Baked French Fries Recipe & Mudding

Steve continues to chip away at our bathroom project with mudding at the top of the to-do list.

Thanks to Steve's steady hand with the mud, the sanding process won't coat the entire house in fine particulate matter. The weather looks great this next week so the outside vent install is next on the list.

To fuel all this work I am spending a lot of time in this sunny place making food for the bathroom-project-weary.

One thing that always cheers both of us are french fries. Who doesn't love them? They don't have to be grease laden gut bombs to taste delicious! We are still loaded with potatoes from last season, which have stored quite well. If you've not grown them, give it a try this season and then enjoy this favorite food and munch away happily knowing they are pesticide free, baked and still absolutely delicious. Yum.

Easy Baked Fries Recipe:

5 or 6 medium sized potatoes (ours are Blue Gold, a nice firm sort of waxy textured potato)
1-2 tbsp Olive oil
Salt (1/2 teaspoon or so)
1-2 tbsp dried herbs and/or spices (sometimes we use dried basil or marjoram and other times we use ground cumin and chili pepper)

Slice or cut your potatoes into fry shapes. We are super low tech and use one of these to cut our fries. Put them in a bowl and toss them with olive oil, salt and herbs or spices. Spread in a single layer on a prepared cookie sheet. (very lightly greased or parchment papered)

Bake at 375 degrees F for approximately 40 minutues (or until desired crispness), tossing halfway through.

Serve hot and with ketchup. Yum.

Christmas Lima Beans and Homemade Tomato Sauce

One of our favorite meals is so simple and so healthy we had to share (again.)  This summer we grew Christmas Lima beans and tomato sauce ingredients, which we canned.  We just finished shelling the limas and they are FABULOUS! The beans are giant with an incredibly rich flavor and a satisfyingly chewy texture. Cooked and topped with homemade tomato sauce and a bit of grated parmesan and they are absolutely delightful.  Really.  Sitting by the fire, eating a bit of this fare and perusing seed catalogs makes for the perfect winter evening in Ohio.

Sturdy Low Tunnels for Raised Beds, Part 2

You will recall from "Sturdy Low Tunnels for Raised Beds, Part 1" that we've been growing a lot of greens post-frost. We have also been eating a lot too...the endgame! Here's an example of a simple recipe:

Easy Greens:

• Lots of greens, chopped coarsely
• Olive Oil, to saute
• Garlic (2 cloves, chopped finely)
• Chilies in adobe sauce (3 chilies, chopped finely)
• 1 T Sesame seeds, toasted. 
• 1 tsp. Poppy seeds, toasted.

Here's what we did, give or take:

Check each leaf for cabbage-white butterfly caterpillars:

De-rib the leaves, compost the ribs and stems, chop coarsely in a bowl using kitchen scissors:

Saute garlic and chilies in olive oil:

Add the greens, mix with the above and saute until desired (we saute at 5-8 minutes):

Near the end of sauteing, add the sesame seeds and poppy seeds:

Serve with bread of choice and garnish with cilantro (since we have a ton anyway!):

Gotta love gardening and greens!

Homemade Veggie Burger Recipe

Sure, like most of you, we have a shelf loaded with cookbooks but, like most of you, we sometimes get home and are too tired to even think about opening a book much less reading words on a page.

So, what to do when hungry and exhausted? Throw things in a bowl and hope for the best! This is how the Potpourri Veggie Burger Recipe was born.

Recipe:

1 Cup mixed shredded carrots, zucchini and hot or mild peppers
1 Cup brown rice and wild rice mixed, cooked
1/2 Cup rolled oats
1/4 Cup flax meal
1/4 Cup wheat bran
1 teaspoon cumin power
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 egg

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl

Form mixture into patties and cook in a skillet with oil:

Serve on bread with feta or other cheese and condiments of your choice:

Eat!!!

Sure, you have to read the above recipe to try these but the upside is that you don't have to do a bunch of "mix the first 4 ingredients, set aside," "mix the next 3 ingredients, refrigerate for 3.2 minutes," heat a skillet for 1.71 minutes then add 33 cc's of olive oil"......none of that stuff...

You just mix a bunch of random stuff together in a big bowl, making sure you have a good mix of dry and wet ingredients so that the mix holds together into patties and fry 'em up!

Good luck....

For the love of parsnips

We are just starting to harvest our parsnips now that we've had a couple of freezes.  The freezing helps create more sugars so the parsnips are deliciously sweet.  I harvested a bucketful this morning and used them in Mollie Katzen's gypsy soup, one of our most favorite soup recipes.  I replaced the called for sweet potato/winter squash with the parsnips since they are equally sweet and very like a sweet potato in texture.  The parnsips put out some seriously long roots so hand pulling proved a bit challenging this morning, but as long as I pulled very close to the root, it eventually came out.  I peeled the parsnips just like carrots and voila - a perfectly sweet delicious root vegetable that's loaded with vitamin C, fiber, folic acid and many other healthful vitamins and minerals.

