Seasonal Sundays (Week 2) Mid January

An inside look at roasting vegetables, big pots of soup to banish the winter chills. Plus is anyone else stress baking again?

~ Skip Straight to the Good Stuff ~

Welcome to Seasonal Sundays ...

#NoWords #NoWords

About the Photo By Popular Request, a Little Insight into the Top Image:

We are stewards of land in the northern reaches of the Ozark Mountains, a wild place of timber and meadow, glade and holler, river and pond. During the winter months, we carefully burn the meadows, rejuvenating the vegetation that in turn encourages wildlife and a healthy, diverse ecosystem. One year, our "prescribed" burn in the Big Meadow got out of control. (Imagine contemplating whether to/how to breach a fire line to reach my now-husband last seen on the other side. Whew. He pulled up in the pickup, safe, in the nick of time.) The meadow had been cut for hay so burned off fast if furiously. But for hours, we fought the inexorable creep of fire circling the meadow and burning through packed leaf cover in the surrounding woods. The fire had n-o-t-h-i-n-g on the big fires of California, Colorado and the West but was frightening nonetheless. There was simply no stopping that slow-burning fire until dark and damp fell after sunset. The next summer, the Big Meadow produced a profusion of wildflowers never seen before ... nor since.

This week, the U.S. Capitol was obscured by the "smoke" of smoke grenades and tear gas. Will the summer bring wildflowers? Or will the fire continue to burn out of control, an inescapable crawl toward the demise of democracy?

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PICK ONE

Pick One is for those of us overwhelmed by life's unending choices. If that resonates, then check out this one recipe and then call it a day. It's one that I think could make the most difference, the one I hope will become a regular in your kitchen, as it is in mine.

• THE RECIPE Roasted Veggie Enchilada Casserole Layers of roasted vegetables, salsa verde, corn tortillas and fresh spinach.

Seasonal Showcase: Roasted Vegetables

• NEVER NEED A RECIPE AGAIN How to Roast Vegetables 22 Tips & a Master Recipe
• ANOTHER TAKE How to Eat More Vegetables

• THE RECIPE Roasted Green Beans with Rosemary & Walnuts Quickly roasted at high heat.
• ANOTHER TAKE Roasted Cauliflower The classic, including my tips and tricks.

• THE RECIPE Creamy Brussels Sprouts Gratin An appetizer with toothpicks? A forgiving side dish? Yes and yes.
• ANOTHER TAKE Bodacious Brussels Sprouts Prep ahead of time, then finish just before serving.

• THE RECIPE Roasted Butternut Squash & Apple Unexpected layers of flavor and color, a very pretty dish.
• ANOTHER TAKE Steamed Butternut Squash in a Collapsible Steamer Basket

Big Pots to Banish Big Chills

• THE RECIPE White Chicken Chili An old favorite, a little lighter.
• ANOTHER TAKE My Chicken Noodle Soup The way I make it, meaty and noodle-y with just a few noodles.

• THE RECIPE Scandinavian Split-Pea Soup Traditional on Tuesdays, without fail.
• ANOTHER TAKE Sausage & Kale Split Pea Soup A classic split pea soup recipe made extra-hearty.

• THE RECIPE Beef Barley Soup with Mushrooms Root vegetables, earthy mushrooms and nutty barley.
• ANOTHER TAKE Homemade Vegetable Beef Soup A concept recipe, all about the vegetables.

Stress Baking Again? Yeah. Me Too.

• THE RECIPE Our Daily Bread: My Easy Everyday Bread Recipe An easy, European-style bread I make every few days.
• ANOTHER TAKE Easy Everyday Bread for the Stand Mixer Better bread, no kneading by hand!

• THE RECIPE Soft Rolls for Sandwiches (NOLA-Style French Rolls) Especially for extra-good sandwiches, crispy crusts, soft interiors.
• ANOTHER TAKE Light & Fluffy Homemade Whole-Grain Bread & Buns The light and fluffy texture that so many people prefer.

• THE RECIPE Swedish Rye Bread Slightly sweet, densely delicious.
• ANOTHER TAKE Best-Ever Oatmeal Bread Hearty and substantial, slightly sweetened with molasses. A family favorite!

Digital Housekeeping #2 ... Photo Management

January 2021 seems like the perfect time to clean out our digital closets. Anybody in? Over the years, I've found a few ways that fit into an otherwise busy life. Will something work for you, too? Look for more ideas throughout January, just one per week because who has time/energy/inclination to tackle every closet at the same time?

PLEASE NOTE: This is NOT sponsored, it just works for me.

