1 Can of low sodium beef broth
3-4 slices of sushi ginger (I had a jar of this in the fridge – I’ve also used this on top of fish when I’ve put it in to bake – really nice). If you have fresh ginger, I’m sure a couple of slices of that would work as well.
1/3 cup of light soy sauce
1/3 cup of cider vinegar
1/4 cup of honey or dark brown sugar

Put on high for one hour; then turn down to low for 6-8 hours. Remove from slow cooker and shred with two forks.
In the slow cooker, add half a bottle of ketchup and stir. Add back the shredded beef, stir up the meat and sauce to combine. Put on high for 20 minutes to heat through

Serve with crunchy sandwich rolls and cole slaw or Claremont Salad

Enjoy.

First – there is nothing wrong with doing a riff on something they already like. It takes a pretty sophisticated palate to like fish such as haddock or cod right out of the chute. “Mildly flavored’ doesn’t even begin to describe the way kids feel about it in its unadorned state; that’s why breaded, deep fried fish is so popular with kids (Mickey D’s has built an entire industry around those sandwiches): that breading and the grease from the deep frying give kids a stronger taste that they recognize and accept easily. But there are other tastes that kids recognize and that you can use to your advantage with fish that is frankly bland:

Italian Food: If your kids like anything with tomato sauce and cheese on it, don’t be afraid to bake fish such as haddock and cod with the same treatment. Or, if you want to go completely sophisticated, chop up veggies and tomatoes, add the appropriate spices (basil and oregano for Italian; cilantro, garlic and chili for Mexican) and bake in a 350 degree oven until done and if there is cheese, it’s all bubbly.

Chinese Food. If your kids like Chinese or Asian of any sort, tonight’s recipe is for you. Frankly, it’s an idea I cribbed from the fish display at my local Wegmans where they’d taken strips of fish filet and stuffed it and baked it. Now, I certainly don’t have crab meat laying around the fridge at Chez Siberia, but I had some other stuff and my son raved about this so much, he asked for seconds and then tonight asked for me to make it again, a sure sign that it’s a keeper.

Chinese Mushroom-stuffed Fish
Ingredients:
Fish: filets of totally bland tasting white fish such as haddock or cod, cut into 1” thick strips, with no skin.
Filling:
Mushrooms – whatever you’ve got, chopped really fine. 3-4 ounces of mushrooms chopped fine will fill up 6-8 of these little fish donuts.
Ginger – I used sushi ginger from the jar, but grated fresh ginger will do as well – see the photo for the relative size of the piles of ginger and mushrooms you will need.
Binder – I used Thai peanut sauce, but whatever Asian sauce, Asian salad dressing or whatever will do – use enough so that the mushrooms and ginger will stick together.
Mix all the filling ingredients together.

Grease a baking sheet and taking the strips of fish, make circles with them on the baking pan. Fill with the mushroom filling and bake in a 350 degree oven for 20 minutes or until done (don’t let the fish get dry).

Serve with Chinese stir fried veggies and either rice or noodles.

For more strongly flavored fish, I saw another really clever trick at the same store: This will work with fish that comes in steaks. Cut into big chunks, marinate in spiedie sauce (if you can find it in your area – it will be in the same area as the salad dressings and the bbq sauces) or some sort of bbq sauce such as Mexican. Put on skewers with veggies and grill. Serve with a salad, pasta or if you want to go totally ‘old school’, Italian bread for a fish spiedie sandwich. We had these once and they were fantastic – got a big thumbs up from everyone at the table.

If this animal were a lamb, it would be referred to as the ‘breast’. In beef, this is also referred to as the flank. If you recall your human anatomy and gaze down at your own chest, you will recall that this area has long strappy muscles on it. Check the photo at the top – those meat fibers are all long and in general all run parallel to one another. In general, this makes this particular cut, unless you prepare it under certain conditions, extremely chewy and stringy. Two things will make it less chewy: cutting across the fibers at a 90-degree angle (like slicing London Broil) and/or cooking slowly with moisture. It’s a cut that can be prepared in all sorts of ways which take advantage of it’s inherent qualities, such as:
Corned beef. You can use other cuts but the brisket is the best.
Pastrami. Ditto
Flank steaks, London Broil, etc.
Pot roast.
Slow cooked, pulled apart dishes such as bbq, the Spanish dish “old clothes”, and other ethnic dishes. In my household, my father referred to it as ‘gedempte fleisch’ which means, in Yiddish, “boiled meat’.

You bet.

But first, let’s imagine what one of these babies looks like. If you have bought a corned beef brisket, you have a pretty good idea of what at least a section of a beef brisket looks like – usually triangular shaped, and usually with a lot of fat on it. Some of the fat is hard; and some of the fat is really sort of spongy. When you work with brisket, you want to trim off as much of that as possible, but again, in working with a muscle group like this, there are membranes running all over the top between the meat itself and the fat and you want to not only trim off as much of the fat as you can but also you want to get the membranes off because those make the meat chewy also.

