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Archive for the ‘cooking’ Category

missing the blizzard

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

From my Facebook friends and family, I see I’m missing one heckuva blizzard in eastern Nebraska right now. I was taking a look at my copy of the St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church Centennial Cookbook (Johnson, NE), looking for holiday cookie recipes. My cousins, two aunts, and great aunts all submitted family recipes, and added funny notes to a few of the recipes, so I just enjoy reading it.

I found my great aunt Alice’s recipe for Snow Ice Cream, and thought I would share it with all of you who have an abundance of snow right now. I remember making this with my mom and dad on a snow day when they both stayed home from school, although we called it “snow pudding”, and just mixed in vanilla pudding with snow. The texture is nothing like regular ice cream, but amazing in its own way.

Snow Ice Cream by Alice Hahn
1 C evaporated milk
1 C sugar
2 beaten eggs (farm fresh)
1/2 t salt
1 t vanilla

Fill a large pan with snow from a clean and undisturbed big snow bank. Add the above mixture to enough snow to make the consistency of the ice cream. Eat immediately.

Recipe Note: In years past, after a big snow and the sleigh rides, building snow forts and snow ball fights were over, came time to make snow ice cream.

ENJOY!

birthday catchup

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

I want to acknowledge some other cool gifts I got for my birthday before the window passes.

My in-laws sent me some really cool plant stuff. The hand painted turtle planter will contain some sort of plant I bring indoors today. (Even though it has been in the 70s this week, it is starting to get down to the 40s at night.)



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They also sent me some awesome mushroom-shaped garden stakes. I can never keep track of where I planted things, so the stakes will be attractive and useful.



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Ty got me a gift certificate for the yarn store in Fort Smith. I bought some pretty cool stuff. I had to buy sparkly sock yarn from Turkey. I also found a project in the Vogue Knitting Winter 2009 issue. A short-sleeved sweater will be very handy to have here!



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My neighbors Sam and Sujith got me some nice bread flour, fig vinaigrette, some cake yeast, and a hunk of sourdough starter!


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We’ve already made bread from it once, and I’ve pieced out the starter to several friends. I’ve never made kneaded bread before, but it turned out great! I’m using this site for the care and feeding of my starter. The recipe creates a very large loaf. I had to give half of it away before it went stale. I suggest halving the recipe for a household of 2.

crafty cakes

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

If you read a lot of blogs, you know about the cake blog, cake wrecks. I once received my weekly dose of funny from Bob Saget and America’s Funniest Home Videos. I only go to cake wrecks every two weeks or so, but they’ve definitely taken up residence in my heart where Bob Saget used to live.

The website has all sorts of cakes that turn out horrible, but they also have pictures of the most amazing cakes in the world. One of the cakes I think should be featured on the site is the gar cake my friends Robin and Eric made. Robin’s husband Mark appeared on the Discovery Channel show River Monsters as what I like to call “The Gar Whisperer”.

Robin also made me a little fish for my birthday.



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I’m wondering if Robin has got a novel in her about zombie fish? Maybe a book about zombie crafts? Possibly a zombie pumpkin cake with toffee survival cookbook?

Crafty Books: 1000 Ideas for Creative Reuse

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

I’ve been posting so much about fiction writers and poetry writers, that I almost forgot this is first and foremost a craft blog!

I’m super excited about my fellow former Nebraskan crafter Garth Johnson’s new book 100 Ideas for Creative Reuse, due out in November.




He’s the author of the Extreme Craft blog, and posted today that he received his copy of the book.

I zipped over to amazon.com to see if any of my projects made the cover, or if I made it into the first few pages browsable by Amazon’s Look Inside! feature. After a few clicks on the Surprise Me! feature, and there is one of my projects at #242!

One of my favorite things about this book is that it has a single picture of each creative reuse project. There are no patterns and no instructions. It is a book of ideas, but it is also a fantastic book of possibilities for people who consider crafting as interesting and as engaging as solving puzzles or gigantic systems of equations. The picture of the finished item is proof that the puzzle can be solved, or that a solution exists. As a crafter, you can infer a few things from each picture, but the path you take in utilizing the creative reuse idea is completely up to you!

