homemade yogurt: one step closer to hippiedom

I know blogging’s been sparse around here lately. I fell off the vegan wagon and the blogging wagon at about the same time. It’s a good thing though: I’m studying feverishly to try and pass the last step between me and an MA in English Literature: the dreaded comps exam. So, expect blogging to resume something resembling regularity sometime after the first week of April, at which point I’m sure I’ll have cute Bufflo Gals’ 1st Birthday photos.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a new routine going in my kitchen, and it involves living organisms.

No, I’m not raising goats or something out in our rented back yard. I started making my own yogurt and now I don’t even know who I am anymore. I distinctly remember a friend saying she made her own yogurt one time, and thinking to myself, “that’s nutty. Just buy the yogurt, ya weirdo.”

But then I got my almost-one-year-olds off formula, discovered they love whole milk, and discovered further that they REALLY REALLY love whole milk yogurt. And that YoBaby shiz ain’t cheap.

Yogurt faces.

Another problem: though Claire loves to be spoon fed (she lives on purees, after all), Little Miss Feeds Herself wants no part of me lovingly spooning yogurt into her mouth. If I let her try to spoon feed herself, every end but the end with the yogurt gets in her mouth, and it’s an epic mess. If I try to feed her myself, it’s an insane battle of waving arms and yelling at me as she tries to grab the spoon while I’m trying to stick it in her mouth. About every 5th bite gets in there, which is nuts.

So, to solve the “my kids eat 8-16 oz of yogurt per day” problem and the Etta loves yogurt but eating it with her hands is difficult problem, I have discovered two solutions.

The first, as I mentioned before, is making my own yogurt. I basically follow this process from Annie’s Eats. I heat half a gallon of milk to 180 degrees to denature the proteins in it (which is apparently important). Then, I pour it into a Pyrex glass bowl and cool it to between 110 and 120 degrees. Then I add a couple of tablespoons of yogurt (at this point, I use the last bit of my homemade yogurt, but my first batch used plain Stonyfield Farm whole milk yogurt), and stir. Then, I preheat my oven for one minute (which gets it to about 120 degrees) turn it off, and turn on the light. Meanwhile I put a lid on the Pyrex and swaddle the whole thing with a few kitchen towels.

I leave the Pyrex in the oven with the light on overnight, for about 12 hours. In the morning, when I wake up, I go in, take off the lid, and it’s yogurt. Well, yogurt swimming in whey. So, I line a colander with either a couple layers of cheesecloth or a thin dishtowel like a flour sack towel, and set it in a bowl (you could just do the sink, but I’m saving the whey because I’m crazy and want to try making whey ricotta cheese), and strain the yogurt until it’s nice and thick and creamy. Half a gallon of milk left overnight yields 1.5 quarts of yogurt and 2 cups of whey. Scraping it off the towel with a spatula is really as tough as the work gets here.

What the yogurt looks like when I take it out in the morning, pre-straining.

Straining yogurt through a colander lined with a flour sack towel.

Resultant strained yogurt and whey.

Taste-wise, the homemade yogurt is just as good as the plain whole milk yogurt I was buying. It works great as a sour cream substitute, too. To serve it to the girls, I usually mix it with some pureed fruit and some oatmeal baby cereal so they get a complete breakfast. For snacks or when they need a little something after dinner, I just stir in a smidge of agave syrup for sweetness (because they can’t have honey yet).

This brings me to: how do I get the yogurt into the girl who won’t be spoon fed?

I had seen on Pinterest some reusable baby food pouches that are basically the same as those Plum baby food pouches, except the spout is on the side and the top is like a Ziploc bag. So, after searching on Amazon and reading some reviews, I decided to go with the Yummi Pouch (consider this a mini-review, I guess) because they were cheaper than the Little Green Pouch, which I was also considering. They are awesome, y’all. I just fill them with 4 oz. of yogurt, zip up the top, hand it to Etta, and she knows exactly how to hold it and suck the yogurt out of the spout, a feat she figured out within seconds of having the first drops squeezed onto her tongue and realizing that sweet yogurty goodness was inside that thing.

