Cook Once, Eat All Week: Chuck Roast

As part of the series on cooking once and eating for the week, I will share my plan for using a large chuck roast (with video!). The first meal will be a pot roast dinner. Minimizing your time in the kitchen will help you to save money on those last minute "let's just order out" days when you are exhausted or simply do not have the time to start a meal from scratch.

Menu

Meal 1: Pot Roast and Vegetables

Pot Roast Dinner

Meal 2: BBQ Beef on bulky rolls, Sweet Potato Fries
Meal 3: Taco Salad

Taco Salad without Cheese

Meal 4: Beef and Barley Soup

Beef and Barley Soup

Meal 5: Cheesy Potatoes with chopped broccoli

(this uses no roast beef, but does use up left over potatoes)

Cheese Potatoes and Bacon (this one has no broccoli)

Recipes

Pot Roast with Veggies

1 large chuck roast
1 carrot, chopped fine 
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 cups chicken broth
4 red potatoes
8 ounces baby carrots
(optional: Turnips, cut up into bite sized chunks)

Cooking directions below video

I apologize for the bad subtitles. Practice, practice practice

Heat up a large dutch oven (I prefer enameled cast iron for this application). Add a tablespoon of oil. Salt and pepper both sides of the beef and add to the pan once the oil is shimmering. Leave in the pan on high heat for several minutes. When very browned, turned meat over and allow to brown on the other side. If your pot roast is not flat, you will want to brown the other sides too.
Remove meat from the pan. Add a bit more oil if necessary, and add the onions and carrots to the pan. Cook for several minutes until you see the onions starting to lose their opaqueness. Lower the heat slightly and add in the garlic. Stir and cook until you really smell the garlic cooking.

Deglaze the pan by adding the broth to the pan and scraping the bits off the bottom. Raise the heat a bit if necessary.

Once the pan is deglazed and the liquid starts to boil, add the meat back in the pan. Turn off the heat, cover the pot and put into a 275 degree oven. Let cook for at least three hours. 

Add the vegetables to the pan after three or four hours, cover the pan again and let cook in the oven for another 30 to 45 minutes until the vegetables are soft enough to easily pierce with a fork.

Remove the meat and vegetables from the pan. Pass the liquid through a sieve to remove the bulky vegetables and skim the fat if necessary.

In the now empty pan, heat 2 tablespoons of fat (oil, butter, even schmaltz or bacon fat will do). Stir in 2 tablespoons of flour and mix together while cooking over medium heat. As soon as the flour starts to smell a bit nutty and maybe getting slightly browned a bit, slowly add in the now clarified liquids while whisking. You want the gravy to be slightly thinner than you plan to serve it as it will thicken as it cools. If the gravy isn't dark enough for you, add a small touch of gravy master until it is the shade you prefer. You don't need a lot of this stuff.

While you are cooking the roast, now would be a great time to boil a bunch of red potatoes. I usually get a 5 lb bag, use some for the pot roast and boil the rest for the week.

Shred any left over beef to refrigerate for the rest of the week.

Meal 2: BBQ sandwiches with Sweet Potato Fries

Shred enough left over pot roast for the number of sandwiches you are making. Top with BBQ sauce of your choice and slowly reheat over a low flame until hot.
Toast the rolls. Top with the beef mix and any other sandwich fixings you like. 
Sweet potato "fries": Scrub and peel two large sweet potatoes (sometimes marketed as "yams"). Cut in half lengthwise, then cut slices about the size of fries, as you like them. Toss the slices in a bit of oil, place in a baking sheet, sprinkle with salt and bake in an oven at 475 for 10 minutes, flip the slices and bake until they start to brown and are cooked through.

Meal 3: Taco Salad

Shred iceberg or romaine lettuce. Cut some tomatoes into chunks, or use a can of diced tomatoes. If you have the time, toss them with a little oil and roast in the oven at 475 until they shrivel and brown a bit, but this is completely optional. Slice a small can of olives. Crush some tortillas and lay at the bottom of the bowl, top with a mix of the vegetables and olives.
Cook up some of the shredded beef with some taco seasoning using the directions on the back from the point after you brown the beef. Alternatively, use the recipe below to make your own seasoning, then add 3/4 cup of water and simmer with the beef until heated through.

Top the bowls with the meat mixture and shredded cheddar if desired, when ready to serve. 

Meal 4: Beef and Barley Soup

Shredded beef (or small chop)
1 onion, chopped
2 large carrots, chopped
garlic, as much as you like. Or none. Up to you.
6 cups broth 
assorted chopped vegetables: potatoes, turnips, parsnips, broccoli, whatever you have on hand
1/2 cup of pearled barley
1/2 - 1 cup frozen peas
I can petite dice tomatoes
few dashes of Worcestershire sauce (use soy if you don't have this, or just leave it out. It will be a bit different, but still good)

heat some oil in a soup pot. Saute onions and carrots. When cooked, add in garlic if using. When you start to smell the garlic cooking, add in the broth. Bring to a boil. If using fresh vegetables, add them now, then add the barley, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Stir in tomatoes and peas and heat through taste and season as desired (salt, pepper) and a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce. 

