Category Archives: kitchen stories

>Just another recipe contest?

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>The email from administration had potential.

Subject line: “New and Exciting Opportunity!” and I knew it wasn’t spam.
In the body of the email:
“The USDA is challenging school nutrition professionals, chefs, parents and interested community members to create tasty, healthy, exciting new recipes for inclusion on school lunch menus across the country.”

Has anyone spotted the omission yet?
So I thought “Recipes. School. Community garden. Local influences. Dairy – grade level curriculum. This has potential.” So I went to the web site to find out that each team would “…develop, document, and prepare at least one healthy recipe in one of three categories (Whole Grains, Dark Green and Orange vegetables, or Dry Beans and Peas). The recipes get tested in a school cafeteria, then sent on up the ranks until a final cook-off.
In the details, I found out that each team had to include “…a chef, a school nutrition professional, at least one student…, and at least one parent or community member.”
Ahem.
I’m only a teacher. I don’t count. Students spend more time with me than with any other school professional. I supervise their snack times. I teach the health curriculum. I implement energizers to get them up and moving. I participate on the community garden committee, send home the annual state-given pine trees with advice for planting, and more. Despite my gardening experience, a growing interest in the locavore philosophy, recent ventures into the realm of canning, and skills in contest & grant writing, I’m only a teacher.
And this USDA school cafeteria recipe contest doesn’t include teachers.
I guess the kids in my school will never get to taste my salsa or my orange marmalade.

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>Another Apple Crisp

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>It’s election day. Chuck is driving a live truck to cover a candidate’s victory/defeat party. Amigo is at his boarding school, and La Petite is out of town, too. It’s just me and the news reports.

Readers, you know me. When the going gets tough, I blog and I bake. Apples are in season, so a pan of apple crisp was in order. I added a little rhubarb – the last of the season – too.
Autumn Apple Crisp
from Food to Live By; the Earthbound Farm Organic Cookbook

4 pounds (about 10) small, tart apples, peeled, cored, and cut into 1/4 inch slices
Juice of 2 lemons
1 cup flour (the book recommends whole wheat pastry flour; I used half all-purpose, half whole wheat)
1 1/2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
2 Tablespoons ground cinnamon
8 Tablespoons (1 stick) butter, softened
vanilla ice cream or whipped cream for serving suggestion, optional
1. Position a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
2. Place the apple slices in a 9 by 13 inch baking pan. Add the lemon juice and toss to prevent the apples from discoloring.
3. Place the flour, brown sugar, and cinnamon in a medium-size bowl and whisk to blend. Add the butter. Using your fingers (or a pastry cutter: worked for me!), blend the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse meal. sprinkle the topping evenly over the apples, but do not pack it down.
4. Bake the crisp util the apples are tender when pierced with a fork, the juices bubble up around the edges of the baking pan, and the topping is crisp and brown, 40-50 minutes. Serve the crisp hot or warm with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream, if desired. Coffee on the side, of course.
By the way, eating the opponent? Green Bay played the New York Jets. Chuck made a seafood chowder on Saturday, and we had bagels for breakfast on Sunday.

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>Top Ten Reasons to love my bread machine

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>10. There is no scent equal to the aroma of bread rising and baking.

9. I never feel forced to partake in La Petite’s preference: boring and nutrient-lacking white bread.
8. I can add local honey, wheat germ, or flaxseed to a loaf without anyone knowing it’s healthy.
7. It’s easy. Drop the ingredients in, fix the settings, push the button, and let it bake.
6. I can choose a bread that’ll go with the meal – without going to the store.
5. An ordinary sandwich becomes extraordinary when it’s made on homemade bread.
4. While it’s not necessarily cheap, it can be frugal: I can make a loaf for less money than a trip to the store to buy an gourmet bakery bread.
3. The smell of baking bread can awaken a teenager from deep sleep. Add bacon, and the teen might even become coherent.
2. Fresh bread is so delicious; there’s really no equal.
1. If we’re out of bread, I like being able to say, “it’s okay, we’ll just bake a fresh loaf!”

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>More comfort food: Easy Oatmeal Cookies with Peanut Butter

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>I’ve been making a lot of comfort food lately. That says a lot about my state of mind; I’m baking for the comfort of baking itself, and I’m choosing to make things that satisfy the family’s need for simple homemade treats. There’s something very comforting in knowing that when I mix the right amounts of flour, sugar, butter, and a few other key ingredients, the results will always be tasty.

Easy Oatmeal Cookies with Peanut Butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup creamy peanut butter
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups uncooked oats (quick oats are best)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine sugar and butter and peanut butter; mix well. Add flour and baking soad; stir in oats. Roll into 1-inch balls. Place on ungreased cookie sheets and press slightly with a sugared fork. Bake at 350 for 8 – 10 minutes. Remove from pan and cool oncooling rack. Makes about 3 dozen.
Simple, delicious, and satisfying.
The original recipe was in WE Energies’ 2008 Cookie Book; I added the peanut butter. If you find your cookies a little too moist, cut back on the butter or add flour/oats. I liked the texture of mine just like this.

