Menu plan!

This week, we're trying some new things.  It's good to search for new recipes and try them out. 

Monday: Turkey burgers (not new, but easy)

Tuesday: Roasted beets and carrots, Swiss chard (from my mom's garden) over couscous, and banana mashed potatoes.  I had the banana mashed potatoes awhile back when we went out to eat at a Caribbean restaurant and knew I'd want to try them at home.

Wednesday:  Eggplant and sweet potato stacks with yogurt sauce, minus the pomegranate because we don't have that in the house.

Thursday: Bacon and beer mac 'n cheese.  We'll use fake bacon so that I'll eat it.

Friday: Champagne risotto with peas and poached eggs.  I'll have to buy some peas, but this sounds like it's worth it.

Saturday:  pierogies with sour cream, caramelized onion and lemon juice.  I know there was something else we wanted with it, but can't remember.  (Recipe: You can use leftover mashed potatoes.  Mix 3 cups of flour, 2 eggs, and 1 cup of water, adding flour as needed to roll out the dough. Don't make it too thin or the potatoes will bust through during the boil. Make a single layer on a floured cookie sheet and stick them in the freezer if you're not going to use them right away. Once they are frozen, put them in a zip top freezer bag).

Sunday:  If we're up for a challenge, we'll make stacked enchiladas.  That recipe calls for making your own enchilada sauce.  Otherwise, we'll have chicken pho.

I'm not sure when I'll get to these, but I will have to try the roasted butternut, apple, labneh salad with pomegranate molasses dressing. 
It's more of a winter salad, but it sounds delicious. 

Menu plan Monday

We're home from camping, when meals are pretty specifically planned but then changed as needed to use things up before coming home.  We had two feasts during the camping trip, which means potluck, which means a great variety of foods and only having to prepare one thing.  For the first feast, Jaimie cooked a lamb and I made a pie. 
For the second feast, Jaimie made corn and grease.  In corn and grease, it's basically half a package of bacon cooked, then 5 cans of hominy (he uses two yellow and three white), then add several handfuls of cranberries right before you're done, mixing it up quickly and serving immediately.

Our harvest has started to come in, so we'll be making dinners based on what is growing.  We've already got peas and beans to freeze. 

Monday:  Pasta with (store-bought) tomatoes, peas, olive oil, and onions.  Jaimie also made a second pasta dish with golden raisins, onions, and balsamic vinegar.

Tuesday:  Quesadillas.  We need to use up some cheese, and the beans will be a great form of protein.  Some homemade salsa would be a tasty addition.  This is one of those meals that we need to prepare ahead of time, because the beans need to soak and then cook. 

Wednesday:  Falafel.  We'll need to prep the dried chickpeas ahead of time, so this week we need to be up on knowing what is on the week's menu.  We have some baba ganoush in the freezer still, and some tomatoes to use up that we bought while camping.

Thursday:  Chicken, with roasted corn, and green beans. 

Friday:  Quinoa (pronounced keen-wa), made with chicken broth, covered in whatever fresh veggies we have from the garden. 

Saturday:  Potluck at our friends' house.  I'm thinking a strawberry rhubarb pie.  

Sunday:  BBQ chicken sandwiches made with the leftover chicken from Thursday. 

Pumpkin recipes - clearing out the freezer

I know that it's not the season, but after spending only $25 a week in groceries for 13 weeks, and refusing to buy a lot of foods when I know I'll be getting some from my own garden soon, we have a plethora of pumpkin left in the freezer (and rhubarb, and zucchini).

A few weeks ago I saw one of my FB friends post a recipe for a pumpkin and cream cheese roll.  I couldn't find it again but I found this recipe.  With much pumpkin left even with just the one quart bag we thawed, I found this site and followed a link to this delicious looking recipe for pumpkin rotini.  I think our toddler will be helping me make this, but we'll be making the pumpkin rotini with butter rather than margarine, and chives instead of shallots.  I'm looking forward to trying out some new recipes.

