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Pigs in Blankets with Mud!
I have been having a blast working with all the new sourdough tricks I’m learning from Gnowfglins Sourdough eCourse. Seems there’s something new to make every day! I am totally in love with the pancakes her recipe turns out. This week, I ordered some breakfast sausage links from West Wind Farms and made pigs in blankets. The family loved them! Problem is, though, I just can’t do sweet in the morning.
After the sausages were all fried and tucked in their blankets, I was about to wash my pan when it hit me: mud! Pigs love mud! I took the greasy pan, added flour and whisked it around, then added milk to make gravy. The little browned bits of sausage in the bottom of the pan provided just the right amount of seasoning. While the family enjoyed butter and maple syrup on their piggies, mine wallowed in mud!
This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
I’ve tried sourdough before. Mom had a bowl on the counter for a while that made the whole house smell like a brewery. The food she turned out was as sour as lemons and I didn’t like it one bit. When my oldest was a wee one and I was a La Leche League Leader, I tried some of the sourdough recipes from Whole Foods for the Whole Family. But I wasn’t really into cooking then and the sudden adjustment of another “mouth to feed” seemed a bit much for a newbie mom.
Now that I’ve learned about phytic acid, the importance of soaking grains for good digestion, and how efficient sourdough is at that process, I’m giving it another shot. I probably wouldn’t have even considered it right now with all I’ve got going on, but Wardeh at GNOWFGLINS is doing this amazing 13-week sourdough course at a price I can truly afford! So, with tippy-toed baby steps, I am entering the world of sourdough once again.
My second dish (my first was some pretty good pancakes) was these amazing waffles. Amazing, as in crispy on the outside, light and fluffy on the inside and just the right flavor balance. I didn’t even put syrup on mine, just some melted butter.
Sourdough Waffles
2 cups fed sourdough starter
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1/4 cup melted coconut oil, cooled slightly
2 eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon water
Combine melted coconut oil, salt, eggs and syrup until well mixed. Add starter, stirring gently until blended. Separately mix baking soda and water, then add to batter, stirring for just a few seconds. Cook on heated waffle iron.
That’s what’s twistin’ in my kitchen! What’s twistin’ in yours?
Wardeh at Gnowfglins is having a series called “Probiotics at Every Meal.” What a wonderful idea! We try to fit probiotics into one part of every meal and I’m really looking forward to reading other people’s suggestions!
This morning’s breakfast fit the theme perfectly. We enjoyed Sunshine Smoothies (adapted from a Sue Gregg recipe) and bright, zingy, in season blackberry muffins with cultured butter. I didn’t soak the muffin batter beforehand, but did use freshly ground flour. Hey, sometimes life’s a tradeoff, right?
Here are my recipes:
Blackberry Spice Muffins
1/4 cup melted butter
1 pastured egg
1/2 cup raw honey
3/4 cup cultured buttermilk
2 cups freshly ground whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon ground organic cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
fresh, organic blackberries
Mix dry ingredients and berries together in one bowl. Mix wet ingredients together in second bowl. Fold wet ingredients into dry ingredients just until moistened, don’t overmix. Scoop batter into greased muffin tins (coconut oil is amazing for this), top with a few extra berries for decoration and bake at 350° for 25 minutes. Allow to cool for a few minutes and the muffins will pop right out of the tins. Serve with cultured butter for a probiotic boost!
Sunshine Smoothie
For each two servings:
1 orange*
1 banana
1 teaspoon flax oil
1 teaspoon whey
1/2 cup yogurt
pinch cinnamon
Peel orange and banana, add to blender carafe. Pulse a couple times to chop. Add remaining ingredients, blend well. When everyone’s been served, pour leftovers into a popsicle mold for a probiotic boost on a hot afternoon!
*Note on ingredients: Don’t take all the white pulp off the orange when you peel it because that’s where the bioflavonoids are! Bioflavonoids (sometimes called Vitamin P) increase your body’s ability to absorb the vitamin C in the orange.
This post is part of Probiotics: Every Meal hosted by Wardeh at Gnowfglins.
