My Vegetarian Meals for a Month is far and away the most popular page on my blog (and the Vegetarian Meals for Another Month is also in the top 10). I’ve recently had some folks asking for some of my recipes that contain meat, which I’ve been cooking a lot more often now that I’ve discovered I’m allergic to almost all legumes. So I bring you the Omnivorous Menu for a Month! Some are the omni version of recipes in the veggie menus (e.g., stir-fries) and some are completely new (cabbage roll fry-up).

These menus also include recipes for making homemade stock from chicken, pork, and beef. However, you don’t need to make your own stock to use these recipes – in several places, I’ve included “super fast and easy” directions as well as “100% homemade” directions. Take your pick!

As per usual, there’s a mix of proteins, starches, and flavor families each week. This batch of recipes is pretty winter-oriented, it being January and all…lots of kale, potatoes, and tomatoes and not a cucumber or watermelon to be seen. Enjoy!

Meat/Omni Menu for a Month (download recipes as a PDF)

• General’s chicken
• *Salsa fry-up
• Dilled beets, apples, and potatoes
• *Meatball soup
• Cottage pie

WEEK 2

• Ginger-garlic stir-fry
• *Sausage, greens, and rice
• Stovetop paella
• Roast chicken with salt potatoes
• *Chicken enchiladas

WEEK 3

• Chicken stew with mashed potatoes
• Beef and broccoli
• Pork, apples, cabbage
• Roasted root vegetables
• *Homemade pizza

WEEK 4

• Cabbage roll fry-up
• *Pad Thai
• Posole
• *Something grilled with rice pilaf and veg
• Beef barley soup

* 30 minutes or less

Yesterday, in my post on local food, MK and Patty pointed out that if local eating is really going to take off, people need to know how to cook, and realize cooking isn’t necessarily more time-consuming than cooking from a box.

This got me thinking…what are foods that people could easily make at home, but think they can’t? The idea would be to have a series of cooking classes with the theme “Yes, you can cook it at home.”These things would ideally take no special equipment or hours of prep, and would replicate things that people think they “have to” buy because it’s way too hard to make them at home.

Here are some of my initial ideas:

• Chinese restaurant-style sauces (white, brown, sweet-and-sour, and spicy orange glaze)
• Crackers
• Pizza
• Fajitas
• Fish sticks & chicken nuggets
• French fries (oven fries)
• Lasagne

What else can you think of?

I love, love, love Thanksgiving. For 12 years, we’ve hosted Thanksgiving at our house for our phamily. All of us spend Christmas and other holidays with our families-of-birth, but this holiday is spent with friends we made in and after college. Folks come in from out of town, everyone takes a turn cooking, and most of the food is from within 50 miles or so. There are even several things I grow specifically for Thanksgiving dinner: rosemary, sage, potatoes, squash.

Here’s how we handle the bird.

1. Wednesday: Have dear friend (aka Turkeyfiend) drop off immense free-range, no-drugs, never-frozen hen at your house in cooler of ice.
2. Thursday morning: roll lazily out of bed, greet houseful of guests, laze around in PJs while nibbling on breakfast. Glance at the schedule which has become a permanent fixture on the fridge and remember that turkey-wrestling begins at 2pm. Remind yourself not to eat the pie yet.
3. Thursday, 2pm:
   1. Assemble seasonings: a bale of rosemary and sage from the garden, and a small bowl with 2-3Tbl of salt and 3-4 Tbl of ground poultry seasoning.
   2. Rinse out bird, set neck and giblets aside. Place turkey in clean roasting pan.
   3. Slide hand between breast meat and skin, loosening the membranes. Take handfuls of the dry seasonings and rub on meat. Evenly distribute fresh herbs between the meat and skin.
   4. Flip turkey over, cut slit in the skin of the turkey’s “hips,” and repeat the seasoning treatment on each thigh and leg.
   5. Place any remaining seasoning inside the cavity.
   6. Wrestle bird into turkey cooking bag.
4. Thursday, 2:45pm: place bird in 350 degree oven.
5. 4pm: First check of bird. Baste, if there are any juices yet.
6. 5pm: Second check of bird. Use thermometer. You want the thigh to be about 185 degrees; the breast will probably be closer to 165. Don’t baste it any more – the skin should be brown and crispy now.
7. When the bird it done, set the pan on the counter and start harvesting juices.
8. 5:30 or 6pm: Eat dinner. Bask in glow of happy Turkeyfiend.
9. 8:30 or 9pm: Figure you’ve finally got room for that pie.

