02.03.09
Red Beans
Lent is coming soon and this is the time to start collecting some bean recipes. I came up with this recipe because I thought the family was a little tired of New England style baked beans, and I was out of navy beans, so I picked up a package of red beans at the market. Red beans have a mild taste, not too beany.
Ingredients: 1 lb. of red beans, about 1 cup of tomato paste, 1 vegetable bouillion cube, one carrot, diced, one medium onion, diced fine, one stalk of celery, diced. (For use outside Lent, about 1 tablespoon olive oil.) Oil for sauteing, if wanted. One and a half cups hot water.
Soak the red beans overnight, drain in the morning, rinse, cover with water, bring to a boil, and cook abut ten minutes. Drain and rinse again. Meanwhile, saute the diced vegetables in a little oil or in water if entirely Lenten, until softened a bit.
Put the beans and vegetables in a crockpot or a 2-3 quart covered pot. Dissolve the vegetable cube in the hot water, add the tomato paste, and pour over the bean mixture. Cook on high in the crockpot for about 4 hours, then turn down to low until time to serve. If using a stovetop pot, simmer about three hours. Keep the liquid just at the top level of the beans, adding hot water.
If you want a non-vegetarian version, crisp fry a couple of slices of bacon and lay on top of the beans. Or add a few slices of cooked Italian sausage.
I served this with pasta mixed with Parmesan cheese (use minced herbs in Lent) and steamed rapini.
01.13.09
Bread
Almost every bag of flour has a bread recipe printed on it. Basically, it’s two tablespoons of yeast, a tablespoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt, at least four cups of flour, a tablespoon of vegetable oil, and a cup or more of water. Add flour as you knead; knead at least ten minutes. Let rise until doubled. Punch it down, knead another five minutes, shape into loaves, let rise again by one-third, put in a 350 degree oven, bake until done, 40-60 minutes, depending on the size of the loaf. Rap the bottom of the loaf with your knuckles. If it sounds hollow, it’s done. Let cool before slicing.
Yeast makes the bread rise by releasing carbon dioxide as they feed; sugar and wheat flour feed the yeast; wheat flour provides gluten in the dough so that the bread will stretch and expand. Salt keeps the yeast from growing too fast. Water is the medium for the yeast to mix with the carbohydrates. Oil makes a softer, moister bread.
Bread wants to happen. It is the natural result of yeast (which is everywhere), water and wheat. If you leave an uncovered bowl of damp flour out overnight, it will probably be bubbly in the morning from the wild yeast in the air.
There can be more to bread than this. If you mix equal amounts of flour and water and set it out as I mentioned in the last paragraph, you will have sourdough starter. Keep it fed with more water and flour, cover it loosely (a lidded beanpot is good, or an old cookie jar) and it will keep forever on the kitchen counter (or refrigerated when its really hot out). There are many recipes using sourdough: bread, muffins, biscuits and pancakes. Sourdough is an art in itself. The starter, if it’s kept going, gets to be a member of the family.
Bread is not limited to white flour. It’s best if it includes other grains. At least it should have whole wheat flour in it. Whole wheat is the entire grain ground including the bran and germ. It is higher in fibre and vitamins. I make 100% whole wheat bread, although I keep some white flour for kneading.
Only wheat flours produce gluten. If adding other grains such as rye, they can be substituted at about 25%, for too much will make the loaf heavy and almost flat. Oatmeal is a good grain to add. I have been using extra germ and bran, and flakes of spelt, which is a relative of wheat.
Stale whole grain breakfast cereal can be used. The large flaked or circular kind is best crushed with a rolling pin, but the smaller flakes can be mixed in. I add about one-half cup to every 4 cups of flour.
Bread can be made without sweeteners. Put one cup of warm water, a half cup of flour, and the yeast in a bowl. Put in a warm place for about 30 minutes. It should get all bubbly and leavened. Then add the other bread ingredients. This is called a sponge. It used to be all breads started that way, before the days of instant dissolving yeast. The yeast got dispersed throughout the sponge so you didn’t get nasty little sour lumps in the loaf.
Other sweeteners besides white sugar can be used – basically, anything that is a glucose or fructose: Brown sugar, molases, honey, corn syrup, maple syrup, sorghum.
