Day 7: Dill carrot soup

Lunch was more of the squash/kale concoction, and for dinner I decided to make dill carrot soup:

Half of a large yellow onion, chopped
~1 lb carrots, chopped
3 tbs butter
4 cups chicken stock (store bought, organic)
2 cups water
1 large bunch of dill, chopped

I melted the butter in a large pot, and sauteed the chopped carrot and onion until the water starts to sweat out of them a bit (5 min or so). Then I added the chicken stock and water, and brought it to a boil. The recipe I was using for this suggests 6 cups of vegetable stock, and I think that might be a better idea because I think the chicken flavor and the dill were fighting, and it wasn't as yummy as when I've made it in the traditional way. Anyway, I brought all that to a boil and then let it simmer for 20 minutes on low to soften the carrots. Then I added the dill and here is what it looked like.

I suppose that I could have stopped there, because that looks pretty delicious, but the recipe called for blending with an immersion blender and who am I to argue?

I got through about half of a bowl being like "this is sort of bland" before I realized that I didn't use salt. So, SALT TO TASTE. You won't regret it. Also I have sort of a sinus thing going on, so that could be why I was underwhelmed by this recipe this time around. I don't have Seth around to taste test this week. The other thing that definitely improves flavor is sauteing the carrots/onion for longer till they start to caramelize a bit, but that does take quite a bit longer (15 min or more).

Future: I  have a chicken/salsa/beans/rice crock pot dish and a pumpkin pie in the works. Hopefully I'll post about the crock pot dish tonight and the pie later in the week.

Canadian Thanksgiving Pregame, with Special Guest Anna!

This is an intro post written by my sister in law Anna explaining her attempt at making an entirely local/home made/chemical-free for Canadian Thanksgiving. Anna and her husband make ALL OF THE THINGS ALL OF THE TIME, so I consider her an expert on these sorts of things. Enjoy! I personally can't wait to here how it went. Maybe if we beg she'll include some recipes.

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I want to start by thanking Crystal for inviting me into her blog – I feel honored! This is part 1 (hopefully of 2) of my triumphs and challenges trying to cook an all(mostly) locally grown, no-chemicals, Thanksgiving dinner from scratch.

I should mention that I live in Canada – Canadian Thanksgiving falls in mid-October which is a much easier time to cook a local, from scratch feast than the end of November (Silly America!). Our menu is a pretty basic traditional Thanksgiving dinner – Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beans, squash, bread, and pie.

I’ve been planning and gathering food for months. Between my own large garden, my CSA share, and the farmers market, a lot of our upcoming thanksgiving meal has been easy. We have in the pantry or freezer and grown with 15 minutes (sometimes 15 yards) of my house: green beans, butternut squash, pumpkin, potatoes, carrots, onions, and garlic. We also made a wild yeast crab apple cider with apples from a friend’s tree. We foraged cranberries from a local (about 30 minutes away) public wild cranberry bog.

About dairy products - There IS an Ontario dairy that we can get milk from (not raw or super local; Milk laws are very strict in Canada). We made some cheese a few months ago we are aging that will be ready for thanksgiving, and we will make a trip to the dairy this week for milk and cream that we can use for some fresh mozzarella, butter, and whipped cream.

The things that I am having trouble with have been; The Turkey! A friend was supposed to raise and harvest one for us, but he fell through. Luckily, another friend of mine gave me a number to a Mennonite farmer she knows, and he had ONE turkey left – a 20 lb one. Well, I suppose we’ll have a lot of leftovers – I pick it up on Monday. Another troubling ingredient – flour. I can easily find Canadian grown Red Fife flour, but I’d really like local flour as it will go into a number of dishes – bread for stuffing, pie crust, and my wild-yeast sourdough bread (for which I have been diligently feeding the starter for months). I have a very tenuous lead on local flour, but I’ll have to get back to you on if it works out.

Some ingredients that as of yet I CANNOT find locally produced – sugar for pies and cranberry sauce, orange juice for my family’s favorite ‘boozy cranberry’ recipe (but I will buy whole US produced oranges and juice them), celery for stuffing, spices, salt.

With one week to go I am feeling good – although this week I have to move, and have a 1 year old to chase around, so we’ll see if I still think this was a good idea a week from now.

Part 2 will hopefully come next week letting you know how this all turned out! And, whether it was worth the months of prep! Anyone have tips or hints for me in my local Thanksgiving challenge?

Days 5-6. Attack of the gourds!

The "fried-ish" rice from Friday lasted me till Saturday night. In an effort to use up CSA veggies (and because of my love of side dishes) I made squash/kale extravaganza:

1 acorn squash
1 spaghetti squash
1 bunch of curly leaved kale
6 garlic cloves
1 lime

I cut the squashes in half and cleaned out the seeds and middle goo. (I also had a pie pumpkin that I baked, which will become pie or cookies in the not too distant future.) I saved and washed the seeds for roasting later. I sprayed the squash halves with olive oil using a Misto and baked them at 350 until they were soft enough to easily pierce with a fork (about 45 minutes or so).

