Real Life Cooking

Fajitas

yellow onion, sliced

green pepper, sliced

boneless, skinless chicken breast, sliced into strips

fajita seasoning (about 2-3 Tbsp per pound of meat)

Preheat oven to 375 Fahrenheit. Line a baking sheet with foil and coat with nonstick spray.

Arrange onion slices in a single layer on one side of the pan. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Toss chicken slices with fajita seasoning and arrange in a single layer on the other side of the pan.

Bake 15 minutes, remove, add bell pepper, and give it all a stir before spreading back out into a single layer, as much as possible. Bake another ten minutes.

Serve on flour tortillas with shredded cheese, sour cream, and guacamole.

Fajita seasoning recipe: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/232967/fajita-seasoning/

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make fajitas! This is my cousin Molly’s recipe, which only requires a single sheet pan.

This recipe is so easy that it doesn’t seem possible the results are so good. Molly says she got sick of having to clean out the skillet every time she wanted fajitas, and worked out this method. Since she gave me the recipe I’ve made it multiple times, and I’m sure you could adapt it to use other types of meat.

You’ll need some fajita seasoning. I’ve linked to a recipe to mix your own seasoning in the show notes, but you can buy it prepared too. If you make your own, just put it in a clean screwtop bottle and it’ll last you quite a while. I used an empty spice bottle that I washed out and dried well. It’s so easy to put together that I decided to just link to the recipe. I mean, literally all you have to do is mix everything together with a fork and pour it into a bottle. The hardest part is pouring it without spilling it everywhere, which is why getting a little food-safe funnel is such a good idea.

Anyway, for this recipe you’ll only need a baking sheet. That’s it. Line the sheet with aluminum foil and coat it with nonstick spray. This is one time when I prefer the spray to greasing by hand, but if you don’t have any of the spray you can coat it with vegetable oil instead. Make sure to grease it all the way to the edges.

Turn the oven on to 375 if you haven’t already, then get your cutting board out. Slice up a yellow onion and a green pepper, and of course you can use other kinds of chili pepper too if you like. Slicing the vegetables into thin strips is traditional, but if you prefer to dice them you can do that too.

Then you need to slice the chicken into strips. This is easiest to do with a pair of kitchen shears if you don’t have a really sharp knife. If you’re using the pieces of breast meat often sold as tenders, you can just cut them into two or three strips. I haven’t tried this with thigh meat but it should work just fine too. Don’t slice your pieces too thin, though. I did that the first time and while they were still great, the meat was a little overcooked. Remember that the meat will lose moisture as it cooks and will shrink.

You can go ahead and arrange the onion slices on the pan, but only put them on half the pan. You need to keep the other half empty so you can add the chicken in a little bit. Arrange the onion in a single layer, not piled up, and shake a generous amount of salt and pepper over it. That’s black pepper, not hot pepper.

Next, you need to toss the chicken in the fajita seasoning to coat it. The easiest way to do this is in a small paper bag, like the kind they sell for sack lunches. You can use a plastic bag if you have to, but the chicken sticks to the sides. If you don’t have anything else you can put the chicken and the spice mix in a bowl with a lid and shake the bowl, but a paper sack is best because you can shake it vigorously. Drop the chicken in first, then spoon t

Fried Squash

Squash

1/2 c. milk or buttermilk

1 egg

1/2 c. all-purpose flour

1/2 c. cornmeal

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp pepper

1/8 tsp garlic powder

1/8 tsp onion powder

1/8 tsp paprika

Oil for skillet

In a small bowl, combine the milk and egg with a whisk or fork. Scrub the vegetables clean and cut off the stems and bottoms. Slice very thin and put slices in the milk and egg mixture to soak. In another bowl, combine the other ingredients. Put enough oil in the bottom of a skillet to cover it well and heat to medium high.

Retrieve the squash pieces from the milk mixture, then dredge in the flour mixture to coat. Shake off excess flour mixture. Fry the slices, flipping once, until they are golden brown on both sides. You may need to add more oil to the skillet depending on how many you have to fry. As you remove pieces to drain on a paper towel, sprinkle with salt. Serve hot.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re finally going to learn how to make fried squash.