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>Bread Pudding

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>I learned to like bread pudding long ago when I made it for a chain restaurant’s breakfast buffet. I also learned not to order it off the menu or buffet unless I’d made it myself. Just knowing that restaurants made it from stale leftover bread made me a little leery of the contents. Home made bread pudding, however, can be a lovely comfort food: breakfast, snack, or dessert, depending on how you want to serve it.

Bread Pudding
2 1/2 cup scalded milk
1/4 cup melted butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
3-4 bread pieces, cut in chunks
2-3 eggs, beaten
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Place bread, sugar, & cinnamon in a baking dish (1 quart size). Add eggs, milk, and butter. Mix well. Place baking dish into a pan of water (1 inch deep) and into oven. Bake 20 minutes or until knife inserted 1 inch from edge comes out clean. Serve warm or cold with milk or cream.
I also diced one and a half ripe bananas into the mix. I had the bananas, and I remembered using leftover bananas that were too ripe for banana splits in the buffet bread pudding. Yum. Oh, and about a quarter cup leftover apple confit, too. Tasty!
I served it with whipped cream and coffee. Are you surprised? No, don’t answer that. But try it; this is a good recipe for using excess bread and rapidly ripening fresh fruits, and a good comfort food as well.


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>The rationale behind the banana bread and bread pudding

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>In order to carry out a successful pantry raid, the pantry must supply decent ingredients. For today’s raid it was baking supplies.

We had too many bananas. Chuck 9the main banana-eater) was ill earlier in the week and not eating much. I added a banana half to my cereal yesterday and my oatmeal today, but we still had four and a half ripe bananas. Banana bread, right? Right. Sort of. Almost.
I also had several bread crusts and a few slices of homemade white bread with flaxseed from earlier in the week. I had enough bread crumbs in the freezer that I didn’t want to grind up any more. I could have composted these, but I thought I’d try using them up first.
AND — if that weren’t enough, I had two rogue zucchini that had managed to ripen during the recent warm weeks.
Hence the afternoon baking results:
Hybrid quick-bread: banana/zucchini with chocolate chips.
Bread pudding with bananas
While the oven was working its magic, I worked on updating my gradebook for upcoming parent-teacher conferences. Whether conferences go well or not, I’ll know I fed my family some good food and did it with a minimum of waste.
Oh, yes. The recipes? Banana bread is here. I doubled the recipe, cut down on the eggs, added a little extra flour and wheat germ to counteract the moist zucchini, mixed in several Tablespoons of cocoa, and finally used 3 bananas and 1 1/2 cup grated zucchini. As for the bread pudding, I’ll post it Tuesday.

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>Apple Confit

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>I used the wrong kind of apples, but it still tastes wonderful. From Taste of Home’s Eating Well in Season, here’s a simple and delicious way to use up extra apples.

Peel 3 pounds of shapely apples (see note at end), and slice 1/4 inch thick. You should have about 9 cups. Place the apples in a 4 quart or larger slow cooker. Add 1/4 cup sugar and 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, and toss to coat well. Cover and cook until the apples are very tender and almost translucent, but not pureed. 2 to 2 1/2 hours on high of 4 to 4 1/2 hours on low. Stir in 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Transfer to a bowl and let cool slightly. Cover and refrigerate until chilled. Can be stored in refrigerator for up to 4 days.
Makes 8 servings, about 1/2 cup each. My family liked it warm with whipped cream on top, sprinkled with a bit of cinnamon sugar for garnish.
Oh, the apples? Here you go.
Saucy apples cook down to a saucelike consistency. Varieties to look for include cortland, Empire, McIntosh, Crispin, and Paula Red.
Shapely apples hold their shape after baking. Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, Jonagold, Jonathan, and Northern Spy fall into the shapely apple category.
If you were wondering what we chose for our “eating the opponent” series, it’s like this. The Green Bay Packers played the Washington Redskins, so the tailgate party lunch looked like this.
  • Potato “skins” made with red potatoes
  • Cherry pie
  • And for a main dish, in honor of all the hard work that happens on Capital Hill: Pork.
Miami is next. Maybe a Cuban sandwich….

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>Hush Puppies and Collard Greens

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>Eating the Opponent met a challenge this week: the Packers faced the Detroit Lions. We knew nothing about Detroit, so we had to do a little research.

