Sunny Sunday

This weekend was so beautiful.  Beautiful-beautiful-beautiful.  Sandals and t-shirts; soaking up lots of vitamin-D at the baseball fields; standing outside at 5:00 am in barefeet and a tank top, waiting for our pup to...do her business...it was glorious!  It won't last (and I'll be grateful when the rains come, I am so sensitive to drought-like conditions!) but it was amazing and wonderful to throw open all the windows, and settle into our home.  The weather dictated spring cleaning, and I obliged, in-so-much as I cared to. :)

(There was a moment, after the sun went down, when it reminded me so much of being a teen-ager, I swear...I'm going to try to describe it, but it may be particular to my own memories:  if you've been at the beach all day, and then you come home and it's not a hot summer night, it's just a regular summer evening that cools down, and then you realize that your shoulders and your cheeks are still warm from a day in the sun, and you're still wearing a beach cover up and a swimsuit with flip flops, but it's colder now, and the cool evening air only seems colder than it is, because of the salt water from the ocean drying on your sunburn...that feeling?  You know that feeling?  I totally had it last night! ~ and yes, I totally thought of my friend Tracy :)

The "teen" feeling quite stopped there, my friends, as I spent most of the morning in my kitchen!  I stocked my jars and my buckets with flour and sugar and oats and seeds.  I made pancake mix and muffin mix and corn bread mix.  And then I cooked...

 I'm pretty sure I've perfected my Laurel's Kitchen granola recipe.  We LOVE it with LOTS of nuts (this batch has walnuts, almonds, and sunflower seeds) and LESS wheat germ.  It is crunchy and beautiful, and absolutely perfect with Greek yogurt and a teaspoon (read: tablespoon) of honey.  One of Tommy's favorite treats is to dip a banana in honey and then roll it in granola.  He calls it 'banana pop crunch' and I am so glad to have a fresh batch.

 As I was pulling the granola out of the oven and cooling it before storing it, I was also browning some ground beef with a jar of our summer-tomato-sauce to add to the calzones (below), and I was also getting ready to rinse some assorted soup beans and cut up potato and carrots for the crockpot.  (The soup was finished for lunches today, and it was yummy!  No recipe, just throw any root veggies and dried beans you like in the crockpot with either 6 - 8 cups of chicken or beef broth ~ a mix of both, for us, because we didn't have enough of either, plus some plain water, because we really didn't have enough of either! ~ some salt and pepper and a couple of bay leaves with oregano and whatever spices you like, then cook it on low for 8 - 10 hours (9 for me!).  I added chicken sausage, heated through at the end, for Erik and we loved it.)

 My favorite pyrex bowl.  But I say that about them all...

 I used the calzone recipe from Gina, and it worked like a charm!  (If you're at all interested in learning to make for the first time, and/or expanding your bread repertoire, I highly recommend her whole series that she's been writing!  I've made the Miracle Bread too, and you better believe I'm dying to try her sweet dough and the freezing method she describes...)

 They were really just for the boys, and while they cooked, I whipped up a dressing for the grilled ahi salad Erik and I had for dinner...AND lunch.  :-/  The dressing is delish ~ just equal parts lemon juice and dijon mustard, a few tablespoons of olive oil (I guess; I don't measure), salt and pepper to taste, and some diced onion (red is better, but, theme here, we didn't have red so I used white) all whisked together.  I use the same dressing for most salads, with some added crushed garlic.  

It was the perfect meal for the sunny day.

I could have added the obligatory long-shot of my completely destroyed kitchen, as you know that I cannot cook even the simplest meal without a total catastrophe from top to bottom, but the calzones were so beautiful...let's leave it that, shall we?

Tell me...what's happening in your kitchen?  Are you enjoying your weather...whatever it looks like?!

Currently Obsessed...

We have so many obsessions here in The Shire lately....

We're each totally fixated on our favorite part of beekeeping...Tommy's being the fashion...