We still have a few bowl fulls of fresh tomatoes that made a perfect addition to the soup.  I used up the last of our fresh sweet peppers so we will now start using our frozen.  It's lovely here today and more garden cleanup is on the agenda with a nice hot bowl of soup to follow.  Perfect.

Favorite Banana Bread

While working on our kitchen project, Jennifer made a couple loaves of bread to sustain us.  The first, How it all Vegan's banana bread made us very happy with our morning coffee.  Jennifer used to make this bread all the time and forgot about it for a few years, but happily rediscovered it this past weekend.  If you have three overripe bananas, here's a delicious recipe to use them up!

Hopefully you can read the picture!  If not, send us a message and we will type in the recipe.

The second loaf was Mother Earth News' No Knead Bread. The crust is beautiful and crusty, but Jennifer found the flavor a bit lacking.  We will continue to play with this recipe and see if we can get more of the yeasty, bread flavor we want.

 Happy bread making!

Home-Made Salsa is So Easy!

We became addicted to fresh tomato salsa in the Mex-Tex city of Carlsbad, NM. There's a great grocery there called LaTienda that has a deli where you can get 2 kinds of fresh salsa and hand-made tortillas and tortilla chips. Wonderful older Latino ladies makes all this stuff right before your eyes. When you go see the caverns and bats, check out the chips and salsa at LaTienda!

So that's how we found out how very easy fresh salsa is to make. Here's what we do here in Ohio now:

Walk out back to the garden and collect tomatoes, chiles, cilantro. We got our garlic at the store but just wait until next year!

To our stickblender reservoir we add tomatoes...

...chiles...

...cilantro, cumin/salt/oregano (1/2 tsp each) and 1 clove garlic and chop thoroughly:

Makes about 1 pint based on about 3 medium tomatoes and 2 chiles. One pint of good organic salsa at the store is at least 4-5 bucks so this is a deal and we don't feel like we have to ration:

The Best Veggie Pot Pie Without Even Trying

We're pretty certain that pot pies were invented to use up random ingredients and this recipe originated similarly. It was a total stab but turned out great!


Here's the recipe:

Filling: 2 cups pureed sweet dumpling (or any sweet winter squash), 1 cup cooked millet, 1 cup cooked quinoa, 1 cup pureed tomatoes, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp black pepper

Mix all the above together and pour into a pre-baked pie shell (we make our own pie crusts and pre-bake the bottom for 8-10 minutes at 450F)...


Put the pie shell top on...


Cook for 45-55 minutes or until edges of crust are brown at 350 degrees F...

Eat and enjoy!

Steve's Trail Mix Cookies

Adapted from this recipe, Steve came up with a big winner by changing up the flours and adding some classic trail mix goodies:

Steve's Trail Mix Cookies (alterations are in Blue Font):
3/4 cup rolled oats
1/4 cup each of white flour, whole-wheat flour, flaxseed meal and wheat bran
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup canola oil
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup each of carob chips, sunflower seeds, pepitas and cranberries

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Coat 2 baking sheets with cooking spray.
2. Grind oats in a blender or food processor. Transfer to a medium bowl and stir in flour, baking soda and salt. Beat butter in a large bowl with an electric mixer until fluffy. Add oil, granulated sugar, brown sugar, egg and vanilla; beat until smooth and creamy. With the mixer running, add the dry ingredients, beating on low speed until just combined. Stir in carob chips, sunflower seeds, pepitas and cranberries.
3. Drop the dough by heaping teaspoonfuls, at least 1 inch apart, onto the prepared baking sheets. Bake cookies, 1 sheet at a time, until firm around the edges and golden on top, about 15 minutes.

Here they are, fresh out of the oven:


And up close:


Even Bobcat loves 'em!

Favorite Summer Recipe!

Whew! It's been a wild few days for many reasons, but the main one: we made a weekend trip out to Kansas to attend Jennifer's cousin's wedding - leaving Friday night and arriving home Sunday night with most of the time spent driving to and from. The event provided some nice family time, which we enjoyed. Pictured below is Jennifer's Grandma Eileen, mom - Linda & sister - Lori.


We always pack lots of road food in our plug-in cooler for these trips. We find we can travel most trips like this and spend very little on food and enjoy quality vegetarian fare, which is MUCH easier to find in our cooler than along the interstates of the United States. One of our newly discovered favorite summer foods we took on our trip is from The Moosewood Restaurant: Cooking for Health cookbook. This recipe is so easy and so flavorful. Give it a try with all your homegrown basil! Yum!

