Baby soup

Since it is officially winter (it was -8 when I left for work this morning!) we are eating a lot of soup. Today, I made some for the baby. I used cooked the heck out of some mung beans, added some brown rice and carrots, and voila!

Here are some pictures, before and after the food processor...

I literally just got done making it and putting it in the ice cube trays for freezing, so he hasn't tasted it yet. But I left some aside so we can try it out for dinner. I think it's good myself, or at least would be with the addition of spices, so I think he will be a fan. He doesn't know stuff tastes better with spices yet!

Some new recipes

Last night for dinner I tried out a couple of recipes I found in the isles of Vitamin Cottage. One was for a tuna casserole and the other was for acorn squash, stuffed with rice. We had one winner and one loser.

Loser first: the acorn squash. Now I love me some acorn squash, and I love rice, but this was gross. You roasted the squash halves with honey on them, and on the side, you made rice in chicken broth, and then added lemon zest at the end. The zest tasted pretty bitter, even though I am sure I didn't get pith since I used my trusty microplane grater. Maybe the lemon was just too old? It looked fine, but whatevs. All I know is I won't have this again... however, I may rip off the idea and just figure out a better way to go about it.

And now for the winner! I am not usually a fan of tuna casseroles because hot, canned tuna kind of creeps me out. This was totally good though. You cooked the noodles first, and in a separate pan, sautee green pepper, onions, carrots and peas. Then add cream of mushroom soup, the tuna and the noodles. Mix it all together and put in a casserole dish, and bake it for about a half an hour. Then you mix some breadcrumbs in butter and top the casserole with it, baking for a few more minutes to toast that. The recipe didn't call for it, but my taste buds said salt, so I just sprinkled some on my serving. Although, so did K so I probably should have just added it to the whole dish! It was good, and made a lot. I took some for my lunch today, and still have a bunch left. This is something we will definitely make again.

Ok, Vitamin Cottage- you get a score of 1 each for your recipes this time!

Marshmallows

This year for Christmas, everybody is getting (spoiler alert!) a basket of sweets. I plan on mostly making cookies, but I have a couple of experiments to try as well. I found a recipe for homemade hot chocolate mix, and one for marshmallows. Obviously, I need to try these out before subjecting my friends and family.

The marshmallow experiment turned out pretty well! They were super easy to make. I used shaved chocolate on the top and bottom, instead of the toasted coconut that was called for. And the recipe said to roll the sides in confectioners sugar, which I did, although I won't do that again. I think if I used dust from graham crackers it would've been way better.

The biggest secret to marshmallow making is to use wet hands, and to keep your knife wet. This is the only thing that helps with the stickyness. These treats will be a part of my finished Christmas product!

Turkey

As I mentioned in the last post, I was not in charge of cooking Thanksgiving this year. However, through a happy coincidence, I was given an uncooked turkey for free! Yay! It was mostly thawed by the time I got it, and I wouldn't have had any time to cook it for at least 4 more days. My solution was to butcher it up and freeze it in pieces. I do this often with chicken, just because whole chickens are cheaper. Surprisingly, it was even easier to de-bone the turkey. I think I have already gotten 4 or 5 meals out of it, and still have the drumsticks left. I want to wait until a warmish day so I can pop them on the grill. Grilled turkey drums are the best!

The Salad

Thanksgiving is my favorite meal of the year. It is basically perfect. All of my favorite things, all in one belt-loosening meal. I wanted to cook it this year, last year I even cooked it twice! But, alas, there is a baby in my house this time. And my husband and I can't usually manage to get a regular dinner on the table before 8:00 at night. So we went to my mom's house instead. And I just had to bring two things: mashed potatoes and The Salad. 7 layer salad, to be exact. It is like the equivalent to crack in my family.

I learned how to make it from my mom, but I am not sure where she got it from. I can remember my grandma making it as well, but I think she learned it from my mom too. It wasn't one of those things that was passed down, like say, the family lasagne recipe. It's gotten easier over the years, because you can cheat with things like pre-packaged salad mixes, but overall, its the same old thing.