Using up the rhubarb

Since our rhubarb is already growing, we've got to use up some of the rhubarb we have frozen.  And we have a lot frozen.  I came across this recipe and just adapted it to whatever fruit I had available.  If the recipe was for rhubarb or peach, why not rhubarb and peach?

 The recipe is easy enough and doesn't have that many ingredients.  It's basically brown sugar, oatmeal, butter, flour, & salt for the top & bottom.

The filling is your fruit, sugar, flour & nutmeg (yum).  It takes a whole 5 minutes to assemble and only 30 minutes to bake.

On our second crisp, we went with ground cherries, black raspberries & rhubarb.

The only problem is that the finished product does not seem to last.

We ate this entire thing in less than 24 hours

We've still got two gallons of rhubarb left, so when we're done eating our second crisp, we'll try out some recipes on this site, which has all the rhubarb recipes you'd ever want.

Squash risotto

We had squash risotto last week when we had the in-laws over for dinner.  I was searching for a recipe and everything had ingredients I didn't want or have, or had specific measurements when I wanted to use a whole squash and onion, or it sounded like it would taste like something I wasn't in the mood for.  So, I came up with my own recipe.  And by recipe, I mean that I just threw stuff together and didn't have exact measurements.

First I took a butternut squash (a holiday gift from my mom - we still have a few more squash (squashes?) in the cold room), cut in half to remove the seeds, poked it with a few fork holes, and microwaved it for about 5 minutes.  I peeled it and cubed it.  I figured that if I wanted there to be squash chunks then I wouldn't want it cooked all the way in the microwave.  If I'd been in the mood for a smoother risotto, I would have pureed the squash, or at least cut it very small.

While that's in the microwave, chop up a medium onion and caramelize it in a bit of olive oil.  Once it's good and caramelized, put 2 1/2 cups of rice in the pan and make sure that it gets covered in the oil.  If you need to add more oil, do that.  Or, you could add a pat of butter like I did.  Then put that in the slow cooker, along with your squash chunks/puree.  Add 6 cups of broth.  We pack our broth in 2 cup and 4 cup sizes for the freezer, so I just grabbed one of each and put the frozen broth right in the slow cooker after I melted it enough to break it up a bit.

Put your slow cooker on high for three hours.  I was thinking of adding salt and pepper but instead I thought that a bit of fresh grated nutmeg would do the trick.  I don't know how much was put in there because my MIL put it in, but it really made the dish.  We'll be doing this one again.

Sweet things with ricotta

When making mozzarella from whole milk, you end up with whey that you just don't want to waste, so you end up making ricotta.  The last two times, we made a pasta bake and then a lasagna with the ricotta.  For today's batch of fresh ricotta, I wanted to do something different.  Considering that we're nearing Valentine's Day (a holiday we don't generally celebrate but I end up craving chocolate), I remembered that you can make a chocolate mousse with ricotta as well.  After researching a few recipes, I thought we'd make it like so:

Take the ricotta from your leftover whey (maybe about 15 ounces like a store-bought size), add about 1/3 cup of melted semi-sweet chocolate (or 4-5 oz baker's chocolate and 1/3 cup sugar), add about 1/2 cup cream, stir & serve. Add some garnishments, like whipped cream or our awesome molasses cookies (in moose form).

There were so many recipes out there, and I wasn't going to do something where I would have to run to the store, especially since we have hit our $25 for the week.   Other recipes called for raw eggs and I didn't want to do that.  Several called for maple syrup, honey, or sugar, generally when using unsweetened cocoa.  Many called for fat-free this or low-fat that, but low-fat foods are just disgusting and unhealthy, so we won't have any of that in our house.

I may have considered using powdered unsweetened cocoa, but I used that all up when making a batch of chocolate ice cream this morning. 

