Continue reading »]]>

Photo from the State Library of New South Wales collection (http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/)

When Gabriel was about 18 months old, I got together with a group of my friends from college. Several of us had children within a few months of each other, so there was a lot of talk that weekend about how life had changed and what we had to look forward to as our children grew. One friend who had older brothers told us about a recent birthday party she’d attended that involved pony rides, a cowboy, and goodie bags that cost roughly $20 a pop. We all howled about how ridiculous that was and about how we’d never, ever, ever do that.

The kids’ first few birthday parties held true to my proclamation. But that’s easy in Boulder County, where dressing up often meant pulling on the new Icebreaker or Mountain Hardware hoody and putting on the dressy jeans that weren’t frayed at the bottom from wearing them with flip-flops. Birthday parties there usually involved playing out in the back yard and oodles of home-made whole-wheat cupcakes, with a few gluten/dairy/soy/corn/nut free ones for the children with food sensitivities. Favors I offered in the past included little pots filled with dirt and basil seeds, home-made play dough, and little bouquets of natural dye-free lollipops.

Fast-forward to 2011. We live in a flat in downtown Helsinki. The weather is too damp and dreary for a park birthday party. Having all 20 children from Gabriel’s class to our house would not only be a tight fit, but likely a complete disaster involving gray hairs, glass breakage, and shouting (not just from the children). And so we’re two hours away from the birthday party I said I’d never have, at a local indoor play place, complete with Pirate-themed goody-bags (thankfully less than $20 a piece!). There are no pony rides or hired clowns/cowboys in the plans, but the event is still going to cost roughly a month’s car payment and certainly more than any of the adult parties we’ve thrown (although Matt & I are now conspiring to have one, just to see what we can do with that sort of budget!).

I think the party will be a blast–two of Gabriel’s friends had their birthday party there last month and everyone had a really good time, came home exhausted, and talked about it at school all the next week. Gabriel is so excited about turning seven this year, and has to deal with so much since his last backyard birthday party in Colorado this time last year, that we’re thrilled to celebrate it with him in style. As one last hold-out to my vow years ago, I still made chocolate cupcakes for the party.

But when I weigh the cost of today’s party against the amount of scraping I had to do to get the ground-in chocolate crumbs that even the dog was too stuffed to hoover up off my wood floors in Colorado last year, or against the excitement Gabriel felt as his friends talked up the party during school this week, I think it was well worth it.

And so, having a high-end birthday party gets added to the long list of things I swore I’d never do. You know, like I’d never leave Lyons, I’d never miss a social gathering because it conflicted with a child’s nap/bed-time, I’d never move my kids every two years, and I’d never be on the board of the PTO. There’s a reason they say never say never…

Continue reading »]]>

Finnish chanterelles (suomenlainen kantarelli) for sale at the market by our house

Despite having added meat back into our diet a few years ago after more than a decade as vegetarians, we still eat meatless meals several times per week. It’s not really a conscious decision, just something that naturally happens when I plan the menu. Still, with the abundance of amazing local poultry & fish available here in Helsinki, I’ve been feeling like my best meals, at least recently, have included meat. That’s why I was so excited to hit one out of the park this past week, and on Meatless Monday no less!

Chanterelles are in season here in Finland, and by that, I mean the market stalls are bursting with these tasty orange mushrooms, and people are out combing the woods for them at every opportunity. So I bought a kilo the other day, and just threw them in to just about everything I was making from vegetable side-dishes to pizza. But I wanted to do something to really showcase them as a main course, and this Chanterelle Tart did the trick.

Ingredients:
1/2 recipe of my pie crust or enough to cover a 9″ pie pan
1 onion, chopped
olive oil
2 T balsamic vinegar
sprig of fresh thyme
2 T of white wine, stock, or water, to deglaze pan
2 cloves of garlic
1 lb chanterelles or mixed wild mushrooms
1/2 zucchini
1/2 yellow squash (you could substitute bell peppers, tomatoes, or really any veggie here, just adjust the cooking time accordingly!)
1 250g tub of ricotta cheese
1/4 c cream or sour cream or plain yogurt
2 eggs
4 ounces parmesan cheese
2 T fresh parsley, chopped

