Posted September 29, 2022 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 0 Comments
I’m a sucker for a good autumn salad. I’ll take hearty greens, roasted root veg, spiced nuts, soft cheese over a tomato-and-cucumber situation any day. Yet I’ve never had a chance to make one for the blog, so when I saw one mentioned in JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL, I knew my time had come. Plus, I knew a beet salad would go perfectly with the other dishes I had planned for my Strange & Norrell menu—wigg buns with orange marmalade, a honeyed Cornish hen pot pie, and an opulent dessert I’m keeping secret for now. 😉
I added honey to my roasted beets to tie them in with both the pot pie entree and the vinaigrette I drizzled over the salad at the end (a honey Dijon variation on my go-to vinaigrette recipe). I wanted robust, earthy greens that would hold up to the deep flavor of the beets, so I used some kale and beet greens (never pass up a chance to use edible root veg greens in your salad—turnip greens are amazing too!). For salt and crunch, I included some bacon and toasted pine nuts.
An autumn salad craves soft cheese, so I went with goat cheese since it’s appropriate for the English countryside setting. Stilton would be even more appropriate, but I couldn’t get any. Up to this point, my salad is pretty much a standard beet salad, so I wanted something unusual to set it apart. Apricots were the answer to my prayer—sweet enough to brighten up all the other flavors, while rich enough not to get overpowered.
I ate this with my sister after I finished taking pictures, and we absolutely devoured it! In fact, she normally doesn’t like goat cheese, but she loved it here. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did! 🙂
Read More
Posted November 9, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 4 Comments
The secret’s out: This whole Stranger Things menu is gonna feature breakfast foods! We started out with Spicy Maple Fried Chicken Waffle Cones, and now we’re moving on to rich, fluffy french toast.
This recipe is inspired by the French toast Sheriff Hopper serves to Eleven in Season 2. Granted, the version he made was a little more basic, but you know me—I can resist playing with my food! Stuffed French toast seemed like the way to go, and the bacon stuffed variety was perfect for health-food-hating Hopper.
This was my first time making French toast, so I took inspiration from several recipes: The Kitchn’s basic French toast, Spicy Southern Kitchen’s Bacon French Toast, and Bon Appetit’s tips for avoiding French toast mistakes. Although I’m not the biggest fan of French toast (hence why I’ve never made it before), I feel like this is a really solid recipe. It starts with thick slices of challah soaked it a lightly sweetened custard, filled with fried bacon and cooked in butter until golden. The texture on the inside was rich, faintly sweet, soft, fluffy, and moist without being wet. In fact, the inside of the bread reminded me a lot of a soufflé. It contrasted so well with the salty bacon in the very center. Top with a dusting of powdered sugar and a healthy drizzle of syrup, and you’re all set!
Read More
Posted June 13, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Holidays / 0 Comments
Father’s Day is just around the corner, and I’m extra excited this year!
This Father’s Day will be my husband’s first official Father’s Day AND it falls on his birthday, so I really wanted to make it count. Especially since most of the gifts baby makes for him these days come wrapped in diapers! 😉
I usually wind up cooking something for the Mister on gift-giving occasions (for Christmas I made him white rum and almond hot chocolate!). So for Father’s Day, I decided to peruse my archive of meaty main dishes for inspiration when I realized that lots of other moms are probably in the same boat! So I decided to share a roundup of all the dishes I’m considering, so you can use them too!
Read More
Posted April 20, 2017 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 4 Comments
One group of characters often forgotten from James and the Giant Peach is the Cloud Men (perhaps since they were left out of the movie). In the book, the Cloud Men are responsible for creating such atmospheric phenomenon as rainbows, storms, and snow. When James and companions float past a Cloud Man city in their flying peach, they see Cloud families preparing dinners of fried snowballs.
These sounded delicious, so of course I wanted to make them for the blog! And I knew exactly how I wanted to create my own interpretation: mashed potato balls mixed with bacon and cheese, rolled in panko crumbs, and deep fried. Utterly delicious and fun to make!
Read More
Posted November 10, 2016 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 4 Comments
There’s no food more synonymous with Moby Dick than chowder. Melville devotes a whole chapter to describing Ishmael and Queequeg’s chowder feast at a little establishment called the Try Pots. The owner serves two varieties (clam and cod). I decided to make clam chowder, since this is the variety Ishmael and Queequeg try first (and I’m a bigger fan of clams than fish).
