Still Life Goes Fast

I sometimes buy flowers to decorate my home, but more often I prefer to decorate with what is available. Pruned edges of plants become a dramatic arrangement, dried crape myrtle blossoms are miniature "winter tulips", fresh blooms and herbs brighten a kitchen window or table. Bring the outside in, keep it simple, find beauty in something that would otherwise be mundane.

 As I was walking around the house a few days ago, enjoying the warm breezes through all the open doors and windows, I realized that I usually have fruit placed throughout the house (more in the cool winter than summer), and I thought of all the wonderful Still Life art featuring a bounty of fruit and everyday objects, so I snapped a few pictures.

Consider yourself warned: these "still life" arrangements go fast if you have growing children around. So why relegate these wonderful colors to the refrigerator? I say enjoy the beauty, meditate on the impermanence of life, and then have a snack.

Easiest to make instead of buy: Homemade Stock

When Fall arrives, I start making chicken stock again. Homemade chicken stock tastes better and is far more nutritious than anything you can buy at the grocery store. And it's super easy to make. Really, I promise. Basically throw stuff in a pot and let it simmer....and enjoy the smells all day. Strain and freeze. 

Chicken, garlic, onion, celery, carrots, herbs, peppercorns....add salt later after tasting.

The biggest revelation for me was learning that I didn't need to peel things or chop them small. Just quarter that onion and throw it in (remove produce stickers and wash off any visible dirt, of course). Chop a head of garlic in half and add it. Throw in some carrot peels. This is going to simmer all day, and the peels will add a lovely color to the stock. If you plan ahead, you can have a Stock Bag all ready to go! Use of a Stock Bag is quite thrifty and can add a wonderful depth of flavor because of the vegetable variety. I should caution you not to add purple cabbage, though, unless you want Barney-colored broth as my neighbor Abby discovered, much to her chagrin.

Making homemade stock -- especially if you use a Stock Bag -- is a wonderful way to Use It All! Here in America, we throw away vast quantities of edible food, and our house is (sadly) no exception, though we've cut waste dramatically in the last few years. Small changes make a difference! So if you have a few mushrooms that need to be used, but don't fit tonight's menu...toss them in the stock bag. Don't wait till it goes off and chuck it in the compost: SAVE IT in the freezer until you can USE IT.

The addition of some giblets to this batch produced a very small amount of foam which is easily removed. 

So...I never use fresh chicken for stock (except for giblets when I have them). Instead, when I roast a chicken (or very occasionally cook bone-in breasts or other parts), I save the carcass/bones in a plastic bag in the freezer and use those to make the stock. Most of the nutrition in homemade stock comes from the bones. You can put them on a sheet and roast them first for a richer color/flavor for the stock, but I am all about easy, so I never do this and my stock never suffers from flavor deficiency. We did make stock with a fried turkey carcass once and it was delish!

Note: if you do use fresh chicken, you'll want to put it in a pot of cold water, bring it gently to a simmer, and scoop off the foam, or "scum", that forms on the top. This foam is not harmful, but it will make your stock cloudy. So remove, Then add veggies and continue to simmer. 

Here is the "recipe" I use:

1-2 chicken/turkey carcass(es), including giblets if available (excluding the liver)
Good glug of vinegar (to leach nutrients from the bones)

Bag of vegetable trimmings

Add quartered/halved fresh veggies if necessary -- I make sure to have roughly equal parts of onions, carrots and celery, and then I add some garlic

 -- other veggies that work well include mushrooms, leeks, fennel, tomatoes, any greens, broccoli, zucchini, squash...you get the idea

Add fresh herbs if you have them (parsley, thyme are my favorites)

Add a shake of peppercorns

Add a bay leaf or two

Start it cold and slowly bring it up to a gentle simmer. It won't hurt it it it boils, but the "low and slow" will give you clearer stock in the end. Simmer for several hours stirring/tasting regularly. If you like, you can let the bones sit in cold water/vinegar for a half hour or so to pull even more calcium, gelatin and other nutrients from the bones. Once it has been simmering for an hour or so, I start to taste and add salt sparingly as it cooks. I do not add salt at the beginning because there are generally trace amounts on the carcasses from when I cooked them the first time. I prefer a lower-sodium broth, since I can always add salt based on what I'm making with it. Taste as you go to learn how the flavor develops!

