Last night, we had my cousin and sisters over for dinner, and did traditional Fourth of July meal of … pasta. :) It was what we were in the mood for and it’s easy for a crowd. I’m still craving things cooked over fire, but I’m generally craving things cooked over fire; hopefully we’ll break out the grill this week.

We started out with baguettes and butter and chopped up tomatoes doused with a little olive oil, onion powder, salt, and pepper. I’ve made these baguettes for every company dinner involving bread for awhile now, and they’ve never failed me. I doubled the recipe, getting 4 big loaves out of it, and all that was left this morning was one 4-inch long chunk. What can I say - we like our bread. :) Half of it went to work with Jeff to go with his lunch today, and I’ll get the other half. (The flour was organic, and the tomatoes and butter [well, the cream that made the butter] were local.)

Dinner was angel hair pasta (purchased, not homemade; I’m not up to make angel hair yet) and red sauce (a jar of sauce that my mom put up from her garden a couple of years ago, plus a little organic tomato puree to thicken it up, since it just wasn’t thickening on its own), white sauce (local butter and milk, organic flour, little bit of olive oil), with a little grated cheese on top (Ohio, sold at our farmer’s market) and a big tossed salad (Farmer’s market lettuce, tomatoes, and green peppers, and cucumbers from my daddy’s garden). I tried this ranch dressing, and it wasn’t bad. Far too sweet. I doubled the recipe but left the sugar and vanilla at single-recipe doses, and it was still way too sweet. It was also way runny, even with adding extra mayonnaise. However, the spices were dead on, and the dill really stuck out. It works, but will just need some tweaking next time.

Desert was Breyer’s ice cream (buy one get one this week, about the only frozen food we still buy) and homemade blonde brownies, from How to Cook Everything. They took a lot of butter, but they were so tasty:

• 8 tablespoons butter
  
• 1 cup brown sugar (medium, dark, whatever you like. I used half light and half dark)
  
• 1 egg
  
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
  
• pinch salt (I used 1/8 a tsp)
  
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
  

Grease an 8×8 cooking pan (and grease it well; I had a heck of a time getting the first brownie out of the pan). Melt the butter (I just threw it in the microwave for 30 seconds or so). Mix in everything else in order; until you get to the flour, a hand mixer will make it much faster. Pour into the pan and bake in a 350 degree oven 20 to 25 minutes, until just set. These will make your whole house smell like butter and sugar, and waiting for them to be done will be torture. :)

Most of dinner went together in about 40 minutes, so I wasn’t away from the socializing for too long, and it was a good Fourth. We watched a movie and played board games. I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday.

Meal: crustless quiche, bread machine baguettes, green salad
Cost: about $2 each
Time: 40 minutes in the oven, 15 minutes prep for the quiche, plus some time for the salad and bread machine time for the bread dough
Leftovers: a small chunk of bread that I used for a sandwich for Jeff’s lunch. Apparently, we were hungry. (And salad makings, but I deliberately cut up way more than we would need, so that we would have salad makings for dinner tonight.)
Local ingredients: cheese, eggs, milk, salad greens, tomatoes, green peppers
Organic ingredients: flour, carrots

We’ve talked about quiche before, but last night was a new recipe, and it was definitely a winner; we’ll be sticking to this for our crustless quiche from now on. The recipe came from Simply Recipes, where quite a few of our new recipes come from. Elise features recipes that use whole ingredients, that are generally pretty easy to prepare, and that are easily modifiable, and this quiche was no exception.

