Mac, Cheese and More

Yesterday for dinner I cooked some Mac and Cheese, which claims to be the best Mac and Cheese recipe in the world.  I think they might be right.  I cut the recipe in half and still fed us all with 3 leftover lunch meals (which are very generous), so keep that in mind.  The recipe is extremely cheesy, too cheesy in fact.  But it’s still really, really good.  It’s incredibly rich so it’s hard to eat much more than 1 serving of it.

You may remember all the rolls I made for Christmas.  Well, I overshot the required amount so now our freezer is stuffed with rolls that I’m trying to find creative ways to eat.  If you have any ideas feel free to let me know.  I’ve already done chicken and noodles (minus the chicken) and poured that over a couple.

I was rummaging around in my junk drawer yesterday looking for a twist tie, and I was having a hard time finding one.  It’s normally not that hard to find one, but then I realized they are in short supply because I don’t buy bread anymore.  Just an interesting side effect of cooking more things at home.  I wonder what I’ll do when I don’t have any at all?

I’m making some Tex-Mex for dinner today, so I started up some beans this morning already.  I stuck my finger in my eye after touching the peppers.  Someday I’ll learn.  Man that stings.

I came across this site discussing how cooking was done in Medieval Times.  I’ve found it quite interesting.  It’s called Gode Cookery.

Books

This past June I decided to start keeping track of the books I’ve been reading.  I thought it would be interesting to see how many I had read during a year each December.

Here is my list.  I thought you might find it interesting.  There are quite a few cookbooks on here, so it’s hard to really count that as reading, but it’s still technically a book.

I’m currently in the process of reading 4 books so I’ll be starting off the next year with a good list.

Books read since June 1^st, 2007

 

Amish and Mennonite Cookbook

What’s Cooking

The Raw Food Detox Diet

Moneyball

1776 by David McCullough

Deep Economy

Middle East book (can’t remember name)

Earth Oven

Bread Builders

The Feel Good Heat

The First Farmers

Eat more Dirt

How to be a Canadian

Walking with Cavemen

Bread Baker’s Apprentice

Fasting made Easy

Toxic Relief

Where we Lived

Dam Nation

Nuclear Nebraska

Vegetarian Classics cookbook

The Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes Cookbook

The Naked Chef

Vegetarian Meals from around the world (sucky book)

New Indian Cooking

The FairTax book

This Organic Life-Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader

Root Cellaring

The Fraternity

The Future of Nature

Almost time…

It’s almost time. Only one more day until the big day. Which is good, because I’ve spent to much time in the kitchen I think my kitchen utensils have become extensions of my hands.

I’m to bring the bread to Christmas dinner, but with my schedule I had to make it today. I hope they taste OK by Tuesday. I made rolls, which is my first attempt at that. I simply made my whole wheat bread recipe, then rolled little chunks into balls and put 4 in a muffin tin to make a clover leaf type of roll. I sampled one and they taste fine so that’s good.  Now I’ll have to get to work on the squash dish…

It’s my little lady’s birthday tomorrow, so we celebrated tonight since it will be hectic tomorrow night. Usually she has angel food cake, but tonight we had a pineapple upside down cake. My first attempt at that. (Certainly not local but at least homemade) It needed more pineapple, but otherwise it is pretty good.  You can make this with apples too, which I’ll try, but it didn’t look nearly as good as I knew the pineapple one would be.

We got a ton of snow last night, so there has been quite a bit of snow time the past few days. I wouldn’t be shocked if we had 8-10 inches. I know it was at least 6. I’ll get some pics up after I get a chance to resize them and get them looking OK.

As an interesting note, we moved our corn stove upstairs from the basement to heat our house more easily. This necessitated that we redo our clothesline situation, so now our family room looks like this.

The corn stove is straight in front of my wife (you can sorta see the very nicely laid tile floor under it, along with the dog bed which she was happy to have us move).  We have two retractable clotheslines that stretch across the room to hang clothes on. We’re still working out the kinks, but it appears that with two busy weekend days we can get all the clothes washed and hung up to dry. Put away is a different story, but we can at least dig them out of clothes baskets after they are clean.

Our house is kind of like a mullet in reverse.  It’s casual in the front but all business in the back!  Hope you all enjoy your holiday time doing whatever you do with whoever you do it with!

2 things not connected at all

Mother Earth news has published an article detailing how free range eggs are nutritionally superior to eggs from caged chickens. I figured that already, but it was nice to see it actually proven and tested. Follow the link for the article. I wish it would be taken more seriously, but I’m sure the egg “industry” will down play it.

