My Kids’ Favorite Sautéed Carrots

February 18, 2016November 26, 2025 ~ Judy's Chickens ~ 33 Comments

Carrots are naturally sweet, have glorious color, and are tasty raw or cooked. What more could you ask for in a vegetable? More often than not, I use carrots as an aromatic to build layers of flavor into stews and soups, but if I’m going to serve them as a side dish, this is how I prepare them. While not necessary, adding the tablespoon of sugar or honey at the end will enhance the natural sweetness of the carrots. The red wine vinegar provides the acidic bite. Together, the sugar and vinegar, create a sweet and sour taste that makes these carrots addictive!

Ingredients:

3 pounds carrots (weight before prepping)
1 pound sweet onions, thinly sliced
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
½ teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 tablespoon sugar or honey

Mise en Place:

Instructions:

Prep the vegetables:

Wash, peel and remove the root end from each carrot. Slice carrots about ¼-inch thick.

Wash, peel and remove the root end from each onion. Slice thinly. I do it all the slicing in a food processor.

Food processor blade care:

I’m terrified of sharp blades, especially this one from the food processor.

I once cut myself while handling it and still shudder whenever I think about that cut. It is the reason I am meticulous about how I store the blade. I always place the red “danger” label over it and store it in its own plastic bag.

Cook the vegetables:

Coat the bottom of a deep 12-inch sauté pan with olive oil and butter. Heat until hot but not smoking and add carrots and onions. Mix.

Sauté covered for 30 minutes, stirring every five minutes. When done cooking, add salt, vinegar, and a little sugar and mix well. Let rest for 15 minutes in the pan to allow flavors to meld. Stir and serve.

These carrots are good served hot, at room temperature, or cold.

Kids will love them. I promise.

Other Thanksgiving Day Side Dishes We Love
Roasted Butternut Squash, Brussels Sprouts and Cranberries
Melissa’s Sweet Potato Casserole
Auntie Martha’s Spicy Spinach (aka Spinach Madeleine)

Grandma’s Cranberry Chutney

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Auntie Terry’s Italian Fried Cauliflower

December 21, 2015November 26, 2025 ~ Judy's Chickens ~ 28 Comments

“Granddaddy ate them by the bucketful,” said his daughter, Rachelle. I know for a fact that my Mom’s cousins, Mary Lou, Angela, Phil, Jeannie, and Paula, will be making them on Christmas Eve. I have wonderful memories of going to my Auntie Terry’s house on holidays and eating them. I’m talking about fried cauliflower. We are a family that loves fried cauliflower and fried celery, broccoli, and carduna if we are lucky enough to find it.

This is a family favorite. When my children gush over something I’ve made and then ask how to make it, I know it is time to blog it. I want the next generation to learn how to make the family favorites.

Here is my grandmother’s recipe given to me by Mom’s sister, Auntie Terry.

Yield: 18 Fried Cauliflower Patties

Ingredients:

1 head cauliflower
6 large eggs
1 teaspoon sea salt
½ teaspoon ground pepper
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons minced garlic
¼ cup chopped parsley (or 2 tablespoons each, parsley and basil)
3/4 cup (3½ ounces) grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Romano
¾ cup all-purpose flour
½ olive oil mixed with ½ canola oil for frying
Lemon slices (optional)

Mise en Place:

Prep the Cauliflower for Cooking:

Cut cauliflower into half-inch slices. Cut out the center stem. This will leave you with many small, sliced florets.

Blanch Cauliflower:
Fill a medium-large pot with 3 quarts of hot water. Add 2 tablespoons of salt. Bring to a boil. Add florets and bring to a rolling boil. Allow to boil vigorously for 1½ minutes.

Remove florets from heat and drain through a colander. Leave florets in the colander and cover. Allow to steam, covered, for at least five minutes. The beauty of this method of cooking the florets is they will be uniformly cooked and not mushy or waterlogged.

Prepare the Egg Batter:
First, add eggs to a mixing bowl and beat. Add everything else but the flour and mix for about 30 seconds.

Add flour and mix for about 15 seconds more. The reason to add the flour last is you don’t want to “awaken” the flour’s gluten by mixing it too much.

Add cooked and cooled cauliflower to the egg mixture and gently stir with a spatula until the cauliflower is well coated.

