New Foods

So we've tried a couple new things recently. Here's my review.

Recipe: Roasted Jerusalem Artichokes

I've been curious about Jerusalem Artichokes/sunchokes for a while. They're not actually chokes, more like the tuber of a certain species of sunflower plants. So when they showed up in my Bountiful Basket co-op share, I figured it was time. They roasted nicely and were crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside. The flavor is mild and sweet, much like sunflower seeds. But something about them made me gag a little. They tasted fine, so it was a mental block. I had a good helping the first day, but I couldn't finish the leftovers.

Recipe: Brussels Sprouts with Bacon

This wasn't the first time I'd eaten brussels sprouts, but it was my first success cooking them. These were really fresh and beautiful, and they cooked up fantastically. If it weren't for the resulting gas, I could eat these every day. And I don't think I used a full three slices of bacon even. My bacon was frozen, so I just chopped some off the end. I didn't use the olive oil called for in the recipe, just bacon grease.

I kept thinking of my sister Lara the whole time I was enjoying them. She used to request curried meatballs and brussels sprouts for her birthday every year, two dishes I hated. I could almost stomach the meatballs, but brussels sprouts? She couldn't really LIKE them; it had to be a scheme to gross the rest of us out. I still don't think I'll be buying frozen ones anytime soon, but I'm converted otherwise.

Fresh Garbanzo Beans. Image source.

I saw these at Harmons and had to try them. I'd never seen them fresh before, and they're really tasty. Smaller than the dried ones, and they taste like peas. There's usually only one bean per pod, so it's kind of fiddly to eat them. I don't see these becoming a regular in my diet, but they were a tasty novelty.

So there you have my food adventures. More to come, I hope.

This and That

More unrelated pictures. Atticus enjoying "frites" at our favorite Belgian waffle shop.

• I've started working again part-time. I'm back at my old job with the Church, working on visitors' center exhibits. I'm not an official employee, and I only go in a couple times a week. Atticus plays at his friend Mia's house while I'm gone. I'm not sure how long this will last, but it's nice to make some extra money. Unfortunately, sitting at a desk for 6 hours at a time is bringing back all my chronic pains. Definitely not going back full-time.

Male bonding over an iPad game where you drop bombs on zombie-filled cities.

• I made lasagne in the crockpot last week. When I first saw the recipe, I envisioned my brother Adam's attempt to make spaghetti in the crock pot. Not a success. But it turned out really tasty. I kept trying to figure out the advantages of using the crock pot instead of the oven, and there really weren't any, except for maybe energy consumption and not heating up your kitchen. So why on earth would you make lasagne in a crock pot? BECAUSE YOU CAN! Bwaaa haaa haaaa!!

Blurry iPod photo of a really excited boy.

• Halloween was kind of a bust for us this year. I made Atticus a really cute grinder monkey hat to wear, but he refused to wear it. Not even to take a picture. James made this great grinder organ from some cardboard, our pasta maker, and an iPod (to play the music). But when it came time for the costume contest at the ward party, Atty just wanted to "wun awound" in circles, so I had to wear the hat. We won for cutest costume. I also won for grossest dessert with my dish of roasted intestines. I used pureed apple pie filling for the filling. And it was extra gross because the pastry didn't cook all the way. I didn't eat any. James scored with his jack-o-lantern, though. Someone asked us if we'd had it carved professionally. Does such a thing exist? I'll post pictures after James uploads them. And I'll try to get a photo of Atty in the hat.

CSA week 1

Braising greens (mixed), spinach, microgreens (overgrown sprouts), rainbow carrots, French radishes, two kinds of chard, and a huge bunch of cilantro.

I've been eating salads of spinach and microgreens, plus peas from the farmers' market. Tonight we had grilled chicken (marinated lightly in lime juice) with cilantro pesto and a barley salad with peas, rainbow carrots, and fresh herbs. Later this week we'll eat the chard and greens in two different meals. I'm not sure what to do with the radishes.

