[Photo by nyaa_birdies_perch on Flickr]

My rule for dumpling fillings is the same as my rule for sausage or meatloaf or meatballs: Dump whatever you want in there, but whatever you do, DO A TEST! If you’re making any kind of ground-meat dish, grind your meat and spices, blend it together, then fry up a little piece and taste it. Trust me, you will be glad you did the first time you taste your meat loaf and realize you left the salt out. Or added too much. These things are much easier to fix BEFORE you cook the whole batch.

Okay, lecture over. Steamed dumplings are super-easy to make. So easy, in fact, that I’m not going to bother going all formal-recipe on you. Just take some amount of pork and/or shrimp (I used a pound of shrimp this time). Add spices and something salty (this time, I used a whole clove of garlic, an inch or so of young ginger, a little bit of sesame oil, and a generous—perhaps slightly too generous—dash of fish sauce. I ground that all together in the food processor, then added a few tablespoons of minced spring onion for flavor and texture. Sometimes I add water chestnuts.

Once you’ve filled some won ton wrappers (this amount made around twenty dumplings), steam them however you steam things in your house, for roughly ten minutes. Me, I like to test them after about eight, but that’s because I love being a grown-up who gets to pick at dinner while it’s cooking. For steaming, I use a bamboo steamer, and I put a knob of ginger (or sometimes a stalk of lemongrass) in the steaming water, if I have it available.

Dipping sauce for these, if you want any, can be a bit of watered-down soy sauce with a few drops of sesame oil, or some Thai sweet chili sauce, or whatever you’d like to dip dumplings in.

A scant pound of shrimp made two very generous servings, so while this isn’t one of my cheaper meals, it’s not hugely extravagant, either.

Tonight’s came out almost like soup dumplings, so moist inside they splashed a little as we ate them. Fun and delicious.

Pantry Cooking Month: Steamed Shrimp Dumplings is a post from: The Mom Food Project

Now, for Chris’s post:

I would like to dedicate this Mertie’s Monday to Mertie herself, who passed away 30 years ago this week. She would never have made something like this, but I think she would have liked it had I made it for her.

I’ve been laid up for a couple of weeks in hospital, eating pretty bad food, and feeling sorry for myself. So when I got out earlier this week, I decided that I’d cook something in a couple of days and have some homemade cuisine. However, I must confess, the first meal I had when I got out was Beef with Green Pepper and Black Bean Sauce and Vegetarian Spring Rolls from our favourite Chinese restaurant. And last night HWMBO (He Who Must Be Obeyed, my husband) bought a Crispy Aromatic Duck packaged by Waitrose, our upscale supermarket (think “Whole Foods” without the high prices.) It was surprisingly good. But these are only asides.

A few days ago our favourite newspaper, the Guardian printed a recipe in its G2 section (daily magazine). Angela Hartnett (a hot-shot chef here in London) contributed a recipe for Sausage and Kidney Bean Stew.

If you’re interested in her original recipe, follow the link. There is also a nice picture there, much nicer than mine. I liked the look and the imagined taste of the stew, so rooted around for ingredients to make it for tonight. What I write below is my thought process when planning the meal.

I had British sausages in the freezer, and decided on a traditional recipe pork sausage. If you are not in the United Kingdom do not under any circumstances use breakfast sausages for this. I imagine they will not only taste terrible in this kind of sauce, but will ooze lots of fat which will make the stew stodgy. In the United States I would suggest sweet Italian sausage, or even hot Italian sausage. That will give it a tingle, and it will be closest to what we eat here in England.

When I looked at the recipe, I thought that limiting the vegetables to sliced onions might lack a bit of a crunch. So I added to my shopping list a bunch of celery. I have a bottle of pickled sliced jalapeno peppers in the fridge, and thought I’d substitute those for the chile.

So here’s my altered recipe, and HWMBO liked it, so that’s all that counts. I hate it when I cook something and he doesn’t care for it. After all, he’s the breadwinner and he deserves good tasty food because he supplied the ingredients.

Another substitution that I would be eager to make is pork chops or pork steaks for the sausages. Pork chops can be pretty dry and tough if not treated right. Imagining this stew with pork chops makes me want to try it—perhaps you’ll try it and report back to us. I suspect that the stewing action will tenderise and moisten the pork chops. Before using them, though, be sure to trim the fat and brown them on both sides just as I did the sausages.

Experimentation is a good thing

Note that while I generally followed Ms Hartnett’s recipe, I felt free to experiment. Some of the things I tried worked—the jalapenos and the celery really made this dish sit up and sing! Other things I tried didn’t. Too much Tabasco Sauce can actually be a bad thing and while it adds its own taste to blander foods, when you have something full-bodied like this I’d recommend leaving the bottle at the table and letting those who wish add some to their own plates.