Here you can see the stock after simmering for about five hours. The broth is developing a lovely color and the vegetables are quite soft. By now, little bits of meat will also float off the chicken bones and the carcass will come apart when I lift it with the spoon. This photo was taken at 4:30, so this stock will cook another hour or two until dinnertime, but I could certainly stop here if I wished.

When you decide it is done, turn off the heat and let it cool. Strain it through a colander, and put it in the refrigerator. The next day, you'll see that any excess fat will congeal on the surface in the fridge, so you can just scoop it off the next day. Sometimes I've made stock that had a jello-like consistency when cooled -- this is very nutritious and great for soup when someone is sick!

The final step is to strain it through cheesecloth and portion it into containers for the freezer. Nowadays I use wide-mouth glass jars instead of ziplock or plastick (just don't tighten the lids).

You can make vegetable stock by leaving out the meat. Ask at your grocery or market for beef bones or fish bones to make other types of stock.

Besides delicious soup, use your stock instead of (or half and half with) water when making rice, use it to make risotto, pan sauces,  use in mashed potatoes with 2% milk instead of cream, cook veggies in stock, sub for wine in pasta sauce, it is liquid gold baby!!

Seeds are the Strongest Magic

“Oh, heart, if one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers, but the seed remains.”  Kahlil Gibran

I teach my children that there is magic in a seed. Inside a tiny seed is a whole plant, which will grow and be pretty and give us lots of food...and it will make hundreds of more seeds that we can plant again if we wish. A seed is Holy.

Back during the August Garden Tour, I shared a picture of my lettuces going to seed. About a month later, when I found the dry seed pods, I finally broke one open and was amazed at the bounty. I started sprinkling them back into my garden since this is the perfect time to plant a fall crop, and then realized that I need to save some for spring so I won't have to buy new ones! This is my first year really attempting to save seeds of all my favorite things, like the Matt's Wild Cherry and Super Sioux tomatoes, the Rosa Bianca eggplant, and my wonderful lettuces, of which I hope to enjoy fall/winter crops here.

Above, you can see the flowers. When they fade, and all looks dry and dead, don't be fooled. There are miracles inside the pods where the flowers bloomed! Below is a picture of one cluster of "flowers" I picked and brought inside, so you can get an idea of size/appearance.

Inside each dry pod are about 10-15 seeds. I'm pretty sure they're probably Bunte Forellenschluss, which is my favorite of all the lettuces I've planted. The Buntes have beautiful bright green leaves dotted with a reddish-purple, and a lovely mild (almost sweetish) flavor and a gently crisp texture.  I did plant other varieties nearby, so this year I will be getting the luck of the draw! I'll have to update again when they sprout leaves in the coming months. Magic. Miracle. Life.

For those of you who want to save tomato seeds for the first time, I have learned that you cannot "just" save the seeds; they need to ferment a bit before you dry them. It's not difficult and Mr. Brown Thumb has a terrific picture tutorial so I don't have to do one!

I also need to note that only with heirloom plants can you be certain the fruit that springs forth will be the same as the plant from which it was harvested. This doesn't mean you can't save seeds from hybrids, of course, just that you should expect to be surprised at what grows! I mostly grow heirlooms because my goal all along has been to save seeds, but each year I do get a few volunteer (natural) hybrids, including one year something that seemed to be a Purple Cherokee plum tomato that was terrific. 

"Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow — perhaps it all will." Albert Einstein

Get Your Greens In!

For Christmas, I received a copy of "What Chefs Feed Their Kids" and immediately found a fun food game that our family loves. One of the chefs played a game with her children called "open your mouth and close your eyes and I will give you a big surprise!"  My kids love playing this game and have tried lots of new foods because it's so fun. I begin by closing my eyes and letting one of them give me a bite and I try to guess what they gave me; then it's my turn. It's most fun when there are a mix of new/familiar foods on the table, or where foods can be arranged to make tasty bites (like tacos or stir fry).