I made another yummy thing that's not CSA-related but not worth a post of its own: strawberry sauce. But I didn't use just any strawberries; these were tiny, sun-ripened berries foraged (with permission) from my neighbor's garden. I was hoping to make jam, but no such luck. I got about a cup of perfect sauce, just berries, sugar, water, and lemon juice. I'm eating it over tart frozen yogurt, my new favorite treat. Mmmmmm..... I love summer food.

Memorial Day, part 1

I know this is kind of late, but I had trouble uploading the video. James had the day off (yea!), so we headed up I-80 to our favorite diner, the Road Island Diner. I was sad to see that they had changed their menu, eliminating breakfast (except on weekends) and *gasp* their house-made potato chips. I'd been looking forward to those chips. But they still had coconut cream pie. And cold drinks.

The secret to good hummus

Cumin. I don't know why it took me this long to figure it out. It's not in a lot of recipes, so I'd make hummus and it just didn't taste quite right. I'd add more garlic, more lemon, more tahini, more salt, and it still tasted, as James put it, like canned garbanzo beans. Edible, but not great.

Then, when I was following the Ornish super-low-fat-reverse-heart-disease diet, I followed his recipe for hummus, which had no tahini and no oil but had a healthy amount of cumin. And even James liked it, which is saying a lot. Ok, so I added a touch of tahini--just enough to add that smoky slightly bitter tinge that makes hummus so wonderful. And now I add cumin to hummus even when the recipe doesn't call for it, and it makes all the difference.

And today I used my fresh hummus in a very tasty dish: Mediterranean pita "pizza" (a slightly modified version of a recipe from my friend Heidi Herway). Toasted pita, hummus, chopped tomatoes tossed with s&p and dried basil, and feta. Then put under the broiler until the tomatoes warm up a little and the cheese melts. YUM!! Holy cow, this was just what I wanted today. Warm and creamy and tomato-y and very satisfying.

In Atty news, he's figured out how to pull a chair over to the counter to get things previously out of reach. Which brings on that motherly mix of feelings--pride and thrill at his accomplishments, and dread that now nothing will be out of reach.

Lunch!

Lunch today was so tasty I just had to share. I guess you could call it a Southwest chicken salad, but I just threw it together: baby spinach, black beans, chicken breast, red peppers, avocado, and a dressing of sour cream and salsa. YUM!! I enjoyed every bite.

And it was just 450 calories! Even with full-fat sour cream!

I've started a new diet. Yes, I know, diets don't work long-term, but I'm going for a short-term fix here. See, I'll be baring my tummy in a belly dancing festival in 4 1/2 weeks, and my tummy isn't ready to be bared. So I'm hoping to lose about 10 lbs before then.

Which means I'm working out more and eating more carefully. I'm following the Prevention "Flat Belly Diet," which can be summed up as four 400-calorie meals a day, each of which must contain a "MUFA", or monounsaturated fatty acid rich food (nuts, avocado, olives, olive or canola oil, dark chocolate).

Limiting my calories to 1600 per day is doable but more challenging than I expected. Getting to eat foods I love (nuts, avocado, olives, and dark chocolate) makes it much easier than it would be otherwise.

So far the pounds aren't melting off as quickly as I'd like them to, but I am moving incrementally in the direction I want to go. Wish me luck!

Food Hoarder

Please forgive the long post. This has been on my mind and writing usually helps me figure things out. I welcome your input as well. :)

I'm trying to figure out my relationship with food. I don't mean in a diet way, like food for comfort or food as the enemy. I've got that figured out and feel that I have a pretty healthy diet psyche, thank you very much.

No, it's food storage and gardening and home canning that I'm trying to figure out. Sure, I'm Mormon, so all those things have been important my whole life. But the mystery is why I have such an emotional connection to it all. I mean, nothing makes me happier and feel more secure than a full pantry and a full fridge. It's a deep, to-the-core thrill, yet somehow it never feels like enough.

