summer dinner in February

by Jackie Patti

No recipes or anything, just a picture I found lovely.

It was mid-February and there was a ridiculously wrm day that started me thinking of summer. So I thought of having a "summer" dinner.

I had some leftover red cabbage cole slaw in the fridge.

I mixed up some tuna salad.

Then, diced a tomato.

Then opened a jar of bread and butter pickles I'd put up a couple years ago (I had a LOT of cukes that year!)

And soon it will be summer for real and I'll be eating like this all the time.

Image credit: summer dinner in February by Jackie Patti

not quite a recipe post - eggplant experiment

by Jackie Patti

I grew 3 types of eggplants last year.

I grew the Casper variety, which is supposed to be early. I don't know as I was in Texas when they would've been being early. They are white and I got my seed from Seed Savers Exchange.

I grew Rosa Bianca cause they are pretty. No other reason really. I got that seed from Fedco.

Also from Fedco, I grew Diamond eggplant, an open-pollinated black eggplant. Basically, I was unsure I'd like the white or rose colored stuff; always get black at the store. So this was my backup eggplant.

Here's what they looked like...

Dead Cheap Meals

by Jackie Patti

Today, I am a magician. I shall take a single pound of ham, bacon or sausage and feed a hungry truck driver and a disabled chick two big dinners with loads of leftovers for lunch. ABRACADABRA!

I do this almost every week. Basically... eggs and beans are the answer! >>TADA<<

The Controversial Microwave

by Jackie Patti

Within the "traditional foods movement", microwaves are often eschewed. I have come down on this issue in a different place than most and am going to discuss in this post why I do not think microwaves are evil.

microwaves & language issues

Much of the anti-microwave sentiment expressed is badly-worded language designed to make people without much of a science background feel nervous.

For example, it is said that microwaves heat food by using RADIANT ENERGY. But all light is radiant energy, from the sunlight allowing your skin to make vitamin D to the most basic cooking of all, over a campfire like our ancestors did all their cooking. The entire light spectrum is radiant energy! However, by saying it as if it's a scary word, there is the hope you will vaguely misunderstand and think that microwave ovens are radioactive, which is not the case.

cooking under pressure

(with accompaniment by the Piano Man)

by Jackie Patti

Within the real food movement, pressure cookers are not as controversial as microwaves, but not nearly as beloved as crockpots.

Health-wise, what we know is that pressure cooking destroys lectins, a class of anti-nutrients, found in grains and beans. reference

Personally, I find a pressure cooker just ROCKS my kitchen.

how to get a bunch of meals from a half ham

by Jackie Patti

There are a bazillion sites out there that tell you how to get 3 or 4 meals out of a whole chicken. I am going to tell you how to get 10-15 meals out of a half ham.

A ham is basically the butt and top bit of the leg off a pig, from the hip to the knee. This big piece is then cured and smoked to produce ham. Whether you get pastured pork, "uncured" ham without nitrates, or regular grocery-store stuff, you can usually get the best deal buying a half ham.

why bother cooking at all?

by Jackie Patti

There is something inside me that finds sourcing good ingredients, preparing and cooking them, and providing my handiwork to an appreciative audience profoundly satisfying.

That is why I cook, I enjoy it and it feels good to me. I can justify it in all sorts of ways, but really, it feels good.

I have a hard time explaining to someone who doesn't have the same feelings about it why they should do it, but I'll give it a shot.

braised green beans

by Jackie Patti

Personally, I like green beans just fine simply steamed and dressed with loads of butter. I also like them dressed with olive oil and garlic. I don't think cooking green beans needs to be complicated.

Garlic is a theme for me with green beans. If I am more ambitious than just steaming, I like them roasted with garlic. Or another favorite green bean recipe is to stir-fry them with garlic. However, no matter how I make them, hubby just didn't like them until this recipe, now he eats them!

It's not particularly difficult, but must simmer for a half hour, so it fits into my repertoire best when I have just put something into the oven that will take an hour or so, like a meatloaf.

It works well with ordinary whole green beans or with Romano-type green beans. Frozen beans work well too, but you really want them to be whole, not cut.

eating seasonally in spring

by Jackie Patti

For me, spring fruits and vegetables do for my taste buds what daffodils, dandelions and johnny jump ups do for my soul. Spring is just so celebratory for me, especially after such a nasty winter as this one was. I laugh at the least provocation, my energy levels rise and I feel all bouncy, the world is full of such promise... and there are sugar snap peas.

The reasons for eating seasonally are several: seasonal vegetables are more likely to be locally produced rather than shipped for long distances, foods in season tend to be more abundant and thus great bargains can be had and finally, foods are just yummiest when freshest.

Pão de Qeijo (Brazilian cheese rolls)

by Jackie Patti

I never really got into gluten-free baking much beyond a few almond meal or coconut flour recipes.

