liza_cooks

This is the gingerbread recipe I use. I used to make it yearly at Twelfth Night, but it's been two or three years since I did it. It's from the Fanny Farmer cookbook, which turns out to be on Google Books now. It's very tasty on its own, but putting whipped cream on it lightens it and makes it even better, to my mind.

One year I accidentally doubled both the molasses and the sour cream. I just couldn't figure out why it was taking so long to bake! When it finally finished baking, it was almost the same texture and flavor as if I had followed the regular recipe, but I think it took over twice as long as it should have to bake.

N.B. It says to turn onto a rack, but I usually leave it in its glass pan.

Everything beyond this point is copied from the book:

Sour Cream Gingerbread

More cakelike than plain gingerbread, with a light texture and a creamy crumb.

1/4 pound butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup molasses
1/2 cup sour cream
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter and lightly flour a 9-inch square pan. Cream the butter and slowly add the sugar, beating until light. Add the molasses and sour cream and blend well. Add the eggs, continuing to beat until well mixed. Mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and ginger, add to the first mixture, and beat until smooth. Pour into the pan and bake for 30-40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes before turning out onto a rack.

I usually eat breakfast at my desk after I get to work, and for the last several months I've been having oatmeal. Recently I started bringing loose oatmeal and stirring things into it myself instead of buying it in pre-mixed packets. So far it's working out well. (I tried stirring in chocolate chips, but they very quickly lost their shape and so I had chocolate oatmeal instead of oatmeal with chocolate chips in it. Oh well, still good! I've also done nut + dried fruit, for example cashews and dried cranberries. The nuts and fruit are from the bulk section at the co-op, so it's not too expensive.)

This morning I had oatmeal with a dash of salt, lots of sugar, and a spoonful of peanut butter stirred in. It was yummy! I was surprised how much it reminded me of peanut butter and bananas.

Digression: if you ate peanut butter and bananas as a kid or eat it occasionally now, which way did/do you do it? We always mashed the peanut butter and bananas together into an unappetizing-looking but tasty glop*, then spread it on bread, but I've heard of other people spreading the peanut butter on bread and then adding slices of banana.

*Works better with creamy peanut butter because it mashes better.

Tonight I was given a piece of fresh opah, which is a kind of fish I'd never heard of. I wasn't sure what to do with it (they say cook it like you would fresh tuna, but I've never cooked fresh tuna either), so I looked up some recipes online. The one that seemed most to my liking was pretty simple: rub with olive oil, salt, and pepper, then cook on medium-high heat for 4-5 minutes on each side.

I ran into a problem right away: the fish was MUCH thicker on one end than the other, and I wasn't sure how to get it to cook evenly. But I figured the worst that could happen is I ruin a piece of fish (and maybe a pan) and started cooking. I cooked it extra long because the one end was so thick (it looked like three inches thick before it cooked down, though it may have only been two inches or so) and then cut it open, only to discover the middle was still definitely not done. So I cut it into smaller pieces and put it back for a while. When I took it off the second time the middles were just barely done.

I ate it with leftover cornbread casserole. I could definitely use more practice cooking fish. This wasn't bad, but I think it could have been better if I had more skill at fish-cooking.

Our new house doesn't have air conditioning. I learned two things about myself this summer:

- If I'm living without air conditioning I put ice in my drink. I never use ice otherwise.
- If I'm living without air conditioning I don't cook. At all. Not the oven, not the stove, not even the microwave.

Aside from that it wasn't too bad, though I think we had a slightly cooler than average summer. But now it's fall, and it's just enough cooler that I'm cooking again. (Plus, I redid my budget and discovered that it would be a *really good* idea to cook for myself for a while.)

Tonight I made chili and corn casserole, using the same recipes I posted in this journal back in March. The chili, as always, had a few variations this time: a can of kidney beans in addition to the chili beans, and an extra can of tomatoes. I make excellent chili if I do say so myself. Which is not to say that I think everybody would like my chili as much as I do--people seem to have very individual tastes when it comes to chili--so it's a good thing I like the one I make.

