Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Hearth Warming Foods

This month’s Skillet Gathering was held in Baltimore. It is that Thyme of the year, a celebration of hearth warming foods! As winter approaches, most people want to cook food that is good, wholesome, flavorful and warming to the body. To celebrate, our Skillet Gathering focused on foods to keep you warm during the cold weather. These foods include soups, but also foods that you can cook in your slow cooker. I am a big fan of the slow cooker. In the winter, it becomes my most used kitchen appliance. At least once a week, I decide to do a clean sweep of foods in the fridge that are on the brink of going bad. I put them all in the slow cooker and try to be as creative as I can and it is a joy to walk in the house in the evening to see what treat awaits me. Most times I focus on vegetables and herbs; this includes spinach, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, just about any herb, whether it is thyme, rosemary, or basil. I also like to add meat to my slow cooker. My favorite is adding leftover rotisserie chicken. I enjoy using the slow cooker so much because I don’t have to watch the pot and there really is no prep time when using this appliance. I throw in all of my ingredients in the morning and just let it cook on low all day while I am at work. What a nice surprise when you walk in from a long day of work, and dinner is already cooked, I get this nice smell wafting from the kitchen. All you have to do is serve it up. I even cook my brown rice in large batches, so all I have to do is warm it up. Now this is a meal that warms you to the core!

The Skillet Gathering menu included our favorite soup, Sweet Potato and Sausage Soup. We also added a new one that seemed nice for the season, Curried Butternut Squash Soup. Both were amazingly delicious. We also prepared Autumn Herbed Chicken with Fennel and Squash, a slow cooker recipe. And of course, no gathering would be complete without dessert, bread pudding with whiskey sauce. And don’t forget, nothing like a warm drink to get you feeling toasty, warm apple cider. It was important to us to use vegetables that were in season, butternut squash and sweet potatoes were the staple food that was available at the time, so we decided to incorporate them into all of our dishes.

As always, our Skillet Gatherings are a time of food, conversation, and good food. In attendance there were college students, the young and working, and some old school, to teach us a little about cooking. This always makes for lively conversation about food. The most important thing we wanted people to take home from this Skillet Gathering were tools on how to prepare hearth warming foods that are simple to prepare and that allow you to feed your family with fresh ingredients.

Stay tuned for our next Skillet Gathering! We hope that you will be able to attend soon!