Apple cranberry cookies

Mix 1/4 cup butter / lard / margarine and 1 cup of sugar. (I blend them in my food chopper then dump in a bowl.)

Core three apples then chop them into little bits in the food chopper (or grate them up). Add to sugar &  butter, and mix in along with one egg and about 3 tbsp of milk. 

In a big bowl mix 2 cups of flour, 1/4 tsp each baking soda and salt, 1 tsp baking powder, and a generous sprinkling of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger. 

Mix the wet ingredients into the dry. 

Put about a cup of frozen cranberries into the chopper and whir them into cranberry bits. Mix into the cookie dough. 

Spoon onto baking sheets and bake at 375 for about 15 minutes. 

Eat with a cup of strong tea... Or a glass of milk!

No Mess Almost Tacos

A spoon-saving recipe for the weary cook.

Brown a package of ground beef. Drain. Add taco seasoning and water, simmer until the seasoning is nicely integrated with all the meat but hasn’t reduced down completely. It should still be a little on the sloshy liquidy side.

Open a can of refried beans (you could, if you were feeling energetic, make the beans yourself some other fine day and then pressure can them) and mix into the simmering meat and seasoning. Stir to blend it all together.

Grease a casserole dish (my handy dandy white Corningware) and put half the mixture in the dish. Crumble a handful of nachos on top of it all, then layer a handful or two of grated cheese on top of that, and repeat with the remaining beans/meat mix, more nachos, more cheese.

Heat through (microwave for a couple of minutes or put in the oven if you have other things baking).

Serve with a big spoon and maybe a salad on the side. YUM!

Further sourdough experimentation

I am doing another sourdough experiment today.

I don't actually much like what we consider 'traditional sourdough breads' ... English muffins, yes, but bread? I like bread to just be ... bread. You know, like the kind you get for sandwiches from the store. Boring, I know, but that's what I like.

Still, I do want to use sourdough - I went to toss out the last sourdough loaf the other day, expecting it to be a solid hockey puck of dry toughness and it was STILL SOFT! and no mould! whoa, it keeps!!! And there is just something cool about not needing yeast from the store.

So I took my starter out of the fridge last night and fed it and let it rise on the top of the stove. This morning I scooped a bunch of it into the breadmaker, then made bread my usual way, more or less, compensating for the amount of starter I used, but keeping the rest the same as what I normally do. Let it knead and rise, and it looked really good ... though the rise was slower than with yeast. (I don’t bake my bread in the machine – I just use it to knead and raise the dough, so essentially it is a big fancy warm mixer.)

The dough looked great, so I took it out, shaped it, put it in a pan, and put it in the oven to rise a second time. It definitely kept rising! Looked great. Just turned the oven on to see how it bakes. :)

I'm excited!

…

Oh, yes, that worked just fine!

The bread came out beautifully … the texture on the inside is just the way I like it, fluffy and airy but compact, the crust had just the right amount of crunch, and the taste was a tiny bit tangy but it didn’t yell “sourdough” at me. I think with the addition of a tablespoon or so of honey or sugar, it’ll be absolutely fantastic.

Yay for bread!

Oh, and to go with it, we had cream of potato soup. I sliced a few potatoes into the pot with my awesome v-slicer, then added a few hunks of dehydrated garlic and a green onion (couldn’t find a regular onion) and cooked that until the potatoes were soft. Drained the water, dumped the cooked veggies into the blender, added milk and zinged it until it was nice and creamy. Then I poured it back in the pot and seasoned with seasoning salt, regular salt, pepper, and a bit of dehydrated onion powder. Yum.

Eating made easier

I often don’t feel like eating. Well, eating I could probably do, but there’s all the hassle of getting food ready and then cleaning up and quite a lot of the time, it just seems like food is more trouble than it’s worth.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for a blender for awhile now. A long time ago I had an Oster Kitchen Centre with the mixing stand and bowls and food processor and blender, it did everything. It was too big though, and once I moved to the country I found I didn’t use it very often … I have a breadmaker, and it’s great for dough mixing, I do pretty much everything else by hand (I enjoy it), and we have a Magic Bullet for smaller beverages.

Still, the Bullet doesn’t pulverize things quite as well as my big ol’ blender used to. Nor can it do as much at once. The blender jars (I had a big glass one plus several small ones, perfect for baby food – or guacamole) and food chopper attachment from my old unit would work on a new blender base … and when the Oster blender went on sale half price at Canadian Tire yesterday, I decided now was the time.

I’ve been experimenting with nut butters and cheeses for a friend with some dietary restrictions, so that was really fun: toss in some soaked nuts, blend with a bit of water, add some seasonings, and you have a fabulous dip for chips or crackers or to spread on bread. Yum.

I have almond milk straining as well – just blender almonds in water and strain through cheesecloth … excellent for making smoothies. The almond that remains can be dehydrated and added to baking, too, so that’s cool.

I took all the oranges that were sitting around here getting weary (we all seem to think we like oranges, but rarely eat them), got them peeled and put the insides in the blender. Whooshed them thoroughly for a bit then put the pulp in my Lee Valley Juice Strainer as I don’t like pulp in my OJ (ask my mom, she used to make me drink a little tiny A&W mug full of juice and I always strained the pulp with my lips as best I could). Voila: over a litre of lovely, pulp-free juice! And I can take the pulp that remains and spread it on trays in the dehydrator … the chickens will happily eat it, and maybe the lovebirds will, too, you never know. (The lovebirds don’t seem to realize that they are supposed to go crazy over raw fruit. They just look at it, they won’t eat it.)

For breakfast, I pureed some soaked almonds with a cored apple, some cinnamon, and a scoop of oatmeal and a dash of honey. Yum. It’s afternoon snack time and I’ve got another apple with some saskatoon syrup (store bought), cherry syrup (that one is home made), a bit of oatmeal and wheat germ and some of the aforementioned orange juice. Yum! The oatmeal gives it a bit of heft and extra fibery goodness, the syrups sweeten the tang of the orange, and the whole thing is full of healthy vitamins and things. Yay.