1. Preheat the oven to 400F (200C). Roll out the pie dough and place in the pie pan. Trim or crimp the edges. Cover with plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator.
2. Chop the onion and sauté over medium-high heat in enough olive oil to keep the onion from sticking. Once the onions start to soften (but not brown!), turn down the heat to medium-low and add the sprig of thyme, salt & pepper, and the balsamic vinegar. Leave the onions to caramelize for 20-30 minutes, stirring regularly.
3. While the onions are cooking, whip the ricotta cheese with a whisk and stir in one egg, one egg white (reserving the second yolk), the cream, the garlic, parmesan, and the parsley. Stir until smooth and season with salt & pepper. Set aside.
4. Once the onions are done, remove them from the pan and add a little wine or water or stock to deglaze. Add another drizzle of olive oil, increase heat to medium, and sauté the mushrooms and squash (or other vegetables) until they have released their liquid and their liquid has cooked off. If you do not cook the vegetables enough, your tart will not set as nicely, so this is important!!!
5. Remove your pie crust from the fridge and discard the plastic wrap. Stir the vegetables into the ricotta mixture and pour into the pie pan. Glaze the edge of the crust with the reserved egg yolk and then put any remaining egg yolk straight on top of the ricotta mixture and mix in gently with a spatula.
6. Bake for 20 minutes at 400F, then reduce heat to 350F (175C), and bake for another 20-30 minutes until the crust and top have browned nicely and the tart has set.
7. Let cool for 10 minutes or so before serving and serve with a mixed herb salad and vinaigrette.

Continue reading »]]>

I like to bake. People have been known to covet my pie and my pancakes have garnered acclaim on two continents. And then there’s my bread and my pizza dough. I mean, when it comes to baking, I know what I’m doing, right? I have conquered high-altitude baking. I unraveled the mysteries of British flour from strong to self-rising. And yet, after seven months, I’m just starting to figure out Finnish flour, and doing a lot more research on it than I was expecting! Oh yeah, and here I am four months later revising it again to include even more info!!

Part of it might just be the Finnish language. For all its rules and structure, there are still several ways to say just about everything. And each brand seems to do its naming conventions slightly differently. I’m trying hard not to think that they’ve done this intentionally to confound me! Here’s an example: Luomu means organic in Finnish. I try to buy organic whenever I can, so I look for this. Sometimes the word Luomu is just on the bag, but sometimes it’s incorporated into the name of the flour itself. So Luomuvehnäjauho (organic wheat flour) is the same as Vehnäjauho Luomu (wheat flour, organic). Seems simple in an of itself, except that if you’re shopping with children and trying to hang on to the subtleties of the different types of milk and yogurt too, it might be just a little bit too much to take in.

The first bit of advice I got on Finnish flour was from a fellow American expat here in Helsinki. She said, when all else fails, get the flour with the pulla on the bag. That would be Sunnuntai Erikoisvehnäjauho (Sunday Special Wheat Flour in English). I’m taking a guess that this is designated special because it’s the flour used for Finland’s amazing cinnamon buns (kanelipulla or korvapuusti depending on the whether you lay the dough spirals upright or on their side before baking and whether you include cardamom or not). Sunnuntai (Sunday) is the brand name, and the company has a fairly helpful Finnish flour primer on its web site. Myllyn Paras also provides a similar guide to its flour, but the English language translations leave off some key words that you’ll find below!

Branching out from the pulla flour presents some challenges. Here are some helpful words to know (besides jauho, which is the Finnish word for flour):

• täysjyvä or kokojyvä or graham* – wholegrain
• vehnä – wheat
• kakku – cake (as in cake flour)
• karkea or maalais – coarse/rustic (also sometimes seen as semi-coarse or puolikarkea)
• ruis – rye
• sihtiruisjauho or ruissithijauho- fine-milled rye flour
• tuore – fresh (this can show up if you buy flour from co-ops or the market)
• Sämpyläjauho, hiivaleipajauho – These two provide the name of what you bake with it right in the name of the flour–rolls and “yeast bread”

* Although everything I’ve read indicates that the word graham means, in fact, whole-wheat and not graham like graham crackers, I recently bought Pirkka’s Luomu Grahamjauho and it appears to be plain white flour like you’d use in pancakes, muffins, etc. So the mystery continues!

The Nordic Recipe Archive has a page on flour and also has a nice glossary of Finnish food terms that are both worth checking out if you’re struggling! It also conveniently points out that the reason I haven’t found anything resembling high-gluten bread flour here in Finland is because it’s too darn cold for the gluten to develop in the wheat crops here. Fascinating!

