[1] SuperSeedz are available in eight flavors, both sweet and savory (photos #1 #2, #3, and #4 © SuperSeedz).

[2] Maple Sugar & Sea Salt for snacks, salad mix-ins, even ice cream garnishes.

[3] SuperSeedz are available in eight flavors, both sweet and savory (all photos © SuperSeedz).

SuperSeedz, gourmet shelled pumpkin seeds that we first discovered in 2007, is one of those.

A better-for-you, nutritious (pumpkin seeds are one of the most nutritious seeds on the planet), fiber-filled and very flavorful, crunchy snack, we also love it as a garnish.

The five-ounce bags make really nice Thanksgiving favors and stocking stuffers, and are great for everyday grab-and-go.

SuperSeedz are non-GMO verified, cholesterol- and trans-fat free, gluten-free, vegan and allergen friendly.

Each one-ounce serving has 7 grams of protein and a good hit of iron and zinc.

In eight flavors, savory and sweet, there’s a flavor (or several!) for everyone.
 
 
SAVORY SUPERSEEDZ FLAVORS

 
Beyond Snacking…

As A Garnish On:

 
As A Mix-In To:

SWEET SUPERSEEDZ FLAVORS

 
Beyond Snacking…

As A Garnish On:

 
As A Mix-In To:

 
 
> The history of pumpkins.

> October 1st is National Pumpkin Spice Day.

> The first Wednesday in October is National Pumpkin Seed Day.

> October 26th is National Pumpkin Day.

> March 4th is National Snack Day.

[4] Toss seeds onto pasta and grains.

[5] Fill up a bowl or dish for snacking. Or roll a log of goat cheese in it (photos © The Nibble).

CHECK OUT WHAT’S HAPPENING ON OUR HOME PAGE, THENIBBLE.COM.

[1] It’s easy to make spice tea without special tea. Just blend your own (photo courtesy Republic Of Tea).

[2] Add butter cookies, ginger cookies or shortbread for a classic snack (photos #2 and #3 © Yankee Magazine).

[3] Constant Comment, America’s favorite specialty tea

For home, perhaps the most popular spiced tea is the first major commercial brand, Constant Comment. A longtime favorite of ours (and the most popular specialty tea in the U.S.), the original black spiced tea bags are now available in decaffeinated black tea and green tea. It’s also available as loose tea.

But if you’re home and hankering for a cup of spiced tea, with none in the house, the solution is simple:

Just make your own with the tea and spices you already have in the kitchen.

In addition to black tea, you can make green spice tea or white spice tea, or rooibos (caffeine-free red tea) spice tea, exactly as Ruth Bigelow did when she created Constant Comment Tea in 1946.
 
 
SPICE TEA VS. SPICED TEA (IT’S SPICED!)

A bit of a grammatical note on spice vs. spiced:

 
 
RECIPE #1: EASY SPICED TEA

Ingredients For 2 Cups

 
Variations

You can keep playing with the spice mix until you have your perfect recipe (see more ingredients in the section below).

You can fill jars with your signature tea blend and give them as gifts to tea-loving friends. For friends who don’t use loose tea, add these unfilled drawstring tea bags.

Preparation

1. COMBINE the water, cinnamon, and cloves in a medium pan. Bring to a boil; reduce heat. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove from heat.

2. ADD the tea bags; steep for 5 minutes. Remove the tea bags and spices.

3. SERVE the tea hot or iced with a lemon wedge and choice of sweeteners, although the spice flavors are so exciting that no sweetener is necessary.
 
 
TEA INFUSIONS

You can also infuse the tea with:

 
Just look around your kitchen for things to infuse.
________________

*Here are 10 herb choices from Garden.org.
 
 
WAYS TO INFUSE TEA

1. With a spice ball. We prefer the new twist-and-lock spice ball style. The closure is less likely to loose with continued use.

2. Loose. If you don’t have a spice ball, just infuse all of the ingredients in a pitcher or a large measuring cup, ideally one with a pouring spout. Then pour the tea through a strainer, into the cup.

There are many devices for steeping loose tea, from simple infusers to more complex devices; for example, travel mugs and electric teapots with built-in infusers.

IngenuiTEA is our favorite device. Tea steeps in the unit, then easily dispenses into the cup.
 

RECIPE #2: MASALA CHAI

Masala chai is Hindi for spiced milk tea (masala = spice, chai = tea). It’s a strong black Indian tea infused with spices—commonly cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, peppercorn, clove, and nutmeg (chocolate or licorice are sometimes included)—with milk and sugar.

Traditionally, the milk and tea water are boiled together, then infused. This ensures that both liquids are hot. In the era of the microwave, you can infuse the tea in boiled water and then add heated milk.

While masala chai is traditionally made from black tea, green tea chai and rooibos chai have become popular in the West, where it is often simply called “chai.”

There is no one “best” chai recipe. As with any other recipe, the best version has the seasonings you prefer, in the proportions that you want.

Here’s a basic masala chai recipe that makes eight cups of tea. Take it as a starting point and adjust the ingredients and the proportions next time.

