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Archive for February, 2012

Mindful eating of perfect cornbread

Every once in a while I stumble upon a recipe so perfect that I know I’ll never try another version of that particular food.

The Silver Palate brownies with cinnamon and instant coffee (I added those two ingredients) is one. Rhonda Mellott’s baked corn recipe is another, although I’d call it cornbread because it’s more structured than the dish I associate with corn pudding. I started to say “drier”, but dry is the last word I thought when eating this lusciously moist bread with a real corn taste.

World’s best cornbread ever

1 15.25-ounce can whole kernel corn

1 14.75-ounce can cream-style corn

1/2 cup sour cream

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, melted

2 eggs

1 12-ounce package corn muffin mix

 Heat oven to 350°.Combine the whole-kernel corn, cream-style corn, sour

This rich "pudding" is somewhere between cornbread and spoonbread.

cream, melted butter or margarine, beaten eggs and corn muffin mix. Mix until ingredients are just moistened, let stand for 5 minutes and then pour into oil-sprayed 9-x13- inch baking pan. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes or until firm and beginning to brown. (As you can see, I got carried away last night and revved the oven up to “scorch”.) Serves 10 to 12.

 
Having set down those precise ingredients, I should probably tell you I used half light butter to cut the fat content, took the kernels off 9 ears of corn and used them with about 1/4 cup whipping cream in place of the canned corns.
 
It is so good. I tried to eat it “mindfully,” but I’m afraid I’m just not “mindful eating” material. I’ve promised myself I’ll try and eat more slowly, putting down my utensils now and again and even appreciating what I’m chewing. But the idea of paying to go to a Buddhist monastery to learn how to spend 10 to 20 minutes eating 3 raisins just strikes me as hilarious. At the same time, of course, I realize that if I could do that, I would be reedy.
 

 

Category:

good food, Quick bread, Simple foods, Weight loss

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Making butter, cheese, yogurt and lots of other stuff

Pickled ginger on upper right, next to ginger carrots and sauerkraut, above the ricotta-spinach spread.

Except for the pickled ginger, Sunday was an outstanding food day. My Valentine made real oatmeal for breakfast, no sugar, just the warm, oat-y taste of the grain and an occasional burst of sweetness from a soft, puffy raisin. The Women of the Church served lunch — a choice of chicken taco or potato soups, muffins, tossed salad and many Valentine desserts. Pink camelias and hellebores on the tables.

Madge's kitchen ready for 17 students

Then on to Madge Eggena’s beautiful Mills Garden Herb Farm where she and her sister Jane Abe were teaching a 3-hour class in fermentation. Fermentation as in yogurt, cultured butter, feta, ricotta and chevre and those — ahem — pickled vegetables which included cabbage, daikon radishes, carrots and ginger. And a zippy mustard made with whey, lemon, garlic, honey and mustard seeds. 

We had the butter and cheeses slathered on Madge’s wonderful whole-grain baguettes. We drank lemon grass-lemon balm-green tea, beet kvass (next time I want mine with gin and

Madge (left) and Jane say their classes aren't a success unless every dish in the house is messy.

sparkling water as suggested by Clark, the young chef in our class), dipped crudites in herbed chevre, tried to restrain ourselves when eating mouthfuls of home-made feta with black olives, gave up any pretense of restraint when the home-made tortelllini stuffed with home-made herbed ricotta, vegetable cheesecake and chicken thighs marinated in yogurt and spices hit the groaning boards. Dessert was Greek yogurt, red raspberries and blueberries, nothing more, nothing less.

Passing around pot of cheese in the making

It is no wonder that I weighed 3 pounds more this morning than yesterday.

Yogurt is something I think I was supposed to learn how to make in the ’60s, but I was busy changing diapers. It’s never too late to learn, though, and as soon as I find milk and cream that are not ultrapasteurized (pasteurized is what I’m looking for), I’m ready to start.

This cultured butter couldn’t be easier, silkier or tastier. I do not think I can be alone in the house with it.

