Strawberry Preserves & Hand Pies

I think it’s nearly impossible to walk past fresh strawberries at the farmer’s market without buying a pint. (Or four.) So between our Greenling Local Box and two trips to the farmer’s market last week, I had six pints of local strawberries in the fridge on Saturday morning. Two pints were from Gundermann Acres in Wharton, two were from Naegelin Farms in Lytle, and two pints were from Two Happy Children Farm in Taylor, Texas.

So many strawberries won’t keep more than a few days, so I decided to make some jam to use up my haul of berries. I am an inexperienced canner, so Michael Chiarello’s recipe for strawberry preserves seemed like a great place to start: not-to-sweet, and no added pectin. His recipe calls for a lot of berries, some citrus, and a pinch of rosemary and black pepper. I made it my own by substituting oranges for the lemon, omitting the salt, increasing the rosemary and pepper, and cutting the sugar down a bit. The rosemary I used is from Pure Luck in Dripping Springs, and the oranges are from G&S Groves down in McAllen, Texas.

Here’s my version of the recipe, scaled down for just one pint of strawberries.

Strawberry Preserves (Each pint of strawberries will yield about 1 cup of jam)
Adapted from Michael Chiarello’s recipe for strawberry preserves
1 pint strawberries, cleaned, hulled and chopped
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon sugar
pinch black pepper
juice of 1/2 an orange, about 1 tablespoon
1/4 teaspoon finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves

In a saucepan with high sides, mix all ingredients and bring to a boil over medium heat. Keep close watch on the pan with a spoon at the ready– strawberries will foam up if you’re not careful! Once the mixture comes to a rolling boil, lower the heat and simmer for 30 minutes, until jam is thick and syrupy. Around the half-hour mark, the consistency of the jam will be thick and the mixture will look glossy. You can test the consistency of the finished jam by spooning a blob onto a very cold plate. Wait a minute, then draw your finger through the jam. If the jam stays separated on the plate, it’s ready! If the jam runs back together, keep cooking. Once the jam is set to your standards, transfer it to a bowl to cool to room temperature. Store in an air-tight container in the refrigerator and use it up within the week.

My six pints of berries made a huge batch of the jam, and while it’s not as good as Confituras‘ I am really pleased with my first-ever attempt at strawberry preserves.

You can see that the preserves have a lovely texture: soft, chopped pieces of berries are suspended in a thick syrup. Homemade jam usually has a softer set than store-bought, and this is wonderful to spread on muffins, toast, or swirled atop oatmeal. Next time I make it I am going to experiment with increasing the sugar and using lemon juice to try to get a brighter flavor from the berries.

Tonight I used some leftover pie crust and 1/4 cup of the preserves to make these pretty hand pies. They’re kind of like strawberry Pop-Tarts, only they taste like real strawberries and there’s no red food coloring.

The finished hand pies were lovely, except for one that I overfilled. A whole chunk of strawberry spurted out of the side of the pie while it was in the oven.

I giggled when I saw it because it looked like it was blowing me a big raspberry! Er, strawberry!

This post is sponsored by Greenling Organic Delivery and appears on their blog “Eating Out of the Local Box.”

Spicy Arugula Spread

This is a recipe that almost wasn’t.  It came about last Sunday night while I was preparing beer bread and chai truffles for a food swap the next day.  I was really nervous about going to the swap, in part because I wasn’t sure whether my dishes would be fancy enough for all the foodies in attendance. This is a common fear for me. I call it Potluck Anxiety, and it tends to sneak up any time I take a large batch of treats to a social gathering. Potluck Anxiety is usually really annoying but in this instance I’m glad I had it, because otherwise I might have never made this spicy arugula spread.

Thanks to Potluck Anxiety, I was doubtful that my beer bread would be okay as a standalone dish at the swap. I thought, why not make an herb butter to gussy it up? I wasn’t working from a recipe, just from the vague idea that pesto and butter together would make a good herb butter.  So off I went. For the pesto, I improvised using whatever I could find in the fridge: some arugula, green onions, pecans, garlic, salt, and olive oil.