The Yummi Pouches claim to be dishwasher safe, but I’m not sure I trust my dishwasher to hold it open enough to get clean. So, I’ve been washing them by hand using a bottle brush, and drying them on my bottle rack. Works fine. One tip I did read in one of the reviews: the lids are easy to lose, but are the same diameter as the disposable baby food pouches, so if you use those, just save the lids in case you lose the lids to your pouches. I’ve tried the lids from a GoGoSqueez applesauce pouch and they worked just fine!

Overall, my newfound yogurt-making hobby is saving me money– a 32 oz. container of Stonyfield Farm plain whole milk yogurt costs me $4ish, while an entire gallon of milk, which yields 64 oz. of yogurt, costs the same. So the homemade is literally half the price, with none of the trash of the packaging. And since I also mix it with fruit purees, we can compare the cost to the YoBaby yogurt, which would be almost $11 for the amount a gallon of milk yields in homemade yogurt! Maybe I’m not as crazy as I once thought my yogurt-making friend was!

beans for breakfast? heck yes

I know I said in my last post on Vegan for Lent that I was having issues with breakfast. Until this weekend, when I somehow concocted the BEST BREAKFAST EVER. Yes: a breakfast worthy of all caps. I didn’t even wish it had a runny yolked egg on top, which means you *know* it’s good.

It started, like some of my best dishes, with trying to make something with the weird odds and ends we had left a week after my last grocery trip. In this case, I had 4 small potatoes starting to go soft, and thus an amazing breakfast was born:

Makes 3-4 servings

Ingredients:
4 palm-sized potatoes
1 onion, halved, one half quartered and sliced thinly, the other half diced
1 jalapeno, diced
1 can pinto beans
3 cloves garlic, minced (we reallllly like garlic, so if you don’t, maybe start with one clove and see what you think)
Cumin
Paprika
Chipotle chile powder
Creole seasoning (even I admit this is weird, so skip it if you want)
Oregano
Red wine vinegar
Salt
Pepper
Oil of your choosing (I used vegetable oil for the hash browns and coconut oil for the beans)
Salsa
Corn tortillas

The thing about a no-recipe recipe is that I sort of threw this together while feeding breakfast to my babies. When cooking on my own, I rarely measure things. I just pour spices out into my palm or sprinkle them over a dish and go with what feels good. So, if you need exact spice measurements, this recipe may not be for you, but I say go with your gut and taste along the way.

I shredded the potatoes using a food processor, then pressed them in a fine mesh strainer to dry them out a bit. Meanwhile I heated up enough vegetable oil to cover the bottom of my skillet. I added the shredded potatoes, jalapenos, and sliced onion once the oil was hot. Then I seasoned with salt, pepper, and yes, Creole seasoning. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I saw the shaker sitting there and went for it. It tasted delicious. Fry the potatoes, stirring occasionally, until to your desired crispyness. I totally believe that frozen hash browns would work here, but I needed to use the potatoes.

In another skillet, I melted a couple tablespoons of coconut oil, because I like the subtle coconut flavor with the beans. Then I added the diced onion and garlic and sauteed til softened. Then I added cumin, paprika, and some chipotle chile powder to the mix, stirring for about a minute. Then I drained the can of pintos and added them to the skillet with the garlic and onions. Then I remembered a favorite rice and beans recipe and added some oregano and a few dashes of red wine vinegar, along with salt and pepper. Cook until the hash browns are done.

Layer the beans over the hash browns, pour some salsa over the top (we used a roasted garlic and cilantro salsa), and serve with a couple of corn tortillas on the side.

Variations: I’m sure any kind of beans would work here, except maybe garbanzos. And yes, it would be excellent with a fried egg or some pepperjack cheese or a dollop of sour cream on top, but it’s perfectly tasty by its own vegan self.

Vegan for Lent, Week 2

This week in my lenten discipline has taught me something about my psychology: I don’t like being told what to do. The minute there is a rule about something, all I want is to break that rule. I may go weeks without eating meat naturally, but the minute I make a rule that I have to be vegan, all I want are runny yolked eggs, things covered in cheese, and bacon cheeseburgers. I may have taken advantage of Sunday to have both a cheeseburger and cheesy pizza. I could spiritualize this into a nice post about how sinful I am, or something, but the reality is, from the very beginning, people don’t like being told not to eat (of the fruit of that tree, or of the fruit of Five Guys). I may be a bad Christian, but it seems to just be the way people are, and I’m people too. I can’t imagine God not knowing that we’d be this way from the start. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with cheese, really, but doing without it has definitely required me to think harder than I would otherwise think about my food.