Earlier today at my new job, I had to fill out a section of my Corporate Resume about my published works and publications. I wonder if they’ll let me add my recycled sweater coozie to that list? I’ll post a little about my job this weekend.

kimchi in the cupboard

Monday, July 20th, 2009

What to do with a damaged head of cabbage? I already made runzas. Sauerkraut sounds interesting, but I don’t have a large piece of crockery. I found a recipe for essentially Korean hot Sauerkraut called Kimchi.

Many recipes online detail all sorts of ingredients which can only be found at an Asian food store. Since we don’t have one nearby, I was forced to rely on the kimchi recipe from backwoodhome.com.

I sliced the daikon radish (long white) instead of grating it. Everything else was very similar to the recipe. Luckily, the fancy Kroger had rooster brand chili paste.



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I stuffed all of the concoction into a half gallon jar and capped it with a plastic cap to prevent rusty rings. Since the kimchi needs to ferment, sealing it by canning would stop that process. It has been almost a week since I made it so we should be trying it out tomorrow!

pickles with peggy

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

Ty’s relatives came down for a visit! Peggy brought her huge pressure cooker canner, and showed me the things that a recipe doesn’t say explicitly. Some may call this wisdom.

This all starts with the large amount ofextra cucumbers we’re getting in. We’ve been saving up. When I went back to Nebraska to visit my family, my mother gave me a bunch of jars, and here’s the secret of the jars: Classico Spaghetti Sauce. I checked it out at the store yesterday, every other jar uses a proprietary lid, but the Classico Sauce uses a regular mason jar/ball lid. Save your jars and give them to a friend or relative!

I also asked my mother for her pickle recipe. She didn’t send me her recipe but found this dill pickle recipe on the internet and said it was close. (She did the same thing with her salsa recipe, but they were no where near the same recipe!)

Before Peggy showed up, I sterilized the jars in the dishwasher, and began cutting up pickles into 4-inch spears and put them in a cold water bath.

Once the spears were ready, Peggy and I went to work stuffing the jars and making the brine.



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Peggy showed me how to cover everything with brine, and make sure no cucumber, dill, or garlic stuck up into the air space. She showed me how to clean the ring area, and she let me put the lids and rings on. What I had read on the internet said not to screw them on super tight at that point but she said that she did.

Then we put the jars in the hot water bath. The recipe said to put the jars in the hot water bath for 15 minutes, but here is what that really means:

1. Start with a cool pot and put your jars in. Put a towel in the bottom if you don’t have a rack to keep the jars off of the direct heat.
2. Add water to the pot 1/3 of the way up the jar.
3. Bring to a boil.
4. It’s boiling? Start your 15 minute timer, and turn the heat down to simmer.
5. Remove jars with one of those jar remover tong things. Twist rings tighter when they are cool enough to touch.
6. If you have another batch, go to step 3 and repeat.

So a 15 minute hot water bath is really more like 20-25 minutes, and even more if you are just starting.

Peggy also showed me how to check the lids for a seal and how to turn over the jars for a seal. In the end we put up 19 quarts!



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Note the Classico label still on the jar! They are really hard to remove. The last piece of advice Peggy left me with are plastic caps. If you want to return your jars and rings to your favorite jam/pickle maker in good condition, you’ll buy yourself a good plastic lid (or ask them for one!). This keeps the rings from rusting and becoming unusable. Peggy says that sometimes after the lids have set, she’ll remove the ring and put the plastic lid on a jar that she gives someone else if they have returned her jars in the past.



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large freckled produce

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

Keeping up with the garden is becoming quite a task. Ty picked all of the ripe tomatoes and cucumbers on Thursday, and then I picked this today:



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Ty’s relatives Peggy and CW are heading down to central Arkansas on Monday. CW has classes in Little Rock, and Peggy is going to teach me the art of canning. She’s bringing her canner and her pressure cooker. We are eating most of our tomatoes right now, but the cucumbers are out of control. There are seven cukes in that picture, cukes that didn’t exist 3 days ago!

fridge pickles

Monday, July 6th, 2009

A few people have asked for my pickle recipe, here it is for a 1 gal glass container:

6 C water
2 C white vinegar
1/2 C canning salt
1/2 t alum
4 large bunches of dill (1/4 lb)
1 large onion, quartered
2 whole cloves of garlic
2 t chopped garlic

optional for heat: 1 t red pepper flakes

Make sure you get the canning salt, otherwise your pickles may become discolored in an unsavory way.