Pepita & Sun-dried Tomato Pesto

1/2 cup sun-dried tomatoes
1/2 cup shelled pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1/3 cup olive oil or extra-virgin olive oil
2 packed cups fresh basil leaves
1/2 cup chopped fresh tomatoes
1/4 tsp salt
dash of black pepper

1. In a small sauce pan, bring to boil the sun-dried tomatoes covered with water and then set aside until softened, about 5 minutes. Drain and chop. (We didn't do this because our sun-dried tomatoes were really soft.)

2. In a food processor (or blender), whirl the pumpkin seeds, garlic, oil, basil, fresh tomatoes, salt, pepper, and softened sun-dried tomatoes until smooth.

Great as a dip or spread or topping or flavoring! Use your imagination!

Finally, for those of you interested in our last post's viburnum identification, a reader commented and let us know it's most likely Viburnum recognitum. Thanks George!

Dinner!

A yummy dinner...big bowl of just picked super ripe mulberries, fresh picked salad (mesclun, arugula, spinach, basil and pea pods), Maque Choux over rice from Moosewood Restaurant Cooking for Health and Six-seed Soda bread from one of my favorite food blogs. mmmm

Best Biscotti Ever

Who among us hasn't wanted to make biscotti for years but just never got around to it? Well we finally made some and they are GREAT. We got the recipe from some magazine but altered it quite a bit to make it our own. Here's the recipe followed by pics of the process:

Best Biscotti Ever:

- 1.5 C white flower
- 1/2 C wheat flower
- 1/3 C each of flax meal, wheat bran and wheat germ
- 3 tsp baking powder
- 1.5 C sugar
- 1/2 tsp. salt
- 1/2 C butter
- 3 eggs
- 3 tsp. anise seed
- 3 tsp. vanilla extract
- 1/2 C sunflower seeds, toasted
- 1/2 C dried cherries cut into small pieces

Directions:
-preheat oven to 325 degrees F
1) Mix dry ingredients and set aside
2) Cream together butter and sugar then add beaten eggs and vanilla, mixing each in.
3) Add dry ingredients gradually to wet ingredients, mixing well.
4) Shape into 2 oblong loaves and place on greased baking sheets and cook for 25 minutes
5) Remove from oven and cool 5 minutes.
6) With serrated knife, cut loaves into diagonal slices about 1/2 inch wide
7) Place slices on their sides and bake for an additional 10 minutes or until lightly brown.
8) Remove from oven and transfer to cooling rack

Here's the dry ingredients (grainy and healthy looking eh?!):


Mixing the butter and sugar (this mix should end up "fluffy"):


Adding the anise seed and vanilla to sugar/egg/butter mixture:


Adding in the seeds and cherries (cutting the cherries into tiny pieces is critical - I used some kitchen scissors):

The "loaves" before going into oven:

The "loaves" after first 25 minutes of baking:

Cutting the loaves into the diagonal slices:

Laying the slices on their side:

Here they are after the additional baking time. They certainly don't look perfect but...

...They taste delicious! Seriously, these are the best biscotti we've ever had. Probably due to the complex mix of grains as well as the cherry/vanilla/sunflower seed/anise seed mix.

Granola Bar Recipe

We've been looking for a good granola bar recipe for so long and we finally found one! This bar is healthy, isn't too sweet and holds together. In the photo you can see Steve gaining some sustenance from one of our bars for our hike this past weekend (pics to be posted later this week). This recipe seems very adaptable so use dried fruits, nuts, etc. if you want. We found it in The Flax Cookbook.

Oat and Seed Candy Bar
2 cups oatmeal
1/2 cup raw pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup raw sunflower seeds
2 tablespoons chia or flax seeds
1/2 cup honey or maple syrup
2 tablespoons unsalted butter or tahini

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter an 8" square baking pan.

2. Spread the oatmeal and seeds on a baking sheet. Bake for 20 minutes, stirring twice to assure uniform roasting. Transfer to a medium bowl. Set aside.

3. Pour the honey into a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 7 minutes or until the honey reaches 275 degrees F on a candy thermometer. (At first the honey will expand and bubble up the sides of the pot. When it starts to condense and thicken its ready.) Stir in the butter or tahini.

4. Pour the hot syrup over the oat mixture, stirring to combine evenly. Transfer the mixture to the baking pan. Let cool 2 minutes, then press firmly with buttered or lightly moistened hands. Let cool for 10 minutes more. Use a moistened knife to cut into bars.

NOTE: I just made these again with maple syrup and they did not hold together as in the photo above made with honey. They are quite tasty but more like granola than a granola bar.