a quick catch-up

I did trick almost all the family into going "apple picking" at the farm near us. (Amy couldn't come because her parents in law were up for a visit that weekend.) We ended up picking raspberries and blueberries, and buying apples, peaches and corn from the farm stand because I was a bit too tired to keep going on with the pick-your-own. We also got some ridiculously yummy feta, tomato and basil dip which is just perfect on veggie crackers!

Since starting maternity leave, I have made soda bread, strawberry-peach jam, quiche, beef stew, apple pie, many pancakes, and a bunch of more regular meal stuff. The jam came out especially tasty. A bit thin, since I didn't put a lot of sugar in, but who doesn't want low sugar, seedless strawberry peach jam? I usually share my jams with the rest of the family, but Alex has pretty much forbidden me to do that this time!

farmer's market

I know I've written about the farmer's market before, but I just went yesterday and got inspired all over again.

I got two ears of fresh corn (picked that day) and two of the tastiest white peaches I can recall eating, for a heaping total of $1.50. All these goodies were from a farm about 10 minutes down the road from us called Applecrest Orchards. I am right in the middle of planning an apple-picking trip there with the rest of my family--and of course, I will be visiting their farm stand while we're there. :D

delicious dish

Ripped off from my beloved Mommie, of course--who better to steal tasty recipes from???

1 link (1 lb) of turkey kielbasa (just as yummy as the pork stuff but MUCH less fatty)
1 can of diced tomatoes
1 cup rice
about 1 tomato can's worth of added water (at least for my rice, which is proving to be somewhat incorrigible about water quantities and cook times)

Throw it all in a skillet and simmer it until the rice is tender.

DONE!

And it's ridiculously good. You wouldn't even believe it. Bo was feasting delightedly on the grains of rice I gave him, because they were so tasty he thought they must be meat.

and for an encore this morning

Pancakes with fresh blueberries swirled into the batter. :D

Tonight I believe I may make sloppy joes!

WHY I cooked enough for a small army

I'm freezing meals for when we have a new Critter to tire us out and distract us from any real food prep! :)

I am very pleased with myself for thinking of this --much better than relying on take-out, or just eating toast all day or something. :)

a cooking frenzy!

Tonight I made giant batches of beef stock, beef stew, chicken stock, chicken pot pie, and followed it all up with a loaf of delicious soup bread (made with beef stock instead of water). I am soooooooooooo tired! I think I was in the kitchen for at least 3 hours straight. But I probably made enough to feed me and Alex for the better part of a week. :D

EDIT: I forgot to mention the jello (with blueberries from the farm down the street) and the mac & cheese that ended up being dinner!

bread experiment

I was getting sick of the tiny bit of sweetness that shows up in my Favorite loaf of bread, so I decided to try a batch with NO sugar added.

Well, it really didn't rise much, ultimately, even though I gave it more time. I did know that the sugar is there to feed the yeast, so I'm not too surprised. It tastes good anyway --it's just about 1/2 the size of usual loaves!

baked macaroni & cheese casserole

This is the best mac & cheese in the WORLD and makes a giant casserole. It used to feed my whole 5-person family when I was growing up, with leftovers!

1 box (16 oz.) elbow macaroni --$1.20
8 oz. cheddar cheese, grated --$2.00
2 tbsp butter or oil --8 cents (vegetable oil)
1/4 tsp salt --negligible
2 tbsp flour --2 cents
2 cups milk --50 cents
1 sleeve saltine crackers --43 cents
Total: $4.23

That's less than $1 per person.

If anyone wants me to start posting recipes instead of just ingredient lists, I can totally do that, but for right now I'm mostly excited about the prices (and how low they are)!

gorgeous bread!

