I Am Martha Stewart
We're having a barbecue this weekend at our home. We've done this barbecue now for each summer that we've been here, so I guess it makes this the fourth annual version of said barbecue.
Last week, I practiced a bit. We went up to my parents' condo in Cuchara, CO. We had no real plans of things to do, and mostly just hiked around the condo a bit. On one of the days up there, I read about a smoking technique for smaller charcoal grills and put it to work to see how it would do.
By visual inspection, you may guess (correctly!) that it went pretty well. I smoked a pork shoulder rubbed with this. It came out perfect - you can ask Anna and Owen. And possibly some bears that got to smell it.
While I don't intend to do a pork shoulder for our barbecue, the important thing was the smoking technique, since I will likely try it this weekend.
What really makes our family's barbecue is the sauce. People like the sauce - it's a sauce my dad's mom taught him to make, that he taught me to make, and people seem to generally like it. (Side note: I need to make it again at the beach this year and not experiment like I have the last few years, so beach attendees can taste the proper sauce.) It's kind of funny - the thing my neighbors like the most is my sausage and my sauce - and they'll talk about how my "sausage is so good" and how I "have great sauce". You haven't lived until a gaggle of ladies talks about how good your sausage is. It's cool, but not as cool, when one or many of the dudes say the same.
Oddly, Anna never complements my sausage. Huh.
We have some neighbors that moved away to whom I'd like to send a care package of some sauce so that they can still get a fix. The problem there is that the stuff only has a shelf life of a week or so. In past years I've had neighbors ask me to make extra sauce that they can bring home.
We got one of these last summer.
What is that, you might ask? A pressure cooker! I started canning things last summer with all the stuff we got from our farm and from our vegetable garden. It went very well - having cans of vegetables through the winter and spring was very awesome. It was especially more awesomer when the tiny moocher decided he wanted to start feeding himself.
It seems I can do this!
So, last night, I made a giant pot of sauce, and canned it in the pressure cooker. Problem solved! The sauce should (if I canned it properly) last up to a year unopened.
Last year I canned vegetables. I never actually thought about canning sauce - let alone the barbecue sauce my family has always made. This is the first time I've ever done this with the sauce - but I feel like it's kind of a monumental occasion. The sauce is being distributed for the first time!
I need to come up with a clever name to slap on the jars with a label.
The other yellow jars contain an experimental sauce that I'm not sure how I feel about yet. It's a honey-peach-bourbon sauce I kind of followed a recipe for. I say "kind of" because it gave me a vague idea of what to add, and then I went ahead and ignored most of what it said to do.
The problem here, for the neighbors, is that I think they know what they're getting for Christmas each and every year from this point forward.
Get Learnin’ On Pickin’
We are still members of our farm. Last week we got a bunch of turnips, some garlic, and some peas.
One of the opportunities we've had available to us as members is the ability to go pick fresh asparagus and strawberries. We've never done it, because in our heads it was just too far to drive, and possibly wasn't worth the effort. This year we wanted to do it because we thought it'd be a fun activity for us and the wee man. We weren't wrong - but we weren't entirely right.
Google Maps puts it at roughly an hour and a half a way. I think that those directions are based on the fact that a lot of the roads to the farm weren't paved. Well, now they are - we got there in little over an hour, which required us to take various county roads that traveled in straight cardinal directions.
You see those nice clean rows of veggies behind Owen? Our strawberries weren't there - they were in a weed-filled field. And by weeds I mean undesirable plants that you could smoke if you were really inclined to.
There were tons of berries in there, but the rows were hard to discern, and there was a lot of weeds to fight. We ended up with a pretty good haul, but only made it halfway through our row before Owen decided he was done stumbling over weeds. He was a good sport and made it quite a ways and impressed many of our fellow pickers - but any strawberries he picked did not make it into our box, so he wasn't very helpful - the moocher. They all went directly into the mouth:
I think we're going to keep doing this annually. It's pretty fun, and I think it may be somewhat valuable to teach the kids that strawberries don't actually come from plastic clamshells at the grocery store. We're far away from that lesson, but it probably won't hurt to start early. He wasn't bothered by bugs or weeds or scratchy plants - which was really cool to see.
