Hummus - Basic recipe

I haven't made hummus for a while. I like to have some sort of beans soaking and noticed the bag of garbanzos someone gave me. So I put them in water a couple of days ago, and by yesterday they needed rinsing and cooking. I turned off the heat last night when I went to bed and just hoped they were done.

This morning I tested them and they were cooked enough, maybe not quite all the way to very soft but good enough for hummus.

I have a new food processor that would surely smooth them into a pleasant paste.

The food processor had a residue of green powder in it. This was left over from drying greens from the garden and pulverizing them for use in the winter. One pound of greens - enough to fill my picking basket - dried down enough to make less than a half-cup of powder. So what was sticking to the food-processor bowl was a significant amount, something I didn't want to waste. Green powder would make a perfect amendment to hummus, so after I got out all I could, I just whirred the cooked beans in the same bowl. (My food processor has 3 nesting bowls.)

Here's the recipe I use. If you like to measure precisely, this is probably not the recipe for you!

Basic Hummus

1. Soak a 1 pound bag of garbanzos for a day or 2, rinse thoroughly.
2. Put in a pot with a lid, cover with an inch or more of water, and cook until tender.
3. Scoop half the beans into a food processor (or less if yours handles only small batches), using a slotted spoon.
4. Let the processor work until the beans are mostly smooth, adding cooking liquid to get to the consistency you like.
5. While the processor is working, add several tablespoons of sesame tahini (made from raw sesame seeds). I prefer a hummus that tastes strongly of sesame. You may want to use less.
6. Toss several garlic cloves into the processor chute while the processor continues to work.
7. Add salt to taste, 1 tsp or more.
8. While the processor is still working, squeeze a lemon over a strainer and into the processor chute.
9. When everything looks homogeneous, stop the processor and taste. Adjust as needed.
10. When you are satisfied, scoop the contents out into a container with a lid, pour several tablespoons of tasty olive oil over the top, and refrigerate. Serve on salad or with raw or cooked veggies.
11. Refrigerate the cooked garbanzos and their liquid for another batch of hummus or to make another garbanzo-bean recipe.

This is a gluten-free recipe made only with real foods.

Spring treat - frizzled garden greens

We planted a fair number of quick-growing greens when we got back from New Zealand in April. We were eager to get something out of the garden, and some greens take only 30 or so days.

And then the 30 days went by (rather quickly) and now we have lots of greens, some of them bolting already despite our very cool June. They include several kinds of mustard, turnip greens, radish greens, kale (old and new), chard (old, just starting to go into its second-year biennial seed-producing phase) - a total of 8 kinds.

If I'd left them in the garden, they would have become tough and bitter. I have other options: leave them in the fridge till I need them (but there are more every day); sauté them and pack for the freezer against a day next winter when they'll be great in a soup; or….

Frizzle them!

I have done this before with kale but not as a regular habit and not with other varieties of greens. Here's what I'm doing now:

I'm looking over the greens when I first gather them from the garden. I don't want to wash them if I don't have to. Mostly they are fine, since I have harvested them by cutting them off several inches above ground level with scissors.

Then I'm laying them out on foil on a cookie sheet. The foil has been used several times, and already has a thin coating of olive oil, which adds a perfect flavor for greens. Once there, I wipe them around a pit in the oil, and if they seem dry, I'm adding a few more sprinkles of olive oil.

Then into the oven they go. The oven has been preheated to 400 degrees. Or else it is hot from baking something else, and that's the temperature I use. They go on the bottom rack.

Then I do my best to keep an eye on them. I don't want them getting black. They could use moving around at about the 3 minute mark. In 5 minutes, they are ready to take out, usually.

Once they're out, I let them cool off. Or I sprinkle them with parmesan. Or I sprinkle them with salt.

I serve them with supper. They're great on soup, or just to eat by hand with almost anything. (So far, with everything.) They're reminiscent of nori.