...Scotty's being the smoker....Mine, of course, the actual bees.

 I'm also in love with these wildflowers that are growing in the field behind our house.  For me, a little happy, brought inside...

...for my boys?  All things Toy Story!  We love all the Toy Story movies.  Erik works next door to the Pixar studios, and he has a friend who works there.  He says it's not like their totally wrapped up in the technology; they're all about the scripts and the characters (even though it's 'just' cartoons!) and I think it shows.  "To Infinity, and Beyond!"  (I once heard an eighth grader describe the infinity sign as un ocho que se ha descansado (loosely:  "an eight that has laid down to rest") and that still makes me giggle.)

 I'm obsessed with stacks of pretty fabrics.

Scotty's obsessed with chocolate milk.

I'm obsessed with my garden.  Is it too far-fetched to call this "a harvest"?  These cherry tomatoes and a handful of zucchini are the first of (knock wood!) many.

In fact, I made the Zucchini Bake from Laurel's Kitchen, and it was delicious!  We took it up to Tilden Park on Sunday for a big going-away party for my one of my favorite people, Jake, and his sweet wife and kids, too.  It was gone in a flash, and I didn't get pictures of it first.  Which, any blogger can tell you, means it might as well not have happened at all.  So, round two, no doubt will be documented!

(Also obsessed with :  geography, currently.  Had to google where Budapest is when Jake said he was moving there for two years.  Actually had a conversation with my husband where he said he had no idea where it was, and I ventured that I thought it might be in Turkey.  I now know it's in Hungary.  Which is NOT, so you know, "right above Sweden".  That would be Switzerland.  The same thing happened when I found out Michelle was living in Belgium.  I was surprised that she speaks French, because, you know, don't they speak German there?  Oh, what?  Berlin.  Got it.  Holy hell, what is wrong with me?  Added to Bucket List:  Get out more.)

Laurel's Kitchen:: Falafel and "Arab Bread"

I was at my friend Laurie's house last night for "crochitting" party (crochet and knitting) and it was so fun!  Laurie reads this blog sometimes, so if she gives permission, I'll share some awesome photos I got to take of her art studio and some bits around her beautiful home.  Oh, and the food!  Holy cow.  The food. 

Well, in fact, the reason I bring up Laurie just now (besides hoping she'll be moved to grant us permission!) is because she is one of the people who recommended Laurel's Kitchen to me in the first place.  She was showing me a second LK book, called The Bread Book and it also looks fantastic.   I have just a wee bit left on my gift card, so I'll be looking for a second hand version, once again.

Last weekend I made the falafel.  I used to get falafel at a deli near my work in the Financial District of SF (back in the day! :) and it was a round ball and it was darkish....green from the parsley, perhaps, plus it was a bit of a crunchy, fried-like kind of texture?  When you ordered it, they'd heat it, mush the ball into a patty-shape, and pop it into a pita with some shredded veggies and either yogurt or humus... pick your poison.

For all I know, I may have done something so wrong here, but they tasted fantastic anyway.  Falafel is pureed garbanzo beans, held together with some potato and lots of parsley...the flavor comes from garlic and lemon, plus some spicy-spices, and there's nothing wrong with that, not at all!

The pitas start off as pretty much the basic whole wheat bread dough.  I have to say...this batch of the whole wheat dough was by far my best attempt.  It was elastic and soft and moist-ish.  If you weren't around for the canneloni disaster, you may not be able to fully appreciate the beauty that is this dough. 

You cook them for five quick minutes, and they puff up.  Then you slice them open, fill them with vegetables (lettuce, cucumber, and tomato for us) and plop the falafel patty right in there.  This book was published in the early 70s, and I have to giggle at the "Arab Bread" moniker! 

