I was not the only winner. The lovely Jennifer (I’m not sure of her permission on names, so for the moment, she’s just Jenn) of New York City also won and to be truthful, this class was really for someone like her (kitchen filled with equipment she didn’t know how to use; fridge filled with take out containers) rather than me (though one of these days I will get a class on soups and pie crusts, two things that Aunt Toby avoids like the Plague because I am truly not very good with either one), but I’ll take any day trip down to New York that involves good food.

Jennifer and I converged on Jyl’s new digs (she just moved from her large loft apartment to a much smaller place). The kitchen area was pretty typical ‘New York City Apartment’ sized, which means that it was, in total, about 8 feet wide by about 4 feet deep, just enough room for an L of kitchen counter with cabinets, a fridge, sink and a four-burner stove. More than once during the afternoon, we had to do the ‘kitchen cha-cha’ with Jenn and I rhumba-ing between the stove and the sink, with Jyl giving running instructions and commentary from just outside in the open livingroom/dining area. But all in all, we left with our heads full of ideas, new-found confidence on Jennifer’s part in terms of working with knives, ground meat, and entertaining (both of us – for all Aunt Toby loves to cook – I am also the person who immediately embraced taking my kids and their friends to bowling for birthday parties. Having people in my house gives me ‘entertainment performance anxiety’).

I will get into more details in future posts, but here is what we learned and came away with:
Flavored Simple Syrups – which we used in what I’d call ‘personal soft drinks’ – we used already made coffee and a raspberry tea concentrate as the ‘water’ in the simple syrup. But, you can also use the flavored syrups as part of personal cocktails with vodka as well. I have to tell you that the coffee one, even with just seltzer, was absolutely fabulous – sophisticated, refreshing.

Hummus – which we have discussed before here. Jyl reminded us (and it’s a fabulous idea to remember), that hummus can be made out of any processed dried bean, so if you want to use black, navy, pinto, kidney, etc. instead of chick peas, then go for it!)

Pesto – which we substituted hulled sunflower seeds for the pine nuts since Jyl’s neighborhood store did not have them that day.

Bruschetta – Given what time of the year this is, I think this is something – because it is so easy – that anyone can whip up as a ‘before dinner appetizer’.

In the oven toasts – using day old Italian or French bread, sprinkles of extra virgin olive oil and freshly grated Romano cheese. These can be eaten by themselves, or used for the pesto or the Brusschetta or the hummus. Certainly a better tasting and healthier choice than a ‘bag-o-chips’.

From Scratch Meatballs and Spaghetti with Sauce. This is heaven on a plate and Jyl showed us a very nifty trick in terms of serving it so that you do not get that icky ‘ooo, look, the sauce is getting all watery and separating’ thing on the plate.

Strawberry ‘shortcakes’ with sweetened whipped cream. This is a definite ‘fast and easy/support your local bakery’ sort of dessert where all you do is wash and slice up the strawberries and ‘marinate’ them a little bit in lemon juice and a little sugar, whip up some heavy cream with a little bit of vanilla and sugar and serve over slices of the best pound cake you can find.

In addition, and this was definitely great for the anxious (ahem, ME) entertainer, we also did a very fast run through on table settings (yes, I WILL treat myself to some ‘charger plates’ – they really did seem to upgrade everything terrifically), more colorful napkins (or perhaps I’ll get some fabric and make my own – this has to be the easiest sewing project..but sewing up hems on 8, 10 or 12 squares might get into the ‘mindless’ at some point. Probably better to have this as a ‘want to sew but don’t want to do anything hard’ project). And we did some ‘deconstruction/recycling/re-imagining’ of a flower arrangement that had, as we say here at Chez Siberia, gotten a little ‘tired’.

Lessons learned:
Planning is everything. It really is worth taking the time a couple of days ahead if you are entertaining, to think through what you want to make, the order you need to have things (the simple syrups actually needed to be made first since it starts with boiling liquid and sugar and needs to be thoroughly chilled when you want to make the drinks just before dinner). Even planning down to the what plates or utensils you will need and digging them out (always one of my anxiety points since I tend to keep things that we don’t use often in boxes in the basement).

Simpler is better. I haven’t thought of serving spaghetti and meatballs as an entertainment option ever. But Jyl is right – it’s one of those dishes that a) everyone likes, no matter what their age and b) even if you can get it in a restaurant, everything has been made way in advance and has to be reheated. It usually never even hits the tick on ‘good’ range. Making the sauce and meatballs from scratch and getting fresh pasta raises this combo to the almost ambrosia stage. Better a dish people already come to the table liking and present them a version that they will close their eyes while chewing than a fancy dish you’ve never made before that they will poke around on the plate.

Put your time and best efforts with stuff you can and like to do. If you are not a baker, find a bakery that does a really really good job.

We made everything that day with the following tools. No other gadgets or little fiddly stuff necessary:
Cutting board and good sharp knives
One stock pot for the sauce
One large frying pan to brown the meatballs
Smaller pot for the simple syrup
Small electric hand mixer for the whipped cream
Food processor
Cookie sheet to make the toast
Bowls

That is it – all you need.

Take it away, Jyl Ferris!!

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.

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.

