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Nestleusa.com

The cool gush of air that kissed me when I stepped outside the house this morning already had me thinking about autumn. So did the fact that I ordered my Thanksgiving turkey from a Floyd County farmer on Friday. So when I checked my mailbox and found a Nestle recipe for Autumn-Spiced Pumpkin Shortbread, I got excited and couldn't help but post it here this morning.

Nestle sends me some of the best recipe cards. I've shared several of the company's creations here on the blog, including one of my all-time favorites, Inside-Out Chocolate Strawberries. If you go to the Nestle Web site, you can see a bunch of previous recipe cards.

Look for the shortbread recipe below the jump. What are you most looking forward to cooking this fall?

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This week, I've received word that TWO fellows with local connections are finalists in national cooking competitions! Katsuko "Katz" Sandifer, who up until recently was a kitchen manager at The Casino Club at The Homestead in Warm Springs, is one of four finalists in the professional category of Ocean Spray's recipe contest. His dish is Asian Shrimp and Scallops with Ginger Cranberry Syrup. Patrick Maggi, owner of Blues BBQ in downtown Roanoke, is one of 10 finalists in the American Pizza Championship. His winning creation is a Prosciutto Pear Pizza, a sweet and savory combination of poached pears, prosciutto and Gorgonzola cheese.

Katsuko Sandifer

Katz was born in Japan but his family moved to America when he was about 13 and he went to high school in Chapel Hill, N.C. He received an Associate's Degree from the Pennsylvania Culinary Institute. He says he worked at The Homestead for about five years, starting as an intern and moving his way up to a kitchen manager. He recently quit and moved to Rhode Island to finish up his culinary degree at Johnson & Wales University. He would like to eventually be a teacher at a culinary school.

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This is my granola bar. It's a Quaker "True Delights" Toasted Coconut Banana Macadamia Nut granola bar. And let me just say that it is delicious -- all two bites of it!

I don't want a granola bar the size of my leg, but seriously, look at this tiny thing. I had to place it next to my stapler for context. When you buy a box of these (they were on sale for $2.49 this week), you get five bars. And then you open them and they are miniscule. Hey, I think Barbie might be hungry, guys. If I give her one of these, she MIGHT have enough to share with Ken.

Maybe it's my imagination, but I still think we are getting less food for our money in some cases at the grocery store. Has anyone else continued to notice this? If so, got any specific product examples?

Wileyptnews.com

If you've had your eyes open at the grocery store over the last year or two, you probably noticed a surge in those little 100-calorie snack packs. It seems like everyone who makes snack food has jumped on the 100-calorie packaging bandwagon. The idea is that if the food is portioned out for the customer, he or she is less likely to overindulge.

Generally speaking, I think it's a great idea and I've purchased some of these products myself. What bothers me about them, though, is the same thing that bothers me about a lot of packaged foods: all that paper and plastic that goes in the trash when you're finished nibbling your precious Goldfish crackers or cookie bites.

As a result, I was pretty intrigued when I recently received a new book in the mail called the "100-Calorie Snack Cookbook" by Sally Sampson. Sampson has created a 256-page guide to creating your own 100-calorie snacks at home. I can only imagine that some of her ideas wind up costing less and tasting better in the end. They may even be more filling -- in Sampson's world, you can eat a whole bowl of soup, 2.5 cups of spiced popcorn or a whole plate of salad for the same number of calories.

I'll share a couple of Sampson's recipes below. If you are interested in buying the book, it retails for $18.95 but can be had as cheap as $13 at various places I spied online.

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We've talked a little bit about German restaurants before on this blog. Today, my colleague, Doug Doughty, drew my attention to a Web site where you can vote for your favorite German restaurant in America. Think we don't have any German restaurants around here? Well, you would be forgetting about The Rhein River Inn in Buchanan!

The Rhein River Inn is on the list of restaurants for which you can vote, so if it's one of your favorites, be sure to give them the support. The closest German restaurant to Roanoke, besides Rhein River, is Edelweiss in Staunton. It's on the list, as well.

Bryan

All of you "Top Chef" fans out there have probably seen the season premiere already. If you have, you noticed something rather unusual: Two men are vying for the title this season who are brothers! Their names are Bryan and Michael Voltaggio

Bryan is Executive Chef/Partner at Volt, a restaurant in Frederick, MD.; Michael is Chef de Cuisine at The Dining Room, Langham Huntington Hotel & Spa in Los Angeles, CA. There's already a nice brotherly rivalry bubbling between them, so it ought to be interesting to see how that plays out. Read more about them on their biographies on the Bravo Web site.

Michael

Why should you care specifically about these guys? Because Bryan Voltaggio sources some of his ingredients from our neck of the woods. He buys lamb from Border Springs Farm in Patrick Springs, Va. Farmer Craig Rogers is pretty excited that one of his buyers is on the popular Bravo television show. Rogers says Bryan Voltaggio also buys from EcoFriendly Foods in Moneta, Va. That wouldn't surprise me since EcoFriendly supplies a lot of fancy, big city restaurants on the East Coast, particularly in New York. But Volt is not listed on their Web site.