My sister introduced me to a book that totally feeds that need: How to Grow More Vegetables... Sure there are lots of chapters on soil prep and composting and all that, but the chapter that takes my breath away is the one with sample garden plans for a year-round garden that will supply all of your food needs for a year. I study those diagrams with glee and fantasize about the mini farm I'll have one day, when I add chickens and beehives and maybe a few goats to the mix. It really wouldn't take that much land, except for the goats. It thrills me to think of buying and filling a chest freezer and basement shelves with summer produce and using it all winter.

Yes, I know that this plan requires a great deal of dirty work, both in the gardening and the canning and freezing. But it's work I want to do, and it's the kind of work that makes me feel competent and human and alive.

But gardening and canning aside, I'm also feeling more urgent about a basic year's supply of staples and a three-month supply of standard meals. I get the same feeling about my savings accounts, and I'm having major conflict at the thought of pulling money from savings to buy food storage. Which is more important right now? Which will make me feel more secure--the food or the money?

What I'm trying to figure out is my motivation for all this. Several people I know who have a lot of food storage are preparing for "the big one," a major disaster or food shortage or political uprising. I'm not really concerned about those things. I mean, if the fault line we're sitting on goes active, our foundationless 100-year-old house and all the food storage in it will be reduced to a pile of sticks and rubble in two seconds flat. And I have no desire to move out to the middle of nowhere and start stockpiling guns to keep marauders at bay.

And it's not like I ever went hungry growing up. There were a lot of us, and there were never enough mashed potatoes no matter how huge a bowl of them my mom brought to the table (we really like mashed potatoes), but we always had enough to eat. So that's not it.

What do you think it is?

Bean update

Ok, I've eaten a few servings of the bean recipe from my previous post, and I'm leaning toward leaving out the sherry next time. Or at least using half as much.

But dang, those toppings make this dish irresistable. I crave those roasted sweet potatoes fortnightly....

So this is definitely a keeper.

My mind is officially blown

Cooking with dried beans is for me a little like cooking a souffle: it's fussy and easy to mess up. And when you mess up, it's not likely you'll be able to salvage it. I've had enough experiences with crunchy beans and bland beans to be a little wary.

So when I decided to try this recipe, I got more than a little nervous. Did it really say NOT to soak the beans? I read the recipe three times and even had James look it over to make sure I wasn't missing something. Doesn't the author know that soaking beans before cooking is a cardinal rule of bean cookery? How can he just disregard rule #1? But I have learned to follow recipes carefully the first time through, so I took the leap of faith (I did buy a second bag of beans just in case the first batch failed miserably--I'm trusting but not stupid).

I tried the recipe this morning, and it actually worked just like it said it would. The beans were soft after 1 1/2 hours, but I let them cook another half hour just to get a little creamier. I'm not sure I'm going to like the addition of sherry, but it does say the flavor is better after 8 hours, so we'll try them tomorrow before making a final judgment.

If cooking beans turns out to be this easy all the time, I may just have to make this a weekly habit. I'm not holding my breath, though. :)

A new favorite

I made this for dinner yesterday, and it was fantastic. I'm getting hungry again just looking at the picture. (I didn't take that picture, I borrowed it from gourmet.com). It's curried red-lentil stew with vegetables, served over basmati rice and with roasted cauliflower on the side. You can get the recipes here.

I didn't make the cumin/red pepper oil to drizzle on top, but I didn't miss it. The best part is it freezes really well before you add the green veggies, so it's two meals in one. Or more than two: even with just half the recipe, James and I both had seconds and still had some left over. Oh, and it really is better the next day. I purposely made the base a day early to let it mellow, and I could totally tell a difference.

I thought the curry was a little strong in just the stew, but once you put it over the rice it balances out nicely. And the roasted cauliflower was really good. I think roasting is my new way to cook veggies. I made roasted asparagus for Easter, and it was divine. I don't think I'll ever eat steamed cauliflower again.

Who knew low-fat could taste this good??

