SereneCooking

I'm kind of excited, because sogwife did a guest post on the Mom Food blog. I think it's a little silly to feel like it's a big deal, but I feel that way anyway. If you want to check it out, it's at http://www.momfoodproject.com/2010/08/16/moms-macaroni-potato-salads/

The next evolution of my open-door dinner policy will be Mom Food Sunday Dinners. More details at the link. Hope we'll see you in September if you're nearby.

http://www.momfoodproject.com/events/

I've been working hard on a new project that lines up well with this blog.  Check it out:

http://www.momfoodproject.com

First day off the LID, and I have been living it up, foodwise:

Lunch: Clam chowder, half a salami sandwich
Snack: big old bowl of fresh figs (fine on LID, but still, delicious)
Dinner: Skillet of potatoes, mushrooms, mushroom sauce, and spicy chicken sausage

Yum.

burger We didn't have any LID bread handy, so someotherguy made me what *looks* like a carb-hater's delight, but is really just a LID-friendly burger (with lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and salt-free ketchup/mustard. My boyfriends ROCK.

The past few days, let's see, what have I eaten?  Lots of boiled potatoes. A few avocados. A restaurant meal! (Steamed veggie platter, fruit bowl, root beer.)  Some frozen potatoes fried up with a little ground beef in olive oil, with salt, pepper, and garlic.

SO many foods are calling me. The pickles at the Jewish deli.  The cans of mushroom soup in the cupboard.  BUTTER.

Oh, well, just another week or so, I hope.  And I'll be home in 5 days, so it'll get a little easier.

Things I miss most while being on LID:

1. Being able to eat whatever I want without thinking
2. Butter
3. Mayo
4. Being able to find food to eat easily when I'm not at home
5. Being able to eat out once in a while
6. BUTTER

I'm afraid I'm terrible at blogging when I'm this busy and stressed, but I've made some decent LID stuff this week, and I thought I'd just toss out a list for those who are looking for LID ideas.

New York Times no-knead bread
Pulled pork and artichokes
Avocado and tomato sandwich with olive oil and salt
O'Brien potatoes with salt-free ketchup (and salt and pepper ad paprika)
Lots of cooked carrots (I'm still eating mostly soft things because of my dental surgery)

Henry's had some good snacks today -- salt-free sesame sticks, and some candies with no salt or other no-nos in them. I can't eat them at the moment because of the seeds, but it's good to have them for when my mouth heals up a bit.

Oh, and MTE made dinner on the grill last night. He made pork with garlic and meat tenderizer, and then chicken with my own LID-friendly barbecue sauce. It was wonderful. (I made some LID-friendly french fries to go with.)

B: Leftover polenta, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt
L: Grapes; kabocha squash microwaved and then sprinkled with salt
D: I'm making pot roast for the family, but I can't be sure the meat isn't salined, so I kept some of the veggies aside, and I'll boil them for myself, and if I'm still hungry after, I'll eat some of the hummus I'm making.
S: Popsicles, juice

I don't have much internet time while I'm at mom's, but I started the LID yesterday, so I thought I'd blog that when I get the chance.

Yesterday's yummy LID foods (still on soft foods from oral surgery):

B: Fresh fruit and juice from the hospital cafeteria
L: Boiled red potatoes (no skins) with olive oil and salt; homemade baba ganouj (roasted eggplant, unsalted tahini, roasted garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, salt)
D: Baked chicken with garlic; polenta; steamed green cauliflower

Today's food (still on mostly soft foods):

B: Cold boiled potatoes with olive oil and salt; baba ganouj
L: Fresh cherries; another potato; mushrooms cooked in olive oil, garlic, and salt
D: Chicken and veggies (see below); fettuccine, huge artichoke

For the chicken and veggies, I made basically the veloute from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, using olive oil instead of butter, and homemade chicken stock for the liquid. I added cut-up leftover baked chicken, onions sauteed in chicken fat, diced red bell pepper, the rest of the green cauliflower, and a whole bunch of the mushrooms I made at lunch. Normally, I don't do the cooking-ahead thing very much, but when I'm at mom's, it's pretty important for me to keep a lot of LID foods around to nibble on, because nibbling on random stuff isn't an option, and I do a lot of stress-eating at mom's.

So far, pretty good stuff. And mom's boyfriend really liked dinner; he said it was really elegant. Score.

