[Note from Serene: Please welcome our new contributor, Kombucha! She has graciously agreed to tell us about her own Dad Food, and I'm happily anticipating hearing more from her.]

Our family ate dinner every night together while I was growing up, and my mom cooked 99.9 percent of those meals. This percentage is probably not entirely mathematically accurate. I can count on my fingers the number of times my dad cooked for us as kids. He had one meal that he could make, and we had to help him out lest he forget one of the ingredients.

My mom worked full time in addition to raising my brother and me, and what was so comforting to me about those few instances that my dad cooked was not just the meal that he made — an easy layered nacho recipe that can also be turned into a great burrito filling and be adapted for vegetarians (just leave out the meat) — but knowing that she was going to be able to relax a little when she got home. My parents worked extremely hard to provide a good life for us, and eating fresh healthy good food was always part of that. I always felt guilty that my mom had to cook a meal after working a full day at her demanding retail job.

This is not a healthful recipe, but it is easy, quick, and a crowd-pleaser. I’ve made it for many friends over the years who have raved about it. I always think of my dad when I do.

In the photos, you can see this version I made with spinach and pecans cooked with onions and green chiles. I am a vegetarian now, so I try to find creative ways to recreate the recipes I used to like with meat!

Kombucha is a contributing writer for RENTCafe,  where she writes about home design, entertaining, and other lifestyle topics on the RENTCafe blog.

Dad’s Easy Nacho Night is a post from: The Mom Food Project

I may have mentioned a few times here that my mom didn’t bake bread. That said, she LOVES the stuff, and every time she visits, I try to bake her favorite New York Times bread, and one or more other things.

This visit, she was well enough to eat (which doesn’t always happen), so I had a blast cooking for her: a full Thanksgiving dinner and everything! One of my own favorites this time was this monkey bread:

It’s pretty to look at, but it’s also really fun to eat. It’s like a pan full of garlic-bread rolls, and you pull one off and, if you’re me, you hope for lots of those little bits of browned garlic on yours. The bottom ones are browned, too, so it’s good all the way through, and it keeps for about 3 days on the counter, or a week in the fridge.

Garlic-herb Monkey Bread is a post from: The Mom Food Project

I used a pound of chuck, and since chuck prefers a slow braise, I put the ingredients (minus the green peppers, which I didn’t have handy) into a cast-iron Dutch oven instead. I browned the beef first, then added the remaining ingredients and about a half cup of water, then cooked on low heat for about an hour and a half.

It’s not too spicy, but it’s got a little zing to it. It’s very very rich and delicious.

Two bad photos equal a good one, right? This stuff was far more tasty than it looks here.

Korean-style braised beef is a post from: The Mom Food Project

I think that all of us who cook want to duplicate items our moms cooked. However, much of the time moms cook by touch and feel and experience, and don’t write down a recipe. Decades later, you remember something she used to make but can’t duplicate it for lack of a recipe.

My mom made the best stuffing imaginable. We used to look forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas simply because we’d get turkey with her stuffing. I remember being in the kitchen when she’d make it, and what I could remember of it was that it was a combination of potatoes and bread with spices and onions. But, I didn’t want to experiment and I thought to myself that the stuffing recipe was lost forever.

However, I recently bought a cookbook called A Taste of Acadie, by Marielle Cormier-Boudreau and Melvin Gallant. Acadie, or Acadia, is the name of the area of Nova Scotia inhabited by French-Canadians. A goodly number of them left for warmer climes in Louisiana, and turned from Acadians into Cajuns, keeping their taste for fish but leaving other food preferences behind.

A quick flip through the book will show that the great resource on which a goodly amount of Acadian cookery is based is the potato. Rappie pie is made from grated potato with the water squeezed out, layered with meat and baked. Potato pancakes also feature.

The first time I went through the book I didn’t pick up on the Acadian stuffing recipe. However, a week or so ago I came across Acadian stuffing and, lo and behold, my mom’s stuffing recipe jumped out at me. It makes sense, as my mom probably got her recipe from her mom, who was born and raised in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. My grandmother’s father was a sea cook, working on the fishing vessels that sailed from Lunenburg to the Grand Banks to catch the cod that figured in many Acadian recipes.