When I tasted the pesto I enjoyed it so much that I almost kept the whole batch for myself.  Luckily, Potluck Anxiety told me that bread alone wouldn’t cut it, and I pushed forward in the quest for herb butter. To my cup of arugula pesto, I added 4 tablespoons of salted butter.

No bueno. The butter did nothing but turn the pesto into an oily mess! I could have resolved this by adding more butter, but I had used the last of it for the beer bread. What to do?

As a measure of desperation, I threw some cream cheese into the processor with the buttered pesto. The flavor of the spread was definitely improved by the cream cheese, but I thought it was still too strong to pair with my mellow beer bread.  Not wanting to be wasteful, I put the finished cream cheese-butter-pesto mixture into a crock in the fridge and forgot about it.

The night of the swap, I was a mess. I had loaded my car and pulled out of the driveway by the time I remembered the arugula spread in the fridge. In the throes of Potluck Anxiety, I turned around to get it mostly because the little orange crock was so cute.  Boy, am I glad that I did!  While the spread was sitting in the fridge overnight it mellowed into a lovely, spreadable, spicy dip. Perfect for pairing with crackers or whole wheat beer bread.  By experimenting with the leftovers, my husband Rami discovered that this spread makes a great pasta sauce if you warm it up in the microwave.

This story has two happy endings. First, I ended up with a new potluck recipe that is easy to put together and a real crowd pleaser. Second, I met a wonderful group of friends at the food swap. There were all sorts of cooks at the party: some were fancy, some were not so fancy, and of them all were kind and accepting. I suspect I will probably have another case of Potluck Anxiety before the next time I see them; my fingers are crossed that I’ll get another winning recipe out of the deal!

Spicy Arugula Spread (makes about 1.5 cups)
4 cups arugula
4 peeled garlic cloves
1 bunch green onions, root tips and limp green tips removed
1/2 cup pecan halves
1/2 cup olive oil
4 tablespoons salted butter
4 ounces cream cheese
1 teaspoon salt

Place arugula, garlic and green onions in a food processor fitted with the chopping blade.  Pulse until veggies have broken down into very small pieces.  Add remaining ingredients and pulse until completely combined. Mixture will be very soft from the heat of the food processor; store in an airtight container overnight to firm up the spread and allow the flavors to mellow. Enjoy in place of butter on breads, as a dip for crackers, or warm with pasta.

Click here for a printable copy of this recipe.

Meal Plan 2/2-2/8

Last night I met a bunch of Austin food lovers at an ATX Food Swappers event co-hosted by Megan, Kate, and Sarah. This was my first-ever food swap and I am so glad I worked up the nerve to go!  I took 5 packages each of whole wheat beer bread mix and chocolate chai truffles and swapped for a huge number of homemade goodies. Most of those goodies are perishable, so I have a wonderful assortment of ready-made breakfast and dessert items to include in my meal plan this week.  The food swap items listed below link back to their original makers as much as I could manage; I am thrilled that my menu will contain so many exotic yummies and tasties!

You’ll also notice that I’m reserving the avocados, sweet potatoes and kale from this week’s local box for a special slew of Super Bowl foods I’m making on Sunday. I’ll post that tailgate meal plan separately.

Here’s what’s coming from Greenling in my local box:

• Sweet potatoes – Naegelin
• Green Cabbage – Naegelin
• Green Leaf Lettuce – Acadian
• Swiss Chard – My Father’s Farm
• Kale- Gundermann
• Cilantro – Fruitful Farms
• Green Onions – Naegelin
• Avocados – G&S
• Grapefruit or Navel Oranges – G&S
• Fennel or Kohlrabi- My Father’s Farm

Here’s what I’m planning to make and eat:

Wednesday: Cabbage and dumplings incorporating chicken and fresh thyme into the recipe, Banana sorbet with peanut butter semifredo

Thursday: Cheddar Chard Pizza for Gluten Free Pizza Fest, Meyer Lemon Sorbet
Friday: black pepper pork bahn mi with pickled daikon & carrots
Saturday: Lettuce salad with green onion and cilantro dressing, blue cheese olive loaf
Sunday: Super bowl menu & recipes will be posted separately!

