The Challenge: Day Twenty-Nine

We’ve reached the penultimate day of the challenge. It’s taken longer than 30 days to complete this challenge, but no one is counting, really. And what have you learned, Dorothy? Or, rather, what sort of tips have you come up with after all this?

1. It would be easier if everyone was sort of on the same schedule. Not just daily life/work schedules, but eating schedules as well. It isn’t so difficult to work around schedules when the time difference is within a smallish window – an hour or two. But when the difference is several hours, or when someone isn’t eating at all, it’s much harder for the home cook to make dinners that consist of things that aren’t just stuffed into a crockpot – or for people to avoid those salt-laden, junky prepackaged foods.
2. It’s a good idea to plan meals in advance. Deciding at the last minute on what’s for dinner often results in too many trips to the store. Planning allows you more time to spend finishing the cooking so you can enjoy the time with family and friends.
3. Going hand in hand with that: it’s a good idea to keep the pantry well-stocked with certain basic, non-perishable items. I’m not talking about Sandra Lee-type nonperishables, either. I’m talking about real food. Chicken stock (if you’re not making it yourself) comes immediately to mind. Pasta (again, if you’re not making it yourself). Canned tomatoes. Rice, several types if you’re into that sort of thing. Flour (all purpose will do; if you bake often, obviously you may have other types on hand). Dried or canned beans. Honey. Soy sauce. A variety of spices.
4. Learning to balance the likes and dislikes of everyone who may be joining you for dinner can be trying sometimes, but the end result is worth it.
5. Buy in bulk. This probably goes without saying, but in conjunction with number two above, this can save you some cash if you plan ahead, as you’ll be less likely to make an impulse-type purchase of something you can get more cheaply in bulk (like, say, deciding as you’re off on one of those quick trips to the grocery that you might as well go ahead and pick up a pack of three boneless, skinless chicken breasts while you’re there instead of planning your trip to the warehouse).
6. Trying to cook everything, from scratch, in a short period of time – like a couple of hours – is unlikely to be practical if you’re recovering from a major medical issue. Pace yourself.
7. Get honest feedback from your eaters and take it for what it is: constructive criticism. This will improve your cooking.
8. If you’re trying to feed your eaters some kind of special diet (lowfat, low-cal, gluten-free, or whatever else), do a little research and be creative. Just because someone wants to eat lowfat doesn’t mean you need to feed them no fat, and if you try, they’ll probably revolt.
9. On that same subject, remember to break out of the special diet mold from time to time. For a reasonably healthy person who is trying to eat lowfat, the occasional steak here and there isn’t going to kill them.
10. Have fun. Think of yourself as an artist with a palette of food available to you. Eating healthy home-cooked meals is not only possible but could be one of the best things you’ve ever done for youself and those you love. As an added bonus, it can also be done quite reasonably, budget-wise.

Monday, my plan had been to get the lawn mowed and then make my tomato sauce. One out of two ain’t bad. After finishing the lawn duties, I was whipped, so took a brief nap, and then had to come up with something for dinner, as no one around me had any suggestions whatsoever as to what they wanted. So, as usual, their personal chef came up with the menu: orange-glazed chicken, rice pilaf, corn on the cob, and broccoli with (lowfat) cheese sauce.

The chicken was seared and then put into the oven, where it was glazed a couple of times with a mixture of orange marmalde, soy sauce, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and dijon mustard. Sounds like a strange combination – it sounded strange in my head, to be sure – but it worked quite well.

Yours truly managed to grab the handle of the large stainless steel frying pan after it came out of the oven. Not bright at all. Fortunately, it appears my reflexes are still quite fast, and I let it go instantly. No blisters or anything popping up on my hand, thankfully.

I was quite pleased with the meal, and even more pleased with the cheese sauce, as I’d not been sure how that would turn out, since I was trying to make it lowfat.