Cultured butter/creme fraiche

1 pint heavy cream, not ultra pasteurized

3 tablespoons yogurt

Fresh herbs, salt to taste, optional

Mix cream and yogurt well in glass bowl, cover with plate and leave out overnight. The next day, whip the cream past the stage where it looks like whipped cream clotting into butter. You want to whip until it separates into butter and buttermilk (and you can do this with an immersion blender or hand-held mixer). Once it separates, use a spatula to force out more liquid from the solids. Add herbs and salt, if you’re using, to butter  before refrigerating. If you don’t whip the cultured mix to separate out the butter, use it in recipes as creme fraiche or European-type sour cream.

If you look at the buttermilk at left, you can see the butter is a beautiful pale yellow.

As for the buttermilk, it’s sweeter than what I’ve bought in the grocery. If you’re a true Southerner, you’ll squish a piece of cornbread in your glass and “drink” it with a spoon.

 

 

Category:

Cheesemaking, Fermentation, Homemade yogurt, Making butter

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Roasting/sauteeing produce just past its prime

 

The pitbull's idea of sharing a chair

Nothing like a nice relaxing 20 minutes of yoga on the floor with a 70-pound pitbull who thinks I’m down there to play and a brain-damaged, chatty cat who thinks I’m down there to play pillow.

The yoga and 15 minutes of weight work, plus a 30-minute bike ride in the freezing rain let me tuck into salmon-soy-ginger patties and whole wheat Israeli couscous with currants and toasted pine nuts for supper. Exercise is the surest way I know to avoid snacking in the late afternoon, and the earlier in the day I do it, the more likely I am not to squander that work on some refined carbs.

While I was “relaxing” in savasana (corpse pose), I was remembering being a gleaning coordinator for the Society of St. Andrew, a hunger ministry, and how the gleaners and I used to talk about we knew “how to use a paring knife.” Bruises and blemishes, in other words, didn’t deter us from using the produce we picked from farmers’ fields and orchards.

But without playing fast and loose with food safety, there’s another trick to using produce that’s just past its glory, and that is roasting or sauteeing. Baby carrots, for instance, which so often taste like chair legs

Carrots are charred in spots, tender and sweet.

or fire wood. Heat the oven to 425°, toss in a bit of olive oil, a little salt and pepper, on a rimmed baking sheet, roast, stirring occasionally, until tender, about 15 to 20 minutes, and then add a couple tablespoons balsamic vinegar, along with 1 packed tablespoon brown sugar. Toss again, and you’ll forget you thought those carrots didn’t taste like a thing.

Or apples.  I had 4 boring Granny Smiths that were beginning to soften and shrivel. I put 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter in a saute pan and peeled and sliced the apples. When the pan was warm and the butter melted, I added the apple slices, along with 1 packed tablespoon brown sugar and a generous half teaspoon of apple pie spice. Had the apples been even more boring than they were, I’d have added the juice of half a lemon. Stir fry over medium-high until the apples soften. Technically, these are fried apples, but I choose to ignore that. They are wonderful. Apple pie without the crust and ice cream.

Now all I have to do is clean off the cat hair and dog spit so I can go to choir without smelling like a pet shop.

Cat in search of padding

Category:

Exercise, Fruit, good food, healthy cooking, vegetables, Weight loss

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Spring still sprung **

Beloved youngest daughter with Tristan, a lovely Thoroughbred eventer suffering from fear of frogs

“At most, there are two kinds of dysfunctional families: those who don’t talk enough and those who talk too much.” Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation, 1994

I grew up in the first kind and married into one of each. Visits to my first in-laws featured late-night, alcohol-fueled rants of the George and Martha “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” variety.

So then I went back to what I knew: silences and conversations about things that matter not at all. Which is how we all find ourselves now tangled in the dilemma of my increasingly fragile in-laws’ daily care. No one discussed it when it might have been productive to talk.

