A Cook's Best Friend. . .

So I've blogged a little before about organizing and how to best prepare foods and make it easier on yourself and your busy schedules.  I stand by my statement that a freezer is a busy cook's best friend.  In this blog I'll try to outline the best ways to use a standard freezer/fridge combo and a chest freezer, for those of us lucky enough to have one.  I highly recommend buying one for anyone looking to save money in the long run - you can usually find them in estate sales and at dent and ding stores for much cheaper.  We bought ours as a floor model at Lowe's and ended up paying at least 100 dollars less than original price.
  To start I will talk to the average home freezer.  The best trick to efficiently using your home freezer is to freeze things like soups, sauces, veggies and other small things in flat sheets. Notice the bottom shelf . . .

My personal freezer is a little sparse at the moment because we have it all in our chest freezer but think of how many servings of split-pea soup, corn chowder and marinara sauces I could stack up on the top shelf as well.  The trick to freezing things flat are good sturdy freezer safe ziplocs: with a sharpie label the ziploc with the contents and the date the food will expire (things always look the same when they're frozen so you can never tell what's in that bag!) place the cooled prepared food into the bag laying flat on your counter (enough for one night's meal)  and seal trying to expel as much air as possible.  Lay the ziploc flat on the bottom of your freezer (or on a cookie sheet if you have no flat surface) things like soups and sauces can usually stay for up to 6 months in the freezer! 
  For storing these ziplocs in a chest freezer it's good to get a plastic file crate and put it in the bottom of your freezer then place the ziplocs upright in the crate (the frozen ziplocs can be sifted through like file folders and you can easily find whatever you need).  I also recommend, as I have before, to double or triple your recipes on those nights that you do cook to quickly get your freezer stocked with extra meals.

My chest freezer may look a little crazy but everything is assorted into its requisite bin.  I chose this freezer because it had hanging and sliding baskets so things won't get buried beneath everything else.  Since we buy beef in large quantities our freezer is mostly meats, stocks, and lots of frozen summer corn.  I have bins for steaks, roasts, offal, and ground beef.  The stocks are all labeled in freezer safe containers and placed on the bottom of the freezer.

To further help me in my meal planning I create a list that I stick on the outside of the freezer that lists what's in the freezer and how many servings there are.  When something is used I just strike it off the list or reduce the number of servings listed.

This helps when I sit down on Sunday and make my grocery shopping list.  I know what I already have on hand and this way I don't buy so much at the store and spend less money in the long run.  To further help me save money I always keep my eye out for any special deals on organic meat that I can stock up on and put in the freezer - like the organic pork sausages that I bought last week for half price!  You may spend more money on a certain trip to the store one week but it will be a lot cheaper in the long run.  Happy organizing!

Chicken Bouilliabaisse with Garlicky Beans

This is a much simpler bouilliabaise than the classic bouilliabaise and the beans give it a heartiness that's homey and satisfying.  I recently found in my favorite book store a book on braises and stews by Tori Ritchie.  Braises and stews are great because they give you lots of flavor with little effort - most of the time just pop it in the oven or crock-pot and let it be.

 

Serves: 4-5

Ingredients:

  - 4 Chicken legs, split into drumsticks and thighs (you can choose to leave skin on or off but I think it adds flavor)

  - Kosher salt

  - 6 tbsp olive oil

  - 1 yellow onion, sliced

  - 1/2 cup dry white wine - I used Pinot Grigio

  - 4-inch strip of orange zest (don't zest it into little pieces you'll want to remove it later)

  - 1 tsp dried thyme

  - Generous pinch of saffron threads

  - 1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes

  - 1 cup chicken broth (preferably homemade)
  - 2 cans (15 oz) garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
  - 4 garlic cloves, minced
  - 3/4 tsp red pepper flakes (more if you like it spicier)
  - 4 oz crumbled feta cheese

 Preheat an oven to 375.
 Rinse the chicken and pat dry with a paper towel.  Sprinkle with salt.  Heat 3 tbsp of the oil in a 5-7 quart dutch oven over med-high heat.  Add the onion, sprinkle with salt to taste and cook, stirring until softened - about 3-6 minutes.  Add the wine, zest, thyme and saffron and let come to a boil.  Add the tomatoes and broth and bring to a boil again.  Put chicken in pot, pushing it down in the sauce.  Cover and transfer to the oven.  Cook until chicken is opaque at the bone, about 45 minutes. 

