I’m glad I’m not cooking Thanksgiving dinner!

Yesterday I made calzones–they were lovely–but placed them each on an oiled cookie sheet (they were huge), which, when placed in the hot oven, smoked. Ew. Hot oil smoke smell is pretty vile, and it stuck around til today…

When I covered it with burning bread smoke, thanks to two apparently not-so-quick-cooking pork chops and a pan that got waaaay hotter than I thought. I really wanted a ham steak but wouldn’t spend the money at Whole Foods–now I have rapidly cooling potatoes and two chops in the oven. Oh, and a house that smells like smoke.

All I’m saying is that my friends and family should be thankful I’m not cooking Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday. We’d have a raw bird and some calcified sweet potatoes, or stuck mashed potatoes and vile stuffing Some weeks are just like this–my cooking mojo somehow falls away and is replaced by Awkward in the Kitchen Girl.

Hopefully the cookie dough I just made will make lovely cookies, and I’ll be back on the tracks. Til then, happy thanksgiving! I have much to be grateful for this year–and a wonderful place in which to cook is the least of them. A wonderful spouse. A loving family. A job I love. A city I….am much better with this year than last year. Great neighbors (compared to last year, these guys are above and beyond fantastic). And a happy orange kitty. Happy cooking!

Don’t buy taco seasoning again!

I just wrote this whole post, ending with my efforts today to not become crabby, and wordpress deleted it.  grrrrrrrrrrrr.

Today’s bit of kitchen know-how involves taco night–one of those quick-and-easy dinners that most of us make every so often.  I began thinking, oh, six or so months ago, that I could likely replicate what is inside some of those mystery packs of taco seasoning in my kitchen, but with better results.  And lo, a little internet searching revealed I was right.  The following recipe (which comes from allrecipes) makes a lot of seasoning, and you only need about a tablespoon and a half for a pound of taco meat.  Add to your favorite shells (we’re big fans of Whole Foods’ 365 Blue Corn taco shells–yum) with cheese and salsa and you’re good to go.

You’ll need:
4 T chili powder
1 t garlic powder
1 t onion powder
1 t dried oregano
1 t crushed red pepper flakes
2 t paprika
2 T cumin
4 t salt
4 t pepper

Brown your meat and add seasoning with a little water–usually a little over a quarter-cup, if any, will do. Simmer until well-seasoned and fix your tacos!

Time for a recipe from the vintage cookbooks!

We haven’t played this game in a while! Today’s recipe comes from a library fundraiser cookbook ca. 1983. I remember 1983. I had an awesome velour skirt and shirt set I wore to the first day of kindergarten. If only I could have come home to this! (barf)

Salmon Loaf
1 15-oz can salmon, bones and skin removed
1 1/2 c bread crumbs
1 tsp salt
1 T butter or margarine
1 medium onion, diced
2 eggs
2 T vinegar or lemon juice
1 c milk, heated

Essentially, this is a mix-and -bake recipe, not unlike a meatloaf, I suppose, but it grosses me out more. Partly this is because I don’t like fish. I’m also surprised to see that canned salmon came with bones and skin. Ew! I don’t buy canned meat (tuna=fish=gross), but I’ve never heard of canned anything requiring so much effort. So there you go. That’s your fun recipe for the day.

Classic Favorites

I wanted to fill you in–though I haven’t posted a ton lately, I have been cooking, pulling recipes from the classics. Here’s a bit of a list–try one this weekend!

Pumpkin Bread (though in altered form–using a quarter cup oil, a little more water, no applesauce)
Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti
Brussels Sprout Pasta
Wheat Batter Bread
DIY Rice-a-Roni
and a few others.

What are you cooking this weekend? Tonight I’m making the rice a roni with baked, breaded chicken and some roasted broccoli. Tomorrow, a new tortellini dish, as long as someone makes it to the store to pick up some parmesan. I’m off to the kitchen to bake the biscotti now, and make some bread for tomorrow.

FYI–I just noticed that in old posts, links to my other posts don’t work. Well, that’ll be a winter project.

