Home Cooking Sampler

When he was living alone, my father bought himself 2 or 3 cookbooks. One of these was the Home Cooking Sampler: Family Favorites from A to Z by Peggy K. Glass. It is filled with midwest staples like beef stroganoff, macaroni and cheese, pot roast and strawberry shortcake, all arranged alphabetically by recipe name. Last night I made the Shepherd’s Pie; it’s one of the places that the book automatically flips open to. The author says she “should call this Cowboy’s Pie since I usually use ground beef instead of lamb.”

Cowboy’s Pie

2 lb ground beef
.5 c onion, finely chopped
28-oz can tomatoes in puree
1.5 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp chili powder
.25 tsp paprika
1 tsp orange zest, grated
pepper, freshly ground
.5 c parsley, finely chopped
.33 c dry bread crumbs
5 c mashed potatoes
1 c Colby or Monterey Jack cheese, grated

In a large saute pan, saute the beef and onions until the beef is no longer pink and the onions are soft. Drain off any accumulated fat

Stir in the tomatoes, breaking them up. Stir in the salt, cumin, chili powder, paprika, orange zest, and pepper. Simmer, stirring often, until the juices are thickened and most of teh liquid has evaporated, about 15 minutes. Sitr in the parsley and bread crumbs and season to taste.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Spread the hot mixture in a 9 x 13-in or a 10 x 12-in shallow baking dish.

Transfer the mashed potatoes to a pastry bag with a star tip and pipe puffy rosettes or a crisscross pattern over the meat. [Or pretend you have a life and plop them on and spread them around with a fork. -j13] Sprinkle with the cheese.

Bake until the cheese has melted and the potatoes begin to color, about 15 minutes. Serve immediately.

I omitted the orange zest though I can see that it would have added a bright note. I wonder if a few tablespoons of orange juice would brighten it up? I also added some sliced button mushrooms and peas to the meat mixture when I added the bread crumbs.

It was a very satisfying meal.

Easter Eggs

On Easter Sunday I was going to dye eggs with the bee but she was preoccupied with eating candy. She did help for a minute, adding the turmeric. I have wanted to try natural dyes for a few years now. Just Braise’ post on how to dye eggs came in very handy. I dyed some eggs using turmeric and some using blueberries. I think her inclusion of a recipe for each dye was what I needed. Once I get the hang of something I’m pretty comfortable experimenting but it seems I need someone to draw up the baseline in specific detail first.

Next year, I think we’ll try boiling the eggs first then dyeing them overnight in the refrigerator. That way it might be more interactive for the bee.

Everybody helped eat them.

No-Knead Bread

I am late to the party on this recipe but I’m glad I gave it a try. I make bread in the bread machine pretty often and I always bake it in the oven. I even use the bread machine to make pizza dough on Fridays and cinnamon rolls on special occasions. But coordinating the timing of the process has never been my strong suite and it doesn’t always work out for me.

I had heard about no-knead bread and the Artisan Bread cookbook from several people but especially from Nancy. Finally, when Justyna linked to the Mother Earth News article explaining how to do it, that was just concrete enough for me to do something about my curiosity.

It is easy to have fresh bread whenever you want it with only five minutes a day of active effort. Just mix the dough and let it sit for two hours. No kneading needed! Then shape and bake a loaf, and refrigerate the rest to use over the next couple weeks. Yes, weeks! The Master Recipe… makes enough dough for many loaves. When you want fresh-baked crusty bread, take some dough, shape it into a loaf, let it rise for about 20 minutes, then bake.

I made the dough in the early evening: it was sticky and smelled like yeast. I was a bit worried about the size of the pot I was using but it worked fine and it fit in the refrigerator when the dough was ready to be put away. The next day, I made a loaf of bread around lunchtime. It was worth fussing with the pizza stone, the wooden peel and the tray of water in the oven. The bread was a little dense and it had a nice crust.

The recipe has neither dairy nor corn (I used wheat germ in place of the cornmeal on the wooden peel) and doesn’t take much preparation to use. I am looking forward to trying it as a pizza dough, for cinnamon rolls, and even as a flat bread.

