This Wild Season

Sharing what I'm learning in the kitchen as well as outside of it.

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Slow Cooker Corn Dip

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Football season is in full swing y’all. That means gathering all your people to cheer on your favorite team and eat delicious food together. At least. That’s what it means to me.

The two teams we cheer for, the Packers and the Panthers, are both 6-0, so we’re feeling pretty great about football in our house these days.

Whether your team is at the top, or you’ve resigned yourself to a losing season already, this corn dip is a perfect addition to your next football get-together. It’s got a kick from the jalapeño and spices, includes a variety of cheeses of your choosing, and gets finished off with a squeeze of fresh lime.

Throw it all together in a slow cooker a couple hours before the game starts and you’ll be all set. Fair warning though: this corn dip is addicting. If you find yourself headed back for seconds, thirds, and fourths… Well. I’ll say I told you so.

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My version of this recipe was heavily adapted from Chungah’s recipe over on Damn Delicious – her method works great, I just wanted to add a lot more flavor to the finished product! You’re welcome to adapt this recipe – add more spice or leave it out, add different peppers, try different kinds of cheese. Experiment and see what you like best!

Slow Cooker Corn Dip

Inspired by Damn Delicious
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Prep Time 10 mins
Cook Time 2 hrs 15 mins
Total Time 2 hrs 25 mins
Servings 6 -8 as a side or appetizer

Ingredients
  

  • 4 c frozen corn
  • 2 jalapeños seeded and diced
  • 1 1/4 c shredded cheese your choice - my favorite combination is pepper jack, cheddar, and a little feta
  • 1/2 tsp cumin
  • 1/8 tsp garlic powder
  • 1/8 tsp onion powder
  • dash of paprika
  • Kosher salt and pepper to taste
  • 8 oz cream cheese cubed
  • Juice of 1 lime

Instructions
 

  • Combine all ingredients except cream cheese and lime juice in a small slow cooker, stir to combine well. Place cubed cream cheese on top of corn mixture, set slow cooker to low, and let cook for 2 hours.
  • Stir in the cream cheese, add the lime juice, cover and set to high for 15 more minutes. Serve with tortilla chips, tacos, quesadillas, or a spoon.

Notes

I use a tiny slow cooker for this recipe and it works perfectly! It's just the right size for all the ingredients and works well as a serving bowl too. If you're using a larger slow cooker, you may be able to shorten the cooking time a bit. If you try it - let me know how it goes!!

Slow Cooker Corn Dip by thiswildseason.com

Chopped Cherry Tomato Caprese

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The Sweet 100 cherry tomato plant in our garden has been most prolific this summer and into the fall. Each day I go out to find a few more little red tomatoes on the vine. As the weather is starting to turn to fall here in NC, this is my ode to warmer days and some of my favorite summer flavors.

Caprese salad is typically made with large slices of tomato and mozzarella, layered with fresh chopped basil, a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, and a little olive oil and salt and pepper. This version is a twist on the traditional recipe by using cherry tomatoes and chopping everything up to make a pretty tossed salad. I usually like to leave out the olive oil, but you’re welcome to add it back into this recipe.

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Chopped Cherry Tomato Caprese

Asharae Kroll
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Ingredients
  

  • 1 pint cherry tomatoes quartered
  • 1-2 Tbs balsamic vinegar
  • Handful of chopped mozzarella You can purchase a pre sliced ball of mozzarella at the store to make this simpler. I used a couple slices and chopped them into small squares.
  • A few leaves of fresh basil chopped
  • Kosher salt and pepper to taste

Instructions
 

  • Combine all ingredients.
  • Let rest in the fridge for 15 minutes for the flavors to get happy.
  • Enjoy.

Chopped Cherry Tomato Caprese by thiswildseason.com

The Best Guacamole

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Confession time. I’ve been holding onto this recipe for a long time. As in I-took-these-photos-last-February long time. And I offer you my deepest apologies. This guacamole is seriously delicious, and it should have been in your life a long time ago. I usually don’t write my recipes down for things like salsa, tzatziki, and guacamole – but last year I finally wrote this one down to share with all of you. And then I promptly – ahem – misplaced the recipe card. (Okay, maybe I lost it, never to be found again.)

Since we’re nearing the end of football season, and in anticipation of the big game (can I call it the Super Bowl here? Is that allowed?) I figured it was the perfect time to recreate this recipe for you to enjoy!

If you like a little texture to your guacamole, feel free to add diced onions and perhaps don’t mash your avocados all the way. If you’d rather have smooth guacamole, you can mash it to your heart’s content. The jalapeños are also optional in this recipe – if you remove the seeds, they don’t add too much heat, but you’re welcome to leave them out if you’re sensitive to spicy food. I prefer this recipe with lots of white onion for crunch (even though I photographed it with red onion) and a jalapeño or two for added heat. The lime and cilantro help to balance out the jalapeño and onion and add an extra level of deliciousness. Mmmm. So good.