I suppose that I should really keep this recipe for Thanksgiving or Christmas, when turkey is on the menu. But I am so excited by it that I can’t wait that long. It’s like discovering a long-lost novel that you read years ago. You have to read it again as soon as you’ve found it.

Start out with mashed potatoes. For a chicken 2 potatoes, mashed (no butter or milk) should be sufficient. Do not rice the potatoes, as lumps are good in this recipe.

Then take three pieces of bread, dry them in an oven, and crumble them. Chop 1 onion and 2 ribs of celery, and sauté them in 3 tbsp. butter. Add the bread crumbs and brown lightly, then add the mashed potatoes, salt and pepper, and 1 tbsp summer savory or Bell’s Seasoning. If the mixture is a bit dry, add a bit of water or chicken stock to moisten. Stuff your bird and roast as usual.

If you’re roasting a turkey, increase all the amounts in the recipe and if you can’t get all the stuffing in the bird, put it in a pyrex dish and bake it along with the bird.

My mom also used to stuff pork chops with this stuffing. After making the stuffing, take thick pork chops and cut a horizontal pocket in the side of the chop. Spoon stuffing into that pocket and bake as usual. You can also just pile the stuffing on top of the chop—it browns very nicely.

A word about summer savory. The Wikipedia article says that it’s used in Atlantic Canada in preference to sage. I have to say that I have never heard of it, and my mom never used it in this recipe, to my knowledge. What she used is Bell’s Seasoning. I do not know whether this is available nationwide in the US—I do know it’s not available here, but I will be bringing some back with me next time I visit Marblehead. If you can’t source Bell’s Seasoning, use sage.

You may think this is total nostalgia on my part, and you may also be right. Nostalgia is good. Aching after your past, even though you will never experience it again, helps you keep in mind the good times, the bad times, the people you loved and who loved you, the places you lived and visited, and is a memorial to all that has gone into making you you.

I remember leftover turkey going into sandwiches on Thanksgiving night. Take two slices of white bread and slather both with mayonnaise. Cover the bottom slice with sliced turkey breast, then a layer of my mom’s stuffing, then a few spoonfuls of cranberry sauce. Salt and pepper to taste, then cover with the other piece of bread and enjoy. These were absolutely delicious and were just enough to keep people who’d gorged in the early afternoon from getting hungry at 8 pm. I had leftover chicken today, but no stuffing. The sandwich I made didn’t taste the same without the stuffing, but it was close.

I’ll end with a holiday Momfood disaster that I forgot to recount in my previous post covering things my Mom didn’t get quite right. Leftover turkey is always a problem, and my mom wanted to make turkey soup. She had a recipe from her mother, and this recipe specified ½ tbsp of barley. Mom looked at the puny (to her) amount of barley and decided that the recipe must have been wrong. She put in half a cup.

When we were finally called to dinner, Mom gave us each a slice of turkey “soup”, as the amount of barley had soaked up all the liquid in the soup. As with all my mom’s culinary disasters, it tasted delicious, and whenever I have stuffing, or chicken, or turkey, I think of that slice of soup. It would go very well with stuffing.

Mertie’s Mondays: Acadian Stuffing and Turkey Sandwiches is a post from: The Mom Food Project

So you all already know I’m kinda wacky, right? Oh, good, you’ve been paying attention. I was a little worried there for a minute.

Anyway, one of the bizarre joys in my twisted existence is Regretsy [Regretsy website | Regretsy's Facebook page].

How to explain Regretsy? Well, see, there’s this site called Etsy whose premise sounds good: a marketplace for people to sell their wonderful handmade crafts. Sadly (or funnily, if you’re Regretsy’s April Winchell a.k.a. Helen Killer), the legit crafters are often crowded out by mass-market resellers of cheap baubles and by crafts that make everyone involved go “huh?”

Here’s an example, of the “gluing shit to other shit” variety. I found it on the front page of Etsy just now, but the things April finds range from this kind of asshattery to truly disturbing stuff that I’m not putting on my food blog—if you want to see it, go waste several hours a week on Regretsy the way I do.

by Etsy seller CosmicFirefly

All of which is the long way of getting to my point, which is that Regretsy is a bad influence. There’s a Super-Sekrit Regretsy Club attached to the Facebook page, “a club so mysterious and exclusive that only 103,755 people have the password!” (The password is cf4l, all lowercase, between you and me.) In the secret club, April shares exclusive content with those of us who aren’t content to merely stalk her regular blog, but want more more more. If you want to know why I made Spam and French-Fry Casserole, you have to read first this entry, and then this entry, and all will be made clear. If, on the other hand, you just want to see what a casserole made of spam, frozen french fries, sour cream, cheese, condensed cream of chicken soup, CORN FLAKES, and a couple token veggies looks like, wait no longer. Here it is, in all its glory:

See? I’m just not normal.