So I'm following Dr. Dean Ornish's super-low-fat plan for a month to try to get my cholesterol in check, and I thought it would be much more painful than this. We've had some hits and misses, but the hits have been dang tasty. Like this red-pepper coulis:

2 small red peppers, cored, seeded, and diced
1 med. tomato, peeled, seeded, and diced (I used canned tomatoes with roasted garlic & onion)
1/2 large onion, diced
1 3/4 cups vegetable stock
1/4 c chopped basil (I used 2-3 tsp. dried)
Pinch of dried thyme

In a medium skillet, combine the red pepper, tomato, onion, and veg stock and cook until veggies are tender, about 10-15 minutes. Stir in the basil and thyme. Puree in a blender (I left it a little chunky) and pour back into a clean skillet. Reduce until about 1 1/2 cups remain.

I made this to go with some labor-intensive veggie cakes (not quite a hit, but close), and it was pretty good. But then I added plain nonfat yogurt to the leftovers, and it became FANTASTIC. The yogurt mellowed and blended all the flavors and elevated it to something I want to have in my fridge at all times. Seriously. I would have included a photo but I ate it all before I got around to taking a picture.

I put it on rice, on salad, in a veggie wrap, and it was fantastic in all of them. The only drawback is that veggie broth is ridiculously high in sodium, so maybe when I make it again I'll use reduced-sodium chicken broth and trade some of that sodium for a trace of fat.

If you make it, let me know what you think.

BEETS!!

There's a reason Dwight Shrute grows beets--people aren't supposed to like them. They're "peasant" food, something your ancestors kept in the root cellar to sustain them through the harsh winter. They're ugly in their raw form, dirty and hairy and looking very much like the roots they are:

I know a woman who detests beets but has several cases of canned beets in her food storage so that "when the marauders come, I'll have something to give them." That's a direct quote. (I don't know why marauders wouldn't knock her over and take her entire store, but maybe they'll be happy with whatever she decides to give them. If they ever come. Apparently there are polite marauders in her version of the apocalypse.)

Anyway, I like beets. I only knew the pickled variety until I went to France, where you can buy cooked whole beets in the produce section or go to the deli for tasty marinated beet salad. Then when I started growing them in my garden, I truly became addicted.

Susan asked for my recipe for gingery beet salad, and I started making some today, documenting the quantities for everything. I don't know what I was thinking, though, and I put in a healthy dose of dijon mustard instead of ginger. It was dang tasty. Here are the proportions for that one, though everything is to taste, really:

4 c shredded beets
4 Tbsp olive oil
3 Tbsp red wine vinegar
1.5 Tbsp dijon mustard
salt and pepper

The gingery salad is about the same, but instead of mustard you put in lots and lots of fresh grated ginger. (My favorite ginger tip: keep wrapped in plastic in your freezer, then grate it still frozen with a microplane grater/zester. It grates like a dream, and you don't even have to peel it. And it keeps forever.)

My other beet stand-by is roasted beets. They taste much better than boiled, and they couldn't be easier. Just trim and scrub them, wrap them in a foil packet like a tinfoil dinner, and pop them in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour. Make sure the beets are about the same size so they cook evenly. Here's what I roasted today:

Funny note about the long, skinny beets--I have been a bad beet steward, so this is the first time I've thinned the herd, so to speak. So I thought that I'd created a mutant variety with all the overcrowding. But then I remembered that I planted two varieties, one round and one skinny. Oh yeah.

After roasting the skin comes off super easy. Then I slice them and put them in a salad with goat cheese, arugula, and the mustardy vinaigrette. Again, super tasty.

What are your favorite beet recipes?

Pickles

Today I tried something new: making pickles. I started with green beans and a recipe from Emeril. Green beans, fresh rosemary, and lemon rind in a brine of white vinegar, water, and salt. Here's the "in process" picture:

Steam process for 15 minutes, then let "cure" for 3 weeks. I don't know if I'll be able to wait that long.... It seemed wasteful to heat up the whole canning pot for just two pints, but it felt like the beans needed to be cooked, so I didn't want to skip that step. And this way I can keep one pint for later.

Then I tackled bread and butter pickles. Lara inspired me with her success story, and then there was a recipe in this month's Cooking Light, so it was fate. Cukes are from the Borskis. This mixture smelled wonderful:

The b&b pickles don't require processing, so I just put them in a big jar and will keep them in the fridge. Here are the finished products:

I'll let you know how they taste...

