Home Cooking

im in need of assistance: mustard for me was just on leftover turkey sandwiches and now for Christmas I was thinking of trying to mix it up for the holidays.--read more

Whew!!--read more

I just finished the "I Love Garlic!!" recipe book I've been working on now for months. oy! That thing took forever! But it's finally in the store and I've bundled it with three other recipe books that, if you love garlic, you'll also love--a pizza book, an Italian cookery book, and a salsa book. A pretty good deal for $11.95!

And with that, I'm closing this box, fixing lunch and collapsing!

I just made homemade yogurt, it came out great!
I made a quarts worth of plain yogurt, ALL from powdered
milk...It certainly didn't taste powdered at all..--read more

Today turned out to be a fairly big kitchen day. I baked a nectarine/pluot galette, because I have SO MANY STONE FRUITS I need to do something with! I used the cream cheese crust from Joy of Cooking using spelt flour, and oh man! Josie says it is the best thing I ever baked, period. I'll post the recipe in a couple of days.

Then John came home with something we've wanted for a while: A Fry Daddy! We filled it up with unrefined coconut oil and made some French fries and some gluten-free battered zucchini sticks, and then I made a couple of little fritters out of the leftover batter. We intend to make some wheat-free treats in the next few days, and it's nice to be able to make French fries that aren't so horrible for us. Looking forward to trying some wheat-free fish and chips, John's fave. (But wait! there's more!)--read more

After slaving over a hot word processor for several weeks, I've completed The New Homemaker Book of Crockpot Cookery! Yay, me! And yay, you--there are several TNH members' recipes in the book.

Included in the package are three BONUS ebooks as well--another crockpot recipe ebook that is truly outstanding, a quick and easy favorites ebook, and a collection of summer recipes that includes my favorite tropical fruit salsa. Oh god, mango salsa, you haven't LIVED until you've had mango salsa. It's only $7.95 for all four books--and they're delivered immediately for all you instant gratification fans!

There's a reason I'm making it so affordable. TNH has gotten so popular I have to upgrade to a new web server. It's why the site keeps crashing, and why you've been having trouble getting here lately. This is going to cost us unexpected money. If you've been looking at any of our ebooks, or at subscribing, now's the time to act. Help us get TNH onto a stable, roomy box, ensure your access to it, and get yourself some great ebooks while you're at it! Thanks!

It's nearly summer, and the dandelion flowers are probably mostly gone where you are. But here, I'm still in the middle of making dandelion wine. Oh, the flowers are mostly gone here too, but it's a long process. Not a hard one--just a long one.

For two years now Anhata and I have made dandelion wine in the spring. This post will prepare you for next spring's crop, and it's a great introduction to winemaking if you've always been interested but didn't know where to start.

For this tonic wine, it starts with picking dandelion flowers. We make it into a party for our girls. Everyone grabs a basket and out into our yard we go to pick until our fingers turn yellow. We get a spectacular crop of dandelions every year because we don't care about lawns. We have what Hata calls a "feral meadow."

Look for UNSPRAYED AREAS to pick your dandelions. You don't want to be consuming Roundup or some dang thing. And stay away from high traffic areas so that you're not dealing with exhaust fumes either.

For each batch of wine using our favorite recipe (#2), you need two quarts of flowers. We keep the sepals--the green part at the bottom of the flower--on. We like the slightly bitter taste it gives the finished product, and I feel it adds to the medicinal qualities of the finished wine. Yeah, we really do make this stuff as a tonic, though it tastes pretty good, rather reminiscent of sake. (I have to be careful because it also has quite a kick to it and I am in recovery. So far, no problems.)

Pour a gallon of boiling water over the flowers, cover with a cloth and let steep for no more than two days. I put the pot back in the pantry with the kombucha and other fermenting things.

When they're done steeping, take a sieve and line it with cheesecloth or muslin. I use a clean "flour sack" type tea towel. Strain the flower water through the sieve into a new pot. I then pick up the towel and give the flowers a good press, gathering up the edges and twisting the bundle of flowers to get all the water out of them. Bring the resulting "tea" to a boil. It'll smell pretty bitter, and it is.

Add the peel of four ORGANIC oranges--just the peel, not the white pith. I use a vegetable peeler to get just the orange part off. Boil for ten minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in 2 lbs 11 ozs of granulated sugar. Stir to dissolve the sugar. Let cool thoroughly, and then add a packet of champagne yeast and the juice of the four oranges. The recipe calls for adding yeast nutrient. Last year we didn't and it came out fine; this year we did, and I'll let you know how it comes out.