Verdict:  We LOVE this!  It's tasty and oh-so-healthy.  I was telling Laurie yesterday, and I'll tell you today, that in the future I think I would just pick up whole wheat pitas at the store.  I don't mind some bread-work, but many of these puffed, and then got too hard; others puffed appropriately, but then deflated and were difficult (read: impossible) to slice.  In fact, just tonight I served Erik what I called a "flasammy", which involved two pitas with the falafel and veggies stacked between them, rather than couched inside one!  But I love having the falafel on hand (for lunches, snacks, and dinners, it's that good!) and it's so easy to make.  It will be a standby from now on.

Laurel's Kitchen :: Canneloni

Perhaps the most ambitious LK "project" I have taken on to date was the homemade canneloni.  It's funny...when we redid the kitchen, we got this amazing oven with the 6-burner stove.  The price was inflated by an additional 30% when we had to purchase the industrial-strength hood with the enlarged outtake tube...and when I questioned the need for this (speaking with my checkbook, of course), I was told that it was a safety "thing", because if I had all six burners going at the same time, a regular hood and fan would not be able to pull the heat off fast enough to be safe.  I thanked the sales rep for the information, and when Erik and I got back in the car, I laughed and said, "Yeah right!  When would that ever happen?  It's not like we're a restaurant!"  Well, I will say for the record, I was very close to using all six burners at once with this meal preparation.  It was steamy, my friends.

Part of it was that there was so much going on!  I need to steam the fresh spinach, make the tomato sauce, boil the water, make the cream sauce, and make the ricotta filling.

Just for Brit, I even used my pestle and mortar to prep the thyme and oregano.  Because she loves that.  :P

Frankly, it was all an awful lot of work.  But, I can say, that both the cream sauce and the tomato sauce could be made any time (and in bulk, because both are used in many of the recipes, with small additions for adjustments) and I will also announce, prematurely, that it was fantastic and well worth every moment, pot, and spoon that it took to make it.  Seriously yummy.  Anyway, I've kept a container of each at the ready in the refer over the last couple of weeks, and it works well.

 One little snag?  My whole wheat dough was an epic fail.  It's that brick-like mound in the background.  It was...not good.  I blame the whole wheat flour I had on hand...after this, I replaced it (I think it was too old?) and I haven't had this problem since.

I'm nothing if not flexible, though, so I quickly scratched the offending dough and made a batch of (even more offensive?) white flour dough.  I quickly rolled it out (my little table has a handy drawer that holds several of my kitchen secrets for success...the thrifted wooden rolling pin...a brush for egg white application...and, barely visible, a tube of lipstick.  So I look good, baking.) and it was very satisfying to use the pizza dough cutter to zip-zip-zip it into perfect little rectangles!

When I was young (college, I guess) and first started making my own pasta doughs, I would always get frustrated that it would stick together in the boiling water.  My great aunt Angie did some troubleshooting and let me know that "our people" add a bit of olive oil to the boiling water to remedy that problem.  Laurel's Kitchen mentions the same tip, so in case you don't have a Venetian auntie to set you straight, there is still hope.

Okay.  Homestretch!  All ten little canneloni 'burritos' fit snugly into a 9x13 casserole dish.  (Those are Laurel's whole wheat breadsticks in the far background, and that's an awesome reusable produce bag in the near background.)  And, honesty here:  It's not too early to pop open a bottle of wine and take a little breather.  You've been on your feet for a while at this point!

Now.  Now you can officially sit down and enjoy an amazing dinner with your family.  Everyone loved it!  This version of the cream sauce has a pinch of nutmeg, and it's brilliant. 

I've featured the canneloni incidentally, when I wrote about picnics at the baseball field.  I think it was even better as leftovers...or, at least, as good as leftovers!

The One That Goes On Forever

There are so many interesting things in this book, and I find it endlessly fascinating how much of it could have been written today, 35 years later.   