If I needed to be gluten-free, perhaps I'd be more willing to experiment. But I did a month-long gluten-free trial and pretty much determined gluten isn't an issue for me. Of course, I greatly limit carbohydrate due to T2 diabetes, so my diet isn't exactly crammed full of gluten anyways, but the serious motivation to go gluten-free just isn't there and thus I have little interest in gluten-free baking.

People I admire do all sorts of complicated recipes involving multiple types of flour mixed together with gums to approximate gluten. It always seemed like too much work with too many unfamiliar ingredients, though I expect I might feel differently if I were celiac or had NCGS.

But one day I ran across the idea of Pão de Qeijo, which are Brazilian cheese rolls. I was attracted to the idea for two reasons, first because these are an actual traditional recipe, apparently having been made since the 1800s.

Secondly, they are made with only one gluten-free flour, tapioca flour/starch, which meant I could pick up a bag of Bob's Red Mill bag at the grocery and experiment instead of a big pile of unfamiliar ingredients most gluten-free baking seemed to call for.

real food for busy women

by Jackie Patti

I am starting a new series on here, inspired my friend Pat who I recently reconnected with on Facebook; thus this series is tagged "posts for Pat". Pat and I hadn't spoken in decades and in catching up, of course, I spent much time ranting about real food, because I am me. I sent links to find local farmer's markets and CSAs, to find local grass-fed meat, to find local raw milk. And when we next spoke and she told me she couldn't do this, I misheard her and answered the wrong question.

Coming from where I've been lately, due to disability and the resultant lack of income, I must stretch the heck out of my food budget in order for us to eat real food. I explained to Pat why it didn't cost more, which really wasn't her issue. Pat is in a different place in life than I am. She lives in the city and works a corporate salaried job, then spends weekends on her farm with her beloved horse Coco. While she's not rich by any means, where she is poor is not finances, but time.

When I realized how I misaddressed her concerns, I also realized I had been there. I've had the deadline that keeps you working 50-60 hours weeks, where all the grocery shopping I could do was hitting a drive-through going to and from work. Where the emergency that happened at 4 PM kept you at work hours past when the salad you brought for lunch was long gone and you could barely WAIT for a pizza or sub to be assembled on your way home. There were way too many days where even THINKING about cooking when I got home was just entirely out of the question.

The thing is women living lives like that are guilty because they feed their families out of boxes too often. Worse than living with that guilt is that the high-stress busy life REQUIRES a nutrient-dense diet to fuel it, to maintain your own health. Eating all that crap destroys health, leaving you susceptible to winding up ill.

This new series is about what one can do with EXTREMELY limited time to improve your own nutrition and better provide for your family even when life has little time for the kitchen.

how to find healthy dinner ideas

by Jackie Patti

I gave away my Joy of Cooking to a young woman a few years ago. She was one of my home health aids and learned much of what she knew about cooking from me and I gave it to her because it's so great for techniques you've never done before and ingredient information and such. And at that point in my life, I pretty much never used an actual cookbook anymore; my cookbook was Google.

Whenever I was looking for lunch ideas or healthy dinner recipes, I Googled. I had to sort through the results manually because Google doesn't understand that I don't want recipes that use canned cream-of-anything or evaporated milk.

But there's a better way to search for easy dinner recipes now!

multiple recipes with bacon with only one cleanup

by Jackie Patti

I like it THICK!

We like our bacon chewy rather than crispy, and the thick-cut stuff is much easier to cook that way.

I love bacon in bacon bean soup, bacon breakfast casserole and my favorite bacon quiche recipe as well as plain old eggs and bacon. But it was always a pain to cook and get grease all over everything until I inadvertently discovered this neat trick.

No, it's not baking. Baking bacon seems to me to take just as long, if not longer, and needs close watching.

Once, I accidentally froze 3 pounds of bacon without separating into smaller packages. So when I thawed it, I cooked it all and had a bacon bonanza! There's a few tricks to this though.

eating with the seasons in autumn

In autumn, there are three things I stock up on for the year: apples, pumpkins & winter squash and nuts.

You get 3, three, THREE posts in one! ;)

apples

Apples are a dirty-dozen crop, so I only get them organic. From September onwards, I can get them in bulk from local farmers considerably cheaper than I can get them the rest of the year.

For fresh eating, we eat as much as we like all fall; the rest of the year, I'm much more frugal with my fresh apple purchases.

But much of the fall purchase of apples around here is stored for the year.

frittata

A frittata is one of our favorite meals; I make one almost every week. It is similar to an omelet, but it doesn't brown on the outside like an omelet (which hubby dislikes). It is also similar to a quiche or breakfast casserole, though mostly cooked on the stove top and only run under the broiler for a few minutes to brown the cheese, thus is faster and has less clean-up.

We don't do a meatless day for frugality like some do, but I tend to do a couple low-meat meals, one in which I make some sort of bean or pea soup with a quarter to a half pound of meat and the other in which I do a frittata with a similar amount of meat. Usually, we're talking bacon, ham or sausage - but it's there mostly for flavor.