Not that this is news.

Spam and French-fry Casserole: in case you had any delusions that I’m normal is a post from: The Mom Food Project

And I’ve bought some little dishes for banchan, because I’ve been in love with those little dishes of joy since the first time I had dinner at our favorite Korean restaurant, Sura. At Sura, they bring out a dozen or more of these little side dishes, and sometimes the little treasures last long enough to be part of the meal, as they’re intended. My idea of heaven is small amounts of lots of different kinds of food, so banchan is a natural for me. Same with Indian thali–I just LOVE little dishes of food!

We gave this concept two tries this week. First, I made a Korean cold noodle soup. Bought the broth pre-made at Koreana, along with the noodles and the banchan dishes.

I put out a bunch of little bowls of ingredients to add:

Then we each added our favorite things from the little dishes (click to embiggen).

Later in the week, though, I decided I wanted to learn to make some of the items I get at Sura, so I headed over to find Korean cooking videos on YouTube, and hit the motherlode. Oh, Maangchi, where have you been all my life?

Maangchi is the embodiment of Mom Food. Simply and cheerfully, she makes the recipes of her childhood while telling stories of Korea and her family. She clearly tastes home when she eats the results of her cooking, and her love of sharing her Mom Food is palpable. (“You could palp it if you wanted to.” — Tripod)

I made most of the banchan you see in the photo below. If you want to know more about each dish, I’ve given the names, and you can go to Maangchi’s site and find out how to make them.

I bought 5 of the things in this photo at the store: pickled garlic, seaweed salad, Korean barbecue sauce, gochujang, and pickled herring. I picked the figs off Guy’s tree. I made the rest.

The bulgogi is from Bonnie’s recipe; kimchi is from Closet Cooking’s recipe; the kongnamul muchim (soybean sprout side dish), musaengchae (radish salad), plain myulchibokkeum (pan-friend dried anchovies), gamjachae bokkeum (potato and oyster mushroom side dish), and spicy myulchibokkeum all came from Maangchi.

Thank you, Maangchi! As you can see, we really like this way of eating!

Frugal Cooks Note: The recipes for banchan all make a fair amount, and most keep for a really long time, so beyond the fact that the recipes are cheap to begin with, they’re even cheaper because they’ll serve you for several meals. I plan to continue learning new banchan dishes and re-making faves so that we have a steady stream of things to fill our cute little bowls with.

Banchan: learning to cook Korean side dishes is a post from: The Mom Food Project

(Click through to enlarge and/or to see what was in each box; Flickr lets me tag each photo with little notes — I love that!)

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

This post is linked up in this week’s Penny Worthy Project. Go check out the other thrifty-living posts there.

My week in Bento is a post from: The Mom Food Project

All that’s left from last month’s big cook is a couple twice-baked potatoes and 2 quarts of potato soup.

This month, the plan is:

Bean burritos (a favorite; I’m going to make more like 4 dozen this time)
Chicken enchiladas
4 dozen oatmeal cookies without raisins (the kid’s request)
Tuna casserole
Chicken pot pies
A couple quarts of kimchi
Pork potstickers

Today, I’ll do the shopping; tomorrow the cooking.

The Big Cook, Take Two is a post from: The Mom Food Project

As you’re doing this, don’t forget the tag line: Food is not love. Feeding people is love.

Food is not love. 

Feeding people is love.

The emotions this stuff invokes aren’t actually in the food itself. Those cinnamon rolls aren’t Grandpa Food because of the cinnamon—they make you feel the way they do because Grandpa saved you the end piece with less icing, because he knew that’s what you wanted. The chicken soup your mother made when you were sick still makes you feel better because she cared enough to make it, not because of the soup itself. The food is a talisman of sorts, a way to bring to mind the memories of lovingkindness inherent in the act of giving sustenance to a child. If you don’t eat chicken any more, you’re not excluded from the exercise of passing that love on to those around you. You just get to do it with different foods.