Breakfasts are especially difficult. I tend toward the hypoglycemic in the mornings and have always preferred protein to carbs or fruit to start my day. Before, my go-to was homemade Egg McMuffins, or a cheese stick. Rarely I’ll have a KIND nut and grain bar. Now, I find myself having an extra cup of coffee to tide me over, because I don’t want to eat cereal or oatmeal or fruit. So, easy vegan breakfast solutions that are not cereal with almond milk would be appreciated.

Another thing I’ve noticed with being a vegan is: I get bored with the leftovers really fast. Even if a meal was really great the first time, I don’t really want to eat it again very often. This has led to some weird ass dinners when I am avoiding leftovers. The other night I seriously ate a baked potato with green goddess salad dressing on it because I couldn’t face any of the zillions of tupperwears in my fridge. Usually, I’ll put a poached egg on leftovers, or turn them into a frittata, to shake it up a bit, but I can’t do that with this diet.

This week I tried to use some of the online recipes I’d collected on my Pinterest board so you guys can try them too. Here’s what we ate in the last week (it’s so few meals because they always seem to make a ton of leftovers, and because I was home alone for several days, so I did less cooking):

This gumbo was really tasty served over brown rice, and the friends we had over for dinner who aren’t vegan seemed to think so too! The key, to me, to make up for the lack of sausage is the addition of some liquid smoke seasoning.

These cookies use coconut oil instead of butter, and I veganized them by using applesauce and a little baking powder and soda to replace the egg. The texture was slightly different than the average cookie, but they were decidedly cookie-like and very tasty. They basically taste like a slightly coconutty sugar cookie.

I wanted to try a cheese substitute, just for the experience, so I largely gave this casserole a try just to use the Daiya cheese. While I couldn’t get the cheese to melt like it claims it will, I found it to have a good flavor, and will buy their products after Lent is over for my lactose-intolerant husband. The casserole itself was a little dry, so I added salsa to my plate. If I made it in the future, I might just pour some enchilada sauce in with the veggie mix to make it saucier.

This squash and kale bowl had a great flavor but wasn’t quite filling enough to be a whole meal. I might add bulgur or quinoa to make it more filling next time.

OK, so I didn’t really cook this tofu banh mi. Consider this a plug for The Root Cafe here in Little Rock. All of their food is local and delicious. It was great to know there was a place I could go and have something yummy for a lunch out with a friend.

This tagine was a dish I had made and liked even before my Vegan Lent, so I knew we’d like it this time around. I was short on zucchini, so I subbed in some frozen green beans, and they worked beautifully. I also didn’t have preserved lemons, so I used lemon infused olive oil, lemon zest, and some extra lemon juice.

2 weeks down, one month to go!

farmer’s market meals

Last Saturday I actually made it to the Farmer’s Market. This was my haul:

Don’t you love how I subconsciously arranged everything in ROYGBIV order? I swear it wasn’t intentional.

I figured it might be fun to turn my Farmer’s Market trips into posts about how we eat for a week on our delicious local produce.

The cukes and the yellow squash immediately became pickles, the squash joining some zucchinis we had grown to become summer squash bread and butter pickles (seriously, such a good recipe, though I skip the whole ice bath part and they still turn out just dandy), and the cukes becoming my absolute favorite, I swear they’re as good as Claussen’s, dill refrigerator pickles.

pickles in progress

The gorgeous heirloom tomatoes and the Japanese eggplant joined some mozzarella and some home-grown basil to become a delicious margherita pizza.

Look at that tomato flesh. So red, it's almost black.

The pattypan squash was sauteed in olive oil with home-grown herbs and served alongside a red lentil salad with heirloom tomatoes, and some tilapia.

And the remainder of the squash, eggplant, and tomato were turned into a sort of ratatouille which we ate with goat cheese over pearl couscous:

This was eaten alongside some tomato and onion focaccia I made using some tomatoes we grew in our community garden:

Truly the most beautiful bread I have ever baked, and also one of the tastiest.