The 7 layers are: 3 kinds of lettuce, onion, swiss cheese, peas and bacon. The dressing is just mayo (real mayo! I accidentally used miracle whip once and it was a disaster) mixed with a tiny sprinkle of sugar, salt and pepper. You make it in sets of layers in the biggest bowl you can find. And then you let it sit in the fridge for at least a few hours, so everything gets kind of wilty. Writing it down this way makes it seem sort of disgusting, but believe me, my mouth is totally watering just thinking about it!

Breakfast for dinner

There is a lovely thing I like to call breakfast for dinner. Hardly anybody sits down to more than a bowl of cereal or some toast for real breakfast, but there are so many tasty things that are qualified as "breakfast foods". So that leaves dinner.

One of my favorites, and very easy, I might add, is a concoction of eggs, bacon, potatoes, onions and cheese. This mixture is also fantastic stuck in a tortilla with some salsa. But if I have just one hand barely free because a certain baby I know is certain that I need to hold him every second, especially if he senses that I am starving, then a bowl and fork work just as well.

Calzones

Usually friday night is pizza night. But we were looking for something (slightly) different so we decided to give calzones a try. I made the same dough that I always make, but everything else was (slightly) different. After some quick internet searching, we determined that calzones should be cooked at a lower temperature for a longer time than pizza. And we found some hints. For instance, most recipes didn't call for the sauce to be on the inside, and that you should brush the top with olive oil and stab it with a fork .

Tricks in hand, and baby asleep, we got going. I decided to pre-cook onions, mushrooms, garlic and Italian seasoning in olive oil for just a couple of minutes. Then I rolled out my dough, put the cooked mixture, pepperoni, parmesan, feta and mozzarella over half, and folded it up. I decided to use the extra oil from cooking the vegges for the top of the calzone, to add more flavor.

K popped it in the oven, and (slightly) less than 30 minutes later, dinner! For dipping, I just cooked a can of tomato sauce with extra garlic and Italian seasoning until it was warm.

The result was better than we ever imagined! I thought we made pretty mean pizza, but these calzones would kick our pizza's ass!

Cinnamon rolls!!!

Oh lord. Cinnamon rolls are the best thing ever. I could eat the whole pan myself. Sometimes I get a bee in my bonnet and just have to make them! And my husband sure isn't going to complain if I do!

So the recipe I have calls for making the dough in the bread machine, and then going from there. In our house, it is K's job to make the bread, so I am not that great with the machine. A lot of times he will help with this part, but this particular day he was busy fixing cars. Anyway, excuses over. The point I am trying to get at is the dough wound up kinda weird. I wasn't able to roll it out as much as I was supposed to, which made for some wonky end rolls.

Once cooked, and with frosting of course, you couldn't tell. And obviously we taste tested the whole batch to make sure they were okay. They were.

Home fries

K and I love fries. But frozen ones are kinda gross. So we have tried tons and tons of times to make the perfect fry on our own. I think we finally have it. Crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. Yum!

We dice the potatoes up, and find yukon golds work best. Then we microwave them for about 10 minutes or so, until they are 1/2-3/4 cooked. Once that is done, we pan fry them in olive oil, dump em out on paper towels, and toss with salt.
Now I know I should have taken a finished picture, but I didn't. So there.

Baby Food

Making my own baby food is going well. It is fun, to me, and easy. On the weekends, I make batches of a few different things so that the baby will have some variety during the week. Then, as I explained previously, I freeze them in ice cube trays. Once they are hard, I store in freezer bags, so that when I am packing the baby's lunch, I can just grab a few cubes of each and make a little baby feast. In the picture below, we have acorn squash, peas, and sweet potatoes. Yum!

Snow day

We had 2 snow days this past week, so I made soup, of course! This time was lentil soup with rosemary. In the dutch oven, I sauteed onions , then added carrots, celery, and tomatoes (one of my own cans!). I cooked all of that for just a few minutes, then added a bag of lentils, a bunch of rosemary, and a box of broth. I cooked it for maybe 45-60 minutes, till the lentils were cooked, and presto! It was good. and the rosemary cooked down so soft, it didn't matter if you ate it or not. The recipe called for fresh, but I used dried, and I forgot to crush it first. We have tons from a rosemary tree we had been growing, that died. Dead=dried for you!

