Sup with me: Honey Baked Lentils

Hrmmph. Dislike cooking?

I'm not a gourmand, and this is no Smitten Kitchen, but I think I might do some posts of cheap, healthy, easy quick dinners. Recipe at the bottom of post--skip down if you don't want my rambling commentary.

This one can be made, for me, without a trip to the store. It's because of our well stocked pantry, which could just as easily be a cupboard. Here's how it works: I always have onions, (I don't know how anyone functions if you don't have a couple of onions waiting for you!) garlic, spices, and the grains and oils and baking stuff I use all the time, on hand. When I use up one of these ingredients, I just write it on the grocery list that we keep running, on the fridge. I have tied a pencil to the magnet that holds the list, because otherwise I can't find anything to write with when I use up the ingredient, and I forget about it and don't have it the next time I need it. Things that are sold in bulk at the coop where we shop, like lentils and honey, I write a b next to, with a little circle around it, so Paul, who does the grocery shopping, will be alerted to bring the appropriate container. If I were really organized, I would put the empty container in a certain place, like the grocery bag, so he wouldn't have to hunt around to find it!
I haven't planned this recipe into this week, but if I needed to, I could go downstairs and make it right now. It can be baked in the oven, or a crock pot (which I don't have) or in a solar oven if it's too hot to heat the house.

I think the key to not loathing cooking is only making food that you personally like to eat! I don't even try cooking things that seem weird or gross to me. When I have, it is invariably a disaster.
I enjoy preparing meals for the family infinitely more if I know where my food came from, and can feel good about serving them something delicious and nourishing. I also like touching good fresh food. I am a bit like a preschooler--my favorite thing about this recipe, is running the lentils through my hands when I put them in the dish! (If the kids aren't too messy, one could let them play with the dried beans while one gets the rest of the ingredients together. It's like a sensory bin in the nursery school! My kids like to put their plastic snakes and dinosaurs in grain and make little diorama scenes! Afterwards they want to help put everything together, and then they have a better chance of liking the food, since they helped cook it.)

Also, a sharp knife, and a good wooden butcher block. It's no fun to cut an onion with a dull knife. That makes me cry. And then I'm liable to cut myself, or go ballistic when the kids flip the lentils I gave them all over the kitchen floor. Life with little children is really more enjoyable with a good sharp knife. I have one plain good chef's knife that I use for almost everything. I sharpen it with a round steel I keep right next to the knife. I haven't taken a class in sharpening, (I know, I'm really just straightening the edge, Imad!) but it stays keen enough for me. I use a wooden butcher block to cut, for everything. A damp towel under the cutting board can keep it from sliding around if that's a problem.

This is the recipe that got me started tolerating beans. I first found it on HappyFoody. For some reason, I grew up loathing them. But this is so tasty, I like to lick out the pot after it's all gone! I brought this to a church dinner once, and people who claimed they hated lentils had seconds and asked for the recipe. No guarantees that you or yours will like it, but I and mine do! I find that my hungry children like almost anything, whereas my children who've had their fill of crackers and sweets are bound to complain about even their favorite dishes!

Honey Baked Lentils
Good for the cooler months. Serve with good rice, or pitas, or fresh whole wheat bread and butter, or as a soup, with a spoon! Great with a nutty or grainy bread. This does take some time in the oven, so it's not a last-minute dish, but it is low effort! Good with carrots or winter squash or sweet potatoes. Winter vegetables could be cooked into it. But honestly I just make it plain and simple.

I cup Lentils, I use brown
Onion, chopped
2 Tbsp Honey, could also be made with maple syrup
2 Tbsp Soy sauce or tamari
2 Tbsp Olive oil
1/2 tsp Ginger: grated fresh or the powdered spice is fine too
2 cups Water
Salt and pepper to taste

Put all the ingredients in a covered dish, in a 350F oven, and bake until fragrant and tender, about 1 1/2 hours. Lentils should be very soft.
If desired, blend or run through a food mill to make it smooth; for some reason my kids like smooth things best.