Continue reading »]]>

My fledgling winter kitchen garden

And it’s a good one. Gardening is more than a hobby to me. The challenge of figuring out how to grow a new plant (from orchids to celeriac), doing battle against the changeable Colorado weather, growing something unusual, especially tasty, or heirloom, and then cooking something fabulous with it, growing something so local that no gas is required to grow it, harvest it, or bring it home, and doing so organically, is nearly religion for me. But now I have a new challenge–how to get my gardening fix in a city, and a city as far north as Helsinki at that.

My efforts started on week one. In a typical winter in Colorado, I have carrots in the ground, parsley, spinach, and more carrots in the cold-frame, and a cellar full of root vegetables to last the winter-long. I always have herbs growing indoors in a south-facing window, and by January, my seed starting kicks into high gear. I don’t have that here. It’s so dark in the winter that I doubt a pot of herbs would survive, let alone produce, during the dark months. And even though I found an awesome source of local organic veggies called Makumaku (or “taste”) that I’m dying to try, I am not going to have room for anything resembling a root cellar in our flat (although there is the requisite bomb shelter in the building…I wonder if they’d mind a small crate of veggies down there…hmmm…).

Yesterday’s visit to the grocery store yielded my first clue. Many of the herbs come with roots attached in tiny little pots. Lettuces also seem to come this way. And they make a nifty little contraption that holds the pots and provides a built-in fluorescent light to keep them growing. For now, the kitchen of our temporary apartment has an under-cabinet fluorescent light that should keep the rosemary, basil, pea shoots, chives & lettuces I bought yesterday alive.

Our relocation consultant has also promised to look into a community garden plot for me, and my infamous Hobbit-shovel, a weed digger, a hand trowel, and my gardening gloves were optimistically packed in the shipment of goods that is now making its way by boat from NYC to Helsinki. So rest assured there will be more garden blogging, but this year (and for the next several years) it will be live from Helsinki!

Continue reading »]]>

Festival Pasta

I make a lot of things from scratch because cooking is a hobby of mine. But it is not gourmet night every night in my kitchen. Despite my desire to participate in Meatless Monday, I often struggle to come up with anything besides leftovers after a hectic day of school, swim lessons, and the general chaos that accompanies our transition from the weekend back into the week.

Tonight, the thought of coming up with something creative and meat-free for dinner sounded especially daunting because my husband just left for a business trip to Helsinki. But what I came up with–a variation on one of the first recipes I ever invented back in college–is a recipe that is healthy, meat-free, and can be prepared in 30 minutes or less. I call it Festival Pasta not only because of all the different colors in the dish, but because there are so many substitutions you can make that you’re nearly guaranteed to have what you need to make this in your kitchen on any given Monday!

Festival Pasta
Serves 4 (if two are children, expect a few leftovers!)

1/2 pound whole-wheat pasta
2 cloves of garlic
1 T olive oil (you can cut back on this if you’re using cast-iron or non-stick. I used stainless tonight and needed the extra oil to keep things from sticking too much)
1 bell pepper, chopped finely
1 small zucchini, chopped finely
1 small yellow squash, chopped finely
1 c. button or crimini mushrooms, chopped finely
3 large roma tomates, chopped
1/3 c. wine
1 c. marinara sauce or 2 T pesto or 1 T olive oil
1/2 c. black beans (or really any kind of beans)
1 c. spinach, chard, or other greens, chopped or torn
1 c. fresh mozzarella, cubed, or 3 T grated Parmesan cheese
salt & pepper to taste

Put a large pot of salted water on to boil. While water heats, clean your kitchen & pour a glass of wine. Seriously. You’ll feel better cooking in a clean kitchen, and you need wine for this recipe, so you might as well open the bottle up front. Put on some good music too, maybe Mon Monarch or Death Cab for Cutie. You have about 7 minutes, might as well use them wisely.

If you’re my best friend, your kitchen is already clean and you’re pregnant so you have to skip the wine. Spend your time on Facebook, or prep your vegetables so you can move more slowly later.

When the water boils, add the pasta and start 1 T of olive oil heating in a skillet over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the garlic and chopped pepper and cook until the garlic is golden, 2-3 minutes. Then add the mushrooms, squash, and tomatoes and cook until soft, another 7 minutes or so.