Lots better than a bowl of ramen noodles, eh? And cleanup is simple: rinse the blender jar, and you’re done. Yep, I think this was a good idea.

I’m thinkin’ guacamole and nachos for supper… there were avacados on sale at the grocery store yesterday!

Sourdough Bread

A few weeks ago I decided to get a sourdough starter going. There’s just something cool about being able to make bread without needing a package of yeast from the store – I mean, that’s how bread was made for centuries, right?

I don’t much like the truly sour taste of the San Francisco style sourdough breads … it’s just a bit overwhelming for my taste buds, I think. However, I know that just because a bread is made with wild yeasts and cultures doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be sour – much depends on how the actual bread is put together.

I did a bunch of reading … there’s a ton of fascinating information on the web, ranging from the highly complex and technical down to the ‘hey, really, this isn’t rocket science’. I followed the instructions for starters from sourdoughhome.com, and after a couple of stalled out days and a bit of mold (neither of which was a catastrophic problem: just change to a clean container and feed the starter more, it sorts itself out) we now have a happily growing starter culture. It helps that the gas oven is very warm inside, and that seemed like the ideal place to keep the culture during its rapid growth stage.

Today I decided it was time to try an actual loaf of bread. I read all kinds of detailed recipes and ideas at The Fresh Loaf and was starting to think maybe this wasn’t for me: anyone who’s watched me cook or bake knows that I learned from my mom … a bit of this, a shot of that, stir until it feels like this, then it’s good. Weighing things to the gram? This is so not going to happen.

Then I stumbled on this great site: wisebread.com. An article that repeats, over and over, “it doesn’t matter” in the instructions segments is my kind of article! I’ve made a lot of bread – it’s not like I don’t know what the dough is supposed to be like. Add flour and water until it’s dough. Knead it until it feels right. Let it rise. Bake it. Oh yeah, I can do that.

So I made my first loaf today.

And it was edible!

Of course I know some changes I need to make … the dough needs to be sloppier (I didn’t leave this one wet enough, so it had trouble rising), and I forgot to let it rise upside down, then plop it out of the basket (I am using a plain wicker basket I got at the dollar store lined with some cotton well dusted with flour – the really cool kids use these snazzy coiled baskets called banneton), but it still worked.

I let the starter have some more flour to eat and by this evening it was all bubbly and happy again so I’ve taken a generous dose of starter and added two cups of flour and two cups of water, then stirred the whole thing together with a shot of salt and a smidgen of sugar (yes, those are the measurements I use). It’s in the fridge because I don’t want it to rise too quickly, and in there it will develop much more slowly … it might be more sour than I normally like, we’ll have to see if the added sugar helps take the edge off (I have learned that a long slow rise apparently leads to more sour taste than a quick single rise). Tomorrow I’ll take the (very sloppy – almost like pancake batter) dough out and add more flour and knead it until it is bread-like … I’ll probably put a little bit of rye and a smidgen of oats in it, so it’s not too boring, and then make a ball with the neat side *down* in the basket, and let it rise until it’s nice and airy. Apparently the trick then is to tip the basket out onto parchment paper and then slide that onto your preheated baking stone (or unglazed tiles).. but as I have neither, I’ll probably use the cast iron pan. I can preheat it in the oven, then take it out with an oven mitt and dump the bread right into the cast iron pan. That oughta work.

Guess we’ll find out!

Cooking poultry the Apple Jack Creek Way

I’ve decided that I vastly prefer dealing with all the cutting and chopping and butchering of a chicken or turkey before it is cooked. We can’t eat a whole bird in a meal, and even if we could, having to face that pile of bones and meat after dinner is just depressing, in my books. Who wants to be wade through all that after having had a nice meal? But I can’t stand to let meat go to waste, and the cleanup has to happen somewhere along the way, so I came up with an alternative.

Basically, I do all the scrounging and scavenging before I cook the bird. I looked in the Old Green Cookbook (this is absolutely far and away the best cook book ever – if you like cooking real food with real ingredients, hustle over to Amazon and buy a used copy, it has *everything* in it!) and found out how to debone a chicken, then I just got out my big peasant knife and a cutting board and went to work.

The bones, wing tips, and all the other yukky bits go outside – because the chicken hasn’t been cooked, it’s okay for the outside animals to eat off the bones. They can’t have cooked bones, and the outside dogs and cats really can use some extra protein at this time of year, so the fact that I could toss them the remainder of the carcass without worry was actually a fairly big reason I started doing this. (Our outside dogs gladly scavenge what the hunters leave behind during deer season, so they are quite accustomed to raw meat. This is not the case with all dogs, so just because ours can handle it doesn’t mean yours will – consider yourself warned.)

The drumsticks come off intact (there are people here who will be happy to eat a roasted drumstick at some point) so those stay whole. The rest is just taken apart bit by bit, small pieces of meat that don’t come off cleanly get dropped into a bowl and the neater, larger pieces are laid out on a cookie sheet. Today, the drumsticks, one chicken breast, and one thigh went in the freezer for another day, and the remaining breast meat was sliced thinner and laid out flat on the cutting board.

All the small pieces then go through the meat grinder with a bit of bread crumbs (and today I tossed in some crumbs from the bottom of a Vegetable Thins cracker bag, for seasoning) and then the ground meat is mixed with some seasonings and liquid smoke to make a chicken meatloaf type mixture. This is an idea I got from Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, a fascinating book from 1860, which refers to this kind of preparation as forcemeat. It is actually a really handy way to use the small bits and leftovers of meat while vastly improving the appearance – you don’t have all these tiny chunks, you have a very presentable, shapeable mass of meat that cooks up nicely and holds whatever seasonings and additions you might wish to add. With veggies or spices as appropriate, it is a really handy addition to a lot of recipes. Skim through Mrs Beeton’s book, and you’ll get plenty of ideas!

