Pasta possibilities

OK, is it just me or does pasta get underplayed here as a food choice?  It’s always displayed with a red sauce with maybe some chunks of vegetables and ground beef.  There are so many other possibilities.  Especially pasta carbonara.  I think that might be my favorite way to eat pasta.  I also enjoy a good cheesy bake as a nice dish.  What is it with everyone and their focus on red sauces?

I make carbonara for people sometimes when they come over and they are shocked that the pasta can taste good without the red sauce.

Do any of you have an non traditional way to eat pasta that you enjoy?

Leftovers. Again?

If your a parent I’m sure you’ve heard that before.  But you have to use them right?  I’ve found a million ways to use up leftovers and not have them labeled as leftovers.  Somedays though, we do have leftovers.  (We call them Mustgo.  Everything in the fridge must go.  HA!)

Tonight, for example, I took some beef-vegetable soup, thickened it and dumped it into a pie shell.  I covered the top with mashed potatoes to make a sort of cottage pie.  Turns out the pie shell didn’t get cooked, but it was still good.  I didn’t hear a chorus of cries about having soup again because I modified it’s appearance slightly.  Not to mention that it was a quick and easy way to use up both the leftover soup and the leftover mashed potatoes, and it was much easier than making cottage pie from scratch, which I’ve done and it takes a while.

Other times I’ll make up extra to remake into things.  Potatoes are of course good for this.  I always make a ton of mashed potatoes when I make them because then I’ll fy them as potatoe pancakes for breakfast.  Same thing when I cook a pot roast in the crock pot.  I load it up with carrots and potatoes.  Then since they are already cooked they can make a quick hash for breakfast, or I can mash the potatoes and pan fry them as a side dish, and they take no time to cook.

Another thing I cook to use up leftovers is a frittata.  All the little bits of leftover veggies can be dumped into the skillet, covered with eggs and cheese and they take on a new life.  Nothing like it!  Of course you can keep a bag in the freezer to add these bits of vegetables to so you can make vegetable soup with them.

For me though, a stir fry has to be the best way to use up different bits and pieces.  The kids love it.  I love it.  It takes great and it’s flexible enough to take practically any leftover I might have in the fridge and repurpose it.

Anyway, what creative ways do you have to use up leftovers?

It’s Official, I’ve Lost my Mojo

In the kitchen that is.  My food mojo.  I’m having a hard time right now.  I don’t know what it is.  This transition from fresh foods to preserved foods is messing with me.  Not to mention that it seems like I go into the kitchen and look around and draw a blank.  I can’t figure out what to cook.

This didn’t happen to me a month ago.  Or even in the spring when there wasn’t much to choose from.

I think part of the problem is that my freezer is so full of vegetables that I haven’t been able to stock it with as many meat products as usual, and that has forced me drop into a hoarding mode where I don’t want to use something because I only have 4 of them, or however many.  This seems to lead to some kind of mental block on what to cook instead. Not to mention that I have a lot more choices when I have some beef in there, and right now it’s all pork and chicken.

Part of the problem is that we do try to go meatless 2 or 3 times a week, but my vegetarian cooking hasn’t kept pace with this desire.  Most of the time it’s pizza, pasta or just a whole heap of veggies.  I have a vegetarian cookbook, but it’s too foo-foo (ie fancy) for me.  I’m a simpleton and I like simple dishes with fresh ingrediants.

Maybe part of the problem too is that we’ve been busier than normal of late so it’s hard for me to sit down and spend some time cooking.  Especially on the weekend when I do most of my best cooking.  When you work full time using the weekends to prep for quick meals to be prepared after work is essential.

Winter is a hard time for me anyway when it comes to cooking.  Half the people here don’t like beans so that takes away most of the potential soup dishes.  Winter squash isn’t a huge hit either, so that takes away two pretty large parts of eating through the winter.

I don’t know.  It’s hard to figure out.  What about you?  Are any of you having some difficulty in the kitchen putting fun interesting dishes on the table with what you’ve put up?

Amazing what they can eat

Admit it, you thought I was going to talk about the chickens didn’t you? HA! Not this time. This time it’s kids. We eat veggie meals in our house maybe 2 or 3 times a week. Tonight we had nothing but veggies. I boiled some new potatoes (about the size of a large egg) and steamed some corn on the cob. I also served some canteloupe and tomatoes from the garden. The kids didn’t think this was enough for them so I also made them 1 slice of bread with PB&J on it.