  Meanwhile, in a baking dish, stir together the beans, remaining 3 tbsp of oil, garlic and red pepper flakes.  Put in oven alongside the chicken for the last 15 minutes of cooking time.  Remove the beans from oven and stir in the feta, season with salt and pepper.  Spoon beans into bowls and top with chicken and sauce.  Serve with crusty bread to sop up the extra juice!

My apologies and new thoughts. . .

So I've committed the ultimate blogger sin - falling behind in posts which leads to lack of interest and general apathy in my readership - for shame!  I do apologize and I blame it on my lack of focus on food in general in the past few months (lots of travel to Missouri, working out of town during the week where there is no place to buy organic or healthy foods of any quantity or quality, worried about finding a real job, etc.).  It has been possible for me with the new job, where I live in a house at a winery helping my brother-in-law manage construction on the site, to eat organically by going to Whole Foods on Sundays and stocking up and planning for the week.  I cook for myself and one other person that works and lives with me at the winery who also subscribes to my food philosphy.  So generally my breakfasts and dinners are good organic food but here's the problem - lunch!
  My lunches are now revolving around the work place and construction work environment.  The owner of the winery buys us lunch most days and other days I go out and get the crew lunch.  It's great to not have to worry about paying for lunches but I have felt my heath issues returning and feeling less well and lethargic these days because of it.  Maybe that's why I have felt less like blogging . . . maybe a little bit of a hypocritical dilemma running through my brain.  I did, however, on recommendation from a new friend just watch a new documentary that may have just changed my outlook on food all over again.
  This documentary is called "Fork Over Knives" and it follows two doctors that over the course of their practice and in-depth research have proven that animal based foods are the cause of most cancers and heart diseases.  Not only is the corn fed beef and industrial meat substances bad for us but meat in general.  Of course it is MUCH better to consume grass-fed and pasture raised animals in reasonable quantities but their extensive studies prove that we should probably be eating only grains, fruits and veggies without dairy, meat or added oils in our diet.
  Their studies are very convincing - people who had had multiple bypass surgerys or extensive cancers throughout their bodies have gone on to live decades after their illnesses and have made complete recoverys, sometimes without chemo and radiation or even surgery - biologically I have one qualm.  If humans were not meant to eat meat then why do we have "meat tearing" canine teeth?  Is this just a hold over from our evolutionary make-up, which we have evolved away from but no longer need (like our tail bone with no tail?) or do those canine teeth have a different purpose now?  Do we need the canine teeth for tearing into fibrous veggies like celery and broccoli?  Next time I eat I am definitely going to pay more attention ;-) but for now I think I will just significantly reduce the amount of meat I consume. 
  Until next time your thoughts and opinions are definitely welcome.  Happy eating!

The scary world of dehydration. . .

So this last weekend Meredith and I decided to continue improving on our preserving prowess and we canned more tomato sauce.  We ordered the organic "seconds" (bruised and split) tomatoes from Soil Born farms (they ended up being beautiful unblemished masterpieces of organic goodness and not bruised at all, for a whopping 50 cents a pound!  So with 60 pounds in total and an array of other goodies we headed home to her house in Amador.  Luckily she has a great brick patio with some shade and we set up our big cooking operation from the previous weekend.  The one big difference is that we had decided to try our hand at dehydrating fruits and veggies as well.
  Our friends and family graciously donated their dehydrators for our venture and I had visions of dried soup mixes and scrumptious dehydrated fruit snacks dancing in my head.  We took the Ball Blue Book and a guide, "How to Dehydrate Food" as our bibles and compared the two recipes.  Through the comparison we came up with our game plan of what fruits and veggies we needed to pretreat in citric acid, how thick we cut them and at what temperature the dehydrator should be set.  What we found was not all fruit and veggies are created equal and what a P.I.T.A some of them were!
  Apples, pears, strawberries, and figs were the easiest and seemed to come out the most uniform (all but the figs were pretreated with citric acid).  White peaches were AMAZING dried but quite a bit of work with blanching, peeling, pitting and slicing.  Grapes, blueberries and cherries - while amazing tasting - were too messy, too time consuming to prep and took WAY too long to dehydrate.  I'll buy my raisins at the grocer in the future.

