Carrot, Sweet Potato and Lentil Potage

Carrot, Sweet Potato and Lentil Potage gets a sweet-savoury boost from deep caramelized onions and a smoky spice from paprika and chipotle peppers. 

Happy New Year everyone! I hope your holidays were relaxing and filled with joy - I know mine were certainly joyful if not so much relaxing! Now that we are a week into the January blahs (followed by the February boos), we are definitely turning our focus onto light-on-the-hips but still high on comfort foods. In the traditional spirit of lentils and carrots symbolizing money and gold, as well as the not so traditional spirit of good health, I cooked up a thick, hearty, spicy and slightly sweet potage of root vegetables and lentils. The base ingredients are accented and elevated with pops of herbs (especially wintery rosemary), smoky paprika and chipotle as well as rich, caramelized onions. The smells of the dish perfume your home for ages, from when the onions hit the oil to when all the flavours are blending together happily in the pot. Frequent taste tests - for quality control of course - are greatly encouraged.

Lentil and split pea puree-based soups have always had a special place in my heart, as they remind me of the delicious soup I had in Montreal on my 18th birthday. The dinner theatre I went to is now long gone, replaced by condos (c'est la vie) but the memories live on. I dare say this is definitely more my speed than the generic lentil soup though... I need all the heat I can get in the blustery winter weather!

What's your favourite January comfort food?

Gingerbread Brittle

Gingerbread Brittle is a sweet, spicy, melt in your mouth confection perfect for sharing with Santa... Or keeping all to yourself!

When it comes to the finishing touches on my gift baskets every Christmas, I always make sure to include some sort of candy. Some years, I've made as many as 8 different types - from licorice caramels to lemon drops - but since time and space was at a premium, and my giftee list was slightly smaller, I stuck to just a few this time around. Usually, I'm not a huge fan of toffees and brittles - they're too sweet and cloying for my taste, and frankly I'd much rather have a sour key or square of dark chocolate. However, other people seem to love them, and who am I to deny the people of what they want?

This year, I found probably the best option to cover both bases - Gingerbread Brittle. While it is still, undeniably, candy, it is swirled through with a medley of warm, rich spices and has a hint of classic gingerbread bitterness from the molasses as well. Since I used a high-fat European style butter, the brittle had a sheen and almost butterscotchy note too, the best of all worlds! Perfect for last minute gifts or a dessert potluck, it cooks up in a flash (mine was done and cooling in under 10 minutes) and makes enough for a crowd or for wrapping in little plastic bags. As with any sponge toffee or brittle, this uses baking soda to help give it an airy, melt-in-your-mouth texture, and frankly it's my favourite part of the whole brittle making process (hearkening back to the days of baking soda and vinegar volcanoes). After cooling for a few hours, the whole slab looked like textured marble, and it broke up neatly into pieces.

The tiny bit I was able to taste was heavenly - think a lighter, spicier Werthers - and those who received it waxed poetic on it's taste as well. I've even given out the recipe a few times, so now I'm sharing it with you!

Carrot Cake Biscotti #CreativeCookieExchange

Season's Greetings! Now that we're in the home stretch before the hullaballoo that is Christmas Day, I've been spending days and days packaging up all my gift boxes for friends and family. Of course, being part of a stepfamily that is born and bred Italian, one of the cookies that always finds it's way into the arsenal is biscotti. Like years before, I try to make a variety of more "unusual" flavours, and one of them is an echo of one of my favourite desserts - carrot cake!

The original recipe comes from Colleen of Souffle Bombay - and I must default to her should you be searching for photos of the finished cookies, as I packaged mine up  before remembering to take a photo! However, I can vouch that they look - and smell - fantastic and very much like their namesake. I did make a few changes to the original so that all my guests could enjoy them - namely making the cookies nut free and vegan - but you'd never be able to tell. The chopped raisins add a delicate, fruity sweetness less intense than dates, while the whole wheat flour and oats add a hint of nuttiness that blends perfectly with the spices. Aquafaba (chickpea brine) replaced the eggs and canola oil stood in for the butter, making the batter delicious (and taste-testable!). In place of a glaze or icing (because let's face it I'd never remember to do that) I topped the logs with coarse sugar before baking, lending them a subtle crunch and crust.

