Fall Flavored Crunchy Munch

Autumn keeps chugging along, bringing us luminous sunsets, chilly temps, and rainbow colored trees. In celebration of this beautiful and cozy time of year, I wanted to post another fall-inspired recipe, perfect for entertaining or just keeping around the house for snacking.

I had a few friends over this past weekend and took the opportunity to make this bowl of fun for them to munch on over the several hours we spent together. I hosted this gathering the day after Halloween, so you will notice there is an... um... interesting character present in some of the pictures from an idea I found on Pinterest. And I definitely incorporated the Halloween colors of black & orange into my minimal decorations for girls' night:

[a lil' bar cart styling - notice the bottle of caramel cream I used to make these drinks!]

...but this recipe is not meant to be enjoyed solely around Halloween. I incorporated the quintessential fall sweets - candy corn & candy pumpkins - so that you can make this crunchy munch throughout the autumn season or at any time you can find these fall favs in the stores. Or buy a couple extra bags so you can save them to use throughout the year!

As you know, I enjoy playing around with flavors on popcorn, and the idea behind this recipe is for it to be a spin on the usual caramel (do you say care-a-mel or carmul? I say care-a-mel :-) corn. Adding caramel to salty popcorn not only creates the ever-loved salty/sweet flavor combo, but it makes it a bit hardened, adding that perfect extra crunch. It's an all around winner. Instead of using caramel though, I used maple syrup, another famous fall flavor. With the syrup and the candy already going on, I didn't want to abuse everyone's sweet tooth, so I knew I had to balance out the sweetness with an opposite but complementary flavor or two. Enter cayenne and my buddy: liquid smoke, which you may remember from this old favorite. Spicy and smoky, done and done!

Last but not least, for a final bit of crunch in this munch, pumpkin seeds! My boyfriend and I dressed Milli up in her costume:

[She's a pumpkin! I know she looks miserable, but that's only because... she was miserable! haha]

...and carved pumpkins the evening before my girls' night:

[He carved the ghost and I did the bat. Pretty good, eh?!]

He had the presence of mind to save all of the pumpkin guts, which he diligently went through to dig out all of the seeds, then cleaned them and set them aside for roasting. I 'borrowed' a few handfuls for this recipe and they went magnificently with the rest of the ingredients in the munch.

One last thing before we get started: for some suggestions as to how to modify this recipe for yourself if you are sugar-free like me, check the bottom of the post.

OK, let's get poppin'!

Crunchy Munch
Servings: 1 medium sized bowl
Prep time: 5 minutes + 20 minutes during cooking time
Cooking time: 50 minutes (20 minutes of which are prep time for stuff that isn't getting cooked)

Ingredients:
4 handfuls pumpkin seeds, cleaned and dried
1 1/4 teaspoon salt
1 5/8 teaspoon pumpkin pie seasoning
4 teaspoons + 1/3 cup maple syrup
2 teaspoons oil (I used extra virgin olive oil)
1/2 cup popcorn kernels
1/8 teaspoon liquid smoke
1/16 teaspoon cayenne
1/16 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons butter
1 bag candy corn
1 bag candy pumpkins

Start by pre-heating your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Spread the pumpkin seeds on a nonstick baking sheet.

Sprinkle the seeds with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1 1/2 teaspoons of the pumpkin pie seasoning.

Toss the seeds to coat in the spices.

Next drizzle four teaspoons of the maple syrup over the seeds and stir them with a spatula.

Place the pan in the oven to roast for 50 minutes. 

When your pumpkin seeds have been roasting in the oven for a half an hour, start making the popcorn.

Pour the oil in a large pot along with the popcorn kernels and place the pot on the stove over medium high heat.

Add a lid to the pot and make sure to give the pot a shake every minute or so before and while the corn starts to pop.

While the corn is popping, make the drizzles, starting with the maple syrup.

Add 1/3 cup of the syrup in a small pot on the stove over medium low heat. Sprinkle in the liquid smoke, cinnamon, cayenne, and 1/8 teaspooon salt. Stir.

Bring this concoction to a light simmer and then turn the heat down to low.

Next, work on the butter drizzle.

Place the butter in a microwave safe dish (or you can go old school and melt the butter on the stove).

Place the butter in the microwave for 45 seconds to melt.