The totals:

Chicken (boneless, skinless breasts, 6): 12.30
Rice: 1.97
Broccoli: 3.98
Corn: 2.00
Cheese sauce: 1.49

Total for the meal: 21.74
Total per diner (6): 3.62

Since it appears that I can only do one rather intensive activity per day, Tuesday will be sauce day. I also need to plan some menus. Planning is definitely key, and something I’ve been a slacker on throughout this entire challenge. Thursday will be another largish gathering for dinner, as will Sunday.

A friend pointed out to me in email (to which I have yet to respond, because I can be so horrible at keeping up with correspondence – sorry, Julia!) that I might want to consider this challenge for other seasons as well. After all, summer’s bounty only lasts so long, and the other seasons will give me other challenges and afford me the opportunity to make other kinds of dishes. Now, we don’t really have “seasons” down here as in other places. It’s summer for a long, long time, then suddenly it’s 30 degrees out for a bit, and then we’re into spring, warming up rapidly to another round of summer. Still, the produce tends to know when it’s fall, and even though at least one of my diners has something against braises, those are perfect for long winter days and nights. That same diner has something against soups as well – maybe she’s just not a winter type of gal – but a nice big pot of spanish bean soup with ham and some crusty bread can be just the ticket on a cool fall/winter evening. I may continue indefinitely with the costing per meal and per diner as I’m able, just to see what differences there are between what we eat when the produce breaks in a giant wave on the farmer’s market and grocery store and what we eat when the tomatoes are out of season (or hothouse tomatoes) and suddenly the Vidalias are gone for another season. It should be interesting. At least it will be to me.

Football season is here! About damn time…

Casual day

Food-wise casual, that is.

I had big plans for Sunday: get up, cut the grass, shower, head to the farmer’s market and Costco, hit Publix for the other things we needed, then get a big batch of sauce going for canning.

It didn’t quite work out that way. For some reason, after getting back from the beach Saturday evening, we all had difficulty getting to sleep and staying asleep. I held off on cutting the grass since everyone else was still sleeping when I got up, and instead, headed out to the farmer’s market for a few things.

I love living in Florida during the summer, blazing heat and all.

Since Sunday was the first preseason football game, I decided that guacamole and pizza should be the fare of choice. My intent was to have the sauce made and do some pizza dough. Alas, my energy was flagging, so it was jarred sauce and readymade pizza shells for us tonight. Not bad, but for some reason, the Boboli shells always feel greasy to me. This may be because they are in fact greasy. But they still have a decent taste. Not homemade, but good enough in a pinch.

Guacamole is remarkably unphotogenic.

Pizza toppings look much better.

Action!

One sister’s pizza.

Mom’s pizza, BC (before cheese).

My other sister’s pizza, fresh from the oven. She likes her toppings on top of the cheese, so they can get crunchy.

Football on, pizza smells wafting through the house…felt like fall, except that it was 94 degrees outside at 8 PM. Two weeks to our first home preseason game. Can’t wait…

Dining seaside

Saturday, we – my mom, my sister, and I – went to the beach to visit with some friends who have a house that bumps gently against the dunes. The house is glorious. They’ve done quite a bit of work on it, and even added on to it. The second story facing the beach is almost entirely windows, and overlooks the water.

The menu:

Homemade hummus
Homemade pitas
Shrimp two ways
Broccoli-two cheese casserole
Tomatoes with fresh basil and balsamic vinegar
Deviled eggs
Fresh breads (baguette, olive-basil, and rosemary)
Pineapple upside down cake

Creamy hummus.

Pita dough, cut and ready for rolling.

The first couple of pitas were sacrificial as I got the hang of making them. Once that round was over, though, the rest turned out very well indeed.

The casserole, before the topping mixture.

And after.

Mom’s famous pineapple upside down cake.

We packed all that up, along with a very good bottle of wine, and made our way to the shore.

I always wanted to sail…

This is what a nicely done appetizer plate of hummus and pitas looks like.

And this is what happy people look like when they’re sitting out on a deck on the beach with that nice plate.

I had a cut on the tip of my middle finger on my right hand, probably from the server I was setting up in the wee hours of Saturday morning. I didn’t notice it until I was making the marinade for half the shrimp and was squeezing some limes and lemons. Ouch. Half the shrimp was boiled, half sauteed after being in the marinade.