What to do with the turkey juices:

1. Siphon them out with a bulb baster, and fill two or three tall, clear glasses. The fat will rise to the top.
2. Make gravy.
   1. Use some of the fat (enough to cover the bottom of the gravy pan) and an equal amount of flour to make a roux.
   2. Use the bulb baster to pull the juices from the bottom of the glass. For gravy, use roughly equal parts juice and water.
   3. Bring to a boil and allow to thicken.
   4. Adjust seasoning – it might need some salt, but the juices were well-seasoned in the turkey, so it won’t need much.
3. Make dressing.
   1. Use some of the fat to sautee the onions and celery.
   2. Mix juices with water in a large jar (1 part juice to 3-4 parts water; about a quart all together).
   3. Start adding chunks of stale bread to the onions and celery in the pan.
   4. Drizzle the thinned turkey juice over the bread until it’s soaked through.
   5. Adjust seasonings as needed; some fresh sage, rosemary, and extra salt is nice.
4. Now siphon off the remaining fat into freezer containers, and use it later to sautee meats or vegetables. (Remember, fat from healthy animals is waaaaaay better for you than fake fats like margarine.)
5. Put the last of the juices in the freezer, too; a pint of concentrated turkey juice plus water will make a quart or more of stock for homemade soup.

On Friday, break up the carcass and boil it in about 2 gallons of water for 3+ hours with some more salt and a couple bay leaves. Pack leftover meat and trimmings into lunch-sized portions and freeze.

On Saturday, pick the carcass clean, dice it up along with all the meat that hasn’t made it into lunches. Can the meat in pint jars and the stock in quart jars.

Eat the last of the pie.

Savory quick bread

I used a Joy of Cooking recipe for “olive nut quick bread” as the base for a bread to serve with soup tonight. No olives or nuts, just fresh rosemary and sage. It was a little dry and needed more flavor – more herbs, definitely, and maybe more salt. Or maybe it just really wanted to be a biscuit or something. If I get a recipe that works, I’ll share it; so far, it’s not worth sharing.

Pumpkin pasties

This picture is a total lie. It’s not a pumpkin pasty, and I didn’t make it. It’s an apple turnover, and my friend Kat made it from the recipe I linked to. But this is what the pumpkin pasty looked like, before I inhaled it without pausing to photograph it. Bad food blogger! No pasty for you! Um, or…not…

This recipe came from about six places at once. I’d made a version before for a Harry Potter-themed party, and they were good, but tedious (essentially rich sugar cookie dough filled with extra-thick pumpkin pie filling). Then, a week or so ago, a friend and I were musing about why no one makes a pumpkin pop tart. Wouldn’t that be awesome? With cinnamon icing? And I don’t even really like pop tarts. Then my brain flashed on the apple turnovers from October’s Preserving Traditions workshop, and it came to me: make a turnover with slices of butternut squash instead of apples! Not too sweet, so definitely pasty-like, and waaaaaaay easier than making pie filling and dough and assembling them.

I started with this recipe for turnover dough. Rolled it into a long oval. Dropped a spoonful of sugar/flour mix on the dough, then I sliced the neck of a small butternut squash into half-circles and placed them on top of that. Topped with cinnamon-sugar and a pat of butter, and baked for 35 minutes or so.

They were great!Definitely not-too-sweet (each one only had about a teaspoon of sugar), flaky, and yummy. The only thing I’d do differently is to use more cinnamon-sugar and coat each slice with it, so it was more evenly distributed. The version I did definitely had a very cinnamon-y spot and some spots that were just like baked squash.

Cabbage salad

I hate calling this “cole slaw” because that brings to mind such gloppy, horrible stuff. But chop a sweet, juicy cabbage into 1/4″ dice, add a shredded carrot, and maybe some slivered pickled radishes, and dress with a dressing of equal parts cider vinegar, oil, and mustard-horseradish pickle juice (plus some salt and  a squirt of mustard), and you have a thoroughly addictive salad that beats out field greens any day.

Naming our food is a long tradition in my family, starting with Boris the Bull, who I believed would cause my parents’ divorce (do YOU really understand how large a whole steer is? Yeah, us neither…). Last year we bought half a hog and named it Eric. This year’s participant has been dubbed Señor Porcus. No absent referent here!