Note:The more your children complain about eating veggies, the smaller you should cut the pieces in this pasta sauce, but there’s so much good stuff going on in here that hopefully they won’t notice. If they love something like cubed mozzarella or olives, add those to distract them from the green stuff You can make this with any type of vegetables, the ones listed above pretty much represent what is available in my garden at the moment!! If your kids are really veggie-averse, I recommend pesto and really finely chopped veggies.

About now, the pasta is probably done, so drain it and throw it back in the pot to keep it warm. Add the wine to the veggies to deglaze any brown bits on the bottom of the pan and then add the beans and sauce. Stir to combine and heat until bubbling, then add the spinach and turn off the heat. You only want the spinach to wilt, not cook until it’s brown.

Pour the sauce into the pasta pot and stir to combine. Then add the cheese and season to taste with salt & pepper. Serve with a salad, a big glass of wine for mama, and fruit for dessert and you’re set! Meatless Monday in a snap!

Check out other Meatless Monday ideas from the Meatless Monday carnival over at Midnight Maniac.

Continue reading »]]> Today is my darling husband’s birthday, so this morning the kids & I baked him a cake. I chose my Grandma’s Fresh Apple Cake recipe in part because I had ingredients on hand and in part because it was one I could adapt so that it used mainly local ingredients. Oh yeah, and also because it’s moist and delicious and one of Matt’s favorites

I’ll give you both the original recipe and the modified so that you can make it how you like, but also so that you can see how easy it is to modify your favorite recipes so that they use local ingredients. Happy Birthday, Love!

Mabel’s Fresh Apple Cake

4 apples, chopped
1 cup sugar
1/2 t cinnamon
1 beaten egg
1/2 c cooking oil
1 c flour
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t salt

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Grease an flour a 9×9 pan.
3. Mix dry ingredients.
4. Add apples, oil, and egg.
5. Beat to mix.
6. Add nuts or raisins as desired.
7. Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes.

Julie’s Local Apple Cake

6 c sliced, peeled apples
1 c local honey
2 eggs, beaten
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t ginger
1/2 t nutmeg
1/2 c olive oil (I think you could easily use local butter here, but I did not)
1 1/2 c fine-milled whole wheat flour
1/2 t soda
1/2 t salt

Follow directions as above. Cooking time will likely increase 5-10 minutes, especially if you’re baking at altitude.

We are lucky enough to have local apples through the winter here in Colorado, although I used some from my frozen stash that I wild-picked here in Lyons this fall (which is why I haven’t specified the varieties because, honestly, I have no idea what they are!!). We also have an abundance of local honey, which I think tastes better than cane sugar anyway. With the switch to whole-wheat flour, I did up the (local) egg quantity just to help the cake rise as much as it normally would with white flour. And I upped the flour quantity a bit to accommodate the honey and the fact that I think I use more apples in mine than Grandma did.

In much of our cooking, switching to local is only possible to a certain extent. We’re never going to have Colorado-grown nutmeg or cinnamon, for example, and local butter is often hard to come by unless I make it myself. And until I get better at getting the water & whey out of my home-made butter, it’s not the greatest for baking. But each ingredient we swap for a local one is grocery dollars funneled into the local economy, fossil fuels conserved, and a step closer to sustainability…

Continue reading »]]> It took me longer than I’d hoped to get this post out. Part of my struggle was that choosing the veggies for your garden is such a personal choice. But a conversation with a friend last night helped me really focus in on how I choose veggies for my garden.

Start with the limiting factors
If you live in Lyons, you can’t grow bananas outdoors, no matter how badly you’d like to. If you live in an apartment, you probably can’t manage an apple tree. If you live in a suburban house, you likely don’t have room enough to grow wheat or barley. So start your veggie planning with identifying your limitations. Last week, I wrote about figuring out how much garden space you have, and how much you need.

Now, we’ll figure out the other limiting factors besides space. First, it’s important to know the length of your growing season. Although each season is different, your county likely records the weather each season and reports it to the government so that they can calculate an average first and last frost date. Here in Lyons, our last frost is typically some time around Mother’s Day, and we can expect our first frost at the end of September or, if we’re lucky, in early October.

If you have no idea when your first and last frost dates are, you can visit the NCDC to find out. Select your state, and a PDF organized by the name of the weather stations in your state will open. Sometimes the names are a little funky, so browse through until you find the one closest to you.

