This rendition of creamed corn couldn’t be any easier and my family gobbled it up. It’s just corn, jalapenos, and cream cheese. But it tastes like so much more. The jalapenos give it a nice bite that hangs around in your mouth awhile, leaving a tingly warm aftertaste. The cream cheese and corn dampen the spiciness so it doesn’t overwhelm. I’m pretty sure everyone in my family went back for seconds. We finished every last bite!

This meaty cobbler is an impressive, comforting, and satiating meal. It’s pretty wholesome too. There isn’t much bread overall, with the bulk of the dish made of tomatoes and beef (you can sub turkey). If you’re limiting carbohydrates, you can easily leave out the corn, but I like it for the fiber and nutritional boost, not to mention the pretty color. The abundance of spices—cinnamon, allspice, ginger—gives the dish fun flavor. Spiced beef cornbread cobbler is delicious, works with my diet plan (yay for the flexibility of weight watchers!), and is pretty enough to serve to company, as I often have.

I unexpectedly learned many ways to prepare wood ears (also called black fungus and cloud fungus) when my husband decided to rehydrate a whole package of them, not realizing it would turn into about half a gallon of shiny ear-shaped fungus! My affection for wood ears began one day in the office breakroom, when my colleague, “Sunshine,” was eating one of her many delicious smelling homemade lunches. I asked her about it and she told me the ingredients in her stir fry. She offered a wood ear for me to try. It tasted of the soy sauce and vegetables in her dish and had the texture of thin rubber, but in a really fun way!

I stuffed this little pie pumpkin full of ham, cheese, onion, and basil and it was delicious! Most stuffed pumpkin recipes I’ve seen include bread and milk or eggs. I wanted something lower carb and less rich. Something that felt decadent but still fit within my diet. So I left out the bread and milk, and I think it’s better this way. The flavors of each ingredient really came through.

We have a great source of local, organic mushrooms. Every week I have the privilege of picking up a couple of these beautiful portabellas at our local farm club. Invariably, I stuff them full of cheese and other complimentary ingredients. Cheese please, I chant!
 
This is a quick, easy, and always delicious dinner. Last night, I used cheddar cheese, refried beans, hot sauce, onion, and dill. It took less than 30 minutes, start to finish. I baked them in our mini convection oven, to save energy and heat up the house less.

This recipe comes from a small, unassuming, and rather generic looking spiral-bound cookbook, 101 Things to do with a Tortilla. I received this book as a gift a few years ago, and at first totally dismissed it. It uses a lot of canned ingredients, which usually isn’t my thing, and it has no photos. But somewhere along the line, I decided to give it a go, and was immediately impressed. The recipes are very easy, very fast, and very inexpensive. While I’m not usually into cooking from cans, which so often contain soggy and gray produce that barely resembles the fresh version of the same, sometimes it’s just so easy! And certain foods actually taste good from a can, such as tomatoes and beans.

For this recipe, I paired the canned goods and supermarket produce with ground beef from our favorite local beef farmers, Bass Farms, who use sustainable growing techniques and minimal chemicals. They have a little farm stand off the highway just outside of the Shawnee National Forest, nested amongst rolling hills and forests of tall, bright green trees with thick undergrowth. The stand sells beef as well as a variety of summer produce, including tomatoes and peaches, and flowers too. We try to get to their stand at least once a month during the summer.