What I do with it when I’m preparing poultry is to ball up the forcemeat and pack it into the centre of the chicken breast, which is then folded around it. If necessary, some big skewers will hold it all in place, or I could tie it with butcher’s twine and make a roll. Today, it all held together nicely by itself so I plunked it into a Corningware dish, put a bit of olive oil on the breast meat so it won’t get too dry, sprinkled everything with poultry spices, seasoning salt, and ground pepper, and it’ll go in the oven tomorrow for roasting.

See? Now when it’s time for dinner there’ll be a lovely chicken roll, easy to slice and serve, and when it’s time for clean up, the Corningware can go straight into the dishwasher, the leftovers can be sliced and put into Tupperware, and that’ll be it.

And today, the dogs and cats are having a Christmas Eve feast of fresh, farm raised chicken. Everybody’s happy!

Summer in a Jar

I do buy a lot of my produce at the grocery store – it’s just more convenient than the market. I try to buy Canadian wherever possible, and organic when I can. With canned goods, it gets tougher: we use a lot of canned tomatoes and mushrooms, and I worry about the conditions the workers have been subjected to (particularly in the US, though Canadian growers are not always awesome employers for foreign workers either). So, I do what I can … and I can what I can.

My neighbour dropped off some giant zucchini that had escaped timely harvesting, and at the Fair this weekend there was an extended farmer’s market so I was able to pick up six big bags of tomatoes. Today I have cooked down two of the giant zucchini, some leftover veggies that were in the fridge, and all but two bags of the tomatoes. The resulting ‘thick juice’ gets acidified (for safe canning) and canned in jars – it makes an excellent substitution for a can of crushed tomatoes or tomato juice in soups and stews.

I also got a big bag of sour cherries from a friend, and I made jelly  out of those: I actually boiled up the cherries and strained the juice, then returned the pulp to the pot with a few cut up plums that were in the fridge awaiting some sort of fate, and a big jar of crabapple juice from the pantry, left over from the huge crabapple jelly making spree of a few years back. This meant I got three litres of juice from my gallon bag of cherries, and one whole water bath canner full of jam.

The jam and one batch of veggie juice are cooling on the rack, and the crock pot has been filled with the processed juice from several pots of zucchini/tomato/garlic/onion so it can thicken over the next day or so – the crock pot makes a nice gentle but steady heat so it will evaporate down but not scorch. To make the sauce I just cut up the vegetables (I used my awesome mandolin slicer that The Boy got me for Christmas, which made quick-cooking thin slices in no time flat) and cook them with a bit of water to prevent scorching until the whole thing is one big pot of mush. That gets run through the food mill (it needs the medium grate, otherwise too many zucchini seeds make it through), and the resulting juice is either canned as it is (well, with the addition of lemon juice and/or cider vinegar to assure acidity) or put in the slow cooker to thicken, and then canned.

Ta da.

Local tomatoes (and zucchini), and local jelly, eco-friendly and as ethical as I can get it.

German Potato Soup

Peel several potatoes (if necessary) and chop into bite sized bits.

Chop up an onion into small bits.

Put in pot with enough water to cover by about 1 cm.

Boil. Then simmer.

When potatoes are soft, turn off the heat and let it sit about 20 minutes if you can, but if you are hungry go ahead and skip this. It just helps the broth thicken.

Add salt and pepper and eat.

Super easy and more delicious than you'd expect.

Recipe from "the More With Less Cookbook", from MCC.

Mexican Supper

I modified a recipe the other day and came up with an awesome, super fast, super easy, super inexpensive supper.

Ready?

If you have dry beans, use those as they are the cheapest. I used black beans, but pretty much any kind of dry bean will work for this. If you are organized, soak the beans overnight. if you aren’t, then at lunchtime (or in the morning) of the day you want to make this, put the beans in a pot and cover with three times the amount of water as beans, then boil for a couple of minutes and shut it off. Let it soak for a couple of hours. Then, if you have a pressure cooker/canner, dump the soaking water off the beans and put them in the pressure cooker, just covered with water. Put the weight on the steam vent and heat it right up to 15 lbs of pressure, but just for 2 minutes. Take it off the heat (and set it outside if you want it to cool fast!) and you’ve got cooked beans. If you haven’t got a pressure cooker, just dump the soaking water and cover the beans with water plus a little bit, and simmer for 45 minutes to an hour, until they are soft (see why you want a pressure cooker?).

If you don’t have the time to do all that, or don’t have dry beans, substitute a can or two of the beans of your choice, rinsed and drained.

You want some tomatoes: I put about half a can of leftover stewed tomatoes in the blender and made tomato puree. A jar of tomato paste would be fine too. Or some tomato soup.

Now, look in the fridge for interesting additions. I found a few mushrooms, and a bit of corn would also be nice, or whatever leftover cooked veggies you might have around. I think some rice would be good too: uncooked rice would work if you upped the liquid by a good bit, or leftover cooked rice would work fine as well. I grabbed a handful of dehydrated red peppers from the pantry and soaked them in the tomato puree for extra flavour.

Last but not by any means least, you need some salsa. I used most of a jar of the zucchini salsa I made this summer, nice and spicy. If you haven’t got salsa, use more tomatoes and add some salsa-ish spices: dehydrated onion, garlic, peppers, jalapenos, cilantro.

Mix together all the ingredients, mashing some of the beans if you want a thicker texture. Put it all into a greased casserole dish and then crumble some stale nachos or tortillas over the top, then add a layer of grated cheese.

Heat in the oven until it’s heated through – I put it in the oven of the woodstove for an hour, but half an hour at 300 would probably do it (maybe longer if you used uncooked rice). When the cheese is really melty it’s probably good.