Fill a 12-inch sauté pan with about one cup of olive oil. You will be sautéing the vegetables, not deep-frying them. Set the heating temperature to medium. Let oil heat for a few minutes. Do not let the oil get smoking hot.

How to Test for Correct Oil Temperature
The best way to test if the oil is hot enough is to dribble batter into it. If the batter sizzles, the oil is hot enough. If the batter immediately turns brown, it is too hot. In that case, remove the pan from heat and let the oil cool down some.

If the oil is too hot, the patties’ interior will remain doughy while the exterior turns crisp. If the temperature isn’t hot enough, the batter will become like a sponge, sop up the oil, and the patties will taste bland. Plan on the patties cooking for a total of four to five minutes.

Remove cauliflower from pan with a slotted spoon. I tap the spoon against the inside edge of the pan to release as much oil as possible. Drain cauliflower on paper towels. This recipe makes three batches of six cauliflower patties.

Serve hot, warm, or cold. They are amazing at any temperature. When they are still warm, I like to squeeze lemon juice on each one before I eat it. I think it catapults the flavor to another level of deliciousness!

My relatives, who have made these for a lifetime, have assured me there will come a time when I will be able to make the batter without measuring it, as they do. Paula gave me the best advice about the consistency of the batter: “the batter should be thick enough to coat the cauliflower and still allow it to run off slowly like pancake batter would.” She also starts off each batch by frying a little of the batter (without cauliflower) to taste test if she’s gotten the batter’s seasonings correct since she makes her batter with Bisquick and without measuring the ingredients.

A photo of my grandparents. Grandma made all of her aprons.

Other yummy veggies:
Roasted Ratatouille
Cauliflower Three Ways: Roasted, Blanched and Mashed
Roasted Butternut Squash, Brussels Sprouts, and Cranberries
Amazingly Delicious Sautéed Carrots
Roasted Spaghetti Squash with Asparagus and Chicken

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50 Ways to Make a Frittata

June 21, 2015May 8, 2023 ~ Judy's Chickens ~ 31 Comments

A few months ago, I was visiting Cleveland and took a cooking class at The Western Reserve School of Cooking. One of the dishes we made with owner and chef Catherine St. John was an oven-baked version of the classic Italian frittata. Frittatas can be served for any meal or as an appetizer. They are firm in texture and easily cut into squares when served at room temperature. They also provide a great way to use up leftovers.

Chef Catherine taught us to sauté the vegetables, pour them into a baking dish, add the egg and cheese mixtures, and bake for 20 minutes.

We have many eggs here at Judy’s Chickens, so we make this one-pot meal a lot!

After making this meal a few times, I developed a foolproof formula for making the dairy mixture of the frittata: 12 large eggs, 1/2 cup whole milk, cream, or ricotta, 1 heaping cup of shredded cheese, and 1/4 cup of Parmesan. Pour this over any medley of cooked vegetables that loosely fills your lasagna pan to about the one-inch mark.

Here’s a recipe to get you started.

Ingredients:

The Egg and Cheese Mixture:
12 large eggs
½ cup ricotta, whole milk, or cream
1 tsp salt
½ teaspoon pepper
¼ cup grated Parmesan
1 heaping cup of any cheese, shredded

The Veggie Mixture:
4 cups potatoes (about 4 medium or 1½ pounds), diced or shredded
1½ cups green onions with tops, about 5 sliced
½ red bell pepper, about ½ cup, seeded and diced
1 heaping tablespoon of minced garlic (from the jar is fine)
2 cups cooked leftover vegetables such as zucchini, summer squash, broccoli, or cauliflower, OR any uncooked greens such as spinach, chard, or kale
⅓ cup extra virgin olive oil

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350º

Chop all the fresh veggies. I used buttery Yukon and red potatoes, sweet red bell pepper, green onions with stalks, and minced garlic.

Sauté garlic, onion, pepper, and potatoes in olive oil, on medium heat, in a 12-inch non-stick skillet for about 10 minutes or until the potatoes are tender but still firm.

Stir in drained leftover cooked veggies and heat until warm. I used leftover roasted zucchini and summer squash with green onions and garlic. Spread vegetable medley evenly in a lasagna pan.

Mix eggs, milk, cream or ricotta, Parmesan, salt, and pepper and pour over vegetables.