Because we'll be making plenty of cheese in the future and we'll have a lot of ricotta to eat, I thought that I'd research for a few more ricotta desserts.  I haven't tried them out, but here are some to choose from, from various other ricotta-loving bloggers and bakers out there.

Coffee and chocolate mousse, using just ricotta, dark chocolate, honey & instant coffee.
Orange ricotta mousse with orange caramel, which just sounds and looks decadent.
Ricotta fluff, with amaretto and rum.
Hindu Cheese Dessert, with cottage cheese and cardamom.
Ricotta Vanilla Cream, with just a few ingredients.
Warm honey and cinnamon over ricotta, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Balsamic Strawberries with ricotta, with basil garnish.

Or, you could put ricotta in crepes with berries for either dessert or breakfast.

Margherita pizza

Since we were making mozzarella, we decided to use some of the whey to make pizza dough.  Since we were making pizza dough and had mozzarella, we figured we'd make pizza.

I made the dough (basically 3 cups flour, a little salt, a spoon full of sugar, a cup of whey (or water), and some activated dry yeast).

Jaimie made the sauce from some of our frozen tomatoes, an onion, olive oil, and garlic.  There were no exact measurements, just whatever was available.  We topped it with our mozzarella and some basil that we'd frozen from this past summer's garden, and voila - margherita pizza.

Baked it in a 550 degree oven for about 8 minutes.

And this is the result:

(Jaimie is dying for a pizza peel - he keeps mentioning how he wants one, especially that we're making pizza now and he wants to make a pizza/bread oven in the yard this summer).

Jaimie here.  Let me just say that this was the most labor intensive meal I've ever made.  Both of us have been working on it since around 11:00 this morning (not that our intended goal was pizza for dinner).  It was also very cheap entertainment, since we both love making things from scratch in the kitchen.  Eight hours of entertainment and a meal for what the ingredients cost is pretty good value for money, if you ask me.  Lily has been "helping" us all day, too.

Granola

My sister gave Jaimie and me a mason jar of home made granola for the holidays.  After we each ate our individual baggies of it, I mentioned to Jaimie when I got home from work that I couldn't stop eating it and couldn't stop thinking about having more.  We then ate the entire mason jar of granola and labeled it "crack granola."  Yes, it's that good.

I e-mailed my sister and asked her for the recipe.  The recipe goes something like this.

Take a 9x13 pan and cover the bottom with a decent layer of oats (maybe 4 cups or so).  Then add your other proteins.  We added pistachios, almonds, pecans, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and a mix of nuts that was almost gone so I used it up.  You can add what seeds or nuts you want.

Then bake that at 350 for 10-20 minutes.  We baked for 15. 

A couple minutes before it's done baking, put your stuff that will become liquid in a pan.  We used peanut butter, honey and molasses.

You can also use other nut butters or maple syrup (I'm hoarding what little maple syrup we have left so none went into our mix).  You will heat it only until it becomes soft and will easily spread over the oat mixture.  If you want chewier granola, add more liquids.  For dry granola, add less. We like it chewy and had about 2 1/2 cups altogether.

Take your oats out of the oven and put your liquid mix in.  Mix it up so it's all coated.

Let it dry for a couple hours.  This is the difficult part because it is nearly impossible not to nibble on some as you are passing near it.

When it's cool, crack it up and then add your fruits.  In ours, we have coconut shavings, dates, figs, craisins, dried strawberries and dried peaches.  Add whatever you'd like, but I think that one of the reasons that the granola we received as a gift was so delicious was because of the figs.

If you are able to resist eating it all as is, you can add it to yogurt.

Cream cheese wontons

Jaimie loves to make (and eat) cream cheese wontons.  He likes his sweet rather than savory, but one day we'll try it savory.  It's just that every time he's in the mood to make them, we'd rather have them sweet.
First, prep your cream cheese mixture.  He put in cream cheese (well, neufchatel), lime juice and sugar.  Put in as much as you'd like, tasting the mixture till you've got what you want.  Put that in either a pastry bag or in a zip-top freezer bag (DON'T use a sandwich bag - it won't hold up to the squeezing) with a hole cut in the corner.