Strain again into a fermenting vessel of some kind. You can use a special plastic fermenter, or go cheap like me. I use a glass gallon jug from some apple juice, fitted with an airlock I bought for under $2 at a wine supply store.

Then comes the easy part. Let it sit some place out of the way until it clears. It will bubble like mad the first few weeks and then it will start to settle. I leave it for about five months or so and then Anhata comes over and we siphon it off into liter-sized EZ Cap bottles. Be careful to leave the sediment in the fermenting vessel, which is why you want to siphon instead of pour the young wine into bottles. Hata takes half the wine, I take the other half, and we put it in the back of our cupboards and forget about it until Winter Solstice. The recipe site says it's even better if you let it sit until the spring, but we make this stuff especially for winter liver and blood support, so Yuletide it is.

For a tonic, take about an ounce every couple of days however you please throughout the winter. You can drink it several ways. Hata likes to heat it up like a toddy. I like it with fizzy water, lemon and a sugar cube, but more often than not I just drink it neat right before bed.

Winemaking is just one more way to increase your self-reliance, especially if the wine also serves a dual function as a medicinal tonic. It's also a lot of fun!--read more

I made spelt banana bread today, a double batch, and it's already almost gone. I think that's a clue I need to bake more.

You like the chicken tea kettle? Anhata found that at a rummage sale and decided it belonged at our house.

The bananas had been sitting forlornly on the counter waiting for someone to mash them up for bread, and I'm glad I took the time today to do it. For some reason they're not getting eaten fast enough, and no one in our house likes bananas once they're really ripe. We're all barely-ripe banana eaters.

However, one person in the house likes banana bread, apparently likes it more than she wants anyone else to know. Guess who?

She used to do this with expensive foo-foo bread from the store--her older sister, too. We'd cut into what looked like a whole loaf and find a hollow shell. Gutted bread.

Anyway, try the recipe. It's tasty, a little spicier than traditional banana bread.

It's been gorgeous here lately, but not today! Last night it was so cold we had to put our down comforter back on the bed.

Coincidentally, we had a turkey carcass in the fridge--well, part of a carcass, it was the leftovers from a turkey breast. We also had some chicken bones left from John's birthday dinner; he made curry and de-boned the breasts himself and I froze the unused part. So into the soup pot they went, along with an entire onion--skin and all--an entire bulb of garlic, skin and all, a handful of old mushrooms, some peppercorns, sea salt and a dried-up hand of ginger. I love stock for using stuff like this up that I couldn't otherwise use, and making it delicious, too.

I make stock using a pot just like this one: A pasta pot. Yes! It makes sense. I'm not going to want any of the above solids in the final soup. So I put the pasta liner inside the main pot, put all the stuff in that liner, and when it's time to strain I just lift the pasta liner out. Viola! Instantly strained. Saves me a lot of burns and swearing straining the stock into another pot.

I'm not at all sure what else is going into this soup. I don't really have any leftover meat from the turkey to speak of. But I have several gorgeous leeks, and I've been asked to put barley in there. So barley leek appears to be the direction we're headed.

I also got a new kombucha scoby last week and have a batch of sweet tea cooling on the stovetop right now so I can start a batch tomorrow. My old friend Gonzales got thrown out when I was in the hospital, and really, can you blame my mom? If I opened up a Corningware casserole and found that floating around not knowing what it was, I'd throw it out too.

And if I don't run out of gas, I'll be making banana bread. I'm determined to not let any produce go to waste and really squeeze the dollars right now, and I have a hand of bananas past their prime. Though I just noted the time. It may need to wait till tomorrow. If it works, I'll post the recipe, since I'm making it with spelt.

Update: Yep. Outta gas. But! I did put up the soup recipe.

Has anyone here eaten a KoolAid pickle? I love pickles of all kinds, and while KoolAid is for dying wool in this house--we certainly don't drink it--I have been known to munch on technicolor pickles from Asian markets that you KNOW have all kinds of funky crap in them.

TNH's edition of "The American Frugal Housewife" from 1832 is now available in wire-bound paperback. It's $9.95 from CafePress. The ebook is available here at TNH for $1.95, 10% discount for members, 75% discount for subscribers. (Discounts don't apply to paperback editions.)

Today was the second annual Dandelion Wine Day here at TNH Central. Anhata, Laura and I and the kids went out and picked all the remaining dandelions in the yard. We got exactly two quarts, which is what we needed for our favorite recipe, which is #2 of the 42 recipes on that page. Unlike the recipe, though, we keep the sepals--the green part at the bottom of the flower--on. We like the slightly bitter taste it gives the finished product. Hata has the pictures and we're going to document the making this time for the site. Last year's batch turned out great; we still have most of a bottle left here and Hata has some left too.