Once you have your average first and last frost dates, you also have a general idea of how many growing days you have. If you live in Zone 4 and north, you may have trouble getting some of the frost-tender, longer-season crops like melons and peppers to produce. If you live in warmer zones, you may have enough time to sneak in a couple of crop successions in a season. Here in Zone 5, I can usually get a crop of peas, garlic, and spring greens out of a bed that will later house summer crops like winter squash, cucumbers, green beans, or strawberries. But more about that later!

What do you like, and what is readily available?
Here’s where it gets personal. There’s no sense in planting a ton of eggplant if no one in your family will eat it (Matt is laughing right now, because I still plant a couple of eggplant every year even though I’m the only one who eats it). Likewise, I find growing something like corn, which is plentiful at the market, takes up a lot of garden space, and is very inexpensive, to be a waste of time. However, my family eats more tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, and herbs that the normal family and all of these tend to be rather pricey at the market. So we focus our attentions there. So spend some time this week thinking about what you’d like to grow, and start with what your family likes to eat!

Start making that list
OK, so you have a basic idea of what you’d like to grow. You know the length of your growing season, and how much space you have to use for gardening this season. Now it’s time to make a spreadsheet. This can be on paper, or online, whichever works best for you. I usually start with a paper list and then transfer it to the computer so I can sort and calculate. But I’m also a geek .

My spreadsheet has a column for type of vegetable (tomato, pepper, basil, etc.), then for the variety in case I plan to plant more than one type, as I always do with those tomatoes, peppers, and basil. Then I make an estimate of how many plants I need. I have a couple of books that help you estimate this, and the variation of their recommendations reminds us again that this is a personal choice, and also one that is impacted by space, time you want to spend in your garden, and whether you’re trying to feed yourself for a couple of summer meals or the whole year long.

I also calculate the square footage that each plant requires. You can get the spacing information off of the seed packet, or usually even in the garden catalog so that you can calculate this, but here’s an example: I don’t trellis my tomatoes, so I give them 9 square feet (3 feet between plants in each direction – 3 ft x 3 ft = 9 square feet of space). Since you already calculated the square footage of your gardening beds in last week’s exercise, you can pretty easily see if you have room for all of the plants you’re hoping to grow. Don’t fudge here, because if you overplant your beds, you’ll likely end up with more disease problems and the beds will be less productive than if they’re planted at the recommended spacing.

If you need some additional resources to help you with this (and keep in mind, I use a variety of books to help me!), check out the free resources available from the Cooperative Extension in your state. For Coloradoans, here are some that I find useful: Vegetable Planting Guide, Block-Style Layout in Raised Bed Vegetable Gardens, Sample Planting Guide.

OK, that’s a lot to work through for this week. And I haven’t even touched on starting your own seeds, choosing varieties (heirloom vs. hybrid), or any of that. But we can talk about that after you’ve ordered your seeds. Oh, and feel free to ask me questions–the ones I’ve gotten so far have helped me choose topics for this series!

Continue reading »]]> My biggest lesson-learned in the Eat From the Pantry Challenge is not to send your spouse to the grocery store–even with a detailed list–if you expect to hold to eating from the pantry. Oh well, we still were able to use up quite a bit of stuff from the pantry this week, so I can’t complain too much. This week, we’re leaving town for a few days, so the pantry will remain full and unused. We’ll have to come on strong at the end of the month (and probably continue this into February) to really make a dent.

If you can’t use the one you love, love the one you have (or something)
This week, substitutions were the big thing for me. If a recipe called for sweet potato, but I had tons of winter squash in the pantry, I used winter squash instead. If we needed walnuts, but I had pecans on hand, I swapped them out. In the past, I probably would have added them to the grocery list, but not this month!

Make Your Own Flour
I decided to try my hand at making flour in the food processor to try to use up some of the bulk grains I have. The result? Rice and oats work well in the food processor, millet & quinoa, not so much. Oh well, the millet was old anyway, so I fed it to the worms. Now if only I had a Vita-Mix with the grain mill blade…

Make your hubby bake for you!
My husband loves to have a well stocked pantry from a baking perspective. But that also means that when things like marzipan and candied peel go on sale, he stocks up. So what better way to declutter the pantry than to have him make me almond macaroons, bananas foster, and other yummies? Not good for the waist-line, but great for emptying the pantry.

