NaBloPoMoNoProFoNo #12: Happy Taco Tuesday! #RECIPE - slow cooker pork carnitas

It's Taco Tuesday!  We don't make tacos EVERY Tuesday for fear of getting sick of them (and man do I love tacos, so that would be sad).  We do make them a lot though, a couple of times a month. There is a ton of flexibility in both the taco base -- beef, fish, beans, pork, whatever -- and also in the fixins platter (more on that later).  But today I'm posting a recipe for slow-cooked pork carnitas tacos because they are one of my favorite things, and boneless ribs are frequently the cheapest meat at my grocery store at 1.99/lb (huzzah!).  I consider my pork carnitas tacos company-worthy, so if I ever serve this to any of you, pretend you don't know how easy they were, please.

TACO MEAT:

Slow-cooker pork carnitas
Recipe adapted from Cook with Sara, who adapted it from somewhere else.

Ingredients:
2 pounds boneless pork country style ribs
 1 large onion
 3 tsp. salt
A bunch of fresh ground black pepper (I never measure, I just grind pepper til I'm bored of it)
6 tsp. oregano
4 tsp. cumin
Chopped garlic: at least a few cloves worth, or more

Instructions:

Chop boneless ribs into chunks -- maybe about 2" wide, or so.  It's not super-critical since you shred them later.  Toss in the slow cooker.

Chop onion roughly into chunks. Toss in the slow cooker.

Add the salt, pepper, oregano, cumin, and garlic to the slow cooker and mix it around with your hands so it's coating the meat evenly-ish.

Cook on low for 6-8 hours.  (Note: you do not add liquid.)

We serve the meat in chunks and just shred-as-we-go into our own tacos (and also add the cooked onions, which are tasty).  Since ribs aren't the kind of meat you can trim before cooking, there will be little bits of fat and such that we just pick out.   

FIXINS PLATTER:

You heard it here first: every meal that can have a fixins platter, should have a fixins platter. For tacos, there are a million possibilities.  I always include avocado and lettuce, and then depending on what's in the fridge I also add shredded cheese, chopped green onion, red cabbage, tomato, red onion, cilantro, or whatever else seems awesome. 

TORTILLAS AND REFRIED BEANS:  Also requried for a successful Taco Tuesday. But this entry is getting long and already contains a recipe, so I'll discuss these on Thursday (tomorrow being what-I-ate-Wenesday, of course, DUH).

NaBloPoMoNoProFoNo #11: Disappointments - musings on foods that didn't make the cut.

This post is about a few products I'm either going to miss or cheat for as I transition to a completely (?) unprocessed diet...and times when label-reading unpleasantly surprised me :(

 1.  My prechopped garlic.  Food snobs, avert your eyes, but yes, I use prechopped garlic. I loooove garlic and I loooove being able to add lots of it without any effort on my part whatsoever.  I always thought this was just garlic in water with maybe some oil, but it turns out it has phosphoric acid as a preservative.  I mean, considering that the shelf life is approximately "forever" I probably should have guessed there was a preservative involved. Sure, I also buy and use regular real garlic, but I am really going to miss my huge garlic jar when it runs out.  POUT.

 2. My chicken base.  Call me naive, but I thought chicken base was chicken stock that had been boiled down to remove most of the water? Um, no.  Here are the ingredients in my chicken base:  

"Chicken Meat including Natural Chicken Juices, Salt, Sugar, Corn Syrup Solids, Chicken Fat, Hydrolyzed Soy Protein, Dried Whey (Milk), Flavoring, Disodium Inosinate and Guanylate, Turmeric. Contains: Soybean, Milk."

WAAAAH, so many unprocessed fails.  ...Corn syrup?  WHY?? (And what exactly is "flavoring"?)