   The plan for the fruit is to make homemade trail mix.  This is something I used to do all the time in Italy before our long bus rides every weekend with my architecture class.  My roommate and I would venture down to the Mercato Nuovo and visit our favorite dried fruit vendor - he had EVERYTHING!  Our favorites being dried mango and pineapple.  Then we would head over to get a bag full of almonds and walnuts with some chocolate candies.  Our DIY trail mix would sustain us on those long bus rides from city to city.  Today I went to Whole Foods and stocked up on raw nuts and semi-sweet chocolate chips from the dry foods bins and once my homemade dried fruit is done conditioning after a week it will all get put into individual snack size food-saver bags!
  For the homemade dried veggies, less pretreating was necessary and they came out fairly uniform.  Green beans, okra, onions, peppers and corn came out great.  Carrots were too much work and do not retain much of their nutrition or flavor after drying so those are nixed for my future dehydrating endeavors.  Meredith and my greatest find, however, were dried zucchini!  We ended up slicing a lot of Mer's extra zucchini from her garden and seasoning it with a garlic seasoning mix.  When dehydrated zucchini becomes crispy and with seasoning easily takes the place of a chip - flavorful, crunchy, no fatty oils and raw so it retains all the nutrients!  Just remember to go light on the seasoning because the "chips" are much smaller after dehydration which compounds the spice flavor!

10 medium zucchini sliced 1/4 inch with garlic salt, pepper, and onion powder.

10    pounds   of   zucchini   equals   a   quarter   pound   of   zucchini    chips!

Bloody Mary Mix (Alcoholic or Non)

This recipe is the one I used last weekend for canning but it will probably stay in the fridge for a week or more and would freeze excellently (just add the vodka before pouring yourself a glass otherwise it won't freeze). 

Makes: 5 quarts - 20, 8 oz. servings

Ingredients:

  - 30 medium tomatoes, peeled, seeded, decored and quartered

  - 2 1/2 cups green peppers, chopped

  - 1 3/4 cups carrots, diced

  - 1 cup celery, diced

  - 1 small onion, diced

  - 4-6 garlic cloves, minced

  - 1 Serrano pepper, seeded and minced (optional)

  - 1/4 cup parsley, minced

  - 1 bay leaf

  - 1/4 cup sugar

  - 1/4 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice

  - 2 tbsp salt

  - 1 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire

  - 1/2 tbsp Tabasco or to taste (I added about 3 tbsp)

  To peel the tomatoes slice the skin of the tomato after washing and drop in boiling water for 1 minute or until skin becomes wrinkly, remove and drop in an ice bath.  When cool the skin will peel right off and then just core and cut in quarters and push seeds out with your thumbs.

  Cook the ingredients from the tomatoes to the parsley in a large pot until mushy - it will quickly become soupy - cook for 30 to 45 minutes, until veggies become softer.  Remove the bay leaf and working in batches, place the contents of the pot in a blender and puree to a desired consistency for drinking.  Return blender mixture to the pot and add the remaining ingredients.  Taste for seasoning and spiciness.  Bring this to a boil and either can the contents, place in a refrigerator container for immediate enjoyment or store in freezer safe containers for later.  If canning place in sterilized quart jars and water bath can for 40 minutes.

  Add the desired amount of vodka (or not) to mixture and place in shaker with ice, shake vigorously, pour chilled mixture into a glass with ice and pickled garnish or celery stick.  It's great with brunch or as an afternoon treat before dinner!

Fun at the farm. . .

So this post is going to be less about ways to eat and live better and more about how much fun I had last weekend at the farm where our CSA  box comes from.  Every year, as a thank you to being a farm member, Eatwell hosts two tomato saucing parties.  They invite whoever wants to come out to turn 1800 pounds of tomatoes (roma, heirloom, beefsteak, etc) into whatever wonderful concoctions you can dream up - for free.  All you have to bring is the propane stove, your utensils for cooking, chopping and blending and your jars - they supply the tomatoes, onions, peppers, basil, water and pressure canners as well as the spacious hoop houses with lots of tables.

The hoop houses where the canning is set up.

