June Spice Rack Challenge: Mint

Wow. So much for posting every month in 2011. Slacker, thy name is Sun Runner. But! Yesterday I picked up my first box of the season from Tantre Farm. Oh, glorious green bounty of spinach, kale, lettuce, tatsoi, spicy mix, radishes, green onions, and asparagus!

How fortuitous, then, that one of the herbs available for selection was mint. I love me some mint. I grow mint in my herb garden. Well, upon further reflection, the mint sort of grows itself. What started out as one plant a few years ago has morphed into a multi-stemmed invader. I should have stuck that bad boy into his own pot. Be warned, herb garden growers! Isolate your mint, or it will advance on the rest of your garden like the Visigoths on Rome!

Mint is best utilized in my favorite warm weather beverage. After the past two weeks of dreary rain, today's 70 degrees and sunshine were a welcome sight. Thus, I made myself a gin smash, heavy on the mint. Perfect for this month's Spice Rack Challenge.

But what mint to use??

My herb garden mint

Tantre Farm mint

How about BOTH?

Mint-o-rama!

Muddled

Ready to drink!

Ahhhhhh

Ingredients:

• mint leaves (a few)
• gin (a lot)
• club soda (to fill the glass)
• sugar (a teaspoon or so)

I make mine thusly:

Put mint, sugar, and a splash of club soda in a flat-bottomed glass. Smash the heck out of it with a muddler. If the club soda starts turning green, that's a good sign. Measure out some gin depending on how mellow you'd like to be and add to the glass. Throw in some ice cubes. Top off with club soda. Stir it up. Toss on a mint spring (or add some more gin) if you're feeling feisty. Retire to porch, relax in sun with cold beverage and reading material.

Vegetable Chowder

Yesterday I met up with some of the Michigan Lady Food Bloggers for a soup swap. I brought my tub of chowder and went home with five large containers of soup, which will feed me for days. My offering was a vegetable chowder.

• 4 tsp canola oil
• 1/2 cup green bell pepper, diced
• 1/2 cup red bell pepper, diced
• 1/2 cup shallots, minced
• 1 tsp curry powder
• 3 cups corn kernels
• 3/4 lb red-skinned potatoes, cut into 1/4-inch cubes
• 1 cup vegetable broth
• 1/2 tsp salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 3 cups milk (skim if you're fat-content-conscious, 2% if you want a rich flavor)

Heat the oil in a large soup pot or Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the bell peppers and shallots; cook, stirring occasionally, until tender, about 5 minutes. Add the curry powder and cook, stirring occasionally, until fragrant, 30 seconds.

Stir in the corn, potatoes, broth, salt, and pepper; bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer, covered, until the vegetables are tender, 10 minutes.

Transfer 1/2 cup of the vegetable mixture to a blender; add the milk and puree until nearly smooth. Return to the pot and cook over medium heat, stirring, until just heated through. Makes four 1 1/2-cup servings.

(adapted from Weight Watchers Ultimate Flex & Core,  "Fresh Corn Chowder," p. 52)

As always, I made some modifications...since I was making this for a larger number of people than specified, I used more corn, more peppers, more potatoes, more broth, and more milk. I also sprinkled a healthy portion of cayenne pepper into it, giving it a spicy kick which elicited a number of comments.

This recipe is my favorite way to use up large amounts of fresh corn scraped from the cob during the summer. When my farm share yields 6 big ears of corn, instead of eating them one at a time, I make this chowder. I also like to use red peppers and potatoes from my farm share.

It was lovely to see the ladies of the MLFB again...I think my last event was the holiday cookie exchange in December 2009!

January Spice Rack Challenge: Rosemary

My, my, my it has been a while since I posted here, hasn't it? I find the lack of attention paid to this blog rather shameful, considering how much I cook. Fortunately, I have an excuse to resuscitate my food blog: a monthly cooking challenge put together by my fellow Michigan Lady Food Blogger Mother's Kitchen: the Spice Rack Challenge. The focus for January was on rosemary.


Rosemary. It grew wild and untended in my childhood home of northern California. There was a particularly lush, fragrant patch in a grassy area on my walking route home from my elementary school. I forgot about the rich piney smell of rosemary bushes warmed by the sun until I went back to California for vacation in 2009. I discovered rosemary being used as landscaping near the house in which I was staying.

It's...a shrubbery! Of rosemary!

