Menu Plan: Week of April 27

This last week the weather completely changed – instead of having the heater on standby, it’s now the air conditioner.  Temperatures are only in the high 70s, but I’m already dying!  The farmers market starts next week, though, so I should be able to convert our meals to spring mode – not only vegetable-wise, but less oven use, as well.  For now, though, it’s the same stuff:

 

Pot roast, braised carrots and potatoes, salad

Soup – pasta fagioli or white chili

Chard and onion frittatas, sweet potato fries

Tacos, refried pinto beans, rice

Pizza, salad

Sausage, potato and apple skillet dinner

Hamburgers, oven fries

 

I’m hoping to get some eggplant, beans, cucumbers, and more tomatoes and peppers planted.  Maybe even some melons.  We love cantaloupe and honeydew in summer!  So here’s hoping…

Yankee Cornbread (dairy-free)

When I moved to the south, I learned that how you like your cornbread reflects which side of the Mason-Dixon you’re from.  I’ve always thought of cornbread as sweet and cakey, but many southerners prefer theirs unsweetened and fried. 

 

Regardless of where your tastes lie, if you need a dairy-free cornbread, this is a good starting point.  It is quite crumbly, but tasty nonetheless.  If/when I figure out how to make it less crumblesome, I’ll gladly let you know – or perhaps you have some tips?  I’m going to try using some of the ingredients that I use as dough conditioners in my whole wheat bread, so I’ll update this if I find something that works!

 

Yankee Cornbread

 

1 cup flour (soft white or AP)

1 cup cornmeal

1/2-3/4 cup sucanat

1 tsp salt

3 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 egg, beaten

1 cup coconut milk (I use Whole Foods 365 organic – don’t shake it and use the creamier portion)

1/3 cup olive oil (to offset the coconut)

 

Combine all ingredients and bake 25 minutes at 400 in a greased/floured round pan.

 

Here’s a piece…

 

 

…just make sure to let it cool completely before cutting, or else it is especially crumblesome!

 

 

 

Baked Beans

 

Doesn’t that fuzzy picture make you want to eat some?  My camera batteries decided to die tonight at dinner, and the backups were nowhere to be found.  That’s life sometimes.  But back to the food…

 

Do you have any fun memories associated with baked beans, like a summertime picnic or dinner at Grandma’s house? 

 

My husband fondly remembers eating “beans and wieners” as a child – baked beans with chopped up hot dogs mixed in, for the unschooled.  In fact, he’d been craving this meal for so long that I finally broke down about a month ago and bought some nitrate-free hot dogs and bacon for the express purpose of recreating his salivatory memory. 

 

The baked beans came out so well that I’ve made them three times in the last month.  So I guess it’s time to share!  This recipe is adapted from one in Peace, Love, and Barbecue by Mike and Amy Mills.

 

Baked Beans

 

1 ½ lbs dried white beans (Great Northern, cannellini, navy, etc)

8 strips of bacon (nitrate-free)

1 small onion, diced

2-3 cloves garlic, minced

2 cups ketchup (organic, no HFCS)

½ cup molasses

¾ cup muscovado or brown sugar

2 tbsp prepared mustard

1-2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

2 tsp chili powder

2 tsp paprika

2 tsp sea salt, finely ground

2 tsp pepper

 

1. Rinse the beans and soak for at least 12 hours (overnight), 24 hours if you have the time.  Drain the soaking water, then cook the beans in a crockpot on low all day or in a large pan on the stove (about two hours).

 

2. When beans are closed to being tender, cook the bacon in a skillet.  Once the bacon is fully cooked, remove it from the skillet and sauté the onions and garlic in the bacon grease until onion starts to change color (this won’t take long).  Remove from heat and let sit until the next step is completed.

 

3. In a medium-sized bowl, mix together remaining ingredients, plus the onion, garlic, and bacon grease from step two.  If you want to crumple the bacon, add it in at this step (otherwise, you can wait until it goes in the pan).

 

4.  Drain off most of the cooking water from the beans (you’ll want to leave a little bit to mix in with the mixture in step three), then go ahead and combine everything in the bean pot.  After it is mixed together thoroughly, pour into a 9×13 baking dish and cook in a pre-heated oven at 400 degrees until bubbly.

 

Note: You could definitely cook it at a different temperature – I just chose 400 because that was the temperature my cornbread needed.  You are going to eat cornbread with this, right?

Menu Plan: Week of April 20, 2009

This is our last week of being really busy for awhile. I have a babysitting commitment every single day, Husband is finishing his classes (with his Masters in hand), then we have six fairly easy weeks leading up to the summer break.  Needless to say, this week is full of easy meals:

 

Chicken tortilla soup

Baked beans, cornbread, greens

Lentil soup, leftover cornbread

My spaghetti, salad

Sesame ginger chicken, rice (held over from last week)

White chili

Hamburgers, oven fries

 

I’m also looking for a good dairy-free sourdough bread recipe, since I just got a starter from a friend.  I tried Sue Gregg’s sourdough spelt bread, but it was hard to follow and didn’t turn out well.  Any help is welcomed!