One thing I’m sure of and that is that I must care for myself, no matter what!  Failure to do so means almost immediate weight gain and feeling like do-do as I slowly slide down the slippery slope of sloth (I just made that up). I cook willingly for my in-laws, but it has to be food I can eat without ballooning up like a sea elephant. I will keep up with my exercise. I started tai chi this week and have promised myself I’ll start Weight Watchers next Tuesday. I need help with the last 16 pounds and with thinking of what I’m doing as a healthy lifestyle, not deprivation or punishment.

This afternoon’s three mile walk: Honeybees abuzz in the Carolina jasmine and little peepers peeping up a storm in the ditch next to an empty chicken house at the 1-mile point. 

 I never hear these happy frogs without remembering the trail ride we took here on the farm a few springs ago, down the hill behind our house to a creek and ditches teeming with the hormone-riddled jokers. Who knew a towering Thoroughbred, when hearing surround-sound peeping, would turn himself inside out? He did, but our daughter managed him very competently. (Had I been the rider, I’d have turned inside out with him. She thought it was fun when he lost track of one of his feet and tripped over it.)

I need this 6 days a week to nudge me away from depression (anger turned inward?), anxiety, longing and food which is such a quick, easy fix.

“I’m always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere,” says Wurtzel in Prozac Nation. Me, too. If I just have this fistful of graham crackers now, instead of waiting and spending my 1,000 calories at dinner out tonight, I’ll feel better, lighter, happier, less encumbered, the way I felt when I was a kid.

Aha! That’s where the imaginary part comes in. If anything, I was more miserable when young and the reality of eating these graham crackers is that I’ll feel fat and frustrated, not good about myself, the way our daughter did when she got that lovely, frisky gelding back in line.

*Not necessarily metaphorical.

Category:

Exercise, Food addiction, Weight loss, Why overweight?

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Chicken corn soup and cranberry-orange bread — who I am

Plump pieces of chicken and hard-boiled egg give this soup a satisfying "mouth feel" beyond the combination of ingredients.

My father’s mother was so Pennsylvania Dutch she spoke it. My mother’s mother, so Northeastern WASP she spoke that!

 My father loved Pennsylvania Dutch food so my passive-aggressive mother never fixed it. (Her friend Doris G. made this soup.) She loved struggling with cranberries to see if she couldn’t get her smooth sauce to gel just like her Great-aunt Helen’s. When she couldn’t (and I can’t figure out what was so tough about it), she turned it into cranberry juice for a palate cleanser, I guess, at the wooden picnic table and benches where we ate most of our meals when I was young and miserable.

So my lunch today is a salute to that backstory. Even if we never talked at the table, except for my father criticizing us or the food or the time (2 minutes past 5 p.m. for supper was a no-no), I enjoyed the food and I’ve found no-fail recipes for both chicken corn soup (very Pa. Deutsch or Dutch) and a lovely, fragrant cranberry bread (very WASPish) with little sugar and no vanilla but lots of orange.

The Central Market Cookbook (1989) from the same in Lancaster, Pa., was a gift from Ruthie Z., one of my high school heartfriends, and also the source of the soup recipe.

Homemade chicken corn soup

4- to 5-pound chicken, cut up

6 cups chicken broth

6 cups water

1 14-1/2-ounce can yellow corn kernels, rinsed and drained

1 14-1/2-ounce can white corn kernels, same

4 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and diced

A handful of minced fresh parsley

6  ounces noodles

Salt and pepper to taste

Saffron to taste (up to 1/4 teaspoon)

1 cup boiling water

Cook chicken in water to cover (or use leftover cut-up chicken). Remove from broth and cool. Skim fat from broth. Chop chicken.

Place chicken, broth and water in 6-quart kettle. In separate saucer pour boiling water over saffron to intensify golden color and flavor.

Add corn, eggs and parsley to chicken in kettle. Break noodles and add, along with salt, pepper and saffron water. Stir and simmer until hot. Serves 12 to 16.

 

 

 

Category:

Family, Family recipes, good food, healthy cooking, Simple foods, Soup

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