Thought for food: A harvest bake.
A recipe I like to cook on autumn evenings, warming and simple.
the ingredients:
Turkey (2 breast fillets, shredded, or 4 sausages, sliced)
1 apple
1¼ cup butternut squash, chopped
1¼ cup sweet potato, chopped
2 cups kale
½ red onion, chopped
½ cup pumpkin seeds
½ cup pecans
¼ cup dried cranberries
1 tbsp olive oil
{Seasonings all to taste}
Garlic powder
Cinnamon
Sage
Cayenne pepper
the instructions:
Preheat the oven to 190°C/170°C fan/370°F.
Do your slicing and dicing as you like.
In a baking dish, combine the ingredients (adding the seeds, pecans, and cranberries last), and drizzle with olive oil and seasonings.
Bake for ~35-40 minutes, uncovered.
Leave to cool for five minutes and serve.
the thought:
This tastes and smells like autumn to me. I don’t turn on the extractor fan when I bake this, because I like to let the cosying scent of the cinnamon and the sage waft through the house for a few hours. It uses seasonal ingredients that would have been gathered at harvest time in early autumn, while the turkey and the cranberries are staples of late autumn, American Thanksgiving. It makes me think of gathering, the nuts and the vegetables. The warm colour of the squash and the sweet potato like low sun tucking in for a mellow fall evening.
(And for good measure, I always bake it in the pumpkin dish that my cousin sent me as a surprise gift. That makes me feel warm, too.)
Note: This pairs well with couscous, gnocchi, and sourdough, as well as a little blue cheese dressing.
Happy harvest.