Cooking for fall

I spent a lot of time in the kitchen today--by choice. The weather was very fall-ish, so I made a big pot of chili for dinner and to last us through the week. This is my second pot of chili in less than a month. Fred makes fun of me because I'll only make it in the fall and winter (and probably well into the spring here, since it stays rainy and cool into June), but to me chili just doesn't seem like summer food.

I also roasted some butternut squash and sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes are for making biscuits, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the squash. I have about 6 cups of mashed pumpkin and squash in my freezer, but when I see it on sale I feel like I need to get more to stock up. I'll be able to bake a lot of pumpkin/squash bread through the winter.

I made a batch of the sweet potato biscuits to go with dinner tonight, and as always they are almost gone. I found this recipe last year after Thanksgiving when we had some leftover roasted sweet potatoes. If I remember correctly, they are excellent with cranberry sauce, but they're great by themselves. The recipe is modified from a Paula Deen one from the Food TV website. I consider it healthy, since it only has 1/4 cup butter in the whole batch (if, like me, you don't brush them with butter after cooking).


Anyway, if you're interested, here's the recipe:

Sweet Potato Biscuits
Makes 8-12

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 heaping tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup mashed cooked sweet potatoes
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) softened butter
2 to 4 tablespoons milk (depending on the moisture of the potatoes)
2-3 tablespoons flax seed (optional)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. In a separate bowl, mix the sweet potatoes and butter. Add the flour mixture to the potato mixture and mix to make a soft dough. Then add milk a tablespoon at a time to mixture and continue. Be lazy like me and drop spoonfuls of batter onto your baking stone, or be like Paulal and turn the dough out onto a floured board and toss lightly until the outside of the dough looks smooth. Roll the dough out to 1/2-inch thick and cut with a biscuit cutter. Bake for about 15 minutes. (Watch your oven: If the biscuits are browning too fast, lower the temperature.)