Suck It, Red Lobster. Suck It With Whatever Part Lobsters Traditionally Use To Suck Things

So, I have not been doing this unprocessed month thing, because everything I eat is processed.  My tears are made of Blue #7 and I can hear Doritos grinding together in my joints when I jog.

So it should be no surprise that I love things that are baked and filled with cheese.  I particularly always had a soft spot for those little cheese biscuits you get at Red Lobster (I force Crystal to take me to Red Lobster, because apparently I am a bad husband and/or seven years old).  So when we were paging through cookbooks looking for all natural things to make, I scoffed a bit when we encountered a cheese biscuit recipe.  It can't possibly be as good as the ones the pimply sixteen year olds make at Red Lobster, I scoffed, what with their MSG firehoses and access to low-grade cocaine.

But somehow I was wrong, they totally are.

It's a pretty simple recipe, it goes like this. 

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (kind of a weird amount) of flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 egg
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup milk
3/4 teaspoon dried dill (we used wet, and also a lot more than that, and it was fine)
1 cup shredded extra-sharp Cheddar (we used non-sharp but it would have been better if we had sharpened it I think)
 1/4 teaspoon salt
1 grind (?) of pepper

Mix flour, baking powder, salt, and pepper in the dry bowl.  Mix egg, olive oil, milk, dill, and cheese in the wet bowl.  Then let their powers combine.  Mix, fill some muffin tins, bake for 10 minutes or so at 450.

They are good.  Here's a picture.

Oh man, I'm going to have to jog so many Pringles out of my knees for this. 

Day 10: Attempted bar food and Also I took Day 11 off.

Thursdays are a rough day to go unprocessed because that is the day we choose to do happy hour at our local bar. Luckily, our local bar has a nice menu.

It seemed like the burgers and sandwiches were off the table, because their breads and delicious pretzel buns were unlikely to be made in house. So I went with the chicken picata salad. 

I got dressing on the side, and even asked the waitress about the chicken and she assured me that it was made in house and not a chunk of frozen processed chicken. I think I did ok for bar food. So not by best day, but salads are better than boneless chicken wings. 

Also we had friends in town on Day 11, so i gave up my crusade for a while. Who can resist Hot Doug's?

Day 9: Pumpkin pie!

This is why we can't have nice blogs: I got busy for a while, got behind on the blogosphere and then got overwhelmed by the amount of blogging I didn't do. Here's a flurry of catch up posts:

The leftovers from both the chicken crock pot meal and the carrot dill soup got better with age, so many meals were had by just eating leftovers of those things. In the mean time, I decided to make a pumpkin pie. This process was spread out over the course of days 6 though 9 of this month, but I'll put it all here:

Day 6: Roasted the pumpkin at 400'C until it got all soft along with the squash. I then scooped out the meat and put it in a bowl.

Day 7: Mulled whether to make said pumpkin goo into a pie, cookies or bread. Researched pie crust

Day 8: Decided to pull the trigger on making a pie. Started the dough for the crust. Typically, I use a food processor to make pie crusts, but they never really live up to my dreams of buttery flaky crust. Evidently, that's because I let the food processor mash the frozen butter into dust and flaky pie crust requires PEA SIZED CHUNKS. And pea sized chunks require a pastry blender. Imagine that a whisk and a potato masher had a baby, and you have yourself a pastry blender. I used the crust recipe linked under pea sized chunks but halved as I only wanted a bottom crust. I left the dough ball in the fridge overnight.

Day 9: I made the filling as a bastardization of several recipes. Here's my best recollection:

3/4 cup agave syrup, for low glycemic action1 tsp cinnamon1/2 tsp salt1/2 tsp ground ginger1/4 tsp ground cloves2 eggs, beaten1 15 oz can of pure pumpkin1 cup 1% milk (because evaporated milk seems totally counter to this exercise. but apparently the guy who wrote the rules thinks milk might not qualify. I have to disagree, perhaps out of desperation)I mixed all of the things together in my kitchenade mixer and then proceeded to make the crust. 

I also rolled out the crust, with my trusty marble rolling pin i had stuck in the freezer to chill. Finer points:
- keep everything really well floured and cold. butter melting into the flour before it hits the oven is death.
- to keep thinks round, rotate the crust a quarter turn between rolling. trust me it works.
- the crust recipe said to cut it into a 12 inch circle, but that was a little shallow for my pie plate.

I linked the pie plate with the crust and filled it with the filling and baked it at 425 for 20 minutes and then 350 for another hour or so, until it set. I also used the remainder of the crust to make adorable ghost cutouts for the top (I put them on about 20 min till the end of cook time)

The pie was really good, a lot more spicy than sweet. But it went bad really quickly. I guess there is a big downside to no preservatives :) 

Day 8: Taco Chicken Bowls

Today's (or yesterday's I suppose) unprocessed recipe is brought to you by budget bytes, as suggested by my pal Kathy. She makes this for her kids and they really love it.

http://www.budgetbytes.com/2011/07/taco-chicken-bowls/

Because this is presented as a cost saving recipe on the web site, I thought I'd do a quick price comparison when doing this naturally.

Major differences:
- I paid $5.79 for 1 lb of chicken, because it was not on sale. (They paid $2.90 for 1.5 lb)
- The cheapest unprocessed cheddar I could find was extra sharp white cheddar for $6.99, as opposed to the $2.49 for whatever cheese they used. Quite the difference.
- Paid $1.79 for [flavorless] 1 lb frozen corn, as opposed to their $0.57 for 0.5 lb, and I used it all because I only had 1 lb chicken instead of 1.5. 
- You might be able to find unprocessed salsa in a grocery store, but I could not. Even the ones that claimed to be unprocessed had cane sugar in them, which seemed to be against the spirit of October Unprocessed. So I improvised by replacing it with sweet peppers, jalapenos, and tomato paste I had on hand and added water.

So, basically, I paid more then their whole recipe for the 2 most expensive items, and my recipe included a third less meat. Moral of the story: BUY CHICKEN ON SALE!!

I followed the recipe pretty much as stated in the link above, and I set up my crock pot on a Christmas light timer to cook for 8 hours while I was at work.

I have to say this stuff was pretty good, but I would imagine that it would be WAY tastier with actual salsa. Any suggestions for things to jazz it up in the absence of salsa?

On deck: pumpkin pie, and a discussion about peer pressure to eat processed and not particularly delicious cake in social settings.

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.

-----------------

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!