Meal 5: Cheesy Potatoes with Chopped Broccoli

2 or more cups of boiled potatoes, cut into small bite sized pieces. Finely chop cooked broccoli to make about a cup.
Heat a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of oil in a skillet. Add some very finely chopped onion to taste. Cook onion until it starts to brown. Add the potatoes and a bit more fat if necessary. Heat potatoes through and let them brown. Mix in bacon bits if desired, mix in broccoli. When heated through, top with cheddar cheese and cover until cheese melts.


Advanced cooking tips:

Boil potatoes when making pot roast
An alternative to cooked, chopped broccoli would be to pick up a bag of frozen chopped broccoli and let thaw before using.
Chop up onions, garlic and carrots in advance all at once for use during the week.
Mix up a batch of taco seasoning in advance
I buy a bag of bacon bits from Costco. Easily add that delicious flavor to anything without the mess.
Freeze any portions of beef that you will not be using in the next 3 or 4 days, to avoid spoilage.

Shopping List

Meat:

5 pounds chuck roast

Produce:

2 lbs carrots
16 oz bag baby carrots
1 pound of broccoli OR 16 oz frozen chopped broccoli
2 lbs onions
3 heads of garlic
5 lbs red, white or yellow potatoes
Iceberg or Romaine lettuce
1 pound or more tomatoes (or, a can of petite diced)
2 large sweet potatoes (also marketed as "yams")

Groceries:

Black olives
Taco Seasoning
3-32 ounces containers chicken broth
Gravy master (optional)
Good quality bacon bits (optional)
Bulky rolls
Tortilla chips
pearled barley
BBQ sauce
14 ounces petite diced tomatoes if not using fresh

Frozen:

16 ounces peas
16 ounces chopped broccoli (if not using fresh)

Dairy:

8 ounces shredded cheddar
8 ounces sour cream 

Make your own taco seasoning mix! 

2 tablespoons chili powder

1 tablespoon ground cumin

2 teaspoons cornstarch

2 teaspoons kosher salt

1 1/2 teaspoons hot smoked paprika

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Put all ingredients in a jar and shake to combine

Taco seasoning recipe courtesy of Alton Brown

Waste Not, Want Not

In honor of Massachusetts passing a "no food waste" bill for places that serve hot foods, I am taking up a challenge of "no food waste" in my own home.
Having the privilege of a garbage disposal, it is very easy to lose sight of how much food, good edible food, gets wasted due to poor planning or simple laziness. While I do compost quite a lot, I am limited because of close neighbors and too much neighborhood vermin (not necessarily the same thing *wink*), as well as city laws which prohibit feeding the wild life. All it takes is someone to get a wild hair across their ass and I am being fined for "feeding the wild life". I know, I know.
So far, I have instituted a worm bin, and have a contained compost outside for some of the overflow of scraps and waste. I also have a "less is more" rule when it comes to food. Take a just a little. If you are still hungry, there is more (usually), but it is less likely that food left on a plate will be saved if not eaten.
Still, there is a LOT of waste. I am embarrassed to admit that I have had to throw out, in this past month alone, one whole roasting chicken and 2 smallish round roasts. Partly, it is because I had some flares and 'sodes that prevented me from taking care of it right away, and partly is was piss poor planning. This was food intended for processing and storing, but I had too much to do at once, and with the pain I could not do as much as I needed to. So, wasted food and money, money we do not have and will have to come out of something else, like my med and doctor co pays, or holding off on paying the monthly mortgage in full. That is not acceptable. It is also not acceptable that all of the resources connected to growing that food were wasted too. Meat uses a LOT of resources, so I am especially perturbed at wasting meat, which cannot be composted or used in another way.
The first step is to create a menu. I have often created weekly menus, using the sales flyer and current food stores to save money and cut back on waste. The problems with doing just a weekly menu is that it must be done more often, which means it is unlikely to be done every single week, increasing the problem of food waste. My answer was to come up with a monthly plan, based more on the types of sales one sees during that season. I plan to have several monthly meal plans set up to easily mix and match, so that eventually, I will not have to create one at all. Doing this in excel makes it much easier to play around with various menus so that each month is personalized, working with current sales and most importantly, what is in season to work with.
This months menu took me two full days to create, but please, do not let that stop you. First, it takes me longer to do things than it used to, so my timeline is not yours. Second, I used an Excel worksheet that someone else made up, so I had to not only make the menu, but go through all of the recipes and create a standardized way of converting all of the ingredients so that it would produce a workable grocery list. Since the menu is for an entire month, and there are still a couple months in Autumn left, if I cannot make another next month, this one is easy to reuse since there is a different meal for each day. A monthly rotation leaves a lot more variety than a weekly one.
Besides using an Excel workbook, I also made a cuisine for each day of the week. Monday is "meatless" or at least "nearly meatless", Tuesday is Italian, Wednesday is soup, Thursday is Pizza (homemade is the plan, but at least ordering one is  not' expensive), Friday is for family comfort foods, Saturday is up in the air as a way to either use up left overs or foods that were not used from the last shopping trip because, well, life does happen, And Sunday is a family dinner type meal like roast chicken or lasagna, something that I associate with big family dinners. I also try to keep leftovers from meals in mind while planning.
Here is a screen shot of my meal plan:

You should be able to find templates for many different types of planners, all free, just do a search using your favorite search engine.