I'm using it up because one of the ingredients used to be alive, but man.  I am going to miss this stuff, it is SO HANDY and I can't find any sort of chicken base product that passes The Kitchen Test.  I will begrudgingly admit that maybe chicken broth isn't meant to be in shelf-stable paste form. (And yes, I know chicken broth is really easy to make from a chicken carcass but who eats that many whole chickens??)

 3.  OK, this one wasn't a surprise per se.  I knew my Favorite Candy of All Time was going to fail The Kitchen Test, I just didn't realize that its preservative was TBHQ, aka tert-Butylhydroquinone, aka "wow they can put that in food???".  I suddenly regret all the bagsful of these I ate as a kid :/

 And just for good measure...

4.  I don't actually like these, but my husband does, and it turns out they contain yellow #5, a dye so nasty that its use is regulated/banned in other countries. I am seriously considering just throwing this bottle away but I guess maybe I should figure out a replacement product first.

NaBloPoMo #10: #RECIPE: Angel food cake

Angel food cake is probably my favorite cake to make from scratch.  Don't get me wrong, regular cake-with-frosting is good too, and I like making it, but it's so rich that I don't love having it hanging around the house, taunting me with its buttery goodness.  

Angel food cake is hardly a health food but as far as indulging in a special treat goes, you could do a lot worse. In the words of Cookie Monster, it's a great "sometimes treat".  I particularly like making it when strawberries are in season...or, year round because it's awesome. 

Angel food cake: the only cake that needs to hang upside down.  Like a bat!

ALSO, the scientist in me loves beating egg whites.

In the same vein of yesterday's entry about how much I love having a tried-and-true recipe to work from...I have tried a LOT of angel food cake recipes in my search for the perfect one, including the one from Alton Brown and the one from America's Test Kitchen...so you might be surprised to learn that my favorite, go-to angel food cake recipe is actually from (drumroll) the humble Betty Crocker herself!  

I like this version the best because it doesn't require cake flour (one less flour to keep around, my pantry is already pretty cluttered with the all-purpose, wheat, and bread flours I keep stocked, PLUS it's hard to find unbleached cake flour and the flour bleaching process is gross) and it also doesn't mess around with grinding up sugar (I like my food processor but HATE washing it). 

It's a simple recipe for a very simple cake. Love!

Angel food cake recipe

From Betty Crocker

Ingredients:

12 large eggs

1.5 c powdered sugar

1 c all-purpose flour

1.5 t cream of tartar

1 cup white sugar

1 1/2 t vanilla

1/2 t almond extract

1/4 t salt

Instructions:

Separate the egg whites into a clean, large bowl (you don't use the yolks, I just throw mine away).

Let the egg white sit until they reach room temperature - 30 min to an hour.

After that, preheat the oven to 375.

Combine the flour and powdered sugar in a small bowl, and set aside.

Sprinkle the cream of tartar over the egg whites.  With an electric mixer, beat on high until foamy.
After the mixture is foamy, start slowly adding the sugar while continuing to beat the eggs on high.

Once all the sugar is added, add the vanilla, almond extract, and salt while still beating the eggs.

Keep beating the eggs on high until the egg whites are stiff and glossy.  If you aren't sure if they're glossy yet, then they probably aren't -- it's pretty obvious.  Err on the side of overbeating rather than underbeating.

Once you have stiff, glossy peaks, sprinkle about 1/4 c of the powdered sugar/flour mixture on top and fold in using a rubber spatula.  Repeat this step until all the sugar/flour is incorporated.  Don't rush it, you're trying to keep the egg whites as fluffy as possible.

Spoon the batter into an ungreased angel food cake pan.
Bake 30-35 minutes.

After you remove the cake from the oven, hang it upside down so that the cake doesn't collapse on itself before it cools.
After 2 hours or whenever it's cooled, run a knife between the cake and pan and shake the pan upside down over a plate to get the cake to fall out. 
Eat, enjoy!

