This recipe is a mash-up of three different recipes with things that we had in hand.

Using up fall root vegetables becomes more challenging by the week. How many interesting and hopefully recipes use turnips and parsnips? A rhetorical question for sure, but hopefully with an answer of "at least one more". Several websites had turnip/parsnip gratin recipes and we added potato plus more a smokey component with paprika. Served with keilbasa grilled on the Big Green Egg (with more smoke), it seemed like a promising combination.

This is our raw oyster log. So many varieties and everybody likes something different. We always serve with mignonette and hot sauce.

We unexpectedly ended up with a beautiful but overly thin slab of sashimi grade tuna and needed to treat it right. Options were limited, but spicy tuna tartare with champagne proved a winner. Based off a recipe from Ina Garten that claimed to serve 50 (though we only reduced by 5 to serve 2) with the usual tweaks and local (from the fridge/pantry) ingredients.

Our most recent CSA box contained some wonderful locally-grown russet potatoes providing an excuse to try making gnocchi. Being the first time, we largely followed an existing recipe (see credits below), but simplified the directions so they made sense to us. For this first try, we served with a butternut squash soup sauce and grilled Italian sausage which proved an excellent combination.

This beef stew receipe uses the Instant Pot to reduce cooking time to approximately an hour while producing very tender meat that would normally take a day in a crock pot. Most any root vegetables work nicely. We used parsnip, turnip and a potato from our latest fall CSA box.

Served with Blitz Bread:No-Fuss Focaccia bread from the King Arthur Flour website.

This root vegetable and beef stew receipe uses the Instant Pot to reduce cooking time to approximately an hour while producing very tender meat that would normally take a day in a crock pot. Most any root vegetables work nicely with the wildcard being cabbage. While looking for ideas to use up some local cabbage, found multiple recipies add it to beef stew with very positive feedback. Potato, carot, parsnip, turnip, onion and celery all make an appearance as well.

Bean dip ala Don Pablo’s restaurant (which no longer operates in our area). Serve with some homemade tortillas and it almost becomes a meal on its own. One can of chipolte chiles in adobe sauce goes a long ways. Remove the seeds from all the peppers in the can and portion out individual peppers into small zip bags (with some adobe sauce) and freeze for future use.