Serve in bowls and be ready to offer seconds!

Flatbread: easier than you think

Winter is a good time for warm stews and thick bean dishes and spicy Indian food, all of which go really well with nice fresh flatbreads.

Of course, you can buy packages of flatbread at the grocery store, but they are expensive … especially once you realize how easy they are to make at home with a grand total of three ingredients.

One of which is water.

The other two ingredients are flour and oil. Salt and multiple kinds of flour are optional (I like a mix of 2 parts wheat flour to one part corn flour, but I’m not picky, I’ll use whatever is handy).

About an hour before you are going to need them (or sooner, they can be reheated in the microwave or the oven right before your meal), put about three cups of flour in your breadmaker / stand mixer bowl / regular bowl. If you want, sprinkle in a little salt, but that’s optional. Use less flour if you’re only making a few .. three cups will make enough for four people, easily.

Take your cooking oil and, while stirring the flour around the bowl, gently drizzle in a bit of oil … just enough to make some crumbs show up, about a tablespoon. This part is actually optional, though if you’re using a breadmaker or mixer I think it helps things not squeak and stick so much. Then take a glass of warmish water and just drizzle it in, again, while mixing, until you get dough forming. Let the breadmaker run through the dough setting / run the mixer with the dough hooks for 10 minutes or so / knead it with your hands until it is nice and stretchy and feels like a not-very-spongy bread dough. If you can, let it sit for half an hour or more, though you can roll them out right away if you’re in a hurry, they just might be a bit stickier to work with.

Take a golf ball sized lump of the dough and smash it down flat on a cutting board / rolling cloth / countertop and roll it flat. They always stick to my rolling pin, so I just roll it once or twice then peel it of the rolling pin and turn it 90 degrees and roll it again until it’s about hand sized. They will stick to each other, so stack with a tea towel between the individual flatbreads, or just roll them as you cook.

To cook, heat a frying pan that is lightly (lightly!) coated with cooking oil. Flop the flatbread in the pan, wait about 30 seconds, and flip. Wait 30 more seconds, then take it out and put it in a tortilla warmer (if you have one) or on a tea towel. You can keep them in the microwave wrapped in your tortilla warmer/tea towel, too (a microwave is a convenient place to keep things warm, being an insulated box with a handy dandy door).

If they’ve cooled off before meal time, reheat for about a minute in the microwave or set them in the oven on warm for a few minutes on a cookie sheet, spread out a little bit so the ones on the bottom don’t get too soft. You can also put them in the toaster (which is what I do when reheating leftovers the next day).

That’s it. Honest. Sure, you have to stand at the stove and flip the flatbreads, but I do it while setting the table or getting the last few things ready for supper. Put one in, put two plates on the table, flip it, put out two more, remove that one, put another one in, go back to the table… it works.

And all it takes is about 3 cups of flour and a bit of oil. Fresh, hot flatbreads for a whole lot less money than you’d pay at the store.

Making Cheese

I love cheese. We eat a ridiculous amount of cheese in this household, actually, and since we have a cow, it seems reasonable that I should learn how to make cheese.

My husband gave me this cheese making kit awhile back, and now that we have milk, it’s time to start using it!

I made a batch of feta the other day and it’s in the fridge in brine. It’s kind of … melting, though, which I have researched. Apparently that means I didn’t let the cheese cure long enough before soaking it (which I didn’t), so I know what to do next time. It’s still delicious, if a bit soft – I think I’ll make salad dressing out of it.

Today I made cheddar. Well, I’ve started it: the culture and curd and draining the whey is all done, and the cheese is now being squished by a few of my husband’s exercise weights. It looks promising, anyway, and the curds I tasted were yummy, so I think we’re on the right track. This one has to age for a few weeks, which should be interesting. It needs to age in a cool spot – we don’t really have any cool spots (the fridge is too cold, the house too warm), so I think I’ll probably try the cooler with a small ice pack and see if I can get that to the right temperature.

I did a bit of reading on what to do with the whey – the liquid left over after the cheese curds come out of the milk. It’s actually quite sweet, and you can use it to make bread or to cook pasta, and the dogs and cats love it. I’ve given some to the pets, as it’s too hot to bake bread right now, but I’ll try that soon. I also found that you can make ricotta cheese from the leftover whey, so I did that today and it is amazing! Soft, creamy smooth cheese from the leftovers of making *other* cheese, and you are still left with a nutritious broth you can use for cooking or baking or whatever.

Neat, eh?

Dairy Day

It was a dairy day at our house today.

This morning, Sasha was in a nasty mood. Crabby, irritable, kicking – and worse, she managed to step in a pile of fresh manure just before milking, so those kicks were messy. Ugh. I did manage to get milk cleanly into the bucket – but there was a lot of washing and rewashing going on!

Once I got myself hosed off and into clean clothes, I decided today was a good day to try pasteurizing the milk. We’ve just had it raw before, and I still will do that some of the time, but my family are not all adapted to the taste of fresh raw milk, and I’m hoping pasteurization (plus watering it down some) will make it taste more like the store milk they are all accustomed to. I got out my cheese making kit – which was a gift from my husband almost two years ago and has sat unused because I wasn’t milking and didn’t want to make cheese with store milk – and found the thermometer it came with. Perfect for pasteurizing as it sits away from the side of the pan and reads the temperature of the liquid. Carla Emery told me what to do, and it was so simple!

Milk pasteurized, it was time to start on the cheese. I had to hunt around a bit for the rennet and cultures, but they were right where they ought to be, in the freezer. I had about 2 litres of milk ready for cheese making which is half a batch, according to the recipes in the kit, and I opted for feta as my first cheese: doesn’t need curing, and it’s something we like. Well, was that ever fun!

