So this week has been a bit crazy. We had our end of the year celebration with our Girl Scout troop, it's the last week of school, we had a yard sale last weekend (the remains of which are still filling up our house,) and I had a migraine going on for 3 days. Today was awards day at M's school, and so I took the morning off to go and see her and go to her class party. The result was that instead of my normal 8-5 shift, I am currently working a 3-10 shift while everyone else is watching TV and enjoying dinner.
For some reason, it didn't exactly occur to me that we needed a gift for her teacher until late last week, at which point I panicked and e-mailed someone that was in my Brownie Girl Scout troop (20 some-odd years ago) begging for ideas. She is a super-crafty, super-cool mom type and saved my butt. Even though I procrastinated about actually using her idea until this week. She had done a project at her kids' preschool where they used fingerprints to make critters on notecards. She explained that the kids did fingerprints and one of her (adult) friends drew in the little faces and such. I am quite certain that her cards looked NOTHING like my cards, because M does not like to play by the rules. She marches to her own drumbeat so to speak. At any rate, after a quick trip to Micheal's, we started working out the notecards. We practiced on a sheet of paper first, and I wrote the title of each piece of art, as well as a dedication from the artist to the teacher on the back of each card. I feel like they turned out really well-- I hope her teacher likes them!
But as a result of all the craziness and my literal inability to be in the kitchen cooking tonight, I scrambled around the kitchen and literally threw things in the crockpot. This happens once in a while, but tonight M declared it "wonderful." Ha. What a little gourmet she is. If only she knew.
It would be helpful if I had been to the grocery store lately, but alas my trips have been centered around buying items for school and for Girl Scouts, so my scrambling for ingredients came up with an odd combination.
It was well-liked enough that although I probably won't blog about it again, I probably won't feel guilty next time the situation arises at 6 am. By the same token, I am only including the recipe to show how a crockpot can turn a bunch of nothing into something good.
"Crock Pot-- Do Your Thing" Ingredients:
1 lb. goat stew meat
1/2 bag frozen spinach
1 bag frozen fordhook lima beans
1 bag Grape Tomato Sauce
Throw it into the crockpot. Turn on low. Cook for 6 1/2 hours. Serve over plain rice. Declare yourself a genius.
In the same vein as the grocery list, I guess I have a list of essential cleaning products. But it's really much shorter.
My Essentials:
Dr. Bronner's (unscented)
White Vinegar
Baking Soda
Basic H2
tea tree oil
lemon juice
washing soda
oxiclean
Murphy's Oil
My Like-to-Haves:
Dawn
Cascade
Tide
You see, my like-to-haves are all brand namers. And really, I can coupon those to death and get them most of the time. But the first list are all pretty environmentally friendly, and can do ALL THE WORK OF THE 2ND LIST. If you are trying to save money, keep in mind-- you can make your own cleaners, and elbow grease is cheap.
Another great hint for saving money on cleaning supplies.. buy products that are concentrated. For example, I've been using the same bottle of Murphy's Oil Wood Soap for 3 years. Has its power diminished? Nope.. Do I use it a lot? You betcha. And the Basic H2? 1 of the small bottles can clean everything from your driveway to your dishes. I've been on the same bottle for a year, and am only halfway through. Baking Soda? I bought a 5 lb bag from Sam's Club in January of 2009 that I use for both cleaning and cooking (careful not to redip and contaminate, naturally) for about $7.
So what are your go-to cleaning products? Earth-friendly or otherwise?
Yes, I know I have mentioned time and time again that my husband doesn't eat pork. That doesn't mean, however, that we never have dinner guests that do. Which is why I bought ground pork at a deal a while back and stuck it in the freezer.
Over the weekend, my aforementioned cousin and her fiance, as well as her younger brother (my youngest cousin) came over for dinner and I made Mexican. I had them over for dinner the same day I had a yard sale (which is why I have no pictures of the food) and had to make something easy. Seemed like a good time for that ground pork.
I thawed out my pork about halfway, but I don't really even think you have to do that. I placed the onions and garlic on the bottom of the pan so that the flavor would seep up into the meat. I then placed the meat, and on top I put the whole jalapeno and the chili powder. Turned it on low, cooked about 6 hours. I stirred it once or twice during the day to be sure the chili powder got mixed in well. When you stir, be careful not to break open the jalapeno. The idea is to infuse the meat with the flavor, not to make it need-a-fire-engine hot.
The result? A flavorful pork that was excellent in tacos. Both of the kids were able to eat it, and the adults were able to add spice enough to suit their taste for hot.
We are winding up our year with out Girl Scout troop, and I thought it would be nice if the girls gave my co-leader a present. For some reason, the idea of making a "Daisy" out of their handprints on a t-shirt popped in my head. Now I do have to try and do everything cheaply, so I used some Walgreens Register Rewards to buy the t-shirt, and dropped over to Hobby Lobby for the paints. (If you are unaware of the Register Rewards deal, go on over to Southern Savers, a blog I follow, and she has great explanations of how it all works.)
I got together with each of the girls and had them do their handprints in a Daisy (-ish) design. Thanks to their helpful moms, I was able to get all 7 over 3 days.
Anyways, here's our finished product. And she should LOVE it!
My oldest cousin is getting married, and I've been thinking of what she needs to know. Oh, I don't mean stuff like the birds and the bees or knowing about how to do laundry, or even how to cook. She's a very smart girl, and out of college and on her way to medical school. She has those sorts of things covered. She knows quite well to take care of herself. But I did start thinking about what it's like to set up your own household.
When you get married, or buy your first home, often you have a shower, or a housewarming party. People give you a crockpot, a coffee pot, and a soup pot. They give you knives & spoons, a cutting board. But there's so much more that you need. You need a broom. Something to clean your toilet. Something to clean off the stove. You see? I once knew a lady who always gave a gift certificate to a grocery store as a wedding gift. That way, the new couple, if they didn't already have their own home together, could purchase the essentials: salt, pepper, oil, flour, and so on. And so I started thinking about what MY essentials are. Because what every person needs as their essential grocery items are not the same. It depends on what you eat, and what you cook. And even if you cook. It depends on how you clean, if you believe you need chemicals to get things truly clean, or if you want to make your own environmentally friendly cleaners. And mostly, it also depends on your budget and how many ways you can squeeze it.
