Fall Community Harvest Dinner

And so my food adventures continue. This was the day after the pumpkin potluck.

I had a ginormous lunch at church (as per usual)… :x

The Lewisburg Farmers’ Market hosted a Community Harvest Dinner with locally grown + produced food prepared by all the market vendors. :D!

Bread! <3

Potatoes of all sorts!

Sage Mint Chamomile Iced Tea!

This was my first plate. (Venison stew, tomato + rice soup, sweet potatoes, various homemade breads and salads, chicken cacciatore, roasted potatoes…)

Pumpkin bisque, sage mint chamomile iced tea, vegetarian lasagna, more sweet potatoes (those were my favorite dish)…

I had about 3 more plates of food after this. :x The food was beyond delicious, and I’m really, really hoping they’ll have another one of these again in the spring.

I barely even made it to the dessert table because we made a couple communal plates (this is just a tiny representation) so we could try some of everything.

Food makes my world go round.

We stuck around afterward and Ross taught us the Virginia Reel. :D

pumpkin potluck

I’m usually really good about writing recipes into the future (thank you, scheduled post option!), but really, really terrible about updating about my life in a timely manner. Luckily, med school is a great scapegoat to blame everything on and most people completely understand, so I’m in the clear! :]

Several weeks ago, one of the first years had a pumpkin potluck to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Volunteers signed up to make some kind of a dish/dessert with pumpkin in it, and there were raffles for different donated items. Anyone who paid $5 at the door would get to eat all they wanted. This may seem counter-intuitive for trying to raise money for diabetes research, but food fundraisers tend to go pretty well here, mostly because no one knows how to cook/has time to cook, so they jump at whatever chance they can get for homemade food.

There were pumpkin muffins, pumpkin spice rice crispy treats, pumpkin sticky buns, pumpkin swirl brownies, pumpkin oreo cheesecakes, vegan pumpkin walnut bread, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin risotto with fresh parsley + goat cheese, pumpkin lasagna, pumpkin mini meatloaf balls, sausage + pumpkin cornbread stuffing, pumpkin coconut soup, pumpkin bisque, pumpkin cornbread, pumpkin pasta, pumpkin chili (2 types!), mashed pumpkin, pumpkin ginger snaps, cape malay curried winter squash, gluten-free buttercream stuffed pumpkin cookies…

In short, it was glorious.

While I do enjoy dessert as much as the next person, the Cape Malay Curried Winter Squash dish was probably one of my favorites.

My favorite dessert (this is saying a lot because there were about 2.5 tables filled with desserts) was the gluten-free buttercream-stuffed pumpkin cookies. The wife of one of the first years is a magical cook and he said her cheesecake alone was enough for him to want to marry her. I need to try this cheesecake (I’m in the process of trying to obtain the recipes for basically everything she makes). :O

The event raised $320! :] Not bad for a $5 admission, yes yes?

腊肠饭 (One-Pot Lap Cheong/Chinese Sausage with Rice)

I’m often jokingly called a failure of a Canto person because I can’t eat pork. (Half the dimsum out there probably has pork in it, in some shape or form.) Such as it is, I can never eat 腊肠饭, which smells gloriously wonderful (and is probably terrible for you and super-fatty, so I guess it’s not the end of the world). My mom happened upon a store that sold chicken Chinese sausages. :O!!!

She sent me back here with a pack of it, so I decided to make a pot of it for our surprise potluck for Kosina (part II of her birthday since we were no longer slaving over that quiz). Again, I didn’t feel like going home, so guess where I cooked it? (Yes, at school.) I checked the rules on the wall and while it said it didn’t allow space heaters, personal microwaves or refrigerators in these rooms, they said nothing about rice cookers. I realize this is probably because I’m like 1 out of 8 Asians every year, so they didn’t see a need to be that specific, but meh! Works for me!

The recipe was adapted from here! I thought I brought an actual knife with me, but apparently I did not, so I used what Adam calls my “hobo fork” (it’s a fork/knife/spoon/etc. contraption that I absolutely adore) to cut it up and kept sneaking covert glances at the window because I felt like a criminal for cooking in my study room (2nd time in a span of 2 days! D: ). About an hour into the cooking (it takes almost 2 hours for my rice cooker to make perfect brown rice), I came back from retrieving something and opened my door. It smelled so amazing, I went to the next room to tell Mike to follow me. (The last time I did this, Sean and I managed to scare him (score!) but Sean almost got punched in the face.) He followed me willingly anyway, and when he walked into my room, he contemplated ditching all his friends to stick around for “when my rice cooker sings.” I felt like this would be a bad idea, so if there are leftovers,  I’ll have him try it later.

Failing at being a creeper. (I happened to turn around.)

We’ve gotten a little more creative with our “Keep out” signs. It’s kinda hard to read, so it say: “Beware all ye who enter here…” (M) “Trespassers will be eaten for dinner.” (F) “^ yea.” (M)

腊肠饭 (One-Pot Lap Cheong/Chinese Sausage with Rice)

Ingredients:
-3 cups brown rice
-1/2 onion, diced
-1 1/2 tsp chicken essence powder
-black pepper, to taste
-1 clove garlic, minced
3 lap cheong (Chinese sausage), sliced
-water
-1 egg

Instructions:
1) Put everything other than the egg into the rice cooker + add enough water to cook the rice (I just follow the markings on my rice cooker.
2) Crack an egg over the cooked rice + mix.
3) Cover rice cooker + let it stand for another 5 minutes for the egg to cook.

Blueberry Rhubarb Crisp

One of the recipes from my birthday picnic! :D

Blueberry Rhubarb Crisp

Ingredients:
-6 stalks rhubarb stalks, cubed (NOT the leaf! it’s toxic :[ )
-blueberries (or peaches/something to make it sweeter)
-half a lemon, juiced
-a few tbsp sugar
-granola
-almonds

Instructions:
1) Preheat oven to 375.
2) Toss fruit with lemon juice + sugar.
3) Bake until soft and bubble. Sprinkle with granola + nuts and let cool to gain thickness.

Strawberry Ginger Punch

Another recipe from the birthday picnic!

Strawberry Ginger Punch

Ingredients:
-ginger ale
-strawberries, sliced
-pineapple juice
-pineapple, crushed or sliced

Instructions:
1) Combine ginger ale with pineapple juice and add strawberry slices + crushed/sliced pineapple.