We can’t bring back the days of childhood, not really. But let’s bring them to mind and honor them, shall we?

Why do I bring this up now? Because I had the great joy today of helping my brother to find a way to feed his own Mom Food — my mother’s chicken and rice casserole — to his son, who has a severe gluten allergy.

After Rick saw my recent posts about him and his family, my mom took him a pan of chicken and rice. When we were kids, my mom found this on a Campbell’s soup can, and she made it a lot. We all loved it. My brothers were like Jack Sprat and his wife — one loved the chicken part and eschewed the rice, and the other ate the rice part and gave his chicken to his brother. I honestly never remember which was which. I was a rice girl, myself, and can still eat the stuff until I’m packed as full as a house on Hoarders. Anyway, Rick got to wondering if he could make it gluten-free so that his son could eat it, and when mom mentioned it to me, I just knew it would be an easy fix.

If you’ve been around a while, you’ve seen me experiment with gluten-free cooking — heck, I even made a whole gluten-free Thanksgiving last year, as part of a Gluten-free Girl project, but none of that gave me quite the joy of making mom’s chicken and rice gluten-free today and having James tell me he wouldn’t have known the difference if I hadn’t told him.

The old way

See, Rick can’t pass on his Mom Foods to his ever-adorable son if they’ve got gluten in them. And nowadays, you can make just about everything gluten-free, so hey, why not give it a shot, I figure?

I’m going to give you both recipes: mom’s original, trashy, delicious version; and the homemade, gluten-free version, which is equally delicious.  The only gluten-containing ingredient in mom’s version is the Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, so really, all I had to do was make a homemade mushroom soup with cornstarch as a thickener instead of flour. You can do this, too. Easy peasy. Sure, it takes more time, but it’s really easy and worth it, especially if you have someone in your life who misses eating that particular condensed soup trashiness comfort food.

[Note: I usually make the big batch you see above, not the amount in the recipe below, but this makes a LOT, so I'll leave it at this in the printable recipe and tell you that for the bigger batch, I use 2 cups of rice, a total of about 10 cups of liquid (3 cans of soup, 3 cans milk, 3 cans water), and two large onions. The rest is the same, including the cooking time, because it goes into a larger pan than the 13x9 in the recipe.]

The gluten-free version

I’m testing a new recipe software on the blog, and this is a good test recipe to use, because it’s fairly involved. Don’t let that worry you, though — it’s an easy recipe, and you can have it on the table in an hour and a half, tops.

Chicken and Rice and Flexibility is a post from: The Mom Food Project

[OPMF = Other People's Mom Food]

Remember the other day when I told you about my brother Rick and the Caesar salad he taught me to make? Well, that got me thinking about his family and what Mom Foods we’ve gotten from his wife’s side of the family.

Debbie, who we all love, is a wonderful sister-in-law to have. Her mother Bonnie came from Korea, so in the twenty or so years since my brother and she got together, her side of the family has added a couple of Korean Mom Foods to our repertoire around here. The carnivores among us love nothing better than Bonnie’s Korean ribs (galbi).

[Photo courtesy of Selena N. B. H.]

But me? I could eat her kimchi all day and half the night.

A week or two ago, I did a photo shoot at our local Korean grocery store (for Oakland Magazine — I’ll let you know when the article comes out), and I decided I needed to make kimchi. Goodness knows we spend enough money on the stuff at the store; why not try my own hand at it? I bought a nice container to ferment the stuff in, a big head of napa cabbage, a bucket of gochujang (red pepper paste), and I was off!

Homemade kimchi is a thing of delightment. I have never had store-bought that could touch Bonnie’s, and I probably will never make homemade that’s as good, but I finally decided to give it a shot. It was MUCH easier than I expected, and not fussy at all. I used Closet Cooking’s recipe as a starting point, but I had gochujang rather than gochugaru (red pepper flakes), so I hunted around the web and decided to use about 6 tablespoons of the paste in place of the cup of flakes. It might not be spicy enough for some people, but it was perfect for us. A little too salty, but I gathered from reading some recipes online that it will be less salty if instead of salting it directly next time, I soak it in salty water. We’ll see.

Here’s the cabbage before salting:

And here’s the same amount of cabbage after adding salt and time (and then rinsing/draining):

Mix it all together:

Et voila!

