siglinde99 | Entries tagged with cooking

Absolutely bagged tonight, so I'm going to bed early. Technically, it's probably closer to "on time" but that's still early for me. But first, I am rendering duck fat. I don't need more duck fat for cooking, but I may experiment with using it for hand cream or something. It doesn't have a particular smell, and it is amazing on the skin.

I love summer, but OMG the garden and my CSA basket are exploding. And I can't resist a bargain... Yesterday's adventures included the purchase of okra because it was on sale. Which meant I needed to buy chicken and look up a recipe for frango com quiabo (chicken with okra, a traditional recipe from Minas Gerais, Brazil). I also have beets cooking up for a cold borscht. I finally sauteed my swiss chard to eat with rice and beans (I hate chard but can't let it go to waste; I have been using all sorts of other greens while waiting for my collards to grow big enough to use, so I figured the chard might work too). Tomorrow I need to get down to the serious business of making pesto, as my basil is exploding. I have discovered that carrot tops make a decent pesto, so I may experiment with adding them too, or I could just sautee them. Usually I just pitch out the green tops, but this year I am trying to learn to use everything.

My freezer will be nicely filled, but I will also have a lot of other foods I need to use up. Summer is the time when my craving for coleslaw kicks in every year, so I bought a cabbage which I haven't had time to use. Last night's CSA basket included a second cabbage, so I will be making cabbage roll casserole for the freezer, just to make room for non-freezable vegetables in my fridge.

How about you? Do you live where summer bounty changes what you eat? Do you prefer old favourites or do you like to experiment^

Except for packing my stuff. Tomorrow is Bring on the Bay, a 3km swim in the Ottawa River. I have promised myself that if I finish in about an hour, I will sign up for the Riverkeeper 4km swim in two weeks. That one is much more challenging, as it is across and slightly up the river; tomorrow's goes into the centre of the river for part of the way, but then turns so you get to take advantage of the current. My ride will be here at 6:50, so I'm off to bed very shortly.

Aside from picking up my race kit across town, tonight has been all about using up seasonal produce. I am learning to put all kinds of leaves into my salad, but tonight it was all about soup and a pot of feijoada. The soup has carrots, celery, beet greens, and green onion (plus the chicken and orange sauce left over from my last cooking class, and some barley). The feijoada has all kinds of scapes I'll be sauteeing beet greens to go with it, at least until I get up to the garden to pull some collard greens. I also need to sort through my bag of miscellaneous greens to find the cilantro I completely forgot to add. It will be nice to have some stuff for my freezer again.

Fancy had a 9 am appointment with the farrier so no swimming for me today. I might have tried to squeeze it in depite the gloomy weather, had I known the girl would bail on going for a ride afterwards. In fact, she didn't even crawl out of bed until after I had gotten home. She immediately headed out to do girl things with some friends. Chocolate played a major role.

By then, I figured I had earned a nap so I curled up with the cats and a book I have been meaning to read for years. Eventually I felt ambitious enough to tackle some refrigerator pickles; I now have three jars of cucumber dills and 2 small jars of beans. Tomorrow, I'll try zucchini dills.

Today's sad truth - despite having a fridge full of awesome fresh produce, sometimes I would rather just eat Ramen noodles.

Now I'm pretending to watch ultimate - instead of games, there is some sort of skills competition, since so many kids are away due to the long weekend.

I did actual sewing stuff on my machine yesterday, and started a new super secret knitting project today, but the real accomplishment has been sausages. The doctor should never have said I'm healing well, as I spent the whole day testing recipes. https://siglindesarts.wordpress.com/2015/05/21/i-made-sausages-and-boy-are-my-feet-tired/. I need to go boil some bratwurst now so it can dry overnight, and print out tickets for my daughter's dance show tomorrow night. Pictures of the sewing projects from the last two days will just have to wait until tomorrow.

Yesterday's headband:

Today's project: https://siglindesarts.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/me-made-may-the-sausage-day/.

Very tired now. Going to go to fall boom into bed.

Current Mood: full

This isn't exactly sewing, but it is something I made and will be using next week. It is a sausage stuffer (basically a very primitive funnel made of cow's horn). I'm researching medieval sausages, and this is one of the tools I have been able to document. You can read about my sausage research here: http://www.siglindesarts.wordpress.com.

For the past year, I have watched

cortejo with a mix of pride and envy as she has deciphered a renaissance cookbook. I have several cookbooks I would like to do that to. I have tons of redactions from various cookbooks that have never made it anywhere. I have even started inventing recipes and WRITING THEM DOWN. Could I actually put together a whole cookbook? Would it need to have a particular theme? As I start to think about what I would like to do for next year's resolution, I'm starting to think that redacting or developing one new recipe every week or two would be do-able. I would have to give up on some other things, though. I am done with the decluttering, though I'll keep working away at the knitting and get back to sewing. I'll probably keep up some form of the recipe challenge, but track the changes I make to the recipes from my books. Hmmmm....