So here's my list of essentials, the things I must have in my pantry/fridge/freezer grocery-wise. Some of these items may seem expensive, but I have a strategy for buying each on the cheap. Some other day I'll talk about cleaning products. These aren't in particular order:
garlic (preferably fresh, minced, and powder)
onion (preferably fresh and frozen chopped)
worchestershire (especially since becoming gluten-free, soy sauce doesn't cut it.)
coconut milk
coconut oil
olive oil
hot peppers (preferably a variety of powdered, dried and fresh)
chicken
lamb
bison
eggs
frozen spinach
sea salt
dried beans (particularly black beans, garbanzo beans, kidney beans)
peanut butter
variety of herbs & spices
celery
carrots
vinegar (preferably a variety, but at minimum apple cider and white)
tomatoes or tomato sauce (we try to stick with fresh and/or homemade sauce because of issues with BPA in canned tomatoes)
mushrooms
fruit, a variety
coffee
tea, a LARGE variety ( we have an actual tea cabinet for this purpose)
rice
potatoes
ginger, both fresh and powdered
Now there are a wide variety of other things that we love and buy, but if we have all of this "in stock," we can make a huge variety of meals. Another absolute essential to me is a good set of containers that can go in the freezer and a set of labels. I buy my labels in the office section at the dollar store. One pack lasts forever. All leftovers that don't get eaten quickly get frozen for lunches to take to work or for nights when noone wants to cook.
So what are the grocery items that are YOUR essentials?
The 19th marked our 3rd wedding anniversary. This year we decided a date night IN would be the best way to celebrate. We sent the kids to spend the night with my parents (thanks mom & dad) and had a date night in.
I gave my hubby a couple of choices, and he choice gyros (Yay!), and opted to stop and pick up the movie Avatar for us to watch. We weren't really sure if it was kid-appropriate, so it was a great time to see it. We also went ahead and watched the last two episodes of Desperate Housewives, to which we are both totally addicted. (Don't let him fool you.) I don't know what I was expecting, but Avatar was awesome. If you are into sci-fi, anthropology, love, or special effects, it covers all of those bases. My husband has good taste in movies.
As for the gyros, I did have to work that day, so I consulted Stephanie over at her blog for the recipe. It was fantastic! A definite keeper. We each had 6 or 7 gyros. Yes, I said 6 or 7. If the kids are at home, we'll have to use 2 lbs of meat.
We did make a couple of adjustments: I double the garlic in the tzaziki. I also mixed the garlic and onions into the meat (because I can't follow directions) and used all lamb, no turkey. It was to die for! Once again, Stephanie rocks! Oh, and we followed her suggestion to use corn tortillas to make them gluten-free. We had standard (gluten-filled) beer for accompaniment, however, so perhaps we didn't do as well as we thought.
A note on that: my husband's lower back has hurt him for two days. I think we've both decided if we feel we must have a beer, that Redbridge, made by Budweiser and that IS gluten-free is the way to go. We feel much better, less bloated, etc. etc. Besides, what's the point in working this hard on the food and then drinking pretty much straight gluten?
I've mentioned before that we had a garden both last year and this year. We also compost, as a way to fertilize our garden without using chemical fertilizer. This also helps us reduce the amount of trash we are actually sending out to the landfill. If you think about it, it makes absolutely NO sense to put food scraps.. eggshells and peels and the like into a plastic bag that will takes hundreds or thousands of years to decompose, when the food scraps themselves will decompose in a matter of months. But I digress.
Composting is an art form that I apparently do not understand and my husband does. (There are many things that go this way...) But we do try to keep it relatively simple, as our daughter has to be able to do it, and our son will once he's bigger and cleaning up after himself more. We keep a bucket in our kitchen (ours is a joint compound bucket from when we tiled at the other house.) Into the bucket we throw:
fruit peels
vegetable ends (celery stalks, bases of carrots, etc.)
coffee grounds
egg shells
cooked grains (rice, quinoa, etc.)
And a few other things. After some trial and error, and a bit of research, we determined no meat. My hubby wanted to include meat for a while to attempt to reduce our actual waste trash to zero, but after a month of feeling like I was dying from the smell I vetoed that. When the bucket gets full, we take it out and toss it in our compost bin. Now a friend of ours has a fancy compost bin that hangs out above the ground and has a crank to turn it, but that sucker sells for about $300 or so. Yeah, right. Our compost bin is a large plastic trash bin with holes drilled in the bottom to let the "juices" flow out. (Why is so much that I write about so gross??) Apparently this bin has to be "stirred" and/or rolled fairly often to help break down the food. It also needs to sit in most full sun most of the time.
Here is what I have learned about composting myself:
1.) Your actual trash bin never smells. (Unless you forget and leave decomposing fish heads in it....but that's for another story.)
2.) Even if you don't include meat, your inside bin will start to smell from time to time, even when you keep a lid on it. This is especially true in the hot summer. Clean it regularly. To clean, take it outside, empty it, and then rinse it out with the water hose. Scrub with an enviro-safe cleaner (I like Shaklee's Basic H2). Leave it out in full sun for about 3 hours. The smell will be gone.
3.) Do not get lazy about emptying it. If you do, the lid won't stay on properly, and the thing will smell.
4.) Often your visitors will simply not understand composting. Explain as best you can, then relax. It's not worth fighting about.
5.) Do enforce composting on your kid's friends. It exposes them to (probably) something new and makes them think.
6.) Assign the person in your family who can smell the least or has been whining the most to deal with the large compost bin out back.
Can you compost if you have an apartment or a place with no yard? Yes, absolutely. But you will be doing it on a much smaller scale, and you'll want to have something with a much tighter lid that a compound joint bucket.
I really need to do something about the bucket. It's quite ugly.....