Finally, the blackberries were mixed with honey, lemon zest, and corn starch and topped with a few pats of butter and a cornmeal crust to become personal-pan cobblers:

All in all, a delicious week of largely local food!

the view from my table

So, food blogging. It’s something I have definitely fallen down on, what with being busy with learning about literature and generally falling out of regular blogging in the post-a-day way I used to do. But, I’m still a total foodie, and have been meaning to get back into geeking out about food.

Add to that, I was recently chatting with a friend about our less-meatarian diet, and she was asking me questions about what our meals actually look like. It’s definitely hard, when first transitioning to a less-meat diet, to figure out what to put on a plate that isn’t a meat and two sides. Mark Bittman addresses this in his book (an AMAZING resource) How to Cook Everything Vegetarian:

Even those people who do cook at home reckon that the easiest way to anchor a meal is to throw a steak or a chicken breast on the grill or under the broiler and scatter a few nominal vegetables around it…But a vegetarian meal is more commonly a table with a few dishes on it, all of them of equal importance…The grain is not less valuable than the cooked vegetable, the salad, or the bread: they’re all there to compliment one another. Pickles you made yourself, a nice piece of cheese, or a bowl of nuts–all are valid courses in the vegetarian meal.

Now, Bittman is certainly not a vegan (note the cheese reference), and neither am I. I choose to eat much less meat than the average American for environmental, humanitarian, and health reasons. I try to follow the dictates of Michael Pollan’s famous maxim: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. I try to eat food, by which he means whole ingredients, rather than food products or processed foods. And I try to eat more plant-based foods. But I still eat fish, eggs, and cheese, and the occasional ethically-raised meat when I can afford it.

Anyway, I figured that a weekly roundup of what we actually eat might help friends looking to transition to a less-meat diet get some ideas about what less-meat meals actually look like. These posts will be characterized by most-likely iPhone photography of our meals, which, I confess, more often than not are eaten on TV trays in our living room while we watch something from our DVR. I’ll share links to recipes when I can, or share which cookbooks the recipes came from. My two most frequently used cookbooks are both by Bittman– the aforementioned How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and The Food Matters Cookbook.

So, what did our meals this week look like?

This meal was definitely the most veggie-licious of our week. I tossed a bunch of sliced veggies (red bell pepper, zucchini, squash, onion, grape tomatoes) with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, garlic, and some Herbes de Provence. I broiled them for about 15 minutes while I made some pearl couscous and cooked a couple of pieces of fish in a skillet. Such a tasty and colorful meal. The fish was really not even necessary. Might have poached an egg and served it on top or just tossed in some chickpeas for a fish-free version.

This is a common meal for us. Cuban-style black beans (I skip the radishes) over coconut rice (the idea for the rice came from this recipe). Almost always eaten with a Cuba Libre (rum and Coke with a lime).

Do those veggies look familiar? They’re leftover from meal #1. I cut them into bite sized pieces, sauteed them til warm, and then added some eggs and gruyere cheese to the mix, for a sort of veggie scramble. I do some variation of this a lot when I have leftover veggies that need to be used up.

Our other meals this week: cheese dip and margaritas and guacamole at a fave Mexican restaurant. Cheese dip and salsa another night too. Chicken and veggie pizza from another fave place. And Mexican night at our church. Might be avoiding anything with a Mexican flavor for this next week!

vegan pumpkin muffins

I’m not a vegan, but I’m very interested in eating less meat and animal products, for ethical, environmental, and humanitarian reasons. As I strive to eat more and more meat free meals each week, I’ve been perusing vegan cooking blogs and have been inspired to try my hand at vegan baking. I’ll probably never end up a vegan, but I can see myself going mostly vegetarian– I’ll never give up eggs or dairy completely, though. (Seriously, there is almost nothing in life that isn’t improved by cheese.)

This weekend, I decided to give the whole vegan baking thing a go, and I started with pumpkin muffins. True fact: there are a few things I hoard like the apocalypse is coming. It’s not anything practical, like toilet paper or something– no, I hoard butter, which I buy every time I go to the store, and canned pumpkin. You may remember a few years ago when there was a canned pumpkin shortage? Anyway, at that time, I wanted to make something pumpkin-y, but there was no pumpkin to be had. When I finally got my hands on a can of pumpkin, I held it to the sky like Scarlett O’Hara with her turnip and swore that as God is my witness, I’d never go without pumpkin again. Look in my pantry and you’ll find probably six cans of the stuff. I like pumpkin, and, though many think of it as just an October/November treat, I enjoy it as long as the weather is cold.

