All the apple treats were not my recipe attempt this week. That was necessity, so as all the lovely apples wouldn't go to waste. I decided on an entree for this week's attempt. I am a firm believer that everyone should have a couple of dishes in their back pocket (not literally, of course) that they can whip up whenever necessary. I am also a believer that at least one of those dishes should be of the comfort food variety. I have a pretty good mac and cheese recipe that I use (thank you Auntie JoJo and Pearl Bailey) but its always good to branch out, right?
The Moosewood Restaurant cookbook series has always been one that I have struggled to get totally on board with because they are vegetarian. And I am not, and I won't eat things like tofu, or pretend that giant mushrooms can take the place of meat. Just can't do it. But Ami had this book hanging around, so I decided to take a look through. Lo and behold, there will be several recipes made from this cookbook, and the first one is...mac and cheese.
The upside to the Moosewood series is that they tend to be healthier recipes, and I was interested in testing out a healthy mac and cheese. I mean...its got cheese in it, right? You use cottage cheese and lowfat milk to make the white sauce (I used the Fiber One cottage cheese, thereby making it even healthier). Blend it up with pepper and nutmeg (or pumpkin pie spice in a pinch!), dump it in a pan with uncooked macaroni, real cheese (even the Moosewood folks said that you could use low fat or fat free cheese, but that it was disgusting...), some breadcrumbs and parm on the top and...
Right into the oven until its bubbly and browned and then...holy cow! It looks great, right?
Here were the observations from the table. The nutmeg/pumpkin pie spice is different. Not bad, but different. It wasn't as salty as regular mac and cheese can be. I assume that is because you use less actual cheese and build your white sauce with healthier alternatives. It wasn't soupy as mac and cheese can be, but that could also be because I added extra pasta. AND if you make a double batch, its plenty to feed a few people and have 5 or 6 servings left over for meals for the week.
I liked it. I am not sure if I will use the nutmeg again, and I might add a little salt, but I am sold on the white sauce portion of the recipe. Good work Moosewood. :)
What do you do when you have more than half a giant bag of apples left over from apple picking last week? Tell the Amis, and bust out a bunch of different things. We made apple pie jam, a pie for dinner, 2 pies to freeze, and Mrs. Cheney's apple cake. Look!
This is last weeks recipe, but as I mentioned previously, I had some technical difficulties. This recipe is from Elle Krieger's cookbook "The Food you Crave". I was going hiking so I decided to try these out to bring along. This is by far one of the easiest recipes I have ever made-essentially you dump all the ingredients into a food processor, grind it up and put it in a pan... First... most of the dry stuff, then...
Fruits, nuts, etc....then...
You add in the eggs and the maple syrup to bind it all together...then...
Press it down into a pan, bake it for about 20 minutes. The bars will still be soft when you take them out, but nice and brown. Here's the thing. They do not taste processed. In fact, the first bite I took I was kind of on the fence about them because there wasn't that instant mouthful of sugar. But they are really good. Warm or cooled off. My kids hated them, but all the grownups that had them said they really liked them. They store really well in a container for a week or so, and apparently you can freeze them. They are also very good for you...email me if you want the recipe.
I will be cooking something else today...I am realizing that I have to plan for this and I am not the best planner when it comes to cooking or baking. So, I am off to Jack's game and then I will peruse the cookbooks to try to find something delightful.
Have you seen the movie Julie and Julia? It is essentially a two-fold story. One of the life of Julia Child, and one of a woman who decided to take her Art of French Cooking cookbook and cook every single recipe out of it and blog about it. Cute movie. Anyway, I had decided that I needed a project/hobby, and nothing has made me happier over these past few weeks than making jam, and putting up the tomatoes, etc. so I decided I was going to do the same thing. Pick a cookbook, and every weekend, pick a recipe or two to cook and blog about it. Let me tell you what...its hard to pick one cookbook. Here's why. I won't cook something if I won't eat it...there are plenty of things I will try, but I don't like fish, or eggs, and I don't care for most meats (duck, veal, lamb, etc). So that eliminates most cookbooks if I want to cook it start to finish. I could have picked the Martha Stewart Cookie Book, but that would be too easy. I have baked many of the things from it, and while they have all been lovely, its not a challenge (sorry Martha). I have been baking all my life and am pretty good at it. Plus, I am not sure that it would be in my best interest to make something out of a cookie book every week. I am trying to actually reduce the size of my behind...not increase it...so....I have modified the plan a little.
Every weekend, I am going to pick a recipe that I have never made and give it a whirl. Entrees, appetizers, breads, desserts, side dishes...as long as it sounds interesting and good to me, I will cook it. I have already looked through 3 cookbooks and have several recipes picked out to start with...if you have a favorite recipe that you think I should try, leave me a comment and I will add it to the pile!!
Now, for those of you who might be serious bakers or cooks, you know that the standard Betty Crocker cookbook is a classic. Betty knew her stuff. If you want to learn to make good, basic meals, start here. I make her banana bread recipe all the time and I get millions of compliments (although I made it today, and it just came out wierd. I don't know what the heck happened...I digress). Last night we had some nectarines and blueberries hanging around so Ami J suggested a cobbler for dessert. I cracked open BC and she had a lovely, and very simple recipe for blueberry cobbler. Since we had the nectarines, I used half blueberries and half nectarines for the fruit, and went from there. I would post the recipe here, but I am not sure if they are copyrighted, so I am not going to....if you want it, leave a comment and I will send it to you. Here we go...
1. Cook the fruit with some cornstarch and a little bit of sugar. I actually mixed the fruit and sugar up ahead of time to let it all mix together well. I also had to go downstairs to cook it on Ami J's stove, as I flooded 2 burners on my stove and the tomatoes were taking their bath....anyway. Bring it to a boil, for a minute or so, and then...