Champagne for breakfast

It's been a while, so I'll pick up where we left off. These are breads I made for Easter. If I do say so myself, the cheesy one turned out garlickalicious!
I roasted garlic till it was all sweet and soft, then mixed it into my dough the day before I baked. Then I kneaded in big cubes of cheese and I think also roasted potatoes. It seemed that putting the garlic in earlier in the process deeply infused the flavors. Oh, and generous with the salt.
We've been absent because we've, by the unbounded and unearned gift of god, bought a house! We're pretending we're busy beavers and repairing it diligently, with the help of many friends and families. Oh bright skies ahead!
If you'd like to be one of those friends, let us know--a little help goes a long way!

Pudgy Pies

Some people call it a tonka-toaster. We always called them pudgy pies, presumably because eating them in great quantities makes us pudgy, hobbits that we are. There! The secret's out! They can be savory or sweet, but the classic pudgy pie is filled with marshmallows and pie filling.
A good pudgy pie can only be made in a cast iron clam-shell cooker. Aluminum or steel will not work just as well. We've tried. We only have one pudgy pie maker, and don't know where to get another one. Maybe I shouldn't advertise!

Pudgy Pies
-butter two slices of soft bread. Whole wheat will work great, so long as it's soft.
-Lay a slice, butter side down on one half of the pudgy pie maker.
-Spoon on fillings.
Sweet:
Fruit is great. Depending on how gooey you want it, add sugar or brown sugar if it's fresh fruit rather than pie filling. Chunky jam will work if it's on hand. Maybe a dollop of butter or a marshmallow, one big or several mini mallows.
Other combos: Chocolate and marshmallows
or Chocolate and peanut butter
Peanut Butter and Bananas.
Chocolate and dried cherries, Dried fruits, nuts, cream cheeses, etc...
The fillings are quite personal.

Savory Pudgy Pies:
Eggs: it may be best to cook the eggs and meats or anything that really needs cooking, not just heating up, before assembling the pudgy pie, especially for pudgy pie newbies. Eggs of course like bacon, ham, cheese, sausage, broccolli, peppers, mushrooms, onions, though I doubt all the above would fit in a single pie!
Potatoes, gravies, meats, you get the picture.
So, we've put in the fillings; enough to fill the pie but hopefully not so much it oozes out all over the place, unless you're into blackened food.
-Now we put the other slice of bread on top of the pile, butter side up like a grilled cheese sandwich.
-Close the clam-shell cooker, clamp it shut
-and set it right on top of a nice bed of coals.
-Flip over every 15 seconds several times and check for doneness. We like our pudgy pies dark golden brown.
The art of the pudgy pie is in getting the insides melted and gooey while the crust is golden brown. The common failing is the filling being cool while the crust is blackened. This especially happens if the pudgy pie is cooked over hot flames instead of hot coals. Coals, I think, cook much better, but the inclination is to put it in the dancing flames. We wait to cook them until the fire has a nice bed of coals, and rearrange things a bit so there's a good place for roasting.
The most difficult part of pudgy pies is waiting until they cool off a bit before devouring them. We eat these at the cabin, where we're ravenous from hiking around all day, so it helps if they come as a dessert course, which also makes time for a nice fire full of glowing coals, but we like them so much they are often the main attraction. I usually burn my tongue on the first one. Watch out!

