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Chicken and root vegetable stew.

This is one of those clean-out-the-fridge soups.  It was just what the doctor (me) ordered when I came down with this horrible cold, and nobody is around to take care of me so I have to take care  of myself.  It is loosely based on a Colombian class of soups called sancocho de gallina (found by googling "chicken root vegetable soup" and seeing what turned up.) The kids even liked it, despite the obvious lack of noodles.

Chicken and Root Vegetable Stew

• 6 cups rich chicken stock (had some going in the crock pot just for this soup!)
• 1/4 c olive oil
• 2 large onions
• 4 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, sliced
• 1 big turnip*
• 4 carrots*
• 5 small red potatoes*
• 1 big green bell pepper*
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 2 bay leaves

*The exact amounts and types of vegetables probably doesn't matter much, although I would not want to do without potato or the particular mild bitterness of green bell pepper.  Parsnips, rutabagas, sweet potatoes would probably all be very nice.  Some versions of sancocho contain chunks of corn on the cob, and I would totally have added that if I had any.

Trim and roughly chop all the vegetables.   Heat the olive oil in a soup pot and add the onions and the sliced chicken; cook until the chicken is no longer translucent and the onions are just starting to brown.  Add the stock and the rest of the ingredients and simmer until the vegetables are all quite tender.  Remove the bay leaves, add salt and pepper to taste, and eat up.

 

We had this with hot buttered toast.  Superb.

Pandora's sugar bowl.

Monday evening I announced, "Muffins for breakfast tomorrow!"

And the children fell to their knees (okay, it was only the 11-year-old) and begged, "Please, Mom, don't make them completely whole wheat!  Put some white flour in!"

I raised my eyebrow (okay, not really; I am physically incapable of raising one eyebrow; probably I just made a frowny face) and said, "Oh, come on, they're not that bad.  Muffins are quick breads. You barely notice the difference in muffins."

"They don't taste as sweet as other people's muffins."

He probably has a point there.  I don't like to eat super sweet muffins, so the slight bitterness of whole wheat flour has never bothered me, and I usually do not add extra sugar to make up for it.   

Maybe if I could have kept my children's taste buds safely sheltered from the world, he would not know what he is missing.  But this past year the 11-year-old has acquired the freedom to range around our urban neighborhood unsupervised.  He has, I suspect, tasted the illicit luxury of coffeeshop muffins bought with his own money.  There is scant going back once innocence is lost.

"Or, Mom, at least could you put more sugar in them?"

Hmph.  Philistines.  "How about I sprinkle a little sugar crust on top?"

"No, it's the middle that isn't sweet enough."

"But it'll have blueberries!"

"They're sour."

I turned to my spouse, the food processing engineer, who (a) has to stay somewhat abreast of the nutrition literature, and (b) has perfected the art of rapid calculation followed by a guess that makes it sound like he knows exactly what he is talking about.  "Mark."

"Hm?"

"If we had to live on homemade muffins, would it be better for us to eat low-sugar muffins made with some whole grain flour and some white flour, or would it be better to eat whole-grain muffins with more sugar in them?"

He rolled his eyes at me (okay, he probably didn't roll his eyes, but I'm not sure how to describe what he did.  Let's say he made a "here's a caveat" face).  "You realize that all the relevant research about this sort of thing is inconclusive."

"Yeah, yeah."

"Well, if it is an either-or, my instinct -- just my instinct, mind you --"

"Duly noted."

"-- is that it's better to keep it 100% whole grain and add the sugar.  Because the relevant research does indicate that more whole grain is associated with better outcomes.  And also the white flour has the same effect on your body as sugar anyway.  So at least you're not leaving out the additional nutrition and fiber, even if it comes with sugar."

"Got it."  I turned back to the pleading child.  "Okay.  This time I will make sweet muffins."  I stormed into the kitchen (okay, I probably did not storm so much as stalk) and made these.  They weren't blueberry because I discovered the dried cherries while I was rooting around in the fridge.

Extra-Sweet Cherry Yogurt Muffins

• 1 cup yogurt thinned with a little milk, OR 1 cup buttermilk, plus extra if needed (which you will)
• Heaping 1/2 cup dried tart cherries
• 1/4 to 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1 egg
• 3 Tbsp butter or coconut oil, melted and cooled, or other oil
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cup sugar (it hurts my teeth just writing that -- a *tablespoon* in every muffin!)
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

The night before:  Put the dried cherries in a bowl and add enough thinned yogurt to moisten all the cherries.  Stir and let soak overnight in the refrigerator.  (Even a half-hour's soak will do some good, if you don't have overnight.)