2. Dump the fruit into a baking dish. That's steam, not smoke coming off the fruit. :) If you can multitask, you can be making the biscuit topping while your fruit is cooking...BC is clearly not a believer in multitasking because she says to put the warm fruit in the oven while you make your biscuit topping...but I am a multitasker, so I had it ready to spoon on the fruit.
3. Into the oven at 400 degrees for 25-30 minutes...so the biscuit becomes nice and brown.
4. Pretty, isn't it? I wish you could smell it. Heaven.
5. Scoop some out, serve with or without ice cream..this is vanilla frozen yogurt, actually. All dinner participants gave it two thumbs up. Bonus for me...there is leftover fruit to heat up and pour over more yogurt tonight for dessert.
So! First recipe a success. Granted, it was right up my alley, and not that big of a challenge, but who says that everything that is worth doing has to be challenging? I made 4 people really happy last night with very little effort on my part. Sometimes, that's what it should be all about. Until the next time...
There will be 2 posts from me today...but first, I want to talk about the big project of the day. Canning. I have canned jam before, but nothing else and it was time to try. I warmed up by making up a little plum jam, however. I had to. Little rascals that they are, they just jumped right into my cart. Really. They did. So we showed them. Ami N and I cut them up and made a delightful jam.
The color is so, so beautiful. Hooray for jam.
It was time to get serious. Started a batch of applesauce in the crockpot, and started in on the tomatoes. Ami J and I bought a few different varieties and following the directions of my current inspiration, Mrs. Wheelbarrow, we set out on our first tomato adventure. Its really quite easy-just time consuming-but if you have a team (hooray for sisters!), you can get a pretty good system down and move the process along. I womanned the stove, boiling the tomatoes for a minute or so to crack the skin, then dumped them in the Ami N's ice bath, she pulled the skins off, and passed them off to Ami J for chopping. Once that was done, back into the pot they go for a few minutes...to a rolling boil for 5 minutes or so. We were just canning them as plain tomatoes, so they can be used as anything. Cooked up, ladled into jars and into the water bath they went. This is the part of canning I had never done. We don't water bath our jam-we use the inversion method, which has always worked just fine. 8 jars of tomatoes required 2 pots of water and I (oops) flooded the pilot light on one side of my stove, so we had to cram both pots on one side of the stove.
45 minutes later...its so pretty, isn't it? I also ended up canning 1 jar of applesauce. I have to admit it was a little disappointing...I got one and a half quart jars from the giant pile of apples that was crammed in my crockpot. They cook down a lot. Sigh. I gave the half jar to Ami J, who is making apple butter downstairs. She added it to her mix. The good news is that this morning, she has a big pot of applesauce cooking so we will can it up later. I'll post pics. Its very pretty too.
Now, stay tuned for my next post. I have a project that I am starting...I totally stole the idea, but I have adapted it a bit for my life, and I am really excited about it.
Would you like to know why? The garden died (gasp). It wasn’t really the garden’s fault…we neglected it. No other way to put it. There are 57 different excuses I could give you, my dear reader, but for me, the real reason has become clear to me. I don’t like gardening. I like ordering seeds, and I sort of like planting things, but after that…not so much. I can’t speak for Ami J, but the bottom line is this for me. I am not a gardener.
However, all is not lost. I did realize what I am, or really what I like to do. I like to make things…bake them, cook them, process them for freezing, can them…I was going to use the term “processor”, but that sounds too industrial for my liking. I have found my place in the food chain…
The focus of this blog is going to change now. I have been looking for a full time hobby (not in place of my full time job, sadly…but a hobby I can do with regularity) and I think diving into the world of trying to eat more locally, and “putting food by” might just be the ticket.
If you will indulge me, I would like to give you a little background information about my family. I lost my mom at a very early age, so I have a very limited memory bank for her. However, the memories I do have are mainly from time spent in the kitchen. I was helping her bake pies for Thanksgiving by the time I was 7 or so, I remember there being a full cabinet of canned items in our basement, there were always baked goods coming out of the oven, every birthday cake I had was homemade and was themed. I have always baked. I thoroughly enjoy the process, and I also enjoy when I share what I have made and its appreciated.
At some point, I decided that I needed to learn to make jam. I vaguely remember Mom doing it, and it was one of those things that I thought I should know how to do. Lucky for me that Ami J was a Betty Crocker Homemaker award winner (this always makes me giggle) and she was willing to teach me. So one day several years ago, Ami J, Ami N and I “jammed” for the first time. And we are hooked. And we have a fairly large fan base, my favorite fan being Jack...I will include a picture of him eating jam in his favorite way (right out of the jar). I like the process involved in making jam, and I really like being able to see what I have accomplished at the end of the day. Its also nice to crack open a jar in the middle of winter.
So here we are in present day. Ami J and I are trying very hard to support local agriculture, and although we don't think a big garden is in our future, we have decided next year to expand the beds of strawberries, try potatoes again, and get some more rhubarb in. Ami N wants peas again...she might have to be in charge of that. Last weekend, Ami J and I picked up our bulk orders of peaches, basil and zucchini...here's what we did with it...
Peach, and Blueberry Peach.
I also made zucchini bread and zucchini muffins to freeze. Ami J made pesto. I also made a birthday cake for Ami N, 3 meatloaves (is that a word?) to freeze, banana muffins, and a couple banana breads to freeze. I didn't get pictures of all of those...my camera is on the fritz. I felt great at the end of this day...so much accomplished in about 6 hours of work (that I don't really consider work)...I need to do this more.
