For the love of Produce...
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@AnnPT77
Good buttermilk biscuits do not need nutritional defense. They just need.... butter. I finally learned how to make really good biscuits, and maybe it's just as good I am not making any. Frozen butter chunks. Cold dough. Fold and fold and fold and don't touch too much with hands. Stack 'em close in the pan so they can support each other as they grow. Yeah, I said grow instead of rise because if they don't have nutritional defense, at least they can be noble and help each other.
My cornbread needs no defense, just willing eaters. I like to toss in some hot chiles in the batter, either dried of fresh. Sometimes fresh (or frozen) corn. Sometimes not. I use a combination of dry ingredients that is very heavy on corn and very light on wheat flour. I mix cornmeal, masa, and polenta with just about 25% or less whole wheat flour. It's a nice combination of tender and toothy.
The other trick is the cast iron. I get the pans HOT in the oven before I even mix the wet with the dry. When they are hot, they come out of the oven, and I mix. Then I briefly wipe down the iron with butter. It sizzles and sometimes gets too brown, but whatever. Add the batter, and that sizzles and sears and seals. Pop it in the oven, and sometimes when it's ALMOST done, I wipe the top with more butter. That makes them a little greasy, but you really need to add no more butter. They are really good when they are fresh from the oven and hot. Later you can still reheat them, and they're still quite good. If you're like me, you'll eat too many.
Some of my cast iron was my grandmother's. I've collected a few more corn stick pans over the years. The triangle pan was hers as was a couple of the stick pans.
You've seen pictures of these going back at least three years in this very thread.
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I felt healthy enough to do it!
After a nice shower, I took a sit-down break, had a second cup of coffee, and started the traditional New Years Day cooking. Much of it could be considered produce. I am so grateful I feel healthy enough to cook.
First I started simmering some black-eyed peas I had started soaking yesterday. Next I made some cornbread - sticks and triangles. I changed up my "recipe" a little this year. I used some fire-roasted Hatch green chiles in the batter. I also cooked it a little bit less hot for a little longer and on a couple of oven stones. I made two batches. I first made two batches of the dry mix, then made one batch and baked it off. When I put the second batch in the oven, the first batch was cool enough that I could package some up in paper lunch sacks and hobble around the block to deliver to some of my neighbor friends. It's a fun tradition, and I love to see people smile when I hand them the bag of golden goodness.
I'm sitting down for a little break, and then I'll go prep the collard greens. I've got them de-stemmed, and I'll just do them in a really simple method. I might add some bacon grease to fry up some onions, then add the greens and cook them down a bit. Of COURSE I will add garlic at some point. When they are almost done, I will splash them with some balsamic vinegar.
That's when I will plate up all three - collard greens, black-eyed peas, and cornbread. Tradition. It is supposed to bring luck in the new year, and I can use some of that. We all can. Scale will be up tomorrow. I know that, so it won't be a surprise. The cornbread, they say, represents gold. Riches for the new year. The collards, they say, represents "folding money," and the black-eyed peas represent coins. It's not just about money; it's about love and tradition.
My New Years wish for YOU is for good fortune, happiness, and wealth of all kinds, not just monetary. I wish you a wealth of healthy food and miles & miles of smiles.
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The rest of the tradition:
I think I ate seven pieces of cornbread. That's lucky too, right?
Each corn stick pan has seven sticks. The triangle pan has seven triangles. Is this coincidence? I was able to fit all the leftover cornbread into one half-gallon Nancy's yogurt container except one lone triangle. That is moot now. I found a place to put it. You can guess where....
I had just a little bit left of the black-eyed peas, so I hit the pan with my immersion blender so tomorrow I'll have one serving of black-eyed pea soup. With cornbread of course.
Happiest new year.
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Wishing everyone the most wonderful possible 2023!
I didn't do anything special food-wise today, but I ate ugly-fied produce: Tofu noodles and lots of steamed green beans with a sauce of hacho miso, gochujang chile paste, peanut butter powder, rice wine vinegar. (If I weren't lazy, there'd have been alliums, but I'm lazy.) Looks scary, tasted fine.
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Today's tasty supper came with some frustration.
I wanted split peas AND lentils. They cook different times, but that's easy to manage.
I started with a mirepoix and added some mushrooms and garlic. No big deal. I added enough water for both peas and lentils, and I added the peas. Ten minutes later I added the lentils. It came out quite good.
While the peas were cooking, I entered all the ingredients in my log. I used the same entries for split peas and dried lentils I've been using lately. As it turns out, if I ate the whole pot, I would have been over on my calories by about 200. So I looked at that big pot and decided I surely didn't need to eat it all. So I went to the recipe section and manually added a recipe using the exact text strings from the ingredients I had put in my diary. I figured that way MFP would find the same foods I was using.