I'm thinking of crumbling them into leftover rice tonight, after it's reheated. Though they really are best when they are crisp, and it takes almost no moisture to soften them up and the rice may wreck them.

Last night supper got delayed by Father's Day calls from the kids, so I didn't go out harvesting. Instead I just grabbed a handful of mixed greens from the produce-keeper bag in the fridge to frizzle. So if you don't have a garden but want to have these very tasty (irresistible) healthy crisps around, you can certainly use greens from the farmers' market or store.

Let me know how you're using them.

Quick cocoa cookies or portable breakfast food (GF)

(Warning: These cookies are gluten-free only if your oats are gluten-free. Oats don't have gluten but the places where they are processed might be used too for processing wheat and then your oats could have gluten. I am highly wheat-sensitive (and maybe gluten-sensitive) but I can eat all the oats I've tried, as long as it's in moderation. Oats themselves are known to be inflammatory, so they can cause problems  in some individuals regardless of their contamination level.)

Recipe.

This recipe has no added sugar, just what's naturally in the unsweetened applesauce and banana. It doesn't need more. The fat comes from the cocoa and nut butter. The protein comes from the oats and nut butter. Minerals come from good salt. Every ingredient adds something healthy. You could have these for breakfast with a hot beverage and consider it a good meal.

Vigorously mix together the following:

3 ripe bananas, smooshed with a fork
2 cups regular (non-instant, non-quick) rolled oat
1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/4 cup cocoa
1/4 cup nut butter (almond, peanut butter, any nut butter)
pinch of good salt (coarse salt is fun - it doesn't all blend in, so you might get some in any given bite)

You can do the mixing in a mixer or food processor. Hand-mixing also works.

Let the mixture sit for 20-30 minutes before baking.

Drop by tablespoonfuls on parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Space closely: they don't spread. Flatten them a little for faster cooking and check after 10 minutes.

Bake at 350 degrees in a preheated oven for about 15 minutes. You want them cooked through but not dried out.

Let them cool. Can refrigerate or freeze.

Additions: Chocolate chips, nuts, bits of fruit.

Whole-chicken and garden soup

We've eaten this soup all winter. This is a small variation on Creamy Chicken Soup because when I got home with the cream I found it spoiled. Improvise! (I am not going to make an 8-mile 40-minute round trip for cream.) This soup takes days but very little labor.

Put the whole chicken into the crockpot, cover (or almost cover) with water, set the pot on low, cover with the lid, and plan something else for dinner for the next few days.

When the chicken is thoroughly cooked, after 24-30 hours more or less, lift out pieces of meat for immediate use or freeze them. Discard the skin. Leave the bones and more of the meat in the pot for this recipe. Cook them for one more day.

On the third day, discard the bones and skin. Return any meat to the pot. Add veggies, such as:

• leftover baked squash
• dried summer squash pieces
• dried mushrooms, or fresh
• leftover mashed potatoes
• roasted veggies (potatoes, onions, peppers, carrots, etc) - or they can be raw
• chopped celery, or freeze-dried celery
• fresh chopped onion
• good salt to taste

Add water to the rim and return the lid to the crockpot. Let everything cook on high until heated, or on low overnight if the veggies are fresh and need more cooking. 

Using a Vita-Mix, food processor, or wand, homogenize everything that's in the pot.

Serve steaming hot. Add cream (half cup?) just before serving, or at the table.

Serving idea: Heat up some red pepper flakes in a little dish of olive oil in the microwave for 2-3 minutes. Using a teaspoon, drizzle this mixture over the soup in pleasing patterns. Don't mix it in - the variations in taste of hot soup, cold cream, and spicy oil make a nice little culinary adventure.  Serves about 8.

This soup can be the basis of many meals in the days to come, or can be frozen for eating at home or on the road.

No-fry refried beans

This week's Anasazi beans had a wonderful flavor that got better every day. I thought I'd make something similar to be the basis of several meals this week.

