We have rescheduled the Iron Chef nights for the 26th of September at 6:00 at night.

See you then!

Hello Friends and Chefs!

Now that the busy summer is starting to pass us by, it’s time to cook up some fun of our own! Iron Chef Nights are going to be starting up, and you are invited to join in the fun! Iron Chef nights are a mutation of the old “Tuesay Nigh Dinners” with a bit of a competive and fun twist.

The first Iron Chef Night is going to be next Friday, September 19^th starting at 6:00 pm. We are going to hold it at our house (Jared and Chris’) in Carlton.

Here are some guidelines and tidbits:

· This first night is going to be a pilot night and everyone that attends can join in and have their say about how to hold future events. We hope to do them either every fortnight or every month depending on how people that attend feel.

· The theme for the first night is going to be “Summer Eats” bring anything you think that reminds you of summer. I’m going to make leg of lamb, lemon potatoes and angel food cake with strawberries and whipped cream (that’s a lot of food, you only need to bring one dish).

Here is some information about the Iron Chef Night idea:

· Anyone and everyone is invited to attend and join in the fun. I have personally intived people that were a part of Tuesday Night Dinners as well as some additional friends. If you think of someone that I may have missed, feel free to send an invitation on. This is meant to be a fun gathering of friends. Please do email me if you plan to attend the first night.

· Every week will have a “secret ingredient” that will either be selected by the “chairman” (a position not yet appointed) or by the group by vote.

· This is being done potluck style. When you cook, bring enough for yourself to eat (two or more people can cook together, as long as they bring enough for themselves to eat). That way, if everyone brings enough to eat themselves, everyone will get enough to eat.

· A silent vote will be collected after the meal to determine the “winner” of the week’s cooking maybe we could do a prize or let that person select the next secret ingredient (see, it’s still all in flux).

· It is very likely that this gathering could get bigger than being able to sit an eat around a table, so plan to eat on couches or maybe even sitting on the floor, this isn’t a formal thing after all. This first week, we have a deck we can put sitting devices on and eat out there (before it gets cold).

· If someone wants to bring wine or juice or something to make italian sodas, I don’t think anyone would object J

· It is possible that we could get in on playing games like Mafia afterwards.

· In the future, it could be possible to assign deserts, main meals, side dishes and beverages to people who plan to attend to ensure that the meal ends up balanced.

· Bring a copy of the recipe you used for the dish you made so that anyone can copy it if they want to. We can all expand our cooking knowledge this way!

· If anyone is interested in being the chairman, let me know. I will hold the role for now, but the idea would be to make a video or something with the secret ingredient and maybe organize or assign what dishes will be made by whom. They would be able to come without making anything or maybe bring the drinks.

Children are welcome just make sure you bring enough food to feed anyone that comes along.

Please do come! We are going to have a lot of fun, and we want to get together and become better cooks!

A friend of ours made a post today about how better and how much cheaper it was to make her own loaf of bread. Chris and I often have fun guestimating how much the meal that we are eating actually cost to make. And our new standard of measurement is a lobster dinner at home. We live in Oregon, so lobster isn’t the cheapest thing ever, but Safeway was having a buy one, get one free sale on them a while back and we had a lobster for each of us for $10. Add in some other ingredients, butter, veggies, etc., and the meal ended up to be less than $20 for she and I to have a lobster dinner and to share some with our baby girl (I guess she’s a toddler now, so toddler girl). Even if we had had to pay for both lobsters it would have only been about $25.

So now, whenever I go out to buy some food like a pizza or sandwiches from the deli, I can’t help but compare it to our lobster dinner. I spent $13 for sandwiches at the deli. Then I got home and realized I had almost spent as much as our lobster dinner on two small sandwiches!

Anyway, it’s sort of fun to try to add up how much all of the ingredients in a home cooked meal cost and then divide by the number of people eating it. If you’re watching what you spend and trying to stick to a budget, it should make you feel much better about yourself once you realize that breakfast for three cost less than a dollar!!