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade and the Bare Cupboard blog carnival.
iTunes is playing “Gonna Fly Now” on my computer as I write this post. You know that song. It’s the one from “Rocky” where Rocky Balboa is beating up sides of beef and jogging up the Philadelphia Art Museum’s steps and holding his hands up in victory at the top. It’s the theme song of determined underdogs everywhere.
photo by radiospike photography on Flickr
My victory once again focuses on a great meal review from my hard-to-please son, John. Earlier this month, I wrote a Fight Back Fridays post about two wonderful in-season foods: strawberries and kale. Michelle commented, “Haha I thought this was going to be a recipe made with strawberries and kale! That would have been a new one.” I took this as a personal challenge and served Strawberry Green Smoothies for breakfast this morning:
Strawberry Green Smoothies
Toss a handful of washed, stemmed, organic strawberries in the blender. Add a raw (pastured only, from chickens you know and farmers you trust, please) egg yollk, a splash of milk, a few drops of flax oil, a drizzle of whey and a few pieces of frozen banana. Turn the blender on. Add a washed, destemmed organic kale leaf and let it blend for a while until all the pieces are invisible and the smoothie is nice and green.
I never expected John to like it. I wasn’t even going to pour him a cup, but he insisted. And he liked it. He said if he was drinking it in the dark he would have never known it was green. And the kale I used was thick, meaty, red Russian kale, too.
It’s amazing and wonderful how quickly our tastebuds adapt to healthy foods if we give them the chance. My mother-in-law is visiting again this week and I learned last time to not allow that to be an excuse to eat poorly. This time, tempted with eating out, grabbing a Starbucks and ordering in, I was able to easily say no. I just have no interest in eating that stuff anymore. I’m spoiled. I’m also educated. The thought of what is in those non-foods kills my appetite as surely as the idea of drinking gasoline.
It’s Friday, I’m fighting back, and I’m gonna fly now!
We had a perfectly charming Dutch Puff for breakfast. I started yesterday by soaking the flour.
Dutch Puff
2 cups freshly ground whole wheat flour
2 cups filtered water
2 tablespoons whey (or yogurt, kefir, or cultured milk)
8 eggs
Soak flour in water with whey 12-24 hours. In the morning, preheat oven to 425°, butter a 9×13 pyrex baking dish and put it in the oven to heat up. Add 8 raw eggs to the flour and beat well. Pour into sizzling hot baking dish and bake 20 minutes. This will puff up, but will fall as it cools. Serve with butter, milk and maple syrup.
This is just your base and pretty bland. You can add dried fruits, nuts, whatever suits your taste. Remember to heat the dish in the oven, that keeps the puff from sticking.
I started dinner when I took the Dutch Puff out of the oven by letting the oven cool down, then putting a bunch of potatoes in at 250° for two hours. (Note to self: two hours was only enough for the smallest baking potatoes.) Before I started the rest of dinner last night, I scooped and mashed the innerds of five of the potatoes with butter, a dot of kefir, some chopped, cooked natural bacon and some raw cheddar cheese. I stuffed the potato skins with this mixture and topped them with a little more cheese and set them in 150° oven to melt the cheese and stay warm. For my allergic daughter, I mixed the “tater guts” with some rice milk and bacon.
Our chicken tonight was simple breasts, dunked in egg, dredged in breadcrumbs and fried up in olive oil. I didn’t pound them first, so they took about 7 minutes a side. When I turned the last batch, I put some asparagus in about an inch of boiling, salted water and covered it. After five minutes, I drained it well and tossed them with some clarified butter. We passed a wedge of parmesan cheese to grate over the top of the asparagus. The kids have always preferred the green shaker cheese, but since it’s not in the house anymore, they are forced to eat the real stuff. Sneaky, ain’t I? Everyone was really thrilled with dinner, and no one even asked about dessert. Perhaps I’m making progress.
As I was doing dinner dishes, I slipped on some water on the floor (Note to self: When it’s time to replace that floor, look for something that’s not so slippery when it’s wet!) and tweaked my knee a little. So much for dancing tonight. Hubby took the older ones, leaving me home with the ones still recovering from a cold. I spent the evening making menus and a shopping list for the next week, planning our Oscar party and playing my favorite video game.