It’s made by slicing the squash thin, battering the pieces, and frying them until they’re slightly crispy on the outside and tender inside. They make a great side dish or main course. It’s the same batter and method you use to fry green tomatoes and okra, but we’ll just focus on the squash.

You can use any squash for this recipe, including zucchini, but I like yellow squash because it’s so easy to grow that people give it away in piles as summer progresses and the squash plants get bigger and more aggressive. A few small squashes will make a lot of fried squash, too.

Once you have your vegetables, you’ll need two small bowls, a skillet, and a plate lined with paper towels.

In the first bowl, mix the egg and milk well, until the yolk is incorporated into the milk and the mixture is pale yellow and a little foamy. It’s easiest to use a whisk to do this, but I usually just use a fork. You can use buttermilk for this recipe if you have it, but you can also use regular milk.

Then give your vegetables a scrub if they’re dirty, or at least rinse them off. Then slice off and discard the stems and the bottom stub where the flower was. Then slice the rest of the vegetable up very thin. You don’t need to be able to read a newspaper through them or anything, but they should be thin. If they’re too thick they won’t cook all the way through.

After you slice the pieces, dump them in the bowl with the milk mixture. They probably won’t all fit, depending on how much you’re making, but this is a good way to keep them out of the way without them drying out.

In the second bowl, mix the flour, cornmeal, and spices. The amounts I listed in the recipe are just suggestions—I never measure the salt, pepper, and so forth, and just make sure I use the same amount of flour as I do cornmeal. You want generous amounts of the spices, though. If you’re only frying up one or two small squash, you can halve the dry ingredients because you’ll have plenty even so.

Next, pour a generous amount of oil into the skillet and turn the heat to about medium. You want more oil than you would use if you were frying meat or sauteeing onions. Cover the bottom with oil to about the depth of one of the vegetable slices you just cut, or a little less. I use olive oil but it doesn’t matter what kind you use. If you want to deep-fry your vegetables, you can add more, but oil is so expensive that I hate to waste it when shallow frying is just as good.

While the skillet is heating, set a plate next to the stove and line it with a few thicknesses of paper towel. You might also want to set out the serving dish you intend to use so you can move the cooked and drained pieces to it as you work. You’ll be frying these in batches.

Before you do anything

Vanilla crepes * buttercream crepe filling * strawberry buttercream icing * stewing fruit

Vanilla Crepes

1 1/2 c. milk

2 eggs

1 Tbsp vanilla

1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour

3 Tbsp powdered sugar

1/2 tsp salt

3 or 4 Tbsp butter, melted

Combine ingredients in a large bowl and mix well, until batter is smooth. Cover and chill for about an hour. Lightly butter a crepe pan or skillet and heat to medium low. Pour about 1/4 cup batter into the skillet, swirl to coat, then cook over low to medium low heat for a few minutes per side. Fill and top with fruit, powdered sugar, buttercream, whipped cream, etc.

Buttercream crepe filling:

4 oz cream cheese

3 Tbsp butter

1/2 c. powdered sugar

1 tsp vanilla

Cream butter and cream cheese together until smooth. Add vanilla and powdered sugar and blend well.

Peach Topping:

2-4 fresh peaches, peeled and sliced

1-2 Tbsp sugar

1/2 to 1 tsp cinnamon

In a small pot, combine peach slices with sugar and cinnamon. If peaches are not very sweet, add a little more sugar. Simmer on medium low, stirring frequently, for about half an hour. Use as topping for crepes or other desserts.

Strawberry Cream Cheese Icing:

1 c. fresh strawberries, hulled and cut up

1 Tbsp sugar

1/2 c. unsalted butter

8 oz cream cheese

1 tsp vanilla

about 2 1/2 c. powdered sugar

In a small pot, mix strawberries, sugar, and a few spoonfuls of water. Simmer on medium low, stirring frequently, for about half an hour. Add more water if it appears dry. Set aside to cool.

Cream the butter and cream cheese together until smooth. Add strawberry mixture and vanilla and blend well. Add powdered sugar slowly while beating until mixture is smooth and of the desired consistency.