Turkey raisers and processors made the decision to turn all that meat into – well, into everything. Remember the joke with the punch line, “Tastes like chicken”? Well, turkey has been turned into everything – sausages, processed luncheon meats approximating everything from pastrami to ham, hot dogs, fillings for tacos, soups and meatloaf. You name it, with the addition of spices and goodness only knows what else, turkey can be sliced, diced, ground, shredded, and liquefied into anything under the sun. Our own little “Soylent Green”.

What happened to lamb? Well, even on it’s best day, worldwide (and despite everything the Australians and New Zealanders do), lamb only captures about 6% of the meat consumption. The vast majority of it is consumed in the Middle East. In the United States, lamb is not a huge seller but is most popular at the coasts. meat statistics

It was not always that way.

Statistics show that in 1940, although lamb certainly was not number one, a lot more of it was being consumed than today. And looking at what American’s consumers ate a lot more of, the answer is simple: beef. Meat Consumption

Consumption in millions of pounds
Year……..Beef……….Lamb
1940…….7,257……..873
1960…….15,465…….857
1980…….23,560…….351
2000…….27,338……..354
2004…….27,750……..273

Why beef? Well, beef was always ‘the expensive meat’ for Americans. After the Second World War, with families becoming more affluent, they turned to the aspirational meat, beef. Why is beyond me; lamb has a lot to recommend it, not only from the taste aspect but also from the ecological aspect (sheep are not as hard on grasslands as beef are and you can raise far more sheep on the same area than you can beef) and nutritionally. Four ounces of meat, roasted:

Item…………..Lamb……………Beef
Calories……….229……………..240
Protein………..30 gr……………32 gr.
fat total………11 gr……………11.5 gr.
Mono fat………4.5 gr…………..4.3 gr.
Poly fat………. 1 gr……………. .43 gr
Niacin…………..7.75 mg………..4.4 mg
Biotin…………..2.3 mcg………….0
folate…………..28.35 mcg……….8 mcg
pantothenic acid….77 mg…………4 mg
calcium…………..19 mg……………8 mg
Omega 3…………. .2 g…………… .04 g

Lamb is also a great source of minerals (as if beef by the way) especially selenium (source: whfoods.org)

If you look at old cookbooks of the period, lamb was viewed as the Sunday dinner and people ate it a lot..not just at Easter or Passover. When we used to raise lamb at Chez Siberia, we had customers and we used to do a bit of marketing by giving out free samples. But we couldn’t give away lamb that was not already cooked to people who did not eat lamb. It was a waste of time and meat – they would invariably come back with statements such as “I knew I wouldn’t like it; I remember that awful smell from my grandmother’s house.” Or, “It tasted like shoes – I’d never eat it.”

We didn’t have ‘that awful smell”. We didn’t have meat that had the texture of shoes. This is when it hit me – there were sense memories that we could not change and people lacked cooking knowledge.

Since then, the whole locovore/grass-fed/pasture raised meats movement has grown tremendously but you still have people who will complain about lamb because they don’t know how to cook it. It’s the same old problem of ‘crank up the barbeque and throw a piece of meat on it and when it looks burned enough, put it on a plate and be surprised that it tastes awful and is as chewy as an old boot.’ But on the other hand, this is the same problem with all grass-raised/pasture-raised meat because people do not understand the differences between cooking meat with high Omega 6 fatty acids and meats with higher Omega 3. The higher the Omega 6 content (such as in grain fed animals), the higher temperature can be used to cook the meat – Omega 6 fatty acids can handle higher cooking temperatures to break down and liquefy. Omega 3 fatty acids cannot – so the trick with grass-fed/pasture-raised meats is to lower the temperature in the oven and cook the meat longer. Even under the usual growing conditions, lamb has higher Omega3 than beef does – under grass-raising conditions, that ratio gets even higher. No wonder what people remember about that leg of lamb from Grandma’s Sunday dinner is the smell of the Omega 3’s being broken down by the high cooking temperatures.

The DH and I went to a workshop run by Shannon Hayes, The Grassfed Gourmet herself. Grassfed Cooking

It was truly mind-boggling what she could do with a Weber ™ grill and a temperature probe, even with the toughest, chewiest cuts of meat such as brisket. We’ve become converts to the use of this little piece of equipment, even indoors in the oven and I have to say that we have never had a bad piece of meat since. Here are two great ways to cook lamb, one a regional specialty, and one for that Sunday roast.

Roast Lamb (using a boneless leg)
If the lamb is frozen, take it out and defrost it.

Mix together 2-3 tsps. Of rosemary and thyme, and finely chopped garlic (2-3 cloves will do).

Rub this all over the outside of the leg of lamb and let rest at room temperature.

Preheat oven to 500 degrees F (take a deep breath…)

Place the lamb into a roasting pan, set it in the oven and IMMEDIATELY LOWER THE HEAT TO 250. (There, I told you).

Continue roasting until a thermometer reads 120 degrees for rare, 130 for medium (don’t eat well-done lamb – just…don’t).

Cooking times will vary but allow at least 2.5 hours at 250 degrees for a medium-rate 5.5 pound leg.

Remove the lamb from the oven, cover loosely with foil and let rest for at least 15 minutes before serving – the lamb will continue to cook while it is resting.

Slice and enjoy

Do NOT serve this with mint jelly. Better accompaniments include: homemade cranberry sauce, unsweetened apple sauce, baked apples with a little bit of cinnamon and so on.