Eventually, you have to put everything together. Shrimp and deviled eggs.

Broccoli casserole, hot and bubbly from the oven.

Tomatoes, sliced, with basil picked just that morning, dressed with balsamic vinegar.

Warm, sliced bread.

The long view.

Al fresco dining on the deck.

Action photo. Photo by me, action courtesy of Mother Nature and the relentless attack on the shore by the waves.

Look to the west.

You’ll see the sun set.

The beach will empty of people.

But the moon will keep you company.

Back on the deck, we enjoyed some dessert.

And after a bit more visiting, we said our goodbyes and headed home, pleasantly full and tired. Too tired to sort through the photos afterward and post about it, in fact.

Meat and potatoes

“You know what I really want right now?” asked my sister the other night, still wrapped in her towel and dripping from her shower. “Fries. Real fries.”

I’ve never worked in a fast food joint, so I’ve never had the opportunity to ask people if they wanted fries (or anything else, for that matter). Usually, this is always the way it is: people tell me what they want and I make it.

We had some potatoes on hand, leftover gravy from steak night, mushrooms, and ground beef. Hamburgers and handcut fries it was.

I cut the fries and soaked them in a bit of salty water, set them out to drain, and then fried them in batches.

Get a couple of hamburgers going, break out the gravy, toss some mushrooms in, throw some fries on the plate, and you have dinner. Except my sister, who doesn’t like gravy because she’s weird, so her burger was segregated from the gravy burgers.

No green stuff with this meal. Meat and potatoes all the way.

The Challenge: Day Twenty-Eight

We finally got to bring mom home from the hospital at 5:30 Tuesday evening. After being up all day Sunday, not sleeping at all that night, taking her to the hospital at 5:30 AM Monday morning, spending all day at the hospital with her, finally getting home at 10 PM, then foolishly working into the wee hours and not getting nearly the amount of sleep I needed Monday night..well, I was tired yesterday. Waiting for the doctor to get his ass to see her and sign her discharge papers (since if she left without it, her insurance would not pay for any of it) was maddening, since it meant I really couldn’t do anything that required me to be out as we had no idea when he’d appear and we’d be able to get her home. But this is the way things go sometimes.

Once we managed to get her sprung from the hospital, it was time to decide on dinner. After all, she’d been on liquids only Monday after surgery (even though we cheated and brought her some of that bread you saw in a previous entry when we brought in the cucumber-avocado soup), and Tuesday’s hospital food offerings weren’t exactly haute cuisine. We had some steaks left over from the boneless whole ribeye I’d cut awhile back, so that was dinner: grilled ribeyes, along with mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli, sauteed onions and mushrooms (baby bellas and button), and a gravy I made in the pan used to saute those onions and mushrooms. A fine meal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Monday morning, bright and early – ok, early, but maybe not so bright – my sister and I took mom off to the hospital. A very, very brusque woman at the surgical checkin desk grabbed up a clipboard and then instructed us and another woman (and her husband) to follow her. We were stuffed into a semiprivate room on the wing, and the two ladies were told to change into those ever-so-lovely and fashionable gowns. And brown booties with no-skids on the bottoms, so they wouldn’t fall and break their heads or anything else.

Then, we waited.

Continue reading The Challenge: Day Twenty-Eight

So, how did that bread turn out?

I just couldn’t wait for the biga to sit overnight, so I gave it about six hours or so (during which time it almost overran the bowl I had it in, attempting to become Blob-like). From there, is was into the dough mix after being cut into ten or so smaller pieces.

The batards, after proofing, ready to go into the oven. A cappuccino for the baker.

Into the oven, with a makeshift steam bath under the pan. Next time I think I’ll bake them right on the stone.

But they turned out well, even in the pan.

And looked decent on the inside.

I had a bite of that slice, with the crust: marvelous! Crisp crust, chewy interior, great flavor from the fermented biga. Takes me a bit to get through a bite, but is it ever worth it.

Nice crumb.

Bread porn!