We left it out for about two and a half days to ferment, then stuck it in the fridge while we were out of town for a week. It was perfect when we opened it, minus the slightly too salty thing.

The joy of this for us is the almost carbonated sizzle you get from a newly opened batch of the stuff. It feels alive or something. This batch had that tingly feeling, and while it wasn’t nearly as good as Bonnie’s, it brought me some of that Mom Food joy, even though her kimchi is now 500 miles away, where I can’t get to it.

OPMF: Kimchi is a post from: The Mom Food Project

Photo courtesy of Dimitri

Dimitri and I hang out on rec.food.cooking, and when he posted the following short essay on the newsgroup, I asked him if I could repost it here, because it’s exactly the sort of thing we talk about on this blog. He graciously allowed it.

[On a personal note, I cringed at calling Lupe "our 'girl'", but yeah, that's the way we talked in those days, and I want to thank Dimitri for the quotation marks, showing that he's aware it's not how we refer to folks now.]

Remembering Lupe
by Dimitri

I spent many of my teen age years in Mexico City.

Our “girl” Lupe had charge of the house and the kitchen. If I wanted to eat or to practice my Spanish I hung out in the kitchen with Lupe.

One of our favorite dishes was Enchiladas Suizas invented by and made famous by Sanborns in down town

Here’s how Lupe made them:

She simmered a chicken and stripped off the meat saving the broth.

She then stripped off the outer husks from a bunch of tomatillos and par boiled them for several minutes.

When tender she added them to a blender with a small amount of the boiling water and liquefied, adding several Serrano chilies. She then heated a little oil and added the liquefied sauce to the hot pan adding a minced white onion and several cloves (teeth) of garlic, allowing the sauce to simmer and stay simmering.

She then heated a pan of oil (maybe 1/2 inch or so).

The fresh corn tortillas were then dipped into the oil to soften and then into the tomatillo sauce then filled with chicken and some kind of fresh white cheese.

The rolled enchiladas were placed into an open casserole pan and placed in the oven with a small amount of sauce spooned over the top.

When served I remember she called the cream, creama agria (sour cream) with extra sauce spooned over the plate & the cream on the top.

A nice memory – once in a while I walk into a Mexican joint that smells like Lupe’s kitchen.

Guest post: Remembering Lupe is a post from: The Mom Food Project

My two younger brothers are awesome. They were great kids, and now they’re great husbands and dads, with beautiful wives, and eleven kids between them.

Rick’s the older of the two. There was a few-year period, between when I graduated from high school and when he met his wife, when we were very close. We would stay up late at night and watch Carson and Letterman and Costas, and play our own Psychic version of Pictionary (mole-asses, hee!), and he would ask my advice on what to wear on dates. I taught him to tie a tie, and he helped me understand differential equations. Did I mention he’s a major genius? And that I really like him? I mourned some when he got married and I wasn’t his main family-hangout-friend any more, but I was young, and I’m over it. I love his wife and their eight marvelous kids, though we don’t see very much of each other.

This salad always makes me think of Rick, whose recipe was the first I ever used. It wasn’t authentic: a bottle of good store-bought Caesar dressing, a tub of shredded parmesan, some store-bought croutons, tossed with a bunch of chopped romaine. Still, I had never made a Caesar before, and it came really close to the ones I’d had in restaurants, so it’s what I did for many years.

Since then, I’ve made tons of Rick’s version. I’ve also made the real deal, with anchovies and coddled eggs and a rubbed garlic clove. Then one day, it occurred to me that egg + oil + acid (lemon juice) = mayonnaise, and I set out to make a Caesar dressing of my own that wouldn’t involve raw (or nearly raw) eggs. Nowadays, I don’t mind eating a raw egg or two now and then, but at the time, I was newly non-vegan, and I was squeamish.

Anyway, what I came up with was another one that’s decidedly not authentic, but it’s delicious, and it’s the second-most requested salad at my house. (The most requested salad is wheatberry salad, which is the kid’s current favorite of all the foods I make.)

Later, I’ll tell you a little bit about Mike, who is also way awesome. I am lucky to have two such wonderful siblings.