All you do is pasteurize the milk (that step is optional, actually, but I did this time as I wanted to be absolutely sure I was growing the right things in the milk culture) and then let it cool down to where it is just warm, add the culture and let it sit in the oven (which is just the right temperature, since ours has a pilot light) for an hour. After that hour, it’s turned into something like thick yogourt, and you slice it with a knife into chunks then give it a bit of a stir. Warm the oven briefly then shut it off and put the pot back in at the slightly warmer temperature, stirring every 10 minutes to help the cheese separate from the whey. Strain into a colander, and voila! Cheese! Add some salt, make the brine (feta soaks in salt water) and you’ve got fresh home made cheese.

Amazing.

The unsalted stuff tastes a lot like the paneer I often make (which is just milk scalded to just under boiling then mixed with a bit of vinegar until it curdles … strain it out and it’s cheese you can use in Indian sauces to make a quick and yummy supper).  Salted, it tastes like … feta!

In further dairy adventures, I made butter from the cream I’d skimmed off all that milk.

Butter on the fork and in the jar on the lower left, buttermilk in the jar on the upper left. Carla says you can make cheese with the buttermilk too – which could be interesting!

And, just to round out today’s dairy adventures, I’m having kalvdans with crabapple jelly as I write this. It’s textured very much like cheesecake, actually, with the same sort of very plain flavour (I made it according to a local friend’s recipe – just cream and colostrum whipped together with some sugar, then baked like a custard). Cheesecake gets served with a fruit sauce, so I figured jelly would be a good quick substitute. Yum!

And now, of course, I’m tired and ready to sit down with my spindle and audio book and rest as the cool evening breeze comes in. We have a lot of smoke from some nearby wildfires (not dangerously nearby, but close enough we get the smoke) so I didn’t have the fans going all day today like I usually do. The smoke has eased up some now, though, so we can open up the windows and let the cool air in.

Ahh. Summer.

Home made tortillas are easier than I thought

Tonight we had home made tortillas. It’s so easy, I just have to share.

I use the breadmaker though this could be done by hand. Since I have it though, well, why not?

Put about 1 cup of white flour and 1/2 cup of corn flour (or use all white, the corn flour isn’t necessary but it is nice) in the breadmaker and start the dough setting. As the little flipper goes around, pour in a couple tablespoons of oil and use a scraper to make sure the flour all gets oiled. Then pour in just enough sour milk, regular milk, or water to make a not-too-sticky-dough (if you put in too much, like I did tonight, just add more flour until it’s the right texture). Let the mixer do it’s thing and get the dough all into a good ball (or knead it by hand). Let it sit for about half an hour.

Make your taco fillings while this is all going on: I used ground turkey from our recent poultry purchase and an envelope of taco seasoning plus some grated cheese and salsa from the fridge, nothing fancy.

Divide up the ball of dough into rounds about the size of an egg then roll them out into tortillas and fry in a hot frying pan with a wee bit of oil: when there are bubbles visible, flip them, just like when you make pancakes. Stack the finished tortillas on a plate (or in a tortilla warmer, one of which happened to find it’s way to my house recently), and serve.

Voila: an easy dinner. And cheap, too: I am pretty sure that a cup and a bit of flour and a dash of oil costs a lot less than a package of premade tortilla shells (they go for at least $4 at my grocery store).

Monday Supper

Mexican Mini Pizzas, with corn tortilla shells this time.

Miniature Mexican Pizzas: easy supper from the pantry

A friend had posted a link to these Mini Mexican Pizzas awhile back, and I thought they looked like something my family would eat. However, I don’t usually have tortilla shells in the house, and running out to the store to pick them up is not easy when you live in the middle of nowhere like I do. Flour, though, I have … so I looked up a recipe to make your own tortillas. There are a lot of ways to do that, but this particular recipe seemed like something that would go over well, and it works with things I have in my pantry.

Of course, the whole thing got modified by the time I was done. I’ll explain what I ended up with, in case you’d like to try this at your house.

First, start the tortilla dough, since it will need some time to rest after mixing. I happen to have a breadmaker, so I used that to do the mixing as it allows me to have my hands free for other things, but there’s no reason not to simply do this on the counter with your own two hands. A mixing machine like a KitchenAid with dough hooks would do a great job as well.

• put 3/4 cup milk in a glass measuring cup and heat in the microwave for 2 minutes (or heat in a pan until it is scalded but not boiling)
• put 2 cups of flour, 1.5 tsp baking powder and 1 tsp salt into the breadmaker and start the dough setting
• slowly pour the heated milk and about 2 tsp oil (I used olive oil since that is what I keep on the counter) into the bread machine as it mixes
• let the machine knead the mixture for about 10-15 minutes, then unplug the machine and just let it sit while you do the filling (or use your hands for this part, the machine is entirely optional)
• put one can of refried beans (I intend to figure out how to make my own refried beans from dry pantry beans, but I used canned beans this time) in a mixing bowl along with a generous dash of taco seasoning and about 1/2 cup of salsa (more or less, depending how much you have, how spicy it is, etc.) and mix all that together
• get out your muffin tins (I used both my one dozen and my half dozen tins to make 18 in total from this recipe) and generously oil all the muffin compartments
• take your dough out of the breadmaker and divide it into 18 little balls, then set those on a damp cloth that you can flip up and over them so they can rest
• leave everything alone for about 20 minutes … you can grate the cheese while the dough is resting (I used some jalapeno Monterey Jack that was in the fridge, but cheddar would be fine)
• if you want to add a bit of meat to the tacos, scramble fry your ground meat (I used some of the ground turkey sausage mix I made up the other day) with some taco seasoning and water
• once the time is up (according to the instructions, you do want to wait the full 20 minutes or the dough will be hard to roll out), roll each ball into a circle and put it into the muffin tin, just like you would for making tart shells
• fill each shell with a spoonful of the bean mixture, then put a bit of meat on top, if you’re using it, and cheese on top of everything
• these can then wait until just before dinner: they go in the oven at 350 for about 15 minutes, until the edges of the tortilla shells are baked golden and the cheese is all melted
• serve with salsa and ranch dressing or sour cream: they are very filling, so each person will probably need only 3-5 of them for a whole meal

And there you have it: keep your pantry stocked with flour, refried beans, and salsa, and have milk and cheese on hand (you could use powdered milk in a pinch) and you’re ready for supper.