I looked at a few different pumpkin muffin recipes, and this is what I cobbled together.

Vegan Pumpkin Muffins

(This recipe was supposed to make 24 muffins. Mine made more like 28. Magic!)

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2cups sugar
2 tablespoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground or freshly grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 15 oz. can pureed pumpkin (Make sure it’s not pumpkin pie mix)
1 cup soy milk (almond milk would work too)
1 cup vegetable oil
3 tablespoons maple syrup

+ a few tablespoons sugar and a bit of cinnamon (I used 3 T sugar and 1 tsp cinnamon) for sprinkling on top of the muffins

Feel free to fold 2 cups of chopped nuts into the finished batter if you’d like.

Preheat the oven to 400. Lightly spray muffin tins with cooking spray. Mix the dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Whisk the pumpkin, soy milk, oil, and maple syrup together in a smaller bowl. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Fill the muffin cups 3/4 of the way full with the batter, then sprinkle each with the cinnamon/sugar mixture. Bake at 400 for 18-20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

Verdict: These muffins have great flavor, and I’d totally make them again.  I took them to church on Sunday, and everyone loved them. They were a particular hit with the kids, even my friends’ kids who are extremely picky.  My only complaint is that they’re a little denser than non-vegan muffins. If I decide to fiddle around with the recipe some more, I might add a little baking soda to see if I can get more fluffiness.

my #1 most favorite holiday recipe: Russian Tea

Image: day 212: over the shoulder, via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

When we lived in Charleston, I hosted the annual Thanksgiving potluck for all the pediatrics residency folks, most of whom didn’t get the holiday off and couldn’t go home and celebrate with their families.  We’d cram people into our little house, folks perched wherever they could, my dogs hoping someone would drop some turkey.  The first year, I made my Memaw’s Russian Tea, and by the end of the party, people were DEMANDING the recipe.  Every year after that, when I’d send out invites to the Thanksgiving Potluck, people would ask, “Will there be Russian Tea?”  Of course! It’s not Thanksgiving without it!

It should be said that there is absolutely nothing Russian about Russian Tea, or my family, which, as best as I can tell, is mostly British and Irish.  Russian Tea is really a citrusy spiced tea, best when spiked with booze like bourbon or dark rum.  I like to make a giant batch in my stock pot, keep it in the crock pot during the party (Memaw keeps hers in an old percolator thing that keeps it SCALDING hot), and then put leftovers in pitchers in the fridge for heating up a cup at a time later.  So, here’s the recipe for my favorite holiday tradition:

Russian Tea

• 4 cups water, plus 8 additional cups
• 4 tea bags (plain tea, like Lipton)
• 1.5 cups sugar
• 2.5 cups pineapple juice
• 1.5 cups frozen orange juice concentrate
• 6 tsp. fresh lemon juice
• 8 whole cloves
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• Dark rum or bourbon

Boil 4 cups water and steep 4 regular-sized tea bags.  Add to that mixture in a large stock pot 1½ cups sugar, 2½ cups pineapple juice, 1½ cups orange juice (frozen concentrate, not diluted), 6 Tsp. fresh lemon juice, 8 whole cloves, 2 cinnamon sticks, and 8 cups water.  Bring to a boil, serve warm, add dark rum or bourbon as desired. I recommend adding the booze to each cup individually, so the buzz-inducing properties don’t get cooked out.

Easy double batch:
Boil 8 cups water with 8 tea bags, add 1 large can pineapple juice, 1 family size frozen OJ, 12 Tsp. lemon juice, 2 cups sugar, 16 whole cloves, 4 cinnamon sticks, and 16 cups water.

bufflo’s boozy peach cobbler

Along with raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bourbon is one of my favorite things.  Somewhere high on the list is also peach cobbler.  So I decided to combine the two into a boozy peach cobbler, to great effect, and I thought I’d share my recipe, created after looking at several recipes and finding none I loved, with you.

You can't go wrong with Maker's Mark.

Local Arkansas peaches!

This cobbler has a rustic cornmeal crust, which I think really goes well with the peaches and adds to the Southern appeal.