If you are a wine drinker, please feel free to serve what you like best with this. Yes, I know lamb is a red meat, but at Chez Siberia, we break that ‘red meat=red wine’ thing all the time. Lamb has a rich enough taste on its own – a good dry Riesling will hold its own.

Spiedies
Spiedies are to the Southern Tier of New York what Buffalo Chicken Wings are to the Anchor Bar in Buffalo. As native Binghamtonians (Binghamtonians?) have achieved refugee status and moved elsewhere, they have taken this beloved local fast food to other parts of the country. Last week, it was even covered on HuffPo. Meathead discovers Spiedies

Start the cutting up and marinating process a couple of days before your event.

To make sandwiches out of these, you’ll need loaves of good quality (not mushy) Italian bread
5 to 7 pounds lamb, cut up into large cubes (about 1.5 x 1.5 inches)
1 head garlic, coarsely chopped

Spices – here are a couple of common combinations:
1 bunch fresh parsley, coarsely chopped (2-3 cups)
2-3 cups fresh basil, coarsely chopped

or
A large bunch of mint, coarsely chopped
or
1 cup of fresh oregano coarsely chopped

Plus:

4-6 tablespoons coarse ground black pepper (add more pepper or red pepper if you like things hot)

Mix cut up meat, garlic and spices in a huge bowl (you may need more than one bowl or big plastic tub with a lid. Then add

1 bottle red wine (approximately 3 cups) and an equal amount olive oil

Marinate 48 to 72 hours, put on skewers and grill until done – don’t allow to burn.
How to make a spiedi sandwich:
Hold a piece of Italian bread in one hand and lay the end of the skewer with meat on it in the center of the bread. Grip the meat with the bread and pull the skewer out.
Instant sandwich. Eat it quick before someone else spots it and snatches it away.
Yum.
Other uses for spiedies: You can make spiedies out of lamb, pork, beef, or venison. You can use this grilled meat alone, cold, warm, in salads, or as filling in anything you can wrap around it.

Well, Aunt Toby realized that she missed out on an entire section of stuff that gets sold at farmers markets (and increasingly gets sold, I might add), which is meat.

Honest to gosh, shrink wrapped (though usually not on a slab of Styrofoam, in my experience), frozen, labeled with weights on ‘em, meat. And many times, they are labeled with words such as ‘free range’, ‘pasture raised’, ‘grass fed’ and so on. This is to differentiate them from what’s in your butcher or supermarché, which generally is ‘conventionally raised meat’ which means “grain raised”.

And when you see ‘grain raised’, the little voice of reason in your head should be saying, “and that means, ‘corn fed’.”

Not that ranchers and feedlot operators do not feed animals other grains to ‘finish’ off the animals that they are raising for slaughter (and when they say ‘finish’ what they are talking about is NOT ‘finishing the process of growing’ although that is what is happening; they mean ‘putting a finish on and into the meat’ and by that, they mean – fattening the animal up). Most feed rations out there have a combination of grains in them: wheat, corn, rapeseed, alfalfa, etc. Feed Ingredients

But the king of feed grains, due to its price and due to what it does to animals that eat it, is corn. Corn is King.

When the DH and I were raising chickens, lambs and goats for market, we especially used corn in the ration we fed in the winter time because of what was referred to as ‘heat’ – if it was especially cold, a little corn in the ration would keep the animals warmer. Why? Because corn has fat in it that animals can use to keep themselves warm in really cold weather. But in conventionally raised animals, corn feeding causes the muscles (the meat) to contain a relatively higher ratio of one sort of fatty acid than of others. That fatty acid is: Omega 6.

Now, Aunt Toby is not going to get into a discussion about ‘good fat’ and ‘bad fat’ or this Omega vs. that Omega. The human body requires a little bit of all of them; it is the balance that causes all the mischief.
Omega-3 Fatty Acid
Omega-6 Fatty Acid

What I AM going to talk about (because Aunt Toby is all about the pragmatic aspects) is some basic facts about ‘grass-fed’ vs conventionally-raised meats and should you choose to buy them, what you can do to get the best out of the meat.

Because if you try to cook pasture raised meats the same way you cook conventionally-raised meats, your garbage can is going to be very very happy and you will be going back to your farmer and saying, “I want my money back; this tasted like my shoes”.

First things first: Nutritionally, what are the differences between grass raised/pasture raised meats and conventionally raised meats?
1) No matter how you measure it, pasture raised meats have much less overall fat than conventionally raised (grain fed) meat.
2) No matter how you measure it, pasture raised meats have a much smaller % of Omega 6 fatty acids in them than grain fed meat.
3) Grass fed meats have vitamins that conventionally raised meats lack or have much less of. Health Benefits of Grass-Raised meats

From a cooking and “putting on the plate” aspect, what do the first two items mean for consumers?

In meat (whether beef, pork, chicken, turkeys, lamb, etc.), it is fat that carries the flavor of the meat. Let’s not fool ourselves in this – for all the push by the health community toward low fat meats, we’ve ended up with some meats and some cuts of meats that frankly taste like paper towels because they have so little fat in them. At the same time, the lower the percentage of fat in the meat, the more time and care must be taken by consumers to cook it so that it will taste good, feel good in your mouth, cut well and so on. And unfortunately, consumers still think that they can throw a piece of meat or a quarter of a chicken on a grill or into an oven with a high temperature and get something memorable.