In the morning, grease a 12-cup muffin tin and preheat the oven to 400° F.  Beat the egg and melted butter together with the remainder of the thinned yogurt.  Add the almond extract.  Mix the dry ingredients together in a medium bowl, then gently stir in the liquid ingredients and the cherry-yogurt mixture.  Add more yogurt and milk if needed to moisten all the dry ingredients (it's hard to say how much liquid will have been soaked up by the cherries).   Divide among the cups of the muffin tin and bake for 20 minutes; test with wooden pick before removing.  Allow to cool in the pan 5 minutes before taking the muffins out of the cups to finish cooling on a rack.

+ + + 

Now let me tell you something.  I do not (repeat, do not) like sweet muffins for breakfast.  And the idea of these terribly sweet muffins -- I used the amount of sugar suggested in Mark Bittman's "Sweet and Rich Muffins" recipe, but did not add the extra fat -- kind of horrified me, which is why I used yogurt instead of the ordinary whole milk I usually used; I thought perhaps it would balance the sweetness a little bit.

Fatal mistake.   I should have left it unbalanced.

These were very yummy muffins.  I had a taste "of Mark's, to evaluate it" and now I am personally responsible for demolishing three of them.  

So now I have this "aaaaagh, what have I done?!?!" feeling.  I fed my kids a tablespoon of sugar in their muffins and I liked it.  This is less sugar than in the most current formulation of Cocoa Puffs.  

Argh.

 Of course the kids liked them too.  I am still going to write "dried cherries" on my grocery list this week.

But, argh.

 

Cheater's deep dish pizza. I mean, maybe only sort of cheating.

So I've been meaning to get around to learning to make Chicago-style deep dish pizza.  I even had friend and commenter ChristyP , who I guess had to learn to make it as a condition for staying married to her husband or something, email me a recipe for crust, like, ages ago, and it has been sitting around waiting for me to pick it up and learn a new crust technique all that time.

This is not the story of how I took ChristyP's recipe and learned to make the authentic Chicago-style crust.  This is the story of how I was leafing through my mother-in-law's back issues of Family Circle and saw a recipe that used ordinary frozen pizza dough and thought to myself, "That picture looks pretty good, and I can do better than the frozen pizza dough.  And I won't have to learn how to do anything new, which is good, because I've been putting off the authentic Chicago-style crust because I don't have time to innovate these days."

Here's the story.

So, there I was, leafing through my mother-in-law's back issues of Family Circle, and I saw a recipe that used ordinary frozen pizza dough and thought to myself, "That picture looks pretty good, and I can do better than the frozen pizza dough..."

...okay, you get the picture.

Anyway, I figured that if refrigerated pizza dough would work, so would the usual dough that comes out of my bread machine.  So I made a pound of 50%-whole-wheat pizza dough and proceeded with something that was kind of like the Family Circle vegetable-pepperoni deep dish pizza, only I substituted the vegetables with a mix I thought would go better around here (eggplant isn't super popular), and I said "to hell with reduced-fat cheese and turkey pepperoni.")

Also, since I don't own a deep dish pizza pan, I used my 10" springform pan, which has straight sides and so isn't perfect for the job, but it worked fine once I got everything inside it.

Cheater's deep-springform-pan vegetable-non-turkey-pepperoni pizza

• About six ounces button mushrooms, chopped medium-fine (around here, mushrooms can't be in big visible pieces)
• 3 small-to-medium zucchini, sliced in half-moons
• Half a red onion, chopped 
• One big red bell pepper, chopped 
• One cup of any tomato sauce -- I used leftover homemade spaghetti sauce that I'd cooked meatballs in
• 1 and 1/2 cups shredded asiago-parmesan mix from a bag (it was on sale last week -- use any combination of shredded cheese, I would think, but make sure that a significant fraction is parmesan)
• Two ounces of pepperoni, chopped fairly finely.  Probably Genoa salami or sausage or bacon would be good instead.  I liked the pepperoni and we always have it on hand for kid pizza.
• One tomato or maybe three roma tomatoes -- whichever looks better this time of winter -- thinly sliced
• 2 tsp dried oregano and maybe some basil
• Salt and pepper
• Olive oil for the pans
• One pound of pizza dough*

Preheat the oven to 450°F.  Brush a rimmed baking sheet with olive oil and scatter the mushrooms, zucchini, onion, and bell pepper on it; sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Roast at 450°F for about 20-30 minutes, stirring once.  

