Tiffanie: this week's menu

After all that rain, the weather is now sunny and cool. I'm craving warm food!

The plan:

• taco night, as usual, with mushrooms. Also going to make Mexican rice, the type with tomatoes. Love that!
• my old favorite, tofu mushroom potato stew with miso gravy. This is a two-meal dish, so one night will be over rice, with roasted brussels sprouts. Another night will be over pasta, with a green salad or sauteed chard.
• mapo tofu, with rice, and onion pancakes, and roasted seaweed. I need to visit Ranch 99 for my onion pancakes and silken tofu...
• pumpkin ginger soup... I have two red kabocha squash on my counter, so this will use one of them. I may even make my first loaf of bread for the winter, perhaps with cherries and walnuts in it. 
• if I can find some escarole, I'd love to make a slow cooker white bean soup, with some orzo and escarole stirred in at the end. Such a fantastic thick soup... perhaps I'll get some Field Roast sausage to fry up alongside.

Today I made a batch of dough for St Lucia buns, from the King Arthur Flour recipe on the web. It's a yellow dough, with lots of milk and butter and eggs. You roll bits of dough into a snake, then shape a compact S. Two golden raisins are tucked into the folds, then brushed with egg white and sprinkled with coarse sugar. The kindergarten class will be making these tomorrow, and I felt I needed a practice run. I'm happy to announce they are good -- slightly sweet, fairly dense, very pretty color. The original recipe uses 1/4 tsp of saffron to add color to the milk, but as I ran out of saffron, I decided to try 1/8 tsp of turmeric. It worked very well; the turmeric is not detectable by scent or taste. Just a lovely yellow color!