Add 1/8 teaspoon each of salt and the pumpkin pie seasoning and stir.

By this time, five minutes or so should've passed and the corn should be about done popping.

Take the pot off the heat and set aside for 30 seconds to allow any residual popping to cease.

Carefully remove the lid from the pot and use a spatula to give the popcorn a little stir, starting from the bottom to ensure none is stuck or burnt.

Toss the popcorn with 1/2 teaspoon salt.

Next, drizzle the seasoned butter over the popcorn...

...and immediately stir thoroughly with a spatula.

Now drizzle the maple syrup concoction over the popcorn...

...and immediately stir with a spatula so that the popcorn is evenly coated with butter and syrup.

At this time, the 50 minutes on the pumpkin seeds should be up, so remove the pan from the oven and stir the seeds with a spatula.

Throw the seasoned seeds in with the popcorn...

...and toss to combine the seeds throughout the popcorn.

Next, the fun part! The candy! Throw in the candy corn and candy pumpkins and toss.

If you are making this recipe at any time other than Halloween, you will skip this next, most fun step, unless you just have a sick sense of humor and want to do this part anyway.

 

Add a small fake skeleten to the bottom of your serving bowl. (I was thinking a fake severed hand would be fun as well! Or tossing in some fake eyeballs with the popcorn.)

Pour the popcorn in over the skeleten.

He looks ready for the party, doesn't he?!

Serve to your guests with festive servingware and holiday treats, like this delicious pumpkin cheesecake trifle (bottom left) I found on Pinterest!

Salute!

*I made myself a little bowl of crunchy munch, sans candy corns/pumpkins and all of the maple syrup. I roasted some pumpkin seeds without the maple syrup - only salt, pumpkin pie spice, and olive oil. Then for the popcorn coating, I melted coconut oil, added 1/4 teaspoon maple syrup extract, and followed the same cooking method as above for the maple syrup drizzle. I tossed my popcorn in that plus the same melted butter used above, as well as a little salt. Voila! Delicious, sugar free fall flavored crunchy munch!
 

Salted Caramel Apple Cocktail

Let me start by saying, I am SO excited to share this drink recipe with you! It turned out so well.

 

I know I told you in my last post that I am on a no-booze diet - on the wagon, so to speak. It is no fun, lemmetellya! But my boyfriend and I scheduled a Halloween themed housewarming party for this past weekend, and I planned to indulge a bit and enjoy the tricks and treats I was whipping up for my guests. I didn't want to force my boring sugar free diet on my loved ones, so I came up with quite the delicious menu, this drink included. We ended up having to cancel the party last minute (that is a story for another day!), but since I already had the ingredients for the specialty cocktail I dreamed up, I decided to go ahead and indulge on Sunday afternoon and break my 42 day booze fast with this fantastic, tasty, autumn inspired cocktail. What else are Sundays for anyway?!

 

The inspiration for this recipe is widespread. For starters, one of my favorite dessert flavor combos is the famous salted caramel. My friend Michelle over at Fifty Shades of Cakes makes an insanely delicious salted caramel cupcake. And my favorite chocolate shop even has a sugar free salted chocolate covered caramel, which I have been loving lately as a little treat. There was just a natural connection for me there with the salted caramel flavor and apples, with it being autumn. I knew that I wanted to have a pot of cider mulling on the stove during the party so that the house would smell fantastic, plus it's such a classic fall drink. My friend Erica had a really great cider at her crab feast over the summer that she made herself, so I decided to ask her for the recipe so I could use that as the base for my specialty cocktail. So major shout out to Erica for today's cider recipe, which is perfectly delectible served on its own. The only two things I left out were the "couple squirts from the dropper of elemakule tiki bitters and Angosutra bitters." I'll be honest: I have never heard of those two things and had no idea where to get them! haha But feel free to add them to the following recipe if you happen to have them on hand!

 

First up is the cider recipe, and following is the recipe for the specialty cocktail. Funny thing - I actually intended to make this drink with a caramel flavored vodka, but when I went to the local ABC store, they had nothing caramel flavored other than this Mary Hite Bowman Caramel Cream Liqueur, as well as Bailey's Irish Cream with a "hint" of caramel flavor. So I chose the MHC brand and I am SO glad it worked out that way! The drink turned out to be really frothy and creamy, with the perfect amount of richness. This would go down as a perfect dessert drink.

