cooking – Page 2 – shoutforjoy.us

Blizzard Jonas Flaming Hash

Tuesday, we were finally able to get out and about after a fine young man with a pickup truck, plow and a snowblower, dug us out Monday evening for 20% of the going rate. We had not prepared for this blizzard. We had left our snow shovels in the shed attached to the barn at the back of the lot. We left our cars parked in front of the barn, instead of next to the house, close to the street. I was pre-occupied with cooking a hearty chicken soup to serve on the street in center city Phila. that night to the homeless and poor and those working outreach, etc. Then I got a migraine in response to the weather system moving in. Bethann was concerned about me, so she forgot about moving the cars, etc. (When I get a migraine, there is a real risk it can cause a stroke. I have had at least six strokes and over 40 TIAs. This is why I am disabled.) So I stayed home Friday evening as the storm was starting, and sent Tony and Will, TKJ’s best driver, to the city to serve.

I grew up in Minnesota. We were required to read O.E. Rölvaag’s book: Giants in the Earth in 8th grade English. I think it was because his son, Karl, had recently been DFL (Democratic Farmer Labor) governor. The most memorable thing in that slow moving plot was when Per takes what he knows is an impossible walk into the blizzard and is not found until Spring. When they venture out, they find his corpse sitting on a haystack. He had been so close to his destination, but snowblind, cold and disoriented, on a fool’s errand to satisfy ceremonial religion. It is an important piece of literature on the harshness of the environment and how it informs our values. Back to 2016.

So I go to the grocery store on Tuesday in Bethann’s car. I find I can buy avocados, fresh peppers, onions, all manner of produce from all parts of the world, just two days after the worst blizzard in 20 years to hit us! What an amazing age we live in! This recipe celebrates that. Yes! This entry is about a recipe. Here goes!

Ingredients:

4 Glugs Yukon Jack 100 Proof
~1-1/2 lbs. 80% lean ground beef
2 Avocados diced
1 Orange Sweet Pepper diced
1 Sweet Green Pepper diced
1 Sweet Red Pepper diced
2 small Yellow Onions diced
3 Red Potatoes, peeled & diced
4 oz. “White Cheese”
3 cloves Garlic pressed
Black Pepper Grinder
Paprika
Coriander
Red Pepper
Turmeric

Directions:

In a 14″ or 15″ skillet, begin to brown the Ground Beef & Onions. Chop and add Peppers as they are ready. Sprinkle Paprika, Coriander Red Pepper Turmeric as you are going along and stir in. Add the Avocados. Grind coarse Black Pepper over the mixture, as well. Press the garlic over and stir in with your spatula.
When everything is about done cooking, glug the Yukon Jack into the pan and turn up the gas burner to full. Watch it catch fire for a moment! If you’re not cookin’ with gas, have a butane lighter handy to light it up. You have to be quick. It’s only 100 proof. 😉
Grate some cheese of your choice over it. We had a little yogurt longhorn or somesuch. I grated it over the pan and covered to help it melt. Feta would work. Blue cheese would be my first choice. Whatever goes with the wine you’re serving!

Enjoy! The settlers never roughed it like this!

40 Year Skillet Maintenance

When Bethann and I got married in 1975, we received Corning Ware Centura dishes with matching cookware that was supposed to be unbreakable, oven to freezer to microwave, last forever. We had four daughters, worked full time, rehabbed a couple of houses we were living in; exercised radical and exuberant hospitality and disproved that theory, or whatever it was. When those unbreakable pans hit the floor and broke, they shattered with panache! (Let it sink in. … OK … now ,,, both parts? groan? Thanks.)

So we replaced the dishes with cheap apple stoneware dishes for years. They take up too much room in our limited cupboards in our current old house, so we bought speckled enamel tinware in Amish country for our everyday plates. We can fit so many in our cupboards, we don’t need paper plates any more for parties. That’s right, the post is about skillets!

Back in 1975, we were given a set of three cast iron skillets. We have probably used at least one of them almost every day since. That set cost far less than a placesetting of our CenturaWare® or than one Corning® pan. Cast iron is superior to Teflon® for several reasons, the most significant of which is the production of it does not poison seals at the North Pole. If we had been given Teflon® pans, we wouldn’t be talking about them now. They would be long gone. Any bits we would have ingested would have been carcinogenic; whereas bits of cast iron pans are iron, which most people need in their diet.