Spiced Pumpkin Cookies

Hi!  How are you?  I’m full into the fall/winter swing of things here.  I think we eat some kind of squash or potato at least once a day.  That’s a habit I hope to maintain til I can’t stand it anymore and need a salad or something.  One of this week’s featured squash recipes is a hearty pumpkin spice cookie.  To those of you put off by pumpkin in everything (this is not me, I assure you–I like pumpkin.  A lot.), this cookie is a nice way of getting the nutrition of the squash without tasting it terribly much–the flavor is more akin to a gingerbread man than a pumpkin bread, but the texture is more like the bread than the cookie.  Either way, you shold make these.  They are delicious and, as cookies go, moderately healthy.  So I eat a minimum of three at a time.

This recipe comes by way of the Food Network, by way of Eating Well, and with a bunch of my modifications.

2/3 c + 2 T whole wheat flour
2/3 c all purpose flour
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 t baking powder
1 heaping teaspoon cinnamon
1 t ginger
1/4 t allspice
1/8 t cloves
1/4 t fresh ground nutmeg (actually, I think I might have forgotten this. That’s ok, they’re still tasty!)
3/4 c pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie mix. ew)
3/4 c packed brown sugar (I like dark)
2 eggs
1/4 c canola oil
1/4 c molasses

Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients together and add to the dry. Mix until everything is moistened. This is going to be more like muffin batter than cookie dough. Heat oven to 350*. Place batter by rounded tablespoons on cookie sheets and bake in the preheated oven for 10 minutes. They’ll puff up and the bottoms will be brown, though you’re better off taking them out and letting them sit a minute or two before you take them off the sheets to prevent them from crumbling at all. They’re very moist, but a couple of my cookie bottoms stuck a smidge, so a cooler cookie was easier to remove. Makes about 3 dozen. I’ve been storing them on the counter in a zip bag (I brought them to school for a meeting originally and when people skipped dessert, I happily took them home), and they do stick together quite a bit. Better storage might be in a tupperware between layers of wax paper, or in the fridge.

Book Review: Made From Scratch

I have been wanting to read Jenna Woginrich’s book, Made from Scratch, for a while now.  Our library didn’t have it, but when I got a gift certificate to Amazon, it was on its way.

Woginrich’s subtitle, ‘Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life,’ was what originally drew me to the volume.  Those of you who have been reading this for a while know I enjoy making things by hand and have, over the years, made more and more stuff that way.  I haven’t bought bread in ages (save one emergency loaf six months ago), I rarely buy cookies (only the occasional Joe Joe’s!), and I like to sew.  a lot.  I’ve also gotten better at repairing sewn goods that I’ve bought, and grown my own veggies. I see what Jenna is after in her book, and I get it.

Woginrich provides lots of examples of her hit and miss homesteading out in Idaho.  I appreciate her honesty, and it helps remind a novice urbanite (or, suburbanite, now) like myself that homesteading is hard work.  Sure, sometimes I dream of a little flock of chickens laying eggs for me and a hive of bees to fertilize my plants and provide me with honey, but it’s a pretty romantic dream.  Starting those projects, as Woginrich learned, and maintaining them are hard work.  She divulges the real heartbreak she’s had in the process, but is always encouraging.  So maybe I will get a beehive someday.  But it won’t be soon.

Woginrich was very enthusiastic about bread baking.  I remember the thrill of making my first loaf of bread, and noticing just how much better it was than anything I’d bought in the store.  Dear readers have seen me make many, many loaves of bread on this blog, some with better success than others.  Woginrich provides a fairly fool-proof recipe for country white bread, which, having not made it in ages, I eagerly assembled.  It has great structure and holds up well for several days; you don’t get a lot of crumbling, which is often the case with homemade wheat breads.  It lacks a little bit in the flavor department, but adding a little more salt and swapping in butter for veggie oil might do the trick.  As it is, though, it makes excellent french toast and is a great vehicle for peanut butter.

Woginrich has written an easy read with a nice little index section.  It might be enough to get me to buy my own banjo…

Ugly But Tasty Squash and Sausage

Last night I made a recipe that was not very pretty to look it.  It was all in the same section of the color palette (beige, yellow, gray) and was served with more beige (roasted potatoes).  So I’m going to share with you the recipe, but not bother with photos, as they may just turn you off.