Add shredded cheese and poke it into the vegetables and egg mixture.

Bake for 30 minutes in a preheated oven. Insert the knife tip in the center to test for doneness. If it comes out clean, remove the frittata from the oven. If not, cook for another 5 minutes and check again. Repeat until done.

Another frittata version: potatoes, kale, green onion, zucchini, and a lone radish

This was one day’s pickings from the garden. I decided, as a trial, to throw all of it into the frittata along with dairy ingredients to see if it would work. I tried fresh kale. It was delicious.

Here it is, all prepped.

Here is how I prepped the vegetables:

Green onions

A lone watermelon radish

My first zucchini of the season!

Shredded potatoes

I trimmed the tough stem off each kale leaf.

I tore the leaves into 3-inch pieces, added them to the vegetable sauté last, and cooked them for one minute until wilted. Chard, collards, or spinach would also work well here. Be sure to remove the thick stems from the collards or chard.

Notice how when the frittata first comes out of the oven, it is like a soufflé, all puffed up and fluffy. It will fall after about 5 minutes. I think the frittata is tastiest when it is still light and fluffy like this, but as I have said, it is still excellent later in the day at room temperature or even cold from the fridge.

Once, I mixed a bunch of cheeses left over from a cookout and used them for the cheese portion of the recipe. This worked just fine.

Another frittata version: leftover ditalini pasta and roasted zucchini, summer squash, and leeks, with fresh, chopped mint

I increased the amount of cheese for this version:
12 eggs, 1/2 cup ricotta, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper, 1 cup Parmesan, 2 cups mozzarella
4 cups cooked pasta, 4 cups roasted zucchini with leeks, 1/2 cup chopped mint

Prepping the mint

Prepping the mozzarella

The four stages of combining and baking the frittata:

Melty goodness!

Other delicious foods to serve at breakfast
Fruit and Nut Bread
The Biscuit King
Very Berry Clafoutis
Quiche Lorraine with Bacon and Kale
Sorghum, Seeds, and Grains Granola
How to Make Grape Jelly (and Grow the Grapes)

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Test Your Sense of Smell

April 6, 2015April 6, 2020 ~ Judy's Chickens ~ 9 Comments

This is so cool. Pinch your nose and, then, place a jellybean on your tongue. Start chewing it. You can tell that it is sweet, but can you tell what flavor it is? Heck no! That’s what I discovered when a docent at the marvelous, wish-it-would-come-to-Nashville exhibit, Food: Our Global Kitchen, handed me a cinnamon jellybean and asked me to do likewise. I tasted nothing. Then she told me to unplug my nose and suddenly a burst of flavor hit me. It was startling and very much an “aha” moment. All those years of telling children to hold their noses so they wouldn’t taste yucky meds and I never once questioned why that advice worked.

This traveling exhibit, curated by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is all about the history and culture of growing and preparing food explored from a global perspective. The exhibit needs to come to Nashville with all of its farm to table restaurants, a climate conducive to growing vegetables almost year round, and a growing population of immigrants. Here’s the link to info on getting the exhibit to a space near you!

So what happened?

Here’s a scientific explanation from Newton’s Apple, “Seventy to seventy-five percent of what we perceive as taste actually comes from our sense of smell. Taste buds allow us to perceive only bitter, salty, sweet, and sour flavors. It’s the odor molecules from food that give us most of our taste sensation. When you put food in your mouth, odor molecules from that food travel through the passage between your nose and mouth to olfactory receptor cells at the top of your nasal cavity. If mucus in your nasal passages becomes too thick, air and odor molecules can’t reach your olfactory receptor cells.” That’s why when you are sick with a stuffy nose almost everything tastes the same; your brain can’t receive any signal identifying the odor and the odor molecules remain trapped in your mouth. [That’s when you should pray that someone brings you a nice bowl of Sick Soup.]

And a graphic from Planet-Science:

The more you know–an old wives tale about plugging your nose to take your medicine, explained.

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@judyschickens

Italian style meals, sustainable gardening tips, and lots of segues in between

Easter

My Kids’ Favorite Sautéed Carrots

Auntie Terry’s Italian Fried Cauliflower

50 Ways to Make a Frittata

Test Your Sense of Smell

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