Makes enough to ice a two-layer cake.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make several delicious things, including vanilla crepes and strawberry buttercream icing. It all fits together, you’ll see.

2020 may be a horrible year in many ways, but the peaches available where I live have been amazing! I’ve made all my peach recipes to take advantage of this happy event, and have also eaten a lot of peaches while standing over the sink, juice dripping down my arm. So earlier this week I decided to use my last two peaches to make a topping for vanilla crepes.

Also earlier this week there was the whole cake meme going around online. If you’re listening to this after July 2020 you probably don’t even remember it, but for the better part of a week everyone online has been doing the whole “cut into an object, reveal it’s a cake inside” thing. Naturally enough, it made me crave cake, so I made one. The cake itself turned out to be kind of disappointing, but the strawberry buttercream icing I made for it is fantastic, plus it’s made almost the same way I make the filling and topping for the crepes. So it makes sense to put all these recipes together in one big episode.

We’ll start with the crepes. I’ve eaten amazing crepes in Paris and I’ve eaten terrible crepes at IHOP, and I think my crepes are closer to the Paris ones than the IHOP ones. They’re also really easy to make.

You’ll need a medium mixing bowl and a skillet. If you happen to have an actual crepe pan, lucky you, but most of us are ordinary people who don’t have room in their kitchen cabinets for specialized pans, so an ordinary skillet will do. A crepe pan mainly just has really shallow sides at an angle that makes it easier to get your spatula under the edges of a crepe without tearing it up.

Mix all the ingredients together in the mixing bowl until it’s as free of lumps as possible. Then stick the bowl in th

Summer Fruit Cobbler

Filling:

¼ c water

2 Tbsp cornstarch

2 Tbsp lemon juice

¼ to ½ c sugar

4 c fresh blackberries and/or other berries, and/or soft fruit such as peaches (peeled and sliced)

Topping:

1 ½ c all-purpose flour

1/3 c sugar

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

6 Tbsp butter

1/3 c milk

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. In a medium bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Cut in butter.

In a large saucepan, mix cornstarch and water until smooth, then add lemon juice, sugar to taste, and fresh fruit. Heat to a boil, stirring, then pour into a 9x9 or larger dish.

Add milk to the topping mixture and blend until just combined. Roll out like biscuit dough and cut into rounds. Place rounds on top of the fruit mixture. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until topping is done through. Allow to cool somewhat before eating.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make a cobbler! Technically it’s a blackberry cobbler but you can use pretty much any kind of summer fruit. I’ve never tried it with apples or pears, but my guess is you would need to cook them longer on the stove over medium heat until they soften before putting them into the baking dish. The baking is basically just to cook the topping, so it isn’t in the oven long enough to fully cook harder fruit like apples.

I don’t make this recipe often because if I have the berries, I’d rather make a berry pie, which was an episode I released last summer. But a lot of people love cobbler. A cobbler has a layer of fruit filling topped with pieces of sweet dough. This recipe has a relatively thin layer of fruit, but be careful if you use more fruit than the recipe calls for because your pan may overflow in the oven while it bakes.

You’ll need a 9x9 baking dish, or a 9x13 baking dish if you’re using more than four cups of fruit, a large mixing bowl, and a pot big enough to hold all the fruit. What kind of berries you use is up to you, but blackberries are traditional. This time I used about a cup of blackberries, a cup of raspberries, and two cups of blueberries that I bought, since the blackberry and raspberry harvest isn’t very good this year in my usual spots and I didn’t get as many as I hoped when I went out picking. You can use soft fruit for this too, such as peaches or plums.

Start with the large mixing bowl. Mix the dry ingredients of the topping together: flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Cut the butter in until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Then set the bowl aside.

Next, take the pot and dissolve the cornstarch into the water and lemon juice. It should only take a few moments to mix it up, although you will have to fight with the cornstarch at first because it wants to make a solid hard lump in the water that takes some scraping with a fork or whisk to break up. Once you’ve done that, you need to add the fruit to the pot.