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.

Best dinner ever.... or at least for now

We love salmon in my house, but tend to cook it in the same handful of ways all of the time. So we decided to try something new. K wanted a sauce, and found a good recipe on epicurious.com for a lemon cream sauce.

We grilled the salmon with just salt and pepper, and made the sauce on the side. I also boiled some green beans for our nightly veg. We smothered those beans in the sauce too! To make the sauce, I sauted some chopped onion in butter (the recipe called for shallots, but I didn't have any on hand). Next, I added about a cup of heavy cream and the zest from a whole lemon. I cooked it for 10 minutes, then added a couple of Tbsp of lemon juice and removed the pot from the heat. It stood for a little while so that we could eat our salads, and thickened a bit in that time.

It was soooo good. I will make this and variations on it a lot in the future!

Make a backup

One thing I have learned is that if you are trying something crazy, like making spaghetti with apples in it, for instance, it is good to also prepare a backup. That way you aren't left starving if your experiment goes horribly wrong. A backup we like is artichokes. The CSA keeps giving us really tiny ones, so we saved them up until we had a lot. I think maybe 20-25, although I didn't count. I popped them all in a big pot and boiled them up. I like to make a mayonnaise based sauce to dip them in, that always includes lemon and garlic, and then also has whatever is on hand thrown in. In this case, scallions and rosemary. We each ended up eating at least 10 of the little guys! Yum!

Apples in spaghetti sauce!

That's right. You read me right. Apples. In spaghetti sauce. I got the idea from Lidia's Italy again. K and I couldn't decide if it would be good or gross and the only way to settle that is to make it! It was a very easy sauce. Just saute chopped onion and celery in olive oil, add tomatoes (we sauced ours in the food processor), cook for awhile, then add a shredded granny smith and a shredded red delicious in at the end. Of course salt to taste. Serve on noodles with parmesean as usual.

As for the verdict.... it was really good!! It wasn't overly appley, just sweet. If I didn't know what the secret was, I don't know that I couldv'e even named it! I will make this again. Plus it would be a fun thing to make when people come over to freak them out!

Makin' baby food

My baby is nearing 6 months, and is just starting his adventure in the kitchen. I have decided to make his baby food myself, because not only do I think it's fun, but it is WAY less expensive, and then I know exactly what he is eating. We haven't gotten him started on too many things yet, so far just rice cereal, bananas and sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes are his favorite.

To start, I dice up a bunch of sweet potatoes

Then, I boil them till they are soft. I know you are not supposed to do that because the nutrients are boiled out, but I have a way to combat this that I will get to in a second. Next, I grind them all up using a food mill


Next, to thin it to the right consistency, I add the cooking water back in until it looks right. This is how I get the nutrients back into the food. To store, I freeze it in ice cube trays.

I read somewhere that each cube is about 1 oz of food. I don't know how accurate that is, but it works for me! Once the cubes are solid, I just pop 'em out and keep in a freezer bag. I take a few cubes out each night to thaw in the fridge for lunch.

Chicken Risotto

I love me a cooking show. It hurts my heart that I no longer have the food network. Now I have to make do with all of the cooking shows that are on PBS. My favorite one is Lidia's Italy. K and I watch it all the time, and have tried tons of her recipes, and copy her techniques. We also use some of her Italian words in our every day life. Yes, we are that dorky. Anyway, last week she had an episode about risotto. I love risotto and her recipes seemed so easy so I decided to make a chicken one that night. It was really easy.

First I had to make some pistata (I am totally guessing on that spelling) which is just her word for carrots, celery and onions that you buzz up in the food processor. Then, in the dutch oven, I sauteed that in oil for a few minutes, and added cubed chicken. I cooked it for a few more minutes, and added about a whole container of chicken broth, and a bunch of rice. I didn't have arborio on hand, so I just used short grain brown rice. The only seasoning was a few bay leaves and salt/pepper. I cooked it for awhile till the rice was done, and that was it! The only difference was on the show, she said that would take 10 minutes, but it was more like 45. If it starts getting too dry, you can add more broth. The picture isn't that great, but the food sure was!