The other day I had lunch, as I often try to do. I had a roast beef sandwich. I didn’t really think too much about it, but later that afternoon, I was chatting with Chris about my lunch, and I realized that it was almost entirely home made–not just made at home from store bought ingredients. So here’s what I had: roast beef which Chris had cooked and which had come from her family’s farm, chedder cheese that she had made from milk from her goat, bread that she had made by grinding her own wheat (ok, we bought the wheat berries, but hey, we only have a city plot), and some mustard–the only ingredient that was purchased from the store. And the mustard is only store bought because I keep buying it before she gets a chance to make her own. So two thumbs up to my little wife who could barely cook when we got married.

I had some old cube steak sitting in the fridge, and I was trying to figure out what to do with them.

Of course, Alton Brown had a show completely dedicated to cube steak, so I tried to the Swiss Steak Recipe.

It turned out fantastic.  I pounded out the steak and then dredged it in flour.  I then seared it on each side until it was golden brown.  In the remaining juices, I fryed onions, garlic, tomato and mushrooms until they were soft.  I then added paprika and oregano along with some Worcester sauce and some beef stock.

After putting it all in the pot together ensuring that the meat was all submerged in liquid, I threw it in the oven for 2.5 hours.

As a last touch, I added cheese to the top when it came out.

The steaks were incredibly tender and fabulous.  We enjoyed eating them a lot.  I think that I even like it better than a straight up steak because no matter how tender the steak is straight up, it is never fork tender like a properly prepared cube steak.

We will be eating more of this in my house.  I plan to change it up a little next time, and I have just the idea.  I’ll post the recipe when it has been formulated!

Go out and buy some cube steak for dinner tonight.

I have heard here and there that raw milk is good for you, but I never really understood on a scientific level until today.

Every time I went to the chiropractor, he asked if I was drinking raw milk because it has the best absorb able calcium in it.  As soon as it is heated, it becomes hard for your body to recognize.  I also have a cookbook called “Nourishing Traditions” that I use, which really touts the benefits of raw milk (they are connected to the Weston Price Foundation).

Julie came over today to make some milk.  She doesn’t have a raw milk source, so she just brought the Lucerne brand of milk from Safeway.  We followed all the directions to make the cheese, but at vital stages of the cheese making process, it became clear that the milk was inferior, and that the pasteurization of the milk had actually damaged it.

She was making mozzarella.  Everything was fine until it was time to stretch the curds.  Despite the fact that they heated up to the temperature necessary for stretching, they remained in tight little sand gradual balls.  Nothing would make them stretch, not even with a lot of coaxing.

We then moved on to making Parmesan, and when the rennet was put in, it simply curdled.  It didn’t turn into curds and whey like it is supposed to, it too turned into sand curds and whey.  It was completely unable for cheese.

The good news is that she was able to get her money back from Safeway because the milk did not work, but it came abundantly clear to me that the milk I am working so hard for IS superior to what I can get at the store.

When I bought my milk goat, her kids were only a week old.  She had three kids her first time–two boys and a girl.  The lady I bought her from kept the girl, and I got the two boys.

At first, my intention in keeping the goats was so that I could raise them and sell them to a 4-H kid or a farmer that needed a brush goat.  When the time to de-horn them came and went, I realized that I was not going to get a worthwhile price for them alive.  I resolved to raise them as meat goats and butcher them for our family.

I was going to follow the French tradition of raising them for 10 months to 1 year and then butchering them when they were full-sized but still tender.  That would have yielded a lot of meat.

As time went on, it was becoming clear that they did not fit on the farm.  There was no real place to separate them from their mother at weaning time, and when I managed to do it, they were figuring out how to sneak milk.  It was a lot of stress.

On top of it all, the owners of the farm are going to have a baby in a week or two, so they wanted the cores to be reduced.  They have been downsizing a bit.  I figured I would chip in since the goats were getting a little out of control.

I took the goats out to the butcher on Monday.  Rather than be full Chevron, they are capretto sized.  Perfect for roasting whole or piecing into roasts.

I was a little sad to see them go, and it is a little lonely when I go up to milk the goat, but I got 3/4 of a gallon of milk from her yesterday, and Jared brought me home a freezer full of meat today from the butcher.