Shortcut Caesar Salad

1-2 heads romaine lettuce, torn into bite-sized pieces, washed, and dried
2-4 ounces (to taste) shredded Parmesan or Romano cheese
a cup or two of homemade croutons (method follows, or use store-bought)

For the dressing:

1/2 cup mayonnaise
Juice of 1 lemon, or to taste
1 garlic clove, crushed
Dash of salt
Plenty of freshly ground black and/or white pepper, to taste
2 flat anchovy fillets, minced, or 1 teaspoon anchovy paste

Whisk the dressing together. Toss with remaining ingredients and serve. I’m not sure I really had to tell you that part, but hey.

Homemade croutons

Cut up some bread (almost any kind) into about 2 cups of cubes. Toss with a crushed garlic clove, a dash of salt, and a good drizzle (2 tablespoons or so) of oil. Alternatively, butter the bread before cubing it. Place on a cookie sheet, with or without foil or parchment for easy cleanup, and pop into a 400°F oven (no need to preheat). Bake, stirring every 5 minutes or so, until golden brown. Let cool on the cookie sheet before using.

Brother Food: Caesar Salad is a post from: The Mom Food Project

Around 115 servings of dinner food (not that we’ll only eat it at dinner)
Cost: $52.33 (not counting salt, pepper, and things like bacon grease)
Average: 46 cents per serving (more details below)

So basically, 38 meals each for the three of us; I’ll be interested to see if they last the month. My sincere hope is that I’ll be able to buy a standalone freezer soon, and be better situated to take advantage of sales and bulk buying. Also, it’ll mean I don’t have to be so careful about arranging stuff in my tiny little freezer.

I posted the pics of my newly full freezer to Flickr so I could tag everything with notes so you know what it is. If you click on the images, you’ll go to the annotated version. Go ahead and cringe at how messy the floor of my freezer is; I know I’m cringing. I was planning to really scrub it out before I started, but that didn’t materialize.

27 bean burritos, $9.80:
tortillas 2.89
24 c. beans (8 c. dry) — the whole recipe was 2.10; used 2/3 of it for the burritos: 1.40
almost all the tomatoes 2.00
1 lb. Onion .38
6 cloves garlic .13
bacon grease (free; saved from previous cooked bacon)
cheese: 3.00
.36 per burrito

8 quarts potato soup, $6.13:
5 lbs. Potatoes: 2.25
1 lb. Bacon: 3.50
onion: .38
celery leaves (free; saved from celery)
.38 per two-cup serving

29 twice-baked potato halves, $10.63:
(I made 15 large potatoes; one half broke)
Potatoes: 4.47
Cheese: 4.79
Parsley: .39
Scallions: .98
.37 per serving

Around 100 potstickers, $8.80:
Wrappers: 2.79
Chicken: 3.00
Scallions: .98
Water chestnuts: 1.76
Ginger: .27
.62 for a 7-dumpling serving

Kimchi soup, $9.77:
Kimchi: 4.99
Fish balls: 2.29
Clamato: 2.49
1.62 per bowl

Also: remainder of chicken, which made 4 burgers, 9 baked chicken thighs, and a big bowl of chicken salad: $6.50 (about .43 per serving)

Remainder of beans: $.70 (9 cents a cup)

OAMC: The Geekening is a post from: The Mom Food Project

Got plenty of sleep, got dressed in comfy houseworky clothes, and put the soaked pinto beans on to boil. It’s time for my first real once-a-month cooking (OAMC) effort, and I think it will be fun. I chose some really easy recipes for things that my family loves, so it shouldn’t really be much more work than getting a big meal on the table. I’ll let you know.

I’ll check in a few times, if I can. I’ll use a jump tag (if I can figure it out) so that this post doesn’t completely eat the homepage.

The dishes:

Bean burritos
Chicken potstickers
Potato soup
Twice-baked potatoes
Corn fritter mix

The prep:

Chop onions, garlic, celery, tomatoes, scallions, potatoes (for soup), bacon
Wash and bake potatoes (for twice-baked)
Cook bacon with onions
Debone chicken thighs
Grind or finely chop chicken
Grate ginger
Mix up salsa

Have a wonderful Saturday, folks. I’ll be over on Twitter goofing off from time to time.

—–

12:15pm

Taking a break. I threw together a pot of kimchi soup for our lunch (this one’s just a bottle of clamato, some water, some kimchi, and some fish balls), and now I’m going to go stand in cold water for a while. It’s not hot out, but with all the cooking and baking, I’m SO HOT.

