Kara Wahlgren

wordsmith. grammar champion. picture taker.

RECIPE: Apple Crisp with Pumpkin Butter

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I’m coming out of retirement to share this amazing recipe.

Okay, maybe “retirement” isn’t the right word. I’ve just been really lazy about posting lately…like, for the whole summer, and then fall, and most of winter. But “retirement” sounds better, amirite, Jay-Z?

Jay-Z doesn’t read my blog. 

Anyway. My usual apple crisp recipe is a mashup of my mom’s easy-peasy recipe and Betty Crocker’s recipe. And every other apple crisp recipe, I guess, because there’s not much to apple crisp. But when I went into the cabinet for some brown sugar, I found a jar of pumpkin butter we bought at Pepper Palace a few months ago, and I thought, “Ohhhhhhhhhhhh.” Which is my default opinion on anything pumpkin-related. I played it safe a little and only replaced half the butter with pumpkin butter, but OMG. OMGAAAAAAHHHHH.

You’ll need:

  • 5-6 big apples (like, the end-of-season monsters)
  • 1/3 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/3 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup flour
  • 2 (heaping) tsp cinnamon
  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 1/4 cup pumpkin butter
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla

1. Peel and chop the apples.

2. Put the apples in a large ziploc bag with the flour, white sugar, and cinnamon. Shake it like a Polaroid picture.

3. Melt half a stick (1/4 cup) of butter in the microwave. Stir in the brown sugar, pumpkin butter, and vanilla.

4. Dump the ziploc mixture into a greased baking dish. Pour the buttery mixture over it.

5. Bake (covered) at 350 degree for around 40 minutes.

Enjoy!

RECIPE: 20-Minute Chili (And It's Healthy!)

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Hi! Sorry for the lapse in blogging, but I just got back from a relaxing four-week sabbatical in Paris.

Okay, that’s a lie.

I’ve just been busy and fell behind on updates. And the longer I waited, the more interesting I felt I needed to be upon my return. But today I decided, screw being interesting! I’m just going to jump back in and post a recipe for chili!

I already have a recipe on here for slow-cooker chili, but tonight I got a hankerin’ for chili* at about 4:47 p.m. So, I had to figure out a way to speed up the process a little. This recipe is totally diet-friendly, by the way, which is important because I’ve spent the past week eating Slutty Brownies after almost every meal. It’s been a bad scene.

Anyway, this chili can be ready, start to finish, in 20 minutes.

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You’ll need:

  • 1 lb. ground turkey
  • 2 Tbsp. chili powder
  • 1 Tbsp. paprika
  • 1 1/2 Tbsp. Mrs. Dash Southwest Chipotle blend
  • 1 tsp. cumin
  • 10-oz. can diced tomatoes
  • 8-oz. can tomato sauce
  • 1 cup beef broth
  • 1 1/2 Tbsp. cider vinegar
  • 2 cups beans (I used a mix of black and kidney)
  • 1/2 tsp. sea salt and pepper (I used Papa Joe’s salt as usual)
  • 1 tsp. onion powder

In a big sauce pot, cook the ground turkey in some olive oil. Once it’s brown, add all the other stuff and simmer for 15 minutes. That’s it. C’est tout, c’est finit. Wasn’t that easy?

Okay. More updates, more often. I promise.

* Did you know this is the gerund form of the word hanker? I could also say, “I hanker for chili.” I think I’m going to start using that.

RECIPE: Perfect Peppermint Cookies

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So, a weird thing happened this week. My husband’s company is having a holiday party today, and one of his coworkers asked, “Will your wife be baking?” — like, in a hopeful manner. I have a reputation as a good baker somewhere! I’m awesome!

Out of sheer gratitude, I made two batches of my peppermint sugar cookies. These cookies have become my calling card at Christmas time — they’re like sweet little buttons of deliciousness. I can’t take too much credit — the key is my Nanny’s sugar cookie recipe, which isn’t sickeningly sweet or overly buttery or too doughy. Then I add Andes peppermint chips, which are seriously one of the best inventions of the century.

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You’ll need:
  • 1/2 cup butter (one stick)
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla
  • 2 tsp baking powder
  • Andes peppermint chips (these are melty like chocolate…do NOT use candy canes!)

1. Soften (but don’t melt) the butter in the microwave. Times vary depending on your microwave, but in my nuclear-meltdown microwave, the magic number is 20% cook power for 2 minutes.

2. Using a hand mixer, cream the butter, sugar, and egg. Add in baking powder and vanilla.

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3. Mix in the flour. You can slowly sift it in, or you can just dump the whole cup in and deal with the consequences. I usually choose the later method and end up antiquing myself and most of the kitchen, but I’m impatient. At this point, your “batter” should like granules of sand and you’ll think, “I screwed up. This will never become a cookie.” That means you did it right. (You can skip the next step if you just want sugar cookies.)

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4. Add in the peppermint chips. I use about 1/4 bag for each batch.

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5. Wash your hands. Then roll the cookies into 1-1/2 inch balls. Because of the sandy batter, you’ll have to really smush them together like you’re kneading Play-Doh.

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6. Cook at 400 degrees for 8 minutes. When you take them out, the bottoms should be just barely golden, and it’s okay if they fall apart when you pick them up.

7. Move them to a cooling rack and hang in there, because once they cool, they’ll stay together like a normal, well-behaved cookie. Cookies always keep baking for a minute or two while they’re on the cooling rack. Keep the faith. If you cook them “to perfection” in the oven, you’ll wind up with crispy cookies.
These are relatively easy and so, so good. Enjoy. I just did. For breakfast.