Wow, a lot of spice blends
We have made a good dent in our store of spice blends in the pantry and have also used up quite a bit of our frozen stash of cilantro and garlic this week. We’ve been enjoying kicking the spice up a notch, and I’ve really enjoyed sending empty containers to the recycle bin. The cupboards are looking nice!

It’s a good thing we’re doing this…
In the end, it’s a good thing we’re doing this because the fridge in our garage finally died as a result of the sub-zero temperatures we’ve been having. The good news is that we’d used enough stuff out of the freezer that we didn’t lose a single thing. Score!

Continue reading »]]> This month, Life as Mom is hosting the Eat from the Pantry Challenge. The idea is that each family spend the month of January trying to eat their way through the bounty in the pantry/freezer/cupboards to save a little money in the New Year.

I am a bulk food addict and I belong to an awesome organic bulk-food co-op. That’s a dangerous combination that explains why I currently have a life-time supply of such staples as quinoa, dried beans, and rice in my pantry. I also love tea. Matt & I have been on a tea-buying moratorium for over a year now and still have probably another year’s worth (and we drink lots of tea). So the idea of burning through some of this excess, while saving a little money, appeals.

Some of the challenge participants are trying not to go the grocery store at all, or have given themselves a budget of, say, $100 for the month. We’re going to do the best we can, but will likely still be buying some fresh produce here and there throughout the month. Here’s a little status update on Day 4 of the challenge, highlighting what we’ve burned through thus far:

Tea

We had talked for several months about our need to break the coffee addiction. On the few recent mornings when I’ve forgone my double-espresso, I’ve been groggy enough to illustrate just how addicted I am. Being mildly lactose-intolerant, this is a good decision for me because it cuts my main source of daily dairy out. So on January 2, we gave up coffee and started burning through that tea. We have way more than a month’s worth, even if we drink several cups throughout the day (quite a bit of it is decaffeinated, so it’s not like we’re totally replacing our caffeine intake!). I’d like to get in to making my own tea blends, so clearing the prefab tea out of our pantry supports that.

Spice Blends

In addition to bulk grains, fruits, veggies, and legumes, I have a serious affinity for tiny jars of spice. Peanut sauce, green curry, various Indian spice blends, chili pastes and powders clutter up my spice rack and fridge. So this week, we’ve eaten through quite a few of these spice blends by mixing them with frozen or cold-storage veggies that we already had on hand. We’ve had Indian food, using up three packets of spice mix, a good portion of rice, chick peas, and cauliflower from the pantry. We’ve also had green curry, using additional rice, green beans, peas, and both green curry & coconut milk from the pantry. We’ve got another can of coconut milk in there, so I’m guessing this will be on the menu again this month!

Rice Milk

As I mentioned, I’m mildly lactose-intolerant, so what better way to drop some dairy from my diet, while at the same time using up some of that bulk rice, than to make my own rice milk? I found the very simple recipe on Vegan Reader, and also learned a lot that I never wanted to know about Hain Celestial! I tried some of the rice milk in my smoothie this morning (also using up several cups of frozen berries from the freezer!) and it was great. I added some almonds for extra creaminess and will be putting rice milk on my granola and oatmeal (did I mention how many oats I have in the basement, sheesh!) this month.

Canned Fruits

We typically try to eat a local diet, and do a lot of food preservation. While I often “shop” for dinner in my freezer full of veggies, grab a can of marinara sauce from the pantry, or raid the cold storage for a potato, onion, or squash, somehow we’re not very good at using the canned fruit, other than applesauce, which is the kids’ favorite. I didn’t even can any fruit this year because I had so much left from last year. So I busted out some canned peaches and pears and guess what? The kids LOVE them. We spend a lot of money in the winter on citrus, bananas, and pineapple, and it will be nice to replace some of that with fruit that I paid for months ago!

Hummus

In addition to trying to eat local, we’re mostly vegetarian. The kids love meat, so I slip in chicken every once in a while, give them beef hot dogs, and make the occasional bacon. But probably 5 days out of seven, we don’t eat any meat. While this sort of explains the abundance of beans, I need to be better about cooking the beans in my good old lead-free crock pot. And again, the kids love hummus. It also helps me use up the many different kinds of nut butters that I have in the pantry.