Tonight, I'll soak some garbanzos so I can make a big batch of hummus tomorrow.

So lately, King Arthur's buns are very popular around here. They're truly the best buns I've ever made, and everyone around here loves them. They take well to being whole-wheatified, they're soft and make great sandwiches, and so on. And lately, I've been stuffing them! That is, before baking: they end up as really delicious pockets of bread with hot filling. Mmmm.

The first stuffed-buns experiment was with barbecued beef. I didn't put quite enough stuffing in them, but fortunately, the bread itself is so good that no one except the nearly carnivorous teenager even noticed. Tonight, at someotherguy's request, I did cheeseburger buns: the buns filled with ground beef, ketchup, dill pickle slices, and American cheese.

Don't hate me for loving this fun, silly, trashy food.

Recipes and pictures later. Right now, I'm gonna go eat another cheeseburger.

[posted here and at my personal journals]

There were broccoli and zucchini in the farm box this week, so I was gonna just make spaghetti (with a jar of store-bought sauce) and steam the veggies and be done with it, but then I got to feeling like something a little nicer, and I was at Whole Foods picking up spaghetti sauce anyway, so this is what we had for dinner:

Salad of watercress, shaved pear, a tiny bit of fancy goat cheese, and avocado, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar
Whole-wheat spaghetti with the aforementioned sauce (Whole Foods' roasted-veggie sauce was on sale, and it's pretty good)
Garlic ciabatta
Pan-fried zucchini coins and broccoli florets
Stuffed mushrooms

I'm so stuffed. It was SO good.

Yesterday's shopping trip netted me a few free things. I've been plugging the cap numbers in when the family drinks Coke products, and I got three free 20-ounce sodas from MyCokeRewards.com. Also, I got the $13.99 size of Metamucil for $.99, so *practically* free. And I think that may be it for yesterday. I'm building up my couponing again after a break, so I'm sure it'll be better in the weeks to come.

Another thing I'm doing to reduce costs around here is to put out smaller amounts of meat, even if there's more to be had. They really don't miss it, and it means we have more for later. (Example: in the past, I would have just made all 16 sausage links for breakfast, but there were only 3 of us. I made 4 for the kid, 2 each for me and James, and no one wanted more. Now I've got the other 8 in the freezer for another meal, and no one went hungry.

More about why we're tightening belts around here again tomorrow. Right now, I gotta get some sleep so I can go make some money tomorrow.

G'night, my darlings.

The ham wasn't pretty, so I didn't bother with pics, but the family loved it. Tasty and not dry at all, which is always what I worry about with ham. The pomegranate glaze would have made a fine sweet sauce, but I didn't bother. It didn't add or subtract anything from the flavor of the meat. I will probably not bother with anything so elaborate next time, especially since James has specifically requested a plain ham for next time. Not because he disliked today's, but because he's just in the mood for a plain one for next time.

I've made these buns from King Arthur Flour three times in the last couple weeks, and every time, they were amazing. They're our new standard roll. Only slightly more work than making a loaf of bread, and I'm telling you, they're just so good. Soft and fluffy and still sturdy enough to make a sandwich with. These are a total winner, and they're very cheap to make, which is a bonus around here.

[posted at serenecooking & serenejournal/DW user serene]

Hey, custardfairy and other cheeseheads, where's the best place online for me to buy rennet? I am going to be making some cheese in the upcoming weeks (because it sounds like fun, and because I like making things from scratch, and even more when I'm making the scratch from scratch). I'll look at my local really good grocery/health-food store, but in case I strike out, where should I check next?

(I bought whole milk to make ricotta from -- that doesn't require rennet -- but I'd really like to make cottage cheese and mozzarella, among other things.)

Since I don't like ham, I don't make it often, even though the folks in my house do like it. This week, though, it was super-cheap, so I grabbed a HUGE one, and then set about figuring out how to make it with things I already have in the house, so I wouldn't have to buy a bunch of ingredients. Mom really wanted me to do it the mom-food way (pinepple, brown sugar, cloves), but I don't have pineapple and I really don't want to go to the store today.

Someone on rec.food.cooking makes a Honeybaked Ham knock-off, so I used that recipe as the jumping-off point, though I'll only have 2 hours in which to marinate.

