Autumn Comfort Food for the Adventurous

One of the things I love observing inside of myself, is how food preferences change with the season. Totally normal and healthy, sure! Still I am fascinated by how the body responds to its environment, to changes in temperature and light and precipitation.

And so this week is all about autumn comfort foods ~ hearty, dense food in autumn colours, that warm you up inside and at the same time feel like wrapping yourself in a cosy blanket.

A nutritious one. 😃

So here's pasta, pizza, and more, autumn comfort style.

Autumn Comfort Food for the Adventurous

Starting with this oven-baked pumpkin-and-red-lentil curry. Only I changed pretty much everything about the dish, so it's now the not-curry. With pumpkin. And red lentil pasta. And beet. But ovenbaked!

Asian-inspired gluten-free pasta bake. thingy.

So what doe we call this? Is it a pasta bake? Let's call this an asian-inspired pasta bake. With pumpkin. 😃

Recipe? Well, as I said, I changed pretty much everything about the original recipe that I saw and thought, "Hey, that sounds like a great idea!" But sure, here's what I did:

Ingredients:

1 small pumpkin (grey-green, a form of Hokkaido)

2 beetroots (or maybe they were turnips)

150g red-lentil pasta

400g (one tin) of chopped tomatoes

4 tablespoons tamari

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

1 tablespoon ginger juice

1 heaped teaspoon miso paste

1 heaped teaspoon tomato paste

salt, pepper

water

how to:

1. Wash and chop pumpkin and maybe-beetroot into oven-proof dish

2. Add pasta, then all other ingredients

3. Rinse tomato tin with water and add that as well (you need enough liquid in there to cook the veggies and pasta)

4. Season to taste, with salt, pepper, maybe chili flakes ...

5. Stir everything together

6. Pop on the lid and pop in the oven, about 25-30 minutes at 180°C / 356°F

7. Check after maybe 20 minutes how your veggies and pasta are doing, and bake a little longer accordingly

Voilà. You have made delicious pumpkin-not-curry! 😃

While that was in the oven, I washed and grated potatoes and zucchini for these fritter thingies:

potato-zucchini fritters with applesauce

As usual, when it comes to making fritters of any kind, I started out with best intentions to stick to the recipes this time, then got impatient and skipped basically the entire "remove water from your veggies" part.

It never works like they say in the recipes, anyway. So. The end result might not be super-crispy, but then, I am totally fine with that! Slightly crispy on the outside with soft, moist, chewy goodness inside? Sounds good to me!

Recipe? Eh. It goes something like this:

Ingredients:

2 zucchini (380g, I weighed them!)

3 large potatoes (about same weight)

3 large onions

3 heaped tablespoons chipea flour

3 heaped tablespoons protein powder

1 heaped tablespoon baobab powder, because why not?

salt, pepper, nutmeg, some chili ...

how to:

1. Wash and finely grate zucchini into a bowl. Add salt to remove water.

2. Wash and finely grate potatoe into a differnt bowl. Mind your fingetips, oops, to late, the grater required blood sacrifice.

3. Get a band-air for your finger, continue undaunted.

4. Grate the onion and cry.

5. add salt to this bowl as well.

6. Start squeezing water out of zucchini. Get grumpy.

7. Side-eye potato-onions mix and decide that, whatever, the water can stay!

8. Mix all ingredients in a big bowl.

9. Get a non-stick pan, heat some oil, fry your fritters

10. Eat the first few while cooking the scond batch, because they are good and hot and right there and you are hungry

11. Stack fritters on a plate as they come out of the pan, and either keep eating or let them cool, so that you can pack them in a container, pop them in the fridge, and re-heat throghout the week as needed

Goes well with homemade applesauce. I made a video about how to make that!

Moving onto the next big thing: autumn pizza!

That one jumped me like the plotbunnies used to jump me back in the day: suddenly there, refused to leave, insisted to be made, didn't accept any excuses. So. I made autumn pizza. Like this:

autumn pizza with cheeze sauce

Yep, made entirely from scratch, and the base needs some work, but for a first try at making gluten-free pizza base? Well done, Joy, good job! 😃

So, step one was to make a dough for the base, which I kind of cobbled together from several recipes for bread, pizza, and other oven-baked goodness. So, not a proper pizza dough at all. But it works.

Next, I made my trusty, go-to cheeze sauce. Didn't have any garlic, oops, so I used miso paste instead for the umami kick. Works.

Wrangling the dough onto the tray was an adventure, but I succeded. Added the entire pot of cheeze sauce, because pizza cannot be too cheezey, right?

As toppings I used one massiv onion, some frozen spinach, and two small beetroot, chopped into small cubes and pre-cooked with the pasta-bake for about ten minutes (could have done with a little more, I'd say).

Seasoning, uh, yeah, that happened, only I forgot. Paprika! And I think some mix for raclette? Yeah. Sorry. Not very helpful. But: use whatever you want! Or feel like! Make it spicy, make it hot, make it mild, make it super-italian with oregano (and then hide from the Italian Food Police). You do you!

Goes in the oven for 30 minutes at 180-190°C / 355-375°F.

And while that was baking, I finally got around to making this:

nostalgia ... I mean, pea soup 😃

Pea soup! That turned more into pea-and-potato-maybe-stew, but is so, so nice!

Totally unlike the pea soup of my childhood, which this was meant to imitate. Probably nothing can imitate the pea soup of my childhood, which was major comfort food and special, because it came from a can! It was pre-made, just pop it in a pot and heat and done! I loved that, my parents didn't believe in convenience food, so any time I got some? Great!

... yeah, I'd probably not be able to eat it anymore these days without, like, braking into hives from all the additives and flavours and whatnot in there.

So it's probably really good that his one is nothing like that one. 😃😃😃

It's simple to make, though - okay, a bit more effort than opening a can. But still:

1. soak 150g peas over night, then rinse and cook for about 22 minutes

2. while they cook, wash and chop 3 medium-sized potatoes (about 350g); add at the end of the 22 minutes and re-set timer for 15 minutes.

3. chop up a block of smoked tofu and add into the pot

4. wrack your head about what to do for seasoning, then add salt, pepper, rosemary, and potentially everything else but the kitchen sink. also, maybe some chili.

I realised after the fact that I forgot to add in some buckwheat, which I'd meant to do, so the dish could tick all boxes in the "a grain, a green and a bean" bingo, but okay. I might still do that, cook the buckwheat spearately, and then simply add to the pot.

And, huh. That's it already? Where did the weekend go ...

I still have one pumpkin left, and was thinking about making filled pumpkin. Filling either millet or quinoa and lentils. OR buckwheat and the sweet chestnut-falafel mix. Haven't decided yet.

Or I might do something else entirely. For now I'm ending this chronicle of this week's Kitchen Adventures, wish you all a pleasant evening and a good start into the next week.

Thanks for reading,

bye! ❤️