When you start thinking this way, your life can never be quite the same.  If we are concerned with wise use of resources, food, for example - this is a cookbook, after all - appears in a new light.  One of the best arguments for serving whole, fresh, unprocessed foods, like homemade, whole-grain bread, is that this practice conserves what is most precious in food - its nutritional value.  When you refine away nutrients you have to replace them somehow, and a whole industry spring sup to manufacture vitamin supplements, at high cost to you, high profit to them.  Processed foods are not just unhealthy; they are wasteful, even before you consider the cost in elaborate packaging and competitive advertising.  In 1974 we Americans spent 10 billion dollars on packaging, five times the amount that the World Food Council in Rome estimated it would take to stave off famine for nine months.

This was written at a time when about 15,000 people (most of them children) were dying of malnutrition each and every day.  Can you imagine what dollar amount might be attached to packaging and advertising today?  And, at the same time, the number of children dying of malnutrition has reached 41,000...per day.  But the fact is, this "call to arms" issued in Laurel's Kitchen (if you will) embodies so many of the very same health, social, and political issues I am thinking about today.  Pathetic, don't you think?  To think of the wasted opportunities; to have come so far, in so many ways, and yet continue to have so many of the same exact (but now even more exacerbated) problems.

*************************************************
Kelly gave a heads-up that some of the nutritional information has changed since 1975.  You only need count the number of times Laurel's Kitchen maligns The Incredible Edible Egg to know she speaks the truth!  :)  There's an entire section at the back of the book that gives a cross-referenced and color-coded matrix of how make complete proteins.

Oh, my aching head.

But then I read something about beans and corn, and that was enough for me.  Have I mentioned that we are not fancy?  If I waited until I was totally sure about what to do and how to do it, I can promise you that we'd be eating Hamburger Helper and Doritos until the end of time.

Cornbread is so easy to make.  And it just tastes good.  Sue me, but I care.  I make it quickly from scratch using this recipe, which is pretty much exactly like every cornbread recipe ever written:

• 1 cup corn meal
• 1 cup flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

Mix together these dry ingredients, then add 1 egg, 1 cup of milk (I use non-fat), and 1/4 cup honey (oh, the honey!!) and 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil.  I fold it all together with a wooden spoon, just until it's mixed, and then pop it in the oven in a greased dish at 350 degree F for 30 minutes.  I now use an 8"x8" glass casserole dish.  I finally found one (I've looked for over a year!) at a thrift store for $3. I think if you're willing to purchase it new, it should be no problem to pick one up anywhere, anytime, but I was willing to wait.

Here's a little tip:  I put all the dry ingredients into a bag (I make up about a half dozen at a time), and when I want to make cornbread I just grab a bag, dump it in a bowl, add the wet ingredients, and cook.  I write on the bag which ingredients need to be added (1 egg, 1 c milk, 1/4 c honey, 2 T oil) and the bake time and temp.  That way, I never have to refer to a recipe.  I can reuse the bags many times, also.  (PS, do you see the size of my honey in that picture above?  Seriously, I love me some honey.)

But see, here we have fresh, nutritional ingredients, and it's such a simple recipe, there's no need to buy a box of mix.  Speaking of which, I bought 25 pounds of dried pinto beans at Costco for around ten dollars.  Twenty five pounds!  I gave the woman who cleans my house about one-third of it, and I still have more beans than you can shake a stick at.  I love how deliberate you have to be when you work with dried beans.  You have to think of it hours ahead of time, even though it's no more work than opening a can.  It doesn't take any energy to soak them, but you can't come home and think, hey, I'll whip up some dried pinto beans in 15 minutes.

The last thing I did, for this particular meal, was I made some whole wheat tortillas.  Totally easy, google it, you won't be sorry.  The kids love to help make these...they roll them out, then pass them to me and I actually roll them out, then we pop them on an extremely hot griddle (do not underestimate the importance of a well-heated, dry surface) for a minute on each side.  Perfectly perfect.  (I can do this in 20 minutes, start to finish, with about half that time spent just waiting around....er, finishing the beans and grating cheese I mean.)