 

You’ll need:

1 spaghetti squash, sliced in half lengthwise
1 lb sweet (or hot) Italian sausage (I used turkey)
One onion, chopped
pinch of basil
salt and pepper

Start by cooking your squash. After slicing, I scooped the insides out of mine, placed a half cut side down in a baking dish, added a little water, and put in the microwave. About 10-12 minutes later it was done, and I proceeded with the other half. While the second one cooked and the first one cooled, I added some olive oil to a pan on medium high heat and added the sausage, which I squeezed out of the casings. I cooked this until done, browning it up a little, and then put it in a bowl. As the sausage cooked, I scraped out the ’spaghetti’ from the squash with a fork. I added a little more oil to the pan then sauteed an onion. To this the squash was added, warming it through (though it was actually still pretty hot), using its liquid to scrape up the brown bits on the pan’s bottom, and letting it brown a smidge. Then I added back the sausage, a little pepper (Whole Foods’ turkey sausage is really salty, so I didn’t add any extra), and a pinch of dried basil. I stirred to combine a few times, and that was dinner.

It was really tasty and hearty along with some roasted potatoes–all you need for that are a few potatoes (I did 4 medium russets) scrubbed and cut into chunks; I put them into a shallow casserole dish, doused them with a little olive oil, garlic powder (whenever I use real garlic it burns, so I use powder for my taters), coarse salt and pepper. Bake in a 400* oven, about a half an hour or until they’re soft throughout and you can pierce them easily. I try not to stir them so at least one side gets a nice crunchy crust.

Halloween!

This is my Halloween gift to you–a freakish carrot pulled by Mr. Pea when he closed down our community garden plot today.  He came home with a couple of dozen carrots–most of them enormous and stout, which makes me wonder–but this one is hte winner as our oddest veg of the year.

 

Pardon my silence this week–I’ve had a terrible setback with the vertigo, prompting panicky doctor’s visits and general mayhem.  I’ll post more soon–making some country bread right now, plus a book review.

New Skills: Darning

Last night I learned a new skill:  darning.  I know few people darn their socks anymore, but I have a favorite pair–green and blue striped wool–that have been worn out by many years of use and which, other than the hole in the heel, were in good shape.  I would be darned (ha) if I was going to toss them out over two little holes, so yesterday I looked up how to darn.  It’s not especially hard to do, so while watching baseball last night (sorry to see you go, Angels), I fixed up three of my holey socks.  Here’s one that’s done.

To darn, you need something hard inside the sock that you can stitch against.  You can buy what’s called a darning egg, which is a wooden or plastic egg shape on a narrow rod; being resourceful and cheap, however, I just used the backside of a remote control.  I stuck it in my sock and was good to go.  Once you have that set up, you need a long needle and some kind of stitching fiber.  I used embroidery thread, so it would match and be thick.  Then you sew a running stitch along one side of the hole; you then make stitches going in rows in the other way.  I started with a stitch up the left side, and then made my horizontal rows.  Then you begin to work in the other direction–vertically, in this case–weaving your fiber into the stitches you’ve made.   Voila–you’ve rewoven your sock, and it’s good to go.

Since I’m rather a poor explainer, here are some great tutorials:
Over at Craftzine
at WikiHow

I know some of you may giggle and tell me to just buy new socks, but why should I when a) I like these socks and b) I can fix them! Call my cheap, but at least I have warm feet, and a new skill.

Artisanal Cheese

I bought this cheese last week at the local farmer’s market.  The women who sell it are very sweet and let you try a whole bunch of different ones.  I have to confess that once in the summer I tried this, loved it, but was feeling poor and hot (hot as in it was 90*, not as in I felt sexy or anything).  So I sheepishly scurried away, as walking it back to my house would have resulted in some melty bacteria-filled cheese, nothing particularly lovely.

But last week when I went to the market there they were and I decided it was high time I put my money where my mouth is.  I think it’s really nice and really important to support local growers and local artisans.  I really appreciate people who make things with their hands, and I love the idea of keeping them in business.  This cheese would not be terribly pricey to one who buys nice cheese a lot, but for me, $17.50 a pound or whatever it was is well outside my usual cheddar-and-mozzarella price range.  But I got a nice little quarter-pound of this–Herbs de Provence cheese, made by Beaver Brook Farm in Lyme, CT.  It’s a creamy cheese, somewhere, texturally speaking, in between cream cheese and feta, coated with a layer of herbs.  It’s divine.  Mr. Pea brought home some crusty bread last week so we could eat some; we’ve since put some in scrambled eggs, too, which was just heavenly.  I couldn’t necessarily afford this stuff every week, but man, it was worth the few extra bucks!