Happy Hanukkah!

Tonight, for the fist day of Hanukkah, I made latkes.  Ryan told me she looks forward to this all year, which made me all warm & fuzzy.  Since latkes do not a meal make, I made mac and cheese too but I made it from scratch, with roux and grated cheddar, just to try a new recipe.  Still a little grainy but so yummy!  Even Tom ate latkes and he's always told me he didn't care for them.  Tommy of course at nothing and yelled "I want circle crackers!" at the top of his lungs because he's decided to live off of Ritz crackers for the rest of his life.  He got no circle crackers, poor kid.
I love when I actually cook something people like.  It's so rare.

I'm lucky that they match that way.

My house smells like pot roast. I am infinitely fortunate that I happen to be cooking pot roast, because otherwise I'd spend all day wondering where that smell is coming from.

still yummy

I have decided that I loved my invention pasta dish so much that I am going to post the recipe. This would also be great with low carb pasta, especially Dreamfields.

one can diced tomatoes, drainied
one half polish sausage / kielbasa sliced into half inch sections
quarter cup fresh or frozen basil*
1T minced or chopped garlic
parsley to taste
salt & pepper
olive oil
spaghetti (I use thin spaghetti and I mix regular with whole wheat, but any kind would work.)

Cook spaghetti. When you put the pasta in the water, drizzle oil in a deep skillet (I use a chicken fryer) and brown sausage as evenly as possible, stirring occasionally.  Add tomatoes, garlic, basil, and parsley.  Warm through and turn heat to low/warm until pasta is done, stirring occasionally.  When done, strain pasta and stir together in skillet.  Serve hot.

yummy

Spaghetti pasta with tomatoes, garlic, sausage, and basil.  Roasted broccoli with salt and olive oil.  Tommy helped me stir everything and made sure the spaghetti water was salted every time I turned my back, and then he ate nothing.  Ryan ate the pasta, Danny ate/crumbled a little of everything and was carried directly from high chair to tub, and I stuffed myself.  Not a bad meal all in all.  At least, not until Danny sneezed in the tub and projectile spit a giant glob of chewed broccoli at me.

It tastes better than it sounds

You know that thing where you look up one thing (usually for me on wikipedia) and then click a related link to read something else, then click a related link, and on and on, until you end up on an unrelated or minimally related topic? Everyone does that, right? It's not just me. Anyway, I looked up the word hotdish (Minnesotan for a type of casserole), then had to compare hotdish to casserole (all hotdishes are casseroles but not all casseroles are hotdishes), then ended up looking up comfort food, and I realized that there is no specific list of comfort foods. It's very subjective.

I guess comfort food, as a general term, refers to things like meatloaf and pot roast and mac & cheese. But it also varies by region, by family, and by person. In my family, believe it or not, a biggie is macaroni milk & butter. That's what comes out of the depression when you have a chicken for eggs (to make noodles) and a cow (for milk and butter) and it literally is just cooked macaroni, a stick of butter melted on it, and then milk. Like a soup, but not. Odd, I know.

I like comfort food. I've never really been one to eat for comfort, but there's something about sitting down to a big plate of parsley noodles (it's what you eat for dinner when you can't stand Mom's stroganoff) or some Rice A Roni (fine, my mom sucked at cooking). I make more classic comfort food now, like baked mac and cheese where the top gets all brown and bubbly, and red wine pot roast, and every morning I sit down with a hot bowl of cinnamon oatmeal. But on nights when Tom's out on the road, I still fall back on the food from my family, the things I remember from when I was a kid. I still pour milk on my macaroni.

Yummy Sunday

Steel cut oats and cappuccino for breakfast.

Homemade poutine for lunch.

Pot roast and roasted brussel sprouts for dinner tonight.

I'm eating good but Ryan hates me.

Baking, and a recipe!