Apricot Curd

OH ... MY ... GOODNESS ... this is tasty stuff.

I love lemon curd, but I'd never heard of apricot curd until Lena mentioned it on Saturday. She gave me the recipe (see below), and I finally got around to making it today, and I'm floored by the results. I was a little skeptical, since it sounds like apricot jam with eggs in it, which doesn't sound tasty at all. But it's amazing how creamy and pudding-like the warm results are, how rich and flavorful. I assume it will be a little firmer than pudding once it cools. Honestly, it tastes like lemon curd with apricot mixed in rather than the other way around. I'm not complaining--I love lemon curd, and this version is just a bit sweeter and more complex.

Oh, and a note to Salt Lakers, Mary Boyer still has tons of apricots, if anyone wants to try this recipe.

8 oz fresh apricots

grated zest and juice of 1 lemon

1½ oz (2½ Tbsp) butter, diced

8 oz* superfine sugar (I used regular)

2 eggs, beaten

Wash the fruit and put into a pan with very little water and cook until soft. Push the mixture through a sieve into a heatproof bowl and stir in the sugar, lemon zest and juice and the butter. Place the bowl over a pan of hot (not boiling) water and cook, stirring, until the sugar has dissolved. Add the eggs and continue to cook until thick. Pour into warm, sterilised jars and cover with waxed discs and lids or cellophane covers. Store in a cool place.

*Note that this is 8 oz by weight, not volume. I expected it to be one cup, but it was considerably more than that, closer to two cups. I thought it seemed like too much sugar, so I used only 6-7 oz, and my curd is a little tart.

Any canning experts out there want to suggest processing times for longer-term storage? I'd love to give this away as Christmas gifts, but I'm a bit wary of leaving it unsealed that long. (I think modern standards even rule out the parafin seal for jams and such.)

Next time I think I'll reduce the lemon and increase the apricots. I wonder how many other fruits are curd-able?

"Research shows..."

I read the other day that (and I'm paraphrasing here) that in one study children who ate only instant oatmeal for breakfast ate 80% more calories throughout the day than children who ate a veggie omelet and juice for breakfast (steel-cut oatmeal fared a little better). The conclusion was that it's important to include protein at breakfast.

Um, ok?

I'm ok with having protein for breakfast, but I have a few problems with this report, especially with the concluding statement. Did both meals have the same number of calories? Same amount of fat? Did they try adding protein powder to the oatmeal? How many kids were in the study? What were their eating habits before? Did the study conclude that we need protein at breakfast, or was that the magazine's inferrence? How do they account for steel-cut oatmeal's difference?

This is just one example of the millions of health-related blurbs we get bombarded with every day, each with authoratative "research" behind it. Too often I get sucked in, but this time I just got annoyed. And I had to share.

Talk amongst yourselves...

Reigning Champion

I am pleased to report that James has held his title as 11th Ward Chili Cook-off Champion for two years in a row. The competition was tighter this year--more contestants, better chili--but he still pulled it off.

He was originally banned from this year's competition--he does set the bar pretty high--but at the last minute he was asked/invited to compete. His standard is hard to beat because he gets really involved in the process. He doesn't like to eat chili as much as he likes the process of making it.

He makes his own chili powder. He buys several varieties of dried chilies, roasts them, then grinds them to powder. He toasts and grinds whole cumin. He uses premium beef roast, never hamburger. He cooks it slowly for hours, then makes sure to give it time for the flavors to blend.

As the judge put it last year, all the chilies were good, but in all the other chilies you would take a bite and taste tomato or beef or beans or peppers. In James's chili, however, you couldn't necessarily distinguish the different ingredients, but you knew there was a lot going on in there.

If you're interested, the recipe is from Cook's Illustrated. We have The Best Recipe cookbook, but Albertsons is currently selling a checkstand booklet of Cook's Soups and Stews, and the chili recipe is in there. (If anyone wants a copy, email me and I'll send you a PDF.) James made a couple modifications, most notably the addition of red kidney beans, but it's mostly the same.