Once upon a time, I was single. When I was single, I lived with my parents and payed few bills. Due to their indulgence, I thought nothing of dropping a hundred bucks or so on an evening out for just me, or just me and a friend. Randomly today I thought back to one of those evenings when I took my friend Niki to dinner for her birthday. We went to a great little place in College Park (unfortunately out of business now) called Kosmos. I remember vague things about the dinner, but what I do remember is the dessert. Remembering a dessert is rare for me, I'm all about the meal itself. But that one time, I was served vanilla ice cream topped with fresh strawberries cooked in black pepper and balsamic vinegar. This was at least 6 years ago, but I still remember how fantastic it tasted. So tonight I surprised my husband with a rare dessert. (The kids didn't qualify for dessert due to behavior and dairy issues....)
Ingredients:
7 fresh strawberries, washed and sliced
1/2 tsp. black pepper
3 tbsp. pomegranate balsamic vinegar
1/2 tsp. white sugar
vanilla yogurt
In a small pan, heat balsamic vinegar. Once it starts to bubble slightly, add sugar, and stir often until completely dissolved. Add black pepper and mix around. Toss in strawberries, mixing while cooking until throughly coated in sauce. Dollop about 1 1/2 cups vanilla yogurt into a bowl, top with strawberries. Serve immediately.
My husband was (I think) deeply skeptical of the black pepper with strawberries. He did, however, pronounce it a "keeper." (Thanks, hon... I knew that... :-)) The vinegar and pepper seems to just make the taste of the strawberries really intense, it's neither hot nor sour, oddly enough.
I bought some whole red snapper a while back since it's my hubby's fave fish. It was wild-caught, but also pre-frozen, so I was unable to get the fishmonger to filet it for me. For some reason, I thought this was not issue. Ha! I went fishing as a kid, and even ate my catch, but I for sure never cleaned a fish before.
Fast-forward to early this morning, when I decided to pull said fish out of the deep freeze. Mind you, when I say whole fish, I mean eyeballs and all. After the fish had been thawing almost to cutting point and after I had made a run to the store for charcoal for the grill, my husband says, "Um, so who's gonna scale and clean these fish anyway?" I kind of hedged around a bit, hoping he would volunteer, and finally said I would do it if he taught me how.
My husband, thankfully, attended fishing camp as a child, so he actually knew what he was doing. He carefully showed me how to not only clean the fish, but scale it as well. For some dumb reason, I didn't realize that scales and skin were different things.... FYI, they are.
He taught me to carefully slit behind the gills and the first fin, all the way around, and then break the fish's spine before pulling the head off. Apparently, something in the gallbladder is poisonous, so you don't want to break that. (I never was quite certain which part the gallbladder was, so I tried not to pop open anything.) He also taught me how to scale the fish, which was the easiest part. He showed me first and then I did my own. I somehow immediately turned the fish and jabbed my thumb into its eyeball. And I almost barfed. But somehow, I ignored the nastiness, and forged on ahead. And gutted the thing and scaled it. (The scaling, by the way, was much easier than the gutting.) Funny thing about all this is that I worked in the kitchen at Red Lobster for 4 years in college and never had to do any of this!
So we cooked the gutted, scaled, cleaned fish in lovely foil pouches on the grill, complete with veggies and seasoning.
Red Snapper Fish Pouches
Ingredients (per person): 1 small red snapper, gutted and cleaned and beheaded 1/2 tsp. lemon zest 1/4 tsp. parsley 1/8 tsp. thyme 1/8 tsp. oregano 5 slivers roasted red pepper 6 halfs grape tomatoes 1/8 chopped onion 1 smashed and chopped garlic clove 1/8 tsp. black pepper 1/2 tsp. olive oil 1/2 tsp. Bragg's apple cider vinegar sugar snap peas 1/2 tsp. capers aluminum foil
Lay the fish in the foil. Arrange the vegetables across and around the fish. Sprinkle seasonings on top and top with capers. Roll the foil up to seal the pouch and add the vinegar and oil. Close foil pouch. Grill, sealed, for about 30 minutes or so. (If you are unaccustomed to cooking fish, it's easy to tell when it's done. It either loses its translucency or is easily flaked when cooked properly.)
I served this with a seasoned rice and some roasted broccoli and cauliflower. I get bored with rice pretty quickly, so I am always trying to mix it up.
Seasoned rice
Ingredients: 1/4 onion, diced 2 slices roasted red pepper, chopped 2 garlic cloves, smashed and chopped 2 tsp. olive oil 1/4 tsp. parsley 1/2 cup lentils, rinsed 1 cup jasmine rice 2 cups water
In a small saucepan, heat olive oil over medium heat. Add onion and garlic. Cook until onion begins to turn translucent. Add lentils and rice. Cook for another 1-2 minutes, stirring constantly. Add water, sliced pepper and parsley. Bring to a boil. Lower heat, and cover, cooking 20-25 minutes until liquids are gone and rice is finished.
The veggies I made were loosely inspired by a recipe for Roasted African Cauliflower that I used to cook from one of the Moosewood Cookbooks. I cannot access said cookbook because we still haven't unpacked our books from when we moved (yes, in last October.) Anyways, so I did this based on memory and added a thing or two.
My Vague Version of Moosewood's Roasted African Cauliflower and Broccoli Ingredients: 10 grape tomatoes 1 bag frozen broccoli and cauliflower 3 tsp. whole coriander olive oil 3 tsp. rice vinegar 2 garlic cloves
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. In a large mixing bowl, grind coriander and garlic cloves. Slice the grape tomatoes and add to garlic & coriander mixture. Add rice vinegar and about 1 tsp. olive oil. Pour in veggies, still frozen. Toss until veggies are coated in mixture. Pour mixture in baking dish. Add veggies and seasoning into oven. Cook for thirty minutes, removing from oven periodically to stir. I cooked mine in a convection oven so this could vary. Veggies are done when none of them are cold.
Serve all together. It's a wonderfully Mediterranean type of meal that got winning reviews from everyone. Make sure the kids know to watch out for the bones in the fish....
With all the special arrangements I make when cooking, I still know to other people it seems very, very hard. I even pack up food for the baby to send to my mom's house when he stays over there because it's confusing. Tonight we are going to my cousin's graduation party, where there will definitely be food. And we've come so far with the baby that I don't want to backtrack. Thank God it's my family. I just called my aunt and explained that my family is weird and asked if I could bring something. She's so sweet, she offered to accommodate, but I just thought that sounded like to much. I did wonder what we'll do down the road with other people. I guess I'll think about that tomorrow, after all, tomorrow is another day. And I have TODAY to tackle.