If eight cups are too much for you, cut back the recipe. Or, refrigerate the remainder, store it in the fridge, and heat it as needed. You can also drink it iced.

TIP: Some recipes (and store-bought blends) are pre-sweetened. If you may be serving the chai to people who prefer unsweetened tea, or use a noncaloric sweetener, omit the sweetener (the last ingredient) and provide sweeteners at the table.
 
Masala Chai Ingredients

[5] You can mix your chai spices ad hoc, or keep your favorite blend in an airtight jar (photo © Foodie Underground).

1. HEAT the water and milk to a boil in a saucepan. Add the remaining ingredients except for the honey and simmer, covered, for 10 to 15 minutes.

2. REMOVE from the heat and strain into another pot or bowl. Add sweetener and blend thoroughly.

3. SERVE from a conventional teapot or a pitcher; or bring pre-filled cups the table.
 
 
THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF TEA

Check out our tea Glossary: the different types of tea, with beautiful photography.
 

This kit from Hella enables any mixologist or hopeful to craft his/her small-batch bitters (photos courtesy Hella Company).

The creative mixologists in your life can perfect their own, homemade bitters recipes for cocktails and mocktails.

You can also make coffee and iced coffee more sophisticated with a dash of bitters (check it out).

The same materials also enable the production of extracts for cooking and baking.

This handsome kit from Hella Bitters contains all the tools and ingredients required, except the alcohol (vodka or other neutral spirit).

Just add alcohol and follow the easy, step-by-step instructions. The handcrafted, small-batch bitters will be ready in no time.

The kit contains all the equipment needed, plus Hella’s proprietary mixes of herbs, spices, bittering agents and dried fruit peel as a starting point for other blends.

 
The kit is $64.95 at HellaCompany.com.

Optionally, you can add a good bottle of vodka for $15: New Amsterdam, Pinnacle, Smirnoff Red, Sobieski, UV, etc.

Save the Stolichnaya Elit ($60) for sipping on the rocks.

Bitters, which date back to ancient Egypt, are liquids consisting of water, alcohol and botanical extracts.These botanicals—aromatic herbs, barks, flowers, fruits and roots—were known for their medicinal properties.

Popular botanicals included cascarilla, cassia, gentian, orange peel, and cinchona bark.

The word bitters derives from Old English biter, which evolved thousands of years earlier from the Gothic baitrs, “to bite,” describing the taste of numerous botanicals.

The Middle Ages saw an increase in the development of medicines that combined botanicals with alcohol to create tonics, often used to aid digestion (hence the term, digestive bitters, as opposed to the modern “cocktail bitters”). Available “over the counter,” they came to be used as preventive medicines.

By the turn of the 19th century, the British practice of adding herbal bitters to wine had become very popular in the U.S. as well.

What happened next? By 1806, there are American references to a new preparation, the cocktail, described as a combination of “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters.”
  

July 29th is National Lasagna Day. Lasagna is one of our favorite foods, but if we make a lasagna, we eat the whole thing. Not to mention, we spend the whole day making it. One of these days, we’ll try Crockpot Lasagna.

But one way to get a quick lasagna fix is ravioli lasagna, with layers of purchased ravioli replacing the lasagna noodles (and adding the flavor of their fillings, from cheese to pumpkin). Just add sauce, mozzarella and more cheese.

You can make something similar with angelotti, tortellini and other stuffed pasta; and also with rigatoni, penne or other tubular pasta: Anything to avoid wrangling those lasagna noodles (here are the different types of pasta).

You can make gluten-free lasagna with GF noodles, or with zucchini ribbons or potatoes (white or sweet).

And then, there’s this lasagna soup recipe from Eat Wisconsin Cheese. Prep time is just 10, minutes cook time is 30 minutes.

Are there other ways to enjoy lasagna? We’ll keep looking!
 
 
RECIPE: LASAGNA SOUP

Ingredients For 6 Servings

 
Preparation

1. HEAT a Dutch oven or large pot over high heat. Brown the sausage for 5 minutes, breaking it up as it cooks. Add the onions; cook 3-4 minutes, until the onions are softened and the sausage is cooked through.

2. ADD the garlic and red chile flakes; cook 1 minute. Add the crushed tomatoes, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Add the stock, 1 cup water, lasagna noodles, basil and pepper. Bring to a boil.

3. REDUCE the heat to medium-high; cook at a gentle boil 10-12 minutes, until noodles are cooked through, stirring occasionally to prevent noodles from sticking to pot.

4. STIR in the spinach. Add salt to taste. If the soup is too thick, add the additional 1 cup of water or portion thereof. Remove from the heat.

5. SERVE: Divide the mozzarella among 6 serving bowls and ladle the soup over it. Top with spoonsful of ricotta, parmesan and additional basil.
 

THE HISTORY OF LASAGNA

When the military might of Rome overthrew Greece in 146 B.C.E., they recognized Greece’s superior culture, and took much from it, including fine food.

The classic Italian pasta dish, lasagna, did not originate in Italy but in ancient Greece!