Current Mood: contemplative

This week I:
- baked two pumpkin pies from scratch, and used them to bribe my parents over for a visit (so they could take home at least some of the beet pickles);

- made a chocolate cookie dough that served as the base for witches brooms (with pretzels for handles) and witches' hats (with macaroons for the pointy bits);
- sugar cookies
- finger cookies (sugar cookies with a bit of almond, shaped like fingers with whole blanched almond fingernails, glued in place with red icing "blood");
- broken glass and blood cupcakes (red velvet cake recipe, corn syrup and sugar "glass", and corn syrup/corn starch "blood"). This recipe needs some tweaking as I ended up with far too much "glass", and the "blood" should have been boiled. It is worth doing again, though.

Combined with other donations, our calorie cart raised $176 for charity at work today.

I'm cvelebrating the end of the sugar rush with trouchia, a Swiss chard omelette from southern France. I have loathed Swiss chard since unfortunate experiences in childhood, but this is quite tasty.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

I swam 3.6 km at Meech Lake today. I could easily have done another loop around the island.

Today I learned that there are only a few written references to leeks and onions in Viking Scandinavian documents, and from the archaeological evidence, it appears that ramsons (wild garlic) was most likely what was being referred to.

I am having a bit of a cooking frenzy - so far I have cooked up a bunch of green onions, a traveler's porridge of pot barley with kale, bacon and a little green onion (before I had word about the lack of evidence for onions).

I have also pitted a bunch of plums and put them in the dehydrator. Next up: some chicken with pasta and pesto. After that, I'm going to roast some kohlrabi, make German cucumber salad, and prepare hamburger patties for later. Unless I fall asleep.

Tomorrow I need to pick up 5 kg of crabapples from a friend, in order to turn them into jelly. Tuesday, I'm hoping to check out the state of wild grapes along the Ottawa River. I think it's about the right season for harvesting. I also found a great source of rose hips, though it may require a late evening trip to Carleton to pick them. Can you tell I was inspired by today's visit with the folks from Hidden Harvest Ottawa?

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

Recipes
Week 1 - roast duck, cracker bark, turkey, pesto and cranberry sauce pizza
Week 2 - zesty carrots
week 3 - vegetable sausage soup, trout in sour cream, mustard brussels sprouts, oriental stroganoff
week 4 - chicken and carrot soup
week 5 - chicken and sweet potato stew, brownies
week 6 - chicken pot pie (mostly)
week 7 - cauliflower and carrot casserole
Week 8 - leek and sausage pie
Week 9 - spicy Asian meatballs
Week 10 - Polenta with baccala sauce
Week 11 - Austrian chicken and noodle soup
Week 12 - chicken paprika (twice - it was a hit)
Week 13 - colcannon
Week 14 - cheese and parsley in phyllo pastry
Week 15 - pasta with chevre, chicken in glazed with honey mustard and curry
Week 16 - carrots in parsley sauce, ham with sweet mustard glaze, roasted root vegetables with thyme
Week 17 - Bacon chicken layer cake
Week 18 - braised pork chops
Week 19 - cheese stuffed jumbo shells (I must learn that I really don't like Romano or Ricotta - next time, I'll use meat)
Week 20 - potato and ham soup (Rebecca's recipe)
Week 21 - chicken with pine nuts
Week 22 - Hungarian noodle bake
Week 23 - poulard saint-cyr, chicken Madras
Week 24 - Sauerkraut Royale
Week 25 - filet divan (won't make this again - waste of good cod in a bland cheese sauce and the broccoli does nothing to help)
Week 26 - crockpot baby back ribs
Week 27 (July 8) - panpanella (World in one Kitchen recipe) Week 28 (July 15) on vacation Week 29 (July 22) on vacation Week30 July 29 - kung pao chicken
Week 31 (August 6) - kale chips, marinated cauliflower and broccoli
Week 32 (August 13) - Marina's cabbage and carrot marinated coleslaw, Sara's egg and cheese pie
Week 33 (August 20) - Sue's beef stew
Week 34 (August 27) - Camilio's pizza (tomatoes, garlic, onions, feta, no sauce)
Week 35 (September 3) - pasta with onion sauce
Week 36 (September 10) - cheesy zucchini bread casserole, hearty turkey soup
Week 37 (September 17) - huckleberry crisp
Week 38 (September 24) - chicken chow mein
Week 39 (October 1) -Nettie's schav, roasted leg of lamb
Week 40 (October 8) - long melon
Week 41 (October 15) - beet cake
Week 42 (October 23) - another long melon recipe, basil-flavoured pickled cauliflower
Week 43 (October 30) - bratwurst and butternut squash stew
Week 44 (November 5) - another chow mein recipe
Week 45 (November 12) - roasted pumpkin soup, chicken and pumpkin bake (I may have made this one before)
Week 46 (November 19) - German pork hocks
Week 47 (November 26) - Hot Tamale Pie
Week 48 (December 3) - seed crackers (Laurel's Kitchen)
Week 49 (December 10) - Korean meatballs, Mahogany ginger chicken
Week 50 (December 17) - Mediterranean pie, nasi goreng, chicken and potatoes oregano (all from the St Thomas Toronto cookbook), molasses cake (from the Wartime Recipes of the Maritimes book)
Week 51 (December 24) - lebkuchen, mars bar rice crispy squares, lemon linguine with spinach and crispy prosciutto
Week 52 (December 31) - May Court butter tart recipe, mango and turkey chutney (from the Stonehouse Cooks blog)