Well go figure. I called it four servings, and if I ate all four, I would be about 200 calories UNDER for the day.
That is a 400 calorie difference between adding each item directly to my diary versus letting MFP pick ingredients by however it picks to add to the recipe. Maybe I'll eat the whole thing.
I am going to go try to find a good place to post this story just as an example of why it's really important to be careful about what entries you choose to put in your diary. I was really surprised.
Oh. Yeah - total simmer time about 20 minutes. I cooked the peas about 12 minutes before adding the lentils for eight. The lentils were still whole and delicious instead of mush. The peas were perfect. The mushrooms and garlic added a lot; just needed a little salt. No pictures tonight even though it wasn't beige.
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I cooked garbanzo beans today. I usually leave the lid on when I cook beans, but the lid for this pot fell to the ground and smashed into pieces a few weeks ago. I cooked them with the lid off, and I think they came out better.
I took most of them and made a garbanzo salad. Red onion, shallot, celery, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a couple kinds of balsamic vinegar. I would add parsley, but I have none. I tasted it, and it's fine, but it will be better tomorrow.
I left some of the beans in the pot, and I pureed them with an immersion blender. I figured I would have some bean soup with the last of my cornbread tonight. Lucky me; a friend came by to drop off a cooler I loaned them and to pick up some things they had stashed in my freezer when they had lost electricity for several days from the last big wind storm. I gave her six pieces of cornbread for them to share so I'm left with not too much. I can always make more. It's good, and now I don't have to worry about eating it ALL.
Well... I won't even eat all that's left. I might save all of it for tomorrow, because I cooked something else. I think cauliflower goes great with garbanzos. I had a huge one - about a kilogram. I broke it into chunks, tossed with sunflower oil, then tossed with salt, pepper, Madras curry, smoked paprika, garlic powder, dried basil, and a couple other tasty things. I tossed in between each spice addition. For good measure, I tossed in a little olive oil on top. It filled two cooking trays. Into a 425 degree convection oven and turned after 25 minutes and cooked another 20. I took the small pieces pictured below and added them to the soup for texture, and the big pieces.... I probably won't be able to eat them tonight. I'll have 'em tomorrow. Or a late-night snack.
I almost took the big chunks out with the small ones, but instead stuck 'em in for ten more minutes. They came out perfect. Just a little black and crisp on the outside and tender on the inside. The curry has a sweetness when combined with the cauliflower.
The soup is pretty damn tasty. Good bean flavor, and the cauliflower gives it a nice texture and an additional flavor. Yeah; it's kind of beige.
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I week or three ago, I saw a recipe on a TV show for Croatian Mashed Potatoes. They looked so good I decided I'd make some. I kept planning to and putting it off until today. I had all the ingredients all along, I just kept making other things. Even other kinds of potatoes. They were quite tasty, and I got to share with a friend.
I had bought some GIANT Yukon Gold potatoes a couple weeks ago. One was a pound and a half (646 grams). Huge. The recipe called for two pounds, but I had what I had.
Start by finely chopping an onion, then cooking in a little oil and a little salt in a Dutch Oven low and slow about 20 minutes until they caramelize. I used a lot less oil than the recipe called for because... well, you know. The recipe didn't have garlic, but that's just NUTS, so I chopped five cloves and put them in the last two or four minutes that the onions cooked, just to take the heat off of them.
Meanwhile, I sliced the Yukon Gold Giant into quarter-inch slices and rinsed them in cold water and let them drain.
When the onions were done, I took them out of the Dutch and set them aside and added the potatoes. I added just a little water - about 3/4 cup - then brought to a boil, reduced heat, covered, and let steam about 20 minutes until soft. There was still liquid, so I took the lid off and cooked most of that off. I added butter, but not as much as the recipe called for. I could have used even less, but they were tasty. I stirred in the butter to melt and start breaking up the potatoes. Then I added back the onions and garlic to which I'd added a bunch of paprika and black pepper and some salt. I mixed that in, and that's all there was to it.
I've never had mashed potatoes quite like this. I will make them again. They were really easy and just a few ingredients, but it does take some time for the two cooking processes. Worth it? Yup. My friend agreed.