Lay out your wonton wrappers (easily found at the grocery store) and put about a teaspoon of cream cheese mix in the center.

Check out this recipe on the Grocery Cart Challenge's on-line recipe exchange.

Have a bowl of water nearby and just stick a finger or two in the water, put it on two edges of the wonton, then fold over the wonton into a triangle, pushing out all the air.

Wet the fingers again and fold over the two sides to make a little purse shape.

Get your oil going on the stove top and fry away (four or five at a time).  Let them rest of a paper towel lined tray for some of the oil to come off.  Enjoy.

Making tortillas

Homemade tortillas are delicious.  You know how you think that it will just save you the massive amount of time it would take to make something so you just buy it instead?  I used to think that about tortillas.  They may just be made out of a few ingredients, but it still seemed like a ton of work.  When Jaimie got me a tortillas press, I was excited but didn't think I would use it for all of our tortillas we go through (Lily loves to eat peanut butter on tortillas for snacks).  It's important to us to limit the ingredients in our foods to what we consume at our home, so it makes sense to make our own when we go through a lot of them.

Lily liked the idea of helping and liked to push down the handle on the press.  Jaimie then fried them up.  It was a good family activity too.

Making stock

We like to make our own stock.  We'll use the carcass of chicken or turkey, bones from beef or lamb, or just the ends and shavings from veggies.  Just put in the stock-making food from above, add water to cover, season as you'd like, and simmer down.

It's great for using in soups, stews, making rice or risotto, and all sorts of other good stuff.

 

(Jaimie here.) Carcasses are great! I even put a "boneyard" bowl on the table so we get all the bones and gristle to trow into the pot.  I usually freeze the first carcass and make stock when we have a second.  That makes for a more intense stock, not to mention more volume.  The picture above is a couple of chickens.  

You can see that some of the meat is a little pink.  This was one of the last commercial chickens we did in the New Wave oven.  I cooked it from frozen and took the label's weight as accurate.  Obviously it was about half a pound shy of the bird's actual weight.  Now I weigh each bird before cooking.

Anyway, back to the stock.  Just throw whatever you have leftover from a couple of chicken dinners, a lamb or turkey dinner, or veggie "waste" that you would normally compost into a pot of water and do like Shelly said above.  When the liquid tastes right, but weak, you want to strain out the solids.  I pour it through a sieve (fine metal screen strainer) into a bowl or another pot.  Throw away the solids (bonus:  you can still compost the solids from veggie stock), then rinse your stock pot before putting the liquid back in.  Now just bring it to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer it until it reduces by a third to half.  Do this to taste.  Just keep tasting until the stock is as strongly flavored as you want it.   Now is also the time to add any extra seasonings or spices you'd like in this particular stock.  I wouldn't season it too heavily, though, because that will limit your options for later use of the stock.

Okay, I'll sign off now.  Time to take care of a few chores.   

Using up leftovers

I really dislike wasting food.  We'll usually have the previous night's dinner for lunch or make it into something else for dinner.  With Thanksgiving just behind us, many people have leftover food.  We didn't have Thanksgiving at our home, but we still had some Thanksgiving food to use up.  We got "leftover" turkey from my MIL (she made it just so that we'd have extras) and leftover cranberry sauce from my mom.

At first I wanted to make this turkey/cranberry sauce pie


However, we ate up all the turkey as is and we had none left for pie.  We did have cranberry sauce, but I didn't want a cranberry pie.  We also had some leftover apple pie filling from when we made a dutch baby (like a panakuken or German pancake) for breakfast recently.  I search for uses for leftover cranberry sauce and I loosely used this muffin recipe found here.