We picked up our 1/2 hog from Old Pine Farm on Oct. 17th. They have a very nice farm – hogs are pastured with some supplemental feed, not confined to a muddy sty. They are slaughtered on-farm and then sent to the butcher, so there’s no travel stress for the pigs. I feel extremely grateful that we have such a farm near us, and that we can afford to buy our food from them.

Looks like we ended up with about 85 lb of meat (for $300, including cutting and smoking, so somewhere around $3.50/lb). Old Pine Farm is unusual in that they charge a flat price for your hog, no matter what size, and they do not charge extra for cutting and smoking. You get to pick how you’d like your meat cut up. Here’s what we got – showing our strong preference for sausage and pulled pork in this house! My only complaint so far is that the meat is wrapped in Saran Wrap, which I find hard to remove from the meat. Hopefully it will fend off freezer burn – since there’s no air inside the wrapping, it should do that. So long as the wrap is thick enough. We’ll see.

• Loin roast: 10lb in 3 large packages. Wonder if we should have gotten this sliced into chops?
• Shoulder roast: 20+lb in about 10 packages (will become pulled pork)
• Bulk Sausage: 18 one-pound packages
• Smoked kielbasa: 10 – two to four links per pkg
• Ground pork: 6 – 1.5 lb packs
• Bacon: 5 lb in one-pound blocks
• Smoked hocks: 8lb in 2 hocks
• Ribs, pork butt, other misc: 8lb
• Plus about 5 pounds of soup bones and 5 lb of fat for lard
• The tail, the bladder, and possibly the squeal for the Cooking with Laura Project, which I will get to in a few weeks

This filled 2 large coolers and a paper grocery bag; it takes up about 2/3 of our tiny 7cu ft chest freezer and close to half the space above the fridge.

I think this was a steal for $300. I think prices are going up for next year, and they will be worth it.

A couple weeks ago, I finally bought a thermal cooking pot. It’s been on my radar for a long time, and I finally splurged. The basic idea is that it’s a pot-in-a-Thermos. You put your ingredients in the inner pot and bring it to a boil on the stove, then put that pot into the insulated outer pot, close the lid, and the food cooks using the retained heat. It’s sort of like a countertop version of haybox cooking, and the idea is to save energy and keep from heating up your kitchen when cooking.

I’ve learned that this gizmo has definite strong and weak points. I’m honestly not sure I’d recommend buying one; they are pretty pricey and it doesn’t do everything I’d hoped it would. Still, it works really well for some things, and I can’t stop experimenting! I thought I’d post the results of my experiments to date, so if you’re considering getting one, you can make a really informed decision. Details after the cut:

Excellent Results

• 

  Beef stew. I browned a slice of beef shank and some meaty bones in the pot with a little oil and onion, then added water up to about 2″ below the top of the pot. (This is considerd “full.”) After it had boiled for 15 minutes, I put it into the outer pot and let it sit for 2 hours. Then I brought it back to a boil (which took only a minute or two) and put it back in the cooker for another hour. At that, point I had a really nice pot of beef stock. It was still steaming hot when I put it in the fridge overnight. The next day, pulled the meat off the bones and added carrots, onions, kale, barley, salt, and seasonings. Brought it to a boil and dropped it into the cooker for 30 minutes, and it was probably the best beef barley soup I’ve ever made. The carrots retained a nice “bite” and the barley was fully cooked. Usually, the carrots are overdone by the time the barley is cooked.

• Yogurt. This was the exception to the rolling-boil rule. Heated the milk to 180, cooled to 110, added diluted starter, and popped it in the pot overnight. In the morning, it was yogurt, with no attention, energy, or re-warming needed. I definitely prefer this over our previous cooler-with-hot-pack method.
• Coconut vegetable curry. Can of coconut milk, can of tomatoes, and a lot of chopped vegetables (including white and sweet potatoes). Bring to a boil, pop in pot for 30 minutes. Quite tasty; all veggies done nicely.
• Taking hot food to a potluck. It’ll keep food hot for several hours without added heat or electricity, so this is perfect for taking a pot of curry or chili to a potluck.
• UPDATE 10-31-09: Beans. I filled the pot a little over halfway with water and threw in a cup and a half of dried black-eyed peas. Soak overnight, bring to a boil, and throw in thermal sleeve for…a while. I had to go out, so mine were in there around 4 hours, and they were *perfect* when I got home. Cooked through, but not at all mushy. As an added bonus, black eyed peas do not make my heart race the way other beans do!
• UPDATE 11-3-09: Potatoes. Dice and cover with cold water (pot half full); bring to a boil and let sit in thermal sleeve for about 20-30 minutes.