While they were roasting, I warmed a couple of table spoons of oil in a pan on medium heat, peeled and coarsely chopped the garlic. I prepared the kale by cutting out the center vein and chopping up the leaves. I sautéed the garlic in the oil until the pieces were golden brown (5 ish minutes, make sure to keep the temp low enough so they cook slowly and don't burn) and then added the chopped kale. When the squash was roasted, I scooped out the meat into a bowl and mashed it together to make it uniform. After the kale was cooked, I added the squash, and squeezed both lime halves into the mix to add some zing and [kosher] salted to taste. I tried a bit of this for dinner after finishing the fried rice and it was pretty good, but then again I am a sucker for both kale and squash. I so want to try spaghetti squash with tomato sauce now. I also had some leftover tonight for dinner, and since i was microwaving it anyway, I threw a piece of provolone (yes I checked the ingredients) on top, turning it into a crazy awesome comfort food.

Then, to provide myself with a much-needed salty snack, I washed the gourd goo off of the seeds then boiled them in salted water for 10 minutes. I dried them off, combined them with 1/2 tsp olive oil and kosher salt and spread them on a baking pan and roasted them at 350'C for about 15 minutes. I would check them every 5 or so to make sure they're not burnt. They were really crispy and awesome when I took them out of the oven, but i put them in a tupperware container too early, so they got subsequently soggy. DONT BE LIKE ME! WAIT TO PUT THEM AWAY!

Also, backing up to lunch today, I had a lovely Greek salad with my friend Lauren after working out that was basically greens, grape tomatoes, cucumber, kalamata olives, oil and vinegar dressing she made herself and feta cheese. Disclaimer: said cheese did have some cheating goodness, but I'm going to ignore that. Shhh! She also made some kickass hummus (with organic canned chick peas that lack preservatives) and gluten free whole grain crackers, which were prominently labeled as "made with love".

So, past my Friday freakout, eating unprocessed this weekend has been pretty awesome! Stay tuned for a special guest post by my sister-in-law Anna!

October Unprocessed Day 4: I can't eat anything in my cabinet and fried rice, sort of..

Being that I did not cook Thursday night, I was dismayed to find that I had nothing to bring to lunch Friday and very little motivation to make something unprocessed. Sandwich? No, I still had not baked, and the Brownberry sandwich thins that we had on hand are chock full of preservatives and other chemical-sounding things: calcium propionate, sorbic acid, monoglycerides, datem, citric acid, cellulose gum, xantham gum, reb A (evidently something related to stevia), corn starch, soy lethicin, soy flour.

I will never understand why bread requires sweetener in it. I make bread at home and it doesn't have any, and because I use a no knead recipe, I don't even use it to activate the yeast. Oh well. I've always found store-bought bread rather suspect after having been spoiled to death by my grandma's home made bread.

Ok, so no sandwich for me. Chicken salad? Nope. The Kirkland canned chicken includes such hits as modified food starch (vague much?) and sodium phosphates.

Hummus and veggies? Forget it. Sabra hummus has potassium sorbate. What about "Fresh 100% natural" greek yogurt spinach and artichoke dip? Nope: carob bean gum, citric acid, calcium chloride, agar, pectin (the previous 2 were listed under the greek yogurt ingredients, bullshit!), and finally xantham gum. Seeming less natural now that I read the label.

I did however have some fresh salad greens and a sweet Italian roaster pepper in the fridge, so I make a quick salad out of that and some of the aforementioned giardiniera, the only condiminent that is safe. No salad dressing, because the stuff I had on hand contains maltodextrin, xantham gum, autolyzed yeast extract (which i'm sure is delicious) calcium disodium EDTA, caramel color, and annato extract.

I was a little discouraged by this process, so when I went to make dinner in the evening, I went on a label reading crusade.

Cholula hot sauce? Xantham gum.
Goya chick peas? more disodium EDTA, for color retention... really? chick peas are practically colorless.
Basically all the condiments have all of the preservatives (not shocking)
Iodized salt? sodium silicoaluminate, sodium thosulfate, potassium iodide.
Canned soups: I did not even bother to look.
That apple sauce from yesterday's post: ascorbic acid!! I'm saying it's ok though, because that's merely vitamin C and i have some airborne tablets in the bathroom so I could totally make it at home :-P

And the most disturbing one to me at least: 
Preshredded cheese: potato starch, corn starch, and calcium sulfate to prevent caking and natamycin to inhibit mold. THERES ANTIFUNGALS IN MY CHEESE, WTF?!

So I WAS A LITTLE DISCOURAGED. And needed to go grocery shopping. But I was able to whip together a nice "faux fried rice"

1 cup basmati rice
4 carrots, peeled and chopped
4 jalapeños, chopped
whatever sweet peppers i had around, chopped. I don't remember how many.
2 daikon radishes, peeled and chopped
1 gigantic scallion
2 tbs olive oil
1 egg

I cooked the rice as per package instructions. While it was doing its thing, I peeled and chopped things as necessary, warmed the olive oil on medium high heat in a wok and stir fried the veggies until they were softening. Then I added the cooked rice to dry out the excess water, stirred for a few minutes. While that was happening I beat the egg, and threw it into the mix, to give the rice some stick togetherness. Salt to taste. Note the conspicuous absence of soy sauce, because it is a condiment and therefore is not an option during the month of October. It was actually a lot tastier than i thought it would be, due to the scallion and the jalapeños. I ate way too much of it but still had leftovers for today.

