Clean-Out-The-Fridge Cuisine

As I've discussed before, I hate wasting food.  I hate wasting it at any time of year, regardless of the circumstances, and pack-out time is no exception.  We're getting down to the dregs now, so for tonight's dinner, I came up with this (all I had to buy to complete this meal was the cheese):

I don't know why this looks kind of gross.  I blame my poor camera skills.  It's hard to photograph pizza.

Flatbread Roasted Pumpkin and Cauliflower Pizza with Sorrel-Mint Pesto and Caramelized Onions
(hint: if you use words like "roasted" and "caramelized" in your recipe titles, they always sound better).
Serves two adults and two toddlers

Ingredients:
Three 12-inch flour tortillas (I had to pick through the bag to find a few that weren't stale)
8 oz cubed pumpkin (mine was frozen)
8 oz cauliflower florets (again, frozen)
1 onion, sliced
8 oz shredded mozzarella cheese

For pesto:
1 cup sorrel leaves
2 cup mint leaves
1/4 cup olive oil (or in my case, grapeseed, because that was what we had left)
2 cloves garlic
leftover salt from a package of Super Pretzels (or, you know, regular salt)
pepper

Preheat oven to 450F.  Put your veggies on a baking sheet with some salt and roast for 30 minutes.  Throw the onions into a pan with some olive oil and allow to cook on medium-low for 30 minutes.  Put first four pesto ingredients in a blender/food processor/Magic Bullet and process.  Add salt and pepper to taste.  When everything is done, spread pesto on tortillas.  Top with onions, pumpkin and cauliflower, then cheese.  Put back into the 450-degree oven for about 4 minutes, or until cheese is melted to your liking.  Enjoy.

(This actually was pretty tasty.  I might make it again).

Blini

Last week was Maslenitsa (Butter Week) here in Russia, and in world Orthodoxy in general.  It's the week before the Church is plunged into a 7-week-long of strict fasting, and the last time before Easter that we can indulge in any dairy products.  The week before Maslenitsa marks the last meat we eat until Easter.

The traditional food of Maslenitsa here in Russia is blini - thin pancakes packed full of milk, eggs and butter.  Blini are typically eaten with fillings - chopped egg, sliced scallions, smoked fish and caviar are popular.  In Russia people eat them year round with vegetable and meat fillings, as well, but having grown up eating them mostly during Maslenitsa, I prefer them with seafood. 

This year we had Jeremy's boss and his family over for blini.  After I had extended the invitation, I panicked.  Jeremy's boss' wife is a born Ukrainian and it's a pretty safe bet that her blini blow mine out of the water.  Although I love blini, I only make them once a year, and as a result, mine never turn out quite right.  As you can see from the photos, they get a little crunchy around the edges.  I get impatient frying them as slowly as you have to, to get a nice light colored blin. 

But they turned out pretty well, and we had a good laugh over the fact that all four of the children at the table (ranging in age from 16 months to 11 years) loved eating blini with red caviar.  I don't know many American children who salivate at the sight of a bowl of fish roe.

Doing it myself

I think about blogging most days - I was doing so well - but lately I have no time for anything.  Part of this is because my oldest seems to be on her way to dropping her only nap.  Lately we get 20-40 minutes out of her per day.  I'm trying to transition her to quiet reading time in her room, but so far, she will only do it if I am sitting in plain sight in the hallway, reading myself.

The other reason I have no time is that I am cooking a lot more than I used to.  We've been on the Feingold diet for about three weeks now, and I can cautiously say that it seems to be helping N's eczema.  It seems, however, to have doubled the time I spend in the kitchen.  We can't eat anything with artificial colors or flavors, or most preservatives.

Example: We don't eat storebought bread anymore.  I don't have a bread machine.  And the recipes I use - a soaked grain bread recipe that is linked in pdf form on the bottom left of this page - and this sourdough bread recipe are pretty time consuming.  You do the math.

But there's more.  Jeremy and I spent several hours this weekend making graham crackers from scratch since Natasha's beloved Honeymaids have artificial vanilla flavor in them (seriously, just charge us the extra buck and use the real stuff!).  And when I made "Oreo" truffles for Christmas (using the Trader Joe's knock off which doesn't have as much garbage in it), I had to find an alternative to chock-full-of-crap candy melts for the coating.  Having used regular chocolate chips before, I knew that untempered chocolate doesn't set up as nicely as the melts do.  And I wanted the coating to be crisp.  And I am a glutton for punishment.  So I decided to temper the chocolate first.  It wasn't hard, but added 40 minutes or so to the process.