Done so far:

Baked/filled/baked the twice-baked potatoes; they need to cool and be put away.
Made the salsa
Made 6 quarts of refried beans (keeping warm until time to make the burritos)
Made about 2 gallons of potato soup (still cooking)
Prepped everything but the chicken for the potstickers
Put all the veggie scraps in the freezer for future stock

Still to do:

Prep chicken for potstickers
Bake remaining chicken for lunchmeat and save skin for schmaltz
Assemble and freeze potstickers
Freeze soup
Assemble and freeze burritos
Cool and freeze potatoes
Bag up fritter mix and write instructions on bags

—–

5pm

Most stuff is done, though I’ll have to wait a bit to put the burritos in the freezer (they’re in the fridge now) because there’s a tray of potstickers in there waiting to freeze solidly enough to put into bags.

Because I shopped at Costco the other day, I had more food than I needed for the planned five items, so I ended up with more than I planned, and it’s still all going to fit in my little freezer, yay! Okay, not all, but some will be fine in the fridge for a day or two.

Here’s what I ended up with, not counting the fritter mix, which I’ll make soon:

27 bean burritos
8 quarts potato soup
29 twice-baked potato halves (I made 15 large potatoes; one half broke)
Around 100 potstickers (I’ll count them after I put them in bags and update this number)
4 quarter-pound burgers made from the leftover potsticker meat
8 or 9 baked chicken thighs
4 or so frozen plain chicken thighs
a bag each of skin/fat for schmaltz, veggie scraps for stock, and chicken bones for stock
2 quarts of really good refried beans
A quart of leftover kimchi soup

Tomorrow, I’ll post an accounting of how much it cost. In terms of work, because I sat for all the prep, and didn’t put any time pressure on myself, it cost me around nine hours of easy work.

Next time, I’ll do one thing differently: I’ll prep everything, put it in the fridge, and then make each dish one at a time, because doing several dishes at once means things sit out cooling for longer than I’m comfortable with. (Not too long for safety, but I have issues.)

The Big Cook commences is a post from: The Mom Food Project

And then I was sitting outside the hospital, waiting for the shuttle, peoplewatching as the farmer’s market crowd shopped and chatted, when a woman came up and sat on the bench next to me. She was eating strawberries out of a bag.

“Mmm, these are SO GOOD!” she said. “Want to try one?”

I did, and she was right. It was literally the best strawberry I’d ever had. She told me I’d better hurry if I wanted some, because the man was packing up, and his prices were good. I hopped up and asked him if he’d wait two minutes while I ran for some cash, and he said yes.

After I came back and thanked him, I asked how much they were. Two bucks a basket, he said. Want one?

No, I want five. And one of raspberries.

“That’ll be ten dollars.”

No, more, because I also got the raspberries.

“Oh, no worries. Ten dollars.”

So here I was with my lovely strawberries and my free raspberries, when a woman came up and asked to try the berries. I told her how good they were, and she smiled. I went back to the shuttle stop, and when she passed by, I asked if she had gotten any.

“Oh, no, not this time. I can’t really afford it right now.”

So of course, I gave her one of mine. After all, I had so many! She had bought two carrots, and I plopped a big pint of strawberries into the bag with them and right that moment, the shuttle arrived, with perfect timing, to take me home to my family, with whom I shared the best strawberry feast ever. We must have eaten over a pound of strawberries each, and they were amazing.

I freaking LOVE living where things grow.

Strawberries. Neighborhoods. Blessings.

Blessings is a post from: The Mom Food Project

The Recipes is a post from: The Mom Food Project

First, I realized this blog turned a year old a few weeks ago. Oops; didn’t realize it, so it came and went unheralded, but it still makes me happy. Also, the post before this one was my 200th! Again, didn’t realize.

Another great thing: No cancer! Blood tests and scans all came back negative. My first cancer surgery was in 2007; this is great news, as you can imagine. Okay, it has nothing to do with the blog, but I had to tell you!

In serendipitous food news, the Berkeley Bowl (@BerkeleyBowl) tweeted yesterday that they were having a special on flats of pesticide-free tomatoes on the vine. About 45 cents a pound. I jumped on it and bought these:

I made a big bowl of the tomato stuff with four and a half pounds of them. Hey, that’s from the first official post, so we’ve come full circle!