So far my weight loss plan to not eat any junk food I haven't made myself has led me to rediscover my deep fryer, as well as baking. I crave potato chips SO bad, yet I have none to eat. Tom bought me a mandoline, though, so I will have chips soon. I just hope I can keep them from becoming the burnt-tasting brown chips. Wish me luck, whenever I get around to making them. Today's experiment was chocolate biscotti. Here is the recipe I used, with a little secret baking information I have*:

Chocolate Biscotti

INGREDIENTS:

half cup vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 cup white sugar (splenda won't work; I tried it)
2 1/2 cups white flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 tablespoon baking powder


DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 375 and line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper.
2. In mixer (you can use a bowl but I used my mixer with the paddle attachment) blend oil, eggs, and sugar until well blended. Add cocoa powder until it resembles fudge sauce. Add baking powder, wait a few seconds, then add flour. Knead on floured surface until workable (it will be sticky and your hands will look like you strangled a chocolate statue) and then split into halves.
3. Roll each half into a log about 6 inches shorter than your cookie sheet and place in middle of parchment paper. Then fold the paper over the dough (like rolling sushi) and smash down, form each side in turns, to get a 3/4ish inch thick rectangular slab. (If my paper folding instructions don't make sense, don't worry. It's the thickness that counts.)
4. Bake for 15 minutes and then remove and place on racks to cool. When it's cool enough to handle, cut into 1 inch slabs and place slices on their sides back on cookie sheet and bake for 5 minutes, flip and bake on other side for 5 minutes. Let cool completely and they should be hard as a rock.
5. Now feel free to dip them in melted chocolate or whatever. I kept mine plain and gave them to the baby as teething cookies, but I plan to dunk them in coffee too. You can add nuts or chocolate chips or just about anything else with a burning point higher than 375 to them, too.




*Secret baking information is that as long as your recipe has a significant amount of sugar in it, you can make just about anything chocolate by replacing a quarter or so of the flour with cocoa powder. Chocolate angel food cake, chocolate sugar cookies, chocolate biscotti. Cocoa is just chocolate flour, if you have sugar to sweeten it. But don't tell anybody or they won't envy your secret recipes. shhhhhh!

Dommy Chakla Cannies

Tommy made brownies.

He stirred he batter.

He broke up most of the lumps.

He refused to stop stirring even after the batter was in the pan.

He cried when it went in the oven. Poor Tommy.

Don't worry. He got full credit for the brownies and got to eat most of them himself. As he said, "Dommy chokla cannies ahsum."

Chicken Stock Day!

Today is my third favorite day of winter. Next to Christmas and Christmas Eve, Chicken Stock Day is my favorite cold weather day. I wake up and put a whole year's worth of chicken carcasses in a pot of water and spend the day stirring and cooking. This year I have a gallon bag of chicken legs we never got around to eating, Thanksgiving's turkey bones, the carcass of a rotisserie chicken we ate one day, and the skins of all the chicken breasts we have eaten all year. That, 3 carrots, 3 celery stalks, an onion, herbs and a head of garlic, and now my house smells like soup. The reason this is a cold weather activity is because A) it will heat your house (it's not the heat, it's the chicken-scented humidity!) and B) you can't put the finished stock right in the fridge or you'll heat up and spoil everything else in there so instead of buying or making tons of ice we just bring in tons of snow to pack around the stock pot in the sink. And no matter how long any recipe says this is going to take, plan on at least 12 hours. It takes time to simmer everything down enough (you'll know it's done when you can take out a leg bone and it snaps like chalk) and then cool it enough to put it in the fridge. And then the next day you skim the fat disc off the top and divide the stock between quart freezer bags and store them in the basement freezer. All year, when anyone in my house gets sick, I cut open a bag or two of stock and boil noodles in it. We all get healthy (no bubonic plague yet!) and eat yummy stock that is NOT msg and artificial flavoring. Win-win!

still hungry so still thinking about food

One hundred years ago we weren't a fat nation. We also weren't a nation of cake mixes, refrigerated pre-made cookie dough, and marshmallows in a bag. If you wanted a marshmallow, you had to make a marshmallow. I don't even know if you could do that 100 years ago. Was there gelatin, or is that only in the newer recipes. I don't know! But you couldn't just run down to the store and get potato chips and frozen hot wings and a self-rising pizza. I want to go back to that time, but in a health food Democrat way, not a Constitutionalist Republican way (a future rant, can you tell?). I want to live in a house without candy and cookies and junk food. I would love to live in a house where everything was homemade. I would wake up and make my own bread if Tom would buy me the ingredients. (Would he really buy a bag or more of flour every week?). I would love to do all I could to eliminate preservatives and artificial flavors if I could. It's not realistic to think I could do it all, but why not do as much as possible?
No, I will not eat potato chips! Not until I get a thin slicer, at least. And sour cream. mmmmmm, sour cream.