Oil is not necessary, but improves the texture of the loaf. Melted butter, vegetable oil and olive oil are the usual additives.
Nuts and dried fruit can be added – not too much, or the loaf will collapse on rising. Use flax seed, psyllium seed, sunflower, pumpkin, or sesame seeds. Raisins and dried cranberries are good in a somewhat sweet loaf. Spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg or cardamom are good in a fruit and nut loaf.
Add up to a half-cup of grated (real) cheese. Watch carefully so that it doesn’t burn on the bottom.
I sometimes add dried vegetable flakes and sundried tomatoes, about a quarter cup combined per 4 cups of flour. Made with whole-grain bread, this is known as monk’s bread – a nutritious meal substitute for the fasts.
Don’t be afraid of bread. It is one of the oldest foodstuffs in the world. There are many more variants to this, using other liquids (milk, yoghurt, beer) and even other leavening. Swap bread recipes. Try new kinds. I bake bread about three times a week, usually two big loaves at a time. It becomes second-nature, like brewing coffee. Enjoy the taste, and thank God for this “staff of life.”
01.06.09
Turkey Giblets
For all of those who keep looking for the answer, NO, it is not dangerous to leave the giblets in the turkey. I don’t recommend it, because they look kind of gross when you take them out of the cavity. Even the little plastic wrapper can be just tossed after cooking. It won’t poison the turkey – or you. We all do it at least once in our turkey cooking lives.
12.31.08
Post-Christmas Cooking Disaster
I made the casserole, and it sure looked good when I checked it about fifteen minutes before planning to serve it. I have some frozen petit pois in the freezer, and the youngies and I were going to sit down to a cozy, home-style meal. They went out for a few minutes to get something from the store, and I decided while they were gone that I would put the dogs out on their leads.
The crafty and footloose beagle decided to take that opportunity to explore the neighborhood and beyond. I heard her go, as she pulled the lead clasp loose and it hit the porch step. By the time I got outside, the pug right behind me, the beagle was across the street and headed for the hills. I fastened the pug on the lead and headed after the beagle, in the cold and dark, in apron, cardigan and wooden clogs. Around the block, down the street about half a block, and she disappeared behind the church. I decided to head back and change into boots and a coat, and enlist the kids to help.
In the meantime, pug had gotten off the broken lead, but decided the wise course was not to head into the street where I was calling and clapping and threatening. He went back to the porch and waited patiently for his beloved owner, my niece, to return. Good pug. Bad beagle.
The kids came out with me, the niece on foot, her fiance in the truck. We searched. We shone flashlights into backyards. We called. After almost an hour, niece was worn out and cold, and it was starting to sleet. She jumped in the truck and the kids kept looking. So did I. I circled wider, checking the waterfront, the park, behind the convenience store. I climbed the hill and checked the wooded path. Dog prints here and there, fresh ones, about beagle size, but the snow either turned to sodden grass or ice. Finally, I though I might be closing in because I found a lot of criss-crossing prints in the snowbank behind the Girl Guides building. I headed down the street, and was about a block from home when the kids caught up with me in the the truck.
“We found her. She was headed home, so I just jumped out of the truck door right on her. She’s in her crate.”
Back home, my sister-in-law was waiting, perplexed. She missed all the excitement by being at work. “Well, that turned out all right.” (I didn’t think minor frostbite of my earlobes was all right.) Then she asked the Big Question: “What’s for supper?”
The turkey casserole, abandoned in a warm oven (I had turned it down) for almost three hours. I pulled it out. The biscuits looked like wood chips. The gravy was a shiny paste. I probed a little. “It’s ruined,” I pronounced. “No, it’ll be all right. We’ll just take the biscuits off.” ”No, it’s ruined.”
A quick consultation between the youngies. “We’re going out.” “Oh, it’s late. I’ll make something else.” “No, no, get your coat.”
So the turkey casserole became fish and chips, a bit late, but solid comfort food, and compensation for my stinging earlobes.
It’s good to have family.
12.29.08
Post-Christmas Cooking
What’s there to cook after Christmas but variants of leftovers, for about a week? Well, less here, with a whole household of good eaters. (Except one. Some one has to be the brunt of our jokes.) Just in case you have a refrigerator full of what-to-do leftovers:
Take the meat from the turkey, cut into edible sized pieces. Put aside some of the gravy. Now butter a casserole dish, line the bottom with mashed potatoes (or stuffing, if you have lots of that) put the turkey pieces on top, pour on the gravy, and top with homemade biscuits. Bake at 350 degrees F. for about an hour, or until everything is heated through and the gravy is bubbly.
