Category: Food

Dem Bones

…are surprisingly easy!

The Things are super excited about them, and well, I am too.  I’m a sweet and salty combo gal.  Candy?  Not so much….but I’ll knock you over for some kettle corn or chocolate covered pretzels.  We just got some Wilton molds from Michaels and the recommended candy melts…add your own pretzels and looky!

We worked outside all weekend finishing the new steps and stringing spider webs, but now there are tornado sirens going, so I’ve moved to indoor preparations.  More photos when I can emerge from the house without the threat of hurricane force winds…

Pork of July

Warning:  this post is rated M for Meaty and may not be suitable for all audiences. Vegetarians and pork averse…Just sayin’.

While cooking out BBQ is the standard fare on the 4th of July, we like to infuse a little ethnicity into our holiday pork.  This year we made one dish to eat, one to freeze.  Tonight we had carnitas with chipotle avocado lime cream.  In future, we’ll be having lemongrass pork potstickers, or lettuce wraps or tossed with noodles etc….

You see, when you’re brining a hunk o’ meat. you might as well plan ahead.  We brined the butt for the carnitas and the tenderloins for the lemongrass pork all together.

The CC’s brine consists of: 2 quarts water, half cup molasses, 1.5 cups kosher salt, I TB juniper berries, 1 TB black peppercorns and 10 whole cloves.  ANY pork will greatly benefit from hanging out in this stuff overnight.

The next day, the butt gets a rubdown of of garlic powder, fresh ground cumin and coriander, cinnamon, fresh bay leaves and oregano.  It goes in the slow cooker with chicken broth and chipotle paste for 10 hours…

When done, break it down into small pieces and crisp up in a 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes….then…dinner!

During the 10 hours the carnitas cooked…the tenderloins were cooked in the oven, then the meat was diced and mixed with fresh lemongrass, scallions, ginger, garlic, chili garlic paste (found in asian markets) fish sauce, light brown sugar and crushed roasted and salted peanuts.  All go into a smoking hot wok.

We use this giant wok outdoors when we are cooking in bulk.  The burner underneath came with a turkey fryer and the wok was an estate sale find.

Once the pork is golden brown…we pack it into small parcels for future use.  We almost always use fresh cilantro when we eat it, but it doesn’t freeze well, so we add it fresh once thawed.

And that, my friends, is what we call the Pork of July.  Happy 4th!

Fresh!

We got our first share from our CSA Avalon Acres today, and I’ve been giddy like schoolgirl in anticipation all week.  We were supposed to start getting shares last week…but, well, we all know what happened there.

I was shocked we got our eggs since they lost over 1200 of their 1600 chickens in the flood.  They’ve done an amazing job of getting back to business very quickly, and as good fortunes go, their crops all survived – Yay!

So what’s in my little box of goodness you ask?  TWO nice punnets of strawberries (Thing 2’s fave), spinach, lettuce, baby bok choy, scallions, broccoli, a half dozen fresh eggs and a sprig of mint.  Can’t WAIT for next week.  The freshness and tenderness of everything we’ve eaten so far is SO fan-tabulous!

Here…let me show you the farm strawberry next to the one from Publix…..

I don’t need to tell you which is which.

Yes….it DOES taste as good as it looks, and YES,  it’s so much better.  I will cry when it’s over…..

Support for Jamie-O

Apologies to my Facebook and Twitter followers, since I’ve hawked this over there already.

Why do I support Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution?  Here’s why:

My kids have always taken their own lunch, but this year, both of them asked if they could go through the lunch line.  I said OK, and volunteered to help the younger kids in the first weeks of school get the hang of it.  There was a breaded chicken sandwich, tater tots, peas and carrots and fresh fruit OR fruit juice.

I naturally started serving up both peas and carrots and tater tots on each plate until I was told that they have a CHOICE of ONE vegetable.  Me: “Are you telling me that tater tots are considered a vegetable?!”  and the lunch director sighed in an exasperated way and said “I know, it’s not right, but yes.”  NO WAY.  I gave the kids both ANYWAY and she didn’t rat me out.

I won’t go on about how fresh fruit and fruit juice are NOT EVEN CLOSE to equal choices.

Our family has been watching the show together, and the statistics on our health as a nation are staggering.

If you don’t have kids, you can support it for the sake of our nation’s health care system, and our life span.  We have the first generation expected to have shorter life spans than their parents.  Who will support the aged if the youth die prematurely from poor health?

He needs one million supporters to take it to Washington DC, and as of this posting, we are not even halfway there.  Please consider?  Click the badge below to sign the petition…and thanks for reading my rant.

Fortune Cookies

Despite the fact my vision is comparable to looking through plastic wrap, I can’t break a promise, so I made a bunch of fortune cookies for the kids to share with their class for the Lunar New Year…Year of the Tiger!  I usually double this recipe, but not everyone is feeding forty something kids so here’s my basic recipe:  The process is very similar to baking tuiles.

Preheat oven to 275 degrees for convection ovens, 300 degrees for regular ovens.

2 large egg whites

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon coconut extract (secret ingredient)

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

Whisk all above together until frothy.

8 tablespoons all purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch

1/4 teaspoon salt

8 tablespoons granulated sugar

Sift above dry ingredients into a bowl,  then add flour mixture to wet ingredients.  Here is the tricky part…add 5-10 teaspoons of water.  You gauge how much after you’ve wisked the batter.  If you let the batter rest a bit, you’ll have to adjust less as you go along.  Sometimes I end up adding a few extra drops after I’ve made my first cookies.  The batter should not be runny, but drop easily from your whisk/spoon.

Take about a tablespoon of batter and flatten into a circle on a cookie sheet with the back of your spoon. I like to use silicone baking mats.  I can only bake 3 per sheet…any more than that and I can’t work fast enough before the cookie becomes too brittle to fold.  It’s a great team project because if you have 2 sets of hands working, you can knock it out much faster.  Otherwise…plan to spend a few HOURS on this. Yeah, I know I just lost half of you….

When the cookie is just starting to brown on the edge, (12-15 minutes) remove with an offset spatula and flip over so the “smooth side” is down and will be on the outside.

You MUST work very quickly here….put your pre-folded fortune in the middle of the circle (it’s hot) and fold over the edge of a glass or cup.  If you have sensitive fingers, move along…probably not a good project for you. (There goes the other half.)

Then put to cool inside a muffin tin with the tips pointing downward…otherwise, the cookie will slowly re-open and cool that way…no good.

If you make them several days in advance..you might need to re-crisp them in the muffin tins the day of serving.  If you keep them in a good airtight container…you should be OK and you’ll have fortune cookies that are actually decent tasting.  It goes without saying that kids (and adults) LOVE these.

Gong Hei Fat Choi or Happy Chinese/Lunar New Year!