Well, it’s memorable all right but it’s not a memory that they want.

Secondly, by any measure, the higher the Omega 6 fatty acids in meat, the higher the temperature can be in the oven or on the grill. I am not an organic chemist, but the difference in cooking conventionally raised chicken and pasture raised could not be more dramatic. With conventional, I can put a piece of chicken in my oven set anywhere between 375 degrees F and 400 degrees F. The fat starts to liquefy very quickly – I can move that piece of chicken from a raw state to the plate in 30-45 min. (depending on whether or not this is boneless chicken or bone-in). Because there is so much fat in the bird, both inside the muscle and on top of the muscle and under the skin, I not only can quickly cook this bird (and get that crispy skin that will cause us all to end up with cancer, right?), but I’m internally basting the muscles with the liquefied fat that is being drawn off the bird by the high heat. The chicken itself does not have a whole lot of flavor to it – a large part of that is the breed (Cornish-Rock crosses which are bred to be the ‘beanstalk’ chickens of the battery world – these go from chick to Styrofoam in 6-8 weeks. They literally have not had time for the muscles to mature enough to gain any flavor) – but the other part of it is that the high heat is moving the flavor-carrying item, the fat, off the muscles much too quickly. At the same time, however, consumers will end up with meat that is cooked and relatively moist.

With pasture raised chicken and turkey, I have to be much more careful. I have to use my meat thermometer a lot because I am looking for a very specific temperature. I have to give myself several hours to cook the bird because I’m starting it at 325 and moving it to 350. No more. It seems to take a very long time, relatively speaking, for the fat to start coming out (and dressed pasture raised birds do not have nearly the same amount of visible fat – unlike conventionally raised birds, I am definitely not taking out great handfuls of fat from the internal cavities and so on). Pasture raised meats cannot be cooked under high heat conditions – because of the low percentage of fat and because of the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids in the meat, if I try to cook them the same way I can cook conventionally raised meats, I will end up with something resembling shoes. Anyone who has cooked game or wild meats will have the same experience. LOW and SLOW. Pasture raised meats are not something you can leave out on the counter when you leave for work, throw into a hot oven when you get home, and hope to have an edible meal on the table in 45 min. That is a given.

So, if you as a consumer would like to move your family to pasture raised meats (and there are all sorts of good, honest, health and local economic reasons for doing so), my advice to you is this:

1) Get big honkin’ cuts of pasture raised meats: roasts, a turkey, a big roasting chicken.
2) Use your weekends to slowly and tenderly cook this item so that you can have a lovely weekend dinner (hoo-wee – remember those?).
3) Then either slice it up and package for the freezer to be used later on or use it over the week for sandwiches, sliced with gravy for dinners, etc. etc. You will have lovely, flavorful, cooked meat which you as a time-stressed consumer can use as you need it. You won’t have to fire up the oven or grill under stressed conditions.

At the same time, I know there are some readers who are saying to themselves, “But Aunt Toby – pasture raised meats are soooo much more expensive than conventionally raised.”

Yep – Aunt Toby is not going to lie to you – the price per pound is going to be more. But the question comes down to this (and Aunt Toby has discussed this before in terms of price per pound of protein): when you buy meat, what are you buying? What should you be buying?

You buy meat for – protein. That’s what you want to get out of this relationship – not fat and certainly not the type of fat that appears to cause cardio vascular disease and inflammatory syndromes. I’m not saying the pasture raised meats are not expensive – they cost a lot more per pound than conventional ones do – but I am fairly sure that considering what consumers get out of eating them in terms of health benefits, in terms of not paying for fat that gets cooked off, in terms of greater flavor, that they just might be worth it. This is of course totally ignoring the locally grown aspects and the facts that you can, nose to nose, ask the producer exactly what has been given to the animals, how they were treated, and so on. That is ‘feel good’ stuff and is very difficult to quantify – but worth considering in any case.

So, remember, low and slow. We learned this at a wonderful ‘grass fed grilling’ workshop that was arranged by our county Cooperative Extension in support of local grass fed meat producers. If you want one, call and ask your Cooperative Extension or suggest it to the manager of your local farmers market. It will really open your eyes to how meat should taste and feel.

For more information on grass fed meats and how to cook them:

Grass Fed Cooking
Texas Grass Fed Beef
Grass Fed Cooking Tips

(Grass fed roast chicken at the top, courtesy of my son, who followed the directions and produced a really delicious bird, along with roasted carrots, potatoes, and onions. If he can do it, so can you)

No, that photo at the top is NOT Aunt Toby’s freezer, though there are moments when I gaze into mine and have the same feeling like I’m going to be climbing into it, not knowing what the hell I’m going to find. Do you have that feeling too?

Even when you stock up, and even if you know one week later that you bought chicken on sale, cut it up, packaged it and put it into the freezer, would you know how much you really have and when you put it in there. How about a month later? How about 3 months later?

Are your eyeballs glazing over (and not from the cold air, either – you can shut the door to the freezer now..)?

Aunt Toby is as guilty of ‘lack of inventory management’ as the next person, perhaps more so since I have this really deep seated belief in socking stuff away for the winter. So, I have more stuff there that I can’t identify, which makes me very grouchy indeed. And I’m going to cure that one RIGHT NOW.