I have a clafoutis (kla-foo-TEE) in the oven right now, after the recipe txanne sent me! Only according to Wikipedia and my mother* it's not really a clafoutis at all, but some other sort of dessert--they both say a clafoutis should have a more pancakey batter, and Wikipedia says it's not really a clafoutis at all if the fruit isn't cherries (though it then immediately gives several examples of non-cherry clafoutis). This dish is more egg-custard-like and has whatever fruit one wants to use. But whatever it is, I'm sure it will be tasty! It'd be hard to go wrong with these ingredients: the good cream (which comes in little glass bottles), delicious ripe nectarines, brown sugar that smells like cookies, etc.

I was happily surprised to find that the nectarines, which smelled ripe and delicious when I bought them at the co-op on Saturday afternoon, were still ripe and delicious tonight! I may have to go back for some more just for snacking on--I love ripe nectarines, but I've mostly given up on finding them at the big grocery store because they're usually unripe rocks there and I haven't always the patience to ripen them myself.

* I had never heard of them before txanne posted about them, but Mom knew of them both from having been a French teacher and because her grandmother used to make them.

Later: It's out of the oven now, and it's somewhere between yummy and delicious! It's wobblier than I expected, but I asked Mom to come over and look at it since she's made custardy things before and I haven't, and she said it looked done. It does feel and taste done, and is very tasty.

This afternoon between getting the new bike and going to my trombone lesson, I started a meal cooking in the crockpot: sauerkraut, kielbasa, and potatoes, all cut up in chunks (except for the sauerkraut, of course) and all steeping in there together. It's an old family tradition.

I learned the last time I made this that if I get impatient and try to eat it too soon, it doesn't taste like much, but if I let it cook for long enough it acquires its usual tasty flavor. So this time I let it cook for about five hours, of which an hour and a half was spent cooking on High and the rest of the time on Low, before I even took a bowlful. It's good and it will only get better. Yum. By the time it's really good, everything tastes pretty much like everything else but you still have the different textures.

Specifics on what's in this iteration of the dish: one large jar Gedney's sauerkraut (usually I've gotten Frank's in the past, but this seems to be working out well too), five kielbasa cut into bite-sized-ish chunks, what was left of a bag of Yukon Gold potatoes, also cut into bite-sized-ish chunks.

Edit: Mom said it's called bigos, and entered our family tradition when Mom and Dad spent time in Poland.

Made chili again tonight! It was good before and it's differently good now.

Chop:
2 carrots, cut thinnish (two because I happened to have two)
1 green bell pepper, large dices
1 zucchini, quarters sliced mediumish
1 onion, chopped large

Snap ends off a bowlful of snap peas and snap into smaller sections.

Put a medium glug of olive oil in a largish pot and add salt, a heaping spoonful of minced garlic, the onion, and the bell pepper. Cook, stirring most of the time, until the onion starts to turn translucent. Add 1 pound 80/20 ground beef and brown the beef, stirring most of the time. Add 1 can of diced tomatoes with chili peppers (from Aldi), 1 can Leinenkugel's Honey Weiss beer (left over from moving in), and carrots. Stir, then simmer covered for ten minutes, stirring only once or twice in the interim. Add zucchini, snap peas, 1 can of chili beans (from Aldi), and 1 drained can of sweet corn (from Aldi). Stir and decide there's enough room for a can of something else, and add 1 can of diced tomatoes (just ordinary ones, no chili peppers this time) and stir again. Let simmer 10 minutes uncovered, stirring occasionally; dish up a bowl, turn the heat down a little, and let it simmer some more while you enjoy your first bowlful. Add grated cheese if desired.

Edited to add:
I've been planning my meals lately and trying to spend less on food, because it's an easy place to save money (before this I was just shopping for whatever I wanted for a particular meal, without planning much at all). Expect a post sometime about that! So tonight I added up how much it cost to make this. Not counting things I keep on hand like olive oil, garlic, and salt, the beer since it's left over, and the two carrots Katie gave me, it cost me less than $7.50 to make the whole pot of chili! That's even including the optional cheese. It'll last me for at least four meals, maybe six or more--I expect I'll end up freezing some of it so it won't go bad before I get through it. Hooray!