Wild Rice Soup for a Minnesota Winter: a Tangential Recipe

Winter Wild Rice Soup
The key to wild rice is letting it blossom. I put several handfuls of wild rice (this is real wild-grown stuff, hand harvested by Ojibwe people on Mille Lacs Reservation! Just another local treat from the co-op!) into my little sauce pan, and a kettle of water on the hob. When the kettle whistles boiling, I pour the hot water over the rice, cover it and leave it. This can be done the day before, or hours in advance of the meal. Before cooking with it, I rinse the rice a couple of times. Then all the rice is softened and each grain opens up. Wild rice seems expensive, but expands a lot more than white rice, so it's not really more pricey. If I don't let it blossom, all the other veggies get mushy while I wait for my rice to soften. You then end up cooking the soup for four hours into flavorlessness, or having chewy wild rice soup.
Heat a jar of broth or stock in the bottom of a nice deep pot. I make stock from leftovers of all kinds. Lacking this, just use water.
Put into the pot chopped carrots, wild rice, chopped potatoes, or other firm winter veggies.*
In a saucepan or frying pan, saute in a few glugs of olive oil:
chopped onion, garlic, parsnips**
Have I yet mentioned my new love of parsnips? You can dig them out of the garden all winter (theoretically. this might take advance planning if you live in the frozen north, but if they can be extracted from that hard ground, they will be sure to please!) I love their tart sweetness. Roasted, they carmelize and become a snacky pleasure food. cooked, they are sweet, soft, and tangy.So, saute this high-flavor matter till it becomes fragrant. I let it brown a bit, and toss in a splash of water. For some reason, this makes it all the sweeter. Transfer to the soup pot. Here I also added a fistful of sweet farmer's market corn frozen from the summer bounty. Slosh in some white wine, if you've got it.
Saute some chopped fresh mushrooms and put in soup.

When the veggies are almost all cooked, add a chopped stalk of celery or two.
I don't bother to wash the saucepan before making the roux. This is to be a cream soup. The flavors from the carmelized parsnip and onions are so good I don't want to wash any away. To make the roux, I put two spatches of butter in the pan until melted. Turn off the heat and sprinkle in an equal amount of white flour. This is not the time to use whole wheat flour for this one! Stir with a fork or wooden spoon till smooth. Then I slowly mix in a cup of real (whole) milk, little by little so as not to get doughy lumps of buttery flour. Stir this white sauce into the soup and season to taste: salt, pepper, parsley***, maybe basil or thyme, as your fancy takes you.

*Winter Veggies
I'm thinking about what people who didn't have supermarkets, cheap gas, and cheap refrigeration would eat, here in Minnesota all year long? Think pioneer suppers, think long Lakota winters. It just doesn't make sense to eat food shipped from South America, Fuji, or California for so much of the year that we don't have a fresh harvest here. Oranges at Christmas are one thing, we don't need this kind of expense and consumption to get good food here. (Joan Gussow articulates the concept of local eating quite well in her readable book, This Organic Life: confessions of a suburban Homesteader. I recommend the book as an intro to the local, seasonal table)
There is so much we can grow when it's warm and keep through the winter right here in Minnesota! I'm hoping do do more and more food preservation myself in the coming years, but for now we're just enjoying the few foods we have put by in the last year, and trying to buy foods that come from good, small, concientious farms as close to us as possible. Shopping at the co-op makes this easier, as they label where each offering hails from. Paul does most of the shopping, so I just ask him to look for the closest state possible. I know he also considers cost. Who wants to pay for shipping refrigerated, gassed spinach and tomatoes from California when parsnips are dirt-cheap?
Another factor is food durability. As in, beets are more durable than spinach. Foods that have to be eaten within weeks of harvest, that bruise easily, or need refrigeration or chemical treatment to survive until they hit the store shelf, we just avoid in the winter. We can eat green salads April through November, right out of our backyards. We're not super strict about this--we're in no danger of scurvvy, but as I learn about the whole history of the foods we eat and its implications for us, our neighbors, farmers, and children, I find it very satisfying to plan our meals around real keeping crops. Not to mention, I don't know anyone who actually enjoys grocery store tomatoes in February. As our friend Liz Fleming says, they should have a different name from the tomatoes one grows and picks in the garden, as they are an entirely different and vastly less enjoyable vegetable.

