I tried a new recipe, "White Wine-Braised Chicken and Artichokes", a recipe from Thirty Minute Meal Prep, by Robin Miller that was featured in the Washington Post column, "Eat Voraciously," back before I let my subscription end. I halved the recipe, which still gives us enough for tomorrow. I took the option of skinning the chicken thighs. My only change was to delete the oregano in deference to my husband. The other spices were smokey paprika and onion powder. I added about a quarter cup of chicken broth with the wine. My husband thought it was fine, although he did not eat any of the artichokes or the pimento stuffed olives (more for me). My verdict is that the recipe was a bit bland without the oregano, so I may try to think of another spice with which to replace it. The recipe specified canned artichokes. I thought that they were ok, but I wonder if frozen ones would be better. The recipe's great virtue is that it is made in a skillet on the stove top and goes together quickly. The weather is too muggy to turn on the oven. I made mixed brown and wild rice, which was good with the sauce and the artichokes and olives. We also had microwaved frozen peas.
Temperatures on Wednesday were only in the upper 80s, but it is extremely muggy, which resulted in a small thunderstorm with rain that we needed. I took the opportunity in the later afternoon to bake Peanut Butter Honeys, which are delicious with iced tea. (I think fondly of Mumpy when I bake my adaptation of her recipe. I wish that she had come to Nebraska Kitchen when the Baking Circle was dismantled.) I also baked Banana Oatmeal Muffins. I ended up with more batter than expected, maybe because I used four bananas rather than three, or maybe because these bananas were more far gone than usual. I ended up with 17 muffins, which meant a pause while I got out a small muffin pan and sprayed five more muffin liners. We, of course, each sampled a muffin for dessert. Well, my husband sampled two, which he had with some of the leftover jam from when I canned.
We had salad too! I was going for a Vietnamese salad but discovered I didn't have fish sauce (must have tossed it). After substituting mushroom soy sauce and tasting the dressing I threw it down the sink and substituted bottled french dressing. With the greens I did include shaved carrots, radishes and sweet onions marinated in rice vinegar , cold ramen noodles, basil, cilantro, mint and cheddar sesame sticks. My husband gave it a thumbs up!
I did have a wonderful time Joan, thank you very much. It was the first time I got to spend a whole week at home since we sold our house 14 years ago (sometimes it seems longer). I got to spend quality time with my brother and SIL, saw lots of friends, sat on the porch and read and walked a lot. I joked when I got home that I had to go North to get a tan 😁
I used the Oxo salad spinner today to dry the broccoli for my salad. It was love at first spin, even though, as Len notes, salad spinners take up a fair amount of space.
I think that Janie Bakes, who has not been active at Nebraska Kitchen for a while, was the only other yogurt maker. If I recall correctly, she made hers in her oven. I have gone through three yogurt makers. The old-style ones had separate little spots for the jars, while the new ones just put the all on a covered heating surface. Eventually, the wiring inside stops working, especially if someone uses it as much as I do.
For a time, I was not making my own yogurt as I had access to quality yogurt where we lived, and I was not saving money if I did so, although it does cut down on the plastic containers. However, here, I can only get full fat Stonyfield (would like low fat or nonfat) even over in the next town, and most of the other yogurts use starch as thickeners and add sweeteners. So, I pulled out a yogurt maker that I had bought on a whim at Tuesday Morning and not gotten around to using, read up on yogurt making, and here I am. I know that the bread proofer that King Arthur sells can be used to make yogurt, but it is expensive, and I have not felt the need for a bread proofer. I like to have a 6 oz. container of yogurt every morning as part of my breakfast, and I fortify it so that I get a good shot of calcium.
Not sure if I'll get to it this week, but I'm going to make a batch of laminated dough for croissants using some of the pastry flour I bought while in Pennsylvania. (Gotta find a way to use up 50 pounds of it!) Some sources recommend a bread flour for croissants, others recommend a pastry flour, so I'll be curious to see if I can notice any differences.
Three of my jam jars did not seal correctly, so I re-canned them on Monday morning and will check them tomorrow. I think that it might not be a good idea to have the air conditioner on when I'm doing the actual canning over in the Annex, so I will turn it off when I get to that stage.
I had bought a lovely little head of cauliflower at the farmers market a week ago, and we had some store-bought broccoli in the refrigerator, so I decided to use my broccoli salad recipe and put in the cauliflower as well. That works well. I did not, however, have any turkey bacon to put in the salad, and had no desire to go to the local store, which would be unlikely to carry it. I thought that I remembered reading about a vegan alternative to bacon crumbs in salads, and I found it at the Love and Lemons blog. It called for ½ cup almonds and ½ cup pepitas, which are tossed in 1 Tbs. tamari (I used soy sauce), ½ tsp. maple syrup, which I doubled to 1 tsp., and ¼ tsp. smokey paprika (I used Penzey's Smoked Spanish Style). I think the recipe used whole almonds. The combination gets toasted at 350 F on a parchment lined baking sheet. While the recipe said 10-14 minutes, I did just 8. I would probably extend it to 10 minutes next time. I did not add it to the salad but put it in a separate dish, so that we could sprinkle it over our individual servings. While it does not replace bacon, it gives a satisfactory taste. I may tweak the recipe a little more, as it is nice to be able to make an acceptable substitute with ingredients that I usually have available. We had our broccoli salad with boneless pork ribs that Scott de-fatted and cooked on the stove top.
On these hot days, I like the idea of a hearty salad and some meat without a starchy food.