Tomorrow, after my mom is settled into whatever room they put her in after surgery, I’ll be heading to the house to pick up her things. More importantly, though, I’ll be taking back some real food for her to eat so she doesn’t have to suffer through hospital food. That will include some of this freshly made bread and some butter to slather on it, along with some iced tea and cold cucumber-avocado soup. A care package to tide her over until they kick her out.

A breaded state of mind

The biga for the Italian bread I want to make is fermenting on the counter as I type this. I really do love making breads of all sorts. There’s something always amazing to me that flour, water, and yeast can make food suitable for sustaining someone – or for enhancing a meal. I’m leaning toward making a loaf or two of bread for sandwiches – maybe a white wheat and a whole wheat, since Aubrey tells me that the whole wheat-whole grain loaf is sometimes too much for a sandwich.

That brings to mind another topic, though: storage. I need a good storage solution for all this bread, since my sister always bitches about the end of bread loaves that go beyond the point where they can be eaten. I suppose I could freeze it, sliced, so they could pull out bread as they needed. I’m wondering, though, if they’ll actually do that. I expect they would if it were the only bread available. The fridge is out of the question, since refrigerating bread dries it out much faster than leaving it out would (see, and you thought this blog was only about food porn and not actual education!). Perhaps a breadbox is in order here if I continue to make all these loaves.

Reheated roasted red pepper soup is delicious, even without the addition of sour cream (we’re out, doggone it). I think next time I’ll add another roasted jalapeno to the mix along with a touch more hot sauce. It’s tasty, but I’d like just a hint more kick to it than it has right now. Of course, the red peppers themsleves are very sweet, currently, as it is the height of the summer, so if I make this in winter, we’ll have to have tasting as we puree and combine to make sure we don’t go overboard. If I had a nice loaf of Italian bread, I could have had a small bit of that with the soup. Alas, that will have to wait until the next bowl and the baking of the bread.

I’m leaning toward getting a third fridge – another garage fridge – to give us more storage. There are times when I need more space than we have for various things, like letting cucumber puree drain, or setting aside bread dough in the fridge to retard it, or storing containers of freshly made soup or marinating ribs or what have you. I think what I really need is just a walk-in. That would be something. I also need to get my act together and get a wine fridge with two zones or just get a rack to store the bottles. There’s wine everywhere around here, and a little organization would go a long way.

Mother Nature is rumbling outside, threatening us again. It might turn into prime napping weather…

The Challenge: Day Twenty-Seven – Summer in a bowl

“What will you be doing with all those peppers?” asked the woman behind me in the checkout line at Publix.

“I’m making some roasted red pepper soup,” I said, as I put all the peppers and the dozen cucumbers on the conveyor.

“With cucumbers in it? That seems a little…” She paused here, no doubt trying to find something to say other than “weird”.

“No, the cucumbers will be going toward a cold cucumber-avocado soup. The peppers and the cucumbers don’t work together well in a soup, I think.”

“I think you’re right about that. The pepper soup sounds delicious.”

“I’m sure it will be.”

It is, of course, delicious. I’m not a big fan of cold soups and never have been, but my mom was reading one of my numerous food magazines and saw a recipe for the cucumber soup, so I agreed to make one, loosely based on that recipe. The roasted red pepper-sweet potato soup is one I’ve been meaning to make for awhile, since I’m not visiting Biscotti’s every day for my fix.

First up: cucumbers. Half the cucumbers are pureed with a bit of honey and then put into a sieve over a bowl to drain.

The rest of the cucumbers are peeled, seeded, and thinly sliced, then tossed with honey and white wine vinegar. Overnight would probably be better for the draining/pickling, but I want to make bread tomorrow instead of fiddling around with soup, and I have real work to do as well. So, after ten hours or so, I pulled both and pressed the puree to release some more cucumber juice. The front bowl is the juice, the back bowl contains the sliced cukes.

I worked in batches to blend some of the juice, some of the sliced cukes, and an avocado together. Mix in some diced fresh dill, some salt and pepper to taste, and garnish with more fresh dill, and you have something that looks like this.