First, get off as much fat simply by taking a knife and cutting it off, getting as close to the meat as possible there are going to be places, especially where the fat is spongy, where this is going to get a little bit dicey. What you do then, is (see the photo), grab one end of a piece of fat and membrane in your non-dominant hand and start to pull toward that hand. Taking the knife in your dominant hand, start cutting as close to the meat as possible, separating the fat and membranes from the meat itself. You’ll find that sometimes, the pulling will go easily; and sometimes it won’t. Take your time and be careful. The point of this is to get as much of this off as possible. If you are the sort of person who feeds birds – load all of this up into a dutch oven and cook it down, skim off anything that floats and then cool it and package it up for the freezer for suet blocks for the birds next winter.

Now that you have a trimmed cut of meat, you can actually do something with it. This post is about making pulled BBQ Beef using a crock pot.

Ingredients:
Trimmed beef brisket, several pounds, cut into large chunks.
1-2 cans of low sodium beef broth
a couple of dried bay leaves
a teaspoon of black pepper corns

Put the chunks of brisket into the crock pot with the bay leaves and the pepper corns and enough broth so that it comes within an inch of the top of the meat. Don’t drown the meat.
Put the crock pot on high for one hour, then lower to low for 8 hours (this is really great done at night)
After 8 hours (or in the morning, whichever comes first), take the meat out, put into a bowl. Take two forks and shred up the meat. Store in a covered container in the fridge for later
Take the liquid in the crock pot, allow to cool, and put into a container in the fridge.
Just before you make the bbq sauce later on, take the container out, take the fat off the top and put the jellied liquid underneath back into the crock pot (I’m going to assume that you washed it this morning..).
Add half the bbq sauce to this in the crock pot and add the meat back. Put the crock pot on high to reheat.
Serve on toasted buns (make sure they are some sort of bun with a crunchy crust) with cole slaw.

BBQ Sauce: There are all sorts of bbq sauce recipes out there. Unfortunately, a lot of them start with ‘take a bottle of xxx bbq sauce’. This is a recipe from home ingredients, tastes great and you know it won’t have anything like corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup in it.
Ingredients:
1 large (14 oz.) can of crushed tomatoes
1/2 cup of finely minced onion, cooked in 2 tablespoons of olive oil
3 tablespoons of brown sugar (you can also use honey)
3 tablespoons of vinegar
4 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 table spoons of light soy sauce
2 teaspoons of dry mustard
(if you like really spicy bbq sauce, add 2 teaspoons of cayenne pepper; you can always adjust for you own taste by adding less however)

Prep:
Cook minced onion and garlic in the olive oil until the onions turn opaque. Add remaining ingredients and allow to simmer until blended.
Holding back 1-2 cups of the sauce for table use, take the rest of the sauce and put that into the crock pot with the shredded meat and the juices and reheat.

Enjoy.

Creme Brulee: This is a real ‘going out to dinner’ treat, which our son recently discovered (he’s finally old enough to have an appreciation for more subtle desserts and no longer requires two inches of chocolate cement held together with gobs of whatever). I have to admit that I’ve never made it at home, held back, strangely enough, by the final step, because I don’t own one of those nifty little butane blow torches. I have now been informed that you can get them at Bed, Bath and Bewildered. However, the rest, as they say, is simplicity itself. And remember, this is a custard that happens to be made with heavy creme. You could make the same dessert by substituting half and half and saving yourself a bunch of calories. Of course, if you do that, you can no longer call it ‘creme brulee’ but it would be probably just as good and little bit lighter.
This is creme brulee for a whole lot of people – serves 12 with little servings(so you will need a whole lot of ramekins or little glass bowls) or six people who really like creme brulee.
Ingredients:
8 egg yolks
1/3 cup granulated white sugar
2 cups of heavy cream (that’s a pint carton)
1 tsp of vanilla extract
a little granulated sugar for the tops when you want to caramelize them

Pre-heat the oven to 300 degrees F.
Beat up the egg yolks in a big bowl until light.
Gradually beat in the 1/3 cup of sugar until all mixed in
Add, in little dribs, the heavy cream and the vanilla and thoroughly mix in

Take a large baking dish and put in enough hot water so that you have a depth of about an inch to an inch and a half.
Divide up the egg and cream mixture into 6 ramekins. If you have a big enough baking pan (and enough ramekins), I think you can divide it up into 8 ramekins, which will make a slightly smaller serving but probably still very nice if you serve it with some fresh washed berries on the side.
Put the ramekins into the baking pan with the water and put on the center rack of the oven.
Bake for 50-60 minutes. You will know to take it out when you lift up one of the ramekins and shake it a little bit; the custard should still be a little bit loose in the center. It will firm up when you chill it.
Once the custard is done, take out the baking pan and leave out until the water is room temperature. Then take out the ramekins and put into the fridge. Chill for at least two hours.
Just before you want to serve them, dust the tops with a little bit of sugar. This should take maybe a teaspoon, no more than that. Since I did not have a torch, I preheated my broiler and put the rack on the highest setting. I put in the ramekins for two minutes (I ended up taking them out after about a minute and a half though; this is something you need to keep an eagle eye on because what you want to happen is for the sugar to melt, not burn). Take them out wait for the ramekins to cool and put back in the fridge for a little while to re-chill and serve.

