Category Archives: Real Food Recipes

Sweet and Tangy Marinated Beets

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Meghan Slocum • 2 Comments

Easy marinated beets recipe | Vegan marinated beets | Gluten-free marinated beetsBeets are still abundant at our local farmers’ markets right now. Normally we mostly enjoy beets roasted with carrots and onions, but lately I’ve also been loving them in this simple marinated side dish. I especially like this recipe because it makes a bunch of leftovers that keep well in the fridge and taste good eaten cold. We prepare virtually all of our own meals, but ideally I only like to cook for dinner so leftovers are a huge asset in our house.

My toddler is also a big fan of this recipe. The prunes make this dish taste fairly sweet, which I assume is what she enjoys about it.…

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Watermelon Coconut Sherbet

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Meghan Slocum • 8 Comments

Watermelon sherbet | Watermelon sorbet | Watermelon ice cream | Watermelon coconut ice creamSo I’m not really sure what to call this watermelon dessert creation. I don’t think it’s a watermelon sorbet, since it contains coconut milk. It’s not as creamy as most of my coconut milk ice creams, so it doesn’t seem quite right to call it watermelon ice cream. So I’m going with watermelon sherbet.

Regardless of what you call it, though, this recipe is delicious. It’s a slightly fancy way to enjoy in-season watermelon–but like all of my ice cream recipes, it’s super simple to pull together.

What if I Don’t Have an Ice Cream Maker?

I get this question from time to time.…

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Sausage, Kale and Potato Soup

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Meghan Slocum • 4 Comments

Sausage, Kale and Potato SoupThis recipe originated as a vegetarian kale and potato soup from the cookbook Laurel’s Kitchen. When Jesse and I first started making it together (sometime in 2007ish, I would guess), we soon modified it to include a hearty helping of breakfast sausage. When I make soup, I want it to be filling enough to make up the entire meal, which this recipe certainly accomplishes when you include the sausage. More recently, I also started substituting chicken broth for the water or vegetable stock called for in the original recipe–a modification that makes this soup both more flavorful and more nutritious.…

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Apricot and Cinnamon-Spiced Cranberry Sauce

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Meghan Slocum • 6 Comments

Homemade cranberry sauce recipe | Thanksgiving cranberry sauce | Healthy cranberry sauce | Paleo cranberry sauce‘Tis the season for cranberry sauce! I mixed up a batch of this for the Thanksgiving dinner we shared with friends this year. While it of course went great with traditional Thanksgiving foods, making the sauce was so easy that I’m also planning on making it a few more times this season to serve as a fun accompaniment to more ordinary meals like roast chicken. I’m sure it would also make a lovely topping on vanilla (or maybe even chocolate?) ice cream.

This recipe has a long cook time, but the actual hands-on time is very short. It’s possible that you could achieve the same results in much less time, but I found that the long, low simmer was a good fit with my never-know-when-you’re-going-to-be-interrupted-by-the-baby schedule, since I really didn’t have to worry about anything overcooking or burning.…

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Cinnamon Coconut Ice Cream

Posted on December 10, 2013 by Meghan Slocum • 6 Comments

Cinnamon Coconut Ice CreamSo Jesse and I have discovered a new ice cream obsession: cinnamon coconut ice cream.

I mixed up a recipe on a whim a couple of weeks ago, and we were both completely blown away by how delicious it was. Jesse declared that it would go great with pumpkin pie, so then I had to make another batch to take to Thanksgiving dinner–where it did, indeed, make a fantastic accompaniment to pumpkin pie.

We scarfed down that batch pretty fast, too, so it was only after I made it a third time that I finally got a chance to take any pictures.…

Filed Under: Real Food Recipes