Monday: Kohlrabi or Fennel soup

Tuesday: Leftover awareness night!

Breakfasts: chocolate chip banana bread, apricot turnovers, Granola Bars

Two Healthy Salads by my Husband

Tonight, Rami and I enjoyed one of the best meals we’ve had at home in quite a while.  We ate a gingery citrus cole slaw and a quinoa broccoli salad, plus whole wheat beer bread. And the best part, I didn’t cook a single thing!

Earlier tonight I was busy making chocolate chai truffles for a food swap on Monday when Rami walked in the kitchen and said, “How can I help?”

That’s a dangerous question in our house, because in a matter of minutes, he had been put in charge of making our entire dinner. He prepared two salads, Kathy Patalsky’s Napa Cabbage Cole Slaw and Amy Sherman’s Quinoa Arugula Salad, plus a loaf of whole wheat beer bread as a test for another food swap recipe.

The beer bread turned out really well (whew!) and the salads were awesome.  I’m planning a full post on the bread in advance of Monday’s swap, but in the meantime, here’s a recap of the salads:

The cabbage slaw is one of the best cabbage recipes I’ve found online.  Rami is typically not a fan of cabbage, and I don’t care for tangerines. However, in this recipe, we loved both of those foods!

Rami did make a few substitutions in Amy’s recipe according to what we had on hand: tangerines from G&S Grove instead of oranges, double the amount of regular mayo instead of vegan (sorry, Amy!!), and a green bell pepper instead of yellow.  Next time we make this, we’ll experiment by using less ginger and even more tangerines.  And the flavor of the dressing is so strong, I think I might be able to get away with adding a whole bag of sunflower sprouts to the mix.

Equally tasty was this broccolli arugula quinoa salad:

Rami was pretty liberal in his interpretation of the original recipe, which originally called for shaved asparugus, avocado, and lemons. He used  broccoli from Texas Daily Harvest (he added it to the quinoa pot for the last 5 minutes of cooking time), subbed tangerine juice for the lemon juice, and skipped the avocado.  The textures of steamed broccoli and quinoa really work well together, so next week I’ll be looking for more recipes that call for them together.

Meal Plan 1/26- 2/1

Look who interrupted our menu plan last week! Ella’s arrival into the Hutchison family means that I skipped most of last week’s meals and I’m working with leftover ginger, beets, citrus, and apples in this week’s menu.  No complaints here, though. My grocery bill is very happy to have the extra ingredients. And I’m happy to have the new niece.

Here’s what we’re getting from Greenling in the Local Box:

• Tangerines – Orange Blossom
• Mustard Greens – Naegelin
• Broccoli – Texas Daily Harvest
• Various Lettuce – Acadian
• Baby Arugula – My Father’s Farm
• Red or Green Kale – Naegelin
• Napa Cabbage – TDH
• White Mushrooms – Acadian
• Yellow Onions – Naegelin
• Grapefruit or Navel Oranges – G&S

Here’s what I’m planning to cook:

Wednesday: Happy hour with friends
Thursday: Napa Cabbage Slaw, Crock pot chicken
Friday: Quinoa with Arugula and Broccoli (just steam the broccoli and sub for the asparagus in Amy’s recipe), apple compote
Saturday: Grilled Cheese with Mozzarella and Garlic Kale Pesto, leftover chicken
Sunday: My own version of this curried mustard green recipe, rice
Monday: Austin Food Swap! Rami is on his own tonight.
Tuesday: Leftover Awareness Day!
Breakfast: Red flannel hash, magical scrambled eggs
Bonus: Onion and Mushroom pizza (gotta plan ahead for Jessica’s Gluten-Free Pizza Festival!)