The second dessert is something that recently has become quite chic in the French version in the United States, macarons. I grew up with the Passover commercial versions of these, which used to come packed in tins. These are not ‘kosher le-Pasach” (kosher for Passover) because they use a little wheat flour in them; to make them for Passover, you can substitute potato starch for the flour.

Coconut Macaroons (this can be divided by half and it still works): Makes – A Lot
Ingredients:
8 large egg whites
2 cups of sugar
2 tablespoons of honey (try not using something like clover, which really has no flavor)
5 cups of unsweetened, dried shredded coconut (you can usually find this in natural foods stores)
1/4 cup of flour (cake if you have it, all-purpose will work) – for Passover, use potato starch
1 tsp flavoring (I used orange, but you can use anything from vanilla, almond, etc. – for Passover, don’t use any flavoring if you can’t get ‘Passover flavoring’ at your grocery store)

In a large pan (I needed my dutch oven), mix together the sugar, flour, and coconut together and add the honey.
Then add the egg whites and mix together thoroughly. It will have the consistency of cooked oatmeal.
heat over a low-medium heat (on my stove, the burner was just slightly under half way), stirring constantly and scraping the bottom of the pan, turning the mixture under over and over.
When you start seeing the mixture turning brown on the bottom, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the flavoring. Transfer to a bowl to cool to room temperature. This is going to take a while – mine took about 30 minutes.
Pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees F. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper. Don’t substitute waxed paper for this, ok? Put tablespoons of the mixture on the paper. Use the spoon to make mounds – DO NOT PRESS THESE DOWN. The goal is to end up with a product that is crispy and crunchy on the outside and moist and chewy on the inside. So you want a little mound there.
Bake for about 15 minutes and check. If they are brown on the outside, take them out and let them sit. If not, let them bake for another couple of minutes, but you will need to check on them because they go from ‘lovely’ to ‘blow torch’ rather quickly. The macaroons can be frozen. The dough can also be frozen for up to two months before you have to use it.

Enjoy!

1) Through various policies and procedures that have come down from the USDA in the School Lunch Program, America’s schools have been put in the position of having to balance their budgets on the backs of the kids. They have cut staff, personnel, equipment, and the quality of the food. It takes people to cook real food. It actually takes people to just reheat or ‘nuke’ food – but it does take more people hours to prepare and cook real food from scratch. You might want to take a look at what the kids in your school district are actually eating at breakfast (if you have a breakfast program) and lunch. Don’t think that it’s only kids in places like West Virginia or Mississippi who are eating chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. Kids need good food to learn. The kids are worth it.

2) Families, whether through marketing or convenience or seeming lack of time, have been put in the same position in terms of serving up processed, pre-prepared foods to their families. Aunt Toby and the DH did this, too – though basically in what we considered a good cause: we used to serve the Little Siberians frozen fish patties to get them into the thing of eating fish. Later, we got them oriented to eating plain, fresh fish. But I do wish we had not resorted to the breaded fish patties. It really does not take any more time to cook fresh fish or shrimp or scallops than it does to bake a breaded fish patty. (end of self-beating up rant)

3) Kids learn from their parents – whatever you cook and eat, they will eat also. If you eat vegetables, they will eat vegetables; if you don’t eat veggies, then don’t try to make them eat them. They’ve already learned the lesson from you that vegetables are not something they should eat. If you teach them to cook those things, they will cook and teach their kids to cook. One of Jamie Oliver’s points in the series so far is that we now have people who are parenting, whose only cooking skills consist of warming things up in a toaster oven and using a microwave oven to zap something in a package. Even if you want to do some ‘from scratch’ cooking, if you don’t have any kitchen skills, there is this ‘I’m going to ruin this” fear – and that makes it difficult to change. Oliver established a cooking school in Huntington, WV to teach everyone – parents, adults, kids, teens – how to cook. So, do a good deed: If you have kids or grandkids, teach them to cook some basic dishes. If you don’t, offer to teach kids from your ‘house of worship’ or other community groups. Volunteer to do cooking with your local county 4-H (the Cooperative Extensions usually have a big kitchen in their building).