Also, I wanted to post this information about how to make a fridge out of a chest freezer. Sounds like a great way to lower your electric bill quite dramatically. Still working on Mrs. Fat Guy on this one …

Using up those orange tators

I’m always looking for new ways to use sweet potatoes and squash.  Last night I made this recipe and I wanted to mention it because it was really, really good. 

The patties turned out like falafal, but I liked them more than falafal.  The cumin in the recipe was a little overpowering, but very good anyway.  I doubled the peas to replace zucchinni which is out of season, and I didn’t notice a difference at all.

It’s quite filling.  You can fit about 1.5 – 2 patties in a pita pocket so we had a half a pita stuffed with patties, green beans and apples.  We were all full and I have 7 or 8 left for lunches this week.

It’s a good recipe.  You should give it a try.  I could imagine changing around the ingrediants and making one from mashed beans rolled in a tortilla for a mexican theme.

Picture courtesy of the recipe site.  You didn’t think I could take picture that well did you?

Big fat back stabbers

Take a second and read this article.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Ok, now that you’ve done that what you think?  The house cares enough about fresh local food that they are redoing their menu, but they don’t give a rat’s ass about the food they are shoveling down the throats of our school children?  If I had to think in my head who should get the most healthy food in the America, I can promise you it wouldn’t be the bureaucrats sitting on the Hill in DC.  It would be our children who are all growing and developing.  They need the healthy food so they can grow up and be something.  At least they have a future.  With any luck we can convince them all to do something with their life and not become politicians.

Why should politicians get this kind of food?  So far they’ve shown what they’ve chosen to grow up and be.  They created a special retirement and health insurance package for themselves.  Now a special cafeteria?  What’s next?  They are supposed to watch out for us and our interests.  Yet again, they’ve shown their true colors. 

HT: Ethicurean

New caucus thoughts

I just found out last night that the caucus for each party is held in different places.

Which means if I hit the GOP one for Paul then if he doesn’t get enough representatives I have to go home, because I’m sure as hell not voting for any of the other losers.

But if I go to the Dem one then I can at least go to a back up choice if my primary choice doesn’t get enough reps.

It sounds like I’m going to have to reassess my options, yet again.

Let your peeps know…

We need to fight back against Big Meat.

I’ve recently learned (thanks to a little birdie from Capitol Hill) that Tyson, Smithfield, and pals are on the rampage this morning, circulating memos and e-mails against two important livestock amendments to be offered today on the Farm Bill. These amendments — the Grassley competition amendment and the Tester amendment — would help make it easier for independent livestock producers to get their animals to market and would prohibit some of the discriminatory practices that the big meat packers have used to shut independent producers out. Big Meat is, unsurprisingly, very unexcited about the prospect. Tyson and Co. are rooting instead for an amendment to be offered by Senator Lincoln that would significantly weaken the good language on livestock that was added by Senator Harkin when the agriculture committee debated the bill this summer.

We can’t let Big Meat win the day. These amendments will be offered today, so calls are needed immediately. Please call your Senators — (202) 224-3121 and ask for them, or look their numbers up here — and ask them to vote FOR the Grassley competition amendment, FOR the Tester amendment, and AGAINST the Lincoln substitute amendment. 5 minutes, right now. Let’s do it.

More information is available from the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition here (.doc).

From the Ethicurian.  It sounds like big Ag already won one battle with the subsidy caps not passing, don’t let them win again.

Working for a big company…

has a downside sometimes too.  Sure there are nice benefits, but when the power goes off they have generators to allow us to keep being productive.

Yeah!

Hope everyone is enjoying the ice storm!  Days like this make me very glad not to have animals to take care of.  It also helps me appreciate even more my stockpile of food.  When the weather gets bad I rarely need to venture anywhere to “stock up” on food.  Even if I couldn’t leave the house for a week we’d be more than OK.

There’s a good chance my kids would not be in one piece if I was around them for a week straight, but it would be possible, in theory, to make it that long.  🙂

The muffin man

I was home today with a sick child, although based on his behavior he doesn’t appear very sick.  I think perhaps he had too much cookie dough yesterday when we were making sugar cookies.  Anyhoo, being home gave me the chance to make some muffins this morning. Being home also gave me easy access to the caramels…but that’s a different story.

A week or so ago I was going to make squash ravioli.  I cooked up 4 delicata squash and put the mushy remains in the fridge.  Unfortunately I’ve never gotten the ravioli done though.  So today I decided to make squash muffins with them.

We are in love with pumpkin bread that comes from the recipe in my Betty Crocker book.  So I just substituted the squash for the pumpkin and put it in the muffin tins.  It came out really well. In fact, I’d dare say I like it better as a muffin than as a loaf.   The coolest thing to me is that I can use up all the delicata squash I grew this summer.  We don’t care that much for this squash by itself, but putting it in muffins seems like a great way to use it up!