So while making breakfast this morning, I still had to make a dinner that would feed at least the baby and my husband, if not all of us. It sounded like time for the crockpot. And while I won't bore you with what I literally THREW in the crockpot, I did half 1/2 a pound of ground turkey leftover that I needed to do something with. So I, quite randomly, decided to whip up some breakfast sausage. Now, we don't buy much sausage for two reasons: 1) my husband doesn't eat pork, and 2) a lot of turkey and chicken sausages have gluten in them. So I haven't had sausage recently enough to quite mimic the flavor in my mind. But I did come up with a lovely mild sausage that my kids loved. To be frank, my husband and I need a bit more zip to it. If you like milder flavors, this is for you:
In a small bowl, add the seasonings to the ground turkey. Mix it up with your hands. Raw ground turkey is too mushy to really do this well any other way. Wash your hands. Heat a skillet on the stove with either oil or cooking spray. I don't use cooking spray often, but I did for this. Take about a heaping tablespoon of the meat mix and form into a patty, repeating until you have as many as your pan can comfortable handle. Flip once the bloody looking juices (doesn't that sound gross?) start to rise to the top. Repeat, until all of the sausage patties are done. This made 6 sausage patties, which fed 4 people when served with my Ultimate Eggs.
Next time, I think I'll add some coriander and more cayenne.....
I believe in taking advantage of a good deal when it's available. I've mentioned before that we live on a budget, and I do all I can to stretch our money. Sometimes that is extreme couponing, sometimes that is going to the farmer's market, sometimes it's freezing bananas that are turning brown to throw in a smoothie later. This week it is making tomato sauce with grape tomatoes. We just got an ALDI here in our town. If you've never been to one, their concept is cheap. They typically have a small grocery store. You deposit a quarter to use a buggy, and get your quarter back once you park it. You take your own bags or pay for them. And they carry a large supply of not-name-brand food for cheaper prices. Or so they say. My love for Aldi revolves around the fact that on any given week they have some sort of produce super-duper cheap. So I pop in there and buy just those items and leave. This week they had pints of grape tomatoes for 49 cents. I don't know what they sell for where you live, but here on average they run $1.49 to $2.29. So that was a super deal. I bought six.
And oh, what to do with six pints of grape tomatoes? I mean the kids will snack on a pint, but they'll go bad if they don't use them. Last night I made three of them into tomato sauce and froze it. I mean, it'll taste better than what comes in a jar and cost me about $1.50 and an hour, and I tossed it in the freezer when I was done.
In a large pot, pour about 1 1/2 tbsp. olive oil. Heat the pan, then add the onion sherry vinegar, and garlic, cooking until the onion is about halfway to translucent. Meanwhile, chop up the grape tomatoes. As you get a few chopped, add them to the pan. Stir often. Once all of the tomatoes are added, bring the sauce to a boil, then lower the heat. You are going to cook it overall for about 45 minutes. I don't have that long of an attention span, so I set the timer in 5 minute increments to remind myself to go back and stir it and be sure it wasn't burning. About 30 minutes into cooking, add all of the herbs. You are cooking until the tomatoes are mostly broken down and most of the liquid has evaporated. There will be a lot of liquid, because this is a lot of little tomatoes. Be patient. Once the liquid has evaporated, get a teaspoonful and taste it. Then, let it cool. I let mine cool, overnight, covered. But if this freaks you out, by all means, stick it in the fridge. Once it has completely cooled, take a container or freezer bag and label it, and pour the sauce in. The sauce should last for about 3 months in the freezer. To use, place your container in a bowl of hot water to thaw enough to remove from container, and add to pan. If you're using it for pizza, thaw completely in the hot water. Um, and although I prefer reusable containers, mine are all full or dirty. And yes, I am using Christmas ziplocs in May. I got them for a steal!
So in the last couple of years, the USDA has changed its recommendations for fruit and vegetables to say that we should each eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Personally I see that as a minimum, and think that with busy lives, sometimes it's hard to meet.
One of my answers comes at breakfast. I try to give two of the servings at breakfast, which really gets us off to a good start. One serving is generally some sort of fruit. We are a big fruit family, so that's never an issue. A few weeks ago, it occurred to me that I should really be sneaking in something else to hit that 2nd serving, especially since coffee isn't considered a vegetable and I'm the only one who drinks it anyway....
My answer is veggie eggs. Now, I cook breakfast every morning, simply because we all seem to do better with a good start to the day that isn't carb and sugar laden. M gets in less trouble at school, and my hubby and I find ourselves being able to make it to lunch better without feeling that urge to hunt down a candy bar or french fries. The great thing about veggie eggs is that I started gradually, mixing a tiny bit of spinach with the eggs, to get everyone used to it. Now the eggs are almost the backdrop, and everyone is a fan.
My Ultimate Veggie Eggs 4-5 eggs 3/4 cup frozen spinach 1/4 cup chopped onion 3-4 garlic cloves, smashed and chopped 6-7 grape tomatoes, sliced thinly salt pepper olive oil
Heat your skillet on the stove, adding in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Once the olive oil is hot, add the garlic and onion. Cook, stirring often, so that the garlic doesn't get burnt, until the onions are turning translucent. Add in the spinach, still frozen. Cook the veggies until the spinach is starting to thaw. Add the sliced tomatoes and pepper the whole mixture. In a small bowl, crack your eggs and scramble them. (You don't have to do this, but to me it's a lot easier than scrambling in an already busy pan.) Pour eggs into the pan, and cook until everything is just starting to look done. TURN THE HEAT OFF AND REMOVE. If you're not a scrambled egg person, that's really the secret to good eggs. Now, take a pinch of sea salt in your hand and crush it up, sprinkling over the eggs. Serve immediately.
