Welcome to the blog for Homegrown Foods, a business from mom and lifelong cook Aleks Till. Being inspired and cooking from scratch is our way of life. How else would we know all the best recipes for our menu and find the best ingredients for your grocery delivery. Enjoy!
Crunchy Baked French Fries
The quest for crunchy baked french fries ends here! Making fries at home should be something enjoyed regularly. Sadly, most online versions disappoint. Say good-bye to limp, floppy potatoes. Say hello to fries that have a longer table-life than the standard drive-through dash. The secret to these fries is a quick boil in a baking […]

Vegetable Garbage Bread
There is something about food being called “garbage” that piques one’s curiosity. Well, it’s quite simple. Garbage bread is like a pizza burrito. Fill it with whatever you’d like, roll it up, then bake or grill it for a SUPER family-friendly dinner. Slice in half, dip in marinara or pesto and enjoy! Vegetable Garbage Bread […]

Latin-Twist Summer Salad with Gooseberries
OK, let’s get one thing straight, I have no idea what to call this salad. For me, dishes with cumin, lime and avocados just make me think of Ecuador or Argentina. The point is that the flavors play really nice with the gooseberries. The greens could be anything, literally — but a pinch of cumin […]

Indian-Spiced Parsnip Soup with Apples and Coconut Milk
One of the side effects of owning a food business is bringing home loads of excess ingredients, like five pounds of delicious, organic parsnips from Driftless Organics, and extra spice mixes from Indian dinners. One cannot waste these things! I set about to turn it into a soup and thought it was really yummy. But […]

Vietnamese Fried Pumpkin and Pork
I used to love my CSA box — that is, until I had children. Babies and toddlers are time vampires and barely eat anything, let alone a heap of vegetables, so it didn’t make sense to continue my subscription of getting farm-fresh boxes of vegetables regularly. But I do remember the years… Especially when I […]

Dinner Hacks for Wholesome Meals in Less Than 15 Minutes
The wind is a’ changin’ and with it comes new schedules to go with the weather. Seems like the perfect time to review some dinners that are done in 15 minutes or less — you know, the kind that may leverage a jarred sauce or spice mix for a super short grocery list. Serve some […]

No-Mayo Creamy Potato Salad
I love mayonnaise on my sandwiches, but I always shy away from putting heaps of it in salads. This is a no-mayo potato salad recipe, leveraging hard-boiled eggs and olive oil as a mayo replacement. Picnic-style potato salad (aka best served cold) can be prone to dryness, so sour cream is added for creaminess, though […]

Getting Kids into the Clean Plate Club
For a little more than a year, my family has hardly eaten a dinner that wasn’t for a reason: recipe testing, retesting, testing a different cook method, finding a replacement meal for the one I originally planned, needing a photo of a dinner, needing to use up remnant ingredients, etc. I gotta say, my kids […]

Fabulous Winter Kale Salad
Now that I’m in the food business, I realize that many a’chef-recipe likely arises from trying to use up remnant ingredients. Such is the case with this salad. I had a small container of purĂ©ed pepitas in the fridge since the fall and I wanted my shelf space back. Even though making the pepita purĂ©e […]

Triple Vanilla Sugar Cookies
‘Tis the holiday season and everyone who plans on making Christmas cookies (including me) is searching for cookie recipes that will impress. Sometimes it’s about putting a twist on a good thing, and sometimes it’s just about making a good thing better. You know, like amping up the special. This recipe is not necessarily a […]