12.02.08
Mashed Potato Recipes
There may be nothing sadder on the leftovers table than cold mashed potatoes. We ate a lot of potatoes when I was young, and that last half-cup of mash always looked desolate and poverty-stricken in the bowl. My mother just tossed it out. Potatoes were free.
But I have to buy potatoes now. We don’t live in the midst of potato farming country. Potatoes, even leftover, look a little more like food to save. So what do you do with that grim substance called leftover mash?
Here is a good casserole. The family practically drew straws to see who would finish this.
4 cups leftover mash, cold. (The kind made with milk and butter.) One-half cup fried onions (not french fried onions, just an onion sliced and fried.) Two tablespoons dried vegetable flakes. Mix together, put in buttered casserole, top with bits of butter and wheat germ. Bake at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes. Use fine bread crumbs if you don’t have wheat germ.
Also, for breakfast or an egg dish supper, fried potato cakes.
3 cups mashed potatoes, 1 egg, beaten. Mix together, form into patties about the size and thickness of your palm, coat with wheat germ or whole wheat bread crumbs. Fry lightly on both sides in olive oil.
You may make extra mash just to have these dishes.
11.28.08
What to do with leftover cranberry sauce
Eat it with a spoon, standing at the refrigerator, when no one is looking.
Works with turkey stuffing, too.
11.27.08
Great Oatmeal Porridge
Many, many people just hate porridge. They think it’s lumpy and gluey and yucky. It is if you don’t know how to make it.
First, do not use instant oatmeal in little packets. The flavours are creepy, the porridge like babyfood. Maybe that’s what you like, but it’s gross.
Second, don’t get quick-cooking oatmeal in the bag or box. This becomes glutinous almost immediately.
Third, don’t make it in the microwave. The microwave is an evil necessity. I avoid it as much as possible, even though there is one here. God meant food to be eaten raw or cooked over heat, not boiled from within.
Buy good-quality oatmeal. I get mine from my favourite store, Bulk Barn. It sounds like they sell laxatives, but it is a great place to buy fresh binned foods in the amount you need. All the Bulk Barns I’ve visited have been clean, well-organized and diligent about food safety. Stuff doesn’t sit for weeks or months. If you are traditional or sentimental, or there’s no good bulk foods store near you, buy it in that box with William Penn smiling at you (Quaker Oats).
You need the flaked or rolled oats, stuff that looks like real oats crushed flat. Oats have to be crushed or cooked to be digestible to humans. Oats (avena sativa) is a naturally healing herb. It is good for those who have been through emotional trauma, suffer from shingles or other nerve-involving illness, and is soothing to the digestive tract. Many of us have irritated stomachs and bowels from coffee, soft drinks, fried foods, white sugar and stress-induced acidity. While cutting back on these foods, eating nourishing porridge will help heal the damage.
Take equal amounts of water and oatmeal. Bring the water to a boil in a saucepan. Add the oats slowly, trickling them in from the measuring cup. Stir constantly while cooking at low temperature. You can add a little salt, too, if you like. I don’t. It doesn’t take more than about five minutes before you have a thick porridge, and you can take it off the heat, since it will continue to set and thicken. If you like thinner porridge, use more water. I don’t recommend using less water, or you get a substance like gritty concrete.
Now add your favourite flavourings. I use cinnamon and nutmeg. Dried fruit, whether raisins, cranberries, blueberries, apple chips or banana, is added now, not at the beginning of cooking. Serve with honey, brown sugar, or maple syrup, and milk if you like that. Don’t let it sit on the stove for more than a few minutes.
Oatmeal is cheap,plentiful, and very nourishing to the body. I recommend we eat more of it, rather than the sugary, salty, fatty, expensive, nitrate-filled breakfast foods we seem to prefer.