And here is a bit of Aunt Toby:
Every kid, even as young as probably 4 or 5 years old, can be brought into the kitchen and allowed to help. Not necessarily chop or fry or get into trouble with the stove, but do actual preparation, such as:

Little Folks:
Washing their hands before they start
Washing vegetables
Helping to knead dough for bread or pizza
Spreading cut up veggies on a pizza before it goes into the oven
Setting the table

8-11 Years – here is where you can have them do more because they are more in control of themselves, but still you must monitor them and be right there:
Learning about the oven and the controls
Cooking eggs
Easy prep things that don’t involve knives, such as grating cheese
Making pizza from scratch, including kneading the dough, raising it, spreading it out on a pan, putting on sauce and toppings and putting it in the oven.
Making a salad
Making meatloaf and hamburgers
How to cook vegetables properly

12 years and up – here is where you can now give them the opportunity, with help, monitoring and guidance, with doing things such as frying, boiling, baking, using appliances such as processors and mixers, and chopping and slicing foods.

My earliest cooking memories were with my father, teaching me to make scrambled eggs when I was five years old, with me standing on the kitchen stool with a big kitchen towel safety-pinned over my clothing. He taught me how to crack an egg into a bowl, how to mix them up with a fork and pour them into the pan. He also was a real stickler for the eggs not being too dry. He also taught me how to make what he thought of as a proper hamburger, in an old heavy aluminum skillet we had, the bottom of which he covered in a layer of salt. I loved cooking with my father and the DH and I have tried to instill a love of cooking and good food with all of the Little Siberians, who are all not very little any longer.

There are things that I could not pass onto my kids as skills. I don’t know anything about electronics, for example. Or computer programming. Or plumbing repair, or putting down cement. I know very little about carpentry or welding. But I taught my kids to cook so that they could feed themselves and their families later on.

Bring the kids back into the kitchen.

And what I wanted to do was reassure readers that there is nothing you can’t do with a kitchen stove that you cannot do with a grill, gas or charcoal. Now, the DH really made me work for this; I wanted him to put the grill in the entry to the garage so that frankly I’d be out of the wind and the snow (it’s in the mid-20s here and windy today), but he said I had to play it straight so that people would know that even under brutal conditions, this could be done. Well, I don’t know how brutal the conditions were (I kept getting smoke in my eyes, which is why I look sooooo happy there in the videos – I’ll bet Martha Stewart doesn’t have anyone telling HER she has to do demos the hard way), but I picked two things to illustrate just how easy doing this can actually BE: baking bread and making a fritata with potatoes, veggies, eggs and cheese.

A couple of notes and tricks here:
1) Again, don’t bring any grill into your house to cook on under emergency conditions. Period. It’s nice if you can do this on the deck and out of the wind but I did this under wind with a bit of snow. Can be done.
2) Don’t use pots and pans with bakelite(tm) or wooden handles – even if you do not have open flames, you are working with extremely hot coals and those two substances will burn and melt. My bread pan is made of Pyrex(tm) – I covered the outside with aluminum foil and greased the inside. The frying pan is an extremely long-in-the-tooth cast aluminum pan whose handle bit the dust many years ago. Again, I greased it heavily on the inside and also mixed a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in with the chopped up veggies that went into the fritata.
3) Don’t forget the hotpads and oven mitts.
4) If your grill has a temperature gauge, this is great. We started cooking the fritata ingredients when the gauge read 275 degrees, but again, the temperature at the ‘business end’ of the grill (that is, inside the pan) is not necessarily going to be the same; I’m sure it was much higher than 300 given how fast everything cooked. The breadpan was on the upper ‘indirect’ cooking area, both raising and cooking at the same time. After the fritate was done, I moved it to the center, where it would be warmer for the final cooking and browning. The bread was only there for 15 minutes before it was completely baked and brown on the top.
5) If your grill does not have a temperature gauge, use a probe if you have one. If not, use the ‘count to three’ test. If you can hold your hand about 6″ over the grill and it’s hot enough that you can only hold it there for a count of three, the fire is hot enough to cook with. Bank the coals down to a bed.
6) Some other ideas for cooking on the grill if you have:
A heavy cast iron or cast aluminum Dutch Oven with a metal or Pyrex(tm) lid: soup, stew or chili. And once it’s done, you can move the pot over to the side to keep it warm for hours.
A heavy cast iron or cast aluminum griddle: eggs, English muffins from scratch, pancakes, Mexican foods, stir fry.
A heavy aluminum saucepan with either a Pyrec(tm) or a metal lid – you can use this for anything that requires cooking in or heating up liquid: water for coffee or tea, soup, pasta and rice.