One of the things that defeats people with freezer management is that a lot of us have advanced cases of ‘I know I’ve got xxx in there someplace, but I don’t know where’. So, when we want to find that, we are faced with basically emptying out the freezer until we come to a package that sort of looks like what we think ground meat or ham hocks or whatever it is should look like. At the same time, we all tend to pick from the section closest to us and if we come up a winner, well, if there is the same thing at the back of the freezer (or the bottom, depending on whether you have an upright or a chest), we are not going to find it. And eventually, guilt or a major family dinner or extra people arriving or whatever causes us to eviscerate the freezer to find the rest and…dang, freezer burned meat (or veggies or fruit or whatever)…again. And you throw that away because freezer burned meat just is very unappetizing (Aunt Toby actually advocates trimming off the freezer burned stuff and cooking it anyway, especially if you can do chicken cacciatore or stew or something like that; sauce hides all sins).

So, here is what Aunt Toby is going to do: Using my fairly dormant (but pretty well developed at one point) skills at taking inventory, I’m going need a couple of things for this:

1) Containers – I figure whatever foam or other coolers, wash baskets, heavy cardboard boxes, etc that I can find and I’m going to label them: beef, chicken, fish/shellfish, veggies, fruit, prepared meals(because I’ve got a whole whackload of chili in that freezer..I know that because I see it every time I open the door. Do I take any out? Nyet.)
2) Indelible markers
3) Heavy Duty Freezer bags
4) Grocery Plastic bags (or plastic tubs or whatever storage I can find easily)
5) Garbage can
6) Pail of hot water with a little bit of soap in it, a sponge and paper towels
7) A helper (if you don’t have a live in helper, find a friend and offer to do this for them too)
Inventory Sheets that look something like this:
Location/Shelf……..Item……Weight……Date Purchased……………..Took out

Right now, I have no clue as to when anything got purchased, but when I get new things, I can put that in. Also, for things that I took out of a bigger package, and broke down into smaller packages, how do I know how much is there? Well, I always repackage into meal-sized chunks, so I know that I’d be looking at a pound of meat anyway. If you can estimate by feel, then you should heft the packages and mark them accordingly. If not, find or borrow a scale.

So, here we go – I’ve got my boxes arranged around me and I reach in and the helper and I start pulling things out , undoing the wrapper if we have to take a peek and putting them into the boxes: chicken goes here; beef goes there, the chili and chicken soup and enchiladas go into the box marked ‘prepared meals’. Anything that is a disaster goes into the garbage. Anything like a bag of veggies that looks like it could use a new bag gets it.

Once the freezer is empty (and I’m not going to defrost this thing, ok; I accept that I am going to waste some energy here with this), the helper wipes out the freezer and dries it out with paper towels. While he or she is doing that, I am labeling all the packages with what it is and that day’s date and I’m putting everything that is the same item into one of the many grocery store plastic bags I’ve got. Now, my freezer is an upright, but I have some baskets in it. Chest freezers usually come with baskets. If you have baskets, put some sort of label on them because people do pull baskets out to rummage around in them and move things around before they put them back. Once you’ve put on your inventory sheet that the chicken is in basket 1, then as long as you always know which basket is number 1, then you are good to go.

So, now I have all of my stuff labeled, categorized and all lumped together. Someone now packs the stuff back into the freezer and shouts out the number of packages in the basket, plastic bag, tub or whatever you are using, and the location you are putting it in. Such as: “Chicken, 10 meals, shelf one” or “ground beef, 5 servings, basket 1”. And the helper marks that down on the list and you go through everything until you have everything packed back into the freezer.

THEN, what I’m going to do with this information is this:
1) I’m actually going to look at it. What have I got? What don’t I have? Between now and when harvest season starts, what do I have to clean up and make into meals? If I have a bunch of something there that I just don’t eat very often, I have to write myself a reminder – Don’t get that again – that is a waste.
2) I’m going to set this up with another set of columns on the right and keep a running inventory so that as I take something out, I’ll know when I get to the last two pieces or whatever and can put things on the shopping list.
3) I’m going to get a lot more creative with my cooking because dayam…I’ve got some very interesting stuff in my freezer that I need to move out of there.

Freezers are a great tool for food storage, but they really needs to be managed – and the best way I know of to manage them is to treat them the same way that the frozen food department managements in grocery stores do – rotate the stock, pull the old stuff to the front, move it out.
Photo at the top is courtesy of Aleksi Aaltonen
This post can also be found at Firedoglake

And you are really quite fed up with it sitting there and are about to unceremoniously throw the poor thing into the garbage, scraping out the roasting pan and letting it be done at that.

“Step away from the roaster, Sir (or Ma’am) and no one will get hurt.”

Now is the time to show some restraint and respect for the poor bird who “gave it up” for your family yesterday. We’re going to turn it into soup today! You will need: the turkey carcass and hopefully the pan that you cooked it in with all the lovely stuff still in it, plus a little salt or a can of chicken or turkey broth.

Take a big pan – like a Dutch Oven – and scrape what was in the roasting pan (veggies, jellied liquid and all) into the Dutch Oven.

Break up the carcass into pieces that will fit into the Dutch Oven and put enough water in the Dutch Oven to just about cover the pieces of the carcass. (Disclaimer, because I know someone out there will remind me about this: If your muni water system adds chemicals like fluoride, chlorine, etc. or if your tap water has “smells,” then you are going to want to use another source for your water, like spring water)

If you want to put more aromatic veggies in there like onions, garlic, and celery, chop them up and add them now.