Brush a deep 10-inch pan (like a cake pan, for instance; I used my springform) generously with olive oil.  Roll the pizza dough out into a circle wide enough to go into the pan and up the sides most of the way.  It doesn't have to splay over the top edge of the pan unless the pan isn't super-deep.  Then put it there.  (With a straight-sided pan it's a little tricky to get the dough to stay on the sides of the pan while you fill it, but I managed with some pinching and holding it out of the way).

Layer about a third to a half of the cheese on the bottom of the crust, followed by the roasted vegetables, followed by the cup of tomato sauce, followed by the diced pepperoni.  Make sure the crust extends at least a half inch above the toppings so it doesn't overflow into your pan; if not, pinch and stretch it as you fill.  It's okay if the crust folds back down over the toppings on the edge.  Bake 15 minutes at 450°F.  

(At this point the crust edges looked sufficiently brown to me, so I made a little ring of aluminum foil to go around the edge of the pizza and protect the crust. Then  I proceeded:)

Top the pizza with the remaining cheese, the slices of tomato, and a sprinkling of oregano and basil.  Return to the oven for 15 minutes.  Remove from the oven and allow to stand for 5-10 minutes before cutting.

Full disclosure:  Three of my kids wouldn't touch the stuff.  They got peanut butter sandwiches.  

Fuller disclosure:  I'm not sorry, as the rest of us ate the whole thing.  What I liked about it, compared to a regular flat pizza, was that we got a much higher ratio of vegetables to bread than usual.  And it was really beautiful coming out of the oven.  Smelled great.  And it seemed easier than normal pizza -- probably because I could fit all the pizza we were going to eat in the oven at the same time, instead of having to do it in thirds one pizza at a time.  I did the vegetable chopping ahead of time, and the bread machine made my pizza dough, and the vegetables roasted in the time it took for me to get the deep pan prepared and the dough rolled out and a fruit salad made.  Definitely a fine pizza for a weeknight.  Families much larger or less picky than mine will have to make two.

 

--------------------

*Make your own or buy it.  One pound means you start with about two cups of flour.  Here's the bread machine pizza dough recipe I used.  Usually I put some olive oil in, maybe 1 Tbsp, but this time I forgot to.  Worked fine anyway.

• 3/4 cup water
• 1 Tbsp honey
• 1 cup Dakota Maid whole wheat flour (something you would actually use to bake 100% whole wheat bread)
• 1 cup bread flour
• 1 heaping tsp salt
• 1 and 1/4 tsp yeast

Caesar with a twist?

So I was making a cheater's Caesar salad, because I am out of anchovies:  I used Thai fish sauce instead, which works fine.  And I also substituted sriracha sauce for the more traditional dash of tabasco, because it was easier to find in the fridge.

And that got me thinking:

I am a sucker for a good Caesar salad.  I make a good one myself, if I may brag a bit.  I think that the Caesar salad is one of the classic blends of flavors and textures, perfectly balanced:  fruity olive oil, bright lemon, snappy garlic, spicy tabasco and mustard and black pepper, the twin fermenty flavors of anchovy and parmesan.  All on the blank but crispy background of Romaine lettuce.  With good bread for croutons, what more would you want?

But putting the sriracha and fish sauce in made me think:

You could substitute lime for the lemon, too.  You could substitute crispy rice noodles for the croutons.  You could maybe put a few shrimp in there instead of the whole anchovies.  You could make a Southeast-Asian inspired Caesar salad!  

The only thing that wouldn't work very well is the Parmesan.  But perhaps for that fetid-fermenty flavor you could use a spoon or two of those fermented black beans that come in a jar?

What do you think?

Okay, let's get that empty cupboard round-up on.

Consider this post a call for submissions for an empty cupboard recipe round up.  

It's an experiment -- we'll see how many posts I can get for it, and maybe tweak the process next time.  (MilWifeMamaofOne has already sent me one link, thus lighting a fire under me.  Thanks, MilWilfeMamaofOne!)

Let's say you have about three days to get the posts in, and I'll try to post the roundup on Friday of this week (before dinnertime).

