Molly Goatwax

Trying new stuff

I sautéed some sliced mushrooms and ate them with tofu and brown rice. It's all in the sauce. Yum.

Hot

Peas porridge in the pot.

Test Patch

I got the new appliance on the parking lot running today. After almost 7 hours the chicken came out of the smoker moist, tender and tasting like ham...with no sodium nitrate. Pretty good for a newbie...I can hardly wait to give a batch of peppers a whirl!

From the other side of the studio

A lazy Saturday. Today is for puttering about: chipotle mayonnaise, better than the type at the store. I usually get a small can of chipotles in adobo and decant them into a glass jar for the fridge. I put a few of them in the food processor with low fat mayo and gave it a whirl. Perfect for squeeze bottle convenience when assembling sandwiches! Watch out, those tinned peppers are hot. Aim for a deep shrimp color. Now we've got butter bread baking in the bread machine. I'd feel like a cheat, but the results are too tasty. My smoked turkey will get the best treatment in town.

Variations

So we have cooked, feasted and cleaned our dishes. Over a low key game of scrabble in the afternoon, some buddies and I discussed our cornbread dressing recipes. More common farther south, this savory bread pudding is called dressing when created as an independant dish rather than stuffed into a roast or a bird and is bound by an egg/broth mixture instead of drippings from the enveloping meat. With sauteed onions and celery, I added mushrooms, a bit of crispy bacon and crumbled cooked sausage into the dish I served yesterday... I want to make a smoked cheddar and chive version next week. It brings to mind a bread-cheese souffle my sister learned how to make in college, called Roono, after the young man who made it his specialty. I feel those big pants calling my name.

Puttering, pottering and painting

Today while Hubby and the younger daughter rallied for sanity, civilty and bacon, I made a red lentil artichoke soup from this recipe, more or less. Kitchen variants included less onions, one can of diced tomato rather than two, adding a couple of the last small hot lemon peppers and a can of chicken broth with more water. Again, this could be so easily vegan without the chicken broth. I also brought in three of the pepper plants I didn't farm out til spring and placed the remaining potted herbs against the south wall for wintering. They are perennials, they should be good. In between all that, the Box of Bad Ideas went through final assembly. The sides of the support went from orange to chile pepper red. Picture tommorrow!

Yum yum and ho hum

This afternoon I made a very velvety fennel and leek soup from this recipe. I did not have any Pernod so some of the seeds from the fennel in the potted plant garden went into the cauldron. This could be made vegan very easily with the substitution of vegetable for chicken broth. It was well worth getting the blender into play. I also fetched from the cobbler some purple clogs with the German cork soles replaced...I felt like a cartoon of myself putting them into the trunk of my SAAB and cranking up the public radio. Then I went on to make plans with a pal to take over her sun room for the next six months to winter the pepper farm. I didn't used to be such a bore and don't really much care, anyway. On to the squash soups...

Fail

Today my gustatoral experiments fouled the kitchen so completely that even after the attempt was bagged and removed, the dishes and surfaces washed, I was compelled to open the windows and pump freshener into the air. And then I escaped. I will never buy "ham chips" again.

Blog posted here.

The persistance of grilling

Four pounds of ribs and one of sausage, I now have a large tub of smoked meats with which to face the blizzard's cooking.

Blog posted here.

Lima Bean Soup

Well, of course I couldn't find my Smokey Joe today. I anticipated that and cooked up four pounds of country ribs and a pound of Italian sausage yesterday afternoon as the snow started to fall. I also planned for the leftover smoked rib meat that makes this soup sing:

Soak a pound of dried baby lima beans overnight, covered in water.

In the morning, pull out the trusty steel soup pot. Dice up a big onion and some seeded mild green chile peppers, I used three handsome small conical ones with just enough bite to wake me up...saute in olive oil over low heat with a few shakes of the dried red peppers until the whole mess is soft and glows pink. Rinse out the soaked beans in a colander and dump them in the pot. Add a 14 oz. can of diced tomatoes and a quart of chicken stock and bring to a boil. Top off with a few cups of water, then add your trimmed chopped up left over smoked ribs. If you don't have time to smoke your own ribs, consider ham or bacon. Maybe if you don't like pork you can score a smoked turkey leg. That would be tasty, too. Once all these things are boiling merrily away, it takes a bit over two hours for the limas to soften to perfection. Add water as it boils down. You know when it's done when the stirring spoon doesn't sound when it taps the beans and the broth gets decidedly thicker.

Yum. Yum.