If you use soft fruit, peel and slice it into the pot. If you use berries, give them a rinse and pick them over to remove any leaves or bugs, then pour them into the pot. Stir them up with the cornstarch mixture, then add the sugar.

How much sugar you add will depend on what kind of fruit you use. I recommend going with less sugar than you think you might need, since the topping is sweetened and it’s easy to overdo it with this recipe. Too much sugar will overwhelm the flavor of the fruit. If you use all wild blackberries, you might want to up the sugar to half a cup, since wild blackberries are not usually very sweet. If you use blueberries or soft fruit like peaches, you definitely don’t want more than a quarter cup of sugar. Pour the sugar over the fruit and mix it up well.

At this point, turn the oven

Beef stew * how to clean and use turnips and parsnips

Beef Stew

1 or 2 lbs beef, cut up

about ½ c flour

salt and pepper

thyme

1 onion, diced

carrots, sliced

potatoes, peeled and cut up

turnips, diced (optional)

celery, sliced (optional)

stock or water

In a small bowl, mix the flour with some salt and pepper and use it to dredge the meat. Put some oil in a large pot and brown the meat along with the diced onion. When the meat is browned and the onions mostly translucent, add 4-6 cups of stock, broth, or water. Add the chopped vegetables, bring to a boil, turn heat down to low, and simmer. Add more salt and dried thyme.

Simmer, stirring occasionally, until vegetables are tender. To thicken, mix about a teaspoon of corn starch or flour with a cup of the stew’s broth and return it to the pot. Stir it well, bring back to a boil, and turn heat off. Stew will thicken as it cools.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make beef stew.

I don’t eat a lot of beef these days. It’s too expensive, for one thing, it’s not that good for you, and cattle ranches contribute to a lot of environmental issues like deforestation of the Amazon and other areas. But occasionally I just really want to make beef stew, because it’s one of my favorite recipes and one of the first ones I ever made.

When I was in high school, specifically tenth grade, a friend of my mom’s hired me to pet sit for a week in the summer. She had a cat and a tiny dog which was actually smaller than the cat, and they were good friends. I would go over and spend hours every day in the fenced yard, letting the animals play together while I read in the shade. And mostly what I read was my mom’s friend’s cookbooks. When I found a recipe I wanted to try, I would copy it carefully into a spiral notebook. The only recipe I specifically remember is this one. Except that it wasn’t beef stew, it was lamb stew, with beef suggested as an option if lamb wasn’t available. So if you can get your hands on a good cut of lamb, it should work great instead of beef. I love lamb and mutton but it’s really hard to find where I live.

Anyway, you’ll need a small bowl and a big pot for this recipe. How big a pot is up to you, but like all stews and soups this recipe is really flexible and you can make as much as your pot will hold. You also don’t have to have a lot of meat. I found a half-pound package of stew beef and used it in an enormous pot, and it’s still rich and tasty.

By the way, you don’t actually have to buy meat labeled as stew beef. Any cut of beef will do. I mean, don’t use ground hamburger, but you can certainly use a little piece of chuck roast or anything else. You cut it up yourself and it’s easy. I’ll go over that in a minute.

The vegetables you use in this recipe are flexible too. I always use lots of carrots and potatoes, but I really like to add a turnip or two if I can get them. Turnips and parsnips are criminally under-utilized in my part of the United States—that would be the southeast—so they’re expensive here and can be hard to find, just like lamb. But both are great in this recipe. Celery is good in it, of course you’ll need onions, and if you just want to use up some bits and pieces of leftover veggies, toss them in.

The first thing you’ll want to do is dice your onion. Then pour a little oil into your pot and add the diced onion, but don’t turn the heat on just yet. Take the small bowl and mix flour, salt, and pepper to make seasoned flour. You’ll dredge your meat in this just like we talked about in the chicken and dumplings episode.

Now, get your beef out. If you bought stew beef that’s already cut up, you’re still going to want to cut it up smaller and trim off any gristle. If you bought a piece of beef t

Chicken pecan quiche * pie crust *

Chicken Pecan Quiche

½ to 1 c cooked chicken, chopped

1 ½ shredded Cheddar cheese

¼ c onion, diced

1 Tbsp flour

½ c chopped pecans, divided

3 eggs

1 c milk

1 tsp brown mustard

salt and pepper

about ¼ c vegetables, chopped small (broccoli florets, green pepper, etc.)