When there are mistakes, there needs to be a way to take care of the possible waste. I like different preserving practices, and they all have excellent uses, but currently I am using the dehydrator because I find that it is easy to store, and easy to do.

My husband accidentally got 5 extra pounds of organic carrots and 3 English cucumbers too many for our meals last week, so I have dehydrated shredded carrots as well as sliced some and blanched them for use in soups and such. There is also 1/2 large cucumbers worth of slices flavored with cinnamon and sugar for crispy snacks, but that is an experiment I will share if they turn out properly tasty and edible.

I Have Yum Yums!

The pain has really been taking a toll on me the past few months. It is very difficult to think about food when concentrating on just getting important things accomplished. Still, with all the lovely fresh tomatoes coming from my garden, and the wonderful surprise of beautiful carrots, I had no choice but to cook (and preserve) the bounty. So far, I have canned up salsas and tomatoes (cut up and as a plain sauce) and dehydrated a lot of zucchini and such, which is terrific (and will be blogged about another time), but the real treats have been the new recipes I have created to take care of some of the glut.

My first two recipes were created in tandem. I was whipping up some American Chop Suey and decided that, as will all foods, bacon would be a perfect boost to flavor. I could not bear to waste all that flavorful fat, so I sauteed onions in it for the dish, but realized that I made too much, so 1/2 a cup of the now cooked onions were set aside for the salad.
I also made a delicious pot roast last night. My son came by in the morning, and after poking around in the garden in the cool morning air, we walked (or I hobbled) to the local butcher to see what he had. There, I picked up five pounds of chicken backs for stock as well as 2 1/2 pounds of chuck roast. There was little fat on it, especially for a chuck roast, but it cooked up nicely in wine and dried tomatoes from last season.

I do not have pictures of everything, that tends to be one of the last things on the list to do, and as I mentioned, it has been rough these past weeks.

Without further ado, here we go.

Beef Pot Roast with Mushrooms and "Sun Dried" Tomatoes

Ingredients:

2 1/2 pounds beef chuck roast
1 cup dry red wine
1/2 cup dried tomatoes, not in oil (I used dried cherry tomatoes from last seasons garden)
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, smashed and roughly chopped (I cut into quarters then slice them)
2 sprigs of rosemary
salt and pepper
3 large white potatoes, peeled and halved
1/2 pound or more of carrots (carrots have a strong flavor, so just enough to serve the number of folks eating) trimmed and scraped when necessary.
8 oz sliced mushrooms, roughly chopped if large
2 Tablespoons flower
2 Tablespoons butter

I use my slow cooker to make this, but it will work wonderfully on the stove top too. Just cook it on a very low simmer rather than use the slow cooking instructions. Alternative, you can use the oven on a low setting, but you will have to experiment as I have no oven to work with currently.

Since my slow cooker has an insert I can use on the stove top, I do that. Everyone else should use a heavy saute pan of some sort, just be sure it is non reactive as the wine can cause a reaction with some metals. Non reactive would be enameled cast iron, cast iron that is VERY WELL seasoned. My pans are well over a hundred years old, and I do not feel confident they are sealed enough, but that is me based on my having tried making tomato sauce in the darned things for years before figuring out why it tasted "off" all the time. Other pans to use are stainless steel or anything with a non stick surface, though the fond won't be as nice from non stick.

Salt the beef and sear in a pan on high heat using a touch of oil just to keep the sticking down a bit. The browned bits are full of flavor, so you don't need to keep it from sticking entirely, we just don't want burned bits rather than deep brown. Give it a really good sear, your patience will be rewarded (thank you Alton Brown).

Remove browned beef from the pan and add the onions. Keep an eye on it and stir until they start to get translucent. Add the garlic and cook until the smell of the garlic wafts up from the pan. Add the wine, starting with 1/2 cup to deglaze the pan. Continue adding the wine and let cook for a bit to help dull the alcohol flavor a bit. Add the beef back to the pan along with the dried tomatoes and set on high for one hour and turn to low for two more hours.

Prepare the vegetables. These are small carrots from my garden that were just gorgeous, so I left some of the stem and cleaned them very thoroughly, as well as scraping the skins off of the ones that were bumpy to be sure I removed all of the dirt. Peel the potatoes (I find the larger whites have tough skins, but if you are using younger white potatoes or red skinned types, you can leave the skin on)

Put the vegetables and rosemary in the pot, turn to high for one hour and then back to low until the vegetables are cooked through, another two hours.