Quinoa

I wasn’t kidding when I said I bought a life-time supply of quinoa. Since we went local a few years ago, there have been some off years where no Colorado-grown quinoa was available. Colorado is the only place I know of outside of South America that grows the stuff, so when it turned up on our co-op list, I was desperate to have some. Other co-op members were less excited, so I ended up with 20 pounds out of a 25 pound bag. In case you’re wondering, that’s a lot of quinoa. Especially when you consider how it expands while cooking. I won’t need to buy it again for probably at least 2 years, but I am going to see how much I can use up this month starting with the curried quinoa and quinoa stew recipes I found online.

Are you participating in the Eat From the Pantry Challenge? What has been hardest for you? What creative recipes have you discovered?

Continue reading »]]>

Julie's Cherry Pie

That’s a bold statement, I know. But my Mom said it was the best pie crust ever, and she’s like George Washington when it comes to lies, so it has to be the truth.

After a flood of Facebook posts and Tweets about struggles with pie crust, I figured it was past time for me to put together a post about my obsession with consistently delivering pie crust heaven during the holidays. You see, I love pie. Not like a normal, healthy person likes a good pie. More like the way a crazy, OCD person loves something.

My Grandma made great pie. But she used lard (and later shortening) and I’m totally not going there for a variety of reasons. So I use butter. I won’t lie and say this pie crust is easy, or for beginners, because there’s a reason the title of this post is Best. Pie Crust. Ever. and not Easiest. Pie Crust. Ever.

So if you’ve made a few pie crusts in your time and are ready to try to achieve true pie Nirvana, read on!

My recipe comes from Joy of Cooking and is really simple with a total of four ingredients. But I’ve included pictures that I think help you visualize how this dough should look as you make it and prevent you from ending up with a tough crust due to over-working the dough.

Mix the following dry ingredients in the bowl of your mixer or food processor*:
2.5 cups of all-purpose flour (I often use whole-wheat pastry flour)
1 t sugar
1 t salt

Add 2 sticks of cold unsalted butter, cut into teaspoon-sized pieces and blend until the mixture looks like this:

Sablé

The French call this sablé because it looks sandy. The fat should be evenly distributed through the flour and the largest pieces should be smaller than a pea. You can mix as much as you need to here without harming the dough, but a Kitchen Aid mixer or a good food processor will do this in under a minute.

Next, drizzle 1/3 c plus 1 T very cold water over the dough and mix on the very lowest setting (or pulse if you’re using a food processor) until the dough just begins to come together. Out here in Colorado where it’s very dry, I often add an extra tablespoon of water, but if you overdo it, your crust will shrink when you bake it. So add as little water as you can until the dough looks like this:

If the dough comes together in a nice ball, you've added too much water!

Now turn the dough out onto a piece of plastic wrap and pack it into a ball with your hands. It’s OK if there are some loose pieces. Mash it into a ball and wrap it tight. Throw it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes, but up to 2 days, before you roll it out. While it’s in the fridge, the water will disperse more evenly through the dough and will help it hold together.

Depending on what you have your fridge set to, you may need to let the dough warm up just slightly for a few minutes before you can easily roll it out. Do not set the dough somewhere warm to warm up. If the butter starts to melt, you get a greasy mess that is impossible to work with. Direct sun–no. Countertop over the dishwasher–no. Next to the stove–no. You get the picture.

I have stone countertops and think they’re great for pie dough, but I made this recipe for 10 years on non-stone counters, so it’s not required. What I do love is my marble rolling pin, because it’s heavy enough to do some of the rolling work for you and cold enough to help keep that butter from getting greasy.

The recipe above will make two 9-10 inch crusts (i.e. 2 open-topped pies, or 1 covered pie). So divide the dough (putting the other half back in the fridge), roll it out, and place it in the pie pan. Return it to the fridge while the oven preheats. This will help prevent shrinkage. So will pre-baking it for 10 minutes with a piece of foil in it weighted down with beans or pie weights. I do this for my pumpkin pie or any custardy pie that might end up too soft without pre-baking.

That’s it. 30 years (and two generations) of pie crust knowledge condensed down to one 800-word blog post. But my Mom swears it’s the Best. Pie Crust. Ever.

* No, I do not recommend mixing this recipe by hand unless you are a fairly experienced pastry chef. Seriously. Have you ever seen the arm muscles on a real pastry chef? There’s a reason. Let electricity help you on this one.