Below, some of my homemade sauerkraut (really tasty) and a slice of my homemade sandwich bread.  Below that, a really bad picture of a few of the truffles scattered around Jeremy's beloved fudge mint cookies.

When I get some time maybe I will figure out how to take good photos at night without natural light. 

Sauerkraut and sour dough

I have begun writing this post several times over the last few days, but I keep starting over because it just gets too long and unwieldy.  I've been thinking a lot lately about making some changes to our family's diet.  I'm not talking about low-carbing to lose weight or anything like that (though I would like to know how it is that I've been following the Couch-to-5K program for the last six weeks and just ran nearly 2 miles straight yesterday and have yet to drop an ounce).  No, what I'm looking for is a healthier way to eat, that will improve all of our immune systems and help Natasha overcome her eczema.  We've been fighting with it for two years now, and I know there has to be a better way.

I've done a lot of reading, and to be honest, it's completely overwhelming.  We have decided to try the Feingold diet, which, while generally recommended for ADHD, is also supposed to be effective against eczema.  It's a two-pronged approach.  The first part involves cutting out all artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners, and most preservatives. 

I thought that part would be easy - I cook mostly from scratch - or so I used to tell myself - and try to avoid junk.  But a quick sweep through our cabinets found quite a bit more yellow No. 5 and artificial flavor than I would have predicted was in there.  Goodbye, Honeymaid graham crackers.  Goodbye, cookie sprinkles.  Goodbye, candy melts.

Part 2 involves eliminating salicylates, which is are naturally occurring food chemicals, from the diet.  Apparently, many of N's favorite foods - apples, grapes, berries, raisins, cucumbers, and more - are chock-full of salicylates.  We have already noticed that she has allergies/intolerances to foods like tomatoes and oranges, and now I know that they are also high-salicylate.  I am a little skeptical of a diet plan that just eliminates certain fruits and vegetables, but I am just sick of seeing my toddler scratch herself to bloody pieces.  It's worth a try, anyway.

As I am shifting my family over to this diet, I have realized that I do rely on freezer items for meals once or twice per week.  Many of these items are not compatible with our new diet.  Like vareniki - which are little Ukrainian raviolis stuffed with potato or cabbage.  So this weekend, I spent hours making over 100 vareniki.  This batch is potato-pumpkin-thyme.

And in my reading, I have come across ideas from other diets that make sense to me.  Mostly that everything we are used to buying prepackaged from the grocery store - like bread and cheese and yogurt and sauerkraut - is much better for you if you make it yourself.  So yesterday I started a jar of sauerkraut.  It needs to ferment in there for awhile, so I am not sure when we will actually eat it.  But here it is, in its infancy:

I've also got a bag of sourdough starter that someone gave me last week.  Sourdough - real sourdough - is supposedly a lot better for you than quick-rise yeast bread, because the bacteria in the starter breaks down the hard-to-digest stuff before you even put it in your mouth.  I think I'm getting that explanation right, but I've a lot of reading yet to do on the subject.  Anyway, this starter was given to me along with a recipe for Amish Friendship Bread.  The recipe calls for a box of instant pudding, which would have turned me off even before I started doing all this reading.  So I'm going to try to use the starter to make a real bread that doesn't have artificial flavors and carnuba wax, whatever that is, in it.

Stay tuned.

Trash to treasure

I was raised in a frugal household.  With five kids and one salary, you learn the value of a dollar pretty quick.  We packed our lunches, picked out our clothes from the clearance racks at TJ Maxx, went to the mall to walk around rather than to shop, and were taught to finish the food on our plates.  Though, so far, money isn't as tight around these parts as it was when I was in school, I plan to raise my children the same way.

One thing Jeremy learned pretty quickly when we got married is that I only throw away food when it has gone bad.  In my house, leftovers are meant to be eaten, not squirreled away in the back of the fridge, only to be tossed after sprouting a thick coat of fur.  If I put food on my plate, I'm going to finish it, and by golly, he had better do the same.  In the last 3.5 years, he's gotten pretty good at estimating how much he will eat, and only putting that much on his plate.  Adaptable fellow, he is.

