Favorite Fall Food

Hi, I was thinking of all the meals I could make from my squash. (I can smell the baked acorn squash with bacon and cinnamon.)  Then I thought I would ask people to post your favorite fall food, or how about your favorite fall meal.

Recipes are always appreciated.

I wish I knew the recipe, Kiko Denzer stopped by the Cob Cottage company in October 2016 I think when I was there, and made a pumkin/squash soup which was incredible. The veggies were grown in Ianto's garden and I think it had rice or quinoa in it, but I don't recall what else or the spices.

Mark, this is probably not as good as the pumpkin/squash soup you remember though it might be worth a try:

https://permies.com/t/94242/kitchen/Pumpkin-Pie-Soup

There is a pumpkin spaetzle with chanterelles on the honest-food.net site that I love. I'll be happy when I can get some chanterelles.

I've improvised a bit when I've made it, but I love an autumn stew based on this recipe: https://www.thepaleomom.com/recipe-paleo-pumpkin-chili/

apple pie

I like winter squash any possible way.  I just got a new Greek cookbook which has a bunch of different new-to-me squash recipes, excited to try them out.

Hi,  Yum!  Happy cooking

For many of us, it's going to be brussels sprouts season soon!  We love to blanch/steam the sprouts till tender, then sear on a pan with evoo, red pepper flakes, sliced garlic, and salt.  So easy but sooo delish!

Okay this isn’t exactly a “fall meal,” as in all the food groups and delicious fats (I’ll take bacon with my squash), but…nothing says harvest celebration like UGLY FRUIT JUICE! Yes, we photograph our prize squashes, giant tomatoes, delicate zucchini, perfectly symmetrical carrots, unblemished apples and other fruits of the land. But what about those really ugly ones; those with unfortunate worm holes and brown bruises and coddling moth doorways and sunburns and grasshopper bites and bird pecks and all the other damage that repel friends and food banks? Well for me, UGLY FRUIT JUICE is the season's elixir. Take a sharp paring knife and build a bowl of random chunks of tree and ground ripened treasure. The good bits of whatever won’t make the beauty contest goes into the 2 quart bowl: any combo of kale, squash, apples, pears, plums, beets, cucumber, ginger, basil, broccoli, spinach, peppers, tomatoes…. Gently let your juicer masticate the boon then taste: too bitter? add carrots; too spicy? add tomatoes; too bland? add salt and cayenne; too strong? add apples; too boring? add lemon or herbs. These never-the-same-twice concoctions fill me with some mystical revelation about Sun, Bitter-Sweetness and Sweat. The earthworms have an orgy over the raw pulp. Pure autumn bliss.

Whatever is ready, now, preferably whatever I'm already prepping for winter storage, because that just makes cooking an extension of what I'm already doing, instead of something I have to drop everything to do. The forms that takes, that are easiest and make me happiest, are usually soups, chilis, and stews.  But, bow hunting season starts this Wednesday, and I'm truly looking forward to some venison steaks & roasts, too. And those also fit into my 'do it as I go' philosophy, because what's easier than just tossing some of whatever veggies I'm already cutting up into the roaster, around the meat and letting those beautiful, fresh, clean flavors meld? Hubs grilling or smoking the meats makes it easy, too - all I have to do then, is hand him some of what I'm working on.

Mmm, acorn squash with bacon and cinnamon sounds good.

I finally found a way that I like Brussels sprouts, and it just says "fall is here" to me. It's roasted Brussels sprouts with bacon, pecans, and dried cranberries. https://juliasalbum.com/brussels-sprouts-and-bacon/

Simple roasted butternut squash or baked sweet potatoes are my comfort foods.
One of my favorite fall meals, breakfast or dinner, is a potato skillet (aka "hash") with sausage, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and bell peppers.

My favorite fall food has been anything made with acorns for years now.  About 20 years ago, we decided to try foraging acorns and making acorn muffins with our oldest kids as a fun homeschooling project.  We thought they would taste like "survival food" like hard tack (blech, LOL), which we also made to realize what Civil War soldiers had to eat.  We were so shocked at how delicious the acorn muffins were, and the smell as they were baking was so unique and heavenly.  

It became our favorite Thanksgiving recipe to make every year, and then when our son Alex was diagnosed Celiac and we had more kids and a tighter budget, we started seriously harvesting them for the wonderful flour. I kept finding more and more delicious ways to use them, and ultimately ended up writing an acorn foraging book with over 80 recipes (afflink: Acorn Foraging: Everything You Need to Know to Harvest One of Autumn’s Best Wild Edible Foods, with Recipes, Photographs and Step-By-Step Instructions ).

We had so much fun developing them, and I even went down a rabbit hole and found out that the first version of hot cocoa was actually a roasted acorn drink called racahout, but in Europe they had to find a cheap and easy substitute for the acorn flour to make it commercially and they were trying to promote this newly introduced commercial food product -- cocoa powder -- so they substituted that and it became a hit.  As far as I know, there's no surviving recipe for it but I managed to recreate it and then taught folks how to make it and handed out samples at free community workshops, along with things like acorn spice cupcakes.  If you want to learn the long history of racahout, I wrote it up on our family foraging/homesteading blog here.

The smell of roasting acorns is still my favorite fall smell.  You can leach the bitter tannins out either the cold water method (long soaking, frequent rinsing, in a fridge over a couple of weeks or in a running stream -- yes, I know some people do the toilet tank method but I could never go there) or hot water leaching (bring them to a boil in water, keep changing the water as it gets brown) and both methods have different benefits (cold water leaching retains the starches, for instance, and is better for baking or when you want things to stick together, hot water leaching is faster....).

Anyway, here's a picture of our youngest daughter drinking racahout (I can dig out the recipe if anyone would like it, I don't have it online) and a picture of me teaching a child how to make it at a library talk, and here's my recipe for acorn spice cupcakes, which are my husband's favorite cake for his fall birthday.  :)  If you want to make them as sweet muffins, just leave off the frosting.  I also have a more traditional muffin recipe with less sugar that's less of a breakfast/dessert.  These are definitely a cake kind of muffin.  My frosting is incredibly decadent, but for special occasions it's what my family loves.

This recipe uses less acorn flour to make it stretch longer but enough that it has that wonderful acorn flavor.

Ingredients:

   ½ cup acorn flour
   1 ¾ cup gluten free flour mix with xanthan gum (or add 1 tsp xanthan gum) or all-purpose flour (I use an easy homemade GF cake flour, recipe below)
   1 TBS baking powder
   1 tsp salt
   1/4 tsp baking soda
   4 eggs
   1/2 cup vegetable oil
   1 cup sugar
   1 TBS pumpkin pie spice (optional)
   2/3 cup sour cream

Directions:

   Preheat the oven to 325 and grease pans (one 9×13 pan, two cake pans or about 24 cupcakes).
   Blend all dry ingredients in a mixing bowl on low until well mixed.  Add the rest of the ingredients, blend well on low, then turn to medium and then high and beat 3 minutes.
   Pour the batter into your prepared pan(s) and bake about 20 minutes for cupcakes, 30-40 minutes for larger pans (check every few minutes after 30 minutes) or until springy on top and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
   Cool completely before frosting or slicing.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Blend 1 stick of softened butter, one brick of softened cream cheese, 3-4 cups of powdered sugar (depending on how sweet you like it) and one teaspoon of vanilla or acorn extract.  Beat until smooth and spread on cooled cake.

Homemade GF cake blend:
   400 grams millet flour
   300 grams sweet rice flour --- not regular rice flour, this is also called glutinous rice flour but it contains no gluten
   300 grams potato starch