Middling Results

• Chicken stock. Eventually, I did get good stock and tender chicken out of the pot, but it took several re-warmings and 4-5 hours of “steeping” time. I was also making stock out of the same batch of chickens on the stove, and to be fair, it took about 4 hours on a constant simmer. These were some tough old hens, and while the stock was great, the chicken never really got meltingly tender (even after pressure canning). I will continue to make stock in this pot when I’m doing one chicken at a time.

Poor Results

• Split pea soup. The batch was so small (1c peas and 3c water) that not enough heat was retained to cook them.
• Brown rice. I’ve tried this four times and ruined a really depressing amount of rice, both because of my own failure to measure ingredients, and the pot’s failure to cook.
  • 2c rice, unknown water = fairly crunchy rice. Hmm, did I put in 2 or 4 cups of water? Well, I’ll just add some more hot water, like I do on the stove and I’ll end up with…wallpaper paste!
  • 2c rice, 3c water = slightly crunchy rice. Um, Em? Do you remember that rice is supposed to be made with TWO cups of water for every cup of rice? No? Well, don’t you think it would be a good idea to MEASURE YOUR INGREDIENTS PROPERLY before blaming equipment failure? That’s a good girl.
  • 2c rice, 4c water = fully cooked rice floating in a lot of hot water. You see, this pot doesn’t let steam out the way a pot on the stove does, which is why the 2c water/3c rice was only slightly crunchy. I just dumped this batch into a sieve and let it drain, and it actually was the best batch to date. Not perfect rice, but it was edible. Next time, I will try cooking 2c rice in 6 or 8c water and just plan to drain it like pasta.
  • 1c rice, 2c water with complicated “double boiler” arrangement inside the pot = total failure. My idea was to put the rice and water inside a stainless steel bowl, and surround that with boiling water. I think the idea bears repeating, but by a different method – perhaps using a Mason jar on a silicone hot pad (so the jar doesn’t crack) with a lot more water around it so the inner pot can actually boil.
  • 2 c rice, enough water to fill pot half full. Let it stand for one hour and it was completely overcooked.

Lessons Learned

• You must bring the contents of the inner pot to a full, rolling boil for a couple minutes before putting it into the thermal outer pot.
• The pot works best when it’s full (80% of 4.5 liters, in this case).
• It works poorly or not at all when it’s not full.

At one point, Thermos made a 6L version of this that came with two pots. You could either cook 2 different things at the same time, or fill one with water to help the other one cook. I can’t find it now, and I’m not sure if the difference between 3L and 4.5L would be enough to, say, get my rice to cook.

Next Steps

• See if I can find a way to do a pot-in-a-pot method that will let me cook smaller quantities of food.
  • UPDATE: This hasn’t worked terribly well, though I did get a passable split pea soup by putting the soup ingredients in a small stainless steel pot and filling the thermal pot *around* it with water.
• Compare to a standard pressure cooker, which also uses less fuel than regular stove-top cooking, but does so at much higher heats. Supposedly it’s faster, too, but I’m not sure that it will be once you take cool-down/depressurizing time into account. But it might do a better job with rice and other things made in 1L instead of 4L quantities.

I’ve just done a write-up of our pickling event for Preserving Traditions. Follow the link for instructions on how to make old-fashioned, lactofermented pickles. It’s really easy and oh-so-tasty!

I’m starting to think that maybe – just perhaps – I have planted too many cucumbers this year. I’ve never grown them before, and I had no idea what kind of yields, I’d get, so I put 3 “tomato” cages in a 3′x6′ bed and planted 2 cucumber plants (var: Little Leaf from Johnny’s) on each side of the square cages. Not all 24 plants came up, but I’d guess 15 or so did.

We are now harvesting, on average, a quart of pickle-sized cucumbers a day. I only harvest every 2-3 days, so I’m usually getting at least 2 quarts every time I pick. We eat very few cukes fresh, so we’ve been making a LOT of pickles. Here are a few we’ve liked:

• Half-sours – probably our favorite, definitely our “go-to” pickle. Just cukes, garlic, bay, peppercorns, and dill, covered with salt brine and fermented.
• Hungarian summer pickles – not bad, once we added some garlic, but they often taste…fizzy. Literally like there’s carbonation inside the pickles.
• Vinegar garlic dills – first batch had a little too much vinegar and haven’t tasted the second batch yet, but these are closest to Scott’s favorite store-bought pickles
• Mustard/horseradish dills – FABULOUS. Maybe my new favorite pickle…my sweetie hasn’t tried them yet and I hope he hates them.