There are people out there who take every opportunity to do what is euphemistically called “camp cooking”, and have whole armories of cast iron and heavy enamel cookware that can be used to bake bread, rolls, muffins, cornbread (and cornbread sticks), fry anything, make coffee, you name it. For more information, go GSI
Camping Cookware
Outdoor Cooking
For recipes and all sorts of tips, search on ‘campfire cooking’ and ‘cast iron cooking’.

For the rest of the cooking adventure:

Bon Appetit!

Aunt Toby has written about eggs before, especially with regard to our little flock of Light Brahma chickens (and they are doing very nicely these days, thank you very much).Egg0sactly What We Were Looking For But, let’s review:

One large egg contains:
Calories: 68
Protein: 5.54 gr.
Carbohydrate: .49 gr.
Fat: 4.67 gr; 1.44 gr of which is saturated
Cholesterol: 186.56 gr.

Also contains:
Vitamin A
Vitamin B1, B2, B3, B6, B12
Biotin
Vitamin D
Vitamin E
Folate
Pantothenic Acid

Minerals, including 16% of the TDA of Iodine and 20% of the RDA of Selenium

So, one whole egg plus an egg white and you are covered in terms of protein on a per person basis. So, if you are making something such as scrambled eggs for a group of people, you can do everyone a favor and use whites for half of the servings and add a few extra whites to make up the difference in the volume lost by the lack of yolks.

I think everyone knows what quick and easy meals eggs can produce. Anyone arriving home from work, not having taken anything out in the morning (which has, cough, been known to happen on more than one occasion at Chez Siberia, I assure you), is still assured of a good, hearty, thrifty meal as long as there are eggs in the fridge.

Absolutely first rule in terms of serving eggs: Don’t turn the stove on high and just throw them in the pan. The protein in eggs responds better to low to medium heat. Second rule: Serve them on heated plates. I know that people think this is rather hoity-toity UK behavior but believe me – hot food stays hot longer if it is put on a hot plate. If you have to put a hot pad on the table so that you can put a heated plate on it, so be it (and treat yourself to some cork mats – Ikea has nice cheap ones). There is nothing worse than cold eggs. Not worth eating.

Easy Dinner 1: Think breakfast, only much nicer
Scrambled eggs with cheese
Whole Grain toast or some other form of bread product
Fruit Salad
Easy Dinner 2: Feel French without the flipping
Julia Child had her moment in the kitchen with an omelet; at Chez Siberia, we don’t take chances.
Count up how many people you have (for each person figure one whole egg and one egg white) and crack that many eggs and egg whites into a bowl and beat them well. Save the yolks and cook them up for your pets (they will love them)
Dice finely a small onion and half a pepper, sauté in a little bit of olive oil in a large frying pan that has a lid.
Shred up one half cup of cheddar cheese.
When the veggies are soft, pour the beaten eggs over the veggies and sprinkle the cheese on top. Stir lightly, cover and lower the heat until set.
Serve with whatever accompaniments you would like – ON A HOT PLATE.

This is a great way to use up already cooked and left over veggies such as broccoli, green beans and so on.

Easy Dinner 3: More French Stuff – Quiche Me Quick
What we’re doing here is frankly taking scrambled eggs and combining them with milk and flour as a binder and then baking it (along with some additions) in a crust. If you don’t ‘do’ crusts (and Aunt Toby is not a dab hand at crust making herself – I think this is genetic and is due to my having hot hands), there is nothing wrong with having crusts from the store in the freezer.

Put the crust in its pie plate in a 350 degree oven for ten minutes to start cooking. While it’s doing its thing, combine:

4 ounces of grated hard cheese (cheddar, Swiss, etc.)
2 tablespoons of butter melted
4 whole eggs plus 2 egg whites, beaten
One small onion, chopped
½ cup of all purpose flour
1.5 cups of milk

After 10 minutes in the oven, pull out the crust and pour in the combined ingredients and put back into the oven for 35 minutes until set. Slice and serve – ON A HOT PLATE.

And finally, totally decadent and for when you have had a supremely awful day at work:
Put plates into the oven, on top of the toaster oven or however you get your plates hot.
Beat up one whole egg and one egg white per person
Reach into your fridge and take out that jar of preserves that you got for Christmas from the visiting relatives .
Melt some butter in a large frying pan (or light olive oil – the sort that says, “for sautéing” on it) and when hot, pour in the eggs.
Do NOT stir around. Coat the entire bottom of the pan and allow to set. When it is just set (not wet on the top at all), using a scraper (the silicone ones are especially good for this), carefully nudge this out onto (you knew this was coming, right?), a HOT PLATE.
Put a big honkin’ scoop of preserves on it, fold it up.
Eat very, very slowly……

This year, as we are reminded by our favorite weather prognosticators winter has come to the entire country. So, today I’ve got something for everyone.