Tommy had ordered a quesadilla for school lunch, and he had thrown it away (thrown it away) because it had beans in it.  Holy cats.  So I made him these.

And he loved it.  I just mashed some of the beans with a bit of water, spread them onto the tortillas, and added cheese.  He's also eaten the beans (not mashed, just plain) with a sprinkle of cheese.  He did it to please me, but both boys have grown to like them quite a bit!

I just ate mine on a plate (no tortilla needed when you have cornbread, though I enjoy them immensely both ways!) and I added some plain Greek yogurt, too, because I like to live dangerously.  (And because I can never eat the sour cream before it goes bad, so this is a fine substitute.)

The four of us can destroy a pan of cornbread.

So, there you have it.  Everything made from ingredients that I bought in bulk, and made from scratch.  And it may look like work (which, compared to picking up a box of Jiffy cornbread, a package of whole wheat tortillas, and a can of beans, it certainly is) but it's such a good kind of work.  And it's only really work the first time I did it.  I'm all about setting up a system to minimize my aggravation in the kitchen, so I spend some energy that first time coming up with the exact right order to do everything.  We've had this meal, in it's entirety, twice...and I've had some combination of bean-leftover for lunch at least five times.  Yesterday, in fact!  So I feel good about the quality of the food, the taste of the food, and, just as importantly given how all this started, way up there at the top, I feel good that I used a minimum of packaging.

Hi-Pro Granola

For weeks, I've eaten this exact same meal for breakfast, and I thought it was going pretty well.  Granola (homemade by me), with blueberries, a few tablespoons of plain Greek yogurt, and what I call "a teaspoon of honey" but what is really, actually, at least a tablespoon of honey.  Ahem.

My homemade granola was very simple:  1/4 cup butter (down from a whole cup called for in the original recipe!), 1/4 cup honey (which, again, was probably closer to half a cup...what is it with me and the honey?), and 3 cups of rolled oats.  You know, quaker oats?  Melt, mix, cook.  Couldn't be simpler.

Apparently, though....it could be healthier.  I started using the Hi-Pro Granola recipe from Laurel's Kitchen.  Total drama, if you want to know.  Okay, first of all...

I made a total ass of myself in the bulk section at the Whole Foods in Oakland.  I left there feeling pretty low.  My self-esteem cannot handle the attitude of the employees there.  It took some seriously focused energy to get myself squared away enough to brave the Whole Foods in San Ramon.  (Please to note:  In order to re-align my self-esteem, I did not find it necessary to give myself a pep-talk, remind myself why this was an important mission to the health and well-being of my family, or dust off my college degrees to remind myself that I am an intelligent woman.  No, to set myself straight, I spent about 3 minutes mentally belittling the employees on various fronts.  Don't you think it says more about me, than them, that I would let an eye-rolling nineteen year old on shift between classes at the junior college dictate the mood of my afternoon?  It's exhausting being me.)

But you see all these jars?  They are full of "exotic" (to me) sounding ingredients like soy flour, wheat germ, vital gluten, wheat bran berries, torula yeast, dried skim milk....and a variety of seeds.  Flax, sesame, sunflower.  At the San Ramon Whole Foods (which is near my mom's house) my faith in humanity was restored when I came across a nice young man stocking the bulk bins.  He patiently answered all my questions (do I want hulled or unhulled sesame seeds?  what's the difference between these sunflower seeds?  what does it mean to 'sprout' wheat berries?  does soy flour have gluten?) and kindly directed me to the baking aisle for a variety of items that aren't sold in bulk.  Someday, I will marry him.  haha!

(And yes, I did in fact use my label-maker to print out labels for the repurposed jars.  Totally normal, I swear.)