Frittatas are frugal because most of the protein and healthy fat comes from pastured eggs, a much cheaper source than grass-fed meat. They also use up odds-and-ends of vegetables before they go bad.

While I give a recipe below, the method is what matters as I rarely use the same exact ingredients week to week.

easy no-knead bread

When my daughter was growing up, bread was something that was made from scratch maybe once or twice a year. When we moved to the country, I discovered that if you're at home working anyway, making bread isn't much harder than baking cookies. I spent a couple years baking bread here, ground from whole wheat berries in a manual grinder. I utterly loved it, the fresh flour tastes yummy in everything from pancakes to breads, but Steve did not. Since I rarely ate much wheat due to being diabetic and needing to limit carbohydrate, I eventually gave up on baking good bread on a regular basis since he wasn't enjoying it.

After my CABG, homemade bread was just unthinkable as there was no way this chest was going to knead without a Percocet or a half bottle of white wine! But then I ran across the idea of no-knead bread and decided to give it a try.

I have perfected a method that takes a total of about ten minutes to make and even an old, crippled lady can do it with just a bowl and spatula and almost no cleanup.

all about almond and coconut flours - with six bonus muffin recipes

I put some thawed muffins on a plate, took a bunch of pics with my cell phone
from different angles, connected the phone to my computer via USB, uploaded to
PC, viewed and chose the best image, cropped and resized it, then uploaded to a
draft post in Blogger to obtain the URL to put in this post. WHY? Is this for the
huge influx of never-saw-a-muffin blog visitors I'm expecting? You muffin-ignorant
hordes!

Today, I want to talk about gluten-free and/or GAPS and/or paleo and/or low-carb baking.

Generally, I have decided not to post recipes as... well, Google and you can find a bazillion of them. I have decided instead to post tips about food, and only my really, really best recipes.

I'm a tad lazy generally about baking. I have done a lot of ordinary baking for my husband and before that my daughter, things like pumpkin pecan bread, banana walnut bread, oatmeal raisin cookies, zucchini cake and carrot cake. I've done it for several reasons, first to limit the sugar used compared to bought bakery products, second to avoid the inflammatory oils by using coconut oil or butter, and finally because my baking usually has a large dose of fruit or vegetable in it, thus has redeeming qualities not found in Twinkies.

For myself, I don't care about these foods much. I have a very minor sweet tooth. My issues with limiting carbohydrate have always had more to do with starchy foods; I'd rather have a pizza than a cake, I crave pasta not chocolate. And if I have to provide sweetness for myself, the laziness kicks in and I'd rather dessert be a bowl of yogurt with some honey stirred in or a handful of berries with some cream.

Overall, the experimenting I have done with more healthy baking has had a great deal more to do with savory baking than sweet. I'd like something to make sandwiches with, or to dip in the yolks of my soft-boiled eggs. I have developed three recipes I really like for savory breads: a corn bread, a cheese roll (from tapioca flour) and a nacho cracker, which I'll post about later. Today, it will be muffins (but includes a savory bacon & cheese muffin!)

When first introduced to the world of gluten-free baking, I just found the whole idea a tad overwhelming in that there seem to be entirely too many flours involved. Recipes that have THAT many unfamiliar ingredients are just too much for me. I don't want to buy teff flour and sorghum flour and xanthum gum and am entirely too lazy to mix 4 or 5 flours just to wind up with flour. I admire those who do this sort of baking for their families, but I'm just not interested myself.

But I have done a good bit of baking with almond flour and coconut flour over the years and have developed some opinions about them - and handful of truly awesome recipes.

Italian sausage soup

Italian Sausage Braising in Beer by wickenden, on Flickr

I made up a batch of Italian sausage soup today, and thought it was worth sharing the recipe since it is truly one of the most scrumptious things I make.

The soup is adapted from a recipe I originally got off the alt.support.diet.low-carb Usenet group many years ago. Basically, it is cooking several pounds of vegetables in such a manner that it all is flavored yummily with Italian sausage. It's been one of my absolute favorites for years.

vintage post: boeuf bourguignon

The point of "vintage" posts is to highlight older posts than in my monthly favorite post feature.

I don't want to ignore really kewl stuff just cause it was posted before I began blogging!

But this is REALLY vintage, in that it is from a time before blogging... before the Internet... before BBSs... before home PCs... before even electronic calculators...

It's ALMOST before me, as I was a year old when the show started, from a time when food shows were live with mistakes and all and actually intended to teach the viewer to cook. Before there were any foodies, there was Julia Child.

pico de gallo & guacamole

Pico de gallo by nonelvis, on Flickr

I was on the phone with my daughter recently and promised to get this recipe to her.

Using guacamole as a sandwich topping has been one of the most useful ways for me to get a bunch of veggies in my husband nearly daily.

I make pico de gallo once a week, then daily mix up some fresh guacamole to put in his lunch.