No, I’m not crabby, dinner is!
Teenaged boy missed the bus this morning and needed a ride in to school. I was back in plenty of time to make UFOs for breakfast. You know UFOs, but maybe not by that name. It’s a hole cut in a slice of bread, then the bread is fried with a raw egg in the hole. You might know them as Johnny Jacks, Egg in a Hole, or any number of other names. We call them Unidentified Frying Objects, or UFOs.
When I got back, I noticed the milk I had set out several days ago had turned to curds and whey! YAY! I’ve started to filter it through muslin. So, I’m adding some individual cheesecakes to the menu for later this week, and putting some veggies on the shopping list to begin lacto-fermenting.
I’ve really been looking forward to lacto-fermenting vegetables. I remember when I was very, very young there was always a jar of homemade pickles on the table at dinnertime. It was just put on the table as part of dinner, like salt and pepper, bread and butter and a glass of milk. I don’t know exactly why we got away from it, maybe Mom stopped making them when she had rheumatic fever, or when I had scarlet fever, or when she became disenchanted with homemaking in general. Each batch tasted slightly different depending on the season and the herbs on the windowsill. Perhaps that’s one thing that attracted me to NT to begin with: some distant food memory of fermented foods at the dinner table.
It was a wild afternoon. Many jobs that needed to get done didn’t get done, and many others demanded immediate attention when I thought they could wait. I didn’t get home until 6PM and we were all quite hungry. I had already stirred together and baked a pan of gingerbread for dessert, and I had a couple roasted red bell peppers hiding out in the fridge. I put some carrots on to cook in butter while I made crab cakes out of claw meat, cilantro, onion, egg, bread crumbs, dijon mustard, and just a pinch of cayenne. It was all pretty good, but the highlight was the Red Pepper Sauce. When I tasted it to adjust the seasonings, I thought to myself, “You can have all the other stuff, just give me this red pepper sauce and a spoon!”
Red Pepper Sauce
2 large red bell peppers
1 small clove garlic, peeled and chopped
2 teaspoons coconut oil, melted, but not hot
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil
Set the bell peppers right on the oven rack and broil until the skin turns dark. Turn and continue to cook until all sides are seared. Put the peppers in a paper bag and roll down the top. Allow to cool 10-15 minutes. Cut open the peppers and remove the stem, seeds and accumulated juice. The skin should slip off easily. Put peeled peppers in blender with garlic, coconut oil and balsamic vinegar. Blend on low speed until incorporated. Add two sun-dried tomatoes and the oil that clings to them and blend again until smooth. Adjust seasonings. Best served at room temperature. Makes a little more than one pint.
I started off this morning with a nice, big pot of porridge simmering on the stove. Last night I soaked a cup of rolled oats overnight in a cup of water to which I’d added 4 tablespoons of kefir. This morning I boiled a cup of water and added in the oats, water and all. It cooked up in about five minutes. I had a steaming bowl with pasture butter and honey. It was a bit tart, something unusual for oatmeal, but not unpleasant.
While watching TV last night, I shelled a pound of raw peanuts and put them to soak in some salt water. This morning I poured off the salt water and they are drying on the lowest setting of my oven. Today I started another batch of chicken broth and make some clarified butter for my super-allergic daughter. The tuna salad sandwiches were very, very good at lunch.
I was really looking forward to the Coconut Chicken Soup I’d picked out for dinner. I’m a big fan of coconut milk and enjoy it frequently in my coffee. Sadly, I was called in to work at the last minute and couldn’t get dinner on the table. One of the teens made some whole wheat spaghetti with Newman’s Sockerooni sauce and a big, green salad. I’m sure it beat the socks off what I had. One of the downfalls of a new cooking methodology, I suppose, is that the youngsters aren’t trained in the revised food prep yet and therefore unable to assist in an emergency. But, nothing is lost, I’ll just serve the planned soup later in the week.