This week is really brining home just how out of the habit of reading labels I've gotten. When I first started this blog originally, I was trying to do something similar, but mostly I think I just wanted to expand my recipe repertoire back then, given that I'm almost certain that I posted a meatloaf recipe that included ketchup as an ingredient. Anyway, this has been eye opening. I don't know if I'll always avoid things with weird ingredients, but I would like to be more aware that they are there.  

Day 3: Unprocessed the slacker way

Weekdays can be hectic, and I get unmotivated/too hungry to cook when I get home. Luckily, I live in a major city with access to lots of really awesome places to eat quality food. So yesterday I went out to lunch and ordered in for dinner.

Lunch @ Uncommon ground on Devon, supposedly the "world's greenest restaurant" in 2011 anyway. I had some lovely perch tacos and a green salad.

Dinner from Sultan's Market on Clark, Tasty, fresh falafel and spinach pie.

I suppose I don't 100% for sure know that everything was 100% unprocessed, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Also frankly, the other realistic dinner option was decidedly processed.

But to make up for the lack of interesting things in this article, I will include the aforementioned banana bread recipe from my mother in law. 

Banana bread:

3 ripe bananas
1 c. sugar
1/2 c. applesauce
2 eggs
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tbsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 c. flour (i use one cup white, one cup whole wheat)

Place bananas in large bowl and mash with electric mixer. Stir in the sugar and let stand 15 minutes. Add the apple sauce and eggs and beat well. Beat in the baking soda, baking powder, salt and vanilla, then gradually beat in the flour, mixing thoroughly. Pour into a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan that has been coated with nonstick spray.

Bake at 350°F for 1 hour or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the loaf comes out clean. Remove from oven and let stand 10 minutes before removing from the pan.

Makes 1 loaf.

The recipe is super versatile. I have added walnuts, chocolate chips, dried cherries, chopped rhubarb cinnamon. I've also subbed ripe pears for the bananas. I'm willing to bet most fruits would go well in here. My fav. combo was pear bread with dried cherries, but banana rhubarb comes in a close second.

Also, it occurs to me that i never checked the apple sauce jar for preservative content. Damn you unprocessed October!

 

Unprocessed October Days 1 and 2: how I learned that not all canned/boxed foods are evil

Day 1 was sort of a comedy of errors.

I don't usually eat breakfast, so that was easy enough. Coffee, milk, raw sugar. Done. One could assume that I have this every day for breakfast unless otherwise noted.

Also I had some home made banana bread at work. I'll post that recipe in the future.

I thought I was being good by bringing some leftovers that I had made over the weekend, a dish my grandma makes that I will lovingly refer to as "eggplant goo" because I have no idea how to spell it in italian:

4-5 cups of eggplant chopped into cubes
6 small sweet peppers
6 cloves of garlic
4 oz can of tomato paste
12 oz can of diced tomatoes

Salt the eggplant cubes and set aside while you're chopping/cooking the other stuff.  I used 4-5 long skinny Japanese eggplants from the CSA. One regular large eggplant should do it. I don't bother peeling them. Chop the peppers into small pieces. I used red italian roasters, yellow flavorburst, and chocolate peppers (CSA). Heat about a 1 tbs of olive oil in a skillet, and sauté bell peppers till they get soft on medium heat. (Covering them speeds up the process, because they get sort of pseudo steamed.) Add the garlic and the eggplant and sauté until the eggplant loses structural integrity. Then add the cans of tomato goodness, bring to a boil, and let simmer on low for 20 min or so. This dish gets better the longer it sautés or ever sits in the fridge.

I would typically eat this spread on fresh bread but i was lazy and didn't bake, so I had it with some whole wheat noodles. Seems legit right?

So I'm eating lunch on October 1, and I'm thinking that I made this stuff on Saturday and did not check an of the labels of the things I used. I assumed that they were all chock full of some sort of preservatives. I was sad and we had a Groupon so we went out for sushi, which seemed relatively clean but who knows what they put in those delicious sauces. And I had some very clearly processed Boy Scout caramel corn. Only later did I decide to check the labels:

Organic Costco brand tomato paste and diced tomatoes only had one ingredient: diced tomatoes.

Barilla whole grain noodles: Whole grain durum wheat flour, Semolina durum wheat flour,  oat fiber.

Evidently, lunch was preservative free. Lesson learned.

Day 2 was less interesting. I ate the same thing for lunch and then had potatoes that I coated in olive oil and dill and cooked in the oven, topped with home made giardiniera.

Cooking with food LIVES!

October unprocessed (http://www.eatingrules.com/october-unprocessed-2013/) was brought to my attention by my lovely pal Sarah. This event fits really well with the theme of the blog, so I'm going to reinvigorate this blog. I'll include recipes where appropriate, but the focus will likely be more about my successes and failures about adhering to the rules of the challenge.  After day 1, I can tell you it's pretty challenging. Hopefully Sarah will contribute too!