Ok, I know what this looks like.....

but it is a cookie!! I swear!! Sometimes when K gets sick of chocolate chip cookies, we have chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips. Along those lines, the other day we had no peanut butter chips so we just used walnuts instead. K made the dough, and I am in charge of dropping them on the sheet. They turned out really well, despite my ignorance in thinking that a cookie with no chips of any kind couldn't possibly be great.

Mmmmm Indian food

We had Indian food for dinner the other night. And yummy. I never had it until a few years ago, but I really love it. It took awhile for me to try cooking it because it seems a bit intimidating. And I have had some hard meals, where I was cooking ALL DAY. But then I started taking some shortcuts, and now it is just a normal thing for us. I made some curry chicken, which was literally just cubed chicken I cooked in a bottle of sauce, and some spicy garbanzo beans on the side. Those were flavored with a packet of spices, and had some chopped peppers thrown in. Put it all over a bed of rice, and you have a fantastic dinner.

Salt

It is such a kitchen basic. But it is so important! I heart kosher salt. After years of watching chefs on various cooking shows always reach for it, I tried it myself and was hooked. This is the celebration of our third box. Is it strange that we keep track of the boxes of kosher salt we have used? Yes, probably. But if you use it, you know. It is so much easier to use to sprinkle in this or that or everything. It takes us quite a while to use a box up. I know a lot of people blah about cutting salt, but it can really be a turning point in a dish, whether sweet or savory. I think salt is not people's problem.... its all the chips and fries and processed foods that salt comes on. Salt is just the innocent bystander! I celebrate it...... YAY SALT!!

p.s. Sorry for the blurry picture. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to take a picture of a box of salt! The box is sort of shiny, even though it is cardboard. Ugh. This was like the 10th try so it is what you are stuck with

Stuffed Sauce

I have posted about my spaghetti sauce before, but I make it almost every week, so here we go again! I tend to make them all slightly differently, depending on what I have on hand. This sauce is a good way to use a ton/eat a lot of veggies. This time, my base was onions, garlic, mushrooms, celery and orange peppers.
I brown them for a few minutes, and then add some of my frozen, crushed tomatoes. Then cook for a long time, probably 45-60 minutes. This looks like a ton of sauce, but it cooks down some, and usually we end up with just a little more sauce than we need to finish a pack of noodles.

My cookie secret

So cookies. Everybody loves cookies. My favorite is just plain old chocolate chip. But one day, while in the midst of a pregnancy cookie craving, I found I was out of AP flour. Would that deter me?? No way. I went for the wheat as a substitute.

Result? Delicious cookies! It gives them a nutty flavor and also, you can tell yourself that they are more healthy!

Brussels sprouts r pretty good akshully

Brussels Sprouts. I don't think I have ever had them before, but I was pretty sure that I didn't like them anyway. Since K loves them, I decided to suck it up and try making them properly (i.e. fresh with a recipe, not frozen and mushy and smelly). I found a recipe that called for shredded sprouts and shredded shallots (I used onions instead because I had them) to be sauteed in butter. Once they were pretty wilty, you add lemon juice. Then, I followed one of the comments that was with the recipe on whatever website I got it from, that said to put it in a dish, put parmesean on top, and pop it under the broiler for a few minutes until brown. It turns out that it was good! I would definitely have this again sometime.

Puttin' up

Over the last few weekends, K and I have been working on puttin' up what is left in our garden. This was our first attempt at a garden and it worked better than we had planned. Here is what it looked like in early July:
We have already eaten or given away a lot of what is here, and the squirrels helped themselves to more than we would have liked. But now that it is fall, we were still left with a lot of tomatoes, carrots, and kholrabi.

As I showed in an earlier post, I canned a lot of the tomatoes, but after a few weeks, I had another batch. We picked all that were even close to ready, and decided to start with carrots.
It's hard to tell, but that is a lot of carrots. Our sink is very deep. I had to peel and dice all of the carrots, which took FOREVER. We put the bowl on our scale after I had done this and it was over 14 lbs!! I blanched the carrots in water for a couple of minutes, spun them dry and put them into freezer bags.

As for the tomatoes, we decided to try something besides canning this time. K helped me out with this. We (mostly he) prepared the tomatoes and buzzed them into sauce in the food processor, and put that mix right into the freezer bags. No cooking or anything. I am not sure how well this will preserve them, but I guess we will find out once we start trying to use it in sauces later this winter! After everything was done, we ended up with 9 quart bags of carrots, and 6 of tomato sauce.

The last thing to take care of was the kholrabi. If you don't know what kholrabi is, its pretty much broccoli without the tree part. You use it the same way, and it tastes the same. K was in charge of doing the peeling this time, and then I diced em all up into bite sized chunks. I delt with these the same as the carrots, blanching, drying and into freezer bags. We didn't end up with quite as much kholrabi as we did carrots, but close.

Now our garden is empty, except for some winter spinach we planted late in the season, and we have a full freezer to help us during winter. Just in time too, because the first snow is falling as I type this!

I'll call this one "the kitchen sink"

So the other day, or maybe the other week.... I don't remember since I am getting behind on these updates! Anyway, one night, I made dinner. Sometimes I like to make up a concoction that uses the bits and pieces I have left over from piles of vegetables. They don't always work out, but this one did, woohoo!

In the dutch oven, I sauteed some onions, shallots, and garlic in some olive oil. I added carrots, celery and some green beans. Next I added some chicken cut into large pieces (I mean a breast or thigh meat cut into about thirds, not bite sized). I also put in some chopped, thick cut bacon. Once this was cooked for a few minutes, I added mushrooms and broth (both chicken and veggie since I had a little bit of each). This wasn't enough liquid, so I had to add some water too. The only spices I used were salt, pepper, and a bunch of thyme. After that, I plopped the lid on, and boiled away. About 30-45 minutes later, most of the liquid was gone and a tasty dinner was made.