Goodbye, Summer; Hello, Fall

By Ben Mims
For Cooking Newbie, a blog for beginner cooks

It’s wonderful when the last waning days of summer are interspersed with cold days that snap you out of your warm weather stupor. I look forward to autumn so much that I welcome as quick an end to summer as possible. And during this season, it’s great to begin cooking slightly heartier fare than fruit-topped salads.

As with most meals I make, I took inspiration from random ingredients in my pantry that I wanted to use in some way before they went bad. This week it was sour cream, and since we also had some egg pasta lingering in the back of the pantry, the idea of making a warm and satisfying meal of stroganoff practically slapped me in the face.

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Autumn Sweet Potato Soup

By Andrew Hunter

Sweet potatoes have gone from obscurity to celebrity in the last few years. They now grace plates in every menu category, especially side dishes, of restaurants from fast food to fine dining. I’m not a nutritionist, but a simple review of their nutritional label shows some real benefits to these orange-fleshed tubers. They weigh in with fewer calories and carbs than russets and they contain more than 700% of your Vitamin A for the day…no kidding.

As a parent, sweet potatoes are the kind of veggie you hope your kids will like. Heck, I’ll even let the boys eat sweet potato fries if it makes them happy. But as summer fades into fall, and I start thinking about the chilly weather, turning leaves and woolen sweaters of my Michigan childhood, I automatically think of soup.

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Soup for two! Plus Leftovers

By Lori Powell

Soup time is here. I had to turn the heat on yesterday. I realized that my hands had lost some of their feeling due to how cold my kitchen was without the oven on...which I must admit, is a rare thing. It would have been lovely to have my hands wrapped around a mug of homemade soup.

In my neck of the Hudson Valley, the arrival of fall carries with it the aroma of dried leaves (carpeting the floor of my front yard which I will have to address soon) and wood burning in someone’s fireplace or wood stove (I have neither and yearn for one or the other) with smoke that wafts in the direction of my house.

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