It smelled fantastic!

I hosted a large gathering at my house at the beginning of the month which necessitated the cooking of several different crowd-pleasing dishes. Along with the black bean chili and the beef chili and baked ham I made this lamb stew, one of my cold-weather favorites.

Savory Lamb Stew (adapted from Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook, 2006, p. 203)

Ingredients:

• 4 tsp olive oil
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 celery stalk, diced
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 lb boneless lamb leg meat, trimmed and cut into 1 1/2-inch cubes
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• 1 14.5-oz can diced tomatoes
• 2 tsp fresh rosemary, minced
• 2 tsp fresh sage, minced
• 2 tsp fresh thyme, minced
• 1/2 tsp grated lemon zest
• 1/2 tsp salt
• Freshly ground pepper
• 1 cup water
• 2 medium red-skinned potatoes, cubed
• 2 cups cut green beans
• 1 tbsp fresh parsley, minced

In a large soup pot or Dutch oven, heat the olive oil. Saute the onion, carrot, celery, and garlic until the onion is translucent, 8-10 minutes. Add the lamb and saute until no longer pink, about 4 minutes. Add the wine and cook for 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes, rosemary, sage, thyme, lemon zest, salt, pepper, and 1/2 cup of the hot water, stir, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer gently for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the potatoes, green beans, and the remaining 1/2 cup of water, cover, and simmer until potatoes are tender and the liquid has reduced, about 20 minutes. Serve sprinkled with the parsley.

I quadrupled this recipe for my party because I was expecting about 20 people at my house. This meant I used almost all of the little container of fresh rosemary I had purchased. It was a huge success and I had several people tell me it was absolutely delicious. You'd never guess it was a Weight Watchers recipe!

I hope the coming months of the Spice Rack Challenge will motivate me to resume regular posting. I have a food blog for a reason: I love to cook and I love to eat, and at one time I wanted to share that with whoever was interested. I can't wait to see what next month's challenge is!

Limoncello

A while back my friends in Sacramento, California, sent me a box full of lemons from their lemon tree. After some pondering I decided to use some of them to make homemade limoncello.

They smelled so good, you just can't even imagine. It was a burst of summer in the middle of a Michigan winter.

I did a simple Google search for "limoncello" and after some perusal settled on this recipe, from the Washington Post. I had a source from Indiana procure for me a bottle of true high-octane Everclear, 190 proof, which is unavailable in Michigan. This, according to various persons in the know, is what one should use to make homemade limoncello.

I used one of my growlers for the initial steeping. It worked perfectly! And yes, I did manage to get all of the lemon peel out of the jug once steeping was over. There was a lot of shaking involved.

The sugar water-lemon infusion mixing step. This was messy and sticky. The end result filled two half-gallon growlers. That's a lot of limoncello.

The finished product!

I was as careful as I could be when I peeled the lemons but I think a wee bit of white pith made it into the infusion and made it a tiny bit more bitter than it should have been. Nevertheless, for my first attempt at anything like this, it turned out remarkably well. It tastes great and is delicious by itself with some ice or mixed in with other things.

This is not a concoction for the impatient. It took five weeks from start to finish, and I have another half gallon that's still resting in my basement. Anyone want some homemade limoncello?

Chocolate Chambord Ice Cream

A random comment on Facebook did what nothing else could: prod me into updating my poor, sad, neglected food blog. I don't even know how I can be called a Michigan Lady Food Blogger since I haven't updated my food blog in five months! I've had the pictures for this sitting around since LAST SUMMER. There's no excuse. I'm just lazy as heck.

When I discovered how easy it is to make your own ice cream, I started experimenting with different flavors. I learned that I could take a plain vanilla cream base and add almost anything to it. In one memorable experiment, my friend and I made ice cream which contained Gummi Bears and mini marshmallows (that strange combination was his request). Why not? It was fun, and I love having fun with cooking. Additionally, I am in complete control of the ingredients, and as such my homemade ice cream has no salt, less sugar, and no weird chemicals with multisyllabic names.