 

One last note: make sure to peep the very bottom of the cocktail recipe for tips on how to make this as a hot toddy instead of a cold drink.

 

Alright ladies & gents, let's get shakin'!

 

 

Boozy Cider

Servings: 1 gallon

Prep time: 40 minutes (includes cooling time before bottling)

Cooking time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

1 gallon apple cider

4 whole cinnamon sticks

2 star anises

Palm full of cloves

1 teaspoon bourbon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

3 orange rind peels

2 ounces brandy

Place a large pot on the stove over medium high heat. Pour the gallon of cider into this pot.

Add your cinnamon sticks, cloves, and star anise.

 Drop in the orange peels as well.

Bring these ingredients to a slow boil for a good twenty minutes.

At the end of the twenty minutes, pour in the shots of brandy.

Stir the ingredients once and remove the pot from the heat. 

Set it aside to let cool for about a half an hour.

Once the cider has cooled a bit, it's time to pour it into the bottles it will mull in for two days.

Place the bottle in the sink with a funnel in the mouth and pour the cider from the pot through the funnel and into the bottle

Use a fork to pick out the cinnamon sticks, cloves, star anise, and orange peels from the bottom of the pot and push them through the bottle mouth. You want all of that flavor mulling with the cider while it's in the fridge.

If you're serving this recipe for guests, make sure to dress up the bottle a bit. I added this homemade name tag & pretty Halloween ribbon.

Totally festive!

Stick the bottle(s) in the fridge and leave for at least two days. Pull out when you are ready to make...

Salted Caramel Apple Cockie

Servings: 1

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cooking time: n/a

Ingredients:

4 teaspoons caramel sauce (I used jarred)

4 teaspoons kosher sea salt

2 handfuls ice

1 (dry) cup Boozy Cider

2 ounces Caramel Cream Liqueur

2 apple slices for garnish

Start by setting two small plates side by side. 

Drizzle the caramel sauce on one, and the sea salt on the other (kinda hard to see the salt in this picture because the plate is the same color as the salt, but it's there!)

Next, dip the rim of your cocktail glass so that the caramel is coating around the entire thing.

Do the same thing in the salt (the caramel will make the salt stick).

Add ice to the glass.

To add the apple slices to your glass's rim, cut a slice down the center of the fleshy part of the apple, but stop before you hit the skin.

Place the apple slices on your glass as a garnish.

Set aside.

Now, add ice to your cocktail shaker.

Make sure to shake up the bottle containing the cider before you pour it for your drink. This will stir all of the sediment from the bottom so that it will mix throughout the liquid. 

Place a small strainer over your measuring cup and pour the cider through that to catch any large sediment.

 Pour the cup (dry measuring cup) of cider into the shaker.

Next, poor in the two shots (ounces) of caramel cream liqueur.

Place the lid snug on the shaker and shake vigorously for fifteen seconds.

Remove the lid to the strainer and poor the drink concoction into your prepared glass!

 Now you are ready to enjoy your cocktail!

 Salute!

P.S. If you want to enjoy this cocktail warm instead of chilled, that tastes great too! Make the original batch of cider and place it in the fridge for two days. Then pull it out and pour it into a pot on the stove (or pour a cup and warm it up in the microwave). While the cider is warming, garnish the rim of the glass as instructed in the recipe above. Add the Caramel Cream Liqueur to a your glass and ladle the hot cider over it. Sprinkle the top with some freshly grated cinnamon sticks and sip slowly! Enjoy!

Pumpkin (Punkin!) Butter

Happy OCTOBER everyone!

 

As much as I love the warm summer temps, there is a certain excitement that comes along with fall that involves getting cozy, watching football, burning creamy, spicy scented candles, and eating or drinking everything pumpkin flavored you can get your hands on! To celebrate the kickoff of autumn, I wanted to share a recipe evocotive of the season - everyone's favorite spreadable treat: pumpkin butter!

 

This recipe is going to be a little unique for vorace. I'll start by saying that I've recently discovered (thanks to a very helpful integrative doctor) that I have some health issues that need some attention. No need to get into the nitty gritty, but I wanted to share that bit of info as a way of prefacing the following recipe, as well as recipes I'll be posting in the near future. One of the holistic approach's treatment techniques focuses on lifestyle changes - one of which being diet. This treatment is based on the idea that what you eat has an effect on how you feel, how your body functions, and how healthy you are overall. This is definitely in line with my thinking, as I have done other research on my own and came to this same conclusion, so I was more than willing to take the advice of my doctor and embark on a new adventure of clean eating.