Swiss cheese slices

Pie crust:

¾ c all-purpose flour

¾ c whole wheat flour

½ tsp salt

½ c fat

4-5 Tbsp ice water

Grease the bottom and sides of a deep-dish pie plate. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mix the flours and salt in a mixing bowl and cut the fat in until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add enough ice water to make a firm dough. Do not overmix. Roll the dough out thin, fold in quarters, and place in the pie dish. Trim edges and prick the bottom of the pie crust all over with the tines of a fork. Bake for about eight minutes, remove, and set aside.

Saute onions in a little oil while the pastry is baking. If you are using fresh broccoli or green pepper, saute with the onions until tender. Once the pie crust is out, place slices of Swiss cheese in the bottom of the pie to roughly cover the bottom. Turn the oven down to 325 degrees.

In a medium bowl mix the chicken, shredded cheese, sauteed onions, flour, and half the pecans. Pour into the pie crust over the Swiss cheese. Then beat the eggs well with the milk, and add mustard, salt and pepper, and broccoli. Pour over the chicken layer and top with the remaining pecans.

Bake at 325 for 50 minutes.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make chicken pecan quiche.

I have no idea where I got this recipe. I’ve had it written down for a long time but only tried it recently, and it’s phenomenal! It’s a great way to use a small amount of leftover chicken, too. The recipe calls for a full cup of chicken, but I only had a scant half cup and it worked out just fine.

This is basically a quiche, which means it’s rich but doesn’t feel heavy. The crust is the best part and really makes the dish, so while it is a little bit of a hassle to roll out dough, it’s absolutely worth it. You can use a ready-made crust, but make sure it’s not sweetened and that it’s a deep-dish crust.

You will need a big mixing bowl, a skillet, and a deep-dish pie plate for this recipe. Before you do anything else, you need to do some prep. If you want to add vegetables to the dish to add color and flavor, get them out now and chop them up small. I’ve made this recipe twice and both times used frozen broccoli. The first time I thawed it, the second time I forgot but cut the frozen florets up tiny with a pair of kitchen shears, and both methods worked fine. Dice the onion and cut some thin slices of Swiss cheese, unless you’re using pre-sliced Swiss. If your chicken pieces aren’t already shredded or cut up small, do that now.

Measure out your pecans and break them into smaller pieces if you need to. Pecans are usually sold as “halves and pieces,” and you want the pieces for this recipe. It takes a few minutes to break the halves in two or three pieces, so do this ahead of time. Or just use pecan halves, I don’t care.

Next, grease the pie plate well and set it aside. Then measure out your dry ingredients for the pastry. This recipe calls for half all-purpose flour and half whole-wheat flour, which makes the pastry more robust and toothsome than if it’s made of only all-purpose flour, but if you don’t have whole wheat flour you can use all-purpose. Bread flour works well in this recipe too. Incidentally, this pastry recipe is a good one to keep on hand for any recipe that calls for a savory pie crust. It makes enough to easily line the bottom of a deep-dish pie plate

Caramel Brownies * using a cake mix in a recipe * using evaporated milk * melting caramel

Caramel Brownies

1 German chocolate cake mix

1 1/2 sticks melted butter

1/3 c evaporated milk

1 c pecans, chopped

1 bag caramels, unwrapped

another 1/3 c evaporated milk

12 oz chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 and grease a 9x13 pan.

Melt the butter and stir in the evaporated milk, pecans, and cake mix. Spread about half of the mixture in the pan and bake for exactly six minutes. Melt the caramels and 1/3 c evaporated milk together (it takes 3 minutes in the microwave). As soon as the six minutes of baking are up, remove the pan from the oven and immediately pour the chocolate chips over the top, then pour the caramel mixture over them. Drop the remaining cake mixture over it all. Bake another 15 minutes exactly and remove from oven. Do not overbake; mixture will look underdone when first removed from oven. Cool completely before cutting. Brownies will be soft inside after they have cooled.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make Caramel Brownies.