The farm also takes volunteers to do farm work - this is something else I'd like our family to be a part of in the future. Again, it'd be neat to have the kids associate that food comes from somewhere and is a lot of work.
The whole album from the pickin' experience can be viewed by clicking on our bounty below:
Ribs Gone Tropical
The Meatwave: Ribs Gone Tropical.
This link isn't so much for sharing it is me bookmarking it so that I can make these at a future date.
It Occurs To Me
That we never actually posted the pictures from Owen's first birthday party. They're filled with a lot of people and children you probably won't recognize.
And since it's been a few days removed from the party, and we have a 4 GB eyefi card, we've obviously taken lots of other photographs:
- Birthday proper photos. My dad had his thumb over the flash, if you're wondering. Also, I totally baked that cake from scratch. I'm a regular Martha Stewart.
- Clever things to do with junk mail.
- Few more monkeybutt.
Oh, and we took a ton at the park yesterday, as yesterday was a gorgeous day. Gonna try something new here, which won't work on iDevices 'cause it uses Flash:
I am: Martha Stewart
Today was a snowy day in Denver, so we've been stuck inside pretty much all day.
We had a ton of strawberries left from when they were on sale. Had to use them up - so I made strawberry jam.
Somebody here has a birthday soon - and I have this plan to make that person's cake from scratch. So today I did a test cake. It was a marble cake with vanilla buttercream frosting. It looks really good, and the frosting tastes good. Half of the cake will be delivered to new neighbors who move in tomorrow, but of course we'll test some tonight.
Then, for dinner, I put together this chicken thing I made up. I'll probably write more on that depending on how it ends up tasting.
Chicken Tacos With the Special-est Sauce
Kind of busy today, but I am trying to keep on my "one post a day" minimum. So I'm going to attempt to do two things at once here: write down a recipe I made up last night for "special taco sauce" because Anna has requested me to do so, and write a blog post. If I don't write down these recipes that I make up, I forget them and they can never be duplicated, which makes Anna a sad panda.
So last night, Anna learned how to use the fabulous meat grinder, and ground up some chicken. For the taco seasoning, I used:
- 1 Tbsp Chili Powder, Kroger Style
- 1 tsp cumin seeds, ground up in a mortar and pestle
- 1 tsp kosher salt
- 1.5 tsp oregano
- 1 chopped up chipotle in adobo
- 2 cloves of garlic, minced
- 1 C water
First I ... browned? I guess cooked ... the ground chicken in my trusty, invincible cast iron skillet. Then I added everything above, brought the water to a simmer, and let it sit for a bit. That is the easy part - basic taco goodness.
What's important here is the special-est sauce: In our mini-chopper I added the entirely scientific and precise amounts listed below:
- 2 handfuls of fresh cilantro
- 3 or 4 mixing spoons worth of Kroger "Classic Whip" (generic Miracle Whip - it's got that tasty zip!)
- about a teaspoon of cumin seeds
- about 1/4 C vinegar
- about 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
- about 1 tsp white pepper
- about 1 tsp garlic-infused grapeseed oil (Olive oil and a clove of garlic is probably about the same)
- pinch of kosher salt
Mix it in the chopper thingy until it's all blended. If I had it to do again, I'd probably add a pinch of sugar or something, as the sauce is very tart, like Anna.
It was pretty good. Oh, and we topped our tacos with grilled onions and Monterey Jack cheese. Nom.
The Fambly Dinner
Once a year, we have pork tenderloin for dinner. Last night was that night.
For twenty-four American hours, the meat marinated in a mixture of orange juice, lime juice, and organic "purchased by Marvie" grapefruit juice - and the zest of all three, olive oil which may or may not have been previously deflowered, garlic, salt, pepper, and some chili powder. It was pretty good.
If you have trouble finding the particular type of grapefruit, you might check with Marvie.
We went with our annual pork tenderloin because it was warm enough to grill. We got'r done early and ate as a fambly. I don't think Owen gets the whole "sitting at a table I'm not tied to" thing.