I doubled it because of the amount of cranberry sauce and pie filling I had, and baked away.  Because our oven doesn't heat as well as we'd like, it took a bit more time than the recipe called for, but I used the recipe as a guide and started checking it every few minutes after.  They turned out great.

At my mom's, we had a ton of leftover rolls.  There were too many just for sandwiches so I made some old-fashioned bread pudding.  I don't really use one recipe, but if you do a search for it, just make certain to SLOWLY put the egg in the heated milk because you don't want them to cook.  Also, most recipes call for taking the crust off.  I don't, because, again, I dislike wasting.  Sometimes I'll add raisins, and sometimes not (Jaimie likes them, but I'm not as fond of them).  Bread pudding makes a great breakfast though.  It reminds me of when my mom would be off of work certain cold school day mornings and she'd make us rice pudding.  It's warm, creamy comfort food.

pesto

It's the end of the season but perennial herbs are still growing.  We made some pesto with the basil earlier in the season and today we're making more.  Basically, pesto can be whatever herb you want to blend up with some additions.  If you want to freeze it, I wouldn't add the Parmesan.  We use nutritional yeast rather than Parmesan for the frozen pesto.  Today, we're making pesto from the cilantro we bought from the store for some other recipe.  The cilantro in our garden went to coriander well before the tomatoes were ready, so that wasn't useful for salsa.  But, cilantro sold in stores is generally sold in a bunch that has way more than you'd use for just one thing.  Today we're also making mint pesto and oregano pesto.  I think we may even have some thyme pesto in the freezer from before.  I'm really looking forward to eating the nasturtium leaf pesto we made this summer.  You are limited only by your imagination.

It's best to have some sort of food processor or blender for this process. Generally people think pesto is basil, Parmesan, pine nuts and oil.  You can substitute any nut for pine nuts.  We use pecans because I prefer them to other nuts and because pine nuts at the local store are $43.99 a lb.  Instead of Parmesan, you can use nutritional yeast (found at a natural food store).  Again, we're not much into measuring, so we just grab a bunch of the herb, a tsp. or two of nutritional yeast or Parmesan, less nuts than herbs, and enough oil to make it smooth without being soupy. Jaimie also likes to add garlic.  Freeze in freezer bags or the canning jars used for freezing, or eat it right away.

sweet goat cheese or cream cheese wontons

Jaimie likes to make cream cheese wontons.  It's easy and delicious. The first time he made them we used egg roll wrappers because that's what I had in the freezer.  It's been awhile, but I like to make a banana caramel dessert in the egg roll wrappers (topped with more caramel, ice cream & whipped cream, and sometimes a raspberry for garnish).  For cream cheese wontons, he uses an 8 oz package of cream cheese and adds sugar.  Of course, the sugar isn't a measured amount.  Use as much as you like to make it taste how you want it.  Because we had some goat cheese from someone, we tried it with that instead for this go-round. Mix that up and put it in a baggie, cutting off the corner to pour small amounts into the wonton wrapper.  Wet the edges of the wrapper with water and fold them to seal them up.  He likes to fold it so that the square wrapper goes in half to make a triangle, and then folds in the two sides of the triangle. Take that and fry it in oil on the stove top.  Eat and enjoy.