Cover and bring to a boil and turn down the heat to simmer for a couple of hours. Then, pull out the bones and pull off any meat that has not fallen off.

NOW you can throw out the carcass.

Strain the liquid through a sieve into a bowl or another pot and put the sieve aside. Now, we need to chill the liquid and get off the extra fat. You can do this by putting it into your fridge, or, if you lack room and it’s winter time, cover the pot tightly and put it outside on the porch, deck or whatever in a secure place. This is your stock.

In the meantime, go through what you separated out and take out the meat. Frankly, at this point, the veggies have given up their best flavor to the stock and you can either do what you normally do with vegetable peels, or put them on the compost heap. Chop up the meat into a smallish dice.

Once the stock has chilled enough, uncover it. The fat will have risen to the top and made a cake, which you can break up into chunks and take out. If you like to use fat with flavor in it to cook other things, then you can wash these pieces off and store in a container in your refrigerator and use it as you wish. In Eastern European Jewish cooking, this stuff would be called Schmalz (that’s sort of an umbrella term and also includes goose fat and chicken fat). There will always be a little bit of the fat still in the stock; it will have plenty of flavor, believe me.

To finish up the soup, put back the meat and new veggies that you want into the soup (more onions, carrots, celery), plus anything like barley or rice. NOW taste the soup. If it doesn’t taste as strongly as you’d like, add a little salt to it, or add a can of chicken or turkey broth. You can cook rice or barley right in the soup as it heats up; if you have already cooked grains available as left overs, then the process just goes faster.

Heat up your soup again and simmer it until the veggies and grains are tender.

Serve and enjoy; refrigerate or freeze the leftovers!

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)

Let’s take a look at chowder, that theoretically quintessential American soup.

Actually…it’s not. Chowder comes from the French word chaudiere. This is the name of a big pot that is basically used for things like stews, because if you look at the word, it contains another French word, chaud, which means hot.

If you look at the map of New England, you will notice that it snuggles up against historically French areas of Canada: the Maritimes and Quebec. The Maritimes are great fishing areas still. And, if you look in any phone book, from Castile, Maine to parts of northern Vermont you will see hundreds and hundreds of people with names like Thibodaux, Dubois, Michault et al. — the border between the US and Canada in those areas is remarkably porous and people for hundreds of years passed back and forth, or were forced out of places like Nova Scotia and moved and brought their customs, dishes and big iron pots with them. And stews and soups made out of fish and shellfish have been around for a very long time.

So what makes chowder chowder rather than just a cream-based soup?

Every New England chowder (whether it’s clam, fish, corn or whatever) starts the same exact way. It is the ultimate “clean out the fridge” sort of dish with lots of chunked up potatoes. You will want to make sure you’ve got the following things already chopped up and cooked:
A couple of big potatoes, peeled, cubed up and boiled until fork tender
Cooked (or canned) clams and/or steamed firm white fish

In general, here is the way to make clam or fish chowder:

Chop up salt pork or a couple of slices of thick bacon and fry it up, pulling out the very very tasty fat.

Fry up about a cup of chopped onions in that rendered fat.

Season with some thyme, parsley, pepper

Pour in a couple of cans of low salt chicken (or vegetable based) stock

Pour in 1-2 bottles of clam juice

Add milk or cream (1/2c to 1 c)

Thicken it up with bread crumbs or broken up crackers

Heat up until it’s steaming and then put in the clams/fish fillets which have been chunked up and let that come to temperature (a pound of fish will make a whole lot of this)

Garnish with pepper and serve.

Don’t boil it back up once you put in the fish or clams – it makes the seafood rubbery. If you happen to have some left over mashed potatoes in the fridge, you can throw those in to thicken it up as well. Basically, you’ve got a chunky thick cream-based stew.

The major difference between New England and Manhattan clam chowder is not just the use of a tomato base; there are also chopped up celery, carrots, and onions in it and no clam juice. So this is a completely different breed of cat entirely. New England clam chowder is really a creature of the fisherman and the farmer bringing together foods that were readily available right there: milk from cows, basic vegetables, pork and fish or clams.

Money saving tip: Well, on the clam side, you can use canned clams. On the fish side, that is a lot trickier. Any firm white fish will do: cod, halibut – I’ve even seen recipes that call for grouper. Frozen fish is less expensive than fresh. Tillapia can be pretty reasonable also. You can substitute mild tasting canned fish like white albacore in water for fresh or frozen fish. You can also use frozen shrimp (just make sure to clean them and cook them first if you are not buying them precooked).

Now for the Op-Ed part: I think corn chowder is a total and complete nutritional waste of time. I find it boring, bland and useless. To get any nutritional good out of it, you have to pair it with a sandwich that contains its own protein. At that point, you may as well just eat the sandwich with a glass of milk and be done with it.

If I have offended the Corn Chowder Lobby, I am sorry and I will further offend with the following suggestion: if you have to make corn chowder, take a can of any white bean (great northerns, navy, cannellini, etc.), rinse them, heat them up in a bit of olive oil, mash them up with some of the liquid part of the soup until they have the consistency of refried beans and keep adding soup liquid until they are sloppy and put that back into the soup pot. 1) They are white, 2) they will thicken up the soup and 3) they have a lot of fiber and good quality protein in them and will, in combination with the corn, give you a complete protein.

