Cranberry Pear Puff Pastry Turnovers

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Cranberry Pear Puff Pastry Turnovers | Fork Knife SwoonCranberry Pear Puff Pastry Turnovers | Fork Knife SwoonCranberry Pear Puff Pastry Turnovers | Fork Knife Swoon

For most of my life, I ate cranberries exactly twice a year – on Thanksgiving and Christmas – and always in the predictable form of traditional cranberry sauce, more often than not poured from a can, and always dressed up for the occasion in a pretty, cut-crystal serving bowl. Over time, I grew to love dried cranberries atop morning oatmeal and nestled into cookies – and college provided plenty of cranberry juice spiked with splashes of vodka – but fresh cranberries remained elusive, save for that yearly holiday sauce.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving each year, I’d begin to see bags of bright, deeply jewel-colored fresh cranberries appear in the produce section, but always passed them by, drawn to other seasonal favorites. That is until a couple of years ago, when I ventured to make fresh cranberry sauce from scratch. While not exactly a culinary breakthrough, my from-scratch recipe was hands down better than the shelf-stable, prepared variety I had grown used to. It was time to ditch that can for good.

Cranberry Pear Puff Pastry Turnovers | Fork Knife SwoonCranberry Pear Puff Pastry Turnovers | Fork Knife SwoonCranberry Pear Puff Pastry Turnovers | Fork Knife Swoon

For this year’s Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, I decided to add some sweet, little Forelle pears and a splash of lemon to the mix. My go-to recipe makes enough for a dozen or so holiday dinner guests, but given that this year we will be celebrating on a smaller scale, I’ve been thinking of ways to re-purpose the leftovers.

Enter a nagging box of frozen puff pastry that I’ve been meaning to utilize. Puff Pastry Turnovers called out to me from our packed and disorganized freezer. It was worth a go, even just to free up some space… Luckily, the combination turned out to be a winner. A generous dollop of cranberry pear sauce is tucked inside light, buttery layers of puff pastry, baked to golden oblivion, and dusted with feathery powdered sugar. It’s sweet and tart pastry heaven.

[Click here to read the complete post and recipe...]

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Butternut Squash, Apple and Fennel Soup

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Butternut Squash, Apple and Fennel Soup | Fork Knife SwoonButternut Squash, Apple and Fennel Soup | Fork Knife Swoon

Butternut Squash, Apple and Fennel Soup | Fork Knife Swoon
Butternut Squash, Apple and Fennel Soup | Fork Knife Swoon

Butternut Squash, Apple and Fennel Soup | Fork Knife Swoon

In the early morning, the fog lays thick and low across empty fields. Graceful, draped spiderwebs, dew-speckled and ethereal, glow against a backdrop of dark earth and deeply-green, wild grasses that have sprouted amongst the skeletal remains of corn. The market season is coming to a close.

It was this time last year that we left Georgia for good. The monotony of evergreen pines thinned as we headed north, our route, along scenic two-lane highways and back roads, increasingly dominated by vast fields of cotton. We drove through a handful of small towns, down dilapidated main streets, with dusty store-fronts and chipped and faded signs above boarded-up windows. We passed cheerful, pastel-painted Victorians with big porches and bright flower pots hanging from the eaves. Sagging trailers with lazy dogs out front, and the best hole-in-the-wall barbecue joints you can find. But mostly it was open country. Dense swaths of tall trees would suddenly open up to cotton. Rows and rows of scrubby, bare plants dotted with white, puffy bolls traced the edges of the road.

I’d forgotten that landscape. Months later, when the frozen, grey ground finally burst alive again, that familiar, bracing humidity, that lush wildness that I had come to know of the South, returned. With each month, more forcefully so. The land hummed loudly, constantly, with the nagging din of insects and energetic, seemingly unstoppable growth. This untamed Southern land – of red dirt and swampy woods, thick with walls of knotted brush beneath shadowy pines – remains perpetually inclined to swallow us back into those deeply-rooted, tangled depths.

And then, a pause. The driving fury of those middle months subsided, the vibrancy and color receding, leaving in its wake only a quiet, muted landscape; a cyclical respite framed in hushed tones of grey and brown. The land rests. The cotton waits again on naked, dry branches, ready to be picked, and I can’t believe it’s been another year.

Butternut Squash, Apple and Fennel Soup | Fork Knife Swoon

Butternut Squash, Apple and Fennel Soup | Fork Knife Swoon
Butternut Squash, Apple and Fennel Soup | Fork Knife Swoon

Butternut Squash, Apple and Fennel Soup | Fork Knife Swoon[Click here to read the complete post and recipe...]

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Finding Balance + A Superfood Green Drink

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Superfood Green Juice | Fork Knife SwoonSuperfood Green Juice | Fork Knife SwoonSuperfood Green Juice | Fork Knife SwoonSuperfood Green Juice | Fork Knife Swoon

I was seriously considering trying a juice cleanse. You know, one of those three to five (to seven!) day restrictive regimens of nothing but super-nutrient-packed vegetable and fruit juices, meant to cleanse, reset and restore your body’s system. Celebrities and health gurus extoll the virtues. People swear by it.

I completely fell for the glamorous, healthful message of cleansing. Heal yourself. Cleanse the toxins maliciously intent on draining your energy. Start anew. The basic theory is that by cutting out everything from your diet but the very healthiest and nutrient-rich produce for a few days – essentially giving your body and digestive system a rest – your body is restored. It seemed easy enough. Lately, I’ve caught myself yawning more frequently. Feeling sluggish. Slipping in an extra cup of coffee mid-morning. Life has been busy – the good kind of busy – but I haven’t been taking care of my body like I should be, or taking time for myself. I’m starting to feel it. A few too many of these and a few less trips to the gym will do that. I began to think that I just needed to press the reset button with a cleanse. I could get back to a healthy baseline.

That is until I did some research and quickly realized that a three day cleanse would cost upwards of $150. That may work for cleansers more dedicated than me, but spending that much to give up eating solid food for three days was neither plausible nor justifiable. The sticker shock alone catapulted me back to reality. Maybe the high cost was a good thing. It was at least cause for some serious reevaluation. Maybe my focus should be less about swinging the pendulum in the absolute opposite direction – and expecting a collection of perfectly concocted, cold-pressed juices to be my cure for malaise – and more about simply finding a better balance.

Superfood Green Juice | Fork Knife SwoonSuperfood Green Juice | Fork Knife SwoonSuperfood Green Juice | Fork Knife SwoonSuperfood Green Juice | Fork Knife Swoon[Click here to read the complete post and recipe...]

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