I'm out of Anasazi beans but I have plenty of pintos.

Since we're traveling soon, I want to freeze a couple of servings to heat up along the way. A quart of the Southwest Baked Beans are already frozen for the road.

Homemade refries next week means starting the beans now. We won't be able to eat them till at least Day 4. Here's how I make refries that are smooth, creamy, and full of flavor without frying even once!

Day 1 (today, 3 pm) - Measure out the beans (3 cups), rinse them, pick out the broken ones, then cover them with cold water in a big bowl. They're going to grow so they need space.

Day 2 (tomorrow afternoon sometime) - Pour off this water, add fresh, and make sure the beans are covered.

Day 3 (Monday afternoon sometime) - Check the beans to make sure they're beginning to ferment (little bubbles are forming). If not, let them go a while longer. Or if you want, let them go till the next day after rinsing them and making sure they're covered.

Let's say I'll find them fermenting on Monday afternoon and I have time for the next step. Then I'll go ahead and....

Cook them. Pour off the water, put them into a pot, cover them barely with fresh water and cook on low. Don't set the lid down on the pot, but you can tilt it to help keep the heat in.

OR

Cook them in a crock pot the same way, except that you will want to cover them completely.

Cook for about an hour. Check for softness. How quickly they cook will depend on how old the beans are, among other things. You want the cooked beans be creamy. (Some beans never soften that much, but pinto beans as well as others do.)

My old beans cooked for over 4 hours before they looked like good candidates for creamy refries.

Those are the basics. But what I'm going to do is add the same veggies I did with my wonderful Southwestern Baked Bean concoction. These included an onion, several cloves of garlic, and chopped chili peppers. This time I'm using ones I roasted earlier today. You can also add finely chopped carrot - but don't add celery: then you would have savory refried beans, which haven't been invented yet. The veggies should all be added when you begin cooking the beans.

Once the beans (and veggies) are soft and creamy, take the pot off the heat and let the mixture cool a little. Then mash it all up or run it through a food processor or use a wand mixer to homogenize the mixture. Then salt to taste w/ good salt. I used a wand mixer and in about 5 mess-free minutes I had delightfully creamy 'refried' pintos.

Variation: add side pork to the pot of beans when it starts to cook. The amount is up to you, maybe 1/4-1/2 cup, chopped. Or maybe more.

Serve these refries alone, or with cheese, on tacos or burritos or in a bowl with a spoon. 3 cups dry beans makes a lot of refries! You can cut the recipe in half but these are easy to freeze, so why not make enough for planned-overs?

PS - The fresh chilies I bought for this recipe were wimps. I could have used 5 or 6 instead of the two that should have given the beans a decided zest.

Super soup, real creamy cream of chicken

This recipe is from +Jenny McGruther, modified a bit. Here's my version (but check hers out).

1. Buy a plump chicken, the best quality you can afford.
2. Place the chicken in a large crockpot, cover it completely with cold water, and turn the pot on low.
3. Lay various veggies on top: carrots including tops, whole stalks of celery including leaves (but cut in half if they won't fit), onions, leeks, kale or chard stems, or whatever is available. Don't chop them or mix them in.
4. Cover the pot and ignore it for 24 or more hours.
5. Remove the veggies and discard the inedible parts.
6. Remove the chicken and debone, carefully retaining as much of the broth as possible.
7. Turn the broth, still in the crockpot, on high.
8. Saving half the chicken for another recipe, place the boned chicken and salvaged cooked veggies into a food processor and whirr till it is almost smooth. (I had to do this in batches).
9. Add the resulting paste to the broth and stir it in thoroughly.
10. Heat till steamy.
11. Stir in a cup of heavy cream. I preheated the cream in the microwave because my crockpot is slow to heat up.
12. Mix 3-4 egg yolks (depending on size - I used duck eggs, and with their large yolks I found I needed only 2 yolks). Use a wire whisk. Add some of the hot stock mixture to temper the yolks, then stir them into the soup.
13. Heat the soup to close to a full boil.
14. Serve. I added an extra tablespoon of cream in a swirl. We ate the soup with roasted veggies (potatoes, rutabagas, and parsnips sprinkled with olive oil and good salt and cooked and browned in a 400 degree oven).