This really isn't as limiting as it might sound:
Parsnips, carrots, turnips, beets, potatoes, winter squash, cabbage, kale. (I found a variety though Seed Savers that is hardy to ten below, Farenheit and then when picked keep forever in the fridge,)
Grains: Barley, oats, rice, wild rice, cornmeal, quinoa, amaranth, pastas, etc.
Legumes, dried
And for fresh foods: Sprouts! Alfalfa! Mung bean, wheat, fenugreek, etc. Mary Jane Butters has a fun section on growing sprouts in her Ideabook, Cookbook, Lifebook.
Mushrooms
Dried fruits: apples, cranberries, currants, raisins, etc.
Wine, hard ciders, vinegars
Dried Herbs, spices
Meat and Dairy: cheeses, cream, milk, puddings, broth, eggs, etc.
All that stuff can either be produced and sold right here all winter long, or stored from earlier production here.
I don't have qualms about getting spices, coffee, tea, etc from distant ports as they don't require refrigeration during shipping and aren't fresh; these are dried products, relatively lightweight, ship quite efficiently as compared to fresh, canned, or frozen fruit.
There is also a beauty in seasonality. Roasted root vegetables, thick soups, fresh bread, puddings, and stews feel good these cold months. Rather than feeling limited, I almost wish I had more time before spring to try all the recipes in my head for these foods. There will be plenty of time when it's too hot to even think about the oven. Luckily, in those months, fresh salads and fruits abundant will grow wild just outside our door!
**Cabbage would also be good
***I would like fresh parsley. If we had a good south-facing window for it, I would try growing more windowsill herbs through the winter. Some things take dried herbs better than others. In this soup, I felt the flavors of the veggies, especially the parsley, corn, and wild rice, along with the creaminess of the roux gave a full, rich taste that didn't need extra herbs. No sense in making bright flavors dusty with last summer's dried herbs. I don't go in much for buying them at the market. At ours, they come in plastic cases and are expensive. You get this paltry bit of greenery, more plastic case than herbage. I say, skip that!

Little Cabin in the Woods

Wow! It's cold! We made these back before Christmas. They were also photographed back then, and have long since now been eaten all up! I just baked loaves of gingerbread. (the dark, spicy kind; nothing like cutout cookies.) My recipe is a modification of the one in Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking, which would make a nice quick winter read.
We just cut the loaf into thirds, and sliced off a few edges to make houses. This way, there was no trying to use frosting to glue together crumbly or cracking cookies together-- what an exercise in frustration that would be for little kids! This way is also quick for littles with short attention spans.
Anyway, frost and decorate with whatever's on hand. Ever seen those "natural" food colorings in pretty bottles at the co-op? Just a word to the wise; they alter the flavors of the frosting. Makes sense, I suppose. Just be warned. I think this pinkish-one tastes a bit beet-ey.
Today, Gibbie crawls into the kitchen: "Mama, I'm a woodchuck! I'm gonna bury this bean! Mama, it's turning to spring, and do you know what woodchucks do in the spring? They turn into COWS!"
Later, in the bedroom, the cow morphed into a penguin. Betcha didn't know that cows turn into penguins when they grow up, huh? I think he might have picked up on my habit of piecing together bits of information gleaned from I've-forgotten-whence and authoritatively dispensing semi-factual information. I don't mean to do it. I intend to always tell him when I don't know the answer to a question, but what can I say?
I think a lot of real things also just seem incredible, as in not quite believable. Like, caterpillars turn into butterflies? Water and ice are the same thing? Rabbits change color in the winter? No way!
Or the circus? We just read a book about a circus, and after I closed it, Gibbie looked at me and said, "that's just pretend, Mama." I explained that there really are circuses; they are big shows, with lots of people doing tricks with costumes and animals like elephants to ride on, and they have the show in a big tent, and people come to see it.. yada, yada, yada...
Gibbie totally didn't buy it. "But it's not [real] outside of the book." Sensible kid.

Stay warm inside your own little cabin!

Cooking with two. Easy kids aprons.

Ezra now wants to help in the kitchen too. I've been letting his big brother help while I cook, sitting on the counter, and doing everything he was able to, since about Ezra's age. The little one is no longer riding on my back during cooking times. He wants to be right in on the action!