Now for what to pickle, this solution will handle 2-3 large cucumbers quartered, or 4-6 medium ones. We love to add fresh green beans, small peppers, quartered beets, green tomatoes that have fallen off the vine, but are too young to fry up (not shiny yet), leeks, bunching onions (scallions). We’ve wanted to try cabbage, but we just haven’t done that yet. If we had carrots and cauliflower, we would have added that. In the last batch we put quite a few hot peppers, and they did not heat up the rest of the pickles. We also added cooked red beet root, and it made all of the pickles pink!

Ok, now for the pickling procedure. In a large pot combine the water, vinegar, salt and alum. Bring to a boil for 2 minutes. Add the rest of the recipe ingredients and all of the vegetables to the pot. Remove from heat. Let stand covered for 4 hours. Transfer glass container that fits in the fridge. Let sit in the fridge for 3 days. After that the pickles are ready for consumption. Safe recipes say you can eat them for a month, but if you keep a safe eye out for mold and keep your dirty paws out of the jar, it may even last longer.

We have ours in a 2 gallon glass container. Alton Brown uses a plastic container for his Hurry Curry Pickles, which I’m going to try next.

Pink Pickles

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Whipped up a batch of quick pickles this weekend. Everything can go in raw, but I boiled the beets for 20 minutes first for tenderness. I boiled a bunch of golden beets, but then I threw in some sliced red beets also. That made all of the pickles pink!

It is called a quick pickle because they’re pickled in 3 days, and kept in the fridge only covered, not sealed. This time the pickles included cucumbers, green beans, a few green roma tomatoes, golden and red beets, onions, garlic, and the first okra of the year.


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Rustic Blackberry Tart

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

I asked my Facebook friends what I should do with the blackberries. One friend said I should make a telephone with them, hardy har Carlin.

The most mouthwatering answer was from my friend Anne Hepburn, “puff pastry crust + mascarpone & whipped cream + blackberries= best dessert ever.” I’ve got whipped cream, but no mascarpone or puff pastry. Maybe I’ll do that one tomorrow. I do have bread dough though!

The beauty bread book I keep referring to is that it has you make enough dough for 2-8 loaves depending on the size of the loaf. The dough stores in the fridge for up to 2 weeks, and we’ve never had a problem with the dough lasting that long. Most of the fruity/sweet bread recipes in the book use the challah/brioche dough, except for the cinnamon rolls. My intuition told me that the regular bread dough would be good for a rustic tart also.

Here’s the recipe for the Rustic Blackberry Tart:
1 grapefruit sized ball of the European Peasant Loaf dough
3 T melted butter
2 T granulated sugar
1 t cinnamon
1/4 t salt
1 C fresh blackberries

topping
3 T ap flour
2 T granulated sugar
2 T brown sugar
1 t vegetable oil
whipped cream

Take a grapefruit-sized piece of dough, flour it and make a gluten cloak around it (so the dough is not sticky). Flatten the dough a 9 inch silicone round cake pan. Pour the melted butter over the dough, covering all of it. Sprinkle the sugar, cinnamon, and salt over the butter. Turn the edges of the dough over to create a 1/2 inch crust. I liked the idea of putting the butter/sugar on first so it would get captured in the crust. The crust creates a wall to enclose the blackberries and topping. This also meant I didn’t have any butter left over for the topping. Next time I’ll use butter instead of oil.

Once the crust is formed space the blackberries out over the tart. Mix the topping ingredients together and sprinkle over the blackberries. Bake for 30 minutes at 425F. Top with fresh whipped cream.



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Finally a rant for this post. In high school, we created a cookbook for a yearbook fundraiser. The sponsors of that feat decided to use T for tablespoon and t for teaspoon, mostly because it saved space, but it also saved ink! I’ve read so many recipes where I’ve missed the “b” in the “Tbsp” vs “Tsp”. I encourage you to implement this shorter hand abbreviation in the recipes you create or type in for a fundraiser or email to your friends.