Aunt Toby figures that by this point, most of the people in the US have got whatever form of heat they use cranked up about as far as it can go (or, everyone has unearthed their sweaters, hats, mitties, and long johns and are wearing them 24/7). And it has been that way for a while (for those of us who have had the heat turned on since November, this is not news; for those folks in the South, we feel your pain, truly). The air inside your house is dry and your eyes and your lips might be feeling dry too. Don’t forget to do what you can to put humidity into the air (hang laundry on racks, put out pans of water on registers and wood stoves, etc. etc.). And don’t forget to drink plenty of water.

But you might find that you or other family members are developing something that we refer to here at Chez Siberia as ‘Winter Itch’. When we had all the little Siberians at home, all it took for the first outbreak was for us to turn up the furnace (and the forced air heat). After about a week the kids would start to scratch. Our younger daughter was in such distress that we had to get a special lotion Rx’d for her which frankly had a little bit of cortisone in it.

What is happening (and I realize this hovers into “no, duh” territory) is that the dry air is wicking the moisture out of the skin, which starts to flake and that causes the itching. The trick here is to do two things:

First: get as much moisture into the skin (both internally and externally) as possible.

Second: Put a barrier in between the moisture on the skin surface and the dry air.

Getting moisture into the skin and keeping it there can be as simple as doing one or more of the following:

Take fewer showers and the showers you take, don’t use really hot water and use as little soap as you can (or a moisturizing gel or something like that; in a pinch, you can always use hair conditioner). If you swear you stink like a stevedore in August, you can always just rinse off/wash off those areas (you notice that no one gets winter itch in their armpits, right?).

After showers and baths, don’t rub every last bit of moisture from your skin; just pat dry and slather on cream or lotion that has a good component of oils in it. Cocoa butter is good; any product that calls itself ‘body butter’ is good. In a pinch, believe me you can use really light olive oil. Mix a couple of teaspoons in a spray bottle with warm water, shake up and spritz all over and smooth on.

When you buy products, check the labels:

Any product that claims to help with dry skin should contain stuff that does the following:

Water — this should be the first ingredient on the list.

“Occlusive” – these are things that block the evaporation of the water. Common ingredients that perform this function are petrolatum, acetyl alcohol, lanolin, lecithin, mineral oil, paraffin, and stearic acid. Popular silicones that act as occlusives are dimethicone and cyclomethicone. I am not particularly fond of petrolatum, mineral oil and paraffin – these all come from the processing of petroleum. If you want to just make lotion, use something that is liquid at room temperature such as a nut or fruit oil.

“Humectant” – these are things that attract moisture from within and without and are usually combined with the ‘occlusive’. The most popular humectant is glycerin.

Now, almost everyone has a tube, tub or bottle of some sort of lotion or cream at home that when they get dry skin they can smooth on. When you have winter itch, however, these do not necessarily have enough of one of those items listed above to really produce the effect you need. Most of the time, the issue is that the ‘occlusive’ is not thick enough or there is not enough humectant. Here are a few items that people many times have at home that can improve the result:

Vitamin E and lecithin capsules: If you are taking either of these, just take one, take a needle and poke a hole in one end of it ad squeeze it into your hand. Put a glob of cream on top of that and a little bit more water and rub your hands together. Smooth that over the effected area.

Let’s say that you want to make your own and don’t want to deal with chemicals. Well, hike yourself to the local drug store and look for a small bottle of glycerin and a small bottle of liquid Vit. E. Or, if they don’t have that, ask for Vit. E capsules. If you want to get fancy, ask for Lecithin capsules too. Put a drop of glycerin (teeny) in your hand, the Vit. E and/or lecithin and as much water as you can hold in the palm of your hand and rub your hands together. If you want to make up a bottle, fill a bottle that can hold up to three ounces of water half way with water, squeeze in the Vit. E and/or lecithin and fill the rest of the way with glycerin. Close, shake up and use. This will be like oil/vinegar dressing — you’ll have to shake it up every time you use it.

If you really want to go all the way, check out your grocery store in the international foods section for rosewater or orange flower water (this is used in Greek and Eastern European cooking). You can use this instead of the water in the bottle (or substitute as much as you want for the water, up to 100 percent, though they really have a very strong fragrance so you might want to go 50/50 with water) along with the glycerin, etc. and you will have produced a very traditional hand lotion that has a lovely fragrance. You may find that you need more Vit. E. as an occlusive, but this is the basic stuff.

Let’s say you want something with more ’staying power’ – then you will want to make a cream rather than a lotion, which means that you will want to use something as an ‘occlusive’ that is at least semi-solid at room temperatures, such as cocoa butter, coconut oil or beeswax. If you can find a beekeeper source, you can ask for beeswax cappings that still have honey in them. Honey has the added benefit in moisurizers that it is hygroscopic, so it fulfills the humectant role and the wax is the occlusive so you have natural products there. Depending on the type of beeswax you can get, the honey will have a different fragrance, so you will be getting something that will add fragrance to the hand lotion or cream you make. If you use beeswax, you will have to warm it up in order to mix it together with your other ingredients. Do this in a double boiler (beeswax melts at about 140 degrees F – it actually has quite a high flashpoint but I would take the melting process seriously and not turn on the stove and leave it there).