It's a principle I read about somewhere, of "downward delegation", of assigning tasks to youngest child in the family who can do them. It makes sense. This way, Ezra will get to do things as he is ready to, rather than everything remaining "Gibbie's job" just cause he did it first. It also keeps us challenging the kids, each of them, with new tasks as they grow.

Unfortunately, downward delegation, in this instance, doesn't make sense in terms of my counter space. Look at the above photo. Where am I going to actually knead the bread here? I suppose if I were really delegating down, Gibbie would be moving on to other things and I wouldn't be amassing children on the counter, but he is just now getting to a point where he can do a lot of the cooking stuff. We have a rhythm. It works for us. Ever wants to be on the counter, but if he's there I have to go back to policing the knife block, and watching half the ingredients fall on the floor when he takes his turn stirring. True, that's just how Gibbie learned to do all he can do now, but he learned it when I only had him to watch. Lots more time. Maybe more patience. No baby pulling on my leg, wanting to come up and help too.

We'll see where this goes.

Oh, by the by--they're both sporting my new kid's aprons. I only wear full aprons, not these little waist-down-only skirts. But the half-aprons are the kind one can find, vintage, handmade, and darling in abundance at thrift stores! (Or make super-easily) It happened on this day that the kid's real kid-sized aprons were all in the laundry, so I pulled out these little decorative ones and did this:
-lay the apron across the child's chest, with the sash ties going over his shoulders
-cross the ties in back and bring around to the front, under his arms
-tie in front, on top of the apron.

Voila! A full-coverage apron sized just right for the baby, toddler, or pre-schooler!

Early Summer Greens

This is my own pasta primavera. I would call them spring greens, but spring is surely over. Here in the Northland, our salad greens are just really getting going now. Hmmm. Just in time for them to wilt in the heat. Alas. Enjoy these tender greens while they last!
I love white sauce and parmesean with spring greens. It would be magnifico with garden peas, but will be a while before they are ready. If you make this, let me know what you think of the sauce; I found the savory pairing of the acid vinegar-tomatoes and the creaminess really satisfying.

Pasta (I like semolina or fine whole wheat)
Sun-dried tomatoes, plain dehydrated (in the bulk section of your co-op)
good balsamic vinegar; a glug or two or three
Olive Oil
a few cloves of Garlic, peeled and minced
a spoonful of butter
a small handful of white flour
a big slosh of milk
mixed garden greens for sauteeing: I used chards, spinach, and daylily buds from the garden
mixed fresh greens, chopped: I used pea shoots (the tender tops of young pea vines), sour grass, and lamb's quarters (two common wild weeds, both mild, edible, and tasty) and a few snipped chives
real parmesean cheese, grated

Chop the dried tomatoes. Heat balsamic vinegar in a frying pan with chopped sun-dried tomatoes.
Put water for the pasta on to boil with a dash of salt.
When the liquid with the tomatoes begins to disappear, add a splash of water. Keep an eye on it and refresh this periodically. This will rehydrate the tomatoes and begin to carmelize the sugars in the vinegar. Chop up garlic and greens as necessary, occasionally stirring the tomatoes. After a while, add the chopped garlic to the pan with some good olive oil, at a point in cooking when there is little liquid. Cook it down a few more times with splashes of water and remove to a bowl.

While working sauces, rinse, sort and de-stem greens. Chop as you see fit. I think the all the greens I used would be lovely whole, but I chopped the fresh ones to mix in the sour of the sourgrass and to not weird anyone out with the corkscrews on the pea shoots. They would look charming whole, however.

When the water boils, toss in the pasta.
Make a white sauce; melt a blob of butter in the pan. It's fine if there are remains of tomatoes and vinegar in the pan. Turn the heat down and mix a handful of flour into the butter. Work it with whatever you've been using to stir until any lumps are worked out. Stir or whisk in milk gradually and stir until thickened.

Mix this with the tomato redux. I served these separately, not knowing how they would pair, but they were beautiful together.

Gently saute greens until just wilted. Portion drained al dente pasta onto plates. Spread sauteed greens on pasta, pour on sauce, pile fresh greens on top. Garnish with chive flowers (in bloom here!) or pansies.