Rustic Cornmeal Crust:

• 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup yellow cornmeal
• generous pinch salt
• 1 T sugar
• 9 T frozen or very cold butter cut into cubes
• 3-4 T ice cold water

Pulse the flour, cornmeal, salt, and sugar together 2 or 3 times in the bowl of a food processor fitted w/ a plastic blade.  Add the cold butter and pulse another 8 or 10 times, until the mixture looks like small peas.  Drizzle the cold water through the mouth of the processor while pulsing until the mixture starts holding together (It may take you more water. That’s fine. My crust didn’t hold together very well, so I wish I had added more water).  Turn the pastry onto a lightly floured surface and form into a 2 inch thick disk.  Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Boozy Peach Cobbler:

• Peaches (I had about 8 smallish peaches, another time I had 4 softball sized peaches, so you be the judge of what will fit in your dish)
• 1/2 cup honey (or sugar, if you don’t keep that much honey around)
• Zest of 1 lemon
• 2 T bourbon (or more, you can never have too much!)
• 2 T cornstarch
• Cinnamon to your taste (I like cinnamon, so I used 1 tsp)
• 4 T butter

Preheat oven to 425. Peel and slice the peaches and mix with all ingredients except the butter.  After your crust has chilled, roll out to 1/4 inch thickness on a floured surface and transfer gently to your pie dish/cake pan/whatever you’re using, letting excess hang over the sides.  Pour in the peach mixture, placing pats of butter on top.  Fold over the overhanging crust, tearing off peaces to cover the middle if necessary. Place the cobbler in a rimmed cookie sheet to catch any overflow of the bubbling filling and bake at 425 for 40-50 minutes, until bubbling and crust is nicely browned.  Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

Excuse the chipped bowl. We had a few years without a dishwasher, and they got chipped all to heck in the hand washing.

a winner of a chicken dinner

We’re eating a lot less meat these days, but when I saw organic free-range chicken on sale at Kroger, I knew I had to grab it.  After that, I had to decide what I wanted to do with it.  Very quickly, I remembered Jamie Oliver’s Chicken in Milk recipe which I had seen hyped on Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn more than once.  They even called it “the best chicken I’ve ever had.” So of course I had to try it!

Overall, the recipe is a very easy one.  Aside from browning the chicken in butter in a skillet (which I think you could totally skip if you’re not planning to eat the skin), the recipe is pretty hands-off.  You just put all the ingredients in a dutch oven and let the chicken braise in the delicious flavors of lemon, herbs, garlic, and, strangely, milk.  Many Apartment Therapy commenters seemed confused that you’d mix milk and citrus and were concerned about curdling. They were right to be concerned, as I often mix lemon juice with milk to make buttermilk in a pinch.  In this recipe, it’s just lemon zest, not juice, in with the milk, so it doesn’t really curdle and separate so much as melt into the chicken, tenderizing it with the lactic acid and keeping it nice and moist during cooking. This is NOT a dried-out chicken recipe.  I’m pretty sure if you just served this up to someone, they’d have no idea milk was an ingredient.

When perusing recipes online, always read the comments– you’ll probably pick up some interesting tips that may make for a better dining experience.  Reading the entire Apartment Therapy post and comments rather than just Jamie’s recipe let me know that I should probably cook this with the lid on for the first hour and off for the last 30 minutes.  I also got the idea to stuff the cavity of the chicken with the zested lemons and a little thyme (the herb I had on hand, though the original recipe calls for sage).

OK, so it's not magazine gorgeous and I should have tucked the wings back instead of letting them flop all over. I PROMISE it's one of the tastiest, easiest "roasted" chicken recipes you'll find.

Here’s the recipe, modified to my liking.

Chicken in Milk, a la Jamie Oliver

Ingredients:

• 1 3.5 lb. organic chicken
• 1 pint milk
• 2 lemons, zested, and lemons halved (If you can, zest the lemon with a coarser grater or use a vegetable peeler for larger strips)
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 handful of sage leaves or whatever herb you have on hand. Rosemary or thyme works too.
• 10 (or more) cloves garlic, skin left on
• salt
• pepper

How to:

1. Preheat oven to 375°F
2. OPTIONAL, only do this if you like to eat crispy chicken skin or want it to look pretty and brown, otherwise, it’s just an unnecessary step: Season chicken all over with salt and pepper and heat a few tablespoons of butter or olive oil in your dutch oven. Sear the chicken to golden brown on all sides. Remove the chicken and discard the oil/butter. Otherwise, just season chicken all over and move along.
3. Stuff cavity of chicken with the halved zested lemon and some of your herbs.
4. Place chicken and all other ingredients back into the dutch oven, sprinkling with salt and pepper to taste. Cook for 1.5 hours, lid on for the first hour, lid off for the last 30 minutes. Baste if you want, but I totally didn’t, and it worked out fine.
5. Let chicken rest for at least 10 minutes before cutting and serving. While it rests, fish out the garlic, because it’s SO YUMMY smeared on crusty bread.
6. Reserve the sauce. Pour it over the chicken, dip your bread in it, pour it over the chicken and serve over rice, make mashed potatoes with it… DO SOMETHING WITH IT, as it’s so delicious.

I served my Chicken in Milk with homemade beer bread smeared with the garlic and sauteed squash and zucchini.

Save your chicken carcass and giblets to make chicken stock.  It’s SO NOT HARD, and so much more flavorful and less sodium-filled than canned/cartoned stock.  My method is to put the carcass and giblets with a halved onion in my crock pot and cover with water. Then I cook it on low for at least 12 hours. Fish out the big stuff, strain the rest, the freeze in Ziploc bags in 1 or 2 cup increments for future use.

It may be cloudier than store-bought stock, but it's much more flavorful and has way less sodium.

I freeze my stock flat in Ziplock bags in 2 cup increments. Makes for fast defrosting in a sink of warm water when I'm ready to cook. Usually it's thawed by the time I'm done chopping other ingredients.

Let me know if you try this recipe!

CSA: Charleston – ratatouille two ways and other fun

We are moving this Saturday, and will be picking up our last CSA box this afternoon.  We’ve arranged for friends to take over our boxes for the three weeks left in the season after we’re gone.  All of this means: this might be my last CSA post for a while, because who knows how long it will take us to get our internet hooked up in our new house.  Here’s what we did with last week’s goodies.  We gave away a good portion of it because we wanted to be able to eat at some of our favorite Charleston restaurants one last time, but I made some goodies with what we used!

• 8 ears corn (gave away half)
• 6 cucumbers
• 4 slicing tomatoes
• 1 bag cherry tomatoes
• 4 bell peppers (gave away 2)
• 3 yellow squash
• 1 watermelon (ate at the beach)
• 2 eggplants (gave away 1)
• 1 bag green beans (gave away half)
• 3 pattypan squash
• 7 banana peppers (Jon ate 2 raw)
• 1 bag potatoes (gave away half)

I confess I forgot to write down which days we ate what, so I’ll just write up each meal.

Meal 1: Ratatouille Pizzas

Inspired by the Smitten Kitchen’s ratatouille tart, I decided to make a ratatouille pizza.  I made a double recipe of crust before work using this recipe:

• 3 cups all purpose flour
• 1 cup whole wheat bread flour
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• salt
• 2 packets yeast
• 1 1/3 cup warm water

1. Mix flours in bowl with 2 T salt and the oil.
2. Stir yeast into warm water.
3. Using dough hooks on mixer, pour yeasty water into flour while dough hooks are moving.
4. Let rise at least 1 hour, preferably all day.
5. Separate into two balls and stretch each ball across a baking sheet.

Then I topped each pizza crust with some leftover tomato sauce I’d made and frozen using this super easy recipe from the Smitten Kitchen (I’m a bit of a fangirl).

Next up: time to slice these babies up!

Then I arranged the slices on top of the sauce, drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper, sprinkled with herbes de provence, and sprinkled with parmesan cheese.  I baked the pizzas for 20 minutes each at 450.  They came out delicious!

Meal 2: Ratatouille with poached eggs over couscous

After the pizza, I still had a gallon bag full of sliced squash, zucchini, eggplant, and peppers.  I also had half of my tomato sauce leftover.  So I decided to try a baked version of ratatouille following this Smitten Kitchen recipe for Ratatouille’s ratatouille, inspired by the Pixar film.  Mine wasn’t as pretty as Smitten’s, but I don’t have a mandoline for fancy slicing, so I think I did pretty well with just my knife!