The recipe I'll share here is adapted from the Greens Puree in the book. I suppose this would be a fine baby food, if you are into making your own (I was not -- we just fed bites from what we had for dinner). It's also suggested as a nice addition to soups or sauces. I had other plans for it: smoothies! 

Green smoothies hit the spot!

I love to add greens to smoothies, but I also like my smoothies really smooth, not grainy or lumpy. Since I have still not fulfilled my Vitamix lust (those things are pricey!), I have not been able to add kale or other "toughish" greens to my smoothies, just spinach occasionally.

The recipe calls for a mix of kale, collard greens, basil and spinach with 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil, same amount of water, and 1 tsp salt. Steam greens on low heat for 15-20 minutes (till things are soft and wilted), then add herbs till wilted. Puree in blender; thin with water, stock, etc. 

Steamed Greens, ready to puree

I had a lot of kale and a tiny bit of spinach. We had a very warm February down South and that was not terribly helpful for the spinach in the area. I also didn't have basil yet, but I did have parsely and lemon thyme, so I used that. My bright green puree went straight into the freezer!

Greens Ice Cubes for smoothies

This is a great base for smoothies! We have added it to all kinds, but if you mix the green with berries or other red/blue colors, the final smoothie is tasty, but a very unappetizing brownish hue. For "green smoothies" we add peaches, banana, pineapple and yogurt or water. I've found if I save fruit in the freezer and use that instead of ice cubes, then I can thin the smoothies with water instead of juice and not worry about watering down the flavor.

Get more out of harvesting your cabbage

Sangria for All, and other uses for frozen fruit

Last week, I was making some white wine sangria when my four-year-old said, "Oh mommy, how beautiful!! Can I have some of that pretty drink?" Since I really love my cool and refreshing summertime beverages, I don't know why it never before occurred to me to use frozen fruit as ice cubes in drinks, but how pretty is this?

The "sangria" we are drinking here includes some limeade, pineapple juice, water, a touch of ginger ale and, frozen peaches and fresh strawberries. I freeze bits of fruit on a cookie sheet whenever we have an overabundance, so there is always a variety in the freezer and I foresee a summer full of sangria-style beverages here at Sunnybrook South.

My related "Use it All" dilemma: when the adults finished off the real sangrias, I was left with a lot of slightly boozy fruit, which I finally decided to puree in the blender and freeze into ice cubes. I plan to use them to make some strawberry/peach margaritas and I think a fruity cube would be a nice addition to a summertime Gin&Tonic!

Waste not, want not!

Fennel Fronds = Dill Substitute

I don't eat fennel all that often. It's delicious roasted, but honestly it's not a "go to" except when I roast a chicken. I love slivered fennel added to whatever veggies wind up under the bird. My problem is not taste; it's that I never knew what to do with those fronds and I hated relegating them to the compost when they're actually quite tasty. It really grinds my gears to throw away such a substantial (and edible and tasty) portion of any food, so instead of subjecting myself to gear-grinding, I just don't buy it that often.

Now, I do add a heaping helping of fronds in with my other herbs when I stuff the interior, but typically I'm roasting a 2-pound bird, so we're not talking about a massive cavity here. In addition to the herbs, I must have garlic and some citrus that limited space, so I always have quite a lot of fennel bits left over. Some can go in my stock bag, but I don't want the fennel taste to overwhelm, so I'm judicious there. 

To my delight, I've recently learned fennel makes a terrific substitute for dill! We use dill fairly regularly around here in everything from scrambled eggs to my husbands killer tuna salad, so if for some reason you never know what to do with your own fennel fronds, just pretend you found some gorgeous fresh dill in your vegetable drawer. According to the intertubes you can also dry it just like dill as well, but I haven't tried that yet. 

Stock is Cheap

Oh did you think I was going to dole out investing advice?  Nay, nay, not so but far otherwise.  Take me to my natal shore and the white cliffs of Albion.....oh wait, sorry, I got distracted.