This recipe is one that calls for a cake mix. I don’t usually like using cake mixes in recipes. For one thing, it feels like cheating, and for another, sometimes it just doesn’t taste as good as homemade and it’s certainly more expensive. But it occurs to me that some listeners who are new cooks may not know how to use a cake mix in a recipe.

This is another recipe I got from a coworker many, many years ago, in this case a woman named Alice. I was so enthusiastic about these brownies when she brought them in for a company potluck that I begged her for the recipe. I was still a new cook at the time and the recipe sounded so complicated that I never tried making it—until now, when I found it in my recipe box. And it’s not really complicated at all.

For this recipe you’ll need a big mixing bowl, a small bowl you can microwave, and a 9x13 pan. You’re also going to need a German chocolate cake mix, and it doesn’t matter what brand you get. Make sure it’s specifically German chocolate, not just chocolate, because you need that cocoa flavor from German chocolate cake mix to make the brownies taste like brownies.

You’ll also need a bag of caramels. Alice didn’t specify how big a bag, so I bought the only bag I could find in my local grocery store. I didn’t keep the package but I think it was about 12 ounces or so, certainly not a big bag. These are the little square soft caramels that are wrapped individually in cellophane. I think you can buy them unwrapped for baking these days, but if you buy the wrapped ones, as soon as you get a minute, open the package, unwrap all the caramels, and store the caramels in a plastic baggie. That makes them a lot easier to use them later, and in fact my recipe has a note that says “this takes forever so do it first.” The hardest part is not snacking on them as you unwrap them.

You’ll also need evaporated milk, and Alice helpfully pointed out that the small can you can buy in the baking aisle has exactly 2/3 of a cup in it. This is the little bitty can, not the 12 oz can. It’s also evaporated milk, not condensed. Be careful because the two are sold side by side and it’s easy to grab the wrong thing.

So, you’ve got all your ingredients together and unwrapped your caramels. Before you do anything else, cut the top off the chocolate chip bag and set it somewhere where it won’t spill but you can grab it easily. Once the pan goes into the oven for the first bake, time is of the essence and you don’t want to have to stop and find the scissors to open that bag.

Then turn the oven on to preheat and grease the 9x13 cake pan. I use my Pyrex pan but metal is fine too.

Put the butter into the large mixing bowl

Sweet potato casserole * how to bake a sweet potato

Sweet Potato Casserole

3 c. cooked sweet potatoes, mashed (about 3 15-oz cans, drained)

1 c. sugar

¼ c. milk

1 egg, beaten

1 tsp salt

2 tsp vanilla

1 tsp cinnamon or allspice (or ½ tsp each)

Topping:

½ c. butter, melted

1 c. brown sugar

½ c. all-purpose flour

1 c. pecans, chopped

Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit. Grease a 9x9 baking dish or casserole. Mix sweet potatoes with sugar, milk, egg, salt, vanilla, and spices, mix well, and pour into baking dish. Mix the topping and spread on the sweet potato mixture. Bake for 30 minutes.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make sweet potato casserole! This was an episode I had planned to run last November in the run-up to Thanksgiving, but you know what? You can have sweet potatoes whenever you like, not just at Thanksgiving.

Sweet potatoes are really easy to make and are a great accompaniment to a mild meat like turkey or chicken, or a salty meat like ham. This recipe is sweet without that gooey over-the-top marshmallow topping many people use, and the pecans give the dish a pleasant texture.

The easiest way to make sweet potato casserole is to use canned sweet potatoes. These are almost always marketed as yams but they’re the same thing as the whole sweet potatoes you can buy in the produce section as far as I know. But if you prefer to start with whole sweet potatoes instead of canned, I’ll give you directions for that too.

You’ll need a big mixing bowl, a small mixing bowl or large cereal bowl, and a casserole dish or something similar. I use a round Pyrex casserole dish but you can use a 9x9 pan. Grease it well and set it aside.

I’ll go over the canned sweet potato version of the recipe first because it’s so simple. You need about three cups of sweet potato, so either buy three of the smaller 15-oz cans or one big 29-oz can and one 15-oz can. Open the cans and drain them, then dump the potatoes into a big mixing bowl.