We like spinach the best, however, I have also used frozen broccoli and even frozen stir-fried veggies in pinch. If we have salsa, my husband loves salsa on top. Do I feel guilty using frozen veggies? No. Frozen veggies are frozen straight from the field, so they maintain a lot of nutrients that your local grocer's fresh veggies have lost through traveling 2000 miles to get to you. And hey, at least my kids are consuming extra veggies.
I don't know if I ever mention it enough, but my husband rocks. And he's a great cook too. I do most of the cooking because I am working from home now and he is not, but when he gets in the kitchen I am always impressed. Last night, he made one of my favorite of his inventions.. jerk-barbeque chicken.
He is Jamaican, and oftentimes tends to be a real purist about Jamaican food, to the point he has walked out of a restaurant without trying the food, because "they don't have enough room to cook things properly." But for some reason, he felt adventurous one day and created this easy and delish masterpiece.
Ingredients: 4 chicken quarters 1/2 cup Walkerswood jerk seasoning 1 cup bottle barbeque sauce 3 tbsp. water
Fire up your grill, whether it be charcoal or gas. (Charcoal adds a nice extra bit of flavor, but work with what you've got.) Using a meat cleaver, cut the chicken quarters, either in small pieces or simply separating thigh from drumstick. In a small bowl, mix jerk seasoning, water, and barbeque sauce. (In our case, we had a bottle of some off-brand barbeque sauce in the fridge that happened to be gluten-free.) Please note: jerk seasoning is very spicy. A little goes a long way. If you or your family don't eat spicy, you may want to adjust that ratio down a notch. For the baby, we grilled a plain drum. This was mild enough, however, for the 7-year old to eat with a lot of water.
Once your grill is ready, lay your chicken on the gril. Baste the chicken with your sauce, and watch the chicken carefully, sauces tend to catch flame. Flip the chicken regularly, and baste each time.
This is really delicious with almost anything. Heavenly, even. My husband is a genius!
So I have a concern at times about the effects of high fructose corn syrup on my family. But truly, we don't drink soda, at least not on a regular basis, so that knocks out the number one source of it for most people.
But my husband and my daughter both love lemonade. Any brand, any variety, canned, bottled, cartonned, pouched, what-have-you. And I bought this great new book, that had this super easy recipe for lemonade. And summer is starting to be upon us, here in Georgia, so it seems like it 'tis the season.
The book, by the way, is called "Back to Basics: Traditional Kitchen Wisdom." Edited by Andrea Chesman. It's got very straight-forward advice about canning and preserving food, if you're into that sort of thing but don't know exactly where to start (like me.)
Recipe for Lemonade from the book:
1 c. sugar
1 c. water
1 c. lemon juice (4-6 lemons)
3-4 c. cold water
ice
1. Make the syrup by heating the sugar and water in a small saucepan until dissolved. Meanwhile, squeeze the lemon juice into a bowl.
2. In a pitcher, combine the juice and the syrup. Add the cold water. Refrigerate 30-40 minutes. Serve with ice. Serves 6.
The way I did it:
Juice 6 lemons in the juicer. Didn't make quite enough juice. Ooops. Juice a pink grapefruit to go with it. Make simple syrup as directed. Mix all ingredients in pitcher. Refrigerate. Serve to family. On following night, mix with gluten-free vodka and enjoy.
I rarely blog about cocktails, but sometimes a nice one can help an evening be more relaxing. So cheers!
Oh, and if you are someone interested/concerned about high fructose corn syrup, there is a recipe or two in the book about making your own soda. From scratch!
Sometimes I get random ideas in my head. Some are extremely practical, some are thoughtful, some make sense only to me. I think this one was all three.
My son, is on a gluten-free diet and only consumes goat's milk, preferably raw. So for both processing and dairy reasons, the poor guy can't have cheese. For me, this is a TRAGEDY. Note the caps. TRAGEDY. I love cheese.
So, whilst rummaging through various cooking sites the other day, looking for yet ANOTHER crock pot recipe, a light bulb lit up above my scalp, old-school cartoon style. I wondered, wondered, wondered... could I MAKE goat cheese????
After much Googling, and reading of recipes, I got the basic idea. The thing is, all of the recipes I looked at called for at least a gallon of milk. Now, I don't know about other people, but raw milk here in Georgia is NOT cheap. And, of course, I had no idea if we would actually LIKE said cheese.
The basic concept seems to be-- 1 large part milk (preferably unhomogenized and unpasteurized), 1 small part acid, 1 teensy part salt. If you're feeling adventurous, add herbs. And the magic temp everyone seems to agree on it 195.
Cool. Sounds like a go.
Of course, this may have gone more smoothly if I had, A) followed a recipe, B) written down a single site I had looked at, or C) tried this after 6:45 AM.
All in all, though, it really wasn't that hard. And every bit I made was gone within 5 minutes of unveiling it to the family.
My recipe:
Approx 1/4 gallon raw goat's milk
1/8 cup white vinegar
3/8 tsp. sea salt
Heat milk over low to medium heat, stirring often so you don't form a skin on bottom or top. Using a thermometer, monitor the temperature carefully. You want to reach 195 degrees but not go over 200 degrees. (I don't really know what happens if it gets too hot, all of my research prior to today suggested 200 was really, really bad.) Once you reach 195, remove the thermometer, and grab the vinegar and a spoon. Sloooowly pour the vinegar into the milk, stirring the whole time. The milk should begin to curdle. Turn off the heat. Let this crazy looking mixture cool until it reaches 100 degrees, you can handle touching it, or you run out of time like I did. Grab a large mixing bowl, and over it place a colander lined with cheesecloth. (I used two freshly cleaned cloth napkins, but cheesecloth is actually made for this purpose.) Pour the mixture through the cloth. Grabbing the cloth by the corners, tie it up to hang and drip until you have the texture you want. (I ran out of time, so I balled it up and squeezed. ) The liquid in the bowl left behind is whey you can use for fermentation. For the cheese, place it into a mold (I used a Japanese-style teacup) and cover with plastic wrap or similar. Place in the fridge and chill. I served mine on a butter knife, directly into the hand.
Some notes: This made an extremely mild cheese. It turned out great for my purpose, which was largely to see if the boy could tolerate it. It's been 3 hours, so far, so good. But for anyone else's purposes, I would season the cheese with more salt and a bit of pepper, or some herbs, or some chopped olives. I think you can add this stuff just before the straining. It would be a lot more tasty.