Breakfast foods containing oats are just not the same, including that popular O-shaped cereal. The oats are probably overprocessed and a lot of their healing qualities are lost. The packaging is expensive, the promotion is expensive, and unless you are about six years old, they are disgusting eaten dry. Rolled oats are cheaper, better, and take up less room in the cupboard. They are closer to their original state, meaning that extra energy costs haven’t been committed. If you can, buy rolled oats at a local mill (there are a few traditional mills scattered throughout the continent.) You’ll find the flavour is incredible when the oats are really fresh.
11.24.08
Drug-free Sleep
I have been plagued with insomnia all my life. It is an unusual night if I’m not awake between 2 am and dawn. I simply can’t take most over-the-counter sleep nostrums because of sensitivity to a key ingredient (acetaminophen) and constant chemical bombardment of your body is not a healthy thing, anyway. Why I don’t sleep, I’m not sure. It’s just how I’m wired, maybe. I’m a busy person who waits until things are quiet to do the heavy thnking, and that means at night. So part of the sleeplessness is anxiety and part is fatigue, which should mean I could sleep better. Physical pain contributes to some of the exhaustion.
I have used quite a few natural remedies, but often they are just substitutes for pharmaceutical solutions. Tinctures of valerian, passionflower, California poppy, hops, and skullcap have all helped, but I began to feel medicated. Friends referrred to the “potions” I concocted every night. And it got expensive.
I had to seriously work on my sleep disorder. This seems to be the best solution so far:
Have natural, freshmade oatmeal in the morning instead of sugary cereals, donuts or fatty bacon and eggs. Add honey, real maple syrup, and fresh fruit. I flavour it with nutmeg and cinnamon. Don’t use instant sugared oatmeal. Oats have principles that sooth the digestive tract and the nerves.
Avoid caffeine after noon. I like coffee, but I can’t have more than two cups. Likewise, I have to avoid chocolate in the evening. It’s probably the combination of a small amount of stimulant and a lot of sugar.
Don’t drink much alcohol, and limit it to the supper hour or early evening. It’s tempting to have that glass of wine, or bottle of beer (with the effect of the hops) to unwind and feel relaxed, but it is counter-productive because the alcohol takes water from your body and you wake up somewhat dehydrated.
Stop eating with the evening meal, and eat early. Your body doesn’t really want to lie down and digest. If you eat refined sugar, do so earlier rather than later. The big bowl of ice cream is merely comfort food for your inner child, not nourishment for your adult body, and it will definitely remind you of its presence in the middle of the night. Sweeten foods with honey, preferably natural, unheated, local honey. This is real food.
Check for food allergies and lactose intolerance. Are you eating something which you really shouldn’t have? My husband had an unsuspected corn allergy. Cut corn products from his diet, and he feels more active and energetic, and doesn’t have unpleasant gastric symptoms (which he thought were from overeating, or eating fats.) I have a long-standing lactose intolerance, and have to watch the amount of milk product I ingest. Need I say that most processed snack food is full of weird, unexpected ingredients?
Get active. I really need at least a full hour of exercise outdoors to feel a healthy drowsiness in the evening. Again, early is better than later. Active people who take sit-down jobs often suffer insomnia; I raised sheep for ten years, and usually after a full day of work and farmcare, I was just the right kind of tired. In these sedentary years, I have more trouble falling asleep and staying asleep.
Make the home a haven. Your home is your sanctuary from strife and anxiety. If it isn’t, then start to change it. If you have to drive a lot, work with the public, or make snap decisions all day, you’ve had enough stress. Don’t let the household become another point of tension (as so often it is.) I will write more on this later. At least, your bedroom should be free of clutter, anxiety provoking projects, and arguments.
Make the bedroom dark – curtains, shutters, blankets over the windows and a rolled towel against the gap at the bottom of the door – and avoid LED and LCD displays and nightlights. You are wired to start waking with light stimulation – in the natural world we call that dawn. Most municipalities are in a perpetual daylight state. Our last apartment was next to a parking garage that was lighted with – get this – a huge floodlight on a seven-story building. The light shone directly into our windows. It was like living in a maximum security environment. Nothing would keep out that intense blue light except plywood over the windows. We moved.
Stengthen your immune system with natural products. Use echinacea for 2-3 weeks, then stop for the same period of time. (It works better if not used continuously.) Eat lots of fresh, raw fruits and vegetables, preferably locally grown. (Vitamin content goes down when produce is shipped and stored, or it was never developed because the food was picked green and ripened artificially.) Best picks: dark vegetables and bright colours. Eat less meat and fat, and eat more whole grains, such as brown rice.