And they ate it up. Amazing how many veggies kids can eat when they want to. My oldest had two bowlfuls of cantaloupe, 1 ear of sweet corn, his PB&J and 2 potatoes. The youngest had 2 ears of corn, a shitload of tomatoes, 2 potatoes, PB&J and 1 bowl of cantaloupe. I’d say they easily got 4 servings of veggies/fruit in just this meal.

In other news I had this conversation with my youngest when I was picking tomatoes, or trying to pick tomatoes.

Ethan: Ever wonder why there aren’t any tomatoes on the plant?

Dad: Well I figured there was a tomato monster eating them. Do you know what happened to them? (I know he’s been eating them)

Ethan: There is. I saw him. It was me. I’m a tomato monster. Grrr. (Then he grins) I sometimes eat the green ones but they don’t taste as good as the orange ones. Now I wait for them to get orange. (They’re Sungold tomatoes)

If you knew his grin you’d probably laugh about this. He looks like a Cheshire cat, only he’s got an ornery glint in his eyes.

Now I get it

For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why people would spend their hot Augusts in the kitchen making tomato sauce.  Why not just can the tomatoes and make sauce this winter?  Well, after processing 36 lbs this morning into sauce in less than 2 hours I get it now.

Last year I bought 40 lbs of tomatoes and canned them in quarters.  It took about 6 or 8 hours to clean them, remove the skins, get them in the jars, canned and then downstairs.  Perhaps more time.

This morning I put 36 lbs of quartered tomatoes through the Victorio  and juiced them in less than two hours.  In fact, it is just now 2.5 hours since I started and I’ve already cleaned it all up.  The sauce is in the oven cooking down right now so that doesn’t really count as time spent canning.  Once the sauce is ready I’ll have to can them, but that doesn’t take a whole lot of time either.

So by juicing them and making sauce instead of canning the whole tomato I saved myself at least 4 hours, even with the canning still to come.

Now I get it.

Damn Houdinis, that’s what they are.

The dang ol’ chickens got out again. Only this time it was dark. I was going out to put them up for the night and there they were, chirping away outside the fence. I have to wonder if they are like chicken versions of Houdini, or maybe David Copperfield or David Blaine. I was able to work the flashlight and herd them to the queen chicken wrangler who snagged them and deposited them back in their home. Their wings are clipped. Other than roofing the run I’m not sure what else I can do at this point to keep them in.

I made a bang up cabbage recipe tonight (here), even if it is August and this turned out kind of like a stoup. I used sweet italian sausage (what I had) along with a red onion and a small head of cabbage from my garden. Also put in some fingerling potatoes (garden), carrots (garden) and parsnips (garden). I was quite pleased to be using up miscellaneous items from the produce drawer. I did use a can of the cheese soup though, along with a store bought can of tomatoes (I’m out for now) and beef broth (haven’t made any since the cow came home) so I had some help from non local ingredients. The soup was very good. Boy #1 had two servings and boy #2 had 3 servings, and got in trouble for drinking it from his bowl. And I had enough left for a full meal when I pull it out of the freezer sometime. Even better, it sat in the crock pot all day so it was virtually no work.

Tuesday nights are normally a tough night for dinner because I go to the farm on Tuesday nights to get the produce from the farmer for the soup kitchens. She didn’t have anything tonight though so it was a night off.

If you have any doubt about the future direction of the Dow (in my opinion) this story with the below picture in it should help you make up your mind.

That’s a pretty damn scary picture. And the charts in the story for housing prices are even more scary, although they’ve already seen some of their declines.

That site, Automattic Earth, is a fantastic daily round up site for all the world’s financial news. I’ve seen so much incredible information on that site.

Changing Things

I’ve got a lot of odds and ends to discuss, so here’s a brain dump.

This story about removing an asphalt driveway and building a garden is pretty cool.

Freegans in the UK, with video.

Some good reading about the financial markets:

Article 1

Article 2

Article 3

While I’m at it, these bailouts in the financial sector are sickening. I’m obviously in the wrong business. I guess I need to start a bank, grow it haphazardly and run it poorly, but make sure it gets too big to fail, rake in millions for myself, bitch at the regulators about free markets and leaving me alone and then when I start to fail I’ll go to them with my hat in my hand asking for help. Yeah, I think that’s what I should do. In fact, maybe I should become a consultant and travel around to bank and recommend they do this. Of course, maybe someone is already doing it because they seem to be doing it already.

Time Magazine had an article recently about cooking a gourmet meal for under $10. I have to tell you, I don’t see what the challenge is. I could easily cook a meal for less than $10, do it all the time. Granted it might not be as fancy as these guys produce, but it will feed a whole family and give you leftovers for lunches. That’s something I say.