I tend to prefer pantry meals to freezer meals, so I don’t store a lot of premade stuff in the freezer, but I suspect that these would also freeze just fine, unbaked, and you could put them back into the muffin tins and bake them a little longer. Healthy fast food.

Bon appetit!

Making efficient use of meat

This past week, I had the chance to buy a turkey from a local farmer, and I jumped at the offer. I will not eat industrial meat, so I don’t have poultry very often.

The bird was HUGE. I didn’t weigh him, but probably more than 15 lbs all told. He rested in the unplugged but still cold freezer for a couple of nights, and today was ‘deal with the turkey’ day.

There’s no way we would eat a bird that large at one sitting, and having all that cooked meat leftover would just be asking for trouble. I’m also not quite sure that I have a roaster large enough … Anyway, I decided that the best thing to do was to break it down into manageable parts.

I got out my trusty knives and sat at the table to begin processing. I removed all the skin and then took off meat as best I could – I’m not particularly skilled at this, but it’s much like carving a cooked bird, only it’s not cooked. I removed the silverskin and cartilage whenever I could and put big pieces in one bowl and small pieces in another. In the end, the two huge turkey breast pieces were frozen in separate bags, as one will be enough to feed all five of us no problem, and the other nice large pieces I got were put in a separate bag to be ‘turkey stir fry’ or meat for a casserole. The rest went through the trusty meat grinder (a big metal one, just like my grandma used, purchased at Princess Auto for under twenty bucks if I remember rightly). Three packages that are probably about a pound each were wrapped in waxed paper and put in the freezer to be the basis for some kind of ground meat meal, and the rest was mixed with a pound of bacon (also ground) and some seasonings to make sausage patties. Those are in the freezer now stacked on a cookie sheet between pieces of waxed paper, when they are frozen through I’ll package them up in meal sized batches.

The whole job took me about three hours, and although I could have made stock from the bones and the leftover meat, I chose to just let the dogs have what was left. I generally prefer vegetable stocks, as my old vegetarian meat aversions do come back and catch me unawares sometimes, and poultry broth can really trigger my “eww, no, can’t eat meat” reflex. The dogs and cats will clean off the bones, and since they weren’t cooked, it’s safe to let them have the carcass. (The dogs drag home bits and pieces of quite a lot of things so they are quite accustomed to raw meat … at least this stuff is clean, which is more than can be said for much of what I find them chewing on.)

All in all, I think this was a good use of three hours. The meat is now ready to use and it’ll hold us for quite awhile, as we still eat vegetarian a lot of the time. It’ll be nice to have roasted turkey this coming week, though, I’m looking forward to it!

Squid Pie

We have found a new quick and easy meal at our house: we call it ‘Squid Pie’ because The Boy can’t read my hand writing and thought that’s what I had written when I scribbled the ingredients I needed on my grocery list… the word was actually Bisquick, but I’ll admit that it was pretty badly scribbled.

No squid are harmed in the making of this pie, trust me. We use the title to encompass any number of variations on the Impossibly Easy Pie recipes the Bisquick people have on their website. In short, you put various ingredients in a greased pie dish or square glass pan (I usually grate up a potato or two, maybe a carrot, add a few tomato slices and some peppers and onions, then cover with grated cheese and cooked and seasoned ground meat if we have it) then cover all that with Bisquick mixed up with eggs and milk (of course you can make your own Bisquick mix, but one of the stores I frequent has it in bulk so I just buy that). If you aren’t feeding picky small people, sprinkle a generous shot of spices over the potatoes before you cook it or it can be a little bland.

As it cooks, the stuff kinda separates and you get veggies (and meat if you added it) covered with a sorta-omelette-sorta-biscuit topping (depending on how many eggs you use, you can make it more biscuit-y or more egg-y). It’s a great way to use up leftovers and it’s quick and simple enough to manage even when you’re worn out. Particularly delicious with lots of cheese. (Then again, what isn’t  particularly delicious with lots of cheese?)

Since we, of course, have a regular supply of eggs and we got a lot of potatoes and onions from the garden this year, we have the core ingredients on hand and just wing it to make it work with whatever else we have in the fridge at the moment.

A great meal for a blustery day!

More productivity in the kitchen

Today was spent in the kitchen again.

I had more apples, and planned to make them into sauce … until I spied a recipe for Chocolate Apple Mousse in the new Preserving book that my friend gave to me the other day.

Chocolate? Fruit? Canned? Together? Oh, yeah, we’re totally gonna try this out!

The process is easy and the result is fabulous.

Just make applesauce (I slice the apples – cores, peels and all – into a crock pot, then run them through the food mill once they have softened) with some lemon zest and lemon juice added to the cooking apples. Mill the resulting fruit finely into a canning pot in which you’ve combined cocoa, sugar, a pinch of salt and a dash of vanilla. Stir, cook over a low boil for 15 minutes, and can in jelly jars the usual way.

The book suggests using the sauce on gingerbread, in crepes, or as a sauce on other kinds of desserts. I put some in a milkshake tonight that turned out quite respectably, so I think this stuff has a lot of possibilities.

In fact, I liked it so much that when I pulled the peaches out of the fridge for processing (might as well deal with them while the canner is already hot), I made another batch … just with peaches instead of apples.

Easy, delicious, decadent, and made with seasonal ingredients. Well, sugar and cocoa aren’t really seasonal, but you get the idea.