Acccck. The selfies. The screen shots. The reminders. The kazillion cute-kid cute-dog beautiful-sunset shots. Sooooo many photos. So so sooooo many photos.

My mom was an avid scrapbooker, she filled several books with family photos. "They're my memories for the nursing home," she'd say. She made personal scrapbooks for her then-young grandsons too. While Mom was undergoing cancer treatments, we turned the dining room table into scrapbook central, Mom on one end, me on the other, cutting and pasting and embellishing.

A few days before she died, my dad and I sat with her walking through a scrapbook. The lung cancer had metastasized to her brain, so the photos were like an unseen movie of her life. "This is Matthew, he is your first grandson. And this is Alex, your second. And this is Sadie," we explained. "And this is the house on the river where you and Dad lived." It may sound tragic but really, it was a sweet time: the pictures made real that she'd lived a sweet life, even if her brain had been robbed of its memories.

The funny thing is, though, that Mom turned to me and even with garbled, confused words, managed to relay that her scrapbook had "too many pictures". Fewer, she advised, would be better.

And that's the thing with allllll our photos. We do have too many. And they're too hard to dig through. And they're too apt to be lost forever, even when we need them for our own nursing home times.

So let's attack, shall we? Here's what works for me. One of my major goals before the end of the pandemic is to get my photos all current ...

Please do share your own ideas, how you manage photos ... or maybe, even why you don't ...

• TACKLE SOMETHING MANAGEABLE For me, this is usually a month at a time.
• DELETE DELETE DELETE Start with your phone. Go through a month's worth of photos, deleting all the obvious unnecessary images, screen shots, etc. Delete the duplicates of the same/similar shots. You needn't be ruthless nor suffer with deliberation. If it's hard to delete, just keep it and move on.
• UPLOAD THE KEEPERS TO A SAFE PLACE iCloud and Amazon and other third party services will store your photos for free but really, do you want your memories in the cloud? subject to a service that may not exist in a couple of years? Me, I've made my laptop "central storage" in part because it's backed up every night via iDrive.
• AUTOMATE THE UPLOAD I use the DropBox phone app to upload photos from my phone, just by plugging in my phone and opening the app. DropBox keeps track of what's already been uploaded, very useful. A free DropBox account will hold quite a few photos. The photos are in the cloud but it's a temporary stop, just a convenient way to copy/upload photos.
• FOLDERS After a month's worth of photos have uploaded to DropBox, I move them out of Dropbox (in the cloud) to a special photo folder on my laptop. From there, I create subfolders for organization, one for each month's photos at minimum. If there's a group of photos, I put them in a special folder, "2021 Twinzz Birthdays". The idea is to make this a quick sort, a quick organization, then to move on without getting bogged down in detail.
• STOP THERE? Just establishing the high-lever folder is a natural stopping place for organization. But of course, you can go lots further, deleting even more unwanted or duplicates photos, organizing them into more specific subfolders, cropping/editing, naming files, tagging, etc.
• FAVORITES But I do recommend creating at least one more folder, a special spot for a few very-most favorite photos. For example, if you have 200 photos from a vacation, pick out a small subset that are the very favorites to into their own folder; in my mind, it's better to copy the favorites vs moving them but that's personal preference. I go even further with a folder for all the very-most favorites for an entire year. Some times it's 10 shots, some times it's 50. But it's just the very favorites, the ones that I most want for later to remember the entire year.
• GO BACK TO YOUR PHONE? While that month's worth of photos is fresh in your mind, take a few minutes to delete most of them from your phone, you don't have to delete them all, just the ones that are now safely stored and backed up elsewhere.
• EXCEPT If you keep certain photos on your phone as records/documents, think about creating an album to access quickly. What to put there? Photos of auto license plates, drivers licenses, credit cards, passports, insurance cards, prescription lists.
• PHOTO BOOKS Extra credit?! I guess I'm my mother's daughter because while I no longer "scrapbook" I do created printed photo books. For some years, I've used Blurb (not sponsored, just me, a regular customer) to create one-off hard-cover photo books to remember special vacations, special subjects, etc. For example, when I lost my dog Lady, filling a book with photos of her helped me deal with the grief of losing such a sweet long-time companion. For Christmas this year, I gave my husband a book of favorite photos converted to "watercolor" with the photo app Waterlogue. Since he paints with watercolor, he was really fascinated by the look ... We don't peruse the photo books every day or even every week. But we do every so often. I keep them on the bottom shelf of the coffee table in the family room so they're handy. Some times the grandkids will even settle in with one, turning the pages, looking, looking, looking. Don't tell but I have big plans for three books this year ...