A basic formula for this would be:
1/4 cup beeswax
1 cup of oil (you can just use one oil, such as almond oil, a very light olive oil, coconut oil)
1/4 cup of water (or rosewater or orange flower water)

Put in the beeswax and melt first and then add the oil and stir together. Last, add the water or rosewater or orange flower water and stir together and pour out into whatever glass or ceramic container you are going to store this in (an empty small jar with a screw on lid is a good choice). The mixture will harden up and then you can use it when you need it.

So, now you have products to use on the dry skin. You can get an improved result with the following: Just before retiring for the evening, take a light warm shower and pat dry. Smooth on as much cream or lotion as you can and put on something to wear in bed. This will hold the moisturizer next to your skin for a longer period and it won’t rub off on the sheets. If you have cracked hands or feet, do the same thing and put on socks.
( Dry earth photo courtesy of Martin Knaapen)

Housekeeping:
Horseradish: Armoracia rusticana, is a member of the cabbage family, along with mustard and wasabi. It’s perennial to Zone 2 and is grown for it’s roots, which contain sinigrin, which, when the root is damaged, gets broken down in about 3 minutes to allyl isothiocyanate (mustard oil). This substance remains as long as the grated up roots are put into vinegar.

Cultivation: This plant has been cultivated for its roots for thousands of years, is mentioned in ancient writings, but for medicinal purposes (which I suspect center around ‘clearing out the sinuses’ more than anything else). It’s use as a condiment is very popular in eastern European and traditional Eastern European Jewish cooking, where it is referred to as ‘chrain’ and comes in two ‘flavors’: Red (which is a combination of beets, horseradish and vinegar) and White (plain horseradish and vinegar). Red is theoretically milder, but you can’t tell by me.

Horseradish How-to:
The easiest thing to do is to get a fresh root from the produce section or a local farmer, wash it up, cut it up into chunks, quickly wrap in plastic wrap and then double bag in a ziplock™ bag and put into the freezer. Then, take out a chunk and prepare horseradish sauce whenever you want it. This is not like pickles. I could not find a single recipe for how to can this. Since it is easy enough to make (other than the total sinus and tear duct cleaning out part), using the frozen pieces as you go seems like a good idea. Here is how:

First – do this outside if you can. I did this out in our green house with two windows open and I still got hit in the sinuses, so at the very least, cross ventilation is a must. My father used to tell me that his grandmother used to make this by putting the grater and the bowl out on the fire escape, having him lower the window on top of her arms and stuff towels in the space around them while she grated.

Second – take your roots and wash them well, scrub with a veggie brush if necessary. At this point, they are still not pungent – I’m not sure why. Perhaps the sinigrin is not at the outer surface levels.

Grate the roots as finely as you can. I used a food processor and even that was not fine enough. Something that will really produce mush is what you want to use.

For every cup of grated up horseradish roots, add:
3 Tablespoons white vinegar
2 teaspoons of water
1.5 teaspoons of sugar or honey

I gave my son a taste of this and he coughed for a good five minutes, so I think I got the proportions right. Store in a closed container in the fridge and use as soon as you can on meats the same way you would mustard. Gifilte fish and other totally bland cooked fishes are a natural for this. Here’s a sauce to use on fish for baking:

2 Tablespoons of mayonnaise
1 teaspoon of prepared horseradish
Spread on fish just before you bake it. Done.

More on horseradish here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseradish

Sources for horseradish roots: Many web-based garden seed and plant growers offer potatoes, garlic AND horseradish. The roots are easy to grow, but are pretty invasive so dig a little plot away from the rest of the garden and make sure there is plenty of room and compost in the hole. Plant the roots several feet down. Harvest the roots when the frost kills the leaves in the fall. Separate out the smallest roots and replant those at harvest time.

We love black beans at Chez Siberia because…they taste great all by themselves but you can dress them up with all sorts of spices and then they taste..greater. Your dear Aunty was introduced to them by the DH because part of his family hales from Central America, where the black bean has a focal point in the cuisine. All dried beans can, with the addition of a whole grain, become ‘complete protein’ and with a little bit of clever nutritional legerdemain, black beans can be everything from soup to nuts. We always have at least a half dozen cans of black beans on the shelf because they can be turned into good, cheap stick to your ribs hearty meals – fast, fast, fast.