Anything chocolate has long been a favorite ice cream flavor of mine, so I began playing with various kinds of chocolate. Orange-infused chocolate chip: a huge hit. Chocolate with Grand Marnier: not so much; something in the Grand Marnier prevents the ice cream from ever fully freezing so the ice cream is mushy and slippery. Chocolate Chambord, however: a smashing success.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup whole milk
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 8 oz bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, broken into 1/2-inch pieces
• 2 cups chilled heavy cream
• 1 tsp vanillla extract
• Chambord liqueur

Heat the whole milk until it is just bubbling around the edges (this may be done on a stove or in a microwave). In a blender or food processor fitted with the metal blade, pulse to process the sugar with the chocolate until the chocolate is very finely chopped. Add the hot milk and process until well blended and smooth. Transfer to a quart-sized container and let the mixture cool completely. Stir in the heavy cream and vanilla to taste. Chill for 30 minutes or longer. Turn your ice cream maker on and pour the chilled mixture into the freezer bowl. Let mix until thickened, about 25-30 minutes. In the final five minutes of mixing, add 1/4 to 1/2 cup Chambord liqueur (depending on how strongly you wish your ice cream to taste of raspberry). Once mixing is complete, transfer bowl to freezer and cure for at least 2 hours. For the ice cream to freeze solid all the way through may take up to 4 hours, so if you want to have this for dessert, don't start making it at 8:00 pm!

This is the Basic Chocolate Ice Cream recipe from the user manual for my Cuisinart automatic ice cream maker (a truly wonderful machine). I added the Chambord all on my own. I like to use Ghirardelli bittersweet (60% cacao) chocolate chips because not only does it save you the tedious task of chopping chocolate, the chips are delicious to snack on.

A variation on this ice cream which I made another time included fresh raspberries, which I threw in along with the Chambord at the tail end of churning time. Now that was an epic ice cream!

I know it's winter and we're all so very tired of cold, but it's always time for ice cream!

Oh vegetable stir fry, how do I love thee...

I think I could write a poem about the colorful elegance of my dinner tonight. I "fridge shopped" again, plucking things from the crisper drawers which I thought would blend nicely in my big stainless steel pan. I combined two recipes from my last Tantre share newsletter, because I wanted to use both the daikon radishes and the tatsoi. Add an onion, red bell peppers, garlic, and carrots (all from my share), and I ended up with a beautiful plate of bright red, green, orange, and white. I made a pot of brown rice, nestled the vegetables next to it, and paired this gorgeous yet simple and healthy meal with a chilled Torrontes from Argentina.

I was at the Home Grown Festival in Ann Arbor yesterday afternoon, where I saw many of my Michigan Lady Food Blogger friends. I tasted tomatoes, ate a black bean taco (Arbor Brewing), blueberry and feta pizza (Silvio's Organic Pizza), goat cheese and carmelized onion tart (The Grange), a delicious pastie (Tranche de Vie), a Rice Krispie square (Bizzy Lizzy), several local beers, and the best thing of the whole day: Maitelates dulce de leche cookies. Oh my god people those are TO DIE FOR. I bought a bag of six and I know they will not be my last.

I wanted to eat more, more, MORE!! but after the blueberry pizza I was totally stuffed and as badly as I wanted a tamale I just didn't think my stomach could handle it. Plus the crowds were reaching a point which had triggered my inner alarm and I knew I had to get out of there. I ran 16 miles Saturday morning, an endeavor which burned 2100 calories, and I definitely earned every delicious bite I ate at the festival.

I love living in such a foodie town!!

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Sometimes a little chaos is good

I rummaged through my refrigerator and threw together a dinner of no particular provenance or coherence: chopped tomatoes, onions, garlic, a bunch of leafy greens, and shredded roast chicken. The veggies were from my Tantre farm share and the chicken was Back Forty Acres. I sauteed the veggies, splashed some broth over the mess to keep it moist, threw in the chicken, and let it simmer. I had originally intended to toss it with pasta but then I thought, "why not just eat the mixture?" So I did. Just the mixture plopped in a bowl. With a hearty glass of my newly received wine shipped from California, it was...an amazing dinner. Just a big sloppy mélange of ingredients and a glass of wine and a cat on my lap. Delicious. Nutritious. Fabulous. No recipe, no direction, no plan, just me and my cutting board and knife and fingers dipping into my jar of salt for a crystalline sprinkle across a fragrant bubbling pan of food, good food, that I made for myself.

I love cooking. I love eating. I love opening my fridge and thinking, "So, what do I feel like tonight?" and pulling something down out of thin air. Yes, I dine alone these days. But I'm never lonely.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]