When I made the sumac muffins last week, they were good but not the same as the ones we had in Pittsburgh. Doing some researching, I decided to order some za'atar to see if that might be what was actually in them. Diane took one sniff from the bag of Lebanese za'atar (hyssop, sumac, sesame, coriander and salt) that came today and said, 'Yes, that's the right smell.' So, I'll try making some with that later this week.
At 8 a.m. this morning, to beat the heat, I went to our larger woodlands with my husband. While Scott worked on a project there, I began picking black raspberries, and he helped after he finished. At home, I combined what we picked with the ones we had been picking on the terrace (and Scott added a few more). That gave me enough to make and can four (8 oz.) and one (4 oz) jars of jam. I did the canning in the Annex kitchen to keep the heat out of the house, and also because that kitchen allows for a better set-up, which I can leave in place until I finish with the black raspberries and the blackberries that will be ripening soon afterwards. It also has air-conditioning that I ran while I worked out there. Canning equipment will be put away after berry season, as we will have guests in early September, but it will come out again for apple butter, and perhaps applesauce, which I have not yet tried to can.
Dinner tonight was easy: the rest of the farro stir-fry!
I went by the local thrift store yesterday and saw a Euro Cuisine Electric Yogurt Maker for $2 that included all seven jars and an extra jar. While I have a yogurt maker from another company, it does have a cracked lid, and I figure it is only a matter of time before it breaks, so I bought this one. I read through the directions, and I would likely continue my own method of making yogurt, which means after heating the milk, I keep it between 183-189 F for ten minutes, whisk in 4 Tbs. milk powder, then allow it to cool down to about 115 F, at which point the starter (170 g Stonyfield yogurt) gets mixed into some of the milk. For my current yogurt maker, the incubation time is 5 hours and 40 minutes.
I looked up the manual online for the Euro Cuisine, and it recommends 8 hours incubating for whole milk and up to 12 hours for skim. I use 1 %, with full fat Stonyfield yogurt. The Euro Cuisine also says NOT to put the lids on during the incubation period but to put them on once the yogurt is done. I expect that I will have to do some experimenting on time, but I hope that it won't require more than eight hours.
It will be an experiment, but first, I will do a test run with jars of water to see if the appliance actually works.
I suspect that I am the only yogurt maker here at Nebraska Kitchen, but if anyone else is familiar with the Euro Cuisine yogurt maker, let me know.
As a side note, my other purchase was a very nice Oxo salad spinner for $4 to replace my Zylis one that has a crack. The Oxo has a push button that goes for much longer than the string pull of the Zylis, so it should be more ergonomic as well.
There was a lot of wild sumac where I grew up (the good kind, genus Rhus, not poison sumac, which is genus Toxicodendron.) The genus for the latter even sounds dangerous, doesn't it? They're not all that closely related, though they are both in the Anacardiaceae family.
It is more commonly found in savory Middle Eastern foods, and is frequently an ingredient in za'atar. The Casbah restaurant in Pittsburgh where we had the sumac muffins was quite interesting, I'd like to eat there again some time.
We planted some sumac in the NE corner of our yard to hide the utility posts, but over the years other plants have pretty much crowded them out. They tend to grow in thickets.
I'm making my first attempt at sumac muffins today, they look similar but the taste is different. Not bad, just different. May need a little more sweetness and more spices. Has anyone baked with za'atar?
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Gee, I would have said you had more gardening room than most of us, but maybe it isn't suitable for watermelons or too exposed to the local animals.
I sprinkled a packet of dill and a handful of dill seeds from last year in part of my garden and raked it in a little, now I've got a lovely dill forest going. (That's how my mother always grew dill.)
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They vendor at our farmers market from whom we bought some cherry tomato and Dester Indiana tomato starts, as well as a dill plant, also had starts for the sugar baby watermelons, but alas, we do not have room to grow them.
We had dinner salads tonight, using some of the leftover roasted chicken breast and the bounty of vegetables, although my husband passed on the bell pepper and green onion. We assembled the salads in small (8-inch) serving bowls.
Lovely and tasty food, Joan and Len!
I roasted two large bone-in chicken breasts on Wednesday, as storms came through and cooled down temperatures. I had some chicken with a large spinach salad with three different colors of mini-bell peppers, some carrots, mushrooms, green onions, and cherry tomatoes. I used some "salad topping" (a mix of dried cranberries, dried cherries, sunflower seeds, and pecans on top. Scott also had chicken, but he had his with the rest of the broccoli salad. The spinach and the green onions came from last Saturday's farmers market.
Probably more of a local supply chain issue, I've not seen any signs of a nationwide banana shortage yet. There is a fungal disease (a strain of fusarium wilt labeledTR4, also called Panama Disease) that will eventually wipe out most of the Cavendish banana plants, like an earlier strain, TR1, did with the Gros Michel in the 50's, but it will likely take another 10-20 years. I don't know if they've settled on a new variety to replace it, and it takes something like 5-10 years for a banana plantation to get fully productive banana plants from new stock.
There may be better mitigation efforts in place than in the 50's, since Gros Michel was wiped out quite quickly once TR1 was widespread, though TR4 has been around for over 30 years already. I've seen some reports of trying to breed fungal resistance into Cavendish, but since banana plants are mainly reproduced by cloning, that's not a very simple or quick strategy. Cloning is also the reason TR4 is a world-wide problem, just like it was for the Gros Michel.
About two years ago I read an article about using gene splicing to add fusarium resistance to the Cavendish banana from fusarium resistant tomatoes, but the anti-GMO folks were quick to pick up on that and I don't know if that project is still ongoing.
The 1920's Broadway tune "Yes we have no bananas" was written about banana shortages from the early years of the TR1 plague on the Gros Michel banana.