I can’t stress too much: when you are cooking from a recipe, feel free to experiment according to your own and your family’s or guests’ tastes. When I cook with tomatoes, I always think “oregano and basil”, even if they aren’t in the recipe. I use my experience to do what in the physics lab would be called a thought experiment, but what I would like to call a tongue experiment. When you look at a recipe, think of other dishes you’ve cooked or eaten that had similar ingredients. Feel free to add things you like. Also, feel free to leave out ingredients you don’t like. If you don’t like anchovies, for example, substitute a bit of salt or perhaps some Thai fish sauce in the recipe.

The only things to be careful of here are not to experiment too much with things like baking methods for breads and cakes, or cooking methods for meat, fish, and eggs. If you’re cooking pork, make sure it’s cooked through no matter what method you’re using. Rare pork isn’t a gourmet delight. If you’re roasting a chicken, make sure that you use a meat thermometer and place it between the thigh and the body, directly into the bird. I have often roasted chicken or chicken parts, and plunged my fork into the meat and the juices ran clear. What I encountered when I cut it apart was a red patch right in the middle. The microwave cures that, but it detracts from the taste.

In baking think “chemistry set”. When you are baking, the ingredients should be accurately measured and substitutions should be made with care and only when you are a successful and competent baker. Otherwise, you may end up with a flat loaf of bread rather than a nice risen one.

In short, the stew was indeed spicy. It was very tasty, however, and the kind of a stew that really goes down a treat on a cold day. The blandness of the sausage was complemented by the complexity of the rest of the stew. It sure beats Bangers and Mash as a way to make a British sausage into a great meal. I hope that if you make it you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

Mertie’s Mondays: Experimenting with a Sausage and Kidney Bean Stew is a post from: The Mom Food Project

Menu plan for the week:

Sunday
B: Brunch out (laundry day; had bagel and yogurt and steamed soymilk)
L: In lieu of lunch, had a snack of sweet-potato tortilla chips and mango salsa
D: Nickie’s fish pie idea; shredded turnip-and-carrot salad

Monday (schoolday)
B: hobbitbabe’s suggestion of the noodle/egg thing from More with Less
L: Packed snack lunch: Granola bar; fresh fruit; trail mix
D: Tacos (or taco salad) made with SoyTaco filling and/or refried beans

Tuesday (workday)
B: Fried sweet potatoes and onions (or leftover noodle/egg thing if there is any)
L: Packed snack lunch: Four-bean salad; fresh fruit; trail mix
D: Shrimp dumplings with ginger and green onions

Wednesday (long schoolday)
B: Cereal and milk and fruit
L: Packed snack lunch: Trail mix; fresh fruit; granola bar
D: Some of whatever James made himself for dinner, if I’m hungry when I get home

Thursday (short workday)
B: Cereal and milk and fruit, or leftovers
L: Lunch with Guy at Cafe Med
D: Curried seitan; rice; chutney; salad

Friday (workday)
B: Eggs and toast or leftovers
L: Packed lunch: Leftover curry and rice; fruit; four-bean salad
D: Veggie burgers with tomato, lettuce, etc.

Saturday
B: Fried potatoes with scrambled eggs
L: Split-pea soup and salad
D: Individual meat loaves; noodles; cooked veggie; salad

Pantry Cooking Month, Week One is a post from: The Mom Food Project

Step One is to be very grateful for all the abundance. It’s not always this way in a house full of part-time workers and students. There have been months when buying any food at all was out of the question. I am filled with gratitude that it’s not that way for us right now.

Step Two is to use up some of this bounty so that (a) nothing goes bad, and (b) my food-storage areas stop looking like an episode of “Hoarders.”

This means it’s–ta-da!–Pantry Cooking Month!

In other words, for the rest of May, I plan to make as many pantry-heavy meals as I can, and blog about it.

In keeping with my past Pantry Cooking Month practices, I’m going to see how many nice meals I can make without going out and buying anything besides the small handful of highly perishable things (fresh veggies, eggs, milk) that we buy in small quantities anyway. Oh, and James will buy coffee. There’s no stopping James from buying coffee.

While the meals may not be super-exciting, I’ll try to keep it from being all tuna casserole, all the time, and maybe among us, we can come up with some great ideas. Once a week, on Saturdays when I’m making my menus, I will tell you what I’ve got on hand, and if you’re up for it, you can give me thoughts. Or point me to your blog, so I can make one of your recipes–that would be fun! Then on Sundays, I’ll post the menus. If I make your recipe, I’ll link back to you and post pictures.