I made the corn casserole today like I'd planned. I couldn't find the cake pan (still in a box somewhere) so I used a larger pan, roughly 12x15, and baked it for only 35 minutes instead of 45. It came out well and it's very tasty! It's sweetish, and I don't know where that comes from--maybe there's sugar in the cornmeal mix? Or maybe it's the sugar from the corn itself. Anyway, it's very tasty.

Katie told me she got the recipe from her fiance Aaron's family.

Drat! I forgot to put in the zucchini, snap peas, and green pepper!

(I don't know where it came from originally. [Edit October 2009: she got it from her in-laws.])

1 can creamed corn
1 can whole kernel corn--DO NOT DRAIN
1 egg
1 cup sour cream
1 stick butter or margarine, melted
1 box Jiffy cornmeal mix (or Aldi's equivalent corn muffin mix)

Mix well. Bake in a greased 9x13 pan at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

I made chili tonight! I don't think I've ever made chili before. I was going to follow a recipe, and went grocery shopping with the recipe somewhat in mind, but when I discovered the recipe called for a pot larger than I own, I decided to wing it. After all, it's ground beef with other stuff added in--and when you put it like that, it's something I make all the time!

Here's how I made it tonight (and it turned out pretty well):

Pour a glug of olive oil into a big pot. Add a large spoonful of minced garlic. Heat, adding salt and pepper. Then add 1 pound thawed 80/20 ground beef and brown. Once it's browned, add one onion, cut into large chunks. Let it cook a little while to let the flavors blend. Then pour in about half a can of Leinenkugel's Honey Weiss beer (left over from moving) and a can of diced tomatoes with chili peppers with their liquid. Stir a bit, then add a can of chili beans with their liquid (from Aldi). Stir a bit more, then add a drained can of corn. Stir and cook. After a while, decide to add what's left of the beer (aside from the few sips you've taken). As an afterthought, stir in a small handful of dehydrated carrots. Stir some more and cook a while longer. Come back and wonder if you ought to have let it boil like that. Turn heat down.

Serve with grated cheese.

I'll have lots of leftovers. Tomorrow I plan to make corn casserole (Katie's recipe) to go with the chili.

I bought some ground turkey with sundried tomatoes and basil the last time I was at the University's meat store. I planned to use it tonight, but I hadn't decided how. Then jenett posted an unrelated recipe that nonetheless provided inspiration. (I'd link to the recipe, but it's a locked post.)

Tonight's Stew:
2 small whitish onions
some olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
1 lb ground turkey with sundried tomatoes and basil
1 can garbanzo beans (Eden is on sale at co-ops here right now *and* it has kombu in it, a kind of seaweed that makes beans easier to digest)
1 can crushed tomatoes in sauce (I like Muir Glen, it doesn't have the tinny taste some canned tomatoes have)
1 bag frozen spinach

Peel onions and slice thin (doesn't matter how long the sections are, they just need to be thin so they'll cook through faster). Heat a large pot (not super big like a stock pot, but larger than a normal stew pot) with some olive oil and a little salt and fresh-ground pepper. Add the onions and cook, stirring occasionally, until most of the onions are translucent. Start water boiling in a separate pot. When it comes to a boil, add the spinach and cook according to package directions. Back at the main pot, add ground turkey and cook, breaking into lumps with a spatula. When it's in small lumps and seems to be cooked through, add the garbanzo beans (drained) and stir a bit, then add the crushed tomatoes (NOT drained). Let the whole thing cook together a bit, stirring occasionally. When the spinach is done, stir it in too.

It came out looking very Christmasy, what with the red tomatoes, the green spinach, and the off-white beans. Rather pretty.

Jenett's recipe calls for couscous. I think what I made would also like to be paired with something like that. The turkey tasted a bit sausage-y to me; I've decided I don't especially like having sundried tomatoes and basil in my turkey, but it was a nice idea (and thankfully it doesn't spoil the dish). Tonight since I didn't have any couscous on hand but wanted something to break it up a bit, I ate it with some sharp cheese I had (Manchego, from the dairy store at the U). That worked well, flavor-wise.

Adding a spoonful of natural peanut butter* to a bowlful of the ground-turkey-and-vegetables tikka masala is also good. Don't ask me why I tried it in the first place, other than that the peanut butter was sitting there in the fridge here at work, but the experiment was a success!