Breakfast Resolution Update

One of my big New Year’s resolutions is to eat more breakfast in 2011.  Seventeen days into the new year, I’m happy to report that it’s going awesome sort of okay. Except not.

I ate breakfast twice in the last two weeks. Good news first: that’s two hundred percent more breakfast than I ate in 2010. Now the bad news: one of those breakfasts occured at dinner time. (Remember that yummy apple pancake cake  last week?) And the other breakfast came from McDonald’s. I ate it in my car. Not only did it taste terrible, I felt guilty and irritable after I ate it. This is not the food-positive breakfast journey I was hoping for at the beginning of the year!

A lot of my breakfast frustrations boil down to the same issues that plague all struggling home cooks: I’m short on time and know-how.  In the past year, I’ve become great at improvising healthy dinners, but I’m still a newbie when it comes to from-scratch breakfast recipes. And while I’m a pro at menu-planning, the strategies that help me keep dinners organized are too rigid for my feeble, groggy mind to employ at breakfast.

So. I don’t have a lot of breakfast solutions yet, but I’m hoping that this third week of the new year will be easier than the last two. Tonight I’m going to make a batch of apple cheddar muffins for grab-and-go breakfasts. I’m also planning to make some steel cut oats in the crockpot. I tried making steel cut oats over the winter break with crunchy results, but I’m willing to give it another go if that means I can eat breakfast this week. At the very least, I’ll feel less angst about crunchy oatmeal than I would over another McSausage Biscuit.

I’ll let you know how things go. In the meantime, what are your strategies for eating breakfast in the morning?

Menu Plan 1/12-1/19

This has been a really crazy week. You can probably tell I’ve been busy with work and some personal projects because posting on the blog has been light. Sorry about that. It’s for a good cause, though, I promise. Tomorrow at work I start teaching a six-week course called “Exploring Chamber Music” to a large group of retirees. I’ve had a blast putting together the lecture materials and working with musicians to find great repertoire to teach, but it’s been taking up a lot of my usual blogging time. Things should get back to normal soon.

The saving graces in this busy week have been menu planning and my husband. Rami took a turn cooking for three nights this week, and thanks to his diligence and my menu plan, we’ve been able to eat healthy and stay within our grocery budget even though we’re swamped. That was all the incentive I needed to plan out this coming week’s menu. As much help as Rami has been picking up cooking in addition to his usual chores, I do hope that I get to cook all the meals. I really missed my usual time in the kitchen last week.

Here’s what we just got in our Local Box:

Tangerines – Orange Blossom
Red Beets & Greens
Various Lettuce – Acadian
Daikon Radish – My Father’s Farm
Bok Choy – Naegelin
Cauliflower – J&B
Apples – Apple Country
Red Russian Kale – Acadian
Butternut Squash

Here’s what I’m making:

Wednesday: Lettuce salad with classic vinaigrette; balsamic roasted cauliflower over blue cheese grits, apple compote
Thursday: Sweet potato grapefruit souffle (I’m feeling adventurous), balsamic roasted cauliflower
Friday: Wilted Lettuce Salad, grilled cheese sandwiches
Saturday: Ladies who Lunch Potluck!! I’m adapting this Texas Chili Pie to be vegetarian, and experimenting with a new butternut squash casserole recipe
Sunday:  Spicy Bok Choy and tofu in garlic sauce, rice
Monday: Kale and mushrooms over blue cheese grits
Tuesday: Whole beet pasta sauce with penne

How to Cook Winter Greens

If you’ve seen the Greenling newsletter this week, you know that we’re  celebrating a great season of greens! Winter is prime time in Texas for kale, spinach, curly mustard, collards, arugula, bok choy, and lots of other leafy vegetables. These nutritional powerhouses are fun to cook with and easy to include in meals, either as main dishes or as sides.