Note: the one inconvenient thing about angel food cake is that it requires a specialized pan. You need an angel food cake pan to make angel food cake and there's (almost) no way around that -- also, NOT nonstick because the cake climbs as it bakes (I have no idea why people even sell nonstick angel food cake pans).  If you really don't want to buy one, though, (understandable) Betty Crocker says you can make 30 cupcakes by reducing the baking time to 15-20 minutes.  Fair warning, I've never tried it.

Second note: sugar, powdered sugar, and I suspect almond extract and cream of tartar, are all considered processed ingredients.  I think I'm 2-for-2 on posting legitimately unprocessed recipes, currently. To which I say: Eh.  ~shrug~

NaBloPoMoNoProNo #9: Musings on trying new recipes (subtitle: they can't all be winners, folks)

This makes me kind of odd but I'm just going to say it: I don't like trying new recipes.

Like, at all.

What I DO like is cooking from old tried-and-true recipes that I've already tweaked and perfected, where I know just what I need to prep, how to prep it, how long it will all take beginning to end, and exactly what I'll be getting in the end.  I'm not one of those people who likes surprises, I guess. And I am DEFINITELY not someone who likes every new recipe I try.  Pretty much the only reason I even bother trying new recipes is in the hopes of stumbling upon something worth tweaking into a tried-and-true.

But, most new recipes just become a one-off "yeah that was fine but not worth making again, really" which is SUPER DISAPPOINTING to me.  Boooo. The vast majority (all?) of the recipes I'll be posting here are tried-and-true for me.  But in an effort to provide fair and balanced reporting and not pretend I don't have massive kitchen FAILS on occasion, let's talk about yesterday when I exploded a chicken, shall we?

The recipe was beer-can chicken, cooked in a pressure cooker.  I LOVE my pressure cooker (almost as much as I love my slow cooker) and I am always looking for new ways to use it.  Whole chickens are strictly weekend meals for us because of how much time they take to cook, so whole chicken pressure cooked in 30 minutes (steamed from the inside with beer, no less!) sounded awesome.

I'm not even going to link to the recipe I used, because well...here's how it looked in the end:

I don't know if the picture fully captures how ugly this meal was.  The chicken exploded (fell apart?) while pressure cooking.  Awesome. What you can't see is that all the herbs I'd rubbed on it fell to the bottom and burnt.  So it was an exploded chicken that was steamed in burn-y flavor.  YUM, RIGHT?  We still ate it because I pretty much don't throw away food, particularly food that used to be alive. SORRY CHICKEN YOU DESERVED BETTER.

NaBloPoMoNoProFoNo #8: Musings on dairy

Some thoughts on dairy:

The official October Unprocessed guide suggests drinking raw milk or at least nonhomogenized milk.

I have had raw milk before.  Even though it was served to me by the man who had ACTUALLY JUST MILKED THE COW I found it too gross to drink.  And I am normally very, very polite with eating anything that people have taken the time and effort to make me. So what I'm saying is that raw milk is REALLY not my thing, and anyways I'm a microbiologist and firmly on Team Pasteurization. 

Another unprocessed blog (100 Days of Real Food) says that processing of dairy products isn't really conceptually different than processing of meat or veggies by cooking them, so why split hairs? And I have to say I 100% agree with that attitude.

That blog is also super anti-reduced-fat dairy products, but I've always been partial to skim and don't really see a problem with that.  She also suggests buying organic dairy only, which I do sometimes but not always...I have a pretty limited grocery budget and I'm currently trying to focus my organic money on the dirty dozen.  Also, life is too short not to eat as much good cheese as possible and only SOME OF THAT is organic, guys!

 

Label-reading has been pretty informative, though.  For example, some sour creams (like Daisy brand) contain only cultured cream.  Others (like the cheapo store brand) have seriously six or seven more not-real-food ingredients in there (???).  Meanwhile finding cheese that passes the kitchen test has been super easy since I don't care about annatto (sorry, I just don't) and I was raised in Wisconsin and therefore have been turning up my nose at Velveeta and the like for as long as I can remember (seriously, NOT FOOD). Finding yogurt takes a lot more reading but has been do-able as long as I'm not too perfectionist about things like corn starch and pectin.