This week’s stuff to use up:

Meats and other proteins:
Beef (some ground, some thinly sliced top round steaks)
Bacon
Shrimp
Chicken thighs
Seitan
Veggie burgers
Pollock (frozen)
Tuna (canned)
Salmon (frozen)

Beans:
Yellow split peas
Red lentils
Brown lentils
Refried beans
Kidney beans
Pinto beans
Garbanzos

Grains and other carbs:
Oats
Rice (jasmine, plain white, sushi rice)
Many kinds of pasta
Fresh and frozen potatoes
Rice noodles
Cornmeal
Panko crumbs

I also have plenty of most of the staples I keep on hand: flour, spices, canned tomato products, soy sauce, etc.

Put your thinking caps on?

It’s Pantry Cooking Month again! is a post from: The Mom Food Project

See? Food!

I’ve been neglecting this blog lately, as part of a spiral I think most of you will recognize:

1. Go too long between posts
2. Feel bad about that and decide you’ll post as soon as you finish a really good one
3. Get really busy and combine that with beating yourself up about neglecting the blog
4. Lather, rinse, repeat

Two things have brought me out of my spiral. One was seeing this video, thanks to Meriah of With a Little Moxie. I really recommend it (and I thank YouTube for letting me embed it in privacy mode; I hate it when outside content wants to set cookies for my readers even if they don’t click the link).

The second thing was deciding to make this post. It’s not perfect. It’s not polished. It doesn’t say anything you haven’t heard before. But it’s my way of reaching out to you, and coming back to posting, because I believe that if you’re seeing these words, you’re part of my extended community, and I want to be a part of that community in my own, imperfect way.

Oh! And here’s my menu for the week. Nothing too snazzy. I’m in school more than full-time, and working besides, so even taking the few minutes to write this post feels like an indulgence. One that’s worth it, certainly, but an indulgence nonetheless.

Sunday:
Breakfast: Potatoes and eggs and oro blanco
Lunch: Veggie sloppy joes
Dinner: Kimchi soup and rice (James prefers not to have noodles in the soup itself, but I like something starchy with it, so I’ll toss some rice in my soup and let him choose for himself.)
Monday: Chicken with barbecue sauce; buttered noodles; peas; salad
Tuesday: Black bean burger tacos
Wednesday: I leave for school at 8am and get home around 11pm; James fends for himself, and I eat at the school cafeteria or I take snacks to snack on
Thursday: Spaghetti and meatballs; James’s “special zucchini”; salad
Friday: James will make us sandwiches or something. By Friday night, I’m fried.
Saturday: Dinner out with Guy; James will fend for himself

Let’s not be perfect. Let’s begin where we are, be ourselves, and share each other’s joys and struggles, shall we?

Getting over the stumbling blocks is a post from: The Mom Food Project

[Photo by Loren Sztajer on Flickr; Creative Commons licensed]

Then Dad got stationed in southern Spain, where winter means the temperature drops a few degrees and it rains for a couple weeks. Then San Diego, where basically, the same thing. And I left winter behind. In the last thirty years, I’ve seen snow a handful of times, and winter essentially means the rainy season, but it doesn’t feel like “real winter” because we can walk outside without heavy coats, and nothing is frozen except the food in the freezer.

[Photo by elgringospain on Flickr; Creative Commons licensed]

I’m visiting my mom while she gets both knees replaced, and this weekend’s been a classic San Diego Winter Wonderland: Rain, wind, and more rain. The wind blew our rental car almost out of our lane on the Coronado Bridge, and last night, my nephew’s car hit a puddle on the freeway and hydroplaned across four lanes of traffic! (He’s fine, as is the driver of the truck he hit on the way back over the four-lane freeway. Oy.)

So it’s soup weather, and it’s pot pie weather. They are the same thing, no? I don’t have much time for cooking today, but I’m determined to make soup, so I’ll grab some meat out of my mom’s freezer, defrost it in the microwave, and throw it in a slow oven for a few hours to make soup for the family. While I’m out, I’ll also grab some frozen puff pastry so that tomorrow, if there’s leftover soup, we can have one of our favorite winter dishes, this lazy pot pie. Here’s one I did a while back with some leftover chicken soup:

I’m not sure when it became my habit to make pot pie out of leftover soup or stew. If it were my own mother making dinner, we’d just eat the soup again. For this one, I thickened the soup, added TVP because the chicken had been picked out (not mentioning any names, but it was the teenager), and plopped a square of store-bought puff pastry over the top. Talk about lazy! Sometimes I bother using pie crust and even maybe crimping the edges, but it’s no matter. The key is flaky crust and hot filling. The filling should be hot going in. Bake at 400°F until browned, over a tray to catch any drips from the hot liquid.

Mmmmm, winter is so delicious!

Dinner in 30: Lazy pot pie is a post from: The Mom Food Project

[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