Of course, one of the great things about biscotti - any biscotti - is that it lasts a good long while in a tin or sealed bag. The rest of the #CreativeCookieExcange group this month has also come up with some ingenious bake now, serve later options for the holiday tables that I plan on trying out in the new year, since there is always a good reason for cookies!

The #CreativeCookieExchange is baking Cookies That Last in a Tin this month, and we’d love for you to join us!

You can also use us as a great resource for cookie recipes. Be sure to check out our Pinterest Board and our monthly posts (you can find all of them here at The Spiced Life). You will be able to find them the first Tuesday after the 15th of each month! If you are a blogger and want to join in the fun, contact Laura at thespicedlife AT gmail DOT com and she will get you added to our Facebook group, where we discuss our cookies and share links.

Almond Flour Sugar Cookies from A Baker's House
Carrot Cake Biscotti from What Smells so Good?
Cinnamon Chocolate Shortbread from Food Lust People Love
Mexican Chocolate Cookies from Karen's Kitchen Stories
Oatmeal Lace Cookies from The Spiced Life

Orange, Carrot and Rhubarb Preserve

Orange Rhubarb and Carrot Preserve tastes almost like the plum sauce you find in restaurants but with a hint of earthy flavour from homegrown carrots.

While I may not have been up to the usual glut of preserving this year, I did pull in an impressive haul of both rhubarb and carrots. Since there are few recipes that use a ton of either ingredient, I had to do some extra scouting, and what I found I couldn't have been happier with! The original recipe from my old church cookbook called this an "Orange Rhubarb Jam" but the consistency and taste weren't quite what I would call "toast toppable". Instead, what the concoction reminded me of most was a slightly winter-spiced plum sauce. Thick enough to stick onto potstickers, samosas or chicken fingers, thin enough to mix into a stir fry, it's sweet, sour, and just a touch earthy. In fact, the un-canned jars of this combination found their way into all sorts of savoury meals, both as an ingredient and as a condiment.

Whatever you call it, it's definitely a unique addition to the holiday table, and one I would feel 100% comfortable pairing with roasted veggies (like carrots! Or Brussels sprouts) as well as the main meat or protein (this is awesome over baked tofu too). Most importantly, it helped me use up my haul of heirloom carrots and rhubarb before they went bad in a way that didn't take up freezer space - after all, we had to shove a 15 lb turkey in there somehow in with all the other day-to-day items!

Mashed Potato Bread

This soft, sweet Potato Bread is brioche-rich and makes both great sandwiches (hello, PB&J!) and simple toast. Sesame seeds on top add an optional but decadent crunch!

Now that we're in the home stretch of the year, our fridge and freezer space has become premium real estate. While cleaning out one of the shelves of our deep freezer, I stumbled on a plastic container of mashed potatoes from our (Canadian) Thanksgiving that I had set aside for baking after the success of my Chocolate Mashed Potato Cake. Turns out I saved way more than I thought, and with the holidays approaching there is no space or need for 5 chocolate cakes lying about!

However, the need for bread at my house is constant. I did a quick Pinterest search and landed on this recipe on Num's the Word. The original bread was white and looked airy and fluffy with a crumb perfect for holding onto a Toast Topper, but my mom prefers her starches whole grain so I swapped the all-purpose flour for whole wheat bread flour. This bread is sweet and almost brioche-like, and I wanted to compliment this flavour (and the nuttiness of whole wheat) with a topping of sesame seeds. The seeds added a delicious crunch as well! I was extremely glad that I doubled the batch, since the leftovers freeze beautifully and my mom couldn't get enough of it. In fact, this recipe (made into rolls) was nominated by my family as the bread dish for our annual Christmas Eve party! I'm sure I'll have plenty of leftover potatoes in the New Year to play with as well, I can't wait to try a few variations like stuffing it with dried fruit, swirling in some jam or even making the bread more savoury with less sugar and some herbs like thyme, rosemary or dill!

When do you usually eat bread? With us it's either a lazy weekend breakfast or alongside a soup or salad with lunch. Comment below!