The original recipe for this quiche calls for 10 ounces of cheese and a cup of cottage cheese for 5 eggs. That is a heck of a lot of cheese. I love cheese, and I’m not sure that even I can contemplate eating that much cheese at a sitting. So, I used to recipe as an idea and took off. I made the roux, and then once it was cool, added the baking powder and salt, and 1/2 a teaspoon of mustard powder to it, then mixed it into 8 eggs beaten with a third of a cup of milk (to make up for not using the cottage cheese, which would have added some moisture). I stirred in 2 cups (8 ounces) of a mix of shredded colby, vintage cheddar, and muenster, and that was it. (There are too many conflicts between food likes and dislikes with the folks we were do movie night with to do any mix-ins or toppings. Eventually, I’ll get around to buying ramekins, and then we can have customized quiches.) That was it. It went into the oven in an 8×8 dish for the proscribed 40 minutes at 350 degrees, and came out slightly brown and puffy. The end result was creamy and cheesy (I could probably easily cut down on the cheese on the next batch, too, and at one-fourth of the pan coming in at 500 calories, I probably will.) I found it to be slight lighter than my normal quiche - more like a souffle - while Jeff found it to be more substantial than my normal efforts, and liked it a lot more. My cousin and sister also approved, so I think we have a new default recipe.

Meal: quiche, salad, and quick Irish bread:
Cost per person: $1.60
Time: about 30 minutes, plus baking time for the bread and quiche
Leftovers: a third of the loaf of bread, 1/4 of the quiche
Local ingredients: eggs, cheese, potatoes, milk, whole wheat flour, lettuce, green peppers
Organic ingredients: carrots, all-purpose flour

Last night was movie night with my sister and cousin, and I fell back on an easy favorite: quiche. This version was 8 eggs, 2 cups milk, 1 cup potatoes, and 1 1/3 cup cheese, in an 8×8 pan. I cooked it for the same time and at the same temperatures as the bread, and it turned out great. The salad was our standard lettuce, carrots, and green peppers. I had a lovely hothouse tomato that was just begging to go on the salad - and I forgot it. Whoops.

The bread was something new. I wanted bread to go with the quiche, but the paddle was stuck in our bread pan, and I couldn’t get it out to wash the pan to make the bread. So I went trolling through All Recipes looking for quick bread recipes that didn’t require a pile of ingredients we didn’t have, and settled on this one. I halved the recipe but otherwise followed the directions, and it was great - tasty and dense. We’re out of butter, but it would be fantastic with butter and some preserves, and it’s bread that I can run up for breakfast the same morning I want to seat it. We’ll be making this again.

Meal: tofu with peanut sauce and rice
Cost per person: $2.50
Preparation time: about 20 minutes, plus another 25 hands-off for the rice in the rice cooker
Leftovers: some tofu, a bunch of peanut sauce, and a bunch of rice (I deliberately made extra rice.)
Organic ingredients: tofu, rice, peanut butter, lime juice, oranges

A couple of weeks ago, we had friends in town. They took us out and treated us to Thai food, whereupon I discovered that Jeff loves peanut sauce. I had no idea. I also love peanut sauce, and it’s one of those things that should be easy to reproduce at home - if you have a good recipe. Previous attempts, pre-Jeff, had been… not so good. However, I had the Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates checked out of the library, it had a recipe for peanut sauce, and I decided to give it another go. (Side note: if you haven’t experienced the wonder that is the Moosewood cookbooks, check them out. They’re put out by the Moosewood Restaurant in New York, and focus on vegetarian cooking (with some seafood). I have yet to make a bad recipe for one of their books, as long as it had ingredients that we liked.)

Peanut Sauce

- 2 tbs soy sauce
- 2 tbs honey or 2 to 3 tbs brown sugar (we used the brown sugar. It was very good, but next time, I think I’ll try honey, just for comparison’s sake)
- 6 to 8 tbs fresh lime juice or white vinegar (I used 3 tbs each [lime juice is expensive], and it was good, but the vinegar really came through. Next time, I’ll start with 2 tbs each and taste from there.)
- 1/2 teas tabasco or other hot pepper sauce, or more to taste (I used about a teaspoon of Thai chili sauce)
- 1 teas ground cumin, optional (I added about 1/2 a teaspoon)
- 1/2 cup peanut butter (get the best peanut butter you can. This is not a recipe for your standard chock full of sugar and preservatives peanut butter. Use that if that’s what you have, but this recipe will be as good as the peanut butter, so it’s totally worth a trip to the local natural foods store to get the organic peanut butter out of the big tubs.)