Cast iron skillets take some basic maintenance. We wash them with hot water and steel wool. Then we put them on the stove with the flame on low to dry. Occasionally, if it looks too dry, we put a little olive oil in it while it is still hot and rub it around evenly with a clean rag or paper towel to re-season it.

After 40 years of use, your pan may look like this:

Medium Skillet with 40 year accretion of crud

It was time to take action to restore this skillet, so it could continue to serve for another 40 years. It was simple, I took a spent oscillating cutter tool blade and scraped the accumulated charred crud off the bottom and outsides of the pan. Then I scrubbed it with steel wool and rinsed and repeated. Then I finished by scouring the bottom and outsides with comet and hot water with steel wool and rinsing thoroughly.

Now it should take less energy to heat and cook. It will distribute heat more evenly, like when it was new. So mark your calendars to do your 40 year maintenance on all your cast iron skillets. It works the same way for Dutch Ovens, too. With them, you could probably get away with 50 years, as there isn’t so much stovetop use.

This was one of my “sidetracks” from home repairs. I get in the mode of fixing things, then that mode sort of generalizes in me. I get sidetracked onto these little projects as breaks from the bigger ones. Not to worry, I did manage to finish replacing the fan in the upstairs bathroom.

I work on these projects and write about them to combat my severe depressive disorder and cPTSD. Maybe you will find something helpful.

Sweet Ginger Pepper Sausage Stir-fry

I can’t just leave well enough alone, as they say. When I am left to make dinner for the family, and there is one kind of meat thawed, by now, they are still expecting to be surprised. This night the meat was a pound of hickory smoked, 100% beef sausages from Shady Maple, Lancaster, PA. They were the size of 10″ long bratwurst. I cut them into 1″ to 3/4″ long pieces and started to heat them in a large, cast iron skillet in some olive oil. Immediately the quartered rings of a yellow onion were added, then the halved strips of a yellow, red and orange sweet peppers were added.

The heat is on. The juices are beginning to flow. But the dish lacks inspiration. So, I grab a bottle of ginger brandy and glug, glug, glug, glug. Yes. All four glugs into the pan, over the contents. Then I turn up the gas a little more. I go to the freezer and get out the frozen corn. I threw a couple handfuls of that into the pan. and stir that in. I keep cooking and stirring until the brandy has a chance to seep into everything a bit. Its alcohol is bubbling away, leaving sweetness and the ginger.

O man! It was good!

Quinoa Cocoa Cinnamon Avocado Mango

That’s about all you need to remember for this dish I created tonight. It was delicious, nutritious, gluten-free, no added sugar, and has chocolate.

Ingredients:

3 cups organic quinoa
vegetable oil or olive oil
6-1/2 cups water
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 Tablespoon ground cinnamon
2 Hass avocados
4 Ataulfo mangoes

In a large sauce pan, toast the quinoa in a thin layer of oil to bring out the flavor. Stir frequently to avoid burning. Add the water, cocoa & cinnamon, and bring to a boil. Pit & peel the avocados and dice into the pan. If they are ripe enough, wisk them into the slurry. Peel & dice the mangoes & add them. Boil for about 6 minutes, then cover. Remove from heat and let sit for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Transfer it to a suitable bowl or casserole dish for serving and cover and put it into the refrigerator to chill.

It is mildly sweet and goes well with salad and/or soup.

Ku méejtech uutsil!

Pork Avocado Soup

If you follow my recipes, you know I like pork and you know I like avocados. I put them together in my first time making pork soup. Pork tends to be really affordable. We got a great deal on a shank roast. We had it for dinner. There was plenty left over, and a good size bone with a joint. I stripped the meat off of the bone and stewed it with a Spanish onion, cut in half, for half a day, in about 5 quarts of water with about a Tablespoon of turmeric, in a 10 quart sauce pan. I discarded the onion and the bone, and refrigerated the broth overnight.