* The co-op has a machine for making your own peanut butter, very fun! You stick a container under the spout and press the button, and the peanuts in the hopper above go through a grinder and come out as peanut butter. There's no salt in it, but when that matters I just add salt to whatever I've put the peanut butter on.

Tonight I made a second try at a tikka masala dish. I used jarred sauce, but the idea of how to combine it with other stuff was my own.

1 lb. ground turkey
1 jar Ethnic Gourmet Calcutta Masala sauce (available at Seward Co-op)*
2 small bags mixed frozen veggies (in this case it was a broccoli/cauliflower/carrot/zucchini mix)

Brown ground turkey. Add sauce + 1/2 jar (about 8 oz.) water. Raise heat a bit to simmer. Once it begins to simmer, add the frozen veggies and cook a further 12 minutes, stirring occasionally. (Wash dishes during this time.) Turn off heat and let sit a further five minutes, then stir once more. Eat over the rice that's left over from Nate's supper. :-)


* I tried something similar a few weeks ago with different vegetables and a different brand of tikka masala sauce. The result: I don't plan to buy that brand of cauliflower OR that brand of sauce again--the cauliflower was too woody and the sauce, while not bad, wasn't anything to seek out either. This time it worked much better.

We went to Nate's extended family's Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. His aunt Jackie's sister Julie made delicious stuffed zucchini, and she gave me the recipe! I haven't tried making it myself yet, but I want to sometime soon.

(To give you an idea how good this is, people in the family who have never met Julie have heard how good her zucchini is!)

Julie's Zucchini

4 large zucchini
4 pieces of bacon
2 tomatoes, diced
1 onion, diced
1 tablespoon garlic (the pre-minced kind works well)
1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese

Parboil the zucchini for seven minutes, enough to soften them. Cut them in half the long way and scoop out the middles (save what you scoop out). Brown the bacon (it works best if you either cut it up beforehand, or else crumble it some after you cook it--you'll want smallish pieces for the final stage). Saute the onion and garlic, add the zucchini guts, add the tomatoes, add 1 cup cheddar, add the bacon. Mix. Stuff the zucchini. Top with 1/2 cup cheddar and bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes.

She said this is a little different from how she usually makes it, because she didn't have all her usual ingredients available--so it's definitely a recipe one can play around with. Also, I'm not sure on the amount of cheese--the last mention of it in the notes she gave me says "top with 1/2 chedd," and I *think* that was an additional 1/2 cup but maybe it was supposed to be half of the one cup mentioned earlier. I chose to transcribe it the way that would lead to more cheese. :-)

I'm really liking that grenadine syrup-lemon juice-water mixture I mentioned last night. This evening I discovered that if I get the proportions just right, it tastes like a drink from my childhood. There was a specialty foods store in Ames called Cheese and Puppets, and one of the things they sold was a European drink mix called Tisa. It came in little cubes (not cube-shaped, they were square and only about half as tall as they were wide, but what else would I call them?) that one could mix with cold or hot water for a drink. We didn't buy them often, but I liked them. I usually had them in hot water because it was easier to get them to dissolve that way.

After a while Cheese and Puppets closed, and I never saw any other place that carried Tisa. A couple of times I've looked for it online, but I've never found it, so I can only assume they went out of business too. I'm happy to have found a replacement!

I'm a genius! Proof of my staggering intellectual capacity: peanut butter on dense, moist chocolate cake. YUM!

Also, tonight I tried a variation on a favorite drink. When I was little, Mom used to keep a bottle of grenadine syrup around the house and for a special treat I could have some mixed with water. As an adult, I keep grenadine syrup around for the same purpose. Tonight I tried it (grenadine + water) with a little lemon juice added, and it was even better! It was a very refreshing flavor.