Buttermilk pancakes

Ever since I stopped eating dairy, I have been looking for pancakes that I can eat. There are some gluten-free pancakes in the freezer at Trader Joe’s that are okay but they don’t really compare with the nice, puffy homemade pancakes I make for my husband and daughter. Recently, I checked out a book from the library, The Kid-Friendly Food Allergy Cookbook, and found it difficult to return. We tried a few of the recipes and the were all very good; it is a book I will be buying. My favorite recipe was for Buttermilk Pancakes. As for many of the recipes, there are variations and the dairy-free variation used a buttermilk substitute.

Buttermilk Pancakes
2 eggs, beaten until foamy
2 c rice flour
2 T sugar, optional
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 c soy yogurt
1 c rice milk
2 T lemon juice
.25 c butter* or margarine
2 tsp vanilla

The pancake batter requires low, slow cooking on a griddle or skillet. The first time I made them I had the heat set too high and they burned without cooking all the way through. I am used to quick-cooking pancake mixes and had to find patience while waiting when I made them the second time. Everyone in the family liked them.

*Since my daughter cannot have corn or nuts, we use butter for cooking. It doesn’t seem to bother me too much. I have not found a margarine or butter substitute that does not have either milk or corn in it.

The best part about the buttermilk substitute of soy yogurt, rice milk and lemon juice is that it can easily be used in other recipes. I have a cake recipe I am going to try it in.

Buttermilk Substitute
.5 c soy yogurt
.5 c rice milk
1 T lemon juice

use in place of 1 c buttermilk.

To market, to market

This morning I walked to the farmer’s market and bought: chocolate croissants and a little tart from a French nun, fresh bacon and Italian sausage, strawberry sandwich donut things, flowers, new potatoes, raisin egg bread, and duck eggs.

Sticky Buns

A few days ago, I suddenly realized I could make sweet roll dough in the bread machine. Friday, the bee and I put the ingredients in the machine. When it was done, we prepared the pan, rolled out the dough and rolled up the buns then cut them apart. I covered up the pan and let it rise overnight in the refrigerator. In the morning, I let them sit for 20 minutes then preheated the oven and baked them.

We don’t usually eat such rich breakfasts here but I have been looking for ways to convert foods with corn in them into foods that Fiona can eat since she is sensitive to corn. She does love spirals, though for her spirals are really cinnamon rolls. I have been working on coming up with a substitute for powdered sugar but in the mean time, I have some rice syrup–to use in place of corn syrup–in the pantry. So I decided to make the sticky buns and they were very successful. So successful I can only make them once in a while in good conscience.

In the mean time, I’ve searched online and found that powdered sugar can be made from granulated sugar by grinding it (by itself or with a bit of potato starch) in a blender. A coffee grinder (one devoted to sugar) supposedly works even better. Commercial powdered sugar is cut with corn starch to keep it from clumping. Another commercial product cut with corn starch is baking powder. According to several websites, baking powder is easy to make at home by mixing 1 part baking soda to 1 or 2 parts cream of tartar and, optionally, 1 part tapioca starch or arrowroot. It struck me as so odd to find that commercial baking powder has corn starch in it but commercial baking soda does not. I am still not quite convinced! As I sort through the pantry and muddle through the grocery store, trying to eliminate more corn ingredients from our diet, I have found the cornallergens.com website to be very helpful. The list of ingredients that potentially contain corn is certainly daunting, though.

Every day I think about getting most of our food from a CSA and a meat share and give up on processed foods entirely. What an exhausting prospect, though. Reading Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters is certainly encouraging the idea. Last night Fiona was acting kind of crazy. We finally figured out that she was having a reaction and, from all the signs, it looks a lot like she was reacting to almonds. Eating fresh, simple food made from unprocessed or nearly unprocessed ingredients wouldn’t solve our problems or cure our food sensitivities but I have a feeling it would bring a greater clarity to managing them.

Easter butter cake

Sunday, I made a lamb cake and between the cake and the frosting and I end up using four sticks of butter. I didn’t mean to! It was pretty buttery. Next time I need to pay more attention to the cake batter recipe I choose. A pound cake would probably work better, structurally.