| chicken enchiladas #2 | portlandpiper | I got a good price on chicken drumsticks this weekend so I bought 16 of them figuring I will make enchiladas from them and a few other ingredients from the store and the freezer. This version ended up tasting really good. |
| meatballs | portlandpiper | Tender and flavourful meatballs for pasta, soup or meatball sandwiches. |
| whole wheat, rye and walnut sourdough bread | portlandpiper | We started eating a whole wheat and walnut bread that we bought from a bakery in Berkeley. It was not a sourdough and it did not have the rye, but it had a really good flavour and it was a fairly heavy loaf for its size - I am not a fan of most feathery light breads.
This version is now my wifes favourite bread. It is even more important than the scones which run out every now and then. I am not allowed to run out of this bread.
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| Chocolate syrup | dave | For the past two years, I've switched to drinking raw whole milk instead of the dead tasteless stuff you get at the supermarket. As a life-long chocolate milk lover, this meant that I had to stir in my own chocolate syrup into each glass since no one sells chocolate raw milk. Then one day I made the mistake of looking at the ingredients of the chocolate syrup, and noticed that it was no longer made with sugar, but had succumbed to the high fructose corn syrup craze that is sweeping the food industry. What is the point in drinking raw milk for my health, and adding chocolate syrup with one of the greatest food villains out there? It's time to make my own syrup!
If I had known how much better homemade chocolate syrup tastes, I would have switched years ago. By making it yourself, you can adjust how chocolaty, how sweet or how thick you want it. For my chocolate milk, I make a thin version by just bringing it to a boil then removing it from the heat as soon as the chocolate is mixed in. For a thicker sauce to put on ice cream, I turn the heat down and cook it for a few more minutes on low.
This recipe is adapted from Alton Brown's version. The biggest difference is that I don't add any corn syrup. Supposedly the corn syrup helps keep the sugar in suspension, but I've never really had a problem with it. |
| Spelt oatmeal bread | dave | As part of my experiment of not buying bread all winter, I had to come up with a good, basic, spelt bread loaf that was really simple and good enough for a regular sandwich loaf. The combination of oatmeal and honey helps make this a nice moist loaf that keeps well in a bag on the counter for several days.
To get a lighter texture and a higher rise, I've added some vital wheat gluten flour which should be omitted if your reason for cooking with spelt is wheat allergies. Spelt has a weaker gluten than wheat, so less kneading and a shorter rise time are generally called for with a pure spelt bread. If I had a bread machine with a programmable cycle, I would try to get a whole spelt bread dialed in, but for now, I'll use the wheat gluten. |
| Applewood smoked Thanksgiving turkey - 2009 | dave | I was unable to get a pasture raised turkey for Thanksgiving, so I decided to give a kosher bird a try. In kosher processing, they don't scald the bird to pluck it, so you are likely to get more pin feathers and skin rips. They coat the bird with salt, to draw out the blood, before rinsing it off, which makes it so it is unnecessary to brine the bird. I went with a really simple wet rub, applewood smoke, and no injected spices or liquid just to see how the kosher bird would come out.
This was my first Thanksgiving with my Masterbuilt electric smoker, and I was also anxious to try out my new Turkey Cannon. The The Masterbuilt smoker is insulated and has digital temperature control, a big bonus when smoking in the cool season. The Turkey Cannon is a gadget for making "beer can chicken" with a full-sized turkey. Since the base of the cannon sits several inches outside the bird, the liquid heats up much better, infusing the cavity with steam. The claim is that it greatly speeds up cooking, in this case I can verify that the claim is true. Normally I have to smoke a 14 pound turkey for at least 6-8 hours; this 17 pound bird was done in just over 3!
The result was a very moist and flavorful bird. |
| chicken, shrimp and sausage gumbo | portlandpiper | This recipe is based on the chicken, shrimp and sausage gumbo in Paul Prudhomme's Seasoned America cookbook. To make my wife happier I drastically reduced the fat used in the recipe from 1/2 c. to 2 t. To keep me happy I increased the amount of seasoning in the recipe to keep it tasting like the original. |
| rich chicken stock | portlandpiper | I like to use this rich and spicy chicken stock as a base for gumbo. |
| single serving turkey shepherd's pies | portlandpiper | I made a large quantity of sweet potato soufle and garlic mashed potato for Thanksgiving this year with this dish in mind for leftovers. I made it in individual serving cassarole dishes but it could easily be done in a large baking dish like a more traditional shepherd's pie.
