Archive for the ‘Cooking’ Category

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Chicken Stew

20 March 2010

I don’t know as I’ve heard of “Chicken Stew” very often, but what I made for dinner tonight is well-descibed by that name. It came out really good!

I cooked it all on the woodstove in my new 7 quart Dutch Oven.

Ingredients:
8 Carrots, peeled and chopped not too thin
5 Large Potatoes, peeled and cut into 3/4″ cubes (I’m starting to peel potatoes more than I used to because of the solanin thing — the potatoes we get at the store are almost always green under the skin)
2 Large onions, cut up (from garden)
1/2 C Rice
2 Large Chicken breasts
1/4 C vegetable oil
1 14-oz can Chicken broth (no msg, didn’t seem to have a lot of salt in it)
A few pieces of dried red pepper from last year’s garden (might be more down in the basement)
1 C of dried tomatoes (from garden?)
1 1/2 C water
1 Bay leaf
Salt, Pepper, Thyme.

Put first carrots, then potatoes, then onions, peppers and tomatoes, then chicken, then everything else except spices in the pot, covered it and put it on a hot part of the woodstove for 2-3 hours, then moved it off to a cooler spot for another hour or so. Added salt, pepper, thyme just before serving.

Should have used more chicken — could have fit a whole chicken in that pan, and although it was enough for dinner, could have used more for the leftovers.

I didn’t add the rice until it had already been on the stove for a while. Should have added it early, and low down so it would be in the water more — it was cooked, but still had a bit of a crunch to it.

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Sun Oven and Poverty

12 December 2009

Received my new Sun Oven a couple of days ago. It’s pretty much what I expected. The boys and I got it set up this morning and I set it outside in the snow to heat up (the directions say you’re supposed to heat it up, let it cool, then clean the inside).

It seems to work well — it hit 320°F before it clouded over. I thought that was pretty good while sitting in the snow less than 10 days before the solstice and with an air temp of around 20°F.

So another way of looking at prepping is as preparing to be poor, preparing to live with very little money. I think if you can plan to be poor while you still have money, you have a tremendous advantage over someone who becomes poor suddenly, without warning or preparation. You can stockpile things you’ll need and work on the systems you’ll need to sustain life without external inputs of any kind. Very very few of us can become totally self-sufficient, but most of us can take large strides in that direction and hope that we’ll be able to make it as part of a community.

The Sun Oven is one part of all that: the ability to cook food year-round with only the sun.

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Pumpkin Seeds and Acorns

11 October 2009

Today G and D and I separated pumpkin seeds from the guts of the two pumpkins (one home-grown, one grocery-store pumpkin) we carved for jack o lanterns. They’d been in the refrigerator since last weekend. The boys were into it and quite helpful.

I had saved about 25 seeds from D’s pumpkin that he grew from seed, and G wanted to do the same for the bought pumpkin, so I saved an additional 20 or so seeds from that. (Wash them, put them on top of the refrigerator for a week to dry them, then bring them down into the cool and dark of the basement.) So we’ll have lots of pumpkins in the garden next year, which is fine. I don’t have that much experience with eating them, but I know I like them.

I washed the rest of the seeds, put them on a large flat pan with some salt and coconut oil, and put them in the oven for 40 minutes at 300F. Stirred them every ten minutes. They came out good, above average for pumpkin seeds.

At the same time, also baked the acorn meats we collected last weekend for 30 minutes at 300F. Those had been in water in a quart jar in the refrigerator for the last week. I changed the water every day in an effort to remove some of the tannins. I tasted them this morning, and they were still too bitter to eat. So I thought I would bake them and see if that improved them — it was either that or the compost pile.

And baking did improve them — they were within shouting distance of edibility. I figured they would be okay in something, maybe especially something sweet, so G and I made some molasses-banana bread with some on-the-edge bananas. It’s in the oven now — I’ll update later with results.

The banana bread came out great. G gave it two thumbs-up, which is high praise. The only trace of the acorns is a distant bitter aftertaste that doesn’t detract from the bread at all. So although it involved a lot of steps, I’m happy that we identified another wild food source and learned how to prepare it.

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Dandelion Greens

2 May 2009

Picked some dandelions from the back yard today. It’s a gorgeous, sunny, breezy day, and it was nice laying out in the lawn picking them. And now that I think of it, that’s the first harvest of the season!

One of the good things I remember from my childhood was visiting my grand-aunt and uncle’s farm out in Lebanon, Connecticut. My aunt was a fantastic cook, and we had some memorable meals there. She was a big fan of dandelion greens, probably because they didn’t cost anything as much as for any other reason (frugality being a virtue she valued above most others, like many from her generation). She would often serve them as one of the vegetables with a meat such as spare ribs, and even though they were quite bitter, since she harvested them all summer, they somehow went with the meat really well.

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Anyway, I washed all the ones I harvested this morning, then had some of them as a salad with my second breakfast (along with 4 of C’s eggs, scrambled) and put the rest in the refrigerator to cook for dinner tonight. They have a very mild flavor, with just a hint of bitterness.

CR’s chickens are getting more and more of their food from pasture this time of year. With those eggs and the greens picked less than 30 minutes before they wound up in my stomach, that should be about the healthiest meal ever.

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I cooked some dandelion greens for dinner, just boiled them for a very few minutes with some butter. They were okay, but the bitterness seemed more pronounced.

I bought a copy of Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants by Bradford Angier yesterday at Borders. I’ve wanted a wild edibles book for a while, and this looks like a good one. It’s certainly fun to browse, and I strongly prefer illustrations over photographs.

And speaking of shopping, I tried to browse the sale DVDs at Borders yesterday, and I could barely do it. I’m so used to shopping online that trying to look through stacks and stacks of physical items was immensely annoying. To find the book I wanted, I immediately asked for assistance instead of spending 15 minutes looking as I would have 5 years ago.

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Last of the Butternut

4 April 2009

Sounds like a movie title, eh? “The thrilling tale of how 4 tenacious butternut squash, against all odds, survived for 6 months in a cold, dark basement.”

Brought the last 4 little butternuts up from the basement today and put them in the oven. They were wrinkled and had some bad spots, but definitely lots of good squash left in them. It still amazes me that we harvested those over 6 months ago and we’re still cooking and eating them.

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The other thing you may notice is that some of those butternut from last summer had an uncharacteristic shape, with a very long, slender neck. I’m guessing that they’re some kind of hybrid volunteer from the year before. They don’t have as much flesh as a more typical butternut, but they taste just as good.

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