prepped acorn squash.  This allowed me to toss this together in record time.

Could I earn money as a Pumpkin Squeezer?

Even if you can’t get to a Wegmans, you can click those links to see the nutritional stats of each ingredient.

The original recipe called for shallots.  Alas, my shallots went off before I had a chance to use them.  No matter.  I threw in some regular white onion, and I added the sliced portabella cap, while I was at it.  You can add just about any vegetables you want.  Beets… carrots… potatoes… other kinds of squash.  Go ahead and clean out the veggie drawer.  Make sure the vegetables aren’t toooo overcrowded.  If you increase the overall amount of the vegetables, you might want to add a bit more olive oil.  (I don’t need to remind you to take into account the nutritional stats of any changes you make, right?  Especially potatoes will up the carbs.)

I love all kinds of roasted Autumn root vegetables, but the acorn squash was surprisingly sweet and warmed me up on a particularly chilly Maryland night.  I think you will love it, too.  The pumpkin seed oil added a lovely and tasty touch, but if you can’t find it… don’t let that stop you.  I find a shallow baking dish easier to deal with than a lined baking sheet.  Even with the oil, they still kind of stick.

Squarshies!

Find this recipe in my SparkRecipes recipe box.

Broked Eggs Florentine

As I was flipping through What’s Up? Annapolis magazine, I ran across a recipe for Baked Eggs Florentine.  I happened to have all the ingredients here, for once, so I decided to have this for lunch.

Ingredients
2 large fresh eggs
1/2 cup fresh spinach
1/2 cup chopped white onions
1 tsp minced garlic
1/2 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon parmesan cheese, shredded
salt and pepper, to taste

Directions

• Preheat oven to 425 degrees and place a ramekin or small casserole dish in the oven to preheat at the same time.
• While oven and ramekin are preheating, saute onion and minced garlic in olive oil over medium high heat in a pan for about 2 minutes. Add spinach and toss in pan for about 2 additional minutes.
• Remove ramekin from oven, spray with a little non-stick spray, and crack two eggs into it. Top with sauteed vegetables. Place dish back in oven and bake until the whites are fully cooked and yolks are still runny (or however you desire them) about 7 – 10 minutes.
• Remove from oven and finish with a little parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper. Allow eggs to sit a moment before serving, as they’re pretty hot.

Sssssmoky saute.

Ready to go into the oven.

In the magazine, there is no mention of spraying the ramekin with non-stick spray, but I should have done this anyway.  I thought perhaps the olive oil would provide enough of a barrier to keep the eggs from baking to the dish, but in the end it stuck a little more than I’d like.  Nevertheless, this was still quite delectable.

It was a lovely surprise to have my husband home early for lunch… just around brunch time, in fact.  I doubled the saute ingredients and used the remaining half, along with some Southwestern style Eggbeaters, to make a nice omelet for him.   He prefers his eggs scrambly.

Spontaneous Florentine Omelet

That's Eeyore's arse.

While I was looking to see if this recipe was typed out online somewhere, I came across a video of the chef, William Paine, actually making his signature dish.  A couple of things he says in the video are slightly different from the printed version of the recipe.  I imagine this is probably because the printed version is more suitable to make at home.

In the video, he puts the oven to 450 degrees.  In the article, he says 425.  He only bakes them for about 3 minutes, while the printed version states 7 to 10.  He also is very good at tossing things around in the pan, while I kludged along with my spatula.  I also broke one of the yolks at cracking time, but that didn’t wreck this dish at all.  I might just keep one whole and crack one on purpose the next time.  And FINALLY, he uses non-stick spray in the video.  Curses!

Find this recipe in my SparkRecipes recipe box.

The pumpkin has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Touch of Autumn.

Ingredients
7 large egg yolks
2 large eggs
1/4 cup sugar free maple maltitol based syrup
1/4 cup erythritol
1/2 cup Whey Low
2 Tbsp Splenda Brown
2/3 cup carrot juice
1 cup VERY finely chopped carrots
1/4 cup butter
3 tablespoons heavy cream

Directions

• In medium (non-reactive) bowl, whisk yolks and whole eggs until combined.
• Add erythritol, Whey Low, Splenda Brown, and maltitol syrup.  Once again, whisk until combined.
• Add carrot juice and a pinch of salt.  Whisk, whisk, whisk-a-go-go.
• Put mixture in (non-reactive) pan. Cut butter into 4 pieces, and add to pan. Cook over medium to low heat stirring CONSTANTLY with a wooden spoon until mixture thickens into a thin sauce-like consistency.

Combining eggs, carrots, juice, and a veritable cocktail of sweeteners.

The recipe says to stir constantly, and it means CONSTANTLY! There is a very fine line here between creating a sauce and creating sweet scrambled eggs with carrots… at least the way I did it.  Maybe the next few paragraphs will allow me to blame something besides my own ineptitude.

I had a lot of curiosity to satisfy by the time I was done with this recipe.  First of all, what in blazes is a curd?   Indeed, it’s a byproduct of cheesemaking, but according to Wikipedia…

“The word can also refer to a non-dairy substance of similar appearance or consistency, though in these cases a modifier or the word curdled is generally used (e.g., bean curds, lemon curd, or curdled eggs).”