The guide below gives some basic cooking methods for greens, plus suggestions as to which vegetables are best suited for those methods:

Greenling’s Cooking Guide to Greens

Of course, a great way to enjoy greens is on their own, either as a side dish or an entrée.  The chart above can also help you to include greens in some familiar recipes. Simply match the cooking style of your existing recipe to one of the greens you have on hand. For example, if you’re making scrambled eggs, any of the greens in the “sauté” column will make a great addition. Just sauté a 1/2 cup of finely chopped greens in a skillet, then add two eggs and cook them as usual.

Add any greens from the “boil” column to comforting dishes like this chicken noodleor tortilla soup for a painless extra serving of veggies with lunch or dinner. Same goes for the greens in the braised column. During the last 10-20 minutes of cooking, throw in a few cups of chopped beet greens, chard, kale or spinach to your favorite braised bratwurst, tofu, or chicken recipes, and you’ve got an instant, one-dish meal.

The biggest secret to cooking with greens is to use the freshest ones you can. Fresh greens from a local farm are more nutritious and taste better than greens that have flown across the country before sitting on a grocery store shelf all week.

It’s also important to choose organic greens, since conventionally grown greens like spinach, lettuce and kale carry high levels of pesticide residue, even after washing.  Give your family a green challenge this week and try to include leafy vegetables in as many meals as you can.  Your taste buds– and your local farmers– will thank you!

This post is sponsored by Greenling Organic Delivery and also appears on their blog, “Eating Out of the Local Box.”

 

5 Tips for Menu Planning

I know a secret that will guarantee that you eat healthier and save money this year.  This 10-minute task will also help you spend more time with family, reduce your carbon footprint, and become more organized.  Best part? It’s free! I’m talking about planning a weekly menu, one of the easiest and most effective ways to live better in the new year.

Menu planning is the cornerstone of my blog.  In fact, it’s one of the big reasons I started to write about food in the first place.  Shortly after we got married last May, my husband and I divvied up household chores, with cooking falling squarely on my shoulders.  I’ve always loved to cook, but it took me some time to get organized about it. I planned weekly menus sporadically at first.  Some weeks, I’d take the time to write out a schedule of meals. Other weeks, I forgot or thought we could skip it. Those weeks went badly. We’d often run out of food, bicker about meals and resort to fast food on busy nights. (Okay, most nights.)

In July 2010 I made a resolution to plan a menu for us every week, and I’m proud to say that I haven’t missed a single one since.  I had so much fun with the process, that I decided to blog about it. And now here we are!  I know I’m just getting started on my food blogging, menu planning journey, but here are five things that I’ve learned along the way.

1. Write down the plan using whatever format works best for you. No matter how great your menu plan may be, it doesn’t mean a thing if you keep it in your head.  The menu becomes useful when you take a moment to write (or type) it down in a format that’s easy to read and share. Here is what my meal plan looks like. I write it in Microsoft Word each week using the same format. Breakfast and lunch options are listed out and don’t change much from week to week.  I organize dinners by the day according to our social and work calendars and the longevity of produce in the Greenling local box. If that format doesn’t seem like a good fit for you, no worries! There are a ton of other examples online. Try one and make it work for you.

2. Print out the menu and hang it on the fridge. It’s impossible to stick to a menu plan that you can’t see. Empower your family to help with cooking tasks and quit asking “What’s for dinner??” by hanging the menu prominently in their view. Go high tech, too, and share the menu via email and GoogleDocs so that everyone knows what’s cooking each week.

3. Find a weekly routine that fits your family’s schedule. I run a Wednesday to Tuesday meal planning schedule since that’s what works best for me. I meal plan and grocery shop mid-week so that weekends are free for leisure and cooking. I also serve leftovers on Tuesday nights, no matter what.  This night off from cooking allows me some extra time to meal plan for the next week, and uses up extra food in our fridge.