The cabbage turned out pretty good tonight. I followed this recipe here. I did mix up a little though. I shredded a carrot into it, along with part of an onion. Then I kicked it up a notch with some crushed red pepper. Turned out good. Not the best still but edible. The boys ate some of it, which is good at this stage. My wife finished off the bowl (it was a small dish) so she liked it too.

I finally did it on Monday. Ever since I got involved with Peak Oil I decided I wasn’t going to profit financially with the knowledge I had when it came to investing. I could easily have bought gold when it was cheap. Oil was around $30 a barrel when I started to become aware of potential shortages. The Dow was 14K plus when I thought the market’s would crater, but I made a promise to myself that I was going to profit at the expense of others. I’ve come to the realization over the past few years that while I can make plenty of money investing in the stock market (and it’s something I’m very good at), it’s not really money. It’s ill gotten funds taken from other people who probably need them. Interest isn’t really creating new money (it sort of does) but more it takes money from other people and gives it to me. If I’m saving $10K and earning interest it’s because someone is borrowing $10K and paying interest. I’m OK with this part of it, but investing in the stock market knowing that when I gain it’s because someone else somewhere is losing is not appealing to me anymore. This is fine in one regard (like simple interest on a bank account) but profiting on oil or food just didn’t seem right to me.

The actions of the past few weeks have changed my opinion. Mostly because of this, the way the country is run my dollar now will be worth a lot less in 5 years and 10 years and 15 years. Not because inflation is so bad (although it is on a few key items) or because of deflation (which would actually make money more valuable) but because the government is debasing the currency too much. For example, how the hell are we going to payoff $10Trillion in national debt? Probably by trying to “inflate” the debt away. (This isn’t the true meaning of inflation but it seems to be what people understand) Meaning, they’ll probably just print some money on the printing presses. This is what they are doing in Zimbabwee. I don’t see why they won’t do it here.

So I need to get as many as I can now and I need to be positioned right when they do start the printing. The way I can do this is to come off the sidelines and invest my money based on my beliefs and what I think is happening. Right now I think we’re heading down a deflation curve so I’m going to invest based on this idea. This week I invested in 3 mutual funds that will profit handsomely if the markets crater. I’m not sure if I entirely want them too or not, but if I emotionally detach from that aspect all the indicators are pointing to this being a smart financial choice FOR ME. I also put some cash into a fund in the expectation that Treasury rates will rise in the future (which seems a near certainty as the Fed is concerned about inflation even though we’re in a deflationary recession).

Does this mean this is something you should do? I don’t know. That’s up to you. But I should also tell you that I still own 3 stocks and 2 mutual funds that are long the market (meaning I would profit as prices go up) as well as a fair amount of CDs to insulate the portfolio and provide some cushion against price swings on securities. So I’m pretty well covered on all spectrums of the market.

Cabbage, Chickens and the Veggie Man

A chicken got loose again yesterday evening.  I don’t know what happened, except I came back there to get my potato fork and one of the chickens was on the other side of the fence.  It wasn’t happy to be there as it was scrambling around trying to get back, and it’s friend was frantic on the coop side of the fence.  I chased it for a while and then got Rachael to help me chase it down.  Eventually we had 2 adults and 3 kids chasing it and we cornered it against a fence and snagged it.  We trimmed their wings so they shouldn’t be popping over the fence anymore.  Chicken wrangling is an adventure!  Those things are darn fast, and quick.  Now I know why Mick told Rocky to chase the chicken around when he was training for Creed.

A lot of commenters were talking about cabbage and how to prepare it.  My big concern with cabbage is that I went to my go to method of preparation that makes about every type of vegetable go down (stir fry) and it was rejected. In fact, he rejected the fresh peas that were in there as well. (I think they needed to cook longer and be a little more soft)  So if that failed I’m concerned.  I’m going to give this recipe a try and we’ll see how it turns out.

The Veggie Man:  In the post yesterday I mentioned that I was working with some local CSAs to distribute excess vegetables to some food kitchens.  I did my first run tonight.  The farm is fairly close to town, maybe 10 miles or so.  I drove out there and she gave me 46 lbs of broccoli, 20 lbs of lettuce, a bag of beets, 21 lbs of shell peas, 13 lbs of snap peas and 32 lbs of snow peas.  I’m pretty excited about this endeavor.  Before she would compost this excess, not it’s going to people.  Once I get a schedule down and find another driver or two we’ll be able to get some serious local, organic food to the food banks.  She thought she would have enough for me to pick up twice a week until early October.  Rock!  And that is just this one CSA, I have one other to work with (who has expressed interest) and also one on the north side of town that I haven’t contacted yet.