 

More menu plans at Organizing Junkie.

Garden Semi-Update

This is a semi-update because a lot got done today, but all for naught.  I intended to start more seedlings today with new soil because my first seedlings were overrun with mold.  I had reused soil from last year – apparently it wasn’t sterile.  So I took the kids to Home Depot, bought some begonias for my daughter’s garden, a bag of what I thought was organic potting soil, and two transplants (a tomato and a bell pepper) for good luck.

 

Turns out I grabbed some very much not organic garden soil – which I figured out after I’d already started 18 seedlings.  This time I was using toilet paper rolls as starter pots, and as I was labeling them, my eyes traveled back to the bag I had just finished scooping out of to notice this admonition: Use Gloves When Handling Soil.  Yikes!  Why would that be?  Because the soil was saturated with a bunch of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK).  And of course I was using my bare hands to set those seeds in the soil.  Yay.

 

So what have I learned about gardening so far?

 

1.  Use sterile soil when starting seeds, or else you get mold.

 

2.  Leave the 15-month old at home when buying things that are stacked next to really scary chemical-filled things.

 

I do have one happy piece of news: three (out of five) of the bare-root raspberry bushes I planted have started growing!

 

 

They were sticks when I planted them, now they have leaves.  Let’s just hope they actually fruit at some point.

Refried Beans: Easier Than You Think!

I’ve been meaning to post this for awhile, but I can’t ever seem to remember to take a picture.  Which is why I have no picture accompaniment – but I’ll add one next time I make this.  After all, Sarah asked for the recipe.

 

Let’s start by saying that I love beans in just about any form.  I’ve eaten beans nearly every day of my life, which is probably why many of my recipes involve them.  I used canned refried beans when cooking them until this last year, though, because it seemed easier.  Not tastier, though, if you’re used to the real thing – and when you’re buying the Amy’s brand, they can be pricey.

 

As with many things I post, this hardly seems post-worthy – but it’s easy, frugal, nourishing, and most of all, flavorful.  The spices really should be added to taste, so please adjust as needed or start with smaller amounts and taste as you go.  This is really just a guideline as to what flavors should be present.

 

Refried Beans

 

1 pound dried pinto or black beans (or mix of both – but the black dominates)

Pinch of asafoetida or epazote

¼ cup olive oil

1 small onion, finely diced

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 tbsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground coriander seed

Salt and pepper to taste (I use a lot)

 

1. Soak beans for 24 hours (or overnight if that’s all the time you have).  The next morning, drain soak water, add new water and a pinch of asafoetida or epazote, and cook on low in a crock pot all day until dinner time.  Don’t add any of the other seasonings yet – the salt, especially, will slow down cooking time.  (You could also cook the beans in a pot on the stove; adjust cook time accordingly.)

 

2. Heat oil in a large pot or Dutch oven, adding the onions when hot.  After onions have softened, add garlic, cumin, and coriander and sauté about two more minutes. 

 

3. Add cooked beans, salt, and pepper.  Mash the beans (still in the pot) with a potato masher until they look the way you like them – Husband prefers not to see a lot of whole bean, so we mash quite a bit – and taste for seasoning.  I’m always needing to add more salt here.

 

Notes:

 

- Chicken broth could be substituted for the water during the bean cooking step.

- If you opt to cook the beans on the stove instead of the crockpot, just sauté the onions and garlic in a small saucepan then add them in with all the seasonings to the cooked beans.  I’ve done this before and it works fine.

- I’ve tried to make this entirely a crockpot thing, but it never seemed to taste as good.

 

So what’s next?

 

Well, following my obsession with sprouting, I’d love to come up with a sprouted and refried bean recipe.  I don’t imagine it would change much except in the cooking time.  So expect that to come soon.

 

Also, I would like to try making them with lard – the most traditional preparation.  I don’t, however, have access to high quality lard (just the hydrogenated stuff at the store – yuck!), and I haven’t yet tried to render it myself. 

 

How do you make refried beans?

Part of the Grocery Cart Challenge Recipe Swap.

Butter, At Last!

Every now and then I skim the cream off my raw milk to make butter.  But something always seems to go wrong, and I give up for a month or so.  The first time I made it was the best – I put all the cream into my Bosch mixer, ran it on speed 2 (out of 4), and after an hour (of mixer noise!) finally got butter.  The lesson I should’ve taken away from that was next time, run it on a higher speed.

 

I tend toward airheadedness, though, so I decided that next time I would use a blender or food processor since it might work better in a smaller space.  Well, I tried both of those with no success – just a splitting headache and an irritable husband afterward.