4. Use a CSA or Grocery Delivery Service. We should all have a personal assistant to do our grocery shopping. Yeah, right. For most, the next best thing is hiring a CSA or grocery delivery service to bring you produce and milk every week. Produce spoils quickly and it’s time consuming to select at conventional grocery stores, so by delegating that portion of the shopping to the experts, you can save time and ensure that you’ve always got fresh food on hand. Our Greenling local box delivery arrives every Wednesday like clockwork, and the menu of local produce they offer serves as the basis for my weekly food routine. Since we can count on fresh groceries and a fresh start every week, we never have the excuse “There’s no food in the fridge,” to eat fast food any more. I’ve also been able to cut back on conventional grocery shopping to just twice a month, saving money on impulse buys at the checkout and gasoline for the car.

5. Start a food blog. I’m just kidding (mostly) with this one.  Blogging my menu plans helps keep me accountable, introduces me to new friends, and gives me inspiration from other food bloggers.  But blogging is a big time commitment.  You can get most the same benefits by getting involved in one of the many menu planning groups online without starting your own blog.  A few standouts include:

• Cafemom.com’s Meal Planning Group. An active internet forum where lots of moms share their meal plans with each other.*
• Orgjunkie.com’s Menu Plan Monday community. Laura posts her own menu plan every Monday and hundreds of other bloggers join in. This is a great way to find new food blogs and see what other home cooks are up to each week.
• This Week for Dinner is the space where California-based blogger Jane Maynard shares her menu plan each week and readers leave comments sharing theirs.  This one is a little different from Orgjunkie’s in that many of the commenters are non-bloggers who share for fun, not to drive traffic to their own content.
• Finally, you can always find my meal plan here at The Austin Gastronomist and Steph’s  over at the Greenling blog Eating Out of the Local Box. On Tuesdays we each blog a different meal plan that use Local Box produce and easy recipes. If you need some help getting started, choose what you like from each of our plans and use that as a launch pad for your own awesome menu.

Admittedly, most of the food blogs and internet forums devoted to menu planning cater to a mid-life, stay-at-home-mom audience. Part of why I became a food blogger is because I felt a bit out of place in those spaces. I mean, I love what they’re doing, but I know that there must be other young, childless, busy people cooking at home from a menu! Hopefully as the locavore/sustainable foodie movement grows, I’ll be able to write more about the menu planning communities of single ladies, starving artists, 20-somethings, punk rockers, rock climbers, and college students. In the meantime, whoever you are, happy menu planning!

Top 10 of 2010, Plus Printable Recipes!

Big news on the blog! Starting this year, any time I write a recipe, along with all the usual pictures and jibba jabba, I’ll include a printable copy of the recipe for download. This one-page PDF document will be scaled down to include just the recipe ingredients and preparation instructions, making it easy to print, email, or save to your computer’s hard drive.  Here’s an example:

I’m particularly excited about the printing capability since it will allow me to quit sprinting back and forth between the kitchen and the computer at dinner time. (My dog will miss the trail of food I leave on the floor in my wake.)

To kick off the new year, I thought it would be fun to go back and add printable pages to each of my top 10 recipes of 2010.  These are the recipes that received the most traffic in the last year, and many of them are my personal favorites, too.  To download the PDF of each recipe, scroll to the bottom of the post and find the text, “click here for a printable copy of this recipe.”

Without further ado, here are Austin Gastronomist’s Top 10 Recipes of 2010, complete with printable recipe pages!

10. Spiced Beet Whoopie Pies
(December 1)

9. Red Lentil & Sweet Potato Soup
(November 22)

8. Pumpkin Bundt Cake with Cinnamon Glaze
(October 13)

7. Venison Pot Pie with Fireman’s #4
(October 23)

6. Sweet Potato Pie
(November 9)

5. Grilled Goat Cheese, Apple & Persimmon Sandwich
(November 17)

4. Mini Apple Persimmon Pies
(November 16)

3. Chili Lime Roasted Pumpkin Seeds
(October 11)

2. Apple Persimmon Compote
(November 13)

1. Roasted Beet and Goat Cheese Pizza
(November 10)