When I do this again, which I definitely will, I'll try some alterations and post again if I come up with a super-yummilicious recipe.
I have such a hard time following recipes. Which leads to the question of why I write them down and share them in the first place. Well, I can follow mine alright. And a blog is a heck of a lot more convenient for me to find mine than to flip through the fifty odd cookbooks I have still packed in boxes from when we moved last October.
I don't know what my issue is. My friend and former roommate Erin gave me a great recipe for lentil curry soup. Have I followed it? As closely as I could with the ingredients I had on hand. But I keep wanting to add an apple. We'll see how that goes. And I did grind use my own ground curry powder, since the Jamaican powder I have on hand has wheat in it. I simply ground everything else up and skipped the wheat. It's really nice and has a bit fresher taste. Just don't get tumeric on everything-- it really STAINS. But prior to my gluten-freeness, I always bought the Blue Mountain Country brand of curry powder.
With no real reason for this, I used about equal parts of everything, throwing it all in the mortar and pestle. I then tasted and added until I reached the consistency I wanted. For the record, I used whole allspice, whole fenugreek, whole cumin, whole coriander. I used powdered tumeric, powdered black pepper, sea salts, and powdered garlic last time. This time I will use whole white pepper instead. I think I'll stick with powdered garlic if I'm not using right away for storage/spoilage reasons.
I ground it as hard as I could, breaking up everything and then mixing both with mortar and pestle and also a spoon. Fenugreek is especially hard to grind, so I did enlist my hubby's help for a sec (although really I could've handled it myself had I perservered. ) What I didn't use I saved for future use.
After the looooong Mother's Day weekend, we were all tired, sluggish, and in general need of recuperation after our overindulgence in food and travel. When I asked my hubby what to do about dinner on Monday, he said, "Soup." "Soup?" He never wants soup. So I made soup. Recovery soup, designed to make us feel all warm and loved inside. And able to go to bed without feeling overly full.
Ingredients:
2 cups chicken stock 1 cup quinoa ends and bits of about 4 pieces of celery 1 onion, chopped and divided 4 carrots, chopped and divided 4 cloves garlic 3 tbsp. thyme 2 smoked turkey drumsticks 2 smoked turkey wings 4 cups water 6-7 sliced mushrooms 2 tsp. olive oil
In a small pan, cook together the ends and leaves from your celery (I save these up for such a time) along with 1 chopped carrot and about 1/4 chopped onion in 2 cups of water. Once water is boiling, reduce to a simmer and add 1 tbsp. of the thyme. Let simmer on your stove at a low heat. If the liquid starts to evaporate, add more water.
Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a large soup pot. Add the celery, onion, mushrooms, garlic, and carrots, and stir. Cook until the veggies begin to grow soft. Throw the smoked turkey in there, mine was still frozen when I did this step. Pour the chicken stock over it and add the remaining water. Cook over low heat, not really boiling anything. Let it cook for 30 minutes or so, occasionally stirring. At this point the turkey was sticking out above the liquid, and that was ok. After thirty minutes or so, throw in the rest of the thyme and add a lid to the pot, continuing to cook over low heat.
Take your small pan and strain the liquid from it into a bowl, discarding (composting) the vegetables. Pour the liquid back into the pan and add the quinoa. Bring the quinoa and liquid to a boil, then reduce the heat. Put a lid on it and simmer for about 30 minutes or until the quinoa looks curly. The veggie broth helps not only flavor the soup, but also flavors the quinoa.
Remove the smoked turkey from the pot and shred the meat off of the bones. Return the meat to the soup, reserving the bones to make more broth out of. Once your quinoa is finished cooking, pour it, liquids and all, into the larger soup pot. Stir everything up and let it simmer together for about 5 more minutes.
Why, might you ask, is this recovery soup? The quinoa makes it filling, but still not overly heavy. You're getting protein, veggies, a great dose of minerals and liquids. It made us all feel good. The baby and I each ate two bowls, I think my hubby had four. My daughter had eaten dinner earlier at my parents' house, but tried it and declared she wished she had room because it was delish.
Tomorrow I am making Curry Lentil Soup. It's from a recipe given to me by a friend, so I'll have to see if I can share it here......
Ah! Mother's day weekend. Visions of breakfast in bed, flowers for mom, peaceful serene.....WHO AM I KIDDING! I must've been dreaming.
We had a truly jam-packed weekend for Mother's Day weekend. We started with M and I attending a high tea with my mother-in-law at her church, which was wonderful and fun. It was supposed to be for kids only 8 and up, but my 7-year-old held her own. We then left both kids with my MIL and drove to Athens, GA to see my cousin Brooke graduate from college. When we left the tea we had exactly 2 hours to drive about 75 miles, find parking, find our family in Sanford stadium, look presentable, and enjoy graduation. By some miracle we did so, and watched her graduate in style. I might add that her commencement speaker was Alton Brown, and he was immensely more entertaining than whoever my commencement speaker was when I graduated from UGA 10 years ago. Note I said whoever, as in I don't remember who! We then met up with my ex-roommate Tommy and went to dinner. We spent the night at Tommy's house, only to rise and drive back to my MIL's in time to get the kids so she could go to church. Once she got out of church we took her lunch (Indian food-yum!) and then headed back to our house.
We all took a nap, got up and took my mom to dinner (Mexican food-yum!) Note in this several things-- I woke up without my kids on Mother's Day, I didn't get to attend my church, and after the Mexican food I was exhausted. But c'est la vie. It sounds bad, but I actually enjoyed most every minute of it. And M gifted me with several lovely things... a Rock n Roll necklace, a calendar, a portrait keychain, etc. I felt loved, and I hope both my hubby's mom and my mom did too.
So I was walking through a local discount grocery, stopping by to get a bag of potatoes on the way to pick up my oldest from school, when I happened upon Charras corn tostadas at 99 cents a bag. "Eureka!" I thought, "New dinner tonight." I read the ingredients carefully, determined they were gluten-free, and grabbed a bag.