Throw everything in a blender; combine. Taste. It actually ended up being a bit thin, so I added another tablespoon of peanut butter. This made a lot of peanut sauce - next time, I’ll probably go for half a batch.

The tofu went on the George Foreman for 5 minutes, and we served this up with brown rice that had been cooking away in the rice cooker, and an orange for me. This was really, really excellent, and totally easy. Peanut sauce is also good on pork, chicken, and all manner of vegetables.

Meal: Quinoa salad with teriyaki tofu, oranges, alfalfa sprouts, carrots, and green pepper
Cost per person: about $2
Leftovers: enough for me for lunch for 2 days
Local ingredients: green pepper, sprouts (these were local, too)
Organic ingredients: carrots, apples, oranges, tofu, quinoa
Prep time: about 40 minutes

Tuesday night we made something new. I made up a batch of tofu teriyaki (2 pounds of teriyaki, 1 cup of teriyaki sauce, marinate for an hour beforehand) and a batch of quinoa (I made one cup uncooked and used more like 3 cups of water than the recommended 2 - we ended up with a fluffier end product, and a bunch of cooked quinoa). I served the tofu on top of the quinoa, with chopped green peppers, oranges, apples, and sprouts as toppings. My sister and cousin had never had quinoa before, but seemed to like it, and other than Jeff’s comment that another sauce would have worked better, we all seemed to like the meal.

As the weather warms up, I’ll be doing more one pot grain salads. They’re usually cheap, easy, and filling.

So, things have gotten a little behind here at Chez Nitty Gritty. Let’s see how quickly we can recap this past week and get it caught up.

Sunday, we did tossed salad. Local hydroponic lettuce, local greenhouse tomatoes and green peppers, organic carrots, local hard-boiled eggs, and homemade croutons from the tail end of a loaf of bread machine bread. (I don’t think I’ve talked about croutons yet. Cut up whatever old, stale bread you have that’s not green yet into cubes - I like large, restaurant style ones, but one of the great things about making your own croutons is that you can do whatever you like - and toss on a baking sheet with a little olive oil and whatever spices you care for. Bake in the oven somewhere between 350 and 400, depending on what else you need to bake, for 10 to 15 minutes, or until brown and toasty. Dead easy, and much cheaper and better for you than croutons from a box.) Dinner was around a dollar apiece and took about 20 minutes to put together, including boiling the eggs and making the croutons. Jeff also had some leftover lasagne.

Monday night, we did chili in the crockpot and cornbread. Monday was a late class night for me, so I made the cornbread in the morning before I headed up to school.

- 1.25 cups milk, buttermilk, or yogurt (you can fake buttermilk by mixing 1.25 cups milk, gently warmed, and 1 tablespoon white vinegar. It’ll sour in about 5 minutes)
- 2 tablespoons butter, olive oil, lard, or bacon drippings
- 1.5 cups cornmeal
- 0.5 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 1 egg

Heat the fat in a small skillet, and pour into your baking dish (I used an 8×8 Pyrex, which I put into the oven at 125 to keep the fat warm.) Meantime, combine the wet ingredients in one bowl and the dry ingredients in another; mix the wet into the dry until everything is combined well (if the mixture seems a little dry, add a little more milk). Pour over the fat in the baking pan, set the oven for 275, and bake about 30 minutes, until the whole thing is slightly browned and firm.

This was pretty good; it wasn’t perfect - my ideal cornbread is more moist and sweeter than this turned out. However, it wasn’t at all bad. We have about half the pan left, that I think I want to turn into cornbread stuffing for lunches this week.

The chili was as simple as chili gets - about a pound of ground beef in the crock pot with half of a 28 ounce can of tomato puree, a little water, and some garlic powder, salt, pepper, and chili powder. There was just enough left for a lunch portion the next day, and Jeff said I should make more next time. The beef, milk, cornmeal, and egg were local, and the flour and tomato puree organic. Total active prep time was 15 minutes, and it ran about $3.50 for the two of us, including the leftovers.