You’ll notice that the sweet potatoes are already peeled. They’re also already cooked. You just need to mash them. Use a fork, and don’t try to get them creamy smooth like regular mashed potatoes. You want your sweet potatoes to have more of a chunky texture than regular mashed potatoes. Mash them up good with the fork, breaking each piece up. You also want to remove any discolored or bruised areas and especially the tough fibers. Sweet potatoes are fibrous, especially at the ends, and those fibers are unpleasant to chew and hard to swallow—sort of like the string of a string bean. Don’t worry about the little bitty fibers, but fish out the longer pieces you notice or any mats of fiber.

Once the pieces are all mushed up reasonably well, you just dump all the rest of the ingredients on top of them and mix the whole thing up really well.

But let’s back up again and go over directions for baking your sweet potatoes from scratch. It’s easiest to do this in the microwave one at a time, and you can do it in advance.

First, you’re going to need to buy some sweet potatoes. Choose medium-sized ones, neither gigantic nor tiny. Sweet potatoes are funky in shape compared to regular potatoes, but choose ones that are roughly the size of a regular potato that you’d want to eat as a jacket potato. You’re going to want four or five of them at this size. Don’t think you can buy two gigantic ones instead, because a lot of times those really big ones have started to get woody inside. You can use really big or really small ones if that’s all you’ve got, but it’s easier to work with medium-sized ones. Try to choose sweet potatoes that aren’t too blemished, although it’s hard to find them that are perfect.

Give each potato a scrub in co

Spicy turkey meatloaf * how to make a substitute for bread crumbs

Spicy Turkey Meatloaf

oil for sauteeing

2 carrots, chopped

1 onion, chopped

1 celery stalk, chopped

1 green pepper, chopped

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 lb ground turkey

2 eggs

1 c bread crumbs

¼ c milk

1 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce

2 tsp salt

½ tsp pepper

1 tsp ground cumin

½ tsp ground nutmeg

½ c ketchup (plus more for garnish)

Preheat the oven to 375 Fahrenheit.

Saute the carrots, onion, celery, and green pepper in a little olive oil or butter until the onions are mostly translucent and the other vegetables are starting to get tender, about five minutes. Add garlic and saute another minute. Put in very large mixing bowl and add the rest of the ingredients. Mix until well blended. Shape into a loaf and place in a 9x13” pan. Top with extra pieces of green pepper and drizzle with more ketchup.

Bake for 1 hour 15 minutes. Let stand ten minutes before serving.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make spicy turkey meatloaf. It’s really easy and makes a huge amount of food that doesn’t get boring—in fact, it gets even better after the first day as the flavors mingle.

You’ll need a really big mixing bowl, a skillet, and a 9x13 pan, because this makes a lot of meatloaf. Don’t try to make it in a bread loaf pan—it just won’t fit.

The first thing to do is chop up your vegetables. Dice your onion, chop your celery and carrots into pennies, mince the garlic, and slice the green pepper in half and dice one half of it to add. If you don’t know how to clean a green pepper, you can listen to the baked beans recipe, but basically you just cut the stem off and remove the seeds, then use the rest of the pepper. My mom always kept some green pepper slices to garnish the top of her meatloaf and I do this too. It looks nice. So take the second half of the green pepper and cut it into slices so you have half-rings of green pepper.

Next, put a little oil in the skillet and turn the heat to medium low. Then add the onions, carrots, and celery, plus the diced half of the green pepper, and saute for about five minutes until the onions start to turn translucent. That means they’re cooked enough that they will contribute their flavor to the meatloaf without taking over. Then add the minced garlic and saute for one more minute. Then turn the stove off and shovel all the sauteed vegetables into the big mixing bowl.

This is a good time to turn the oven on to preheat.