I also grated up a bunch of the carrots I had picked up at the greenhouse and put those in the dehydrator. That will ensure that we always have carrots for winter soups and so on … I have a few in the garden still, but we didn’t get as many this year as I had hoped. Next year, they are going in early under the cold frame!

Supper was curried soup – more carrots, sliced and put into the crock pot with red lentils and yellow peas, a dash of the dried garden greens we use in just about everything (dehydrated carrot and beet tops run through the blender to make an all-purpose seasoning mix), some curry, cumin and garam masala. Let it simmer in the crock pot for a couple of hours while doing the last batch of chocolate sauce, then ran it through the food mill (which got quite a workout today) into a serving dish with a pinch of salt stirred in for flavour. Made a quick batch of sourdough biscuits with the kefir I always have going in the fridge, set out some pickles from last fall, and voila – dinner.

I am, once again, nearly out of canning jars – I have used up just about everything I have, even though I bought more as they’re on sale this time of year. I’ll keep an eye out for more produce on sale and possibly put up a few more jars of something, but we’re probably about done with canning for the year. Dehydrating will continue though – it’s more energy efficient and the resulting items don’t take as much storage space as jars of canned stuff, plus it’s a good way to preserve leftover bits and pieces. I’m pondering some meal plans that will let me use dehydrated veggies in the slow cooker or pot-on-the-woodstove – it’s always nice to know that you can make a whole meal out of just the things in the pantry.

Especially when you live at the end of a long gravel road that sometimes doesn’t get plowed for three days in the winter. :)

The Fruits of our Labour

A friend of mine wanted to try making pickles: some dills and some bread and butter pickles, enough to have some to eat and some to give away. The plan was that she’d pick up the seasoning, vinegar and jars and I’d stop at the greenhouse on the way into town to pick up bags of cucumbers. As I was packing up my canning gear and going through the last minute requirements I remembered something … she has a flat top stove. You can’t use a regular water bath canner on one of those stoves – you can crack the glass. What to do?

We solved two problems at once by purchasing a single burner electric element: it sits on a table outside and not only did we have the kind of burner we needed, but we had the added bonus of all that excess warmth not heating up the kitchen! This was a good thing, as the temperatures here have been very, very warm (for us, I know that the Texans would think we were wimps for thinking that 28 degrees is really hot, but we’re just not adapted to temperatures like these).

Here’s a picture of the pickles we made – we ended up with about 2 and a half dozen jars of pickles as well as several jars of applesauce, some plain and some mixed fruit – apples, plums, apricots and peaches all blended together.

We made the applesauce the easy way: wash the apples and other fruit, slice everything into chunks and put it in the crock pots for a few hours. The crock pots don’t seem to heat the kitchen like stove top cooking does, and they work nicely in the background while you do other things. We sliced cucumbers and made brine while the apples cooked down, and by the time the fruit had turned to mush we were done with pickles and ready to start putting sauce into jars. The handy dandy food mill made quick work of pureeing the sauce and separating out skins and seeds (treats for the chickens), and a bath in the canner means the stuff is now shelf-stable. Yum.

While I was at the greenhouse getting cucumbers, I picked up a flat of lovely tomatoes to cook down into sauce. Those went through the slow cooker and the food mill just like the applesauce – the resulting tomato sauce is very watery as I didn’t bother cooking it down to thicken it. We use a lot of tomatoes in our winter cooking and the extra broth won’t be a problem in most of the dishes, so it’ll be fine the way it is. Fourteen dollars’ worth of tomatoes made 3.25 litres of canned crushed tomatoes – probably more expensive than store bought canned tomatoes but they were not transported a zillion miles and they weren’t harvested by ill-treated migrant workers, and that is worth a buck or two at least. Hopefully next year my own tomatoes will do better – I have a few tiny green ones out there in the garden, but not much hope of a harvest at this point in the year.

Today’s adventure was all about free fruit. Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton matches fruit growers who have fruit they aren’t going to use with volunteer fruit pickers who will harvest and share the produce (a lot of the picked fruit ends up at local charities as well, when that’s possible). I happened to be headed into town anyway, so when a last minute request for an extra picker to help harvest apples and crabapples popped up, I volunteered. When I arrived, the Fruit Captain was already there working on the crabapple tree – the apple trees had only a few apples, and everything was at the point of being almost too ripe. There was, however, a little plum tree in the corner so I tackled that job. The tree was surrounded by rough shale landscaping rocks which made my ladder a bit wobbly and they had a tendency to poke holes in the skins of fruit that hit the ground, but I’d noticed an ambulance parked outside a house up the street and figured that if I fell, at least help was nearby, and the fruit was gonna be used right away anyhow, so a few punctures to the plums wouldn’t be too bad.

I didn’t fall, the plums came off the tree easily, and a good three litres of very juicy plums were the result of my work. The Fruit Captain offered me some of the crabapples, but I’ve really had my fill of those for the year … so I took half of the plums and a few apples and was quite content. I did the rest of my errands and came home to fire up the canning gear.

The plums and apples from today’s pick went into a pot on the stove, as I already had the rest of the tomatoes simmering in the crock pot. A quick boil and the fruit was turned to a mush that went through the food mill and back into the pan with plenty of sugar to boil for a little while longer. The resulting thick syrup was poured into jars and canned in the water bath – I could’ve made jam by adding some pectin, but I think it’ll be a lovely addition to muffins and baking just as it is, and we really do have a lot of jam already. I’m thinking a banana muffin recipe with a jar of sauce instead of the 2 mashed bananas (and a lot less sugar since the sauce is already sweetened). I’m also thinking about granola bars, cookies, and ice cream syrup. Yum.

