Recipes Archive

I saw a recipe by Marie over at Through My Eyes for Wild Rice with Raisins and Pinenuts. It looked great (she took a bunch of pictures, step by step). I don’t like wild rice (it’s a little gamey for my taste) and the quantity was a bit much for just Kurt and I, so I doctored it a bit.

Not so Wild Rice With Raisins and Pinenuts:
2 Tblspn. Butter
½ small onion - chopped
1 apple - chopped
¼ cup raisins
½ lemon –juiced
¼ cup pine nuts
1 cup Basmati Rice - already cooked (See bottom of this post for directions)
¼ cup chopped cilantro

Sauté onion in butter until it’s translucent. Add chopped apple and let it cook for a couple minutes. Juice the ½ lemon and add raisins. Then add the rice. Make sure to stir so the rice doesn’t burn. Add the pine nuts, and then the cilantro.

Basmati Rice:
1 ¼ cup water
1 cup Basmati Rice
(Pan with a lid)

Bring water to a boil then add rice. Turn heat down to simmer and with the lid on the pot cook for about 15 minutes or until all of the water has been absorbed. Let stand for 5 minutes, then fluff with a fork before serving (or in this case, before adding to the other pan).

Yesterday I made stuffed bell peppers. I specify bell peppers because I occasionally (twice) make Chile Rellenos as well. I have a few dishes that I never really make the same way twice and stuffed bell peppers is one of them. Here is the basic recipe:

Four bell peppers
One can of diced tomatoes (14 ounce)
One can of black beans (14 ounce)
One can of salsa (4 ounce? - very small) or make a little of your own
A couple small slices of Monterey Jack cheese
Sour cream

Mix the tomatoes and beans together and stuff into peppers. Add a couple teaspoons of salsa and a couple slices of cheese in each pepper. You can either place the peppers in a crock pot and have dinner ready right after work or put in the oven at about 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about 45 minutes (I place the peppers in a enamel coated cast iron Dutch oven). Serve with a dollop of sour cream. Depending on the size of the peppers they may not be fully stuffed with just those ingredients and this is where the changes take place.

One time I made this dish and added some polenta. It was edible but I wasn’t impressed – never bought the stuff again. Another time I had some extra frozen corn from another dish I had recently made and so I added that. With both of those variants, Kurt took little notice. Last night I made it and cut up a couple carrots – he freaked out. “You added carrots!” he says with disgust. He likes carrots. I guess he felt they don’t belong in this dish at all! He acted like I may as well have served live chickens.

Today after work I went to the grocery store to pick up some tamarind for Agua Fresca and oohh it felt so good in there. Typically on super hot days I’m out there soaking up sun like a lizard. While others may retreat to the shade if I did the same, I would require a fleece at the very least. AC – forget about it! I would start chattering my teeth even if I had just been out in 97 degree Fahrenheit heat like today. No, I’m not anemic! I just live for warmth and the sun and AC is much too much concentrated cold for me.

Now that I’m pregnant and in my third trimester I’ve not only turned on the AC in my vehicle but I’ve turned the vents towards me instead of aiming them at the opposite side of the car. I’m dying over here! I even drank water today. Anyone that knows me knows that is no small thing – but it’s actually the third time I’ve had water since becoming pregnant. The first time I drank water at least one of my friends literally marked it on her calendar - March 9th at 3pm. Water is the most vile and disgusting liquid on the planet. I don’t care if it’s filtered and/or bottled if it hasn’t boiled and flavored I won’t drink it. How can anyone hate water you may ask, simple, I grew up in Alaska where my city water came out of the tap BROWN and smelled like rotten eggs. If you allowed it to sit, you could actually see brown sediment settling to the bottom. I ain’t drinking that crap. It has amoebas and I’m not touching it.

It turned out to be much too hot for me to cook today so we went out to eat and it was still too hot for me to get my lazy butt up and make agua fresca, but I’ll give you directions for it…

• Get about 12 to 16 tamarind pods – tamarind is the stuff that’s usually located next to the fresh jalapeños and habaneros and looks like a large peanut
• Take the outer shell off (you can take the vines off but it may become a sticky mess so leaving them on/in is ok too)
• Put the sticky fruit in a large pot and add about ten cups of amoebas water
• Add a cup of sugar
• Bring it to a boil then lower the heat to med/low for about ten to twenty minutes then let it sit with the lid on for an hour or so – you want the fruit to become a bit mushy
• Get a strainer, place it over your juice container, and scoop the fruit into the strainer
• Pour the water through the strainer a little at a time and mash the fruit through so that you get as much of the fruit in the water without the seeds and vines
• Refrigerate, Stir, and serve cold

*Do a taste test before refrigerating – if it’s too tart for you just add more sugar

Yes this creates brown water, but at least I know what’s in it!

Last week I received a newsletter from a magazine to which I subscribe. Actually it was from their website birdchannel.com. At the bottom was an ad from hobbyfarms.com that caught my eye. It read, “Looking for good recipes? We’ve got everything from animal treats to zucchini bread”. I didn’t bother to see where the ad was from at first. I just saw that picture of zucchini bread and wanted some. I snagged recipes for cornbread and pumpkin biscuits as well.