Today's tip is the Stock Bag for the freezer.  You can compost all those end pieces of onions, carrot peelings and leafy celery tops, but it's an even better idea to use them to make your own stock.  You know how sometimes the inside of a garlic bulb is just those teeny-tiny cloves that are impossible to peel?  Cut them in half and throw them in your stock bag. Don't worry about the skin!  How about that one squash that got hidden in the drawer and is fine but a little shriveled?  Stock bag!  And don't forget to go through your fridge and toss in anything that you aren't going to be able to use that week.  Any vegetables will work!  The bonus is that your stock will taste like the season.

When my bag is full, I decide what kind of stock I need.  For vegetable stock, I usually take a look at what's in the bag and round it out with an extra carrot or half an onion (again, resist the urge to peel off the skin!) and a potato.  I add some herbs (if they're not already in the bag) and some peppercorns and let the whole thing come to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until it tastes right.  I do taste throughout and add a little salt.

For chicken stock, I don't use fresh chicken.  That seems incredibly wasteful to me.  Besides, if you use fresh chicken, you have to cook that first and skim the top of the water multiple times before adding the vegetables.  If you roast a chicken and use the carcass to make the stock, you can just dump it and the stock bag into a big pot with water and, again, herbs, peppercorns and bring to a boil.  Add a splash of white vinegar to leach calcium from the bones and let it gently simmer all day.  Taste and add salt as needed. 

When it's done, let it cool, then strain it.  One word of advice: do not put it in the refrigerator with the plan of straining it next day.  You will have to reheat it before straining and it will be cloudy.  And, well, why add all that work?  Often I will strain it in a colander and put it in the fridge and then strain through cheesecloth the next day when separating it to freeze.  That really doesn't add any extra steps for me.

I generally freeze mine in two- and four-cup portions in plastic, but am on the hunt for paper cups that will hold at least 1.5-2 cups.  I plan to freeze those on a cookie sheet, same as I do with the baggies, then put them in a larger container for deep-freeze storage.  Oh, and that Stock Bag itself?  It's a perfect candidate for re-use.  

Update: I now freeze stock in jars since I've built up a good stash. Do not tighten the lids until after the jars are frozen. Works wonderfully!!

So, start your Stock Bag today and plan to make some low-sodium, homemade stock yourself.  It's the perfect touch for making soup or giving rice a boost without extra butter.  And best of all, it's incredibly easy and doesn't take much time.  

And special thanks to my mother-in-law for this tip.  It's not something she does herself, but something her mother used to do and I'm awfully glad she shared it with me!

Consider the dandelions

So there I sat one night, sucked totally into some mindless show in TV.  I was totally drawn into this amazingly lovely shot of a girl, about to blow the white, puffy dandelion..  A Perfect Childhood Moment.  Inhale and.....

And then....
Then it ended abruptly, with her father running out (ineffectively, I might add) to try to stop her from enjoying that moment, so that his perfect, green-blade grass would not be destroyed with.....(oh hold your horses)...flowers. You can see the slo-mo "glory shot" of him yelling "noooooooooo."

Well, I was bothered by the whole concept of that commercial.

My kids love dandelions. They love to pick them.  They love to blow them. And they love to eat them (well, that varies, but they do eat them more than I would imagine).  If you had a country gramma, you must know that you can eat them in a pinch.  I've never done it, but I like knowing that I can.  They are incredibly nutritious. So there!  But mostly, they like to pick them and/or blow them.  I've always loved this myself.  The dandelion has adapted itself really beautifully for things we like to do.

Dandelions are one of the first flowers to sprout in the spring and they are so very welcome.  They are heralds of growth. They pop out with the daffodils and provide In-Your-Face evidence that Our Earth keeps on keeping on.  Then, when you're distracted by the other bulbs or flowering trees other things you might want to plant, they can grow big and green and cover the ground if there's nothing else there.  But really those dandelions would rather to just chill out and let the clover have its day -- to hide down there and meditate under the fragrant flowers and soft leaves (and the honeybees)...and the occasional lawn mower..  The word "weed" is very subjective, truly.  It just means "a plant that grows well in a place I don't like it."

So think about letting the dandelions grow.