It was the duck combined with memories of my beloved Little House on the Prairie books that got me thinking about how to make better use of the stuff I buy at the store.  After using every ounce of that duck to make a meal, rendered duck fat, cracklings and stock, I started thinking about all the vegetable scraps that get tossed every day in my household.  Onion skins.  Cucumber peels.  The little bits of bell peppers that you don't salvage when you cut off the stems.  Etc.  And I started throwing all those little bits into a bag in the freezer. 

Last weekend that bag became full.  So I dumped its contents into a stock pot along with a few quarts of water and a couple of bay leaves.

I simmered for about an hour (I read that cooking vegetables stock longer than that actually hurts the flavor of the stock), then strained and jarred.  I was surprised at how tasty it was.

Voila!  Free, a good use of stuff I would have thrown away, and better for you than MSG-laden bouillion cubes. 

Now I have a gallon of vegetable stock in my freezer.  I think next time I will leave the stock simmering in the pot after I remove the vegetable scraps in order to reduce it down.  Even so, I can fill a freezer bag full of vegetable scraps every couple weeks.  I don't need quite that much stock.

Quack

I've recently become intrigued with duck, perhaps because it's readily available at the local grocery stores.  I don't remember seeing duck at DC-area Giants and Safeways. 

I made duck for the first time this past Christmas.  It was pretty tasty.  Today I made it again.  I bought two half-ducks and used a combination of recipes I found online (seriously, I don't know why I even own so many cookbooks).  I was interested in wasting as little of the duck as possible, so I decided to render my own duck fat.  (I learned how to do this on the Internet too).

So I started with the left over fat from the duck.  This is the skin and fat remaining after our dinner:

I also had this:

The recipe I used called for steaming the duck in a steamer basket set into a pot of several inches of water.  I put the steaming water into the fridge overnight, and the drippings solidified and became the solid white mass, about 1/4 of an inch thick, that you see above.

I put the skin and the white solid fat into a saute pan and filled it with about 3/4 an inch of water.  I set the stove to the lowest heat setting as I had read online.  That turned out not to be nearly hot enough, so I raised it to 3.

After 30 minutes, I had this:

I decided at that point that maybe I should have cut the fat up smaller, so I fished it out and did just that.  After a total of 55 minutes of cooking time, I had this:

And after 75 minutes, I had this:

I fished out the cracklings with a slotted spoon (had to loosen them from the bottom of the pan first) and then strained the remaining fat.  I ended up with this (sorry for the poorly focused photo - I get no natural light in my kitchen and also I don't really know what I'm doing):

and this:

The cracklings are delicious, but really, really rich.  I ate four of them (all about dime-to-nickel sized) and couldn't eat any more.  That's saying a LOT, because this girl can put away animal fat.

I used a bit of the duck fat to roast red cabbage and onions for tonight's dinner.  Pretty tasty.  I plan to experiment with frying eggs in it later in the week.  And tomorrow I will use the bones left from the duck to make duck stock.  Voila: no waste!

We are Si-a-me-ese if you ple-ease

Sunday after church, as Jeremy was making brunch, he called to me from the kitchen "Honey, I think we're having a baby." 

Come again?

"Yeah, I think we're having twins."

Turns out he had just cracked six eggs into a bowl, and all of them were double-yolked. 

That evening, I used #7 to bind chicken burgers.  One egg.  Two yolks.

Monday morning, I ate #8 and #9 for breakfast.  Both double-yolked.

Tuesday morning, I scrambled up #10 for Natasha.  Kid got two yolks for the price of one.

That emptied the carton (eggs here are sold in tens, not dozens). 

This same phenomenon happened to my sister while she was pregnant with my niece last year.  We teased her the whole time that it was a sign she was having twins.  She didn't have twins, as it turned out.  Those eggs were from Trader Joe's.

My carton of freak eggs were bought here at the hypermarket.  They were a brand that professes to be extra-nutritious.  A brand I had switched to, because the previous, extra-nutritious brand that I was using (called "Extra"), had started to freak me out.  You see, the Extra eggs have extremely, freakishly, orange yolks.  They also taste a lot better than normal eggs.  I have tried in vain to determine what the producers of Extra eggs do to their eggs to make them so tasty.  As I have been unable to figure this out, I will assume it's something really bad and/or dangerous.  The best-tasting stuff is always bad for you.

And that's why we decided to try these other eggs.

Which were probably laid by chickens on steroids.

By the way, part of the reason I am blogging about this is in the hopes that someone out there knows what makes these Russian eggs so tasty.  If you are that someone, please comment and fill me in!