This is a smooth, rich, satisfying soup full of flavor and real food. The two of us will get two meals each out of it. The flavor is so full that more cream or even water could be added to stretch it. Thanks, Jenny!

Recipe: Rhubarb cream surprise

Last night, an hour or so after dinner, I wanted a bite of something special. The old gray cells started reviewing what we had in the house. This yummy concoction appeared a few minutes later, and it satisfied every tastebud.

Rhubarb, cooked in enough water to cover it about halfway in a pot (not aluminum!). I added about 2 T sugar at the end of the cooking to about 3 1/2 cups of rhubarb and stirred it in. Stir as little as possible to keep the rhubarb chunky.

10 frozen peach slices. We freeze bucketloads of ripe peaches in season by cutting them in about 12ths and laying them on cook sheets, then freezing them till they're hard and packaging them in Ziplocs.

30 frozen blueberries. We freeze bucketloads of blueberries, too, straight from the box, on a cookie sheet. We also package these in Ziplocs.

Half-and-half cream. We use good jersey cream from Bellingham.

Assembly:

In a small attractive dessert dish (we use our Chinese miso bowls), pour in about 1/3 cup of cream. Then lay 5 peach slices in a layer partly submerged in the cream. Sprinkle the blueberries on top of the peaches. Spoon the hot cooked rhubarb on top of the fruit. Use as much as you'd like and include some 'juice'.

So you have a cold layer and a hot layer. The cream wells up around the rhubarb. Eat by digging straight down through the layers. It should be delightfully hot and cold. By the last spoonful the flavors will have blended delightfully.

You can have seconds if you want - it's that good, and that healthy. Nothing bad in it!

Let me know if you try it. We enjoyed this over the Mariners game - it almost compensated for the loss.

Garden update - July 25, 2010

Today we ate something from our garden. I reached deep into the beans, where I thought some greens would like the shade and the extra nitrogen, and broke of two 4" leaves of lettuce. They were tasty and too soon gone.

But they are a start. This was literally the first of the harvest, though there are signs of more to come. How soon?

The squash are in bud, with some female flowers emerging. The plants look awfully small to me. How can they have enough leaf area to grow a squash fruit of any size? We'll see.

Both tomato plants have blossoms, but I haven't seen any newly set fruits for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, the three tomatoes that have appeared are still hard and green and in the case of the Early Girl, rather small.

The eggplant has no blooms, but it is growing leaves abundantly. I decided to move it to a section of the trellised area that is close to the house, so it gets reflected as well as direct sunlight now. That seems to have made all the difference.

Beets are making leaves, as are carrots and turnips. They are still tiny. Spinaches are growing but surely it will be a month before they will be eating size. Chard is finally emerging, and parsley is still not visible. I tucked in a few extra squash seeds of various types, and they are all growing smartly. It is impossible to believe they will have time to mature and grow fruit, though, unless we have many hot days.

Down in the yard, the baby jerusalem artichoke is growing taller each day. It is beginning to send forth its fourth set of leaves, as of this morning. I figure every leaf means more energy for the plant and yet faster growth. We figure the tubers will be ready in the winter, and will stay happily in the ground even after frost, so  right now the big deal is to get them to survive snails and deer. If they do, we'll have yummy tubers for months this winter.

Today the porch is registering over 80, so we'll get some good growth. I would feel better if the tomatoes were setting fruit - I would know I'm doing it right.

Farmers' Market Fare - Greens and pork

A couple of years ago we were driving around the small farms of Skagit County here in Washington State, and found a cheese shop (essentially a shack) by the side of a small rural road. We stopped in and discovered Samish Bay Cheese Company. We were delighted to learn that they milk their own cows, that the cows are on pasture, and that they also had pigs on pasture, supplemented with whey from the cheese-making.