  This year was my first year and my sister Meredith came out with me to be my sous chef.  I wasn't really sure how much I would get canned but I was hopeful it would be a lot (I bought 48 quart jars which ended up being a little too ambitious). Meredith and I arrived at the farm 30 minutes early to make sure we had a prime spot, unloaded our turkey fryer, dual propane stove, two coolers, blender, pots, cutting boards and 2 five gallon propane tanks and got things hooked up and ready to go.  Within an hour of arriving, a wonderful concoction of freshly picked tomatoes was boiling away on our stove and the turkey fryer water was heating up ready to sterilize jars.

The sauce just after coming to a boil - the foam boils away after an hour or so and it reduces by about a 1/3 before it's ready for canning.

The recipes that I had spent hours looking for on the internet were the easiest and the most flavorful I  could find.  Making tomato sauce had previously been a little off-putting to me because it is so much work - boiling the tomatos, putting them in an ice bath, peeling the skin off, slicing, decoring, deseeding, draining and then boiling down before processing in jars.  I found a great recipe online that said to just wash your tomatoes, slice them in quarters, remove the stem and blend to a liquid consistancy then just boil it for 2.5 hours until it is at the thickness you want and then can for 25 minutes in a boiling water bath canner.  That was a lot less work in my opinion and the added bonus is that not peeling off the skins adds more nutrients to the sauce.  By blending it all up together the pulp, skins and seeds all become one texture and no one would no the difference unless you told them. 

Meredith blending up the tomatoes for the sauce.

  The long part of the process is waiting for it to boil down so while we had our first pot of tomato sauce boiling away we decided to prep the tomatoes and other ingredients for our bloody mary mix.  Unfortunately the recipe I found for bloody mary mix called for peeled, cored and deseeded tomatoes, so Mer and I promptly set in to blanching, cutting and peeling 60 tomatoes.  It was a messy repetitive job but it helped pass the time as we waited for things to cook.  Added to the tomatoes were onions, parsley, worcestshire, tabasco, serrano peppers, celery and carrots.  After all this cooks down for 45 minutes you blend it all up, return it to the pot, check for seasoning and spice, bring to a boil and can in a water bath canner for 40 minutes.  You can drink it with or without alcohol and my little taste test before canning told me it was going to be pretty darn good!

The first batch to come out of the canner.

  We cooked and canned from 10:30 am to about 9:30 pm.  We got 13 quart jars of sauce made and 11 jars of bloody mary mix, plus we made a great meat ragu to share with everyone that night at dinner.  Mer and I learned some valuable lessons that will only help us to be more efficient and organized next year.  We know that we definitely need at least one more pair of hands and an extra turkey fryer wouldn't hurt either.  Eventhough it was a lot of work, we found ourselves planning to do it again before the season is over - perhaps in Mer's backyard.  We would just need to find a cheap supplier of organic tomatoes in large quantities.  Perhaps I'll call Eatwell this week and see if I can get a few more crates of tomatoes and do some more canning this weekend.

  Once you start canning it quickly becomes an addiction!  I encourage everyone to try it out at least once - it makes for great presents at the holidays and what better way to preserve the fresh taste of summer all year round!

Lemon Fusilli Pasta

This is another great recipe from Ina Garten - it's fulfilling in that it cures your carb craving but uses great fresh ingredients like cherry tomatoes, which are especially wonderful this time of year. It's great served hot or room temperature!

Serves:  4 to 5

Ingredients:

  - 1 tbsp olive oil

  - 1 tbsp minced garlic (I usually double this)

  - 2 cups heavy whipping cream

  - 3 lemons (with good clean rinds)

  - 1 lb dried fusilli pasta

  - 1/2 lb baby arugula (or 2 bunches common arugula - the more arugula grows the more bitter it gets)

  - 1/2 cup freshly grated paremsan

  - 1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved

Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat, add the garlic, and cook for 60 seconds. Add the cream, the zest from 2 lemons, the juice of 2 lemons, 2 teaspoons of salt, and 1 teaspoon of pepper. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, until it starts to thicken.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, add 1 tablespoon of salt and the pasta, and cook according to the directions on the package, about 12 minutes, stirring occasionally. Drain the pasta in a colander and place it back into the pot. Immediately add the cream mixture and cook it over medium-low heat for 3 minutes, until most of the sauce has been absorbed in the pasta. Pour the hot pasta into a large bowl, add the arugula, Parmesan, and tomatoes. Toss well, season to taste, and serve hot