Fall Harvest Soup

Poor Mr.Surly, I haven’t made a full dinner in months. I'm not sure how much longer he can get by on my spartan dinners. I’ve been busy with hospital tests and doctor appointments and when I get home the last thing on my mind is food. All I want to do is to crawl onto the couch with my beloved heating pad and relax. Finally, all my medical appointments are winding down; my last 2 appointments are next week. By Wednesday I should know whether it’s a bad kidney or a bad pancreas that is causing my abdominal pain. Not sure at this point which option would be better. At least by knowing I can stop worrying about it and the doctors can start treating it properly. Then I can get back into cooking and baking. Sorry, about my medical rant; I'm just frustrated about it.

On a happier, seasonal note, I love the flavors of fall: pumpkin, apples, and especially acorn squash; warm, spiced comfort food. Lacking inspiration and feeling lazy, I decided to take some of my favorite fall foods and add them all together in a soup. It turned out creamy, dreamy, and delicious. Most importantly, for me, this was easy to make, yummy to eat, and caused minimal abdominal pain and bloating. Yay.

The soup is sweet from the apples and apple juice and gets a nice kick from the cayenne pepper. It is creamy enough that you don’t need to add the cream. I only added it because I need the extra fat and calories, since I'm still trying to gain weight.

Roasted Sweet Potato Balls

Another dish I wanted to make for Thanksgiving was some kind of sweet potato appetizer. Not one that included lots of sugar and marshmallows. My body isn’t absorbing fat, so lots of excess sugar and fat makes me feel nauseous and sick. I prefer to sneak good fats into my diet to try to trick my body into absorbing it. So far it hasn’t worked; my body is too smart. But I’ll keep trying. Since I need the fat and calories, I use butter to grease my dish, otherwise I would just use non-stick coconut oil.

Anyway, back to the sweet potato balls. I didn’t follow any recipe, I just made it up as I went along. I think they turned out really well. I love bite-sized things, and these were perfect. I made these up on wed and popped them in the oven on thurs right before serving our appetizers. Simple and low key, just how I like things. Oh and they are healthy, too. If you’re not a fan of nuts the walnuts can be omitted. I added a lot of walnuts since they contain a lot of “good fat.”

I have other scrumptious recipes from our thanksgiving dinner, but I have no idea when I’ll get around to posting them. The medicine I’m on is really kicking my ass, leaving me really tired, drained and way behind in my posting. I’m really hoping my posts are at least somewhat coherent and my recipe instructions make sense.

Butternut Squash and Apple Soup

I’m still not really feeling much like being in the kitchen. Due to Mr. Surly being out of town on business for a couple days this week, I didn’t have to make any food. But when he returned I had to make something so I chose to make an easy, quick soup. The addition of the apple and apple juice adds a nice sweetness to this soup. It’s yummy as is, but I’m trying to experiment with different spices to try to jazz it up. This time I added cumin (probably my favorite spice), turmeric and a pinch of cayenne to give it a nice kick. Mr. Surly ate so much of this for dinner that I was lucky to get a picture of it before it disappeared.

Spicy Mexican Pulled Chicken and Vegetables

I love this chicken so much I made myself sick eating too much of it. Since my stomach has trouble emptying I have to eat my meals spaced out. Because a few bites of anything causes my stomach to blow up like a balloon, my nutritionist suggested spacing out each part of my meals. I eat the vegetable, wait an hour or so, then eat the meat/protein, wait an hour or so and eat the potato/grain, etc. It’s frustrating, but I’m getting used to it. However, when it came to taco night I couldn’t help myself, I ate 3 tacos, knowing I should only have had two. I should have waited an hour before eating that third one, but it was so tasty I couldn’t wait. My stomach was painfully distended, but it was so worth it.

For lunch the next day I made nachos covered in the chicken and topped with homemade salsa. You can use this chicken as a topping for nachos, a filling for burritos, tacos, or just eat it as is. Less chipotle chiles can be used if you don’t want too much spice. It also freezes well. I usually just freeze it as is, but you could add the filling to some burritos and make frozen burritos. Unfortunately, this was gone in 2 days, with no leftovers to for me to freeze. Speaking of tacos, have you ever tried the Trader Joe’s organic hard taco shells? They are to-die-for. I will never buy the supermarket ones again. The flavor is unbelievable. If you find yourself at TJ’s, do yourself a favor and get a box.

Moroccan Chicken with Couscous

A few weeks ago Mr.Surly came home with a big bag of sweet potatoes. I have been feeling pretty ill lately and have had no desire to cook until last week. In an attempt to find a recipe that would help me use up some of those sweet potatoes I came across this dish on Martha Stewart’s website. It sounded good and I had all of the ingredients. I adapted the recipe a bit by added some spices and extra ingredients. It turned out really well. I love a dinner that is easy, quick, and requires minimum clean up. Also, the leftovers I had for lunch the next day were even better than dinner the previous night. Definitely a recipe I will make again.

Thai Yellow Curry Chicken and Rice

I love, love, love, curry; especially yellow curry. There was a Thai restaurant near my old office and I would often get their yellow curry with chicken for lunch. I was so excited recently when I saw this yellow curry sauce at Trader Joe’s.

Now I could attempt to recreate this delicious dish at home. The restaurant curry sauce was pretty thin and flavorful, almost like a soup. It was served with white basmati rice on the side so you could add the rice to the sauce to, allowing the rice to soak up all the delicious sauce. When I’m adding the bottled sauce to the pan I put a little bit of water (a Tbl or two) in the bottle, shake it up, and dump it in the pot so that I get all the sauce out. I suppose that if you feel like you need to you could add water or chicken broth to stretch out the sauce. I don't because I don’t want to risk diluting the flavor. Of course you could use any rice that you want, but I prefer brown basmati rice, since it has a low glycemic index. Also, you don’t have to add the sweet potato; you could use all white potatoes. But sweet potatoes are so nutritious that I try to mix them in with white potatoes any chance I get. I prefer using baby yukons because all you have to do is wash and cut them in half. I have used russets before, just peel them before cubing. I debated whether or not to add garlic, but decided against it this time. I think I have added garlic in the past. Of course vegetarians/vegans could use tofu instead of chicken.