Lasagne, the modern plural form of the individual lasagna noodles, is derived from the Greek laganon, the first known form of pasta. The dish it was baked in was a lasagnum.

Laganon was not the modern-age lasagna we know, made with traditional Italian ingredients. It was composed of layers of noodles and sauce and baked. The noodles were flattened dough, sliced into strips and baked without boiling.

Today, laganon remains the Greek word for a thin flatbread. And “Greek lasagna” is pastitsio, with very similar ingredients to Italy’s lasagna bolognese, tomato sauce with ground meat).

It survives today as the Greek dish, pastitsio, with ground beef and béchamel sauce.
 
 
THE ROMANS IMPROVE GREEK LAGANON

The Romans served pasta-like layers with other fillings between these layers, and this is how modern lasagna came to be. The first known lasagna recipe of the modern age (or at least, the Middle Ages, a.k.a. the medieval period) is in a cookbook published in Naples in 1390.

Also a layered dish, it was laboriously crafted by the cooks of the wealthy, with many more ingredients between the layers than sauce and cheese, including meats, offal (such as chicken livers), vegetables and hard-boiled eggs. It was a special-occasion dish.

Regional variations ensued: besciamella (the white sauce béchamel—here’s a recipe) and seafood on the coast. Where meat was plentiful, it was ground into a sauce; when meat was scarce, there were layers of vegetables.

[1] Ways to enjoy lasagna. First up, Lasagna Soup, today’s recipe (photo © Eat Wisconsin Cheese.

[2] Classic lasagna (photo © Carrabas Italian Grill).

[3] Ravioli lasagna. Here’s the recipe from Gooseberry Patch (photo © Gooseberry Patch).

[4] It looks like rigatoni lasanga, but it’s Greek pastitsio (photo © Westside Market | NYC).

[5] Zucchini and radicchio lasagna. Here’s the recipe from Pasta Fits (photo © Pasta Fits).

The first version that came to the U.S. in the 1880s with the wave of southern Italian immigration was with marinara, a simple tomato sauce (in northern Italy, spinach pasta and besciamella (béchamel) were the preferred ingredients. Finding affordable meat in the U.S., ground beef or pork, and/or sausage, was added to the sauce; and large meatballs, not found in Italy due to the price of meat, became popular with the dish of spaghetti.

Since then, chefs and home cooks alike have been preparing their signature recipes. Our mom’s included, between the layers of lasagna noodles, meat sauce and ricotta, a layer of mini meatballs (an authentic Italian ingredient), a layer of sliced sweet Italian sausage (with fennel!), and a layer of pesto (just basil, parmesan and oil, no nuts). All layers got a topping of fresh-shredded parmesan, and the whole was crowned with a thick topping of mozzarella.

We’ve never had a better lasagna.

[1] Winner, winner: quick and easy chicken dinner. [2] Delicata squash has an edible rind and a built-in scalloped edge (both photos courtesy Good Eggs).

Winner, winner chicken dinner!

This phrase is typically credited with originating on the Vegas Strip. Back in the 1950s, every casino had a $1.79 three-piece chicken dinner, which included a potato and a vegetable. At that time, a standard bet was $2. So if you won a hand, you’d have enough money to buy yourself a nice chicken dinner.

At the time, as in many places today, this simple chicken dinner was the cheapest dinner around. So you didn’t win the roast beef dinner.

But hey, don’t disparage a good plate of chicken and veggies. It’s one of America’s favorite meals.

This one is a winner because you make it all in one pan, as in: Winner, winner, chicken dinner with a side of delicata squash and brussels sprouts.

If you haven’t had delicata squash, it’s a great opportunity to try it. It may become a favorite.

 
Thanks to Good Eggs, which delivers fine provisions in the Bay Area, for the recipe.

RECIPE: ONE-PAN CHICKEN THIGHS WITH FALL VEGETABLES

You can have this on the table in 35 minutes. If you don’t like brussels sprouts, exchange it for something else.

Ingredients For 2 Servings

1. SEASON the chicken thighs on both sides and set aside.

2. HEAT a large (10-inch) cast iron pan over high heat. When the pan is hot, add the chicken thighs skin side down and cook until the skin starts to turn golden brown, about 6 minutes. Remove the thighs and set aside.

3. ADD a tablespoon of olive oil to the same pan. When the oil is hot, add the garlic, sage and chile flakes. Cook until the garlic starts to color, about 4 minutes. Add the brussels sprouts and squash and cook for about 5 minutes. When the vegetables start to soften…

4. NESTLE the chicken skin-side-down in the vegetables. Turn the heat to medium and cover the pan. Cook until the thighs are cooked through and the vegetables are tender and caramelized, about 25 to 30 minutes.
 
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*In fact, the delicate skin is why no American over 20 years of age grew up with delicata squash. The thin rind is susceptible to mildew which rots the crop. Thus, delicata squash all but disappeared after the Great Depression. Thankfully, a group at Cornell University’s Department of Plant Breeding took it under their wing around 2000, and bred a variety that was resistant to most squash diseases.

†A handful is one of those imprecise measures that says: Use how much you want. More or less of the ingredient is not critical to the recipe’s outcome.