Because I am butchering them so young, I have asked for all he pieces of the goat back so that I can use them.  We will eat the liver.  I will tan the hides with the brains and I will piece other scraps out to use as dog or cat food, or stew bones or something.  I have plans, you will hear from them all.

the meat had not quite frozen up yet by the time I got it, and the bag with the skins and liver and other things in it needed to be handled by Jared.  I just need to get a little more perspective on it before I go tanning the hides and eating goat for dinner.

My story about learning to bake bread is a LONG and sad one.  When Jared was sick he was not allowed to eat any foods with gluten in them.  That made it very difficult to bake bread.  He really liked on type of bread that you could buy at the health food store, but it was almost $6 per loaf, and it tasted terrible (in my opinion).

My mission was to learn to bake my own bread so that I could not have to spend money on it, and I could make something edible for both of us.

Apparently, learning to make something complicated to begin with without the most vital ingredient turns out not to be such an easy task.  I had bad loaf after bad loaf, and I was sure that I was never going to make it work.

Now that he is feeling much better, he can eat anything he wants.  That means that gluten is back on the table, and I could start making bread the traditional way.  Let me tell you, that sure made it easier!  I went on making a loaf or two of bread for a few months.

However, I decided to grind my own grain, which meant that I was going to have to be making whole wheat bread.  That is another thing that makes it complicated and more difficult.

I must say, that I have succeeded this time.  The key was actually getting vital wheat gluten and putting it in with the flour.  It has helped the gluten develop in the bread so that it could rise and get nice and fluffy.

Today, I looked up a recipe for sandwich bread because I was getting tired of making French loaves.  The bread got really big and fluffy.  When I cut the bread in half, it looked exactly like a loaf from the store. I was proud of myself.

I ate a nice big slice of it for dinner with jam on it.  I was the happiest girl around.

I have been stocking up on milk so that I could make some fresh Mozzarella.  I have an entire meal plan surrounding the idea of having some fresh Mozzarella around.  I was going to make Capri Salad and I was going to make fresh from-scratch pizza.

The recipe that I have calls for 4 gallons of milk, so I have been stocking up on milk to be able to make it.  The recipe also is the same recipe for Provolone, only you are supposed to omit a step or two.

I was going along making my cheese while doing 100 other things as usual.  I got to the step where you stretch the curds, and it turns out that I did not omit the step I needed to.  I have Provolone, not Mozzarella.

Oh well, I can age Provolone over a long period of time and make it really last.  Guess I need to stock up on some more milk over the next couple of days and try it again.

I am a big fan of Good Eats. Watching the show has definitely gotten me to think outside of my normal range on food. I have even been willing to try foods that I would never have considered a few years ago.

Greens are one of those foods. I have a market share at the farmers market, which means that I have a certain amount of money available each week that I get to use. I will make another post about this at a future time, but the point is that I have lately been “forced” to get produce that I may not have otherwise gotten. Last week, I ended up with two bunches of chard and a bunch of kale. My plan was to cook the greens over very high heat until they wilted. I wanted to add some flavors that might stave off the reminder that I was eating greens. I was never a big fan of greens, even when I saw them sitting there looking edible every time I walked into a restaurant when I lived in Greece.

I cut out the center rib of all of the greens and then used my kitchen scissors to cut the leaves up into edible chunks. While I did that, I got my enamel Dutch oven out and put about a half cup of olive oil. I let it sit and heat while I cut the greens because you want the pan to be smoking hot.

As soon as I got the greens cut up, I shoved them all into the pot and put the lid on. It was a very tight fit, but greens cook down a LOT when you cook them over high heat, so I was determined that stuffing them in the pot would work. After a minute or so, I added some salt and some rice-wine vinegar. As they cooked down even more, I added even more salt and then what little bit of teriyaki sauce I had in my fridge (if I didn’t have that, I would have just put some brown sugar and some soy sauce in). For some protein, I put in the last bits of some corned beef that I had in the fridge.

After the greens totally wilted, I pulled them out and put them in a bowl. I was expecting to be chewing them and hating them all the way, but both Jared and I were surprised that they actually tasted quite fantastic. We cleaned our bowls without a problem.

I’ve even go some left over that I am going to cook some orzo into and then sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Operation Mean Green was a success. We can eat greens in this house now! It does help that Alton Brown did a show on it to get me to be brave!