I am not a butcher

Yesterday I made this for dinner.  I inadvertently baked it at a lower temperature than necessary, and my gravy totally separated and looked horrible, but both chicken and gravy were absolutely delicious.  It's hard to screw up the flavor when the recipe calls for that much butter.  Because of the sheer fattening-ness of this dish, we won't be having it very often, but it's definitely a keeper. 

I will, however, buy pre-cut chicken parts next time.  This time I decided to use a whole fryer that I had in the freezer.  I found a Youtube video about cutting up a chicken, got out my knife, and went to town.  I'm not usually squeamish about meat, but by the time I got to the part where I was instructed to pop the bird's thigh bone out of its socket, I started to feel a bit nauseous.  I don't think I'll be doing that again.

In the kitchen

So, I've been hit with the nesting bug big time, but as most of our stuff is still somewhere on the ocean, I can't sew, or knit anything other than lace (since that's the only yarn I brought on the plane).  Although what I would really like to be doing is sewing baby wipes and burp cloths, I have thrown my domestic energy into culinary endeavors.  Strawberries are really tasty and not too expensive this time of year, so Natasha and I have been riding the metro one stop to the Dorogomilovsky Rinok (rinok=market in Russian) and buying large quantities of them.  The fruit goes bad if you look at it funny, which means that after I've lugged four or five kilos of fruit home, I have to process it immediately.  I wish I had the know-how or equipment for canning (something to think about next summer).  Since I don't, I just freeze all the fruit that isn't bruised or rotting, and make something with the rest.  So far, we've had strawberry turnovers (which I think I've finally figured out) and this disastrous strawberry pie:

This was my entry in the Embassy bake-off yesterday.  I took a few liberties with the recipe - I didn't want to add gelatin, and I didn't have cornstarch, so I figured I'd just toss some flour in and call it good.  I was so excited to make it pretty - I even cut out little leaves from scrap dough and pasted them on the top crust.  I was devastated when it came out of the oven looking like this:

Little did I know that this was only the start of pie-related problems.

The bake-off was held on the green on the upper portion of the compound.  We live on the lower portion.  So I put Natasha into the stroller and loaded the pie into the stroller basket (yes, I should have known that this was a bad idea).  By the time we made it up the ramp and onto the green, strawberry juice had sloshed out of the pie and all over the stroller basket.  It was such a large spill that I had to hose the stroller down at the community garden.

And then it was time for the judging.  After they'd cut into the pies (I should note here that mine was one of only two entered in this category), I was dismayed to see that the cut-out where pie had formerly been, had filled up with strawberry juice.  Needless to say, I was awarded an "honorable mention," while my competitor's non-sloshy apple pie took the blue ribbon.  I guess the pie tasted ok, though, because there was only a tiny piece left when I went back later to retrieve the pie plate.

I've learned my lesson, though, and this morning when I went to the grocery store, I looked for corn starch.  They only had potato starch.  Which I'm going to use in today's cherry pie instead.  Hope it works ...

In other, more successful news, I've also been making pasta sauce out of fresh tomatoes for freezing.  I usually don't have an issue using canned tomatoes, but we go through a LOT, and I haven't been able to find reasonably priced canned tomatoes in the stores yet.   So every week or so, I turn this:

into this:

First grocery fail

Natasha and I explored a new grocery store today, Zelyonii Perekryostok.  It's a bit over a mile's walk from the Embassy, slightly downhill when you have no groceries to lug, and uphill when the stroller is a bit heavier.  Nice store.  Baby was sleeping when we got there, but woke up about 15 minutes in.  She has become quite whiny lately when she's not getting my full attention, so I couldn't spend the time really checking out my options.

I wanted to make pizza for dinner tonight.  I had in my head a vision of a very Italian style pizza.  Thin crust, not too much sauce, light on the toppings, fresh basil, salami instead of pepperoni, etc.  Natasha was in full whine mode by the time we got to the cheese section, so I grabbed the first thing I saw with "mozzarella" on the label.  The fact that each slice was individually wrapped should have been a warning ...

Because, yes, although it was billed as mozzarella, what I actually bought was basically American cheese.  I HATE American cheese.  And even if you like it, you could hardly argue that it belongs on pizza.  So my beautiful, thin-crust Italian pizza ended up looking like this:

It didn't taste as awful as it looks, but the cheese did leave that awful processed film on the roof of my mouth.  Better luck next time, I guess.