Ingredients:

Broth in 10 quart sauce pan
6 carrots sliced thin
1 leek diced, including green leaves
8 or 9 radishes quartered
large handful of fresh kale, chopped
~ 8 sun dried tomatoes, diced
4 ounces pea shoots, chopped
2 large Hass avocados peeled & diced
~ 1/2″ fresh ginger grated
15 twists medium grind black pepper
salt to taste
1 Tablespoon ground sage
~ 1 pound pork diced small, including fat portions
water to almost fill pot

Basically, heat up the broth and start chopping and adding the ingredients in order and stew. It makes a great soup! It’s healthy , too, for an Atkins diet.

“I Like Ike” Pork Tenderloin

When President Dwight David Eisenhower was running for re-election in 1956, he came to Minnesota. My parents were GOP state committee persons. At the parade that was held to welcome Ike, I was presented to him. He kissed me and held me high in the air! Of course, I was just a little more than a year old at the time. I still have the rhinestone IKE brooch my mom was wearing for the occasion. My mom had a hand signed, black and white photograph of Ike and Mamie Eisenhower sitting in the rose garden of the Whitehouse, in a brass frame, sitting on her dresser next to her bed for four decades, until she passed away. I have several “I Like Ike” buttons, even one in Norwegian. I did say I’m from Minnesota after all. Ike dreamed big. More importantly, he led a nation who was tired of war to dream big, and to work together for some things that were bigger than themselves.

Ike had seen Hitler’s Autobahn and envisioned the Interstate Highway system to knit our country together as one nation as it had never been before. He witnessed the scourge of polio and mobilized free, universal immunizations for every child in America to wipe out this crippling disease. He wanted to go further and have universal healthcare for children. Schools and universities were built and a generation of veterans and their children were educated, thanks to a progressive income tax and a high corporate income tax. The middle class was established and the war debt was paid off. It seems we have now lost that spirit of bold cooperation for anything other than endless warfare. Ike warned us about that as well when he told us to beware of the military industrial complex. Well, I have gone on long enough. What does this have to do with a recipe?

I got to thinking what to call this and it hit me that this would have been impossible without Ike’s input and vision. It would have been impossible when I was a child. I was able to go to the grocery store and buy all of these ingredients for reasonable prices thanks to Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway system. So here goes.

Ingredients:

~ 1/4 cup lard
~ 2 pound pork tenderloin
1 small sweet onion, diced
~ 1 cubic inch ginger root, peeled & finely chopped or grated
1 papaya, peeled, seeds removed & cut into bite sized chunks
3 Hass avocados, pitted, peeled & cut up
2 kiwis, peeled & diced
~ 1 Tablespoon ground mustard
~ 1 Tablespoon ground turmeric
5 ounces Gorgonzola cheese
6 ounces fresh, baby spinach (1 Dole salad bag)

Slice the tenderloin into 1/2″ to 3/4″ thick medallions. rub it down with the turmeric and the mustard. Heat up the lard in a large skillet, preferably cast iron. I used our 13″ one. It was full by the time I was done. You are going to need sides. Start cooking the pork the onion and the ginger root in the lard. Let it cook for a bit, turning frequently. You don’t want to carmelize the meat. You want it tender, not crunchy. As you prep the fruits, add them to the skillet. Stir the mixture, so nothing burns. The only thing that should have carmelized would be the onions. You can put a lid on it to help hold the moisture and the heat in to help cook the meat and reduce the heat to medium. Slice the meat open to test for doneness. If it is about done, crumble the Gorgonzola on top of the mixture and cover for a few minutes, reducing the flame to low. Rip up the spinach and pile it on top. Replace the cover. Turn off the stove. Just let the steam and heat from the cast iron pan and the other ingredients cook the spinach. Serve.

It makes six servings. It took about half an hour to make. It is a one pan meal. It is super interesting! It has so many different flavor notes and textures. It is the rare recipe in which I did not use garlic or pepper. The ginger provided enough heat. I preferred it in little chunks rather than grated so it would surprise the tongue now and again. The kiwi are an element of whimsy. Each serving may get just a tiny bit of it. It wakes up the palate with a bit of tartness. The cheese melts in with the fruit and meat juices to form this uniquely luscious sauce. When I was all done, I wanted to pick up my plate and lick it to get the last gooey drop of it.

Bethann and Hilary told me I could definitely make that again. It is gluten free, low carb, and includes two super foods.