Veggies Forever

To mark A Veggie Venture's 15th anniversary in 2020, I took a hard look at the first 365 vegetable recipes from the first year to select just 15 which, all these many years and recipes later, remain ever so useful. The result is a fascinating collection of recipes, 15 Favorite Vegetable Recipes, Still Useful After 15 Years. Here's just one.

• THE RECIPE Roasted Cauliflower The classic, including my tips and tricks.
• ANOTHER TAKE Spiced Chicken with Roasted Cauliflower Tagine A one-skillet supper with warm spices.

PS Who's noticed? I'm big on "usefulness". See? Best-Ever “Most Useful” Recipes 2002 – Present, just one recipe per year from Kitchen Parade.

Timehop

Who else loves seeing old photos pop up, quick memories from years past? Welcome to a recipe timehop ...

• THE RECIPE Microwave Creamy Oatmeal with Peanut Butter My morning ritual ... nearly every single day.
• ANOTHER TAKE Just add chopped apple! Or blueberries. Or a spinkle of cinnamon and sugar. Heaven ...

• THE RECIPE Homemade Minestrone Soup Classic Italian, light but filling.
• ANOTHER TAKE Weight Watchers Spinach & Tortellini Soup Slurpy with fresh noodles from the grocery store.

Trending

My Top 10 Recipes are predictable, hello Should Cooked Pork Be Pink? and Weight Watchers Zero Points Garden Vegetable Soup. But every week, seasonal recipes catch the internet's attention and start to trend.

• THE THINKING Rethinking Fruit for Weight Watchers Weight Watchers works. But free fruit might not work for everyone.
• MORE INSPIRATION How to Lose Weight with Weight Watchers Tips from Alanna & Kitchen Parade readers.

• THE RECIPE Spinach Quiche with Red Pepper & Feta Pretty red & green for holiday brunches or year-round comfort food.
• ANOTHER TAKE Light Tomato Basil Quiche Make-ahead, light and healthy.
  

What's New?!

• THE RECIPE Low-Fat Vegetable Soup No fat, no fuss.
• ANOTHER TAKE How to Make Homemade Vegetable Soup The Master Recipe, never the same twice.

Just Updated!

• STRAIGHT TALK How to Lose Weight with Weight Watchers Tips from Alanna & Kitchen Parade readers.
• ZERO POINT FOODS Weight Watchers Zero Point "Free" Food Lists
• RECIPES SORTED BY POINTS Weight Watchers Now with myWW green, blue and purple points!
• FEELING STUCK? Rethinking Fruit for Weight Watchers Should fruit be free?
• MOTHER-DAUGHTER CHALLENGE My Everyday Creamy Herb Salad Dressing Can Just One Thing help a mother and daughter get healthy?

• THE RECIPE Mocha Chocolate Chip Cookies Chocolate chip cookies for grown-ups.
  
• ANOTHER TAKE Old-Fashioned Chocolate Chip Cookies My husband says these taste "exactly" like his mother's chocolate chip cookies.

• THE RECIPE Perfect Make-Ahead Mashed Potatoes (Party Potatoes) Make-ahead mashed potatoes for a crowd.
• ANOTHER TAKE Three Secrets for Rich & Creamy Mashed Potatoes Easy to remember, quick to do.

• THE RECIPE Easy Everyday Bread for the Stand Mixer Better bread, no kneading by hand!
• ANOTHER TAKE Our Daily Bread: My Easy Everyday Bread Recipe An easy, European-style bread I make every few days.

Text Me Back!

I'd love to hear from you. Comment, send me a quick e-mail via recipes@kitchen-parade.com, dot-dash in Morse code, build a fire for smoke signals, launch a message in a bottle, send a Christmas letter, get the dog to yip, toss me a note wrapped in a rubberband, write a message in the sky, scratch a note in the sand, listen to a seashell, whatever.

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Kitchen Parade is written by second-generation food columnist Alanna Kellogg and features fresh, seasonal dishes for every-day healthful eating and occasional indulgences. Quick Suppers are Kitchen Parade favorites and feature recipes easy on the budget, the clock, the waistline and the dishwasher. Do you have a favorite recipe that other Kitchen Parade readers might like? Just send me a quick e-mail via recipes@kitchen-parade.com. How to print a Kitchen Parade recipe. Never miss a recipe! If you like this recipe, sign up for a free e-mail subscription. If you like Kitchen Parade, you're sure to like my food blog about vegetable recipes, too, A Veggie Venture. If you make this recipe, I'd love to know your results! Just leave a comment below.

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