Overthinking a simple salad

I think too much. Not in a good way, like I'm always sitting around pondering DeCartes, but, rather, I  overthink things that really don't need my gray matter to put in extra time. Food is one of those things that I overthink--not the making of food so much as how I consume food.

I was a vegetarian for about a decade (until the night I fell asleep watching No Reservations and dreamed I was eating lamb. I woke up from that nap an omnivore--a voraciously hungry omnimore). I wasn't a vegetarian for ethical reasons--I think animals should be treated with respect while they're alive, but I have no problems with humans consuming flesh; I told others that I didn't eat meat for health reasons, but my limited diet wasn't well-maintained and I usually felt tired and run-down, not healthy. Truth is, I was a vegetarian because I needed to impose order in my life at a time when my mental health was spinning a bit out of control--the narrow parameters of vegetarianism were perfect for granting me a false sense of control while I moved through a world that I didn't understand in the least bit.

I eat meat now, and I love it, but I still fall back on old habits imposing order on the way I eat. It's not compulsive and totalitarian like my adopting vegetarianism--in fact, I think the end result is pretty healthy.

Here's an example: On Friday nights, Carla and I do burger night. It's the only night when the big kids don't eat with us, so we go nuts making the most gourmet burgers we can think up. (We'll definitely visit burger night as a topic here soon...they're just so good that we forget to take pictures of them until after we've cleared our plates.) On Saturday mornings, I have a burger night guilt hangover. I know it's a holdover from my years as a vegetarian, but I always feel the need to eat an outrageously healthy lunch. So today, when my stomach started rumbling and the kids sat down to eat their fish sticks, I started grabbing produce out of the fridge to whip up something good.

This is what we ended up with--a couscous salad made with apples, celery, carrots, grapes, onions, in a blueberry vinaigrette. The couscous base was an easy choice, as we had some left over from dinner the other night. I whipped up the vinaigrette using blueberry juice from some frozen blueberries I dethawed in the microwave and gave the kids. Oh, and I tossed some celery leaves on top after I plated it because they look nice. (Don't they look nice?)

Ingredients: couscous; apples, celery, carrots, grapes, onions (chopped and/or sliced). For the vinaigrette, mix blueberry juice; apple cider and olive oil at a ratio of 1:3; and salt and pepper to taste--just dump it all into a lidded container and shake it up, then pour it over your chopped produce, stir it up, and plop it onto the couscous. Oh, and then toss some of those pretty celery leaves on there. Easy peasy.

While I've got you, I need to take a second to sing the praises of this little machine--it's an old-fashioned apple peeler/corer/slicer and it makes stuff like this (not to mention apple pie on a whim) super easy. You can get one on Amazon--they're pretty cheap and they are awesome. Go get one.

The philosophy of potatoes

Despite what could be accurately described as a "cautious demeanor," I've learned to accept that there are some risks in this world worth taking. Our kids, for one (or three). Quitting my desk job to start our own business for another. Making hash browns.

Hash browns are one of those things I've never been able to get right because I never bothered to learn how to make them right. I maybe tried twice and, while the results were still tasty (I mean, a fried potato is a fried potato), the resulting mess of starchy mush was in no way a proper "hash brown."

Last night, as I was holding my baby boy and watching some "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," I started thinking about future breakfasts in this hypothetical farm on which we've hung both our hopes and dreams. We've taken some mighty strides away from boxed cereals and other processed breakfast fare, with homemade granola being our lazy-morning meal, so the next step in our goal to gain near-complete control over our diet is growing our own food--we're deadly serious about having egg-laying chickens someday, and our limited success in our little gardens superseded the failures and made us want to grow way more (if not all) of our own fruits and vegetables. Homegrown potatoes fed us for a few weeks this summer, so my thoughts turned to a breakfast of eggs and potatoes...hash browns.

My wife and I are learning how to cook--it wasn't a skill passed down to either of us from our parents, so we're finding our own way. That means we burn some meals, some dishes turn out painfully bland, and we sometimes sit down to happy surprises--you want every meal to delight the palette, but learning curves don't tend to work like that. But a recent experience with omelets, of all things, taught us that one little word in an online recipe--"cover," in the case of omelets--can nullify all previous failures and put a new dish into regular rotation.

I mean, it makes sense that you'd have to get the moisture out of potatoes if you want them to stick together and form a patty. Or does it? I don't know, cooking doesn't make that much sense to me, but when I Googled "hash browns" and read that you have to squeeze that water out--well, I can follow a direction. This morning I popped the shredder attachment onto the mixer (my current obsession with slicing and shredding foodstuffs in that thing also played into the decision to make hash browns, and not just a little bit) and, following directions from the Internet, I squeezed the hell out of those potato shreds before tossing them into the pan of oil. And it worked--they surely weren't the best hash browns ever made (and not just because I didn't have any lard on hand), but they were the best hash browns I've ever made.