I recently wanted to make a double recipe of the super-tasty spaghetti sauce I like so much, but a single recipe is almost more than my frying pan can hold, so I decided to try to adapt the recipe to my crock pot. It worked OK; it's not as good as the original, but it's still quite tasty. It's been a few days, but here's what I remember doing:

- Brown two pounds of ground turkey in skillet with a little olive oil and some garlic, maybe some salt and pepper.
- Chop one onion into large chunks (would have used more but my other onion went bad; in the long run it was OK because I didn't have room in the crock pot for more!) Put the onion in the bottom of the crock pot.
- Add to the crock pot: all the dried chopped carrots you have left, and a little of whatever other dried veggies* look good. This included mushrooms, celery, I think some broccoli, green and red bell peppers, and maybe one or two other things.
- Put the browned ground turkey in on top of the vegetables.
- Pour two cans of crushed tomatoes in tomato paste on top of the rest.
- Cook on high for one hour and turn down to low for a further two hours. Do not open or stir until it's done.

As I said, it came out well enough. Things I'd do differently next time:

- I forgot the crushed red pepper!
- I'd chop the onion a little smaller. I chopped it larger than I usually do, thinking that would be the best way for cooking it in a crock pot, and I think I'd go the opposite direction next time.
- The dried mushrooms should probably have been chopped up a little smaller before I threw them in, and adding some fresh celery would have improved the outcome.
- This was really too large a recipe for my crock pot! Everything I found online about converting recipes said not to fill the crock pot more than about 3/4 full, and this filled it to the brim. I have a new crock pot now and I'm not sure how the sizes compare, so this may or may not be a problem next time.


*A while back Katie, Mom, and I split a sample order of dried veggies from Harmony House Foods, plus dried strawberries, which are tasty! The dried corn is also good for snacking on as is. Most of the dried vegetables were quite good reconsituted, some were also good unreconstituted, but one or two were just regrettable. Unfortunately I don't remember which ones. *grin* The dried chopped carrots are my favorite--soak them in a little water for five or ten minutes and add them to a dish as its cooking, and it's the same as using fresh!

Supper tonight was something I would have absolutely hated as a kid: canned peas AND canned lima beans! But for the last several days I've been eating almost nothing but breadstuffs (and things to go on the bread--I include pizza in the category of "breadstuffs with other stuff on top"), and I wanted to get some more vegetables into me quickly and cheaply. So I stopped at Aldi on the way home, spent less than $1 on a can of sweet peas (with added sugar, it turned out) and a can of lima beans (also with added sugar!) and stir-fried them together, with some minced garlic, olive oil, a pinch of thyme and as an afterthought a heavy sprinkle of garam masala (the good kind from Penzey's). It was pretty tasty, actually. Rather mushy, but not in a bad way.

I really like flavored olive oil, especially basil. (OK, most of what I do with it is to drizzle it on popcorn instead of butter--but still, I really like it.) However, it's kind of expensive at around $6 for an 8 oz. bottle. So Saturday night I made my own!

I did a bunch of research online first. Most of what I found wasn't recipes, but warnings of OMG BEWARE BOTULISM!!1!1!! However, Making Light had a piece on making habanero oil, so I decided to try adjusting that to fit herbs instead (taking appropriate precautions for botulism).

I took two cartons of thyme (bought fresh at the grocery store, put them to dry a little overnight, then they dried completely before I got around to doing anything with them--maybe next time I'll buy dried bulk spices at the co-op, that would be cheaper) and put the thyme into a Pyrex measuring cup, one of those glass ones with a pour spout. I poured in enough extra virgin olive oil to cover the thyme (roughly 16 ounces), then microwaved it for 60 seconds, "watching the whole time like a cat at a mousehole," as the Making Light piece said. Then another 60 seconds. Then I poked it with a chopstick. Then another 60 seconds. Then I poked it with a chopstick again, decided it must be done, and poured it into two bottles I had ready (two of the bottles I bought flavored oil in, thoroughly cleaned). It fit perfectly in the two bottles. I tried not to pour in any of the plant leaves, as leaving vegetable matter in the oil was one of the things that was warned against as a botulism risk, but I didn't try too hard as the dry leaves are less of a risk than if they had had any water content left in them.

The bottles are now in the fridge--not where I normally store oil, but as precaution against the much-warned-of botulism. I tried some on popcorn and was a little disappointed to discover that thyme oil just doesn't go as well on popcorn as basil oil does, but I think it will be very good for cooking with. I'll probably try some basil oil in a while too.