Edited to add:
Ohmigosh! I forgot the whole end to this recipe! So after the rice is cooked and everything, you add a couple of pats of butter, and then pretty much a handful of grated parmesan cheese. Once that is all melted in, THEN you are done!

How to know if it is monday around here

We belong to a CSA from a farm called Grant Family Farm. Monday is our veggie pick up day. This means we have a goal to try and get through everything from one week before the next monday rolls around. On monday nights, we usually cook a bunch of vegetarian things, mostly to try and use a bunch of our haul while it is the freshest.

Last night we made this:

To start with, there are candied carrots that I made using brown sugar and water. Next is eggplant, which we sliced and then grilled. We made a chinese type of sauce that we got off of a copycat recipe for something at P.F. Chang's. It is good sauce. I liked the eggplant this way. Well I should clarify, that I like the japanese eggplant this way. Regular old fat eggplant isn't something that either K or I can seem to enjoy, no matter how we make it. Lastly, I made sauteed and then broiled some potato slices with onion, and eventually added a bunch of spinach, which I wilted. All I added to it was some olive oil, salt, and pepper. I somewhat mashed the potatoes when they were cooked, and it turned out really well. This would be a delicious thing ti add eggs to for a breakfast.

Everything we cooked here, including the salads we had on the side, came in this weeks CSA box. And there is still a lot more things! We are in the summer bounty, for sure.

I canned!

So yesterday was the big day. I had a bunch of tomatoes and needed to do something with them before they all went bad. Canning was the answer. I read a bunch of books and blogs and internet sites and figured out my method of attack. I needed a lot of stuff, but had a lot of it on hand. Just had to buy jars, and I got a $10 kit that had the jar grabber, a magnetic lid grabber, a funnel, and a bubble getter-outer/head measure-er thingy.

I decided my best method would be to hot pack the tomatoes in water. So while I got all the giant pots boiling, I started the job of boiling and blanching and peeling and cutting all the tomatoes. This was WAY more work than I thought it would be. It ended up taking over 2.5 hour between starting to boil the tomatoes and putting the jars in the bath for sealing.

After I had all the tomatoes peeled and cut, I re-boiled them in water for 5 minutes, and then used that mixture to fill the jars. I wound up with 5 quarts. I thought it would be more, but that is fine.

I had to leave them sit for 24 hours after sealing, and I think it worked! All the lids have the buttons pulled down so I guess I did it right. Woohoo!

Tomatoes, we has them

This was the first year we tried growing a garden. I assumed that nothing would come of it, so I insisted that we also join the CSA for one more year. This is causing us to have veggie overload! Every week I bring bags in to some of the girls at work, and we are still up to our ears in veggies. To combat this problem, I need to learn how to can. Or to 'put up' as the experts call it.

Yesterday I went out and got a bunch of jars, and a kit that has the other stuff I will need to can these tomatoes. K and I aren't fans of raw tomatoes, but we use them all the time in our cooking, for pizza, pasta, Indian food, etc. Hopefully this will work out! Either I will learn a new skill this weekend or else I will waste A LOT of food :)

Pizza Night

Usually friday is pizza night, but since this week we had the ice cream feast, pizza was pushed back to saturday. I make the pizza dough from scratch. People think I am nutty, but it is so easy! Mix water and yeast, wait 10 minutes, mix in the rest of the ingredients and wait 30 more. That's it! Just as fast as ordering it in on a weekend. And way tastier.

I was being a little bad this week and had pepperoni. It had been so long since I've had it! We got some gigantic ones from the deli. They covered the whole top of my pizza. Either this, or the fact that the dough was a little thicker than normal caused me to end up with magic middles when I thought it was done. A few more minutes in the oven fixed that. Although the meat is all you can see, I actually have mushrooms, onions, orange peppers and feta on there too.

K makes his pizza as a pepper lovers. He put 3 or 4 different peppers on his, along with mushrooms and onions. He likes to put olive oil over the top of his to get the veggies to cook better. Since his pizza was second, he cooked it a minute or two longer to make sure it was all cooked the first time, instead of being like mine.

I highly suggest cooking your own pizza. You can put whatever, and however much of it you want on em, and once the dough is ready, its just a few minutes in the oven. Easy!