During the great shopping excursion, I'd found asparagus rather cheaply. And the girls had been clowning around with a pair of lemons, rubbing them on their butts (only my kids, sigh) so I had to buy those.

So while cooking dinner last night, I thought I'd try making hollandaise sauce for the asparagus.

I don't actually know how to make hollandaise sauce. But while I'm cooking, I'm also on the phone with my sister, whose husband is a Gourmet.

"How do you make hollandaise sauce," I ask her.

"You open the envelope and stir in some water," she replied.

Not the answer I was looking for. But hey, my hubby's been cooking professionally on and off for twenty years. This should be No Problem.

"Honey," I ask, "How do you make Hollandaise sauce?"

"You open the envelope and stir in some water," he replied.--read more

I was having a bit of an existential fit this morning: the work I'm doing, while enjoyable, is not necessarily the work I want to be doing.--read more

I need a Valentine's menu to make at home. We plan to feed the kids early and then have a late dinner after they are in bed.
Any great ideas for a menu that feels special but is not a ton of work?--read more

We watch Food Network a lot around here; it's one of the few things we can all watch together, for starters. And so I was happy to see that (one of) my foodie crush(es), Tony Bourdain, has about the same takes on FN folks as I do. Namely:

• Alton Brown rules:
  

  How did Alton slip inside the wire--and stay there all these years? He must have something on them. He’s smart. You actually learn something from his commentary. And I’ll admit it: I watch and enjoy Iron Chef America--in all its cheesy glory. Absolutely SHOCKED and thrilled when guys like Homaru Cantu show up as contestants--and delighted when Mario wins--again and again, forestalling his secretly long-planned execution. His commentary is mostly good. And that collar-bone snapping fall off the motorcycle on Feasting On Asphalt? Good television!

  Alton, of course, being my other big foodie crush. If you only watch one FN show, Good Eats should be it. Home cooks can learn more from a little Alton than from any amount of "bamming." And Alton single-handedly saves Iron Chef America.

• Ace of Cakes is surprisingly fun to watch, as long as you don't expect to learn anything.
• Somebody please save me from Rachael Ray. Too bad, says Tony, she's unstoppable:
  

  Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful. Her ear-shattering tones louder and louder. We KNOW she can’t cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So...what is she selling us? Really? She’s selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She’s a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that “Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!” Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, “Hell…I could do that. I ain’t gonna…but I could--if I wanted! Now where’s my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?” Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better--teach us--and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. “You’re doing just fine. You don’t even have to chop an onion--you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing…Just sit there. Have another Triscuit…Sleep….sleep….”

  mmm...Triscuits...wait! I'm wheat-intolerant! d'oh!

• Sandra Lee is pure evil. Holy cats is that true.

There's only so much home cooks can learn from professional chefs; the challenges of running a home kitchen are far different than a restaurant one. For instance, has watching Iron Chef (both versions) taught me anything, really, about cooking? No, not really. I just like listening to Jeffrey Steingarten insult the other judges. But Mario Batali on his old show Molto Mario? He taught me scads. Jamie Oliver, the same, though I know he grates on some pros. And Alton teaches everyone.

I'm sad that FN has turned away from that mission and towards a...well, I'm not really sure what their mission is now. They say they're "way more than cooking," but I don't want way more than cooking. If I wanted way more than cooking, I wouldn't be watching the freakin' Food Network, would I?--read more

I got an email today listing all of the various ways agri-business tries to pass itself off in the health food segment as small, mom and pop natural/organic companies. Most of them I knew about--when in doubt, assume it's owned by Hain-Celestial--but this I did not know about: Colgate bought Tom's of Maine last year. I'm almost as upset as when Kraft originally bought Celestial Seasonings in 1984. I honestly thought Tom's was still owned by the Chappelles. Perhaps it's time to start making my own.--read more

We took the lessons we learned in our first attempt at spelt pizza seriously the second time around, to wit:

• Many small pizzas are better than one big pizza.
• Don't over-top. No more than 3 is best.
• Don't over-sauce. A little goes a long way.
• Bake directly on the pizza stone.
• Build the pizza on the pizza peel (see below).

Following those guidelines, I made a double batch of spelt pizza dough and we proceeded to make four small pizzas with different toppings to suit the four of us. Making the pies right on the peel made it so much easier to get them onto the stone, I can't even TELL you what we were thinking trying to do it any other way. And baking them on the stone made the crust in the middle much much crisper. We broke another pizza rule--you should let the stone heat up at full temperature for at least 20 minutes, but we were hungry and it turned out pretty well for all that.