I'm trying really hard to avoid the metaphor "gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet," but, you know...you do. You have to mess up to appreciate finally getting something right, have to go through lean years to appreciate when times are good, have to know a kid's cry to really cherish his or her laugh. I'm trying to stay really aware of this right now, as we ready ourselves to start a new chapter in our life--turning the page on years of failure and successes, diving into a whole new set of missteps and (hopefully) accomplishments. Broken eggshells, hard-won omelets, and pretty okay hash browns.

Renaming

Tonight I named dinner. I have noticed that with children, at least mine, the name and color and even the proximity of each item on a plate can make or break a dinnertime battle. So tonight we ate Apple Medley. If I had even whispered the word Pork Shoulder, I am fairly positive that no one would have touched their dinner.

Anyway, last week I threw pork shoulder, potato and carrots in the crock pot with some apple cider. It's delicious and requires almost no prep work. But, we had a lot of meat leftover so tonight's agenda was to use it up before it turned into a science project. I do think any meat would be great with this dish...chicken, steak, sausage--whatever you have on hand.

I love this dish because it is super quick.

Apple Medley

ingredients
1-2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
1/4 of an onion, chopped
2 Cups cooked pork shoulder, cubed
1 Cup fresh spinach, chopped
2 apples, chopped
2 strips of cooked bacon, crumbled
1-2 Tablespoons cinnamon
1 Cup couscous
1 Cup water
1 Cup shredded gouda cheese (optional)

directions
1. In a medium pan saute onions and garlic in extra virgin olive oil until tender. Add meat, spinach, apples and bacon. Add cinnamon to taste.
 *If meat begins to stick to the bottom of the pan add a bit of water (just enough to prevent sticking). Drop to a low heat and cover with a lid for 5-10 minutes or until apples are tender.
2. In a small sauce pan bring 1 Cup of water to a boil. Remove from heat. Add 1 Cup of couscous. Lightly toss with fork. Let couscous fluff up, about 5 minutes.
3. Combine couscous and apple mixture together, top with gouda cheese.

Enjoy!

Comfort

Whether you call it seasonal affective disorder, seasonal depression, winter blues, or whatever, it's a real problem up here in Northeastern Ohio, where the sun has taken its annual leave from our days and isn't expected to return until a few months of 2012 have passed. The monochromatic blanket of fleecy gray has been tossed over our landscape and, already, our bodies are struggling to produce enough vitamin D to get our tired and achy frames out of bed. 

I think this is where winter food traditions become more than just a way to pass the time--they become an anchor, a reason to haul ourselves out from under the piled quilts and let our feet make contact with the cold, wood floors. And it's not just hunger, which will do its part to drag us into the kitchen eventually, but the making of something that makes us feel good--I think there's something really important to that.

Obviously, this week's big to-do, Thanksgiving, is the archetypical example of cooking for and by tradition, and we'll be knee-deep in flour by mid-morning Thursday with the rest of ya'll. But this past weekend, when dusk and noon were pretty much identical, Carla and I both ended up in the kitchen, letting the oven do the furnace's job and dropping foods ranging from staples to sweets onto the kitchen table.

Am I going to get fat? Oh, hell yeah, but if eating homemade comfort foods actually "comforts" me, it's a lot better than ingesting the nasty chemicals in processed foods or going straight to the source and popping a pill every day to keep that dull ache off my emotional palette.

 

The fountainhead of food traditions in my life starts  with popcorn balls. When I was a kid, as soon as the weather turned cool, my mom would pull out the popcorn and corn syrup and fill our house with the smells of air-popped corn and stovetop candy. (And the popcorn tradition goes back further with her, too, as she told us stories the other day about her dad slipping into the other room and popping up a bowl of fluffy, white goodness for his wife and five children when my mom was knee-high to a grasshopper.) 

I asked my mom for her recipe, but she emailed it to the wrong address and I lost the printer paper she eventually handed me, so I'll have to get her index card and transfer the recipe to an index card of my own. But I had some Amish popcorn and all the ingredients so, yesterday, I Googled "popcorn balls" and tried my hand at Paula Deen's recipe. It kinda worked--I have some kinks to work out, but the exploded kernels did hold together, so I'll call them a qualified success. I'll feed them to the kiddos this afternoon and feel all self-satisfied in passing on a family tradition.       

  

If popcorn balls are an old tradition revisited, then these brownies with whipped cream are the tradition du jour in our kitchen. The brownie recipe is solid--I've been thinking about adding some white chocolate chips to the mix to change things up, but there's really no need to mess with that recipe. I can't stop fiddling with the whipped cream, though--I added cinnamon the last time I made the brownies, and last night, thinking of an orange mocha that we make at the shop, I grabbed a bottle of orange extract and the food coloring out of the cabinet and made an orange whipped cream. My goodness, they were good and they looked pretty in candlelight, too.