I have a favorite bread recipe, which I make pretty much whenever the weather's not too hot. I prefer making bread at home to buying it in the store anyway. I made this today:...and then in the spirit of what Alison and I have been talking about, I got to wondering whether/how economical it really is to make my own bread. I did a bunch of research, and here's what I came up with:

1 package yeast --67 cents
1/4 cup warm water
7/8 cup warm water
1 1/2 tsp salt --1 cent
1 1/2 tbsp sugar --2 cents
1 tbsp vegetable oil --4 cents
3-3 1/2 cups flour --56 cents

Whole loaf: $1.30
Comparable loaf from the store: $3.89
Saved: $2.59!

Even if you're just getting a loaf of Wonder Bread, it's $3.19. I'd much rather have mine!

What happened to cod, anyway?

Another thing we did with Alex's family was visit a kind of seaside museum/conservation center a little way up the coast from here.

Among other things, we learned about how cod was this awesome fish that all the colonists just adored... They even made it part of Massachusetts' logo for a while. So they kept fishing it and fishing it, and just loving this tasty fish! There was some concern about overfishing when they started being able to catch less, but they switched to smaller boats and were still catching so darn many that there COULDN'T be a problem!

Fast-forward a couple of centuries and the numbers of cod being caught were still plummeting and the average size was way down.... it's no surprise that the whole cod-fishing racket crashed in the early '90s. The choice was either to let cod disappear from the region entirely, or to impose strict government controls on fishing.... guess which happened.

So the good news is, the cod population is hypothetically making a comeback. The bad news is, cod is no longer the available fish-and-chips of choice.

This relates back to me because I started my life in a Massachusetts fishing town where if your fish didn't come out of the ocean THAT DAY and get cooked into a state of perfect deliciousness, it was an embarrassment and the establishment just ought to be ashamed. I used to get fish and chips about 1/2 the times our family ate out, and that was that. I remember that at a certain point, I stopped liking fish and chips because the fish just stopped tasting so good, and got kind of chewy. I thought it was a series of bad cooks, or because we were at an out-of-town restaurant--if I thought about it at all. I mostly didn't, and just got burgers instead.

Apparently that was the demise of cod and transition to haddock and other white fish as fish-and-chips staples. So now I can (unfortunately) say I have been a first-hand witness to an ecological semi-disaster. Think friendly thoughts about the recovering cod population--I really do think that if people weren't dumb we could have our cod and eat it too!

I tried real lobster a while ago

...sort of, anyway.

While Alex's parents and brother were in town, we all went to this restaurant down the street from our apartment, called The Old Salt. The food turned out to be pretty okay, but nothing fabulous. Anyway, Alex got a lobster roll that was pretty much hunks of lobster in a bun, so I ate one of the hunks.

I am torn between whether "foamy" or "rubbery" would be a better word for the texture, and I think that sums the experience up completely. Too bad!

I also had fish and chips, which was made with haddock. I miss cod....

pot roast turned out well

I did it by my mom's method. (It's my favorite way to get acquainted with cooking a new food--try it how my mom does it and then play with it from there, if I even need to!)

In this case it meant I browned it on all sides, then nearly submerged it in water and gave it a good simmer until it got really tender. I also threw in some carrots and potatoes to boil in the meat water as the meat finished up.

At the last minute I decided I wanted to make some gravy too. I don't really know the first thing about gravy, except that you start with a roux, and that it involves flour and meat juices, but it turned out okay--a bit bland but definitely edible. Some salt and bay leaf fixed that up okay, and the meat was tender and moist enough that it didn't really need gravy anyway. The thing I ended up being proud of with the gravy was that I didn't burn it to the bottom of the pot. :)

artichokes, artichokes, yum yum yum

Alex has informed me that he doesn't care much about artichokes one way or the other, so I am eating them both myself!

Last night I had the first one fresh from being steamed, with melted butter to dip it in. Tonight I am looking for some other sauce varieties, but they all seem to be mayo-based. I wish I had lemons--I would make lemon-butter sauce, which is more up my alley.

