Cozy Season For Reals

Hello!

My best friend right now is my hot water bottle, which I fill around 9 pm and snuggle while I watch a show and then keeps my feet warm in bed until the morning. Honestly everyone who lives in a cold place or gets very cold at night like I do deserves to have one. I’m definitely craving foods that will warm me up from the inside lately as well. I’m not going to send out an email next week because of Thanksgiving, but I will send one the Saturday after the holiday to have plenty of inspiration upon coming back to regular weeknight cooking.

Quick Links

beef and barley // roesti // quesadillas // bolognese, veggie bolognese // apple pie cookies

Weeknight Meals

• Instant pot Beef and Barley

  • Save this one for a very cold night and it will do its job. I use a tablespoon of tomato paste added with the broth and skip the fish sauce at the end. Barley is a great source of fiber and protein and something I want to cook with more often. This soup also makes incredible leftovers.

  • You could also make vegetable and barley soup. Also delicious.

• Roesti with veggies and eggs

  • I lived in Germany and Austria 10 years ago and roesti is one of my favorite foods from that region. It’s a crispy potato cake, pan fried on both sides. I remember eating roesti topped with vegetables made by a really amazingly kind woman and I’ve wanted to recreate the dish from memory ever since. This week we made roesti and served it with fried eggs, sauteed mushrooms, marinated tomatoes and bacon. It wasn’t as good as my memory, but pretty close. You can use whichever vegetables are in season near you.

  • I deviated from the recipe just a bit- added a thinly sliced leek and used a smaller amount of onion in the potato mixture, crumbled the pancetta/bacon on top at the end, didn’t add cheese to the roesti. It was excellent. Remember to squeeze out the extra liquid!

image from seriouseats.com

• Vegetable filled quesadillas

  • Here’s another recipe option. It feels silly to put in a recipe for literally the easiest food known to man, but also I need a reminder sometimes that this can be dinner and I don’t always need to make something elaborate. Good beans, guacamole, fresh veggies and homemade salsa all elevate these quesadillas.

  • If you have a sourdough starter, these sourdough tortillas are one of the best ways to use your discard.

Weekend Meal

• Pasta Bolognese or Vegetable Bolognese

  • Another one of the coziest dinners you can make. The recipe recommends serving with a long noodle, but we have found that shorter, curved pasta actually work better with this sauce. I like to make this with 1 lb of meat instead of 2 but keep the rest of this recipe the same.

  • The veggie bolognese uses small cut cauliflower for texture and plenty of good vegetables. It also takes less time but has a lot of flavor.

image from new york times cooking

Treat of the Week

• Apple Pie Cookies

  • These are on my fall bucket list every year and I have still never made them. Is this the year? They look amazing to me.

image from smittenkitchen.com

Something to Listen to

• Folkocracy by Rufus Wainwright and guests

Have a wonderful week!

Emily