I was able to use the canner outside, too … and boy oh boy I can’t believe I didn’t figure this out sooner. The little single burner element was on sale at Canadian Tire this week and I’d say it’s paid for itself in comfort already! If you’re tired of sweating over a hot stove, do consider one of these – or use your Coleman stove, or your gas barbecue if it has a side burner, or one of those propane turkey roaster things. I like using an electric burner, since at least some of my power comes from the sun thus it’s at least partially renewable energy – though heating elements use a lot of juice. If I had a woodstove outside like my friend down the road has, then maybe I’d use that for canning  … but in the meantime, this is a workable solution.

Canning is a very energy intensive way of preserving food and I don’t use it for many things – I’ve dehydrated some tomatoes this year as well, and plan to adapt my cooking over the winter to try and use those more often than the canned tomatoes, but it’s a learning curve I’m just beginning and I want to make the transition slowly so as not to starve anyone. I did pick up a bag of peaches today as they were on sale, and I’ll make more jam and syrup from those –  and that means more canning. But some of the peaches will probably go in the dehydrator for snacks and dried fruit bits to put in cookies and pies over the winter. I saw a bag of mixed peppers on sale today too so those are destined for the dehydrator in the next few days – I probably have almost enough peppers dried to see me through the winter now. Maybe not quite enough green … I use a lot of those.

The way I see it, each thing you can do for yourself is one way you can save spending money at the the store. Yeah, I didn’t grow the peaches or the plums or the apples or the peppers … but I can buy them now while they are in season and cheap (or get some of it for free just by volunteering to do the work of picking the fruit), and process the seasonal foods to preserve that goodness for the cold days of winter when the local greenhouses aren’t growing peppers or peaches, when I have to pay for them to be shipped halfway across the world if I want them out of season.

What I’m doing here isn’t self-sufficiency by any stretch of the imagination .. but it is at least a step closer towards local eating, and I’m happy to be doing that.

Crabapple Jelly

Every so often, I search through the Kijiji ‘free stuff’ ads, just to see what’s out there. After all, you never know when someone might be giving away something you really need, or be looking for something you want to get rid of.
Last week, I saw a post from a city dweller who had a crabapple tree that was full of ripe fruit they were not going to be able to use. If we’d come pick them, we could take all we wanted! Well, free fruit sounded good to me, and the house was located not too far into the city making it a reasonable distance to drive. The Boy and I packed up some containers, a stepladder and our water bottle and headed into town.
The tree was indeed laden with apples, branches sagging towards the ground under the weight of fruit. Fortunately the tree had a lovely climbable shape, so The Boy headed up into the branches and picked from up there while I climbed the stepladder and took what I could reach from below. In the end, we had approximately three laundry baskets full of crabapples – and there were still plenty of apples left on the tree.

I’ve spent the last four days preserving this generous gift: I scavenged the house (and my mother’s basement) for jars then purchased four dozen more, plus three 10 kg bags of sugar and several boxes of pectin. Supplies at the ready, and with my mother’s generous assistance, we made over fifty jars of jelly, applesauce, and canned juice. The juice that remained when we ran out of jars is now fermenting in the crock pot (who knows, it might make a decent fruit wine, and it’s worth a try).
It was a lot of work, but it’s the kind of work that paces itself quite nicely, so you can easily sit down and rest in between stages if you need to. I kept the computer on the kitchen table and looked up recipes, checked email, and played Scrabble with The Reluctant Farmer (who is working out of town for two weeks) as I worked. The jelly making process itself isn’t complicated, and the various tasks seem to naturally flow together, making an assembly line that can be run by one person, but goes faster with two.
Here’s what it looks like: put your canning jars in the dishwasher for sterilization. While it’s running, wash and load some apples into the big stock pot and set it to simmer. While that’s simmering, take the juice from the previous jelly bag extraction and start a batch of jelly (measure and heat the juice with pectin, lemon juice and sugar, then bring it to a fast boil). When the jelly is done and poured into jars, still steaming from the dishwasher, you can remove the stock pot from the stove and let it sit on the floor while you get the jars into the canner. While the canner boils, empty the crock pot of juice, then mash the fruit in the stock pot and pour it into the jelly bag to get more juice (I normally use my Lee Valley jelly bag setup, but for quantities this huge, I took one of The Reluctant Farmer’s t-shirts, sewed the hem shut, and put a stick through the armholes to hang it from two chair backs so it could drain into the pickle crock). Wash some more apples and reload the stock pot, then start the next batch of jelly. You can probably make two or three batches of jelly from one stock pot’s worth of juice, so take your turn in Scrabble while the canner boils. When the juice has all dripped out of the fruit pulp, dump the contents of the t-shirt juice bag into a bucket and take it out to the chickens.
Repeat as needed until crabapples are gone. :)

We now have over fifty jars of preserves: some large Gem jars of canned juice (which can be used to stretch other fruits into larger batches of jam or jelly, or used in a punch); some apple sauce (crabapples make sauce the same way regular apples do, and I found a recipe for applesauce pie that I want to try); several jars of syrup (The Boy and I both like oatmeal for breakfast, and a dollop of fruit syrup mixed in makes it perfect); and, of course, an awful lot of jelly. We have plain crabapple jelly, as you’d expect, ideal for glazing pork or fruit flans, mixing into porridge or baking, or eating on toast. We also added chopped apricots or peaches to several batches of jelly, which produces a really interesting result: the fruit more or less disintegrates during the cooking and the fine pulp distributes itself throughout the jelly, adding both flavour and texture.

Of course, it would take us years to eat through this much jelly and sauce and syrup ourselves … but it’ll keep for years if need be, as it’s all been processed with full sugar and a hot water bath. Besides, it makes a wonderful gift - just about everyone enjoys a jar of home made jelly. I’m also hoping to make some trades: if you’ve got too much of whatever fruits or pickles or jams you put up this year and want to swap for crabapple, let me know, then we can both have variety in our pantries!