RECIPE: Horchata!

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Horchata has been around for eleventy billion years (or at least a lot of centuries) so I’m not sure why I never discovered it until about four years ago. We were at Blue Tortilla in New Hope (one of my favorite Mexican restaurants) and the owner peer-pressured us into ordering a pitcher. I love rice, and milk, and cinnamon, and vanilla, so horchata pretty much blew my mind.

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But for all my extensive burrito consumption, I haven’t had the best luck finding places that serve horchata. So I’ve been relying on our yearly trips to New Hope, and the one time at Rutgers Day when one of the Latin-Am student clubs had a huge cooler of horchata and the girl running the table was like, “We have a lot left over, so take as much as you want” and I swear I heard church bells.

Anyway. I decided to make my own. And guess what? NAILED IT! On the first try, no less! O-freakin’-lé!

You’ll need:

  • 1/2 cup uncooked rice (anything non-instant…I used basmati)
  • 2 1/2 cups water
  • 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1/4 tsp cinnamon (heaping)
  • 1/6 cup sugar

Soak the rice in the water for about 45 minutes. You’ll end up with murky rice-water like this:

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Dump it into a blender and puree for about 30 seconds.

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Then pour it into a pitcher, using a strainer to separate the rice water from the rice.

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Throw the rice chunks away. Add the milk, vanilla, cinnamon, and sugar to the pitcher. Stir it up and serve it cold. As Backpack would say, “Om nom nom nom nom, delicioso!”

P.S. Random fun fact: In Valencia, Horchata is called orxata, as in “Or, xata!” or “Gold, darling!”

RECIPE: Sweet Potato with Ham, Black Beans, Pineapple, and Swiss Chard Cheese Sauce (Jeez, is that title long enough?!)

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“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” — Abe Lincoln 

Maybe Abe was talking about Swiss chard? Because the leafy green turned out to be extremely divisive at the dinner table last night, by which I mean I loved it, and hubby hated it.

It started with a LivingSocial deal for Suburban Organics. Basically, Suburban Organics will ship fresh organic fruits and veggies to your door. I have trouble resisting group buys to begin with, and I love getting mail, and I love eating, and I love when things are marketed as organic or local or free trade or any other feel-good words. So hellz yeah I was getting this deal.

My box arrived a few days ago, and it contained some old faves (avocado! bananas! a medium-sized grapefruit!) but it also contained Swiss chard, which I couldn’t have picked out of a veggie lineup. I posted a plea for recipes on my Facebook page. Suburban Organics was cool enough to link me to a few recipes on their site, but their recipes were a bit too…well, straight-up chard. As a chard virgin, I felt more comfortable mixing the chard with a bunch of other ingredients.

Enter Brianne at Cupcakes and Kale Chips, a.k.a. my aforementioned former foodie roommate. She sent me a very complicated recipe for Mexican sweet potatoes. I dumbed it down big-time and added ham (I needed the bone for split pea soup this week). And it was nothing short of amazeballs.

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Except hubby heartily disagrees with me. His exact quote was, “Eww, what’s that smell?” followed by several affirmations that it tasted as bad as it smelled, and finally, the helpful suggestion, “Don’t ever cook chard again.”

Me? I LOVED IT. So tasty. There were, like 17 unique and delicious flavors going on in my mouth, and it was still delicious. Imagine throwing a party and inviting your work friends, your college friends, your gardening-club friends, and your Civil War reenactment friends and everyone miraculously gets along.

Anyway. You have to be your own judge, but I thought it was awesome. (P.S. I was also directed to this tasty-looking recipe at Smitten Kitchen, but went with the Mexican recipe because I had already eaten half a brick of havarti and figured an au gratin might not be the best idea for dinner. But I’m putting it in the mental database — clearly, for a night hubby’s not home!)

You’ll need:

  • sweet potatoes (I made three)
  • Swiss chard (I used four big leaves or stalks or whatever they’re called)
  • olive oil
  • Papa Joe’s salt
  • 1 Tbsp minced garlic
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1 cup shredded Monterey Jack
  • 1 red pepper, chopped
  • 15-oz. can of black beans, drained and rinsed
  • 2 Tbsp lime juice
  • 1 Tbsp chili powder
  • 1 Tbsp cumin
  • 1 cup canned pineapple chunks, drained
  • 1 tsp ground cilantro
  • 1 cup diced ham

STEP 1: Stab the sweet potatoes with a fork a few times, and cook them in the microwave on HIGH for about 10 minutes.

STEP 2: Rub some olive oil on a pan. Chop up the Swiss chard (I found a helpful tutorial here) and heat it in a pan with the garlic and a few shakes of Papa Joe’s salt (or a mix of sea salt and black pepper).

STEP 3: In a bowl, mix the red pepper, black beans, pineapple, chili powder, cumin, cilantro, ham, and and lime juice.

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STEP 4: The chard should be pretty soft now. Add the cheese and milk to the pan until melted, then puree the whole shebang in a food processor.

(No, seriously, this is the dumbed-down version! I am telling you, my friend is nuts in the kitchen.)

STEP 5: Cut open a sweet potato, scoop in some salsa, and pour a little bit of the cheesy chard sauce on top.

STEP 6: Ignore husband who clearly has no taste buds.

STEP 7: Steal hubby’s rejected cheesy chard sauce and mix it into your eggs the next morning. OM NOM NOM all over again.

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Thanks for the recipe, Brianne!