I am using up bits of stuff I have around, including some pomegranate jelly made by a friend of mom's and some pomegranate sauce/syrup I bought without any idea how tart the stuff is (I usually just use it in place of vinegar for a pomegranate vinaigrette). Also, I don't like alcohol in food, but I don't like ham anyway, so I decided to use up some of the marsala I bought to make 's tiramisu.

Pomegranate glaze (see ham method at above link)

1/3 cup marsala
Around 1 1/2 cups light brown sugar (I just weighed what I had -- it was 11.5 ounces or so, and I used an online converter to come up with the 1.5 cups)
1/4 tsp. cloves
1/2 cup pomegranate jelly
1 tsp. pomegranate sauce (syrup)
1 teaspoon HP sauce (can use A1 or worcestershire)
juice of 1/2 lemon

I'll let you know how it works out. Per serving, it's super-cheap (well under a dollar a serving including the sides), though since the ham is a twelve-pound monster, it was $11.72 itself. I expect we'll have ham in the house for at least a few days, and the bone will, as always, go to making split-pea soup later on.

Pics later if I remember.

Tags: ham, meat, mom food, under $1 per serving

I'm doing the 21 days again; I really liked almost everything about it: I felt better; it encouraged me to eat salads/greens; and my ethics were happy with me (yes, I personify my ethics; so sue me). I only disliked two things:

1) the kid's complaints (albeit usually goodnatured complaints) about missing meat; I shall work on this by explaining to her that I need to do this for me, and she's more than welcome, as always, to fix (or buy) meat for herself any time she wants. (We still keep meat in the house; it's only that I'm not cooking meat for dinners.) I will be honest and tell her that it hurts my feelings when she complains about what I'm not serving. She's a good kid; she won't keep it up if she knows it's hurting my feelings.

2) the hyperfocus on food, which I think was magnified by my feeling I needed to blog every day or else. Or else what, you may ask? Oh, who knows. I shall fix this by not blogging every day, and by not recording everything I eat. Though it was kinda fun to do that, it also made me have to think too much about food, and I have other things to think about.

Anyway, back to the 21-day thing (because that's a manageable time for planning) with some tweaks to my menus (under the cut), and I may blog a little about it and I may not. Sound good? Good. :-)

Oh, and I upped our quantity of fruits and veggies from FFTY, too, because it is SO nice to have that stuff to hand all the time, rather than having to go shopping or go without. (Normally, "go shopping" is my preference, but let's be honest: between the rain, my health, my work schedule, and having a kid newly in college, getting out to the store has dropped from four to five days a week to once or twice. If I get back in the swing of shopping, I can drop the box down to the smaller one again.)

( 21 days of menus, revised to reflect stuff we liked and didn't from the last ones, and to add more veggies and whole grainsCollapse )

[Note: This entry is post-dated so it will stay on top. It's not really January 22nd yet, so don't panic.]

"Kickstart" = PCRM's 21-Day Vegan Kickstart

If you're looking for my MENUS, click here.

Or click here to see only my Kickstart posts.

If you're interested in vegan eating, here are ( the basics:Collapse )

Every day, I'll be posting my menus and reviewing any new recipes I try. If you're joining us on the Kickstart, cool. If not, maybe you'll just find something new to try. Either way, have fun!

( More resourcesCollapse )

Yesterday (Day 19) is so fired. What a terrible day. Not food-wise -- that was fine, including getting dinner made for me by a great teenager who cooked me vegan food so I would feel taken care of. But everything else? So over it. Bleah. Today's not starting out so well, either, but I guess I'll just keep starting over every day until it improves.

Here, have some wonderful vegan sites to make you happy:

The Fat-free Vegan Kitchen
Notes from the Vegan Feast Kitchen
Post-Punk Vegan
Vegan stuff on TasteSpotting
VeganYumYum
Vegan Lunchbox
VeganDad

...but it's not getting me down. To the contrary, I love an occasional lazy rainy day, when I don't leave the house, and can cook and clean at my own pace. I ate soup and toast for breakfast, fried up some potatoes for lunch (added meat to the others' portions), and may go ahead and make more soup for dinner -- it's a soup kind of day.

It's coming time for me to decide whether or not to continue this thing past day 21, which will be on Thursday. My inclination right now is to stick with it, because I've been feeling so good physically and ethically, but it does kind of aggravate my family, and it does take a little more thought. On the other other hand, it costs less than eating meat. I'll keep pondering.

If you're doing the Kickstart, are you planning to continue it?