John ignored the 3-topping rule and built a pie so top-heavy it wouldn't come off the peel. He finally got it off into a big cheesy messy heap and stalked away cursing. (Let this be a warning to you, O Potential Flouters of Pizza Rules.) But I tell you, it was a delicious if lumpy pie.

Each of us had enough pizza of our own design to satisfy and to share. The crusts puffed up on the edges and were crispy on the bottom. By golly, this was pretty good spelt pizza!

I am a pretty good pie maker, but of late, I refuse to make certain pies (pecan pie, pumpkin,etc.) or fruit pies, because I loathe soggy crusts.
I don't mind going to any extra trouble to get the crust crispy. Is there no way? I've searched cooking sights and have found very litle info. I had an old cookbook that told about a slipped custard. The crust is baked first, and the custard in another pie pan, and you slip the cooled custard in. Pretty messy! Surely someone can find a way to cook the custard on the stove, or at least part of the way.--read more

Josie and I miss pizza. Not being able to eat wheat is a drag sometimes. In fact, it's such a drag that I sometimes eat wheat anyway, and if I'm already stressed it makes me quite ill. Dumb Lynn. So I'm working really hard now to avoid eating wheat at all. Josie is better at not eating it than I am, how weird is that? Kid has willpower.

Saturday we took a drive to Bob's Red Mill to do some stocking up. We were out of spelt berries to grind our own whole spelt flour, oat groats for porridge and some alternative flours like tapioca and sorghum. While we were there we found that they now make "light" or white spelt flour, the spelt equivalent of wheat all-purpose flour, and so we bought a sack to see how well it worked.

Last night I made pizza dough with it, using my favorite old dough recipe from The Greens Cookbook and just swapping spelt straight out. It didn't rise as much as wheat, but we knew it wouldn't--but it did rise. The top picture is how it looked when we topped it. The bottom picture is how it looked when it was done (the first time).

Yeah, the first time. While the crust was nicely browned at the edges, and the top was just this side of burnt, the sausage wasn't completely cooked and the crust in the center wasn't done. We put it in a lower temp oven for 15 minutes longer and it was done enough to eat. And it was pretty tasty, but I was disappointed I didn't get it right. It's been years since I made pizza because of the wheat thing.

Interestingly, we were watching the Portland/Seattle episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations and he was eating at local hotspot Apizza Scholls (just a hop from TNH Central--Tony was in my neighborhood! *fangirl swoon*) and the folks there gave their rules for killer pizza--both of which we'd broken.

Rule One: Three Toppings, Max, and Only One Meat. We had only one meat (sausage) but we had at least six toppings--and they were heaped. Too much to cook through.

Rule Two: Don't Put On Too Much Sauce. We really over-sauced things.

So next time we're going to make two small pizzas instead of one big one so that we can cook it directly on the stone, and we're going to be moderate in our topping and saucing.

I'll ty to remember what we have had this week:

New Year's Day - Chinese takeout - well, it was my birthday!!

Tuesday - Couscous and roasted vegetables (potato, sweet potato, butternut squash, carrots. Drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt, black pepper and oregano)--read more

I'd like to make a "rum" cake without any alcohol. The recipe I use has 1/4 cup of rum in both the cake and in the glaze. I'd like to maintain the taste and consistency without using alcohol for my tea-totaling friends.--read more

I am lucky to live in a city whose paper has one of the best weekly food/cooking supplements in the country: Foodday, a multiple-award-winning section I look forward to every Tuesday. Last week, it published a whole set of articles on a burgeoning trend among foodies here in Portland: Drinking chocolate, aka chocolat chaud, aka heaven in a demitasse.

John immediately became obsessed with making it, and to our amusement three other families we know made it that night too after reading Foodday ("We made THE BEST hot chocolate last night!" "--have you been reading Foodday?"). The difference is that we can't stop! We've had it nearly every night since! We've even gotten a few different chocolates to compare tastes!

I would be concerned about it, but the little cup of hot chocolate doesn't really amount to much; one standard bar of chocolate makes enough for the four of us, and it's our sweet of the day. While you might drink a mug of regular hot chocolate, with this stuff we use our little Chinese teacups filled less than halfway--maybe four ounces liquid--and it's plenty satisfying. We've experimented with different chocolates and flavorings; so far our favorite has been 75%. John likes his with vanilla and extra sugar. I like mine with a little sea salt and a bit of cayenne.

Try it! You may go a little nuts too!