I saw an add on TV for an egg steamer, and had a laugh about it because I LOVE the way those gadget commercials always make simple tasks look impossible in order to convince you to buy their gadget. So they were showing these people who were unable to cook eggs without their fancy steamer, which I thought was quite funny. But the idea stuck with me and so I looked it up on the net. Indeed people do steam eggs to hard boil them, and several sites I read suggested the steam makes it easier to peel the eggs. Because our eggs are so fresh, they are very hard to peel, hard enough that I had given up making hard boiled eggs with them!

So I pulled out the steamer and took a few eggs, pierced a little hole in one end (I think that was supposed to keep it from blowing the shell apart, but they did that anyway), and set it to steam for 30 minutes, which is what I read online. I also read to steam them for 10 and let them rest for 20. After 30 minutes I moved them into a bowl of ice water in the fridge for half an hour. Then I pulled them out and sure enough, those shells slipped right off! It was wonderful! And the eggs were perfect, didn’t even have the green ring around the yolk. I did a bunch more and made egg salad for sandwiches, and then had a few left over for Dave to snack on.

I’m so excited to have found an easy way to cook our eggs. And I didn’t need to buy any new gadgets to do it!

I have been experimenting with ways to use up lots of eggs, so the first thing that comes to mind is Angel Food Cake, because that uses a dozen egg whites. I made an AFC when I was a teenager, all by myself, and it came out just fine (lucky lucky). So a couple weeks ago I downloaded a Good Eats recipe and gave it a try.

First attempt didn’t turn out so well. Everything looked fine until I got it out of the pan and cut it and then I discovered random gooey blobs inside. The cake around the blobs was good, but the blobs were gross, so I ended up ditching it. I’m sure it’s something I did because I absolutely swear by Alton Brown’s recipes. Sometimes the recipes may not be to my taste, but they always come out.

Second try was today, and I got a recipe off cooks.com and tried it. The order of operations was a little different. It seems that AFC is all about technique, since the ingredients seem to be about the same. This time the cake came out looking good, tasting good, and no gooey blobs, but it’s heavy! More like an Angel Food Brick!

Oh well, since the chix are giving me 6-7 eggs a day now, I’ll be able to try again in a couple days. As for the dozen yolks, I cooked them and threw them back out to the chickens. Hate to see them go to waste, and I don’t know what else to do with yolks by themselves.

Sorry no pics, the camera is Out of Order for a few days.

I used to buy Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice, thinking I was getting the closest possible thing to the real stuff, until I read this article:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/02/22/qa_with_alissa_hamilton/?page=full

It’s in interview with the author of a book called “Squeezed: What you don’t know about Orange Juice”. Well, you know that can’t be good. I don’t know if it’s truth or hype, but it was a wake up call to remember to eat food with the least processing whenever possible.

So in my ongoing quest to ‘eat real food, not too much, mostly plants’ (see Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s manifesto), the concept of only eating things Grandma would have recognized as food, I decided to start drinking fresh-squeezed juice for breakfast.

I already had the juicer head for the mixer, I bought it a couple years ago, thinking I would squeeze a bunch of oranges at the beginning of the week to enjoy all week. Well that didn’t work out. But it turns out that just squeezing two oranges for breakfast every morning is fast and easy, in fact I can juice them and have the whole thing cleaned up before my toast pops up. And it tastes really good. Plus now I have oranges around the kitchen, so I’m more likely to grab one for a snack during the day. There are also fresh baked cookies in the kitchen, and since I’m sure Grandma would have recognized those as food, they are also fair game.

I was put off a bit by the fact that the oranges are still sprayed with some unpronouncable chemicals to protect them during shipping. We’ll just have to live with that, I guess, since Oranges are not something we can grow around here.

What do you do when you have nearly two dozen eggs in the fridge and no one to give them to? How about make a frittata? This was actually inspired by having nothing on hand for breakfast except eggs. Eggs are the one thing we have too many of!

I sauteed half an onion, then added some cut up chicken left over from one of those roasted chickens from the store (which gave us enough chicken for three meals, I might add), then I shredded up two leftover small hunks of cheese – one pepper jack, one gruyere. Leave the cheese too close to the edge of the counter so Barclay can steal about a third of it. Crack open a dozen eggs and whisk them with a little dash of milk. Put half the remaining cheese in the eggs, dump them into the skillet with the onions and chicken, and stir. When it’s starting to set up put the rest of the cheese on top, pop it under the broiler a few minutes until browned and puffy – I was really surprised it got puffy like that – and it’s done! I put a dab of sour cream on it, but it was just as good without. Easy and delicious, and used up a bunch of leftover tidbits, so I always like that.

We were snowed in again today, but this time it wasn’t as annoying because instead of shutting our business down and costing us money, it was our day off anyway. So instead of running around and doing errands, we were forced to sit home and relax, and that was kind of nice.

So I made pizza. I have been wanting to experiment more with making doughs, it’s just hard to find the time. Earlier this week I made a quiche with a homemade pie dough, which wasn’t as hard as I was expecting. So I used a recipe in a Gordon Ramsey cookbook I had handy to make homemade pizza dough. Unfortunately it made enough for four pizzas! So I took the first round and did a test pizza with just plain cheese to see how it went. Pretty good, but needed a bit more flavor.