Solar Oven Love

So this morning Gibbie helped me cook dinner.

We lugged a bag of carrots and a lil sack of potatoes out the back door.I peeled carrots while the kids played in the grass. We washed the potatoes together. (Gibbie also helped by fetching rags to scrub with, putting the lids on, and he and Ezra gnawed on carrots. They love helping with real work) We put everything in our black enamel pots along with half a dozen whole raw eggs. The pots went in this black box, then a big clear lid and a collapsible reflector. We turned it to face the sun and played all day in the yard. Twice in the afternoon I turned the oven a bit more as our northern sun arced across the sky.
By our 5:00 dinnertime we brought out bowls and drinks, served up piping hot food and had a dandy little picnic. A simple meal, quite good. We are looking forward to using this new oven lots and lots. The next day we got a little more adventurous. I adapted this recipe from The Sephardic Table,
a lovely Middle Eastern cookbook.

Solar Oven Lamb Stew
This is one for the recipe box. It was easy and delicious. It makes its own gravy.

1/2 onion, chopped
6 md. yellow potatoes
12 carrots, peeled and broken into finger lengths
1 lb. pieces of lamb stew meat (so worth it to get organic, pastured meats!)
1 tsp. fresh ground coriander (let me rave about my mortar and pestle sometime!)
2-3 bay leaves
1-2 tsp. tumeric
1/2 tsp. salt
a few grinds of black pepper
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
handful of raisins
a glug or two of apple cider vinegar
I've given measured amounts here for the spices, but I honestly just do dashes and handfuls and pinches myself. These things are flexible.
Put all ingredients, in a black covered pot, into the solar oven. We cooked them 5-6 hours. The oven temp never exceeded 250F; these low temps make for tender, juicy meals and apparently more of the vitamins stay intact than when cooking conventionally.

We toured the Solar Oven Society where the oven was made. (it's in Mpls on Hennepin!) All of its simple, carefully engineered parts can be cut, folded, and assembled using hand-operated jigs. No electricity is used. They are a pretty great organization. Half the price of our oven goes towards making these affordably available in third world countries where this kind of technology makes so much sense, for the same reasons I want to cook solar here in Minnesota though the needs in other communities may be more accutely felt.

Solar cooking doesn't:
-consume natural resources
-cost anything
-degrade our air or water
Our friend Willington, a Ugandan priest who attends our church while working towards a PhD, said of solar cooking, "The one thing we have so much of in our country is sunshine! And all it does it seems is to make it too hot, to make the groung too dry. But this-- this is a way to catch it-- and use it, for something good!" You really have to see his face and hands while he talks-- he was quite excited. He wants one for his mother.
Many people in Uganda (and countless other countries) cook daily over open wood fires. Now, I love a good campfire, but a little reading has opened my eyes about the implications of cooking with fire everyday. The byproducts of cooking with wood are deforestation; (fully on half of the wood consumed today is used for fires--more than that for paper or lumber!) lung problems, especially for women and children; and lots of time spent gathering wood as local supplies diminish.
Now, while we don't typically cook with wood,

for us, solar cooking means:
-Gibbie's increased participation in cooking (safer for him to be near than the stove)
-decreased use of non-renewable resources
-not heating up the house in summer! We try not to use A/C and I missed cooking so much last summer. Bread, vegetables, meats, eggs, cake, cookies can all be made in the oven.
-the simplicity of consuming less
-the pleasure of being outside more
-a lower energy bill (I said above we don't cook with wood, but we use it indirectly; our power comes from a grid of nuclear, wood, and coal power plants, each of which create their own types of disastrous waste. We try to use as little as we can.)

I think this oven is a do-able choice for anyone with access to sunlight. This is Minnesota in April! It doesn't need to be hot to cook; just sunny. It was also less expensive than I thought it would be, and very easy to use.

Thanks to our neighbor and friend T.J., who swang, slid, and rolled on the ground entertaining Gibbie and Ezra while I wrote this post!