Winter

Seriously folks what is with all the bad weather in the U.S.? When I'm tooling around on Facebook I feel like I've been living everyone's bad weather, including my own. So much snow everywhere. Let's hope Spring comes a little early this year. All these gloomy days means the slow cooker has been earning its keep. This Pulled Pork Chile Verde has been something I've been working on. But today it was perfect and that's why I'm sharing it with you.

My goals for this recipe were straightforward. I wanted a dish that makes enough food for several meals, reheats well, lower in calories and a version even picky eater kids would eat and love. All were accomplished!

In regards to meal times, my older son is easier to please than my younger one. Let's just say I have a real critic when it comes to what he wants to or will eat. But he loved this. I purposefully made it mild enough so the kids would enjoy it. You can do the same and add hot sauce to get the heat you prefer or use a spicier sauce to begin with.

I have gone on and on here about how much I love mashed potatoes (one of my fave recipes). Who doesn't really? However, I do consider them "special occasion" food with their copious amounts of butter, cheese and cream. 

The rest of the time I often just puree cauliflower for a "faux" mashed potato fix and don't add much of anything, it doesn't need it. Kind of like this Winter Root Vegetable Puree, it has so much flavor from the veggies themselves. I love, love root veggies more than one can imagine, I'm not even sure where it came from. I didn't grow up eating this stuff. But geez it's such a yummy, low-calorie way to enjoy what your brain thinks is mashed potatoes. It totally satisfies my urge for that starch side dish.

One of the root vegetables I used was celery root. Have you ever used it or seen one? They are pretty ugly and look challenging to cut..but they're not. They peel easily with a knife and are available at almost every market. Try adding it to soup, it's delicious.

I love mushrooms for their flavor, texture, and meatiness. It's almost odd to say so, but mushrooms do have a texture and deep flavor that reminds me of meat. One of my favorite comfort foods is a bowl of mushroom soup. For me it's just as satisfying as a bowl of chili. Like little sponges, mushrooms easily take on the flavors of other ingredients that they cook with. Sautéing them in garlic or onions makes them especially wonderfully robust. This soup uses cremini mushrooms, the brown button type, and dried porcini mushrooms, which have an intense almost nutty flavor. This soup has a lot of good going for it.

Not surprisingly, there are hundreds of varieties of mushrooms, but surprisingly the ones that we buy in grocery stores are almost all the same. White button, cremini, and portobello are all forms of the common mushroom. All our supermarket mushrooms are cultivated, grown on inoculated logs in mushroom farms. The most popular, button mushrooms, are white as a result of mutation. But the common mushroom is typically brown, such as cremini, or baby bella as they are marketed. When they are large and mature, they are sold as portobello mushrooms. All of these mushrooms are great in the kitchen, but each one has its best use. Portobellos, for example are exceptional when grilled and can be eaten like a burger. Cremini, with their full flavor yet tender size, are perfect for soups.

I love Orange Marmalade—the sweet jam accented by the slightly bitter bits of rind is the perfect topping for buttered toast. My brother Brad used to keep me in a good supply of his tart homemade version, but now that he’s traded his orange grove in for a pear orchard, I’ve found myself wanting, and I set out to make my own.

I have a Morro Blood Orange tree in my garden, and I have made blood orange marmalade before. Of course I can’t remember how. So I looked at all sorts of recipes, and gee whiz, what a pain! Some call for boiling halved oranges, then soaking, then chopping. Some call for removing the peel with a peeler, then cutting away all the pith, then slicing the denuded oranges and then finally cooking—but I was looking at roughly 6 pounds of juicy fruit. I finally found one that seemed good: juice the oranges, thinly slice the peels—that I can handle, but then it called for wrapping all the seeds and membranes in 4 layers of cheesecloth and cooking the bundle along with the juice—forget it.