Tonight I made the biscuits which reminded me why I don’t bake, ever! It started with me getting out the mixing bowl to combine the dry ingredients the next step was to mix in the cold butter until the mixer was “crumbly” but I couldn’t find our 30 year-old avocado green hand mixer. “Kurt where’s the mixer?”

“You mean the old hand mixer?”

“Yes”

“You threw it out when we got the Kitchen Aid mixer” Yep that sounds like me. I can’t deny that one. So I wash out the bowl that comes with the Kitchen Aid, dry it out, and pour my dry mixture into the bowl dumping some of it into the sink (at least I think a little bit ahead and know some ain’t gonna make it through the transfer). I added the butter, but I never got the “crumbly” look that the instructions said to watch for - I’m not even sure the butter really mixed in. Oh well, the next ingredient is milk - oops that was a little too much. Add the pumpkin - oops a bit too much of that too. Why is this stuff so damn sticky? How in the hell will I roll it out? Ok I’ll just add more flower…this isn’t working. I told Kurt I didn’t think they were going to turn out and he said, “that’s ok I appreciate your effort.” Now most women would say, “aawww that’s so sweet” but I know Kurt.

With one eyebrow raised, “You just said that so you have the freedom to spit it back out in front of me if you don’t like it didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah” he answered. In the end he said they turned out pretty well even though at one point during our meal Kurt accidentally dropped his biscuit and it made a “thud” sound on the table. We burst into laughter and of course had to tease the crap out of me by writing on our calendar that I made, “Bean soup and pumpkin flavored concrete”. He actually ate two of my pumpkin flavored concrete disks. And yes, we keep a calendar of who made which meal on what day - it helped eliminate most of our arguments about whose turn it is to wash the wretched dishes.

If you can’t find the recipe on the hobby farms site here it is:

You can use commercially canned or homegrown pumpkin for this recipe. If doing the latter, bake the pumpkin rather than boil it in order to get a drier, denser product. After scraping the baked flesh from the rinds, use an electric mixer to beat until smooth. Remove any tough, fibrous pieces that didn’t cook down.

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
¼ cup brown sugar
1 tsp. salt
3 T. baking powder
1 Tsp. cinnamon
½ tsp. nutmeg
¼ tsp. allspice
1/8 tsp. ginger
1/3 cup butter, cold
¾ cup pumpkin
¾ cup milk
additional flour if needed

Preparation
Stir together dry ingredients. Using a pastry blender, cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add pumpkin and milk, stirring just until ingredients are moistened and a soft dough forms. If the dough seems very soft, add more flour, a few tablespoons at a time, just until the dough is easy to handle.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out dough to a half-inch thick. Using a 2-inch biscuit or cookie cutter in a simple shape of your choice (such as a pumpkin or leaf), dip the cutter into flour, shake off excess and press into biscuit dough. Place biscuits on a lightly greased cookie sheet one-inch apart and bake at 450 degrees F for 8 to 12 minutes or until golden brown. Serve hot with butter and honey or apple butter. Makes about 12 biscuits.

That is the recipe exactly as it shown on the hobby farms site, so I have no idea if the “1 Tsp. cinnamon” is actually a tablespoon or a teaspoon. It is the only one with a capital “T”, but still has the “sp”. I used a tablespoon. In addition, I think if I make this another time I’m going to cut the baking powder to one tablespoon instead of THREE and just add more flour. I hope that I’ll get more fluffy biscuits instead of such dense and heavy bread.

My first craving (around week 6 or 7) was for salty foods. That is bizarre for me because I typically don’t like anything super salty. I cured and killed that craving by going to Wendy’s for lunch one day and ordering a large fries. One of my co-workers commented, “What are you pregnant you never eat that stuff.” I hadn’t told any one at that point and the comment freaked me out because I didn’t want anyone at work to know yet (except a couple of people). I actually got sick from those fries.

My next craving was for mangos. I would buy a container of sliced mangos – there were probably about two or three mangos in a container and I would eat one of those a day with lime and salt. That lasted for about three weeks. After or maybe even during that craving I would eat sandwiches with refried beans, ham, feta cheese, and tons of jalapeños. Recently I was on a canned muscles kick – muscles on saltines with Tabasco sauce. I made sure not to eat that one more than twice a week for fear of mercury content. Aside from the amount of mangos those last three are very normal cravings for me, so I didn’t really count them.

Yesterday I had an odd craving (odd for me) that I wasn’t able to fulfill until today. Macaroni salad - actually the peas and hard-boiled eggs were what I wanted, but I don’t like peas by themselves.

1 sm. box elbow macaroni, cooked, drained, and cooled
2 cups frozen peas
2 eggs, boiled
1/2 c. mayonnaise
2 tbsp. pickle relish

Oh and for the past two weeks I’ve been snacking solely on fruit – I’ve never liked pears so much