It’s good, but again, I’m not a cold soup eater. Mom liked it, and since it was for her anyway, that’s what matters. Plus, since it’s cold and doesn’t require reheating, we can take some over to the hospital Monday night while she’s locked in.

The other soup, of course, is the roasted red pepper soup. For this, you must have peppers.

Sliced lengthwise, seeded, and then pressed down on a baking sheet.

These go under the broiler until they’re blackened nicely. I’d have done this on the grill instead, but Mother Nature was rumbling outside (and still is as I type this), bringing us some welcome rain off and on. After they’re roasted, the peppers go into a bowl and are covered with some plastic wrap to steam a bit, which helps loosen the skins and makes them easier to peel. I also added a jalapeno to the roasting.

The other ingredients for this rather simple soup are prepped: onions – vidalias, of course, at this time of year – garlic, and some spices (pepper, bay, thyme).

The onions and garlic are sweated in a touch of olive oil over low heat. While that’s going on, the peppers are peeled and then given a rough chop. The sweet potato, baked earlier in the day, is scooped out of its skin. It’s so soft that nothing is really required for it.

When the onions are soft, the peppers, spices (in a tea ball, as I have no cheesecloth at the moment), sweet potato, and four cups of (my homemade) chicken stock go into the pan, with a dash of rice wine vinegar and a touch of Tabasco. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 20-30 minutes.

Dig out the tea ball, add a bit of salt and pepper, then puree the soup in batches.

Before you know it, it’s soup. In this case, served with a dollop of sour cream and garnished with chives and fresh basil.

I liked this soup much better than the cuke soup, but then, I’m biased toward the heated soups. Served with a piece or two of crusty bread slathered with butter, perhaps a cheese or two, and it’s a meal. I settled just for the soup alone.

Each of the soups makes multiple servings (6) so there is plenty left over from both batches from our tasting this evening. Still, we must have an accounting. Below are the total costs for each and the total cost per serving as made.

Cucumber soup, total cost: 7.00
Roasted red pepper-sweet potato soup, total cost: 8.49

Total cost per serving, cucumber soup: 1.17
Total cost per serving, roasted red pepper soup: 1.42

The cucumber soup, by the way, requires no cooking at all. If it’s too hot to cook, or if you’re one of those raw food people, it’s not bad. Both soups are dead easy to prepare, lowfat, and low calorie.

Comfort food

We sent my sister off to her dinner party loaded down with food last night. She had been to Ginnie Springs during the day with her boyfriend and a few other people, and asked if I would prep the creme brulees for the group. Surely, I said, and so I did. When she returned, they were ready to go and we finished off the rest of the prep: chicken breasts stuffed with asparagus spears and feta, the makings for a large salad, and cut up potatoes for garlic-parsley potatoes. Except for the creme brulees, everything else was cooked at her girlfriend’s place. The group finished off every scrap of food she took, and if that is a barometer of how things went, they went very well indeed.

As for mom and I, it was a snack-y, no good for you sort of food night. After cleaning up from Hurricane Aubrey, neither of us felt like cooking (or eating) much, as we’re busy with month end type of work. I broke out an emergency blue box of mac and cheese, dug a couple of hotdogs out of the freezer, and that was our dinner. As with the pizza from the other night, it’s been a long time since I had a hotdog. The last time, in fact, was the last Jaguars game I went to. That was the opening game of last season, and of course I missed all of the remainder of the season as I was too ill to attend. I have to say that even without a bun, that hotdog was tasty. So was the mac and cheese, an old standby.

Today I’m working on a couple of soups: cold cucumber-avocado soup and a roasted red pepper-sweet potato soup. The cucumber soup starts with two parts: a puree, with honey, of a bunch of cucumbers, and a marinated batch with rice wine vinegar and honey. Both of these need to sit overnight – the first to drain, the second to slightly pickle. For the other soup, after my break with a cappuccino and a Reese’s, it will be time to roast the peppers. Earlier this morning, I baked a sweet potato to add to it. Both should be delicious, and I’ll have pictures of the process later, of course.

Reflections on gardening, cooking, and life