Um, long story short, I am not fretting too much about my dairy consumption during this challenge. But, as always, I am being more mindful of what I buy, including lots of neurotic label-reading. Like I  mentioned at the beginning, I'm wanting to make a reasonable and permanent lifestyle change here, not drive myself crazy (via cheese deprivation.  PERISH THE THOUGHT).

NaBloPoMoNoProFoNo #7: Slow cooker love #RECIPE: Slow-cooked ham and bean soup

I love my slow cooker.  If I were forced to give up my kitchen doohickeys one by one, I think my slow cooker would be the last thing I'd get rid of. (Although, I'm not really clear who would do that to me). 

Ham and bean soup is one of my favorite things to make in the slow cooker: it's definitely in my top 5 slow cooker recipes. I'm going to guesstimate it's at about #3ish.  Soooooo, I was pretty bummed to learn that I couldn't find ham that passed The Kitchen Test at any of our grocery stores.  Nitrates!  Nitrates everywhere! :(

 

ANYWAYS, I improvised and made this soup yesterday with bits of cut-up pork loin (cooked first) instead of ham.  I'm not sure what to do about the ham issue long-term since nitrates genuinely concern me and I like ham.  But, that's a work in progress.  It turned out really good with cooked pork loin, for the record.

Slow cooker recipes are not inherently photogenic.  TRUST ME THIS IS GOOD.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Without further ado...

Slow cooker ham and bean soup recipe

Adapted from Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook, my favorite slow cooker cookbook of all time despite its goofy name.

Ingredients:

To slow cook:

1 lb dried beans: great northern or navy, soaked overnight

1 onion, finely chopped

1 rib celery, finely chopped

2 carrots, finely chopped

Ham: any amount, from a few leftover pieces to a whole cut up ham steak. Your call!

1 t oregano

1 t sage

1 t garlic powder

6 cups chicken broth (or water, in a pinch)

After slow cooking:

salt

pepper

1.  Combine all the ingredients from the first list in the slow cooker.  Cook on low for 8 to 9 hours.

2.  Remove about two cups of the cooked soup and puree: with an immersion blender, a food processor, or a blender, whatever you prefer.  Add the puree back to the soup.  (Don't skip this step, it makes the broth delicious.)

3.  Add the salt and pepper to taste, and serve.  (How much salt you need will range from 1 t to none at all....depending on whether you used salted chicken broth or not).

 

 

YUMYUMYUM.  I consider this a dinner-worthy soup (clearly) but it also freezes well for lunches.

NaBloPoMoNoProFoNo #6: What I Ate Wednesday!

It's...What I Ate Wednesday! 

Breakfast:

Cranberry-orange granola. The granola was pre-made, but passes The Kitchen Tess.  It's from our "local" natural/organic store, which is actually an hour away, so we have to really make our visits count.  I am obsessed with their bulk granola section.

I also had milk with the granola. Maybe I'll write about dairy separately on another date. Short version: I have no qualms with milk.

 

 

 

 

Lunch:

Almond-butter and jelly sandwich, and an apple.  Everything is store-bought but passes The Kitchen Test.  Finding unprocessed bread requires a surprising amount of careful label-reading.  I'd love to always have homemade sandwich bread around but I'm not sure how realistic that is.  And sadly, I have yet to find a sandwich bread recipe that I love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dinner:  

Salad, and ham and bean soup! The soup slow-cooked all day while I was at work, and was ready to eat when I got home. YAY.  I'll post the recipe tomorrow.

I did use storebought dressing -- we make our own dressings sometimes, but we eat salads so much (almost every dinner) that we like the variety of having a bunch of store-bought options in the fridge.  Finding unprocessed dressings has definitely been a challenge and I'm not sure everything in our fridge right now passes, even though we've been trying.  But, one step at a time.