To make the gravy, add the butter to a frying or saute pan and cook the mushrooms until the liquid escapes, dissipates, and the mushrooms start to brown. Season the mushrooms with salt and pepper to taste. Sprinkle the flour over the mushrooms and cook for a few minutes to get the raw flavor of flour out. Strain the pan juices and slowly add to the pan until you reach your desired thickness. Remember to keep it a bit thin as it will thicken as soon as it starts to cool a little.

Serve!

Are they not gorgeous?

I have no pictures for the next two recipes. At least I do not right now, but it was so delicious I could not, not share.

American Chop Suey Michele Style

1 pound ground beef
6 slices good bacon
1 large onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 pounds of plum tomatoes, peeled and cut up
1 cup chicken stock (broth will work, but the gelatin in the stock makes this amazing)
2 cups shaped pasta (traditionally elbows, but I used campenelle which was perfect)

Cook the bacon until brown and just crispy. Do not over cook as it will taste "off". Remove the bacon to drain. Pour out the fat, leaving two tablespoons for cooking the onion. Add the onions and cook until translucent and just slightly starting to caramelize. Remove 1/2 cup of onion for use in salad. Add garlic to pan and cook until the smell of the garlic wafts from the pan to your face. Remove vegetables to a bowl.
Brown the ground beef. Leave some nice lumps, you want something to chew in this. Drain the beef and add the vegetables back in along with the tomatoes and stock, scraping up any bits from the bottom of the pan. Cover and simmer 10 minutes. Add pasta, cover and cook ten minutes more or until pasta is al dente. Add four slices of lightly crumbled bacon and stir. (the other two slices are for the salad)

Snow White Salad

I call this Snow White salad because that is the type of tomatoes I used and they are fabulous. Substitutions can be any sweet tasting tomato, preferably a cherry or grape variety.

Ingredients:

1-2 cups of Snow White cherry tomatoes, cut in halves.
2 big handfuls of baby spinach, well washed and trimmed
1/2 cup of onions cooked in bacon fat
2 slices cooked bacon, crumbled
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
Pinch of salt, if required (to taste)

This is easy, just toss it all together in a bowl. The onions should not be hot, but warm is fine. The amount of mayonnaise is a suggestion, there is no need to use a lot, just enough to make a light dressing with the juices from the tomatoes and the flavors from the bacon and onions. Serve immediately, this salad does not keep well, to my eternal sadness.

Stay tuned for my laundry detergent tests, making dishwasher discs, and other fun things I have been doing this season aside from gardening.

The Cheepah Chicken

Okay, maybe I am the only one who remembers "Father of the Bride" with Steve Martin, but hey, the title makes me giggle and it is what goes through my head whenever I get chicken. I am not a huge fan of chicken generally, which is unfortunate because a whole chicken is a budgeting dream. This fryer was regularly 1.49 a pound, and while the roasters are .20 cents less, they are also much bigger. With a small family and only one large appetite, the smaller ones work better for us. That and the roasters tend to be less tasty when fried, which is what the legs will be used for.
Since I am usually not well, the idea of spending "spoons" making a grocery list and menu within a budget, and then going to the store and fighting the masses, then lugging it all home, putting it away and starting to process meats and fruits for use, it is a bit too much. I have lost a lot of meat and vegetables trying to do it all, even in a few days, so now I often go through Peapod online. My husband can pick it up for free, and that way doesn't have to work so hard after working so hard at the job all day. I have learned how to keep within a budget this way, and have stopped buying some things that are much more expensive through the service than if we went down ourselves. All of that was a lead up to saying that I got two chickens by accident. This worked out for you all, because after I processed one bird, I had my husband come in and take some photos of the second one to share on this blog. I would like to apologize in advance for the photo set up. The pictures were great, but I had to compile them like this to keep the page from loading improperly. They also seem somewhat over-sized for the blogger format even though I used their settings. This is the smallest I could set them and still be able to see anything.

Each chicken left me with:

2 boneless chicken breast halves
1/2 pound of chicken tenders
2 drumsticks
2 thighs
2 wings
1 carcass, bag of innards plus scraps for stock
1 liver which I freeze in a container until I have enough to do something with.
2 quarts of clear chicken broth

Keep in mind that there are more than one way to process a chicken. If I were making a large fried chicken dinner, for example, I would have kept the breasts on the bone and cut each half in half again. If I wanted to also serve chicken wings at the same time, I would have cut them off slightly different, so that they would have more meat on them from the breast. In this case, my husband has been helping with the cooking a lot and is a bit leery of cooking meat on bones, so I went ahead and boned the breasts which gave me more bones for the stock pot.