Tuesday, we did a repeat of the tofu salad tacos, along with wild rice and a simple carrot and apple salad. Organic ingredients included flour, tofu, carrots, and apples, and the lettuce was organic. The rice was some that we’re using up from our previous eating habits, so I’ve no idea where it was from. Cost was comparable to the last time we did this dinner, but the time was longer, partially because the rice takes awhile to cook. I wasn’t tracking the time very well, because I drafted my cousin into helping, and we were socializing while we cooked.

Wednesday was a pseudo-new recipe. I say that because it wasn’t much of a recipe. I took a 3/4 pound pork tenderloin, sliced it up into medallions about a quarter of an inch thick, and pan-fried them in a little olive oil, along with a liberal dousing of black pepper, salt, and thyme. I served the medallions up with a topping of garlic butter and sides of roasted potatoes. The potatoes, pork, and butter were local (from our own homemade butter). Active prep time was about half an hour, mostly accomplished while the potatoes were baking. There were enough leftovers for me for lunch the next day and for breakfast the day after (I minced the pork finely, and tossed it and the potatoes in with a bunch of other stuff and two scrambled eggs), and the whole thing cost about $7.

Thursday, I was supposed to have a late class, but class got canceled. We did tossed salad again.

Friday, we were scheduled originally for pizza. However, our cheese vendor wasn’t at the market by the time we got there on the 24th, so we decided to do beef ribs, which had been on sale. However, we had friends coming in from out of town, and the flight got rescheduled from a midnight arrival to noon, and our package of ribs was just enough for two people, not four. We updated to taco pie, and decided to just bite the bullet and buy some decidedly non-local cheese, before one of our merry band remembered that another of our merry band doesn’t much care for ground beef. Being picky on a few select food items myself (I hate beans, to name one), I try very hard to serve people food that they like. We decided to fix lasagna. However, as it approached dinner time, a sudden craving for Thai food descended, and so our friends took us out and fed us a veritable feast at a locally owned non-chain Thai restaurant. Dinner was delicious.

Last night, Saturday (the 3rd), there might have been a frozen Tombstone pizza incident, but if there was, I’m not telling. :) If there was such an incident, it was our first in about 6 months. Plans are underway to experiment with making our own frozen pizza, since that would be infinitely superior to Tombstone. (One good thing about the Tombstones is that they don’t use hydrogenated oils.)

This week I’m on spring break, which means that blog posting (hopefully) won’t be neglected, email will be caught up on, and there’s some new recipes coming up. The week after, we’re going to do a week of make ahead meals with mostly local and organic foods, which should prove interesting.

lasagne two ways and biscuits

Meal: lasagne, salad, herby biscuits, snickerdoodles
Cooking time: about an hour and a half prep time, plus some baking time
Cost per person: about $2.50 each
Local ingredients: lettuce, milk, eggs
Organic ingredients: flour, spinach, tomatoes
Leftovers: about half the red sauce lasagne, three biscuits, and salad (the biscuits got eaten by me for lunch Monday, and the salad provided most of Sunday night’s dinner, along with some leftover lasagne, which lasted several days)

Saturday night we had my two sisters and my cousin over for board games and dinner. All the recipes were from my big red Betty Crocker cookbook.

We made two lasagnes: one with TVP and red sauce, and one with white sauce and spinach. (Small confession: I have been fiending for spinach lately. I finally broke down and got some for the lasagne on Saturday night. Yes, it was from California, thus eatting into my gratuitious food miles for awhile. Yes, it was organic. Yes, it was utterly delicious.) The pasta recipe was our standard recipe, and two 8×8 pans of lasagne took the entire recipe. The red sauce lasagne took about a cup of dry TVP, which made about 2 cups of hydrated TVP (cover TVP with boiling water; wait.) You can do a lot with TVP, and it would be better if I started learning how to do things with it instead of using it plain, but in the highly spiced tomato sauce, plain TVP was fine. Thanks to the advice of multiple people, I did not boil my noodles this time, and they turned out great.