A recap of the rules:

1. Write a post about what you managed to throw together when you hadn't yet gotten a chance to go grocery shopping.  
2. You have to post the whole meal, not just one recipe.  (This is especially important if no actual recipes were harmed during the preparation of the meal.
3. It's okay if one or more of the components was packaged/prepared/processed, out of season, non-organic, or raspberry Jell-o (TM).  I'm interested in the whole picture of thinking out of the box to create a pleasant dining experience for your family.
4. Send me a link to your post by Friday morning and I'll get it up on Friday before dinnertime.

Shall we give it a try?

A summer algorithm for a pleasant family meal.

- Prepare a one-bowl main-dish salad, such as tabbouleh with chickpeas thrown in it, or Indonesian rice salad, or lentil-red pepper-feta salad, or perhaps curried chicken salad or something like that, or a nice Caesar with some grilled steak to throw in.

- Make sure there's plenty of bread to go with it.

- Slice up some cheese that the children like.  Cold cuts or salami or pepperoni would also do.  I like to use mozzarella or colby.

- Have a big bowl of fresh fruit, like strawberries or grapes.  Not a fruit salad -- too much trouble.  Just some nice ripe fruit.

- Give the kids a taste of the salad, and if they don't like it, say "Fine, that means there's more for me!  Have some bread, cheese, and fruit."

At least, that worked for us this evening.

Happy Fourth!

Pondering a recipe-roundup: empty cupboard meals.

I've been bouncing around the idea of trying to host a recipe roundup, once or twice a month.  (You know the drill -- write a recipe post, send me the link, I'll put it all together into a post.)  But I've been searching for a theme that hasn't been done to death.

Today I think I might have hit upon it.  What do you think about an "empty cupboard" roundup?  I'm not sure how often -- once a month or biweekly -- and it doesn't lend itself to an alliterative name, maybe you all could help me with that -- but here's what I'm thinking:

The idea is to write a post about what you managed to throw together the night before you go grocery shopping.  What can you make from your pantry staples?   It's easy to eat fresh, local, seasonal, interesting, and impressively right after you come back from the farmer's market (or the co-op -- or even the SuperValu).  What can you do at the end of the week, from your leftovers, odds and ends, and emergency rations?  What have you got to choose from?  What did you decide to make and why?

Here's an example from today.  I'm pretty good about meal planning, but I often leave the last couple of days blank because I know I'll have things to use up; on the other hand, sometimes we eat up all the leftovers and I have to get suddenly creative.  I'm about to leave to go grocery shopping right after I finish this post.

Before dinner, the only fresh veg I had in the fridge was a bunch of broccoli (and it was starting to look a little sorry, so raw was out).  No fresh fruit left except some wrinkly apples, an orange, and a lemon.  We had some leftover enchiladas and arroz con pollo, but we were kind of tired of both and needed a break (it'll still be good for lunch tomorrow).  

So I made this:

• Grilled Meatloaf (double onion, since I had no green pepper -- there's always ground beef in my freezer)
• Steamed broccoli with a squeeze of lemon and a drizzle of olive oil
• Plain Fordhook lima beans cooked from frozen -- just a little salt and pepper
• A can of cut beets, drained and briefly marinated in a dressing of orange juice, balsamic vinegar, and fennel seeds
• Homemade bread and butter.
• Oh yeah, and rum and coke for the grownups.  (Hence the need for me to churn out a couple of blog posts before I go shopping)

I think it turned out pretty great, and not bad for a day when I didn't know what I was going to make until about three-thirty.

Anyway, what would you say to having a roundup on a semi-regular basis?  I think it would be a nice way to explore our creativity, celebrate frugality, and get over some of our hangups about appearing as if we only occasionally rely on convenience foods.  Also share some ideas.  And even if your answer is something like, "frozen pizza -- again," well, why not fess up?  If you had an ice-cold beer on the side, you could at least tell us about that.  In fact, I'll make one of the rules be you have to tell the whole meal, not just one interesting recipe.

What say you?  How often?  Which day of the week (or month)?  And furthermore, what should I call it?

Faux cinnamon rolls.

On Tuesday mornings when we head off to Hannah's early, we need a breakfast that's quick to eat. It doesn't have to be super-quick to make, since I'm usually up early enough with my coffee to put something together, but quick to eat is important. So I tend to make things like muffins, or breakfast burritos, or peanut butter sandwiches.