Weirdo pickles

The following were Pickles of Desperation, made when we just couldn’t think of what else to make. We actually haven’t tried most of these yet…I’ll let you know if they’re any good.

• Curry pickles – these were actually quite good. Fermented in salt brine, with a tablespoon of curry powder and a teaspoon each of whole corriander, cumin, and black pepper
• “Kitchen sink” pickles – faced with too much vinegar brine and too many jars with spices already in them and not enough cucumbers, we frantically searched the kitchen for anything we could pickle. The result? A pint of pickled kohlrabi, and two mixed pints of kohlrabi, cabbage, carrots, and apples. We plan to serve it with pork.
• “Thanksgiving” pickles – fermented with garlic, sage, rosemary, and chives.
• Thai basil-chili pickles – lots of Thai basil, 2 chili peppers, and garlic

Lessons learned

• Cherry tree leaves work better than grape leaves for keeping pickles crunchy
• We like them sized 2-3″ best. At 4″, they can’t keep their crunch, and larger than that, you really have to cut them into “coins.” (I do flavor experiments with these bigger pickles. If the flavor works out, we’ll do it again with tiny premium cukes.)
• If fermented pickles don’t taste fabulous after 3-4 days, just leave them out of the fridge another couple days. The flavors will continue to develop a *lot*.
• Wear sturdy gloves when picking cucumbers!

I’m doing my first workshop on stocking a pantry to live out of! This workshop aims to appeal to a variety of folks: those who want to save money, those who want quick meal prep, and those who think the economy is going to collapse but aren’t quite ready to join a peak oil group or move to a commune. Here’s the announcement: [EDIT 8-13 4:30pm - revised location]

Oct 10: Stocking your Pantry

Join us at 10 AM on Saturday Oct 10 at St. Paul Church elementary school (495 Earhart Rd., Ann Arbor) when Emily Springfield, a member and organizer of Ann Arbor’s Preserving Traditions club (http://preservingtraditions.wordpress.com), will present a workshop on Pantry Staples. Having easily-stored staples on hand will make meal preps easy, and Emily will even share some simple recipes to which you need only add vegetables or meat. In addition, Emily will share tips on basics to have on hand in case of emergency (think blizzard or tight funds), items you could buy in bulk or on sale to stockpile.

Cost is only $5 and includes the workshop and munchies. We promise to let you go by noon. Please RSVP to Ruth Zielke 994 3718 (azielke914@comcast.net). Bring your friends. Ask that nice woman who sits in front of you every Sunday if she will join you. There will be time for sharing tips and stories, too. It will be great to be together. There is no home game, so you won’t even have to worry about traffic! Treat yourself to great fellowship!

This time of year, I take most Fridays off to work in the garden and put up the harvest. This helps keep it somewhat fun, and keeps me from getting totally burned out.

Yesterday, I harvested the first zucchini and potato from the garden, so I decided to make these for breakfast. They take some time but are really easy.

Zucchini-potato pancakes

• 1 medium zucchini
• 1 large potato (you should have equal parts zuke and potato)
• 1 small onion
• 2 Tbl flour
• 1 egg
• Salt
• Dill (optional)
• Oil for frying

Shred the zucchini, potato, and onion. Sprinkle well with salt and put it in a sieve to drain for about half an hour. This is really important – if you don’t do this, the pancakes will be too wet and will steam into mush rather than frying up crispy.

After 20-30 minutes, squeeze as much water as you can out of the veggies. It’ll be a funky brown color; no worries – that’s just the potato starch reacting to the air. Put the veg shreds in a bowl, add some more salt, the flour, egg, and dill (or any other herbs or spices you like).

Heat a frying pan (cast iron is the best) and a couple tablespoons of oil. (I used bacon fat I’d been saving in the fridge.) When it’s hot, drop about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of the batter into the pan and shape it into a pancake about 1/4″ thick. Fry until golden on one side (6-7 minutes) then flip over and cook until it’s done (another 6-7 minutes).

The best topping for these, in my opinion, is raw sauerkraut. The plain cakes are a little bland, but the salt and crunch of the kraut makes them shine!