I’m adding a tab to the storing/harvesting tab above to track this.

A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

Man, tons of updates.

OK, sorry to disappear for so long but it is sooo crazy around here right now. What have I been doing?

Friday, Sat and Sunday I helped demolish the interiors of 2 houses. The houses were ripped down to the studs. Immense piles of rubbish were piled on the curbs. Have you ever used a wheelbarrow inside a house before? It’s interesting. Makes it easy to haul out the material, especially when you have a 4 ft high ramp down the front stairs. As we said while were were doing the work; if it wasn’t such a tragedy we’d say we were having a good time. We had a lot of help which helps the work go fast. I hope all the volunteers don’t burn out too fast though. This recovery will take a long time and we’ll need everyone for a long time to make it happen.

I’ve got more thoughts on the flooding, but too much other stuff going on. This is a critical time in the rehab because the houses have to be torn up and opened up to dry out to keep away all the mold and other bad things away. My sister is trying to organize a mission trip up here from AR, which would be very good for all of us.

When I wasn’t doing that I was too damn tired to do much else. Between those three days I spent about 22 hours yanking apart houses and picking up trash. Enjoyed some nice lunches which were donated by the Red Cross and area churches. I need to get on my church about why churches that are flooded can provide food but my church can’t, or hasn’t so far. I have to tell you, we hit a Mexican place Friday night with some friends (1 couple that is flooded out that we helped on Sat and Sun and our friends that they are staying with (flood victims brother)) and I have never had a beer taste so good as that night. Man, that was a good beer.

While this is going on my wife decided to paint the family room. Yeah. Really. So the house is torn apart and the room is partially done. It does look better already with trim and some primer in place, but bad timing I’d say. This weekend we might be able to get it finished. When the demolition at the houses is finished then they are left alone to dry for a while.

When I was at home I tried to keep up with the garden. The rabbit and woodchucks are eating too much stuff, so they are going to have to be removed. My wife is getting a trap and we’ll trap them and move them down to the nearby park or creek area. Things are coming along very well out there, not withstanding the rodent damages. We are being well supplied of lettuce still. The warm weather plants are growing well even though it’s been cooler than normal. When I have a few hours I’m going to get back to the garden plot and get some things planted. Specifically the long season plants of melons and squashes need to get in the ground soon. I have to worry about how contaminated the soil might be though.

Then of course one child had a stomach bug yesterday, but seems to have kicked it in one day (I wonder if it was something he ate at Grandma’s as she was sick too and he got better as soon as he starved all day). And the other child came home with critters in his hair. So massive cleaning, delousing and haircutting was undertaken last night. Oh, and it’s VBS week so that’s going on from 6:30-8:30, so both kids are up later than usual as the younger one won’t go to sleep until the older one gets home (mostly) and the older one goes to bed around 9 now instead of 8. Even though kids having critters is “normal” it still makes me feel like a failure as a parent.

Whew, I’m tired just writing that. I was able to can 7 pints and 7 half pints of strawberry jam last night. And I just found a recipe for strawberry-rhubarb jam (from the Zahn Zone) which I’ll be trying this week with some of the remaining strawberries. I’ve eaten so many strawberries lately that I think my hair has been replaced by a green stem. At least I don’t have to worry about strawberries not being available this year.

Turnips for Dinner!

said the zookeeper.  Has anyone else read that book?  Anyway, we had turnips for dinner tonight.  I’m trying to get into eating turnips for a variety of reasons, but one of the big ones is that they provide two side dishes from the same plant, and they are fairly easy to grow and grow quick.

Tonight we had a recipe called Tugboat Turnips which has turnips and carrots in it, along with a half cup of butter and some brown sugar.  I didn’t care much for this recipe.  It tasted like acorn squash with butter and brown sugar, which I’m not all that fond of.

We also enjoyed the greens following this recipe for Leon O’Neal’s Turnip Greens, and my wife and I both enjoyed this recipe.  Of course, you could bacon on just about anything and I’d eat it.  But it was very good.  Similar to a recipe I tried down in AR with some collard greens that my grandfather brought to us at a recent holiday.  A great way to eat the greens from turnips, and in the future perhaps some collards or mustard greens.

These turnips came out of my garden.  They are really so easy to grow and the rabbits don’t seem to care for them, which is a definite plus in my book.  If you have any other turnip recipes please share them and I’ll try them.