My chowder (adapted from a Taste of Home recipe) is altered just a bit from the one in the book to allow for more modern ingredients. The chowder in the book is described as containing crushed ship’s biscuits, which I imagine acted as a thickener, so I used flour to achieve the same effect. It also calls for salted pork, which I swapped for bacon, since they’re so similar. I then sauteed some onion and garlic in melted butter and threw in some red potatoes, corn, celery, and—of course—minced clams. The final result was creamy, savory, and salty—just the sort of stick-to-your-ribs meal you need before heading out on a long ocean voyage.
Read More
Posted June 16, 2016 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 11 Comments
When it comes to Star Trek TNG, pretty much the entire cast is near and dear to my heart. I love Geordi La Forge’s head for numbers and Deanna Troi’s weakness for chocolate. And of course I love Captain Picard (how could you not?). But my all-time favorite Star Trek character is Lt Commander Worf, hands down.
I have a soft spot for prickly characters, and Worf is a veritable cactus of a Klingon. He is uncomfortable with affection, hates jokes, and resents having a birthday party thrown for him. What’s not to love? 😉 Worf loves traditional Klingon food that reflects his planet’s warrior culture, and what’s more warrior-like than blood pie? Rokeg Blood Pie is a Klingon staple usually made with real blood, but don’t worry, ours is made of bacon, sausage, beets, and butternut squash!
Read More
Posted June 9, 2016 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 6 Comments
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Geordi La Forge is one of my favorite characters. He’s the chief engineer on the USS Enterprise, and he’s smart, loyal, and adorably awkward around girls. Plus, his best friend is an android. What’s cooler than that?
One of Geordi’s favorite foods is pasta alla fiorella, so of course it had to be the entree for my Star Trek menu (though he mistakenly calls it “pasta al fiorella”).
As it turns out, pasta alla fiorella is super easy to make and ultra delicious. Traditionally the dish consists simply of plain noodles with ricotta or fiorella cheese, bacon, and asparagus. Clean, simple flavors—and extra delicious with fresh basil. No wonder Geordi loves it so much!
Read More
Posted May 5, 2016 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 3 Comments
A few months ago, I read The Borrowers for the very first time, and I couldn’t believe what I’d been missing. It was amazing! Despite being written for a young audience, the characters were nuanced and relatable. The plot, though relatively simple, was engaging. I LOVED Arrietty’s spunk—she quickly became one of my top literary heroines!
We first meet the Borrowers while they are making their evening dinner: potato soup. Of course, since the pot was no bigger than a thimble, only the most delicate slivers of potato and onion were taken from the Borrowers’ stores to make the soup. Nevertheless, the resulting dinner was hearty and delicious, and I knew right away that it would be the appetizer for my Borrower menu.
Read More
Posted March 17, 2016 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 13 Comments
Milady de Winter is one of my all-time favorite literary villains. She’s the sort of cold, evil manipulator that you just love to hate. In fact, she’s such a good bad guy that my favorite chapters in The Three Musketeers are the five chapters she spends in prison doing nothing but scheming. Naturally, such a wonderful villain deserves a spot on our menu.
And given her name, I knew the recipe I made in her honor had to be winter soup!
Since I didn’t have a go-to winter soup recipe, I had to go hunting for one while planning this menu. This particular winter soup—my own slight variation on one I found by Chungah Rhee–is fragrant and wholesome. I chose it because it includes an extra step that many soup recipes don’t: it calls for roasting the vegetables before adding them to the soup. I think roasting vegetables ALWAYS makes them better, so I had my eye out for a recipe that took advantage of roasted veggie goodness. And this is definitely it! If I didn’t have a go-to winter soup recipe before, I’ve sure got one now! 😉
Read More
Posted December 3, 2015 by Alison's Wonderland Recipes in Book of the Month Recipes / 11 Comments
December is here, and with it all the trappings of Christmas. Since I moved in early November and didn’t get a chance to decorate for Halloween, I was determined not to let that happen for Christmas. On the first night of Advent, I set the lights low, turned on a CD of Christmas hymns, and finished almost all my decorating in one night (I saved the tree for the next day). I was so ready for it, and it was actually really relaxing. I even found that it has been a lot easier to remember the “reason for the season,” I guess because it gave me a chance to think about why I was decorating. I know I won’t always get that, so I was grateful to have it this year.
Read More