Be sure to use broiler safe baking dishes if you want to use the broiler to crisp the potato crust on top of the dish. |
| Turkey pot pie with tortillas | dave | The cold weather got me in the mood for some chicken/turkey pot pie, but I didn't really want to do all the work making the crust. Out of nowhere, Laurie suggested that I could try using whole wheat tortillas. What a great idea to try! It turned out really well, though like making quicky pizzas on pita bread, it will never replace a pot pie with a homemade crust.
I also wanted to eat out of the freezer, and try to keep with local produce that is available in the winter. Does it really make sense to use celery in the mirepoix, when I'm making what I consider a cold weather dish? I suppose I could have used some celeriac in its place, if I grew some this year, but I didn't. The only things in this recipe that are not locally grown are the tortillas, the flour and the spices.
I give most of the credit for the incredible flavor to the homemade stock, and the heirloom, home-grown potatoes. Using other quality local ingredients made a difference, but it was the stock an potatoes that really stood out.
Since this dish cooks moist and slow, it is ideal for using up leftover frozen chicken or turkey. You could certainly use fresh meat, as I do in my regular chicken pot pie recipe, but this is one case where you don't lose much by using frozen leftovers. |
| cinnamon pears over vanilla ice creame | portlandpiper | We got a lot of pears in our farm shares this year so I have been making chutneys and my wife has been using them in salads but there are still more than a dozen pears left in the fridge. So I figured cook one a bit and put it over vanilla ice creame. I had a pear tart with clotted creame before that was quite good so I headed to the kitchen a few minutes before "Inspector Lewis" was going to start to cook up a pear - and it was good. |
| orange beef for one | portlandpiper | While this recipe is not quite as nice as orange peel beef, it is a delicious quick and easy meal for one that has some of the citrus elements of that dish. |
| stuffed cabbage rolls | portlandpiper | This is a slight modification of a recipe we used to get almost every week growing up on the farm. It did not cost much and it could be easily stretched by adding more grain to the filling. Now that we are getting a couple of heads of cabbage a week from our C.S.A. shares I am making this dish a lot and freezing most of the cabbage rolls for later. |
| chili | portlandpiper | Dave is on his drive back home right now, the kitchen is all cleaned up, so I decided to transfer our chili notes to the web-site. While this batch was not our best chili - it is too early in the season to get the variety of fresh chiles in the Pacific northwest - it is a good guide to getting to our best chili. |
| Very homemade lasagna | dave | I've been trying to make a few meals a month that are as close to completely homemade/homegrown as possible. This lasagna is one of my most complicated yet. The sauce and veggies are from my garden, the pasta is homemade, and for the first time, I made most of the cheese. Where I didn't go homemade, I did try and buy local. The meats, milk and eggs were from local farms, and even the spelt for the flour was grown a few hundred miles from here. I guess I could have ground the meat myself, but I have to leave a few challenges for next time.
While it was time consuming to make all the different parts, it was also a lot of fun. And there is no arguing with the results, as it was one of the best lasagnas I ever made. |
| curry dry rub for beef | portlandpiper | I got a good price on short ribs at the market a while back and I had several pounds cut into thin strips across the ribs - flanken cut. After eating batches of ribs with BBQ sauce, orange sauce, and chili sauce - I wanted to try something a little different. This curry dry rub is really nice on the beef ribs and the ribs went nicely with stir fried broccoli seasoned with my teriyaki glaze and a baked sweet potato. |
| Spelt pasta | dave | For the past 6 months, I've been experimenting with more whole grain pastas, with spelt being my new default. The nutty flavor of the spelt really comes out with tomato sauce based dishes, and the rougher texture holds on to the sauce. I use more liquid than I do with white wheat and semolina flours, and I let it rest longer to absorb all the liquids.
I currently use a food processor to make the dough, but you can use a stand mixer or mix it by hand. |
| tomatillo and roasted green chile soup | portlandpiper | This flavourful soup was created to feed my need for some chiles and salsa on a snowy day. |
| warm pasta salad | portlandpiper | This is an easy one dish dinner that my wife and I like to have every now and then. Use this recipe more as a guide to create your own warm pasta salad meals. |
| pasta, bean, and sausage soup | portlandpiper | It has been fairly cold for the past few weeks and I wanted a nice hearty soup to warm me up so I came up with this recipe after looking through the freezer and pantry. Cooking the pasta in the stock helped give the soup a really nice texture and added a lot of flavour to the pasta. |
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