These are tea formulas to help you relax and to strengthen the body with vitamins and minerals.
Peaceful tea:In equal parts, or in any combination that suits your taste – rose petals, lavender buds, lemon balm (melissa officinalis), catnip (nepeta cataria), green oat tops (avena sativa). Steep in a china teapot, covered, for ten minutes or more. This is very good for shingles, chicken pox, or any herpes-related pain, as well. Use it regularly during the day and evening for a week or more. It’s a very pretty tea, like potpourri. You can get organically grown catnip in a pet store.
Good Sleep tea: My husband calls it knock-out tea. Equal amounts of lemon balm, nettle (urtica diotica – buy it dried), peppermint and chamomile. Add a sprig of fresh rosemary if you have it, or a half-teaspoon of dried rosemary. Steep in a china pot, covered, as above. Have two cups (6-8 oz, each) before bed. This tea will help build healthy nerves if you have been under a lot of stress.
Maybe you have some solutions of your own you would like to share, or you may have some questions. Please use the comments section to let me know!
10.31.08
Multi-Use Kitchen Tools!
It slices, it dices, it chops, mops and minces! Get one today!
I don’t have any gizmos like that, except maybe a knife, which doesn’t do any mopping. Kitchen stores are a vast wasteland of gizmos YOU DON’T NEED. Note the emphasis. Stay out of kitchen stores! They are centers of lust for hoighty-toighty cooks. Yes, I’m trying to shame you. Or myself.
We bought a gadget lately for sharpening knives, since I didn’t keep the high-tech electric knife sharpener and we can’t find the knife steel. It was fine until my husband used it on an axe, and the strongest-man-I-know broke it. We need to find the knife steel. I don’t think he can break that.
Kitchen drawers end up tangled, forlorn places full of gizmos, gadgets and bits. (You know, the twist ties, bag clips, honey dippers, plastic doodads still unidentified as to use.) I have tried to move away from such accumulation and have found multiple uses for ordinary kitchen things.
You may have read already of my turkey lifting system (two wooden spoons jammed in undignified places in said turkey). But other items work in other interesting ways! Chopsticks will support an improvised coffee filter cone made of a big funnel, paper filter, and a teapot. The kitchen tongs get called into use in the chapel occasionally to hold the charcoal while lighting it for the thurible (incense burner). And the demitasse spoons no longer used for espresso are perfect for incense dipping. (Espresso is a distant memory of my single life at seminary. We now need coffee in really big cups.)
Once when the power was out and I hadn’t made supper for the kids, I used two bricks set on end, a cork-backed tile under three votive candles, a cookie-cooling rack, and an aluminum pie plate to cook cut-up hot dogs in tomato sauce. They had it on bread. It was good, too. (If you have a fondue pot with fuel, then you have an emergency stove. I know people in areas of poor electric service who keep them just for that. But who makes fondue anymore?)
My big cast iron skillet goes on top of the stove and into the oven as a baking dish. I don’t have a cookie sheet right now since I never bake cookies, anyway. I make pizza in it, too. I roasted a nice piece of beef in it at Thanksgiving this year. (We will eat meat if someone gives it to us.) It was great for that – holding the heat evenly, and the roast potatoes put in with it were perfect. It took a bit of cleaning afterward, but I didn’t ruin the seasoning. Sometimes it doubles as a stove-top oven, when I make skillet bread. This is not cornbread, but yeast-raised wheat bread rolled into small cakes and cooked on both sides. They turn out a bit like crumpets, and were an innovation when we didn’t have a working oven.
I use old-fashioned double-handled cookpots, which are all metal and enamelled. The medium size one with the cover makes a good bean pot. The traditional stoneware beanpot is now a collector’s item, I think, and while great in the woodburning stove, hardly necessary in a modern thermostat regulated oven. The underlying steel is thicker in old pots, by my observation.
The canning kettle is used also for apple butter (when I can get the apples and cider), pot luck sized soups, and as an emergency dishwashing sink. It has also been a bread box and a mouse-proof container for dry beans and grains.
My large cutting board used to double as extra counter space, covering half of the double sink.
Do you have any mother-of-invention ideas using standard kitchen items? Perhaps you would like to share them.