Basic Black Bean Stuff – can be used all by themselves as a side dish, fillings for tortillas, dips, etc.
One can of canned black beans, rinsed
Olive oil
2 big cloves of garlic, chopped fine.
1 onion small fist size, diced fine.
Chile powder – start with a teaspoon and work up from there if you like things spicy

In a big frying pan, put in a couple of table spoons of oil and put on a low light with the chopped onions and garlic. Cover and stir, cooking until soft.

Add rinsed black beans, stir around and put back on the lid.
If what you want is a side dish, stop here.

If you want a dip, at this point:
Take a potato masher, large fork and some muscle and start to mash them in the pan.
Add water (1/3 to ½ cup should do the trick for one can) and keep mashing until you get the consistency you want. If you want to up the protein (and yes, it also ups the fat too, but), add up to a ½ cup of grated sharp cheese and stir until it’s melted.

If you want filling for tortillas:
Mash up half the beans, add a little water and stir in the rest of the beans.
You might want to add more chili powder and perhaps some chilantro
Fill tortillas with the bean filling, grated cheese (we like cheddar), sautéed onions and peppers.

If you want to do enchiladas:
Do filling for tortillas, line up in a baking dish. Cover with:
Enchilada sauce (commercial or make your own here Easy Enchilada Sauce) or
1 large can of crushed tomatoes either by itself or combined with any or all of the a couple of teaspoons of the following: chili powder, cumin, chilantro, oregano.

Sprinkle more grated cheese on the top and back for 30 min. at 375 degrees.

And here’s the surprise:
Believe it or not, black beans can be used in desserts too. When I was thinking about this, I remembered having Japanese sweets made with what they called ‘red bean paste’ and wondered if black beans had been used for desserts. I have not tried this but the reviewer said it was awesome. Not that I am of the ‘add dried protein to all the sweets to rationalize eating them’ group (actually Aunt Toby’s mom, The Grandma, used to do this and was the queen of adding things like dried milk and soy flour to baked goods. The whole ‘Cornell Bread Book’ movement is based on the position that there are certain people on this earth who are going to eat nothing but baked goods no matter what you do, so you might as well make sure that there is some protein in it. The only problem with this position is this: there is a certain point where the ‘beany-ness’ takes over, so a light hand is advised), but making something that carries the additional benefits of higher fiber, high protein, vitamins, minerals, and anti-inflammatory chemicals is, as Martha Whatshername says, ‘a good thing’.

Amazing Black Bean Brownies (courtesy of Black Bean Brownies)

(this is Aunt Toby here – Before you get started with this, take a look at this recipe – there is NO flour of any sort in this. They are depending on three things to hold this stuff together: cooked black beans, a granulated coffee substitute or dried instant coffee and chopped up walnuts, bound together with eggs. If you don’t have or don’t want to use coffee or coffee substitute, you will need another dried substance to take up the slack here – it’s only ¼ cup so you could use anything from various flours, bran, etc. The other thing is that if you don’t have/want to use nectar or honey, you have a liquid issue. You can use a dry substance such as sugar to sweeten with, but you will need to put liquid back in. I’ll experiment and report back)

4 ounces unsweetened chocolate
1 cup unsalted butter
2 cups soft-cooked black beans, drained well (reviewers note: canned is fine – I’d rinse them well)
1 cup walnuts, chopped
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
¼ cup (granulated) natural coffee substitute (or dried instant coffee, for gluten sensitive)
¼ teaspoon sea salt
4 large eggs
1½ cups light agave nectar – you can substitute honey 1 for 1 with this. If you choose honey, use something like clover which basically doesn’t have a strong flavor.
Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line an 11- by 18-inch (rimmed) baking pan (hs note: or jellyroll pan) with parchment paper and lightly oil with canola oil spray.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a glass bowl in the microwave for 1 1/2 to 2 minutes on high. Stir with a spoon to melt the chocolate completely. Place the beans, 1/2 cup of the walnuts, the vanilla extract, and a couple of spoonfuls of the melted chocolate mixture into the bowl of a food processor. Blend about 2 minutes, or until smooth. The batter should be thick and the beans smooth. Set aside.

In a large bowl, mix together the remaining 1/2 cup walnuts, remaining melted chocolate mixture, coffee substitute, and salt. Mix well and set aside.

In a separate bowl, with an electric mixer beat the eggs until light and creamy, about 1 minute. Add the agave nectar and beat well. Set aside.

Add the bean/chocolate mixture to the coffee/chocolate mixture. Stir until blended well.

Add the egg mixture, reserving about 1/2 cup. Mix well. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Using an electric mixer, beat the remaining 1/2 cup egg mixture until light and fluffy. Drizzle over the brownie batter. Use a wooden toothpick to pull the egg mixture through the batter, creating a marbled effect. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until the brownies are set. Let cool in the pan completely before cutting into squares. (They will be soft until refrigerated.)
Makes 45 (2-inch) brownies.