I took the second crust and roasted some garlic and brushed the top with the garlic and olive oil, and docked the dough so it wouldn’t blow up like a balloon. Still came out looking floury and pale. So I brushed a bit of butter on it and stuck it back in for a few minutes. Looked and smelled great when I pulled it out, so I went ahead and put all the fixin’s on for Dave’s favorite, Hawaiian.

I cooked it in Great-Grandma’s cast iron skillet. The story goes that the skillet came from Illinois to Oklahoma with Great-Grandma on a covered wagon back when she was a little girl. True, or just family legends? Who knows, all I know is when I was growing up that skillet was used for nearly every meal and hardly ever cooled off between cooking for family members on graveyard shift and swing shift. Makes me feel special to cook in it.

When I was a little girl, too little to help, my Grandma and her daughters (my mom and aunt) would make jelly every year. They would do boysenberry and blackberry and other kinds too, carefully can them in little glass jars, and put paraffin wax on top. I remember that when we needed more jelly we would go get a jar out of the cupboard and pry that wax off the top. Unfortunately my mom had a stroke when I was ten and I don’t think they ever made jelly again after that. Life got very complicated.

So making jelly seems like something you do when times are good. This year I successfully made jelly myself for the first time. Unfortunately Grandma is no longer around to help me figure out how, so I just followed the recipes off the net. I decided to go for freezer jam (I think I prefer chunky jam to jelly anyway), maybe someday I’ll learn to can. I tried it a couple years ago and it just didn’t turn out right. But this seems to have gone much better. I used the rhubarb from our garden to make rhubarb jam, and it tastes really good. Then I took advantage of all the sweet fresh strawberrys available this week and made strawberry freezer jam. Yum! I ended up with 4 cups of rhubarb and 7 cups of strawberry. I’ll do blackberry when those ripen, and we’ll never have to buy jelly again!

I think these should be more popular. I asked for mine for Christmas a few years ago, and the hubby obliged. I love to cook outdoors, but the regular grill is a bit big for cooking for two. So I saw this and decided it was just what I wanted.

I guess the thing I love most about it is that it can cook a meal for two with a ridiculously small amount of charcoal, and that it has a plastic ‘cool touch’ exterior so if necessary you can move it around. Also you are unlikely to get burned while using it, and it’s safe if dogs decide to stick their nose against it. It’s very stable too. Not at all rickety like the mini BBQ we used to have which always felt like it’s little metal legs were on the verge of collapsing.

So this evening after our unsuccessful fishing expedition I decided to smoke a piece of salmon I had in the fridge. Would have been happier with trout, but it’s not the first time I came home with an empty hook! So I put a few mesquite charcoal chunks in the Cobb (I took the whole bag when I first got it and broke all the big chunks into roughly briquette sized pieces) and started them with the firestarter sticks. That little bit of charcoal was enough to roast a squash, an ear of corn, and a red pepper (for tomorrows soup), followed by the salmon (with a bit of wet mesquite chips thrown on the coals for more smoke – as pictured above), and then after I pulled the salmon I set an apple with raisins and cinnamon on there to cook and by the time I was done eating dinner it was perfect.

Now when the coals cool off I can clean it up and tuck it away in it’s bag until next time. This is about our third year with it, and I never use the big grill anymore unless we’re having friends over. This little guy is all the grill we need. It even travels easily. And I prefer using a few briquettes of charcoal to having to tote around a little bottle of propane. I’m just really happy with our little Cobb!

I don’t usually post recipes, but I made a particularly good hot dish last night, and I don’t want to forget the recipe, since it’s a mix of recipes I’ve been trying for a while. It’s nothing fancy, it’s just plain old good food like Grandma used to make.

1 lb lean ground beef
1 medium onion
1 small can of mushrooms, drained
1 small can of corn, drained
a little butter and olive oil
crispy crown frozen tater tots
cream of mushroom soup
half a soup can of milk

Slice up the onions and saute them in a little butter and olive oil until they are soft and browned. Add the mushrooms, and cook until they start to brown, then the corn, and cook until the corn is browned. Move them into a bowl.

Brown the ground beef, adding a little chipotle tabasco sauce as it cooks. Drain off fat if necessary. Add onion mixture back to pan and heat through.

In a separate bowl mix soup and milk.

In a 9×12 glass baking dish put down a layer of tater tots on the bottom. Put ground beef mixture over it, smoothing it out. Now pour on the soup, spread it out a bit to get it even, then give the pan a few little shakes and jiggles to make it sink down into the meat. Put another layer of tater tots on top.

Cook for 45 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Take it out and let it set for 5 minutes on the counter.

This is delicious! Browning the ingredients first adds a lot of flavor, as does the little hit of chipotle. Yum! You end up with a nice strata of browned potatoes on top, meat, onion, mushrooms and corn, and broken up potatoes on the bottom, all connected by the soupy goodness. So Good! It also reheats well for lunch the next day.