The one thing that will save your sanity while doing this very simple task is preparation. Yes, processing a chicken from the market is pretty simple. Once you do it a couple of times you will be a pro and wonder why you haven't been doing this all along.
Clean your work surface thoroughly and remove any clutter. You will need:

1 large cutting board
Various knives, I use my 8 inch chefs, Sontuku and paring knives
Poultry shears, these are not a "must" but they do make some of the jobs easier
Soft headed mallet, OR a nice heavy cleaver
2 clothes, one sanitary one that is not to be used with any of the actual chicken or juices, and one that is okay to wipe your hands on, it should be immediately put in the wash after as salmonella bacteria spread pretty easily and cross contamination is how most folks end up sick from it.
Paper towels
1 bowl for livers
1 bowl for chicken wings
1 bowl or plate for finished parts
1 large stock pot, if you have any bags of scraps saved for stock, now is the time to put that in right off.
1 wash cloth
Dish soap for clean up and washing hands. You will wash your hands a lot.

Set up your work space, making sure everything is easy to get to. I keep the wash cloth rinsed and by the sink so I can use it to turn on the faucet to avoid cross contamination from my chickeny hands.

This is part of my set up. As you do this more often, you will find your own way that works best for you.

First, remove the wings

For a better view of the photos, right click and choose "open image in new tab". When your cursor is over the photo, you should see it become a magnifying glass with a + inside of it. Just click on the photo to make it original size.

Next we take the legs and thighs

Removing the back will help with boning the breast

De-boning a breast is easy!

When I was done I had a bowl of chicken parts, a stock pot of extra bits for the stock and froze the liver separately for another use one day down the line. I also freeze my wings separately until I have enough for a meal, because buying them pre-cut is ridiculously expensive.

I have a new found respect for folks who blog actual step by steps with photos now. Practice makes perfect.. right?  Practice applies to cutting up your own chicken too. My husband took a lot of pictures, but the best ones where the ones when I was not trying to show anything, because it has become second nature to me. It is like trying to say the alphabet without the song, something you have to think about, otherwise you just do it.

Really Good Buy

Since the weather will not be cool enough in my kitchen for pastries or candies any time soon, I am just posting this here without a recipe or anything to get the word out before these are gone.

This is a good sized (16x20) marble slab with feet that is 5/8 inch thick. I notice that it does slide on my cheapo countertops, but that is easily fixed. These marble slabs are also available (sans feet) at tiles at some hardware/tile type stores, but I have not been able to find anything of comparable size in the same price range. This link is an affiliate link and will take you to Amazon to purchase it. It is also available straight from Sur La Table and is not Prime eligible. It cost under 8 dollars to ship, which was still a deal for me.

Wormy Composting

At the beginning of this summer I was bequeathed with red wigglers, aka vermiculture worms for composting inside the house.  Armed with the almighty internet and a passion for research, as well as a little pain reduced time, and I built a box for keeping them. The premise is fairly simple, one box to live in, one to make a new home when necessary and one to catch any drips. I did try to cheap out a little and just use two levels, but that makes transferring the worms difficult. It can still be done, using one of the lids to the totes as a drip catcher, but I found that set up to be less stable using the materials I had available at the time. I chose the most simple way possible, but when I think on it, I am sure that there are other configurations that could be more efficient in terms of materials.

This is what you need:

2 plastic totes.

Mine are of the medium sized variety. They should not be too deep, you want enough space for the scraps and then some bedding on top of that and I like having some extra head space in case these normally homebody worms get freaked out and try moving up, as they did when I first put them in their new home.
It is important that the totes do not nestle inside each other tightly. Since the ones I had available did nest tightly, I put a couple of rocks between the two, just under the handles, to give it a bit more space.

2 drill bits (and a drill!)

I do not have the exact sizes, and that isn't terribly important. The large holes were under 3/8th inch, but larger than 1/8th inch, and the small one was under 1/8th of an inch. The large holes are to allow the worms to migrate when harvesting the lovely composty material. They start out really small and skinny, but I had no idea how fat they could get, so I err'd on the side of a bit big. The small bit is just to pop in some air holes. I doubt they are small enough to keep the worms from crawling out if they really wanted too, but they are non migratory by nature, so my hope is that the narrow holes will dissuade any adventuring type worms.

Strips of damp newspaper. Just soak the strips and wring very dry.

Food scraps, a couple days old and chopped up ideally, but it is not necessary. Just do not feed them any animal products except some crushed eggshells (with the membrane removed, which is a pain, so my eggs shells go straight into the garden usually) and do not put citrus fruit scraps in there as too much acid messes with them.

Now for the fun.

Take one lid and drill some small holes in the top like so:

Around the top portion of two of the totes, drill some small holes too. These are for ventilation. I have a fear of opening the darned thing and having something terrible come out, like very strong odors or worse, decomposing worms.