Cranford Cleans Up Nicely

Apologies to those of you who are starting the fast today. We cannot fast due to health limitations. I have to avoid drastic changes in diet in order to prevent migraines that cause strokes. I also need to avoid grains and gluten and limit carb intake. This recipe happened this evening, since Bethann was busy finishing a peppermint swirl dress, and could not break away to cook. I used ingredients I found in the refrigerator, cleaning up odds and ends. Bethann had started to thaw about a pound of 80% lean ground beef. It was still pretty frozen when I put it in the cast iron skillet. That worked pretty well. It allowed enough time for me to cut the other ingredients and for them to cook, without overcooking the beef.

Ingredients:

~ 1 pound 80% lean ground beef
1 small, sweet onion, finely diced
1 Gala or other sweet apple, peeled & diced
~ 10 radishes, finely diced
4 portabella mushrooms, diced
a handful of fresh cilantro, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, pressed
a generous pinch of ground ginger
a generous pinch of ground mustard
a generous pinch of ground turmeric
5 twists of black pepper
~ 3 ounces of feta cheese

Start to fry the ground beef in a large cast iron skillet. Flip it and scrape it as needed to break it up and continue thawing it and cooking it, while slicing the other ingredients. As the ingredients are cut up, add them to the skillet. Add the spices. Keep turning and mixing the ingredients. When all of the vegetables are tender and the beef is cooked, crumble the cheese on top of the mixture and cover until melted. Serve.

It was delicious!

GLAM Hash

We were given a large chunk of leftover gyro lamb meat from a church festival. You know what they say, “When life gives you gyro lamb meat, make Gyro Lamb Avocado Mango Hash!” What, you have never heard them say that? That’s because they have not tried mine.

Ingredients:

~ 2 pounds Gyro Lamb meat
1/2 Fennel split lengthwise, diced, including fronds
~ a cup of sweet pepper pieces, red & yellow
3 cloves Garlic, pressed
bunch of fresh Cilantro chopped
3 Mangoes, peeled and diced
3 Hass Avocados or 2 Florida Avocado, pitted, peeled & cubed
20 twists of Black Pepper
~ 4 ounces of Feta Cheese

Directions:

Use a large skillet. Slice the lamb, then break it into bite sized pieces. Throw the Lamb and the Fennel into the hot skillet and brown. Stir and flip while cooking. Add the the Peppers and Garlic next. Then add the Cilantro, the Mangoes & the Avocados. Stir in and continue to cook until everything is soft and juicy. Twist the Pepper. Break up the cheese on top. Cover for a minute or two to help the cheese melt a bit and serve.

Serves 6.

I know it sounds a little unusual. I made it for my family. They loved it. They took the leftovers in their lunches and asked for it again!

Puf da buna!

Oatmeal Scotchies

This is the recipe from the back of the Nestle’ bag. I’m doing this so we don’t have to go out and buy another bag of chips and use a magnifying glass every time we want to make them.

Ingredients:

1-1/2/34 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract or grated peel of 1 orange
3 cups quick or old fashioned oats
1-2/3 cups (11 oz. package) butterscotch chips

Preheat oven to 375° F.

Combine flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in a small bowl. Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar, eggs and vanilla extract in large mixer bowl. Stir in oats and chips. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets.

Bake for 7 to 8 minutes for chewy cookies or 9 to 10 minutes for crisp cookies. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.

Makes about 4 dozen cookies

Pan Cookie Variation: Grease 15 x 10 inch jelly roll pan. Prepare dough as above. Spread into prepared pan. Bake for 18 to 22 minutes or until light brown. Cool completely in pan on wire rack. Cut into bars. Makes 4 dozen bars.

Re-use McCormick Pepper Grinders

We go through a lot of spices. I like to use fresh ground, black pepper. It is better for you and more tasty. We don’t have the budget or the space for those ornamental, high end pepper grinders, but to constantly be buying throwaways from McCormick isn’t that economical or ecological either. Here is a solution:

Easy way to refill a McCormick pepper grinder.
Warm the black plastic grinder top a little with a hair dryer.
This makes the plastic pliable enough that you can pull
the black plastic grinder top off the glass bottle with your
hands. To reattach push back on until it snaps over the
glass bottle lip.

This works for the salt grinders, as well, obviously.