My knowledge of tostadas and the expected configuration of them is somewhat limited to Taco Bell, I'm afraid. And I wasn't trying to make "Mexican Pizza." But since my family loves Mexican, I came up with my own version of the tostada, which I am happy with after the 2nd run. And my family? They cut eat it 3 times a week.
First I made a bean spread. It looks crazy, but both kids could eat it with a spoon.
Soak beans overnight in separate containers. You can also do a "quick" soak by following your package directions. Cook them in separate pans. This is important, because kidney beans release a toxin and they must be boiled to release it. I would rather cook them separately to reduce risk of cross-contamination. Once they are both done, drain and rinse the beans and dump them in a pot together, along with the tomatoes. Simmer for a few minutes. Pour the mixture into a food processor, and add the onions, ancho chile powder, cilantro and garlic powder. Process until smooth. If the spread clumps up, add olive oil through the top until you get the consistency you desire. (If you have small ones who are not ready for the chile powder, process first, remove some, then add the seasonings and blend with the remainder.)
Now, on to making tostadas. You'll need:
Tostada shells
Shredded cheese
sour cream
lettuce
tomato
bean spread
meat
avocado
salsa or hot sauce
chopped onions
For the meat, I cooked 1 lb. ground grass fed beef with some garlic, ancho chile powder, and chopped onions. I didn't measure the amounts, because grass-fed beef tastes so good that I ate bits of it as I went along to ensure good flavor!
To construct your tostada, spread a layer of bean dip and then top with other toppings as you like. Kids like this because they get to assemble their own. Adults like it because it's yummy.
All in all, it's a pretty easy, low maintenance dinner. Gluten-free, easily dairy-free for those that require it.
I'm constantly struggling with how to entertain both kids at the same time. One was an only child for 6 years, and the other for my purposes is really still a baby. They both want ALL of my attention. And I know others struggle with this too, particularly when their interests are so varied, their skill levels are so different, etc. The other day, my daughter wanted to play hide-and-seek and I was cooking dinner. So she decided to involve her younger brother. How, might you ask, did she get a 15-month-old to find her? By stringing his pacifier on her jump rope, and pulling it behind her. He loved it. And while the germ aspect of that had me running to wash the pacifier before he put it in his mouth, it got me thinking. What all can I do to entertain them at once, so noone feels left out?
So I came up with a list of 7 things to entertain two kids of any age:
1.) Dance. They'll both love it. If you do it with them, you're getting free exercise. 2.) Let them help cook. The toddler can stir something, like flour and water, even if you don't actually cook it, they'll think they are helping. The 7 year old should be able to cook just about anything with supervision. 3.) Anything with water. Turn on the sprinkler. Let them water plants. Give them a bath or "swimtime" in the tub with toys. 4.) Beanbag toss, basketball (short goal) or anything that involves tossing something into something. They can both try, the toddler can carry the item over, and everyone gets applause. 5.) Hide and Seek. An adult or other child needs to accompany the toddler for safety reasons. Even if the toddler doesn't grasp the concept fully, he or she will surely love the discovery aspect of the game. 6.) Go to the playground. 7.) Make an indoor tent. Take chairs, couches, tables, and drape blankets or sheets over them. Crawl inside for a great playtime with any age kid!
In case I've never mentioned it, my husband doesn't eat pork or beef (except for grass-fed beef) and so when I get a hankering for a non-poultry or fish dinner, I often turn to alternate meats that he will eat. Now he has made curry goat for me before, and it was good, but I felt that certainly something else could be done with an animal that's been eaten by humans for thousands of years, other than making curry.
Enter my Nigerian-ish Goat. Traditional Nigerian Goat has peanut butter and tomato paste as some of the main ingredients. I dig on that flavor idea, but wanted to expand on it. And goat is a rather lean, healthy kind of meat.
Ingredients 1-2 lbs. of Goat Stew Meat 2 1/2 cups of chicken stock 2 tbsp. natural peanut butter juice from 1/2 a lime 1 diced red bell pepper 2 carrots 2 stalks celery 3 roma tomatoes 1-2 onions 2 tsp. allspice 1 tsp. cinnamon 1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper 1 tsp. powdered garlic 1 tsp. thyme.
In order to be tender and yummy, goat really needs to cook slowly for a long time. So this is best done in a crock pot (preferably a programmable one, if you have it.) Stir up your peanut butter, then dump the goat meat into the pot. Top the meat with the peanut butter. Pull the chicken stock out of the freezer. Wash and cut up the veggies and throw in there too. Juice the lime and throw the rind in. Pop your very barely thawed chicken stock out of the container and place the frozen block on top of the meat & veggies. I like to use the cheaper plastic containers to store my chicken stock on so they have a little give to them. I'd rather not nuke it if I don't have to. Cook on low for about 3 1/2 hours. Stir it up, cook on low again for 3 1/2 hours. If you won't be around, you can always just set it to go all day. Towards the end of cooking, at the seasonings, at least an hour prior to serving. When you add the seasonings, stir everything in the pot at least enough that it all gets turned over. Serve over rice or quinoa.
I never got a picture of the finished product... it dissappeared too quickly.
Coming up: Seven Ways to Entertain a Toddler and a 7 Year Old at the Same time....
For the last several years here in Georgia we have suffered from drought. Not a light drought, but a drought that has caused water restrictions and arguments between states about water usage and water rights and fear about where the next drop is coming from. This has made conservation, always at the top of my family's list, an even more crucial thing when it comes to our garden. And as much as we try to be conservationists, we also live on a BUDGET. Not budget, you understand, but BUDGET. We looked into rain barrels available at hardware stores, available through community organizations, and realized the average price tag for a decent size one is in the $120 range. Not to be overly 1990s or anything, but NOT.
So my ever-inventive husband decided to build his own. We got a cast-off laundry soap barrel for free, and about $5 worth of supplies from the hardware store. Ah, $5. Now that fits in the BUDGET.
Should you decide you would like your own rain barrel, a few hints:
1.) You need to clean it out REALLY REALLY good. Otherwise, you'll have soapy water.
2.) Use a quality sealant for the hole around the spout.
3.) Make sure your mesh is strong enough to withstand whatever might fall on it-- small tree limbs and the like.