These will be your worm nests. The worms live in one, and after a few months it will be filled with a compacted mix of bedding and worm poop! When that happens, they need another, clean nest, to live in. This is where the bottom holes come in. As well as allowing any liquid to drain, these holes make is easier for the worms to move downward when the time comes. I tried to just use the one nest, but when I went to sort through to remove the worms I realized that I was going to lose a lot of them because they look just like their surroundings at that point. So, I made two of the above totes and drilled these holes in the bottom:

So, now you have two totes with small air holes near the top and a few larger holes on the bottom as well as a lid with some small holes drilled in. The third tote needs no holes, but if your bins fit tightly you may want to put something there to keep a space between the totes so that the water can come out if there should be any. I have not seen any liquid dripping from mine yet, but they say it does happen. I am still on a learning curve, but I have had them for over six months and they are still alive and kicking, so to speak.

I just used some empty toilet paper rolls to lift the bins up a bit. They don't last long, but there is a continuous supply until I find four items of equal height to replace them. I don't use canned goods often, so I rarely have more than a couple around. That, and I do not want to deal with the rust. I am that lazy.

Now, put them all together, the one tote with no holes on the bottom to catch anything that may come out. So far I have only had a very little bit of what looks like worm poop (castings, which technically all the compost will be)

You are scratching your head and thinking "Why are there only two bins? Why did I put holes in a third?" The reason is, this was my first attempt and I have not had a chance to photograph the other and am too lazy at this moment to go take one. Hey, it is hot out there. Not good for the chronic pain, believe you me. The third tote just goes on top.  If you wish, you can just make the two totes with holes and use the lid that you did not put holes in as a catcher underneath. I am not so brave as I did not know how much liquid would come out and I was not convinced that the worms would not escape.

In the very top container, put your scraps. On top of the scraps, loosely layer the damp newspaper shreds (I used the ads and flyers as I do not get a physical newspaper anymore, and neither do my neighbors so I could not scavenge them from recycling bins). Put your worms on top of that, and here is a major trick, keep the top cover off and put the whole thing under a light. The worms instinctively move down, away from the light. I did not do it that way at first and even two weeks later, most of the worms were still near the top. You would think the need to eat would encourage them downward, but I am thinking that without noses they don't know it is there.
Mix a little dirt or used up coffee grounds in with the scraps as the worms need a bit of grit to digest properly.

After a few hours, check to see if the worms are no longer on top of the bedding and put on the cover with the holes in it. The rule of thumb is a one to one ratio of scraps to worms. One pound of worms (about a thousand red wrigglers) can eat a pound of food in a week. Mine are quite a bit lazier than that, so start with less and work your way up. If the nest material looks dry when you check, spray some water. They don't need a lot, as there is a lot in the food, but the damp is supposed to be good, as long as it isn't sopping.

In three months or so, you are going to have to change the bins. To do this, lightly loosen the castings in the occupied bin. In the unoccupied one, create a new home, just as you did at the beginning. then, set the old home on top of the new, making sure that there is space between the bottom of the totes. If they are not moving, which honestly, I am not sure how they survived long enough to get this far as mine are super lazy, just set them under a lamp again, coming in occasionally to remove castings and stir up any remaining to get the worms to move down to their new home.

That is it. I have thought many times that my neglect had killed them. When you have chronic pain, sometimes that takes priority, and my flare last a week or more sometimes, leaving me with a lot of backlogged work that must be prioritized to get done before the next flare which is not predictable. Despite this, my worms are thriving. I even found them mating in a big old squirmy worm ball.
These worms do not have a male/female system, but they do need each other to reproduce.

Ah, the pectin

So, I promised an update on the great homemade pectin experiment. So far it does work, but I have not been able to get it to gel as firmly as jams do with the store bought kind. I ran out of strawberries before I could continue experimenting with different batches, but it did gel a bit, more like a very thick and chunky sauce rather than a more spreadable jam. It is still delicious and some was eaten on waffles and I bet the jam would be excellent on a piece of sponge cake in the middle of winter while dreaming of the Spring's gardening ahead.

Making your own pectin is actually pretty simple, especially if you save all of your apple scraps in the fall from making all of those yummy goodies that the fall harvest brings.

The fruit that I know has the most available pectin (off hand, there may be others) are apples. Grannysmith have more, as do those that are slightly unripe. Crab apples are brimming with the stuff, so if you find a safe source somewhere, that is free pectin on a tree. The pectin lives mostly in the cores and peels, but in this case I used whole Grannysmiths due to that is what I had in the house and I did not have a lot of them in the crisper drawer.

The first step is to scrub those apples. Commercial apples are sometimes waxed and often sprayed with insecticides. Even organic types will have residue from handling and sometimes an organic waxing product to help keep them looking fresh for shipping and storing.

Yes, that is a regular scrubber. Make sure it has been sanitized though as sponges are notorious as little bacteria factories. No one wants to eat that. I use lukewarm water to help loosen any waxes that may be holding on to the skin.

Next, chop them all up, cores, peels and all. If you are using scraps you may want to chop up the cores a bit if they are whole. The more surface area that is exposed the less heating will be needed to extract the pectins.

After cleaning and chopping, throw them into a slow cooker or deep, non reactive pot for the stove top, or, if you are okay with heating up the house, this can be done in a covered baking dish on a very low oven. I have not used the oven method, so I have no tips on making it work properly. Personally, I love my slow cooker as has been mentioned in the past a "few" times.