There, I’ve done my culinary duty.

And finally, here is today’s recipe. I had to clean out the fridge because the DH brought home all the uneaten shrimp from an office party and as we all know, that stuff will not keep. The photograph above is the result of that effort – Shrimp Chowder. It’s got a lot of zip from the various sorts of veggies and spices; it’s interesting looking and even the DH, who is NOT a chowder eater, liked it.

• 2-3 potatoes as big as your fist, peeled and cubed
• 2 cans reduced sodium chicken broth
• 3 stalks of celery, chopped – get rid of the bottom couple of inches
• 1 fist-sized onion, chopped
• 1/2 cup chopped sweet pepper – I used some multi-colored bells I had in the fridge
• 2 T. olive oil
• 2 T. unsalted butter, divided into two pieces
• 1 1/2 cups milk – I used 1% because that’s what we’ve got
• 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup fat-free evaporated milk
• 25 pre-cooked medium shrimp, (for uncooked, I’d go with at least a pound, peeled and deveined and cooked)
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon soy sauce
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/8 teaspoon pepper

–In a big saucepan or dutch oven, put a couple of table spoons of olive oil and 1 T. of unsalted butter and heat up. Don’t let it burn.

–Put in the chopped up onions, peppers, and celery, cover, put on low and cook, occasionally stirring for 10-15 min. Don’t let it burn.

– In a different saucepan, put the chicken broth and the potatoes and boil that up. Once the potatoes are fork tender, turn the heat off and take out half the potatoes and set aside. Add the milk to the pot with the broth and potatoes and turn off the heat.

– Once the veggies are really soft, take a potato masher and mush up half of the veggies and add the set aside potatoes and mash those up too. So, in the pot on one side, you’ll have mashed up potatoes and mashed veggies. On the other side of the pot, you’ll have cooked but unmashed veggies. Take off the heat for the moment.

– In a small saucepan, put the other tablespoon of unsalted butter and melt. Add the flour and the spices and make a roux: which means that basically you stir around the spices and flour into the melted butter and let it cook a little bit over a low heat. You will start to smell the cooking flour and spices, which is what you want – never put “raw” flour into a soup or sauce. Blech.

– Take the condensed milk and add it a little bit at a time, stirring it into the roux; keep adding it a little bit at a time until it is all done. You should have a really thick sauce; if it is not “saucy” enough (not enough liquid), start adding the broth/milk from the other pan until it is. Once it is thinned down enough (it’s still going to be thick – think cheese sauce consistency), scrape that out into the pot with the potatoes and broth/milk and put that back on the heat – medium.

Add back the veggies and mashed veggies/mashed potatoes to this and heat this until it starts to bubble. It will thicken up a LOT. Turn down the heat and add the shrimp to heat through. Don’t bring this to a boil; it will make the shrimp rubbery.

Serve with bread, a salad, and you’re good to go.

And, speaking about bread – next time, we’re going to discuss “fear of being too kneady.”

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)

Take out your wallet and take out a $10 bill. Put that bill in an envelope with your coupons or shopping list for the week and hold onto it. We’ll talk about that $10 bill a little bit later, but trust me on this one: You will want to do this every single week for a while. It WILL save you money.

The whole point of this series (which will be on-going…at least until the economy gets itself together) is to share ideas on how to nourish ourselves and our families with stuff that is a) good, b) cheap and c) good for you. There are a lot of things that are cheap and good, but from a nutrition standpoint, are not particularly good for you. The point here is to hit the Nutritional Trifecta: Good, Good for you and Gives you ultimate bang for your nutritional buck.

For our last discussion of Nutritional Bang for the Dollar, see:
What’s It Worth To You?

Our first week’s topic is the old and new favorite: chili.

I’m going to assume that everyone knows the difference between Chile and chilis so we won’t go there. There is no mystery (despite the Terlingua contests) to making a great pot of chili: If there had been, cowboys would have been starving on those long cattle drives. I’m not going to discuss the other deal about chili that is supposedly “real,” “genuine,” “authentic” or whatever.

The basic formula for chili is this (commit this to memory and save yourself a lot of grief):
Beans
Some sort of liquid
Meat if you’ve got it (we’ll talk about vegetarian chili later)
Onions, lots
Garlic, lots
Pepper
Time

After that, it’s all in the seasonings.

The picture above is our favorite chili at home, made in a crockpot. I take out a pound of ground meat the night before. Any ground meat will do: chicken, turkey, beef, whatever you have.

That morning, brown the meat and throw the whole thing, grease included, into the crock pot.
Throw in a handful of garlic (that usually works out to 5-6 cloves)

Coarsely chop an onion – keep the pieces pretty big (if the onion’s been in the fridge a while and has sprouted, throw in the green sprouts too)

Choose your liquid and throw that in. If you like it tomato-y, then the big can (26 ounce can) or a quart jar of canned tomatoes in sauce or juice is your weapon of choice. If you don’t want it tomato-y, then two cans of low salt beef broth is your ticket.

Put in your beans: We happen to like having more than one type of beans in our chili – one can each of black beans and pinto beans, rinsed, with the rest of this, will fill up a good sized (2.5 qts) crock pot. You can always use less meat and more beans – it’s up to you. I like canned beans because I hate to go through the washing-sorting-washing-soaking-cooking, etc. thing with dried beans. If you want to do that, you’ll need to start this process the day before so that they soak overnight.