Then my friend left me a big bag of fresh beets, some rutabaga, a bunch of collard greens, some arugula, salad mix, and spinach. She is in a CSA and can't eat all the produce. She gives me some, and she still gets to eat some of what I cook. She also left some halloumi from a local cheesemaker. She said it will last a few weeks, so no rush to use it. I have some other cheese I need to get to first, and now I have SO MUCH produce that I refuse to let go bad. I wonder what I'll cook first. Beets or rutabaga I think. Maybe salad for lunch tomorrow, although I also need to finish my garbanzo salad (last serving is in the fridge). I also started soaking more beans, so... please come help me eat.5 -
I cooked black beans today. I turned it into two things. First was another bean salad similar to the garbanzo salad I made the other day and finished today. I won't start eating it until tomorrow when the flavors mature. I turned the rest into black bean soup. I might heat some up and have some tonight.
I also decided to get started on the large load of produce my friend brought yesterday. Today was just a big salad. A bunch of really good organic salad mix. Lettuces, radicchio, frisee, and mustard. I added more arugula and fresh spinach and a carrot. Meanwhile I cooked some beets, sliced them, seasoned with salt & pepper and balsamic, and when they were cool and vinegary, added them on top. With some crushed roasted Oregon hazelnuts.
The vinegar from the beets meant I didn't have to use much other dressing.
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Those beets are such a gorgeous color! Little gems of deliciousness.2
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spinnerdell wrote: »Those beets are such a gorgeous color! Little gems of deliciousness.
Yes, I finally shared something that wasn't beige!
I wanted to dig in to the fresh salad greens while they were really FRESH and at their peak flavor and nutrition. I have more beets left. Today I might roast the rutabaga. I also might put my black bean soup in the freezer, just for a day, so I can then take it out and have it still be good a few more days than if I just leave it in the refrigerator since I also have a bunch of black bean SALAD, and I want to eat more than beans.2 -
Today's bean salad (and soup): Mayocoba. Maycoba beans are also known as Canary Beans, Peurano Beans, Peruvian Yellow Beans, and Mexican Yellow Beans. I never knew about them until a friend turned me on to them a year or three ago. They have a taste not unlike Pinto Beans, but they are much creamier and oh, so delicious.
I cooked about a pound (two cups dry) with salt, a few leaves from an Oregon Bay Laurel, cumin, a few chopped carrots, a busted up celery stalk, and a dried Chle de Arbol. Since I was making salad, I was sure to stop them before they turned to mush; I let them cool on the stove. I removed the bay leaves, and I set all the carrots and celery aside for later.
I chopped up a half red onion, a shallot, the inner ribs of a celery stalk including the leaves, a handful of parsley, an English cucumber, and a jalapeno with the pith removed. I added some more salt, pepper, cumin, and smoked paprika and some olive oil and hazelnut oil and two kinds of balsamic vinegar. It made a half gallon of salad, so I'll be eating it a while. I had to try some. It's already good, but it will be better tomorrow.
I had left some beans in the pot. I took out some and set them aside, and I added the cooked carrots and celery back to the pot with the beans and cooking water. I turned it to puree with an immersion blender and then added the whole beans back. I have about a quart and a half of soup. Well, now only a quart because some is in my belly. It's mild, but so simple to make and quite delicious.
I also had a whole bunch of mushrooms. I popped out the stems, chopped them fine, put them in a bowl and added salt, pepper, garlic powder, and paprika and some grapeseed oil. I added not too much panko crumbs and mixed it all together, then stuffed the mushrooms and baked 'em. Perfect appetizer before I reheated the soup.
I really should take a break from cooking for a while, although I need to eat the rest of the salad greens, probably tomorrow. I have a cauliflower to cook while it's still in very good shape, plus beets and rutabagas. Oh. Yeah. And a bunch o' collard greens. One of these days I want to pull a sockeye fillet out of the freezer and cook it, but I'm just too busy making vegetables. I need to find someone to help me eat all this stuff.
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I am almost done with all the produce my friend brought last week. I think all I have is two beets, one bunch of collard greens, and some really good carrots.
Today I roasted the two rutabaga and served with brown jasmine rice. The rice is beige-ish, and the rutabaga would be if it didn't have a nice char.
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Hmmm, I have some rutabaga left in the fridge: Maybe I should roast it? It was pretty great in my red lentil soup the other night, too, though.
Speaking of weird brownish foods, I did an off the wall experiment last night that included produce: Kodiak pancakes with smashed roasted Georgia Candy Roaster Winter squash (some I froze a couple months back), plain Greek yogurt, pomegranate molasses, plus I added a light sprinkle of Maldon salt after the photo.
Yeah, weird. Tasted pretty good, though.3 -
I did it! Except for a few really delicious carrots that I can snack on, I used up all the produce that my friend gave me last week!