The next step is to put in 1/2 a cup of water. This is just to prevent any scorching before the apples exude their own juices. If you are not using whole apple you may need to add a bit more.

Put the cover on your cooker and set the heat to high for just one hour. This helps the juices start coming out right at the beginning to avoid using more water which will dilute the final product.

After the first hour, put the apples on low and let cook for four hours or more. I neglected to take a picture of the finished product before straining, but it is a lot like making juice for a jelly, except you can give in and squeeze if you want.

You can use a jelly bag, a very clean tea towel or flour sack towel, or you can use cheese cloth, layer thickly. Line a colander with your material of choice or fill the jelly bag as normal, and carefully (slowly) pour the apples into the fabric. Cheese cloth lets the liquid through a bit faster, but I used a flour sack towel and it worked fine, you just need a teeny bit more patience as the liquid goes through. Stir it a bit if the draining is going very slowly.

The, gather up the ends (or close up the jelly bag) and secure shut with a large, sturdy, rubber band. This is where all of you jelly makers get to finally do what you always wanted to (do not deny it!). Squeeze the fabric to wring out as much liquid as you can. Then sit the bag in a strainer over the bowl, put a small plate on top and weigh it down with a can of tomatoes or anything that weighs at least a pound. Put it into the refrigerator over night and in the morning you will have a (mostly) dry product in the bag and a viscous liquid in the bowl. This is your pectin.

I have not tried freezing it yet, but I have been told it will keep in the freezer. Otherwise, remember that this product can get moldy, so keep it in the refrigerator and use it up quickly.

Here is the tricky part, and unfortunately I can do nothing to remedy that with quick and easy tips or tricks. How much pectin you need depends on how concentrated your pectin solution is, how much pectin was in the fruit you extracted it from as well as how thick you wish your product to be. For a regular sized batch of strawberry jam, I used a little more than half a cup, and it did set, it just did not set as firmly as I would have liked. If you used crab apples that may be enough to use, but if you used ripe apples you may need far more. It is a crap shoot, but a fun crap shoot. And a cheap crap shoot if you are using foraged crab apples or scraps from previously used fruits.

New Look in the Kitchen

A little over two weeks ago I received news that my estranged father had passed away.  Lots of drama and strife of course, so in an effort to ignore all that for a bit, I decided to finally tackle refinishing my kitchen island.
About a year after we moved in to this house, a store called "The Mill Store" opened a little under a mile down the road. I loved roaming the aisles and smelling the fresh pine scent of all the unfinished furniture. At one point, we got a great deal (well under 200 dollars) on an unfinished wood kitchen island. That was over 15 years ago. Other than putting a few hooks on it and getting some  metal baskets for the shelves, I didn't nothing to personalize it.

This is what it looked like after using it for so long and not having it finished. There are also two wood slat shelves that sit underneath.

So, in a fit of despondency and a strong desire to get something accomplished, I decided to paint and refinish the butcher block top. Tip: if you have a butcher block top you may want to do a little wet sanding before you oil it next time. I am happy I did!

After sanding off the parts that the cats used as a scratching and rubbing post and painting it a nice old fashioned cream color, my husband and I created a copper hang rail for it and I painted the knobs for the drawers black. I am looking for some nice, small, glass knobs, but that can wait a bit.

Here is what it looks like now:

We are hoping to create a paper towel holder using more copper, but I love having it handy there. I don't use paper towels often, but when I do it is almost always right there at the island with goopy hands, so having it here is perfect. Those holes behind it were from the original wooden hooks, I will probably hand herbs from it during the summer to dry.

This side is the copper rail we put up. It is just 1/2 inch copper pipe and brackets from the plumbing section at the hardware store.

All of the Tomatoes!

Hello everyone! I had my surgery last Friday and have been spending my time trying to keep up with the work around the house without setting back my recovery. Super fun, as I strongly dislike sitting around with things to do that I am not allowed to.

Before I went to surgery though, everyone's tomatoes came in! This may be coming a bit late for some, but just before I went in, I canned some tomatoes and salsa, and the one thing that you always have to do for those items is peel. There are some who don't peel for salsa, and that does no harm, but I tried it once and found too many sharp strips of peel in the condiment for my taste.

You may notice that I am not mentioning sauce with the peeling. There is a reason. If you are canning tomato sauce, there is no need to peel each tomato. That goes for ketchup or anything that you will be turning to a soupy sauce. In those cases, I just wash the tomatoes, core, chop them a bit and cook them down. Once they are nice and soft you can put it through a strainer or a mill and that will remove the skins and seeds. Some people find cooking the seeds in the sauce makes it bitter. If that is you, just scoop the seeds out of the slices before putting them in the pan.
Now, on to peeling tomatoes for other recipes. The pictures below should help lead you through any unclear bits.