I decided to serve my ratatouille over couscous with a poached egg on top.  Considering I’d never poached an egg before, and considering I’m still getting over an aversion to runny yolks, I think my poached eggs came out pretty darn well!  It was an absolutely delicious meal. and we still can’t decide if we liked the ratatouille pizza or the ratatouille with poached egg and couscous better!

If I were a real food blogger, I'd have a photo of the yolk oozing out of the poached egg. Lesson learned.

Meal 3: Smoky corn chowder and Greek cucumber salad

I made a smoky corn chowder with the corn using this Real Simple recipe, which I’m a big fan of.  I’m an even bigger fan of it now that I have an immersion blender– the first time I tried the recipe, I had to use a blender, which resulted in a molten corn chowder volcano.  An immersion blender is really a must-have for creamy soups, and it’s also crucial to the tomato sauce I mentioned above.

To go with the chowder, I decided to go Greek with the cucumbers and slicing tomatoes.  I chopped them into bite-size chunks and tossed them with a dressing made with the following recipe:

Whirl the following in a food processor:

• 1 cup crumbled feta cheese
• 1 cup Greek yogurt
• juice of 1 lemon
• 1 clove garlic, chopped finely
• 2 sprigs oregano (any herb fresh from the garden would work!)
• 1 tsp. ground cumin
• 1 tsp. ground coriander
• 2 dashes hot sauce

The resulting salad was delicious, and the smoky cumin in the sauce went well with the smoked paprika in the soup.

Meal 4: Nicoise salad with pesto

To use up the last of the veggies, I adapted two recipes to make a nicoise salad with a pesto dressing.  I always have good pesto on hand, because my mom makes her own with home-grown pesto, and, even if I have to pack it on ice in a cooler, I always bring home a jar or two after a visit.

I boiled four eggs and let them cool.  I chopped the potatoes and the green beans into bite-size pieces, then boiled the potatoes for 10 minutes, then added the green beans to the pot and boiled both together for 5 more minutes.  Then I drained the potatoes and green beans and rinsed with cold water to cool.  I cut the cherry tomatoes in half and tossed all the ingredients in a bowl with a can of tuna and a can of garbanzo beans (both drained) (not traditional, but I wanted to use them up before the move).  Then I dressed the salad using a mixture of pesto, lemon juice, olive oil, and salt and pepper.  Yum!

Meal 5: Pattypan scramble

One morning when I was home alone, I fried up some bacon, sauteed the pattypan squash in the drippings, and then scrambled them with eggs, mozzarella cheese (it’s what I had), oregano (it’s what I grow in my front yard), and the bacon.  A yummy brunch!

After all those meals, you need dessert: Key Lime Coconut Cake

I’m not kidding about my Smitten Kitchen fangirldom.  I went looking for a recipe to use up some coconut before the move, and I found this Key Lime Coconut Cake recipe.  Whaddaya know? I had limes too! I was so excited about this cake, only to be devastated when It got half stuck in the pan and crumbled into a big mess.  I tried again, this time buttering and flouring the pan instead of following the instructions to butter it and place parchment paper in the bottom, and this time it came out great.  A great summer cake.  I have a feeling I’ll be experimenting with the recipe, maybe trying to turn it into cupcakes or a layer cake.

And there you have another week of fresh local eats!

Bonus: restaurant reviews

When not eating delicious food at home, we ate out a lot! One night we ate at FIG, one of our favorite Charleston restaurants (seriously, a must-visit if you come here).  Another night, we rounded up a whole gang of friends in search of a seafood feast.  We had planned to hit up our favorite, Bowen’s Island, a true experience and a must-visit if you’re in Charleston for oyster season (any month that has an “R” in it), but Bowen’s was closed for a private party.  So we ended up trying the Sand Castle, a seafood joint on Folly that we’d never visited before.  I was sold when I saw that they had fried softshell crab and $3.25 pinot grigio, and Jon got a seafood feast which featured fried flounder, shrimp, oysters, and deviled crab.  Saturday we hit up Red’s Ice House with a bunch of friends.  Red’s has miles of deck space overlooking Shem Creek, and my one goal was a giant pina colada, a goal I achieved.  We also spotted a guy paddle boarding with his DOG on board, and were amazed at the dog’s steady, calm pose aboard the surfboard.  Just another great night in Charleston! I’m going to miss this place!