Chicken Every Night
I was reading this post on a food blog - this gal bought a seven pound chicken roasted it, and stretched the leftovers for seventeen meals.
The meal total included leftovers for lunch, which is neat to consider. Leftovers are very important in our house. Twenty-six dollars for a work week's worth of food is not too shabby, and makes my ... thrifty ... heart grow three sizes.
But, we could never do that, other than for the express purpose of saving cash - and even then, it wouldn't be very fun. I love me some lean-protein chicken, but I don't think I could eat chicken five days in a row. It wouldn't be enjoyable, especially because around day four I'd start actively wondering if I was going to die if I ate the chicken. I know I probably wouldn't die? But I would think that I could die, and that seems to be enough to give my intestines the go-ahead to speed up the process of expelling used food.
What I have been trying to do lately is to eat more vegetables, and we have been going vegetarian once or thrice a week. It's a bit less expensive, and honestly, a lot more healthy so long as we get some sort of protein, giggity.
Tofu gets a bad rap, but if you prepare it correctly, it's great. Owen loves it!
Doesn't that look delicious? There are two reasons I like tofu, and Anna tolerates it. On normal weekday evenings, quickly put together dinners are the best. A tofu stir fry takes approximately ten minutes to prepare, if you don't count the arduous process of cooking rice in the active preparation, and the pre-prep time of pressing the tofu. Bonus - it is flavorful, healthy, and inexpensive! One pound of extra-firm tofu costs us a single George Washington.
Normally we use a store bought stir-fry sauce. We used to use the Iron Chef sauces for ironic and tastiness purposes, but apparently those are difficult to find at our local grocer these days.
The only thing you would need to know is that, ahead of time, you need to press the tofu. After that, it's a simple stir fry. Cut up a veggie or two, heat up some oil, and stir fry everything. Then, add some sauce. Add to rice. Win.
On tofu nights, we're happily fed and on to watching Lost or Chuck. Or more correctly, Anna is watching it, and I'm bitching about it. Or, even more correctly, Anna is watching it, and I'm half watching it while playing Final Fantasy (again) on my iPod Touch, yet still bitching about it.
The Unsurprise of Wal-Mart
A long time ago, I wrote about the phenomenon that occurs when people buy things. It seems that a person who spends more money on something will be convinced that it is better - simply because it was more expensive. I obviously tend to believe this study because we don't generally buy expensive things. Clearly I'm biased.
This morning I read about Wal-Mart's attempt to ... go green by supporting local farmers and produce.
This was then followed up by an article by a foodie, Corby Kummer, who has an unfortunate name but writes for The Atlantic.
He has a lot of the same contempt for Wal-Mart that seems to befit people who identify with the progressive, left side of politics. Or should I say - he had. He was impressed enough with Wal-Mart's offerings to actually hold a blind taste test between them and organic, local produce from Whole Foods.
This is probably my favorite quote from the article:
“They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.
I think that's true of a lot of people and businesses.
So Tired of Avocado
Avocados are healthy - avocado.org doesn't mind telling you so.
Anna had a soiree at the house recently, and she bought a Costco sized pack of Wholly Guacamole.
One of the ladies who came to said soiree brought Guacamole (non Wholly).
Owen loves avocados. We'll just slice up chunks and he'll pick them up and slam 'em down about as fast as we can get them in his cone of vision.
Avocados were recently $0.77 apiece at our local grocer - and even more recently $0.39 apiece. Being tired of eating avocado, but having a son that loves it, I did what made sense - I bought ten of them. Avocado as far as the eye can see, including leftover guacamole that I'm quite sick of eating.
I shouldn't complain. Avocados in other places are much more expensive than they are here. And they're incredibly healthy:
High avocado intake has been shown to have an effect on blood serum cholesterol levels. Specifically, after a seven-day diet rich in avocados, hypercholesterolemia patients showed a 17% decrease in total serum cholesterol levels. These subjects also showed a 22% decrease in both LDL (bad cholesterol) and triglyceride levels and 11% increase in HDL (good cholesterol) levels.
If only I thought my cholesterol was a problem. My blood pressure needs fixin', not my cholesterols!