All in all, the rain barrel took him about 30 minutes to assemble.
Its brilliant blue plastic beauty allows us to water our veggies and flowers, regardless of any drought restrictions.
Sometimes I just want to make something simple. Sometimes I crave a food I can't have. And since we are still in the midst of the great gluten-free experiment, I have both of those things going right now... a desire for pizza and a desire to not do a difficult meal.
Thus was born my idea for pizzataters. I just simply do not have the ingredients on hand for a gluten-free crust. And I honestly have 787 other things to do...Ok, honestly I'm still scared of gluten-free crust. And so I am giving into my fear and using baked potatoes as my crust for tonight and seeing how long I can get away with it. LOL
Pizzataters
1 jar of gluten-free marinara sauce (or 1 bag of your own, made from scratch and pre-frozen)
1 lb. ground turkey
1 onion
a handful of fresh mushrooms
mozzarella cheese
2 small or 1 large potato for each member of your family
any other pizza toppings you desire....i.e. spinach, olives, pepperoni, etc.
Thaw your meat and toss it into a crock pot with your marinara, mushrooms, and onions. Turn it on low and leave it for a couple of hours. Come back and break up all the meat. Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees. Wash your potatoes, and really scrub them. The kids are gonna eat the skin this time. And you will too. Promise. Using a fork, poke holes in the potatoes so they won't explode in your oven while baking. Once the oven is nice and hot, place the potatoes directly on the oven rack and cook for about an hour. Walk away, ignore them.. they'll be fine.
Once you come back, split open the potatoes on a plate and mush up the insides with a fork. Pour your "pizzasauce" over the potato and sprinkle with cheese. If you are adding other toppings, you may want to use an oven-safe plate that you can stick back in the oven a couple of minutes to bake it together. Serve. And eat. Give out lots of napkins.
Will I pass this off as dinner? Absolutely. Do I feel guilty? Not at all. I'm serving it with a salad, it's low fat and gluten-free. Does my family love it? I'll let the picture answer that:
Last year was our first year attempting to raise a vegetable garden. Halfway through the summer, we decided to move, and more or less gave up on our poor vegetable plants. We learned some valuable lessons to get us started for this year.
Things to know about our family-- we are overly ambitious. And I can live with that. Not to be satisfied with mere tomatoes like many of our friends and neighbors, we have sprouted 2 types of tomatoes, kale, cucumbers, peppers, okra, and cauliflower. We have at least 7 or 8 other varieties of seeds lying around, just waiting to be planted. We are also growing herbs, but that's a topic for another day.
My husband is the resident plant expert. Me, I can kill a cactus. No, seriously. My mind just focuses on too many things.. too-small clothes to be donated, little toenails to be clipped, permission slips to be signed, vitamins to be administered, etc. But my husband? He can remember how many times a day something should be watered, how much shade it needs, etc. we all have our talents. And so when I say that "we" have sprouted all of those things, by and large, I mean "he." (Although the baby does seem to be getting in on the action.)
He also has constructed a dog-proof garden fence (which our larger dog, Grancy, immediately jumped and got trapped in.)
Once the fence was built, we transplanted okra, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Oh, the excitement! Could it be, that I, Miss Orange thumb, could help transplant these little things and actual real-life vegetables would prosper under my watch?
Um, maybe. Except the heavens opened that night, the dog got trapped in the garden during the downpour, and it's possible they all drowned.
At 4 o'clock yesterday morning (something I should have taken pictures of) my husband was outside digging a trench around the garden to try and stop the flow of water.
Hopefully, some survived, and we'll plant more seeds.....
Last time we were at the Asian supermarket, something in me thought "Buy frog legs." Of course, this was before going gluten-free, and I thought a simple batter-and-fry recipe would do the trick. And I like frog legs. And I thought it would entertain the older child. So I stuck them in the freezer and promptly forgot about them, at least until I was rummaging around the other day trying to decide what to make for dinner. So off I go, into making gluten-free froglegs. I of course, never have buttermilk on hand when I need it, so I soaked the frog legs in a mixture of milk and vinegar while mixing my dry ingredients.
I'll list them, but not give an exact recipe, because you DO NOT want to repeat this cooking experience. Cornmeal, paprika, salt, pepper, lemon zest, garlic powder.
Ick. Ick. Ick. My ratio of spices to cornmeal was off, the oil didn't get hot enough, the batter fell off, the what should've been tender frog meat was stringy and oily.
So back to the drawing board.
The funny thing? Frog legs still amuse a 7 year old, and she asked if we could have them again, without the breading.
Well, the birthday lunch was a rousing success. The kids enjoyed the food, my husband and I enjoyed the food, and most importantly, the birthday girl loved it. And since I planned ahead (for once) making my stock ahead of time, and rising early to chop all my veggies, it wasn't even that hard.
To make the quinoa, I simply brought my Mushroom Stock to a boil, then threw in 2 cups of quinoa and about two handfuls of sliced fresh mushrooms. I let it boil, covered, for about 30 minutes. I think this was the birthday girl's favorite dish.
My husband handled the salmon. He took two separate lengths of salmon, about a pound each, and placed on a sheet of tin foil, topping each with the seasoning. One was jerk seasoned and one was lemon pepper. We like Walkerswood brand seasoning, it's not too salty and it has a good flavor. Warning: water it down! I would like to try to make my own, but haven't gotten around to it yet. He wrapped the salmon in the foil, leaving the top of the pouch open, and grilled them until they started to dry out on top. This gave them a medium-type of doneness, rather than a well-done (TOO dried out and gross) type of doneness. Both were a hit. The 7 year old was even able to handle the jerk because he watered down the concentrate appropriately.
And finally, I made individual platters of sliced fruit, as my mother-in-law doesn't really care for sweets at all, and my daughter declared it the BEST DESSERT EVER! I also added apples, which the picture doesn't show because I chopped them at the last minute so they wouldn't brown.
So, this, then, is how you can easily make a sugar-free, dairy-free, gluten-free meal, should you ever have to that is still a crowd pleaser. I hope you don't!
Coming up next-- the Gluten-Free Frog Leg Disaster.....
