This month, whip up three delicious recipes with ingredients fresh from the garden, including Sorrel and Chive Pesto, Garden Gem Salad, Chai-Spiced Carrot Cake, and Chicken Cacciatore. Full recipes are displayed in the dropdowns below!
Good Eats
Sorrel and Chive Pesto, Garden Gem Salad, Chai-Spiced Carrot Cake, Chicken Cacciatore
Aimee Walton of the Fairfield County village of Carroll didn’t know quite what to do with the lovely cake stand she got as a gift a few years ago. It was tall, maybe 16 inches, but had only a small platform with a lip to hold the cake.
“It wasn’t big enough to be functional as a typical cake stand, but it was so pretty, I had to come up with a dish to showcase it,” says Walton, a member of Lancaster-based South Central Power Company. “At the same time, I had a lot of tomatoes from the garden, which I had roasted, and I was trying to figure out what to do with them.”
That’s when the idea of savory cheesecakes came to her, and after testing out a few different iterations on her husband, David, and their seven children, she came up with Tuscany Cheesecake — winner of Ohio Cooperative Living’s 2024 “Alluring Appetizers” Reader Recipe Contest. Walton earned a new Ohio-made KitchenAid stand mixer, while Butler Rural Electric Cooperative member Beth Polk and Midwest Electric member Cora McCalla each earned $50 gift cards as runners-up.
Walton taught herself to cook when her kids were young, and eventually even taught cooking classes — first at the old Lazarus in Columbus and later at Easton. She has since moved on to create for the BeFeathered catering company, where she says her friend and company owner Feather Johnson encourages her to stretch her talents even further. “My husband will tell you that when we were first married, he would never have thought I would ever be paid to cook,” Walton says with a laugh. “But after all this time and practice, I guess I’m pretty good at it.”
Polk took inspiration for her Fish and Bubbles appetizer from Chex Mix, by way of her sister-in-law, Becky Steele. “I had been making this recipe for years, a spin-off of ‘Nuts and Bolts’ Chex Mix that Becky had adapted ages ago using pretzel sticks,” Polk says. “I wanted to change it up some for one of my son’s birthday parties.” So she used Goldfish pretzels and added some Cheerios cereal, and voila! “It’s a perfect party appetizer,” Polk says, “and it also makes a great snack for movie night.”
McCalla says she’s been making her Frisky Whiskey Dogs for so long, she can only guess where the original recipe came from. “It might have been in one of the magazines I would read at the barber shop while my boys got their hair cut.” The recipe, her take on classic cocktail wieners, starts off a bit boozy — but don’t worry, the alcohol cooks off during the long simmer.
Tuscany Cheesecake, Fish and Bubbles, Frisky Whiskey Dogs
No-Bake Cheesecake, Enchilada Stovetop Casserole, Four-Ingredient Muffins, 20-Minute Flatbread
Sheet Pan Steak and Fries, Samosa Meat and Potato Pie, Italian Sausage and Potato Soup, Low-Prep Slow Cooker Breakfast Casserole
Made-with-Love Marshmallows, Roasted Tomato Marinara Sauce, Fresh Ricotta Cheese, Easy Guacamole
Scottish Cheese Scones, Traditional Sausage Rolls, Treacle Tart, Classic Madeira Cake
Smoky Skillet Sausage Mac & Cheese, Smoked Salmon Quiche, Smoked Club Sandwich, Smoked Gouda Cauliflower Bake
Aloo mutter (potato and pea curry), Creamy adobo chicken and sweet potatoes, Mashed potato salad, Leftover mashed potato omelet
Never let it be said that Rae Hruby let a holiday pass without cooking something specific to the occasion.
St. Patrick’s Day, for example, is an occasion to set up a fruit tray arranged like a rainbow; red, white, and blue themes rule the table on Independence Day. But on Halloween: Bring out the Feetloaf.
Hruby’s horror-movie-prop-turned-main-course took top honors in Ohio Cooperative Living’s annual Reader Recipe Contest; this year’s theme was “Spooky,” and Feetloaf certainly fit the bill, earning her an Ohio-made KitchenAid stand mixer.
“I’ve just always done my themed foods,” says Hruby, who lives in Grafton, where she and her husband, Paul, are members of Wellington-based Lorain-Medina Rural Electric Cooperative. “I took four years of foods classes in high school, and I’ve always enjoyed doing creative things with food.”
Part of that passion for creative cuisine has been inspired by her love of cooking with and for kids — her own and any others who happen to stop by the house. She and Paul have a grown daughter, Lauren, and a son, Dmitry, 15, so she’s been cooking for kids for quite a while now.
“We always had neighbor kids who came over to go trick-or-treating, and I always tried to make sure they had some real food before they went out,” she says.
Meatloaf, she says, was a natural because of its versatility to feed a few or a group. And of course, she couldn’t make just a plain old loaf.
“You know, it’s basically just a slab of meat, but with the ketchup, it doesn’t take much imagination to create a body part, and a foot was just fun,” she says. “That just happened to be what I was working with at the time — it could have been spaghetti worms, or really any number of things.”
Cynthia Boles of Lithopolis, a member of Lancaster-based South Central Power Company, took runner-up honors in this year’s contest with her Batty Spinach Balls.
“It’s a recipe that’s been in the family forever,” Boles says. “It’s one of the few vegetable dishes that we never had any trouble getting the kids to eat. We serve it all the time, though we don’t dress it up for Halloween when it’s out of season.”
She says her mother, Rose, first came up with the original recipe, but she’s adapted it for a busy lifestyle by making it with boxed stuffing mix, and made it a spooky Halloween favorite with the simple addition of blue tortilla chips for bat wings. Her sons, Jacob, now 23, and Nathan, 22, and her husband, Bill, still gobble them up whenever she makes them.
The dish is plenty versatile as well. Boles serves the spinach balls as either an appetizer or a side dish, and the recipe is adaptable to account for spice preferences. “We usually make two batches: one hot and one not,” she says. “Me, I like a little kick.”
Feetloaf, Batty Spinach Balls