1. Wash tomatoes thoroughly. Even organic vegetables are exposed to bacteria, and if you are canning it is best to be as clean as possible to avoid contamination in the finished product.

2. Lightly score an "X" at the blossom end of the tomato.

3. Plunge tomatoes into boiling water in batches. As soon as the skins seem to be slipping a bit, drop them in cold water to shock them.

4. The skins should peel easily from the cuts. Although I have always cored after peeling, it makes sense that coring before blanching would make the skins even easier to remove. Doh!

5. To "core", use a melon baller and scoop the stem end out. I hate that they call it "coring", to me that implies removing the center entirely.

6. Use as directed in recipe.

Coming up: Adventures in making pantry staples!

Clever Curtain Rod!

Where I live in the Northeast there are a lot of Victorian homes as well as homes built in that image but for the poorer folks. One of the features of these houses are strangely shaped rooms, or corners. So many of the apartments I have lived in where built like that, basically because Victorian homes are perfect for dividing into more than one living area. When I was around 8 years old we lived in one that had two kitchens, three bedrooms, two living rooms, a den and just two bathrooms, one in the attic. If we lived back then it would probably make a lot of sense, but not so much now.

Here is a picture of a typical window bay in an old home:

I apologize for the low light. Things have been crazy here so I have been snapping photos without as much care as I try to show normally. But I digress. You can see from these windows that the corners are close and at a 45 degree angle (more or less), which makes hanging rods awkward. I have tried just closing off the entire corner and use it for a bit of privacy, but nothing really looked right.

Well, my husband and I have moved back into the room which was the kids until my oldest moved out. It was the larger room, and kids tend to need a bunch of space. The arrangement helped keep things out of the living room too. We wanted a nice grown up curtain, but how to hang them? Especially the ones that have the large openings like these.

My husband and I gave it a lot of thought and realized that 1 1/2 inch PVC pipes would work. What you see above is the result of our combining forces. We used the PVC, and for the corners we used 45 degree elbow joints. Our window was slightly off, so my husband warmed the PVC to unbend it just a bit. I don't know how much manipulation it will take, but it worked for our purposes.

This is how we hung them up. The copper bit was found right in the same aisle as the PVC pipe, and the spacers (the white bit that is setting the holder a little away from the frame) were found with the screws. What is terrific about this set up is that: 1. we only needed four to hold up the window treatment and 2. no bottom screw! The curtains stay up beautifully, BUT, they are also extremely easy to removed without ripping up the window frame (more than I already have).

Because of the household crazy of my upcoming fairly major surgery, the garden and canning, and until recently, grad school, I do not have step by step instructions for this, and for that I apologize. You will want to pain the pipe. What we used was just an off white spray paint. 

A tip with spray paint is to do it right on your lawn. Any bits that get sprayed on the grass will be cut off when you mow the lawn!

Okay, here is the set up after it was completed. The little caps on the ends are also in the PVC pipe aisle.

Now I have to get back to canning. I have packed up 12 pints of tomato salsa and am now working on the whole tomatoes. My son told me that I am the only one he knows who finds out they need surgery and decides that I must do everything before hand. I am who I am. :)

Victorian (Rhubarb) BBQ Sauce

I found this gem in the Ball Blue Book, but they call it Victoria (no "n") sauce. I misread it and just kept calling it the wrong name.

I have always been fascinated with foraging, even as a young child. When I would go for my long walks on our wooded property, I would try leaves and such that I found. Fortunately, I didn't die! I was fairly cautious, but not enough to my current sensibilities.

What does this have to do with the sauce? Well, around here, Rhubarb grows just about anywhere. Every house I have ever moved to in this area that also had a yard, usually had an old rhubarb plant. My current home is no exception. So, to me, rhubarb = wild foods. Kind of like mangoes are in South Florida, you find them everywhere and should never have to buy one from a nursery.

This Spring I split up the rhubarb to try to perk it up a bit. My family has been living in this house for over 18 years, and I had never done anything to the plant other than take, take, take. I was only able to manage two crowns, and it seems as if one of them died. The other is going like gangbusters though, and I may even get a few stalks out of it before winter. Right now I am letting it just do its thing and grow.

Victoria(n) BBQ Sauce

12 stalks (approximately) rhubarb, chopped (about 2 quarts)

1/2 cup chopped raisins

1/2 cup chopped onion

3 1/2 cups brown sugar

1/2 cup vinegar

1 teaspoon ground allspice

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon canning salt

Combine rhubarb, raisins, onion, brown sugar, and vinegar in a large sauce pot. Simmer until thick. Stir frequently while cooking, and keep a moderate flame. Add spices and cook for five minutes more. Ladle sauce into hot jars and process in water bath for 15 minutes.

For information on the basics of water bath canning National Center for Home Food Processing. Be sure to follow all current guidelines. Some of the older ways of processing have been changed or eliminated as simply not safe enough to use.

I love grinding my own spices in this mortar and pestle

Yum.. raisins!

I think that this is so pretty all cooking down

Here it is, bubbling away!