 

Last week I decided to save the cream from two weeks’ worth of milk and try again in the mixer at a higher speed.  I used to get a gallon per week, now I just get half a gallon, so there’s really not enough cream in a half gallon to make it work.  And all of those things together were magic – after half an hour I had butter!

 

 

(Ignore the indentation from my fingers – I was too excited about this to smooth it out before I took a picture.)

 

I’m not going to give a tutorial here about how to do this, since I’m definitely not an expert.  But if you Google “how to make raw milk butter,” you’ll find plenty of resources.  I let mine sit at room temperature on the counter for 12 hours (which is supposed to improve the flavor), but other than that, I followed the general instructions.  Now I need to figure out what to do with the leftover buttermilk, since I can’t cook with it (on account of D’s allergy).  Anyone want some buttermilk?

Menu Plan: Week of April 13, 2009

In that particular is contained the universal. – James Joyce, on writing about Dublin.

 

I’m beginning to wonder why I post my menu plans every week – they’re an important part of my home management, but I’m not so sure they make great reading.  Most of what we eat isn’t terribly exciting, unless (like me) you find beauty in things simple and quotidian.  Too much of the same is boring, though, and it keeps me accountable to tell the internet this bit of business.  So for now, the menu plans continue.  This week is full of chicken…

 

Roast chicken, baked sweet potatoes, green beans

Sesame Ginger Chicken, rice

Turkey pumpkin chili (yes, I still have pumpkin!!)

Beef or bean tacos, refried pinto beans, Mexi-millet (or quinoa)

Sausage and bean soup, cornbread

Mediterranean chicken, salad or wilted greens

Hamburgers with sweet potato fries

 

Really, I’m not trying to compare myself to Joyce – my menu plans are not the Rosetta stone to unlocking all of humanity’s secrets.  What we are eating does, however, make a statement about who we are and what we value.  Which means I’m probably going to turn into a hamburger or sweet potato fry anytime now…

 

 

 

 

Citrusy Rhubarb Sauce for Breakfast, Dessert

Is rhubarb showing up in your gardens, CSA boxes, or farmers’ markets yet?  Truly, rhubarb is the bellwether of spring.  Asparagus, too, but ruddy rhubarb makes a more striking contrast with the drabness of winter. 

 

Packed with vitamin K, vitamin C, and even some calcium, rhubarb belongs on any spring menu.  Its tart, celery-textured stalks play well with the sweetness of honey or fruit.  Try this sweet-tart sauce on baked oatmeal or with breakfast porridge, yogurt, or ice cream – including a full-fat dairy product will help the absorption of the vitamin K.

 

 

Citrusy Rhubarb Sauce

 

3 stalks of rhubarb, diced

½ cup raw honey

1 clementine (zest and juice)

A few dashes of cinnamon (1/4 tsp?)

3-4 whole cloves

 

Combine all ingredients in a small saucepan and heat on the lowest heat possible to keep at a very low simmer until the rhubarb softens.  (You can test it by trying to cut it with a spatula – it should fall apart with no resistance.)  Serve warm or let it cool and refrigerate for later, and remove cloves before serving.

 

 

I will post a recipe for strawberry rhubarb vinaigrette as soon as local strawberries are available.  This farm, right around the corner from my house, runs a u-pick during strawberry season.

 

What do you like to do with rhubarb?

Part of Food Renegade’s Fight Back Fridays carnival.

Charleston

 

Spanish moss and intricate wrought iron ornamentation – these things use to bring to mind the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland.  How sad (for me) that my only understanding of such lovely things was a campy ride at a commercial theme park!

 

 

Needless to say, we had a great time and will definitely be visiting again.  We didn’t even scratch the surface exploring the city. 

 

 

We did a lot of walking around, though, admiring beautiful detail everywhere.

 

 

Husband enjoyed fresh shrimp and grits at Hyman’s – a restaurant at which we ate on the recommendation of friends.

 

 

My favorite food experience was Taco Boy in Folly Beach.  We ate there in spite of our fear of South Carolinean Mexican food, but we figured that since it was near the beach, that would somehow make it good.  Luckily, we were correct!  I had a baja-style fish taco (similar to Rubio’s or Wahoo’s, for you Californians) and a potato and chorizo taco. 

 

 

The fish taco was my favorite, even though the sauce was a little sweet.  The potato chorizo combination was a bit too sweet, as well, and didn’t taste like the chorizo I’m used to.  I would, however, still highly recommend Taco Boy if you’re ever in the area!

 

Husband loved his tacos, too – he got a grilled fish taco and a carnitas taco.

 

 

The kids ate rice and beans…

 

 

…and really enjoyed them.

 

 

It’s so nice to get away, even if it’s just for a weekend.