The book said to "toast the seeds as instructed on the following page"...so I flipped the page and read through the directions.  I got to this line..."remember, the less surface area exposed to dry heat, the better"... and I thought huh.  Being told to "remember" something implies that it's information I have stored, somewhere, for some reason.  I assure you, that is not the case.  Not only do I have no current schema for toasting nuts, I have to admit that I couldn't even make sense of "less surface area".  God, I hate applied mathematics.  I swear, that was my first thought!  Math, to me, is the essence of liberal arts...truth, beauty, knowledge.  I have no interest in actually using math.  I just like doing math.  Alright, so I never could figure out what that meant (should I spread all the seeds out in a thin layer? or mound them up in the middle of the baking sheet?  is it the overall surface area, or is the surface area specific to an individual seed?) so I just skipped it. 
 
I put the recipe together, with my untoasted nuts and all, and cooked it for 45 minutes.  In the end, it was nothing like "granola".  It was not crunchy.  It was not clustered in any way.  A taste test revealed that it tasted, literally, like grass.  Grass.  As in, lawn.  I transferred it all to my cereal jar, where I stared at it for a few hours before deciding whether or not it was a failed experiment.  I couldn't tell if I should trust my taste buds...they'd been marinating in butter and honey, after all, and it was possible that I had a highly skewed perspective on what constituted granola in the first place.

In the end, I told myself that I would eat this batch.  Ultimately, I was going to add blueberries, yogurt, and some honey to make my breakfast.  At that point, would it really matter?  It turns out that no, it does not matter!  Over just a few servings, I became completely accustomed to the new tastes and the new texture, too.

In the book, she says "Hi-Pro is concentrated.  A small serving stays with you all through the morning."  I'd have to agree.  So far, I'm the only person in my family who eats it.  Everyone else loved the original recipe (well, no duh!) so I think I'm going to pursue some kind of hybrid....like, maybe take the original recipe and add some of the wheat germ, wheat bran, soy flour, and sunflower seeds.  I'll have to experiment with quantities, I'm hoping it will be a simple way to pile on the healthy stuff.

Laurel's Kitchen

On the advice of both Laurie and Kelly, I purchased a (gently) used copy of Laurel's Kitchen using the Amazon gift certificate Linda sent to me.  (Wow, talk about six degrees....!)

You can get the newest publication, but I went for the original 1978 copy (for about $5!  Bargain of the year, I'm telling you what).  I'm so glad I did!  I can't speak to what changes, if any, have been made in any updated versions, but this one has the original introduction(s).  I do believe that even without the recipes/cookbook aspect of the book, I would have bought it for the colorful, folksy stories that star farm-girl transplant Hippie Laurel on the backdrop of Berkeley in the late 60s/early 70s.  I was completely charmed by the first 75 pages or so of this book!

This book is ultimately about being, or becoming, a vegetarian.   Hmmmmm....that's not exactly on my mind, so much as just eating well, so I don't think that's the path I'm on.  One of the things she talks about in the book is to sort of (lovingly, gently) dismiss 'fake meat' products.  Since she became a vegetarian for both moral and spiritual reasons, the idea of pretending to eat meat doesn't suit her.

But we are a simple folk, with no such moral or spiritual compass, and so I present to you what I like to call the Snausage Pizza.  I found a package of Gimme Lean sausage at Whole Foods, which is made from vegetable protein.  Oh!  Ha!  Gimme Lean...I just realized when I wrote that...do you think it's a play on Jimmy Dean breakfast meat?  That would be funny!

Anyway, Tommy decided he liked sausage pizza, so we've made this Snausage Pizza a couple of times now, and he never even noticed that he's not eating meat.   And it's really tasty, too!  Although, if you're willing to eat chicken, I can't recommend this enough!  I made it for Maia and Lenny when they came over this weekend (they're back from London this summer for good, and I can't wait!!!) and we were all still talking about it 24 hours later. 

I have so much to say about what I'm learning from Laurel's Kitchen that I think I'm going to start a little 'series' under the "Laurels' Kitchen" label.  I'd love to hear other people's experiences, either with being vegetarian, or with making BIG changes in eating habits....