Spices: All of this depends on how adventurous your family is:
Oregano and basil will make your chili taste like Mexican Spaghetti Sauce, which is very nice, but not authentic.

Taco Seasoning Mix: I admit that sometimes, I just am not in the mood to try to think of combining spices and I just reach into the cupboard for a package of low salt taco seasoning mix, throw a tablespoon of that into the meat when I’m browning it. Not the most authentic, but can pass muster with teenagers. If you use that, then all you need is a little pepper.

Cumin – Very authentic and can be overdone – throw in a teaspoon and taste again later.

Pepper – 1/2 teaspoon and taste again later

Cilantro – very authentic; throw in a tablespoon of the dried stuff

Fresh Green (or red or orange or yellow) Peppers – very yum – chop coarsely and throw those in; the more colorful the better

Dried Hot Peppers – here is where the whole thing can end up with the fire department – if I am doing this, I put in a really small one like a jalapeño, chopped up with the seeds and taste again later.

Anything else? Well, if I am down to the last half a jar of medium salsa, esp if it’s got corn in it, I’ll throw that in too.

There you have it – red chili.

If you are a vegetarian, here is all you need to know:
Leave out the meat and make sure you eat this with a whole grain bread. That will complete your protein from the beans and you are good to go. I know there are a lot of folks out there who like to throw tofu into their chili as their protein source – go for it. I don’t eat soy products as they interfere with my thyroid hormone replacement.

White Chili:
I’m sort of at a loss as to the attraction of white chili, just the way I feel a tremendous level of ambivalence about “white chocolate.” That’s like saying, “kosher bacon”. But, I happen to like eating white chili a lot and it IS different.

Again, to go back to our basic formula:
Beans – use Great Northerns or navy beans…they are white!
Meat – use chicken (I suppose you could use pork too, but I have never had white pork chili) or turkey – cooked if you have around (yay, Thanksgiving); if not, brown some cut up chicken parts that are meaty, cut off the meat and throw that in, skin included.
Liquid – ah, here is where we get different – use a couple of cans of chicken broth. Do NOT use chicken bouillon cubes.

All the rest for spices follows the same as for red chili.

Put your crockpot on low and leave it for the day – when you get home, you will have chili all made for dinner. Serve with some fresh veggies or a salad, bread or rolls. In our house, a favorite accompaniment is cornbread, which I will save for another time.

Now, let’s say that you don’t have this sort of planning or time available to YOU. Let’s say that you get the call when you get home from work from the DS or DD that they are bringing home their friends from school for dinner…and they are going to be home in an hour. Should you just pick up the phone and order a pizza? Nope – as long as you have things at hand, you will be able to do this and still have time to set the table, clean up a little bit and take out the dog.

But the key is: having things at hand, which brings us back to …the $10 bill.

Cooking Good and Cheap requires one thing and one thing only: having basics on the shelf (under the bed, in the pantry, in a cardboard box…whatever). How many times have we ended up “eating by Pizza Hut™” because we got home, stared into the fridge and shelves and saw pickles, a half-eaten sandwich, a couple of onions that looked past their best and nothing defrosted? The entire US restaurant industry is based on this problem. Take that $10 bill and turn it into an opportunity for you and your family to eat cheap.

This weekend, check the circular from your usual grocery store. Chasing the best price on one item is just nuts. You will save more money going to one place to do all of your shopping. If another store does the best buy on fish or meat, then do that there but basically, don’t chase around.

Look at specials on the following items:
Chicken Broth (low salt if possible)
Beef Broth (low salt if possible)
Canned tomatoes (low salt if possible and whatever your family uses most – crushed, whole, diced or whatever)

You will hardly ever find a special on powdered milk, but buy a box anyway – unless you are allergic to milk. If you are going to buy it, the reason is that you’ll need it for another one of these postings, when we cover breads and holiday yummies).

Take that $10 bill with you and that circular and figure out and buy the most of a couple of those items above so that you stock up on them. Once you have them, then you can do anything you want in terms of cooking cheap and nutritiously.

Next posting: Chowder!! (or, more correctly, “Chow-dah!!”)

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)

It seems that I am a bit “behind-hand” (as my mom used to say) in terms of urban farming. Apparently, raising chickens in the urban setting has become, like knitting, “the new yoga”:

This past year alone, grass-roots organizations in Missoula, Mont.; South Portland, Maine; Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Ft. Collins, Colo., have successfully lobbied to overturn city ordinances outlawing backyard poultry farming, defined in these cities as egg farming, not slaughter. Ann Arbor now allows residents to own up to four chickens (with neighbors’ consent), while the other three cities have six-chicken limits, subject to various spacing and nuisance regulations….

In New York, where chickens (but not roosters, whose loud crowing can disturb neighbors) are allowed in limitless quantities, there are at least 30 community gardens raising them for eggs, and a City Chicken Project run by a local nonprofit that aims to educate the community about their benefits…

(Poultry Politics, urban chickens)

For those interested in getting together with other egg-fanciers, here are a few sites to help you find one another, check out your local ordinances, and so on.

TheCityChicken.com
UrbanChickens.org
MadCityChickens.com
BackyardChickens.com

(originally published at Oxdown Gazette)