My seven-year-old's favorite Tuesday breakfast is a sort of a whole-wheat sweet bun I make from the bread machine (though I bet you could mix up the dough the night before and let it rise in the fridge).  I'm going for cinnamon-roll pizzazz without the extra steps of rolling out, filling, and slicing.

This is how I do it (makes one dozen small rolls):

•    2 and 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
•    1 and 1/2 tsp bread machine yeast
•    1/2 tsp salt
•    1/2 tsp cinnamon (cardamon is also nice, as is chai spice)
•    3/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp milk (or you can use apple juice; omit the sugar)
•   3 Tbsp sugar
•   1 Tbsp coconut oil (or butter)
•   1/2 cup raisins or currants

Produce risen dough in the morning by your favorite method (for me, the bread machine).  Cut dough ball into 12 pieces.

(At this point I take each piece, stretch it out, give it a little twist, and pinch the ends together so it has a vaguely cinnamon-roll-like shape.  But you can also just make little round buns.)

Arrange the buns or rolls 1 and 1/2 inches apart on a baking sheet coated with cooking spray.  Allow to rise about 30 minutes (here is where I get dressed and drink my coffee).  Bake 15-18 minutes at 350 degrees.

Cool on rack until buns are just warm before, optionally, drizzling with your favorite glaze or frosting -- I like cream-cheese-and-powdered-sugar here.  Actually I like them fine without the frosting, but the children beg to differ.

Rice cooker jambalaya.

The low-carb visitors will really be disappointed in me on this one.  

Here's a new rice-cooker dinner I tried today.   In general, when I say "rice-cooker dinner," I'm not always looking for meals where you throw everything in the pot and turn it on and that's it.  I'm looking for meals that finish cooking in the rice cooker, and then stay warm in there indefinitely, so they are perfect for Monday night swimming lessons where we get home at 5:45 p.m. I don't mind doing some prep beforehand, as long as I can hit "COOK" right before I run out the door and have dinner ready when I get home.

If you're using white rice, apparently you can toss the raw rice and liquid and other stuff right into your rice cooker and have it all turn out okay.  Brown rice, which is the only kind I buy, is a bit more finicky.  I usually cook the brown rice first and then add other stuff and hit "COOK" a second time in order to have it done enough.

So, tonight I adapted a fakey-jambalaya recipe as follows:

• Cooked a cup of brown rice in three cups of chicken stock with a little salt, in the rice cooker.  (If you use white rice instead of brown, two cups of stock will do, and you probably don't have to pre-cook it)
• Chopped up two green bell peppers and a medium onion.
• Sauteed the green pepper and onion in 4 tablespoons butter till soft and a little brown.
• Mixed in 2 teaspoons "cajun" seasoning (not the kind with salt added; from the bulk spices section of the grocery store).
• Added this to the rice cooker, butter and all.
• Also added to the rice cooker one can of blackeyed peas, drained, and one can of Ro-Tel brand tomatoes with green chilies, not drained.
• Sliced up a 14-ounce ring-shaped smoked sausage.  Browned that in another 2 tablespoons butter.  Dumped that into the rice cooker too.
• Deglazed the pan with another cup of stock and added that to the rice cooker.  Mixed it all up.
• Closed it and hit "COOK" for the second time.  Left for the Y.
• Came back and made a fruit salad to go with.  Also some okra.

Very well received by 4/6 of my family.  The rest had peanut butter sandwiches.  

Get your political hotdish right here.

So, did you wake up this morning with an unbearable urge to know the answer to the question, "If the Minnesota congressional delegation had a hotdish contest, what would Al Franken and Michele Bachmann bring?" 

If so, the Heavy Table blog has a recipe roundup for you.

Normally, I find Michele Bachmann cringe-worthy as far as Republicans go, but I'll give her quite a lot of credit for showing up to this harmless Franken-planned event.  (Hint to other Minnesota Republicans:  When Michele Bachmann shows you up in the bipartisanship department, especially for a publicity stunt, you might want to take a good long hard look at yourself.)

If anybody from outside Minnesota clicks through to the recipes and is horrified by them, you need to know that the inclusion of cream of mushroom soup is kind of a Minnesota inside joke.    And I will bet you dollars to donuts that if you actually made the winning recipe, you'd like it, whether you admitted it or not. 

I mean, deep down, who doesn't like tater tots?

OK, maybe really deep down.