The white sauce was dead easy. Melt two tablespoons butter (or heat two tablespoons olive oil, which will make a lovely rich sauce) in a small saucepan. Add 2 tablespoons flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 1/8 teaspoon pepper, and combine well. Reduce heat and slowly add in a cup of milk, stirring weel after each addition to prevent lumps. Bring to a boil and boil for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Add a touch of garlic powder and nutmeg.

The biscuit recipe was my stock biscuit recipe; I added some parsley, garlic powder, and pepper to make them more dinner like.

The snickerdoodles were a treat:

- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 1/2 cup stick margarine or butter, softened
- 1/2 cup shortening (I used vegetable oil. They tasted great.)
- 2 large eggs
- 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- sugar
- cinammon

Heat oven to 400. Cream together sugar, butter, shortening/oil, and eggs. Add in flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt. You will not have your standard creamy, almost liquidy cookie dough. You will have a bowl full of lumps. Do not despair. Mix up some sugar and cinammon in a bowl. Take some dough, roll it into a ball, and roll it around in the cinammon sugar. Place cookies on an ungreased sheet. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes (I like mine on the shorter end of that range). I made a half batch and got 2 dozen cookies, most of which vanished Saturday night.

I made up the lasagnes in the afternoon before people got here; I made up the biscuits right before everything was due to go in the oven (and discovered that saying “Well, I’ll just put in the biscuits at 350 and cook them with the lasagne” doesn’t work. They really do need to be cooked at 400.) The salad got thrown together while the lasagne had come out and the biscuits were browning. I made up the cookies during a break between games.

This coming week is spring break. This means catching up on blog posting, and trying new recipes. :)

Quiche and Roasted Carrots

Meal: Quiche, roasted carrots, and biscuits
Cooking time: about 50 minutes in the oven, betweeen everything, and about 30 minutes prep
Total cost (fed 4 people dinner and Jeff and I quiche for breakfast today): about $8.50
Local ingredients: eggs, cheese, potatoes, butter and buttermilk (homemade from local cream)
Organic ingredients: flour, carrots, sugar

I had my cousin make the carrots last night. He’s a self-professed non-cook, but he’s more than willing to help out, so I directed him while I was dealing with the quiche. They were the same roasted carrots as last week, and they proved themselves amazingly flexible, going in at 425 when the quiche was started, then down to 325 for awhile longer, then back up to 450 when the biscuits went in. The baking dish full vanished, so he must have done something right. :)

I found myself having oven issues last night. The carrots needed 30 to 40 minutes at 350. The quiche needed 15 minutes at 425 and 20 minutes or so at 325. The biscuits needed 10 to 12 minutes at 450. This was a bit of a quandary. I solved the problem by putting in the carrots with the quiche, and as I said, just cooking them at whatever temperature everything else needed to be cooked at. When the quiche was done, I pulled it out (it was in the big 8×12 Pyrex) and set it on top of the stove with a cookie sheet over it while the biscuits went in. It was still perfectly warm when we cut into it 15 minutes later.

Into the quiche last night went 4 large potatoes, 1 cup of cheese, 2 cups of fat free milk, and 8 eggs. The eggs were a surprise - 3 of them were double-yolked! I’d never seen a double-yolked egg before, so that was a bit of a delight. I ended up using the 8 planned eggs, anyhow, because the double-yolks were about half the size of what we normally get. I microwaved the potatoes until they were soft, and then chopped them up and distributed them into the bottom of the 8×12 Pyrex. The eggs, cheese, and milk were beaten together and poured over the potatoes, and the whole thing was salted and peppered. (Side note: one of my birthday presents was a pepper grinder. Freshly ground pepper is heavenly; now I’m annoyed we waited this long to get a grinder.) It went into the oven at 425 for 15 minutes, and then the heat was reduced to 325 for 20 minutes. The result was poofy, starting to brown just a touch around the edges, and just set and creamy in the middle - in other words, perfect.

Lastly, we had biscuits. I used butter I’d made that morning, and the buttermilk from it, and it doesn’t get much better than that.