 

Clean eating means a lot of different things to various groups of people. The meaning behind the way I use the term is specific to myself and my health needs and is just a convenient way to shorthand my diet. To clarify, along with trying my hardest to maintain a whole-foods, plant-based diet (with the occasional addition of cheese & seafood), I have cut out almost all sugar & carbs - especially simple carbs. Sugars & carbs sneak their way into my diet in the form of low-glycemic fruits (strawberries! melon!) & complex carbs. So far that has been OK. But no sugar means no white sugar/honey/agave/syrup, and most importantly: no booze. Major sad face.

 

Not eating sugar is HARD. There is sugar in everything! Even stuff that doesn't  really need it. Take a look at any label in your local grocery store. I did this on a recent trip to my fav Trader Joe's. It was depressing how little I could take home. One funny thing did happen though: I came across the obligatory PUMPKIN! display - pumpkin pancake mix! pumpkin cookies! pumpkin macaroons! pumpkin ice cream! pumpkin butter! Pumpkin butter you say? I picked up the jar and read the ingredients list and saw that it contained honey, and immediately thought, "honey! I can have that in moderation as like a treat every now and then! At least it's not the white sugar devil!" I bought it, took it home, and promptly enjoyed a smathering of it on my new fav go-to snack, brown rice cakes. A few days later I took another gander at the ingredients label and sure enough, sugar was listed. In my desperation to legitimately be able to treat myself to ONE pumpkin based seasonal cheat, I went selectively blind to the word "sugar," and tricked myself into thinking TJ's PB was kosher. And it wasn't.

 

I thought to myself, there has got to be a way I can make myself a version of pumpkin butter that I can have. I referred back to a pumpkin "ice cream" clean eating recipe I had found on Pinterest that I had tailored to my dietary restrictions. That recipe called for maple syrup so I skipped that and used maple extract. To sweeten it, I used my new best friend, Stevia. I figured I could use this same idea to create my own clean pumpkin butter. In the hayday of sugar ignorance bliss, I had been enjoying the TJ's pumpkin butter atop a healthy portion of creamy cashew butter, spread on the rice cakes. It.was.amazeballs. I decided to use the cashew butter as the base for my clean pumpkin butter and incorporate the ingredients from that "ice cream" to make it pumpkin-y, more like traditional pumpkin butter. And get a nice little protein boost to boot!

 

Before we get started, I have to say that I named this recipe after my favorite nickname for my puppy, Milli. Last year around this time I started referring to her as "pumpkin face," which quickly turned into "punkinface." I say this about a million times a day, so it made sense to name this recipe after her. Why not?

 

OK let's get cookin'!

 

Punkin Butter

Servings: One 16 oz jar

Prep time: 10 minutes

Cooking time: n/a

Ingredients:

1/2 cup pumpkin puree

2 1/2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice mix

3 packets of Stevia

1/8 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon maple extract

1 cup cashew butter (creamy, not chunky)

Start by placing the pumpkin puree in a bowl & mixing it so that the water (juice?) that has separated combines with the pumpkin.

Add the pumpkin pie spices and Stevia to the pumpkin and stir so that the spices are completely incorporated into the puree.

Next, drizzle in the extracts... 

...and stir to combine. 

Spoon the cashew butter into a food processor.

Add the pumpkin mixture to the food processor. Turn on the processor long enough for the cashew butter to combine with the pumpkin mix.

You may have to do this several times, scraping the sides down with a spatula in between.

When the pumpkin & cashew butter are fully mixed, use the spatula or a spoon to scoop the punkin butter back into your empty cashew jar or a food storage container with a tight fitting lid. You'll want to store this in the fridge.

 [YUM!]

There are so many things you can eat this with! I spread it on brown rice cakes:

But it would also go great on graham crackers (if you're eating sugar), apple slices, pumpernickel toast or pretzels (if you're eating carbs) - the choices are endless!

I must say though, the brown rice cakes are pretty scrumptious with this punkin butter spread on them. Give it a try!

 Salute!