making yogurt

It's not a difficult process at all.  I thought that I'd need special equipment or lots of time, but it's easy to make your own yogurt, and a great way to cut down on paying for all the individual containers when you can just make your own.
I don't have a yogurt maker, and our oven doesn't have a pilot light, but you don't need that if you've got a crock pot.  Start by putting your crock pot on the Stay Warm setting.
I make one 4 cup batch at a time.  I take about 1/4 to 1/2 a cup of plain yogurt (starter) and set it aside, allowing it to warm up to room temperature.  This yogurt can be from a batch you bought at the store or from the last batch you made. It must be plain yogurt, and none of that junk with no fat (i.e. full of artificial sweeteners).
I heat about 3 1/2 cups of milk in a Pyrex container in the microwave (you could do it on the stove if you wanted, but this is easier for me).  Heat to about 170.  That takes about 5 minutes for me in the microwave.  If it's not there yet, then add 30 seconds at a time until it gets there.  DON'T overheat to boiling.  If there's a film, take it off.  Try to avoid a film because then you've heated it a bit too much.
Keep the thermometer in the container and leave it in there, waiting for it to go down to about 105-110.  Go do something else at this point, but don't forget about it.
You could put it all in the crock pot and put it in a container later, but I like to put it in the container it'll be in once it goes in the fridge.  Get a quart jar (I just use a canning jar).  Put some yogurt and warmed milk in it and swish it around.  Then put all the milk and yogurt.  Put a lid on it and put the jar in the crock pot.  Turn off & unplug the crock pot but wrap a thick towel around the crock pot to keep in the warmth. Wait 4-8 hours (it's great to do this before bed and have it fresh in the morning) and then put your new yogurt in the fridge.

If you like yogurt Greek style, just put the yogurt on cheesecloth over a bowl and let the whey (slightly yellowed liquid) separate from the thicker part of the yogurt.  If it's too thick, add some more whey in. Don't waste your whey.  There's a lot of good stuff in there nutritionally.  You can use that in place of water in recipes (though I haven't tried it in anything but bread).  Sometimes I use the yogurt in place of water & milk in bread too.    You could also drink it outright, but I don't know that I'd do that without some other flavoring (maybe in a smoothie or something).

If you're making a bunch of yogurt, you could use your whey to make ricotta.  I haven't tried this, but, hey, ricotta is tasty.

You can flavor with jams, honey, fruit, whatever.  I like mine with honey, but jam is always good too.

Ice cream, sorbet and gadgetry

Last year for the holidays I received an ice cream maker.  To be quite honest, I wasn't sure that I'd use it very often and thought that it would just sit in the kitchen cabinet.  Then we decided to try it out because, well, we're trying to eat less extra "stuff," so if we made our own then we'd know what was in it.
The basic recipe for sorbet is sugar, water, a dash of salt and whatever fruit you want for flavor (we've got frozen pureed watermelon from our garden and I'm looking forward to having it in the middle of winter).  For ice cream, it's sugar, heavy cream, milk, dash of salt and whatever flavor you want.  We've been experimenting, of course, and don't want to just stick to the booklet that came with the machine.  We've tried the norms - strawberry, chocolate - but then we tried other flavors that you can't find too often at the store - green tea, peanut butter, mango, violet, and lavender (which Jaimie thinks tastes like soap).  I'm snacking on violet ice cream right now, and we just made peanut butter. We do love our ice cream at this house. (Our toddler loves her sorbet, because she is lactose intolerant, but she needs a treat too).

For being someone who hated being in the kitchen except for the annual holiday baking parties, I have changed drastically.  My go-to dinner used to be frozen pizza, because really, it doesn't get much easier.  I've had the fortune of living with different good cooks over the years, including my sister and my husband.  I admit that those years (and these years) I was spoiled.  I still didn't bother learning from them, but at least now I like to bake and create, though still not fond of cooking.
I am fond of kitchen appliances though.  For wanting to live simply, I like our kitchen gadgetry.  I inherited my sister's Kitchen Aid mixer, with attachments.  We have a bread maker, which we only use for mixing but not actual baking (it's been a full year now since we last regularly bought bread from the store).  We have a rice cooker, a slow cooker, an immersion blender, a quesadilla maker, a waffle iron, a food dehydrator, a NuWave oven, and more, and we use them all regularly.  I'd blame it on Jaimie, but I'm equally at fault for being an appliance hoarder.  Oooh shiny.  And people thought that giving appliances was not cool.  One of my husband's favorite gifts was the immersion blender. 

I'm loving our kitchen stuff, and the yummy food it all makes.