Internet searches showed us the chili dog and/or the Coney Dog; La Petite doesn’t like hot dogs, so she wouldn’t like that.
Another Internet search found many different dishes that featured onions – sausages slathered in onions, onion rings, anything onion. We hypothesized that too many years of losing teams had led Detroit fans to hide their tears behind the cutting of an onion.
We asked my stepfather, a Detroit area resident for many years: he suggested hush puppies and collard greens. The research began again. Traditional hush puppies are deep fried. We don’t own a deep fryer and don’t plan to buy one. I did, however, find a simple recipe for baked hush puppies, so we pulled out the cornmeal and got to work. Here it is, Packers fans and blog readers: our game day meal vs. Detroit.
Baked Hush Puppies
2/3 cup yellow cornmeal
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup finely chopped onion
1/3 cup milk
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
2 Tablespoons butter, melted
Preheat oven to 450. Lightly grease (or spray with nonstick spray) a 24- mini muffin pan.
In a medium bowl, combine cornmeal, flour, baking powder, salt & pepper.
In a separate bowl, mix together the onion, milk, eggs, and butter. Fold the egg mixture into the cornmeal mixture until just moistened.
Spoon one Tablespoon of mixture into each mini-muffin cup. Bake for ten minutes, or until the hush puppies are firm to the touch and golden brown around the edges.
I resisted adding cheese. Maybe next time.
Whatever will we cook when the Packers play the Minnesota Vikings? I’m sorry, but lutefisk is out of the question.

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>Where do you keep your foods in jars?

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>Food In Jars, a canning blog, is one of my regular reads and go-to sources for information. A month ago (was it really almost a month ago?) blogger Marisa put up a post asking readers where they stored their goodies after canning them.

I’m a beginning canner, so there aren’t many cans on the shelf yet. The cupboard, like almost everything in our home, has a history.

This gray cabinet resides in our basement along an inside wall. It has glass fronts on the main lower shelving, and solid doors on two smaller sections on top. When we found these in the basement, we presumed they had been part of the original kitchen or dining room, probably lining the walls. The previous homeowners, most likely practical and frugal sorts, had moved them downstairs rather than throw them in a dumpster.
Last summer a young couple knocked at our door. Somewhat sheepishly, the woman told us she had lived here as a child and as long as she was in town, could she see the house again? Of course we invited them in. She described many changes beyond those we’d made, and told us that the gray cabinets had indeed sat in the small dining room, but they had lined up at a 90 degree angle from the wall at the bathroom door, making a sort of short hallway.
Well, now they’re in our basement, serving a good purpose. My canning supplies and the resulting jars are sitting behind the glass doors, looking delicious. I expect to fill the shelves a little more each year as I learn new skills and get more adventurous with the canner and food in jars.

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>Raspberry Applesauce

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>This is a real recipe, not a pantry raid, not a garbage recipe. I’d picked up apples at the Farmers’ Market – Macs to cook & Honeycrisp for my workday lunches – and we had 2 pints of raspberries, the last of the season. The raspberries were heading past their prime, and we needed to use them up.

It’s a great problem to face, to have fresh fruit that must be used up ASAP! I turned to my stash of cookbooks and found this raspberry applesauce in Food to Live By: the Earthbound Farm Organic Cookbook.

Ingredients
4 medium sized sweet-tart apples (I used MacIntosh), peeled and diced
1 1/4 cups fresh or frozen raspberries (mine were fresh and getting softer by the minute)
1/2 cup sugar or more to taste (we found 1/2 cup to be just right)
1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
…and (you guessed it, I never perform exactly by the script) I added 1 teaspoon frozen orange zest just because I still had some in the freezer.
Directions
1. Place the apples and 1 1/2 cup water in a large, non-reactive saucepan and bring to a simmer over high heat. Reduce heat to medium and simmer until the apples are soft, about 15 minutes.
2. Add the raspberries and sugar (and orange zest, if you live in my kitchen) and cook, stirring frequently, until the apples are soft, about 5 minutes. Break up any remaining chunks of apple with the back of a wooden spoon. The applesauce should be thick.
3. Remove the pan from the heat and allow the sauce to cool slightly. Add the lemon juice. Taste the applesauce and add more sugar if necessary. If you are not planning to serve it immediately, transfer to a clean container and cover it. Serve warm, room temperature, or cool.
I realize there are a few potentially confusing redundancies in the directions. Bring to a simmer, then reduce heat to a simmer? I brought the apples to a light boil and then immediately turned the heat down to a simmer.
We also have the “simmer until apples are soft” followed by a second “cook…until the apples are soft.” Use your own judgement, of course. I considered the first step done when I could pull out the peelings, the second when the chunks were almost gone.
I did not peel my apples immediately, either; I cored and quartered them before cooking, then pulled out the peelings with a fork. (Hint, hint family, a food mill is on my wish list for Christmas or birthday! It would make chores like this easier. I might even share the resulting goodies.)
This sauce is delicious. Even with end-of-season raspberries, it beats the heck out of any store-bought flavored applesauce. I predict this applesauce will become a regular on our table every August and September.

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