Dinner in 15 minutes

Kids are weird. Believe us, we've got three and They. Are. Weird. 

This is true for so many reasons, but their weirdness really takes center stage at the dinner table. For example, if we set a plate of rice in front of our children, they will turn up their noses and proclaim that they don't like rice. However, if we put a plate of steaming couscous before them, they'll grab their forks and say, "Yummy, rice." If we, as parents, ever took the time to correct them or debate why rice is a no-go while "rice" gets requests for seconds, those days are long gone. The kids eat it, so we buy "rice" in bulk.

But you know what gets old? Plain couscous, that's what. So Carla decided to whip up a 15-minute couscous dish featuring fresh veggies (including some broccoli side shoots from the otherwise dormant garden--despite the cold weather, the broccoli's still going strong) and peanut butter, all things the kids like. They even tasted the stir-fry sauce beforehand and gave it a thumbs-up.

It was delicious, and the little monsters wouldn't even consider eating it because, as you can see, the couscous and the peanut stir-fry were "touching." *Sigh*. 

Here's her recipe, which we will make again but serve in separate dishes for the weird ones.

Stir-Fry with peanut sauce and couscous

ingredients
3 cooked chicken breast, chopped
1 small onion, chopped
4 chives, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 medium carrots, shredded
1 cup broccoli, chopped
1 cup fresh spinach, chopped

2 cups cooked couscous

2 to 4 Tablespoons peanut butter
2 to 3 Tablespoons hoison sauce
1/2 teaspoon rice vinegar

directions
1. Warm oil in pan over a medium high heat. (I use olive oil because it's what I have on hand but peanut oil makes this even tastier.) Toss in onion, chives and garlic. Saute for about minute or two, just don't burn your garlic.
2. Add carrots, spinach, broccoli and cooked chicken. Turn pan to a low heat.
3. Cook until carrots are tender (about 4 or 5 minutes)
4. In a small bowl mix together peanut butter, hoison sauce and rice vinegar until you reach a taste you like. (You can add soy sauce in place of the rice vinegar, but I was out.)
5. Add peanut sauce to your stir fry mix and let the ingredients meld together for about a minute.
5. Serve with couscous mixed in or on the side.

Baked Potato Soup

The first snow prompts me to start digging through my soup recipes. Most folks go for chili but, to be honest, we still have a huge container in the freezer from the last time we made chili. Our kids aren't huge fans of kidney beans or ground beef, and 50% of them hate tomatoes. So soup it is.

This soup lingers in my head days before I actually make it, which is a huge plus because it does require a little prep work. For instance, when I cook bacon I bake it in the oven and I usually cook a whole pound. I use a little for that morning's breakfast and then keep the rest in a container in the refrigerator for salads, a BLT or, as in this case, for soup.

When the oven is on, I like to use it as much as I can so I tend to powerbake. If I start that morning baking muffins, I will likely make a quick casserole or a bread or something else we will eat during the week so that I'm getting good use out of the energy the stove is producing. On Friday, between baking bread and waiting for the pizza dough to rise, I baked potatoes with this soup in mind for the weekend. (Also I'm horrible about timing and waiting for yeast doughs to do their thing.) This is one of my most favorite wintertime soups, I hope you enjoy it.

Baked Potato Soup


ingredients
9 baked potatoes (I leave the skins on)
3 Cup Water
3 Cup chicken broth
2 Cup half and half
4 strips of cooked bacon, crumbled
2 Tablespoons of herbs (I use thyme & oregano, but use what you like)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cracked black pepper
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
4 chives, chopped
1 Cup of shredded cheddar cheese

directions
1. Dice potatoes and toss them in the crock pot
2. Add all the remaining ingredients and slow cook for about 8 hours
3. Ladle soup into food processor and blend. Start with 1/4 of the soup and then pour it back into the crockpot. Give it a stir and then continue blending the soup until you reach a consistency you like. Some people like a more brothy potato soup--we are more of a creamy soup family around here, so I usually blend about 80% of the soup.

Some recipes recommend that you saute your onions and garlic first, but I don't taste too much of a difference so I skip this step for the sake of one less dirty pan in the sink.

This is a lot of soup. You will be able to eat this all weekend and maybe even have a bowl or two leftover for lunch on Monday.  Enjoy!

Addendum - Cold Frame Repair

I'm not sure how interested you are in the ongoing saga of our attempts to regulate Northeast Ohio's schizophrenic growing season--and I'm fully willing to accept that you're not as invested in it as I am--but in case last night's post about repairing the hoop house cold frame left you wanting some visuals...well, here are some pictures.

 See the roof of the house in the background? 

That's snow--the cold frame did its job last night.

 Here's the ridge along the top. There's a better way to do it, 

I know, but I had scrap wood and limited time, and it works.

Ready for the next windstorm!