Tonight I couldn't decide if I should cook beets or collards. Or just wait and make potatoes... I looked at the collards, and I thought they probably should be cooked sooner than later. I had already turned on the oven, so I decided to have collard greens sauteed with onions and garlic, roasted beets, and some brown basmati rice. I sliced the beets a little thicker, and they did better. Mmmm.
And lest you worry this was a vegetarian meal, I used bacon fat to cook the onions and then the greens.....
There easily were enough greens for two people. But it was just me. I could have easily made twice as much rice if someone were here to share with. I'm not sure how willing I would have been to share the beets, though. That whole big plate was only 500 calories, bacon fat, rice, and all. I still have room in the calorie budget that if I really want, I could also make oven-fried potatoes. Or a double-batch of popcorn.
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I cooked my mom's treatment for frozen peas tonight. They go really well with asian food. Add a scant amount of oil with a minced, grated, or pressed clove of garlic. As the garlic starts to colour tip in a couple of handfuls of frozen peas. Cook until just heated through and still bright green. Salt generously to balance the sweetness.
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Thought of you all today. Went to the store and the most vibrant hued asparagus was hoping to come home with me.
Currently baking on cast iron in the oven.
Wish I would see purple asparagus more often… do you have regularly in your neck of the woods?
Got these green guys.
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I needed to eat more than my budget today to make up for a deficit yesterday that was too big. I made a 798 calorie plate of delicious food based on a very large bunch of organic rainbow chard that I had planned to cook tonight.
I cut up the leaves coarsely and chopped the stems. I sauteed an onion for a while until it was getting soft. I added the chard stems and cooked a few minutes more. I added seven very coarsely chopped cloves of garlic, and I put the chard leaves on top and closed the lid to steam, stirring from time to time. When they were getting pretty well cooked, I added some balsamic vinegar, some nutritional yeast, and some sesame seeds.
When the chard was ~almost~ done, I added some mixed seafood (shrimp, scallops, and squid) I had marinated in a mix of soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger, and sambal oelek. I let that cook just until the seafood was done. I served it next to one serving of brown basmati rice. It was a HUGE plate. I ate it all.
I still have about 450 calories to work with tonight before I even break even, much less eat back some of yesterday's deficit. I'm going to wait because I'm full. I sort of want to make a batch of popcorn, but just munching on some Manchego Anejo cheese would fill the calories quickly and make me smile. I like good cheese for dessert.
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Seemed like pea freezin' season yesterday, and split pea soup has been a major comfort food for me since childhood.
I like variety, so cooking a big batch and freezing the extra works for me. (This is only a medium batch. I had a nice big bowl from the pot before dishing these up, too.)
Usually I keep the frozen version very basic, for more flexibility when thawing/using. This is just split peas cooked to near mush (the way I like 'em) with a little salt. Sometimes I add cooked-down onions, too. This time I didn't.
I admit, with peas, it probably would've been a good idea to add onions, but I was short on supply. With something like black beans that might be used in sweets or other things where onions aren't ideal, 'no onions' increases flexibility.
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Pizza night. Had buffalo mozzarella which needed to be used up. I make it once every few weeks and always the night before I workout.
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That pizza looks delicious, @neanderthin!
I guess this also is a produce meal, though not fancy: It's an an egg-cheese-roasted cauliflower-onion-dill mustard Ezekiel pita sandwich, with sides of tomatoes, apple, and a few leftover marinated mushrooms.
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NDR Ratgeber is giving something to think about: what is better: fresh or frozen? In the taste test, the testers prefer fresh, but the funny thing is that one of the reasons they prefer it is actually the very reason I prefer frozen. That said, as far as I can tell, most people would agree with them, not with me. To me personally, there is no upside to fresh, even less so because of the sorry condition of most "fresh" vegetables I can buy at my local Loblaws in toronto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZMHCcYen0M 1 -
Well, someone's got to eat frozen. Cheers0
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I am fortunate to live in a place with lots of good and FRESH produce much of the year. Some is truck-farmed. Right now we're getting farm-fresh carrots and beets and greens. Rutabaga too. I'm not sure if they're digging potatoes, but I had some darling tiny little russets that seemed like they were just out of the ground. During winter, the greens are grown in a greenhouse of course. There is a local organic farm that grows greens year-round and has a you-pick. If a person went and took ONE LEAF from each variety of their salad greens, the bowl of salad it would make would feed multiple people. Yep. Lucky me.
Now for things that have to be shipped, frozen should maintain nutrition better. And even if a person were to GET fresh produce and then leave it in the fridge a while, well, that might not be as good as produce that's flash frozen when at its peak near or at the farm. Better to get what's local.