We indulged in some of their strong gouda, which ran out too fast. We also bought some bacon, the best bacon I've tasted.

Not many weeks later, we discovered them at the Anacortes Farmers' Market. Now we see them regularly. Last week we bought some side pork from them to go with the armload of greens we bought from Moondance Farm. Here's what happened next:

Greens and Side Pork 

1 lb or so grass-fed side pork
3 lbs or so mixed greens, such as collards, kale, beets, spinach, etc
1 bunch garlic scapes
3 T or more balsamic vinegar (or according to taste)
½ t coarse sea salt

On coming home from the farmers’ market, leave the side pork on the counter to come to room temperature. Leave all the greens on the counter, or wash if gritty. With scissors or your hands, snip or tear the greens into strips about an inch wide. Chop the coarsest stems about an inch long. Cut the garlic scapes, including the buds, an inch long or so. Snip the side pork with scissors into about ¼-inch strips. Saute the strips till some of the fat melts, then add the garlic scapes and stem pieces and cook for a minute or two. Add the prepared greens, a handful at a time, and stir until hot and wilted before adding more. When all the greens have been added to the pot and stirred well, add a cup of water and cover. Cook for 15-20 minutes or until as done as you like. This dish is nicest when it has been cooked thoroughly.  Remove the lid, stir a few more times, and add the balsamic vinegar and salt. Stir some more, taste, adjust the amount of vinegar and salt, and serve with a yellow vegetable. Can also be served over rice. Leftovers, if any, are excellent for breakfast the next day.

My take on vitamins - part 1

Foods have vitamins and real foods have real vitamins in abundance, or to put it more generally, they have nutrients.

The concept that foods have nutrients would be so trivial, under normal circumstances, that it would never be stated as if it were a fresh idea.

But now our food doesn't necessarily have nutrients, and I've been noticing ads that try to make us feel that the foods they are trying to sell don't have MANY nutrients, as if fewer were better. One of these downplayed nutrients is FAT (the stuff our brains and nervous systems are made of).

Foods are manufactured, today, to get rid of the "bad" nutrients, the ones the culture has determined are EVIL.

Hold on! How can a nutrient be evil? A nutrient is something that nourishes us, that gives our bodies something they need. We can't live without nutrients, the more the better on average.

But, you may argue, fat is bad because it makes us fat.

Actually, that's not true, as obvious as it sounds. Simple carbs that raise our blood sugar beyond what our activity level can use make us fat. Simple carbs are those that have been extracted from the food crops that grew them. They are broken, partial foods. They are not real foods. And they make us fat and unhealthy.

Kids are not getting fat from potato chips, they're getting fat with simple-carb sweetened sodas.

But I digress. Real foods have nutrients (and not-real foods have few if any nutrients). Real foods have the macros: carbs, fats, and proteins. And they have the micros: vitamins and minerals.

These thoughts are about vitamins. Real foods come with them. We don't need anything but what we get in real food. IF. Big IF.

We don't need to use vitamin supplementation IF:
1. We eat real food and no other food but real food.
2. We eat only fresh real food, no more than hours old when eaten or preserved.
3. We eat real food that was picked when it was ripe, but not over-mature.
4. We eat a variety of real foods.
5. The real foods we eat were grown in healthy, compost-fed soils.
6. The real foods we eat are in a digestible form (or converted into a digestible form through fermentation).
7. The real foods we eat are in season.

IF we can't meet all these standards with every bite we eat, we are getting fewer nutrients than we got when we all relied on growing our own. IF we can't meet these standards, supplementation with vitamins and minerals is essential.

Modern life essentially dictates vitamin/mineral supplementation. When in doubt, supplement. If you feel better, you'll know you were missing something.

More on picking a supplement later.