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The Best Guacamole

Asharae Kroll
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Servings 6 -8

Ingredients
  

  • 4 ripe avocados see note below about choosing avocados
  • 1 tsp cumin
  • 1/4 tsp chili powder
  • 1/4 tsp onion powder
  • 1/4 tsp garlic powder
  • 1/8 tsp cayenne
  • Juice of 1-2 limes
  • Handful of cilantro leaves chopped
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • Optional about 1/4 c red or white onion, minced
  • Optional 1 jalapeño, seeds removed, diced

Instructions
 

  • Remove avocado from the peel. The best way to do it - carefully using a sharp knife, cut all the way around the avocado, end to end. You'll gently cut around the pit in the middle. An easy way to remove the pit is to carefully, but firmly press a sharp knife into the pit (please be careful - don't want you to lose any fingers in the name of guacamole!) Once the knife blade is pressed into the pit, take the avocado half in your hand and gently twist the avocado one way and the knife the other direction. The pit should release from the avocado. Save one of your avocado pits to use in a minute. Once you've halved all your avocados and removed the pits, use a butter knife to cut the avocado into pieces, being careful not to cut through the skin. Use a spoon to scoop the avocado pieces out.
  • Combine avocado with the rest of ingredients and mash together until guacamole reaches the consistency you prefer. Enjoy with chips, on tacos, with a quesadilla, or eat straight with a spoon - I won't judge.
  • Place the avocado pit you saved in with the finished guacamole - this helps keep it from turning brown so quickly. Store in an airtight container and enjoy within 3 days.

Notes

When choosing an avocado at the grocery store, look for ones with firm, smooth skin (no weird hollow spots, squishy spots, or bruises). You can check to see if an avocado is past its prime by removing the small stem - if it's still green underneath, your avocado is still okay. If it has turned brown under the stem, the avocado is past being ripe - don't purchase these. Let the avocados ripen on your counter for a few days if they're particularly firm.

 

Caprese Salad with Honey Balsamic Reduction and some Mid-Week Inspiration

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This week I want to share a few of the things that I’ve been inspired by lately.  I hope a few of these words speak to you and perhaps encourage you to read these books or visit these blogs. Enjoy!

Tsh Oxenreider and her family’s year-long round-the-world trip.

I’m completely in awe of this trip Tsh and her husband are about to set out on with their three kids. I haven’t even gotten a chance to read her book Notes From A Blue Bike which I bought back in the spring, but it’s next on the list. I love reading stories of families who are thinking outside the box – the ones who are willing to make certain sacrifices in order to pursue what’s most important to them.

The Oxenreiders are doing something which seems so radical to some, but as Tsh explains it – “Traveling is in our blood.”

I love this quote from her blog. I think it applies to so many things, particularly when it comes to taking a big “next step,” in anything from vocation to marriage to family to going on a year-long trip around the world.

“I think sometimes we feel like there needs to be this extrinsic, sign-from-God sort of reason to do something this big. But really, what if God simply delights in us following our desires? What if we’re partly fulfilling our vocation (in the literal sense of the word) by acting on our deepest passions?”

Yes. This.

These photos of the Ingalls homestead from Joy Prouty. 

Go look at them. And read her words. Altogether they make me want to melt in a puddle of happiness. I loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books when I was a kid – and these photos reminded me of how much they ignited my imagination – perhaps my secret longing to build my own house, grow my own food, and raise chickens and goats has something to do with those books. I even remember a short-lived phase where I insisted on calling my parents Ma and Pa.

I think Little House on the Prairie is moving up on my list of books to re-read. But right now I’m trying to convince Tim we should read The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle aloud – it’s another of my childhood favorites. We started reading it on Sunday, and he was sweet enough to read a few chapters to me before I started snoring on the couch. Sunday afternoons man. They’ll getcha.

Anna Watson Carl and her blog The Yellow Table

I’m a relatively new reader of Anna’s blog, but I’ve been loving everything she writes. She’s a chef and a writer based in NYC and she’s publishing a cookbook this fall. It’s been a lot of fun to follow her journey via Instagram and her blog. She writes with refreshing honesty about combatting the doubts and discouragement and realizing her need for rest, refreshment, and new perspective.

I came across this post of hers recently and it really resonated with me. I too have trouble slowing down and truly resting. Working from home and running my own business is a blessing and a curse in that regard. I’m home all the time, so it seems it would be easy to relax and simply enjoy being home. The flip side of that is that I’m also always at work – there’s always more to be done – more emails to send, more blog posts to write, more photos to edit. And it really never ends. I’ve taken to (almost) never checking my email on the weekends because I simply need a break from it all. I’m slowly letting go of the guilt I can sometimes feel when I let an email go a couple days before I answer it. My heart and my brain simply need to rest sometimes.

 

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This recipe is inspired partly by the plethora of tomatoes we have exploding from our garden right now and partly by our honeymoon over four years ago (no, we didn’t go to Italy, but we did eat at an amazing Italian restaurant in Georgia of all places.) We ordered caprese salad as an appetizer and it maybe changed our lives. Mine at least. The waiter explained that they had created a balsamic vinegar reduction to drizzle over the tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil. All I remember is that that dish forever changed my dislike for tomatoes. The sweet, salt and peppery, tart combination left me yearning to figure out how to recreate that dish. Until now I’d never actually tried. I came across this recipe for a honey balsamic reduction and adapted it into my usual caprese salad ensemble. The result – delicious.

 

Caprese Salad with Honey Balsamic Reduction

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Ingredients
  

For the Honey Balsamic Reduction

  • 1/2 c balsamic vinegar
  • 2 Tbs honey

For the salad

  • 3 Medium tomatoes any variety - we used Black Krim, Lemon Boy, and Better Boy tomatoes
  • Mozzarella buying the pre-sliced rounds makes this easy - I even slice those in half since they're so thick
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • Fresh basil chopped

Instructions
 

For the Honey Balsamic Reduction

  • Combine the balsamic vinegar and honey in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until syrupy and reduced to 1/3 c, about 10-12 minutes. Let cool to room temperature. Store leftovers in a sealed container in the fridge.

Assemble the salad

  • Layer the salad in this order - tomato, salt and pepper, mozzarella, honey balsamic reduction, fresh basil.
  • Enjoy!

Notes

If you're short on time or feeling lazy, you can always skip the honey balsamic reduction and drizzle a few teaspoons of balsamic vinegar over your tomatoes instead.