Fish is similar. If you aren't near the coast and have access to very fresh fish, it's better if it's flash frozen or blast frozen, even while still at sea, rather than sold "Fresh, never frozen." I walked to my fishmonger this afternoon to see if they had crabs. They are closed Monday and Tuesday. They were out of cooked crabs, and one of the couple who owns the shop was just unloading a bunch of live crabs into their live tanks. They also operate fishing boats, so a lot of the fish is very fresh. They list which boat the fish comes from if it's local. I live less than 50 miles over the coast range from the ocean. It was still 90 minutes before they closed, and the owner offered to go ahead and cook one for me if I didn't want to cook it myself. It was a beautiful, gorgeous, but COLD sunny day, so I went for another walk for about 45 minutes or so, and when I got back there was a 2.48 pound freshly-cooked Dungeness crab waiting for me. Mmmmmmm. But that's not produce. I have heard that Dungeness are the only crab that doesn't eat putrefied things. I wonder if that's what makes them so sweet and delicious. OK, I better stop talking about SEAFOOD in a vegetable discussion. Sorry about that. I do like fresh crab, and this year the season opened late (again) but the crabs are big and hard and really filled out.5 -
On the produce end of things, I've got some plans to cook something else I got at the fish market, but i have to wait a while.
On the stove is a big pot of split pea soup. I've been wanting to make some for weeks, but I just keep cooking black beans, garbanzo beans, and mayocoba beans. Finally I remembered to make pea soup. I thought about making split pea soup with beets, but I was worried it would be a disgusting brown color and I would have to eat it in a very dark room. So I just went with the usual carrots, celery, onion, shallot, garlic, Oregon Bay Laurel (fresh picked from the yard; substitute for bay leaves), and some Chiles de Arbol.5 -
I prefer fresh produce, especially with respect to texture, but do eat a fair amount of frozen, especially in Winter. My frozen produce intake increased during the pandemic, too, as a way to shop less often, and I guess I've gotten in the habit a bit. I cook differently with the frozen veg: More mix-in use where texture matters less, vs. standalone with seasonings, probably.
Unlike mtaratoot, a hearty walker/biker, for me the nearest store is a bit farther than I want to walk routinely with a load of groceries, around an 8 to 10 mile round trip. I should probably get a better cargo set-up for my bike, for summer. Nowadays, I still tend to shop only once every 1-2 weeks at stores, but go to the farmers market (all local producers) most weeks. There is produce there all year 'round despite it being Michigan, but in Winter it's more root veg from storage, sometimes some few types of greens from greenhouses (or row cover in the shoulder seasons), various sprouts or baby greens, apples, mushrooms - not a huge selection.
In Spring to Fall, selection there is wider, and I get more of my food there. It's so fresh that it keeps much longer than the grocery store produce, too.
At the grocery store, too, I do buy some fresh, and some things keep well for the better part of a week or so, but far from all. I have a big chest freezer in the basement, and it's nice to have frozen veg to fall back on between shopping trips. (A lot of it is basics in giant bags from Costco.) I strive to hit at least 800g veggies and fruits most days . . . that's a lot of fresh veggies to keep on hand, from Winter sources. At some point, I'd rather eat frozen veg than tired "fresh".3 -
I guess this would be a produce-ish dinner, within the constraints of Winter here?
It was something new (experiment by a culinary philistine) but seemed pretty tasty to me.
Ezekiel tortilla, sweet onion sliced very thin, layer of cut-up dried tomatoes that had been rehydrated in warmed aged balsamic vinegar, some leftover broiled fresh asparagus, baked for long enough to heat; then added a thin layer of Cambozola and put it back in long enough to just melt, then added fresh ground black pepper.
I'd eat it again, if I ever happened to have those exact things on hand. Shown in its tidy just-out-of-oven form, and cut up revealing the tomato mixture.
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I guess this would be a produce-ish dinner, within the constraints of Winter here?
It was something new (experiment by a culinary philistine) but seemed pretty tasty to me.
Ezekiel tortilla, sweet onion sliced very thin, layer of cut-up dried tomatoes that had been rehydrated in warmed aged balsamic vinegar, some leftover broiled fresh asparagus, baked for long enough to heat; then added a thin layer of Cambozola and put it back in long enough to just melt, then added fresh ground black pepper.
I'd eat it again, if I ever happened to have those exact things on hand. Shown in its tidy just-out-of-oven form, and cut up revealing the tomato mixture.
I'd be all over that in a heart beat. 1 -
That means a lot coming from you @neanderthin, because I know you're not a uneducated experimenting amateur like I am. Thanks!1
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I adore a well-prepped veggie! The meals you posted look delcious 😍 do you mind dropping your recipe for the roasted kabocha?1
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