Meal: teriyaki tofu, udon noodles, stir-fried green peppers and zuchini
Cooking time: about an hour, partially hands-off
Cost per person: about $1.50, with enough tofu leftover for one lunch (it helped that the tofu was on sale for 99 cents a package)
Local ingredients: green pepper, honey
Organic ingredients: zuchini, flour, tofu

For our Tuesday night movie night, we made teriyaki tofu, stir-fried vegetables, and homemade udon noodles.

The only modification I made to the noodles was that it took a whole cup of water, rather than a half, to get a ball of dough going (I did haul out the food processor for this, and I’m glad I did; the dough was stiff.) Also, the recipe calls for “high gluten white flour”, so I did what I do when my bread recipes call for high gluten flour - added gluten, at one teaspoon per cup plus an extra teaspoon. This is great for sandwich bread, but made for a very stiff noodle dough - so I think next time I’ll back off on gluten and see what that does for the dough. Otherwise, these were great - thick and chewy (a little too thick; next time, I’ll roll them thinner.) They were utterly unlike store brought udon noodles, and I suspect, much closer to the real thing than what we can purchase at the store. It took me about half an hour to roll out and cut noodles for 4 people, and there were no leftovers.

The tofu used our normal teriyaki sauce. It went into the sauce about three hours prior to dinner to marinate. I made 28 ounces of tofu - almost 2 pounds - and there was just enough tofu for a lunch salad for me the next day. Wowsers. When it was time for the tofu to cook, it went in the oven for about 20 minutes at 350.

The zuchini and green pepper I just sliced and tossed in a wok with a little seasame oil until they were done. I like my vegetables just barely cooked, so this didn’t take long.

And that was it. Everyone piled their food into our big soup bowls, poured a little extra sauce on top, and feasted. We neglected pictures, as we were distracted by how good dinner was. :)

so very tasty

Meal: homemade pasta, tomato sauce, white sauce, baguettes, apple crisp
Cooking time: about an hour, plus lead time for the bread
Cost per person: about $3.00
Local ingredients: egg, cheese, milk
Organic ingredients: apple, oats, sugar, flour, tomatos

Tuesday night we had our normal space geek movie night. I did homemade pasta, side salads, baguettes, and apple crisp for four.

For the pasta, I used a slightly different recipe than normal; my copy of How to Cook Everything was hiding from me, so I fell back on Betty Crocker.

• 2 cups flour
  
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
  
• 2 large eggs
  
• 1/4 cup water
  
• 1 tablespoon olive or vegetable oil
  

Mix flour and salt together and form into a mound. Make a well in the middle of the mound, add everything else, and mix well. Adjust the dryness of the dough as necessary with a little extra water. Form a ball with the dough and kneed for five minutes, or until the dough is smooth and workable. Roll out by hand or use your pasta machine.

I was very pleased with this pasta; it was easy to work with, and had a great taste. It met with universal approval.

The apple crisp came from Betty Crocker, as well:

• apples, diced (Betty Crocker recommends 4 medium, but really, your apple to topping ratio is up to you)
  
• 2/3 to 3/4 cup packed brown sugar (you want to err on the high side with this, believe me)
  
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
  
• 1/2 cup oats (use the normal kind, not the instant, please? :) )
  
• 1/3 cup butter, softened
  
• 3/4 teaspoon ground cinammon
  
• 3/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg (a little ground ginger never hurt, either)
  

The apples go into an 8×8 pan. Everything else gets mixed and dumped on top of the apples, and the whole thing goes in the oven for 30 minutes at 375 degrees. This makes ahead well; make it early in the day, then put it in the oven whenever you’re ready to eat it.

If you’re feeling decadent and have cream on hand (which we often do, since we make our own butter), pour just a touch of cream in a bowl - a quarter to a half a cup will do it - add sugar to taste (and really, this will take some trial and error), and beat it with electric beaters until you have whipped cream. Add a bit of suger to taste during whipping if you want it sweetened.

The baguette recipe came from here. They were delicious - the four of us killed both loaves.