The rest I blanched, skinned, and turned into a massive vat of tomato sauce, with onions, garlic, veggies, and olive oil (click thumbnails if you want to see bigger pics):

And now, in the same vat, I’ve just made the mother of all pots of split pea soup, with a huge smoked turkey leg. It’s delicious, and it will fill my freezer. Recipe later, and photos, but James offered to put it away for me, and I took him up on it, so I don’t wanna bug him just now. He also made us grilled mozzarella sandwiches to go with it. He’s the best.

Not a bad weekend at all. How’s your weekend?

Joyful weekend so far is a post from: The Mom Food Project

I first met or even heard of Laura from Hey What’s for Dinner Mom? (@whats4dinnermom) when she was a panelist at BlogHer Food ’10 in San Francisco. I was captivated by her. She spoke about the sorry state of school lunches with an alternating anger and optimism, and all the time, her humor was in evidence. I remember her saying her kids had never had Ranch dressing. I remember a slight twinge of envy at her pioneer-woman ways. (No, not THAT pioneer woman.)

I’m a city girl at heart. Born and raised in the suburbs of the ’60s-and-’70s navy-base lifestyle, I am now a happy urbanite. Still, if you read Laura for long, I dare you not to think it would be totally cool to:

make your own bacon;

All photos courtesy of Hey What's for Dinner Mom?

turn your dandelions into jelly;

or maybe forage for fiddleheads in Alaska.

Laura is a lovely, hardworking woman with a strong heart and a sharp mind. You should check out her writing. And if you have the soul of a bargain-hunter the way she and I do, you should stop in on Sundays for the Penny Worthy Project.

Thank you, Laura, for caring about the world, your loved ones, and your bloggy friends. I for one appreciate it.

Follow Friday: Hey What’s for Dinner Mom? is a post from: The Mom Food Project

She was serious.

This recipe was surprisingly non-fussy, considering all the ingredients, and I think you’ll agree that it makes an attractive burger.

Dorie wrote about this burger in 2008, if you want to read more.

I thought it was okay, but I’m not a huge fan of tarragon. The kid, who is usually suspicious of leafy green things in her food, decided to take a photo to tell you all what she thought of it.

Since I had three (and only three) gorgeous Asiago buns to use for this dinner, I made three burgers out of what was supposed to make four. These were HUMONGOUS burgers. Again, the kid was vocal in her approval of this move. I left half of mine in the fridge for later. Some elves or something must have come in the night and taken it off my hands.

The burger may have only gotten a 67% approval rate, but the onion marmalade was an unqualified hit. Silky, delicate, with a lovely texture. I’ll do it again.

I’m happy to be back in the French Fridays saddle. If you want to see other folks’ treatment of this burger recipe, check out the Leave Your Link post.

FFwD: Cafe Salle Pleyel Burger is a post from: The Mom Food Project

I asked her to list her top 7 favorite foods, but asked her to choose from the less expensive end of our menus—no big slabs of meat—and to choose things that will freeze easily. She found this fun, and we sat for maybe an hour trying to think of all her favorite things. Once we had a list of things she loved, you can imagine that this big cooking day was starting to sound more attractive to her, and she offered—offered!—to help with it. I added one (spaghetti sauce) and deleted a couple from her list (I’ll make lasagna next month with the saved sauce) but she’ll be happy with the end result, I think.

So. Drumroll, please. This is our list of foods for next week’s cooking. I’ll be shopping on Thursday the 1st, organizing and picking up last-minute produce on Saturday, and COOKING ALL THE THINGS on Sunday.

1) Twice-baked potatoes
2) Cheeseburger buns
3) Homemade chicken potstickers
4) Bean burritos
5) Potato soup
6) Spaghetti sauce
7) The baking mix for making corn fritters (they’re not good frozen, but she’d like to be able to add the wet ingredients and make them when she’s in the mood for them)

We’re going to make four meals’ worth (roughly) of each food (more than that for the burritos, because they’re good lunches), so we’ve got around a month’s worth of dinners here.

If anyone wants to see my hilariously fussy shopping list for all this, do let me know and I’ll post it on Saturday.

Once-a-month Cooking: The plan is a post from: The Mom Food Project