Squash, Chickpea and Red lentil Stew

Photo from Eatingwell.com

 Squash Chickpea and Red Lentil Stew from EatingWell.com


 I found this recipe and thought it might be a great way to use squash and get my family to enjoy it...they love lentils and garbanzo beans, so I thought I had a winner. While I found this quite tasty, no one else did. Jack and Brian ate it but Meghan felt it resembled baby food.  I served it over brown rice and because of my squash abundance, I doubled the recipe! The texture is a bit mushy and the flavor leans to the bland side but given the ingredients, this is what I had expected. Jack's suggestion, which I will employ with the left overs, is to add spicy sausage to give it a kick.

The moral of this story is most of my squash will have to be prepared to be used in pies and breads...I will keep those sweet acorns for lunches for me, but I guess the rest just needs to become puree. My version looked just like the picture above, but my kids didn't think the recipe was blog-worthy so they didn't want me to take a picture. To the author of the recipe and the photographer of the photo above, thanks, I thought it was pretty good!


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Crockpot Adobe Pork

This one is almost too easy to blog about!

3 1/2 lb boneless pork shoulder roast

3 T Penzey's Arizona Dreaming seasoning

couple grinds salt

Put it in the crockpot for 12 hours on low. Shred. Serve on tortillas with a drizzle of lime juice.

It really works to make this in the slowcooker without any liquid!!

I made mashed potatoes, broccoli and baked sweet potato fries to go with it.

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Cheesemaking

 Cheesemaking is something that has intrigued me for a bit.  I guess it's my ancestry...The Swiss, I suppose.  I thought that my first adventure with this should be ricotta....to combine ancestries and honor the Swiss and Sicilian!

I had wanted to try making mozzarella after reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  She details the process and gives some supply lists.  I haven't done that yet, but I am feeling a bit more confident after my first attempt with making ricotta was a success!

The September Bon Appetit has a section with instructions and also features a chef (Nancy Silverton) at a restaurant in LA at Osteria Mozza where there really is a thing called a cheese bar! This was the inspiration I needed to try to make ricotta.

We get our milk from a local dairy, so I ordered a half gallon of whole milk for the adventure.  The Bon Appetit recipe also called for some whipping cream so I got that.  The thing is, the cream was out of date and solid by the time I got around to making this recipe.  I did need to use the milk, so I did a bit of online searching and found a recipe without the cream.  The recipes I found all looked pretty similar to the one in Bon Appetit.
http://www.bonappetit.com/tipstools/tips/2011/09/mozza-homemade-ricotta
I just made it without the cream and it was fine.  In fact, it was better than fine..it was excellent.  Even the two skeptics in this house were impressed.  I had some fig jam and had a warm spoonful of the ricotta with it..delicious.

My next project in my cheesemaking adventure will be to try mozarella.  It seems like the whey can be used to make ricotta.  That's two cheeses in one:)

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Spicy Sichuan Noodles

8 oz ground turkey/pork

3 T soy sauce

2 T dry sherry (I left this out)

2 T fish sauce

1/4 c peanut better

1 T rice vinegar

1 c chicken broth

1 T oil

1 T minced fresh ginger

6 med cloves garlic, minced

1 t red pepper flakes

1 T sesame oil

3 medium scallions

2 c bean sprouts

12 oz dried Asian noodles

Combine meat and 1 T soy sauce (and sherry, if using) stir with fork and set aside. Whisk together fish sauce, remaining soy sauce, peanut better, and rice vinegar. Whisk in chicken broth and set aside ( I did this early in the morning so the dish would come together quickly).

Cook noodles according to pkg directions.

In a skillet cook the meat in oil until cooked. Stir in ginger, garlic and red pepper flakes for 1 minute or so. Add the broth mixture and bring to a boil. Simmer for a few minutes and stir in sesame oil.

Serve with scallions, bean sprouts and optional ingredients (cilantro, limes, Sichuan peppercorns)

My family is a bit cautious regarding peanut butter in any recipe (see my post about THE soup), but Paul likes this. Every time I make it Eleanor doesn't remember having it before, so maybe she is telling me it is NOT memorable?
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Potato Corn and Leek Chowder

 Potato Corn and Leek Chowder

I have an abundance of potatoes from the CSA, red, white, russet and sweet! I also received leeks this past week, so chowder it is!

This recipe is easy to throw together...I made it on Sunday for a Monday night meal and I doubled the batch. I used red potatoes, added a small jalapeno for flavor and used red/green peppers which is what I had. Being November, I also used frozen corn.

The family was once again split on this recipe.  Meghan and I thought it was good, Jack and Brian thought it was bland...in the future I will use a second jalapeno and perhaps handle the thickening of the recipe differently. This recipe called for adding the flour to the milk and then adding this to the vegetable mixture, I think I would handle this more like a traditional rue by adding the flour to the vegetable mixture and then add the milk.

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Baked Potato Bar

Lately I have been thinking about baked potatoes a bit.  Paul's work group often has a baked potato bar when they buy, cook, and serve at a local food pantry.  Eleanor said that it is a common meal at Forensics meets.  And, my friend Amy has just taken over the swim meet coach food job which involves coming up with people to donate food and meal theme ideas that can be carried out with little electricity due to the current room situation.  Anyway, I thought it would be a good meal to have at home some night.  Maybe I can sneak some leftovers into the meal without that being known (wink, wink) and use up the free potatoes my parents got for me at a recent Packer football game.

The tricky part for me on this is baking the potatoes.  I decided that I could bake the potatoes when I was home in the early morning and hold them in a crockpot until dinner.  Then, I wondered why I even put them in the oven at all.  So, after just about 10 minutes of potatoes in the oven I threw them all in the crockpot (dry) and put the setting on low.  It worked out great!  I'll do that again for sure but probably leaving the potatoes in the slowcooker the entire time.   That was the experiment portion of this dinner.


For potato toppings this time I used:

broccoli
sour cream
peas
cheese (bleu/cheddar)
bacon


If I were a bit more scheduled about meals I would probably put this into a regular rotation.  This would be a great way to use up chili, pulled pork, chicken, etc.

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