Silly me.  I know what curdled eggs are.  Nevertheless, I pulled up one or two more definitions to satisfy my obsessive curiosity.  The Merriam-Webster dictionary says…

1 : to form curds; also : to congeal as if by forming curds [a scream curdled in her throat]

Ahhh… the plot thickens!  lolz.  See what I did there??  And I think curdled screaming is very Halloween appropriate, so we’ll leave that there.  Finally, dictionary.net says…

1. To change into curd; to cause to coagulate. “To curdle whites of eggs” –Boyle. [1913 Webster]
2. To congeal or thicken. [1913 Webster]

Ok, I’m more than satisfied.  Was it good for you, too?

That spoon should be stirring!@~

Alrighty.  Next course of action was to find out a little more about non-reactive pans and bowls.  I knew it had something to do with acid and metal, but my cookware is limited.  I went with what I had.  Turns out, I was ok with the non-stick pan.  Might be that the non-stick pan only worked because it’s cheap and all the non-stick coating has worn off.

Recipe Tips had this to say on the subject of non-reactive crap…

A pan or bowl made of non-porous material the does not alter or add a flavor to or change the color of a food being prepared. Stainless steel, glass, enamel, and glazed ceramic are examples of non-porous materials that do not adversely affect the taste and appearance of foods such tomatoes or citrus fruits that are high in acidic content and may react with absorb components of porous substances. [sic]

The jist of my research was:  Avoid aluminum.

Perhaps my noxious plastic storage container isn't ideal either.

Of course, the first thing I did with this was add it to Greek yogurt.  I like to make sweet snacks with Greek yogurt as the base, but I usually wind up adding an extra packet or two of sweetener to the concoction.  This was the first thing I ever added that required no enhancement.  It didn’t take much.  It is SUPER sweet.  You might opt to cut back on the sweeteners a bit, depending upon what you plan to do with it.  I never seem to remember that you need only 1/2 as much Splenda Brown as brown sugar called for in a recipe.  Not sure that had much of a bearing here, all told…

I might have to go ahead and make a low sugar version of the pumpkin bread featured in the original recipe, just so I can drizzle this on top!  So, I really don’t know what a serving size is.  I reckon I had about 4 cups when all was said and done… and I think I used about 1/8 cup on my Greek yogurt, if that.  If you can MODERATE the amount you use, this can be enjoyed as part of a reduced sugar / reduced carb program.  Having said that, Whey Low provided a large portion of the sweetener.  Whey Low claims to be low impact.  Nevertheless, it’s still a form of sugar.  Make of that what you will.  This was the first time I cooked with Whey Low.  It worked out pretty well, but I will still moderate my usage of the stuff.  I really wanted to wait until I found some Whey Low gold, but I gave up.  I should have ordered some from the good ole information superhighway when I first thought about it, but I was wrastlin’ with my inner moppet over that sugar issue.

Pathetic and lazy, I bought a Pumpkin Pal. What's with the teeth?

My husband has a link for everything!

Find this recipe in my SparkRecipes recipe box.
For the full-on real thing, visit Anatomy of a Dinner Party.

Don't they look INSANELY good, Georgene?

Last night, I wanted to use up some parsnips I had leftover from a much more substantial veggie roasting session. However, the oven was full with Cornish Hen, and I wanted to be lazy. I came up with a perfectly suitable stove top variation.

Ingredients
3 large parsnips, sliced
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt & fresh ground pepper, to taste
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons sugar free maple syrup

Directions

• In a small bowl, mix together the mustard, syrup, salt, and pepper to a smooth and even sauce.
• In a medium pan, saute the parsnips in the olive oil for 5-10 minutes until tender. Add fresh ground pepper, if desired.
• Add sauce to pan and continue to cook, stirring frequently, until parsnips are glazed to your satisfaction. About 5 min.

Fish shaped bowl not mandatory.

Parsnips are root vegetables similar to carrots but are lighter and have a more aromatic flavor. If you’d like to read more about them, Wikipedia has a good article on the topic.

How long you saute the parsnips is up to you. We like ours not quite crunchy but not mushy. If you have a preference, adjust the time accordingly. The longer you saute them, the softer they become.

All snuggled up in the pan.

I used Safeway brand sugar free pancake syrup, but just about any kind of syrup having some thickness to it should work. If you so desire, give honey or agave a try. Maltitol based sugar free syrups work great, and Smucker’s sugar free breakfast syrup would probably work fine. Perfectly Sweet has a wide array of sugar free syrups and what they call sugar free Bee-less Honey which is a fine honey replacement if you can tolerate maltitol.

If I do these the lazy way again, I will add some sliced carrots to the mix.  Carrots and parsnips go well together, as you might imagine.  The best, however, is to roast them in the oven with other Fall veggies such as beets.  Check back, as I plan to journal an all-out Autumn veggie roast very soon.  If you want something different and quick, though, this is a perfectly suitable recipe and a lovely alternative to the usual side fare.  This recipe put out 2 or 3 servings.  If you’re feeding a whole crew or want your servings bigger, just double up on the ingredients.

Shown here with a Wegman's stuffed Cornish Hen.

Find this recipe in my SparkRecipes recipe box.