I guess I'll just have to try one of these recipes and see how it does. How about a combination of mayonnaise, mustard, cayenne, ketchup and Worcestershire sauce? (Does that sound hideous to anyone else???)

another tasty dinner by the Bowlings

Alex and I were feeling inspired by the beautiful weather that we had today, so we decided to go to the store and see what jumped out at us for a good springtime dinner.

We found some yummy-looking pre-marinated pork tenderloin, but decided we could marinate some ourselves (pre-marinated was $7 and change and non-marinated was $2 and change, which was good motivation).

We also got corn on the cob to boil up, and then the real stroke of genius was getting apples and onions to boot.

We rubbed the tenderloin in this ridiculously yummy stuff called Maple Pepper. Aside from those, it also has garlic and some Secret Ingredients. My sister and brother in law gave me a jar of it from a restaurant somewhere in the boonies a while ago, and it turned out to be the perfect complement to the pork.

So we baked the pork while we fried up the apples and onions in yummy butter, then we poured the apples and onions onto the pork and baked it all some more.

This was possibly the yummiest thing we've EVER eaten. I'm not exaggerating, either. The pork was so tender we could cut it by waving a fork at it. I think it helped that we had a cover on the baking dish, so all the moisture stayed inside. Also, we threw a little brown sugar into the apple/onion mixture, which helped to caramelize it gorgeously.

The only flaw is that it used up a bunch of maple pepper! We'll have to find out where it came from, so we can get more. :)

woo, gardening!

I got together with my mom this week and talked over my plan to commandeer some of her yard space to expand her garden. We are agreed about the idea of expanding her garden area and maybe even making a raised garden bed!

My next task is to figure out exactly which kinds of veggies and herbs I want to put in there, anyway. :)

real vegetables

I am in LOVE with fresh, GOOD produce. We got some tomatoes from Stop & Shop (which turns out to be kind of 2/3 of the way in quality and price from a Market Basket to a Hannaford, for those of you who have any idea what I'm talking about).

Anyway, the tomatoes were so ripe and perfect that the whole display of them smelled like REAL tomatoes--the kind you can pick off the plant and just gobble down. MMMmmmmm.....

(ASIDE: I am SOOO sick of "vegetables" and "food" that are in fact not truly edible at all! For instance, supermarket cucumbers are a joke. They are foamy plant fiber and water, and nothing else. A home-grown cucumber is a thing of flavorful beauty. I NEED to get some garden space!)

Anyway, it's a couple of days later now and the tomatoes still smell like that, and every time I smell one I just want to dig in!

Eating these delicious tomatoes reminded me that my mom grows tomatoes when the season is right, and that they are invariably damn tasty.... This combined with my general state of disgruntledness at bad veggies, and resulted in me hatching a plan to see how I can earn a supply of Mom's tomatoes for myself, and maybe get some more kinds of fresh veggies to boot. :)

What, cottage cheese now?

I had cottage cheese for breakfast! This is another first food for me. I'm doing quite well at widening my food horizons! And I have to admit, it didn't taste like what I expected it to. I had it with cinnamon-sprinkled peaches. I might even make it a regular breakfast. :)

foods I want to try

shellfish
duck
veal? (don't know if I'm brave enough for that one)
actual non-Cod fish
octopus

as you can see, I'm really trying to get acquainted with the ocean here. :)

Why a cooking blog, exactly?

My best friend in the whole world has been on a natural/healthy/organic kick for a year or two and has gotten me pretty excited about it. She invited me to do an experiment with her this year where we will challenge ourselves to do more things at home in a natural way, for ourselves, rather than just buying pre-made stuff and going along with the Consumerist American lifestyle. For me this means (for one) that I will be doing a lot more cooking from scratch, and I thought I'd keep a record to see how I do!

Other than that, I just love messing around in the kitchen and am excellent at willfully disobeying recipes. I like to share what I discover, so I'll be posting my own recipes here too.

So, I guess I'll get to it. :)