A new episode of Top Chef airs tonight on Bravo at 10 p.m. If you're watching, let me know what you think of the V-boys and the rest of the contestants. Oh, sorry, "cheftestants."

Images from www.bravotv.com

Would you just look at these gigantic peppers I bought down on the Roanoke Farmers Market last week? I have green peppers growing at home, but they're nowhere near this size. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? These bad boys look like they could hold about 1/2 pound of meat stuffing. I guess there was only one way to find out. (And there's no way I was stuffing them with seitan. You saw what happened to the girl who tried to do that on the first episode of Top Chef.)

First, I cut off the tops and cleaned out the seeds. Then, I blanched them in boiling water for about 3 minutes, tops. If you have never done that before stuffing peppers, try it. It makes a difference in the texture of the peppers when they are done.

Now, Rosie goes to work so Lindsey doesn't have to get her hands too gunky. In went about a pound of ground pork, a pound of 90% lean burger (so we don't have too much grease floating around), 1 medium onion, chopped and sauteed with two ribs of chopped celery and two cloves of garlic, minced. I also chopped up the pepper I had to remove to get the tops off and sauteed that with the other veggies. Also into the bowl went about a cup of bread crumbs, a beaten egg, a tablespoon of Worchestershire sauce, kosher salt, cracked black pepper and about a teaspoon each of oregano and thyme.

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Let me take you back to a scene from last night: I'm sitting in my kitchen, staring sadly at half of an angel food cake that I know will never see the lining of a human stomach. Why? Because in my house, there are just certain products that never seem to get finished off.

With the angel food cake, it's because I always buy it for strawberry shortcake and the strawberries always run out before the cake. I know I could dream up some other delectable topping, such as peaches or fudge sauce, but the little voice in my head that doesn't want to be grossly overweight says, "You don't HAVE to polish the durn thing off. You got it on clearance for 99 cents. See the blaze orange sticker?" Not to mention the fact that Howard will never eat it if I don't dress it up and set it in front of him. He isn't a huge dessert guy.

What else routinely goes bad in my house? The last 1/4 of the jug of milk. I know you folks with kids out there are probably laughing and thinking about how often you have to make emergency trips to the store just for milk. I don't have kids, my husband drinks chocolate milk, and I only use milk on cereal, which I don't eat every day. So something usually goes down the drain.

It strikes me that every household probably has at least one food item they can never finish. And since I love these little sociological experiments, I want to know what it is that your family just can't seem to polish off before it goes bad? Is it the loaf of bread? The head of lettuce? The lime you bought to garnish cocktails?

Maybe we could start a food trade! My angel food cake for your lime!

Cedric and Sarah Shannon of Weathertop Farm / www.weathertopfarm.com

This is Cedric and Sarah Shannon, the owners of Weathertop Farm in Check, Va. They raise chickens, turkeys, pigs and rabbits on pasture for sale to customers, and they also sell several varieties of eggs.

In the next picture, you can see the top five reasons the Shannons work so hard at what they do: their kids. The kids have recently gotten involved in some of the work on the farm, namely the egg operation. Because the average age of a farmer in Virginia is 55 or 60 (Virginia Farm Bureau stat), lots of farmers want to see young'uns like the Shannon children getting excited about the business.

The Shannon kids / www.weathertopfarm.com

Fortunately for farmers, the local food movement seems to be mushrooming rapidly, increasing customers' interest in the kinds of farm fresh products produced at Weathertop Farm and the dozens of other farms in Southwest Virginia. Still, marketing remains a big challenge for these small-time producers, so last summer I put together a database of local farms for the newspaper Web site, Roanoke.com. It's a pretty neat tool because you can specify a county and a product, then click a button, and the program will tell you exactly where to go to find what you're looking for.

I'm working now to update that database. It has about 60 farms on it, but I've already identified some 19 farms that either popped up over the past year or finally had the time to get listed on a national database such as Local Harvest.

If you like to shop local, please do me a favor and click the link above to take a look at my list. If you don't see the name of a farm you buy from at the local farmers market or the co-op or elsewhere, leave a comment or shoot me a line at lindsey.nair@roanoke.com. I pick up farmers' business cards or jot down their information as often as I can, but I'm sure I don't have a complete list. The updated database will go up in a couple of weeks, so help me help the farmers!

www.amazon.com

I have run across the perfect gift idea for your favorite foodie. And if that happens to be you, well, now you'll have an excuse to spend a little money on yourself!

The ever-vivacious Rachael Ray has come out with a new product called "Make Your Own Takeout." But I can't call this a cookbook in the standard sense because the recipes actually come in a little box and are printed on removable cards that are categorized by the cuisine. There are categories for Thai, Chinese, Indian, pizza, burgers and sandwiches and Tex-Mex. At a time when lots of us are trying to spend less money on entertainment, this strikes me as a genius idea!

The question is, do the recipes look good and do they cook good? Well, here's a sampling of what the M.Y.O.T.O. deck has to offer (she really likes those acronyms for some reason).

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