Current Mood: accomplished

Used up the rest of my first jack-o-lantern in a roasted pumpkin soup. It confirmed the adage "everything is better with bacon". Mmmmm...

Good thing I had the soup, because my ham pizza was devoured by the girl. I still have some dough, and am debating making another pizza instead of bread.

While grocery shopping today, I scored a nice roast on sale, so it's in the oven now. I also had pork hocks and leeks on my list - I sure hope I can once again find the recipe that will turn them into something yummy.

I'm almost done peeling the 10 lb of beets Mom dropped off in hopes of beet pickles. I'll drop them off tomorrow with the squirrel traps she loaned me a couple of weeks (long story involving a hallucinating friend, unusually active cat, and parents who got all fussed about squirrels in my basement, when the imaginary squirrels were actually at my friend's).

Still to go: horseradish, sunchoke soup, pumpkin and barley risotto, and another batch of chicken and pumpkin stew.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

The weekend was busy - yesterday involved a longish swim, shopping for much of the day with

pink_lady2, and a fitful sleep. Today involved 8:15 church service (so much for sleeping in!) so we could make it to riding, then a visit to my parents' followed by dealing with the food purchases from yesterday. I made:

Vegetable Sausage Soup for my lunches
Murstard Brussels Sprouts (ftw!)
Trout with Sour Cream (also ftw as ShuLing came back for thirds)
Oriental Stroganoff for kids' lunches
Mashed potatoes to go with the trout (Geoff made a salad)
Noodles to go with the stroganoff
Steel cut oatmeal for breakfasts
Salmon filets that needed to be dealt with as they had been thawed

I was supposed to make pork wellington but forgot to take more pork tenderloin out of the fridge
I was supposed to cook a chicken but couldn't remember which recipe I had planned to use (it was boiled chicken with noodles, for the record, and I now need more noodles)
I was supposed to make an avocado salad, but I ran out of steam

I also cleaned the kitchen at least three times. Thankfully, ShuLing took care of making brownies for lunches and cleaned up her own dishes.

The kitchen isn't completely tidy as my latest dyeing project is still on the counter. I tried the purple loosestrife. After I had dumped my wool in the dyebath, I flipped through a dyeing book that suggested letting the mordant age for a day or two. I'll have to try that next time, as the purple loosestrife didn't give nearly the dark purply-black I had been led to expect. I am seriously considering an A&S entry built entirely around ditch weeds that would have been found in medieval Europe. I need to research whether ordinary folks would have had access to alum, and whether they would have bothered dyeing. How much information is there about finds using dyes other than madder, weld and woad?

I am now in serious need of sleep. My hands are rough from dishwashing and my back hurts from standing by the stove.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: home
Current Music: dog snoring

I feel like I have been completely sideswiped on my challenge recently. I blame the Farmer`s Market. Yesterday it was peach jam. Today it was pickled beets. I still need to pickle my onions and I want to make plum jam. I have also promised to join a friend to make grape, apple and/or crabapple jelly. Mom is sad that she missed out on making the pickled beets, so I have to schedule another session. I have also dried a year`s supply of tomatoes. None of these can be counted towards my challenge.

Tomorrow, I will try to get some beef jerky smoked, if it isn`t raining and I have time after riding lessons and taking ShuLing to Kemptville for her `job`.

Somehow, it has gotten to be the end of the summer and I have yet to drag out my tent to convert it to a Viking A Frame. I need it for camping this weekend. I also need to finish my Merovingian brooch molds so I can send them home with Bre for casting. Kermit Flail!!!

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: home
Current Music: Saturday Night Blues