Next, add the ketchup, the milk, the Worcestershire sauce, and the spices, including salt and pepper. Mix that up well, then add the eggs and mix them in well too. Then add the bread crumbs. I use Panko crumbs because they don’t get soggy, but you can use other types of dried bread crumbs. I can never find the bread crumbs in the store without a hunt, and then I forget where I found them, but Panko crumbs will be on the same shelf. Maybe try the salad dressing aisle. Don’t just crumble up a piece of bread and think that’ll work—it’ll turn into goo as soon as it gets wet. Maybe one day I’ll cover how to make your own bread crumbs, but for now, if you don’t have any, you can crush up some crackers or salad croutons and use those instead. To crush the crackers or croutons, you can put them in a clean paper bag, roll the top closed, and press down on the bag with a rolling pin or something else that’s reasonably heavy and easy to handle, although not breakable. The bag will probably end up tearing, especially if you’re me, but it will hold up to the crushing better than even a heavy-duty plastic bag will.

Once you have all this mixed up well, you will think it looks pretty unappetizing, and you haven’t even added the meat yet

Sally Lunn bread * yeast * letting bread rise

Sally Lunn Bread

1 ½ c flour

1/3 c sugar

1 envelope rapid rise/quick-rise or instant yeast

½ tsp salt

½ c water

½ c milk

½ c salted butter (one stick), cut into pieces

3 eggs (room temperature)

About 2 ½ c more flour

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl (flour, sugar, yeast, and salt). In a medium bowl, heat water, milk, and butter until butter is melted and mixture is hot but not boiling. Add to dry ingredients. Mix in eggs and enough flour to make a dough about the consistency of biscuit dough.

Cover and set aside ten minutes, then beat well for about a minute. Spoon into a greased tube pan, cover, and let rise another hour, or until doubled in size. Bake at 325 Fahrenheit for 40 minutes.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make Sally Lunn bread. This is a rich, delicious yeast bread made in a tube pan that doesn’t require kneading, so it’s a good introduction to making bread.

You can’t use any old yeast for this recipe, though. You have to use a type that’s specified quick-rise, rapid-rise, or instant. It should be plainly marked so you don’t have to guess. If it doesn’t say something like quick-rise on the packet in nice big letters, you don’t have the right yeast.

Other than that, the recipe is pretty straightforward. You will need one big mixing bowl and a tube pan or Bundt pan. You’ll also need a small mixing bowl that you can microwave.

First, grease the tube pan and set it aside. Then get out your big mixing bowl and mix the first cup and a half of flour, the yeast, sugar, and salt. Set that aside too. You can use all-purpose or bread flour, or if you have whole wheat flour you can use it for up to half the called-for flour. Of course you could use whole wheat flour for all the flour, but it tends to make a dense, robust loaf and Sally Lunn bread is meant to be light, more like a brioche or tea cake.

Next, cut up a stick of butter and put the pieces in the small mixing bowl. I usually use salted butter for this recipe. Add the water and milk and stick it in the microwave for 30-second bursts until the butter is mostly melted and the liquid is hot. You can do this in a small saucepan on the stove if you don’t have a microwave, but be really really careful that you don’t let the mixture get so hot it starts boiling. You’ll be adding this to the flour mixture and you don’t want to kill off your yeast.

See, yeast is alive. It’s a fungus that’s dormant when dry, but add moisture, heat, and some form of sugar and it becomes active and starts doing its thing. Its thing, in this case, is to consume sugar and release carbon dioxide, which is what makes bread rise. But if it gets too hot, it dies. You don’t want it to die until, you know, later.

So, add the melted butter mixture to the flour mixture and blend it in. This is where you’ll notice the difference between making yeast bread and making quick bread, which is the term for bread made with baking powder or soda. As you mix, you can actually see the dough expanding as the yeast activates. You’ll also notice the pleasant smell of fresh bread and a faint smell sort of like beer, which is actually the smell of the yeast.

You also need to add the eggs and the rest of the flour. This is why you want to use eggs that are room temperature. If you use eggs that are cold from the fridge, you’ll cool the yeast and it’s most active when it’s nice and warm. You can use cold eggs, of course, but if you can remember to take three eggs out of the fridge a few hours before you plan to make bread, even better.

So, add the eggs and mix them in well. Then start adding flour. I’ve tinkered with the amounts and can verify that you should add two and a half cups at this