Whatever fløts your grøt

Fløtegrøt is a Norwegian creamy pudding still enjoyed on special occasions today in Norway and parts of the United States with a history of immigration from Norway. The word fløtegrøt is a compound of the words fløte (cream) and and grøt (porridge). It is thickened with flour and can be flavored with sweetener and spices.

A 100-year-old recipe from the St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN) Phi Kappa Phi Literary Society's cookbook explains the modern process of making the pudding:

“Use a round bottomed kettle; have a good pudding stick. Take rich cream – if a little sour it may be used anyway. Let it come to a boil, then sift in flour gradually, stirring rapidly. When about as thick as cornstarch pudding do not put in more flour. Let it boil and stir constantly, and the butter will be given off. As it floats pour it off into a cup and put on back of stove to keep warm. When you can drain off no more butter add a little warm milk and stir…Cook well, stirring continually. When done serve with the hot butter drippings, sugar and cinnamon. This mush is very rich and a quart of thick cream will make enough for six or eight persons.”

  

Kathleen Stokker in Remedies and Rituals: Folk Medicine in Norway and the New Land describes a childbirth tradition brought to Minnesota by 19^th-Century Norwegian immigrants: 

“Mothers who survived the birth could look forward to the far more joyous custom of receiving the sengemat (bed food)…” 

She also relates a story from a doctor about his mother’s experience in 1857:

“…the neighbor woman came to see her and brought along fløtegrøt, such as had been the custom on similar occasions in Norway.” 

Stokker writes that the practice of sengemat dates back to Viking times, but offers no further explanation for this claim.

Toying with this idea of Vikings making fløtegrøt, I came up with a process of making the dish with ingredients more likely to be available in medieval Scandinavia, where white flour, sugar and cinnamon were hard to come by. I won't bore you with the details from my research into other flour-thickened puddings of the Middle Ages, but will just jump to the recipe:

Fløtegrøt

Pour a quart of cow's milk cream into a heavy kettle over a very low fire or hot coals. Stir frequently with a frayed stick or whisk. If butter rises to the surface, skim off and keep in a bowl. While the cream heats, sift some freshly ground wheat flour through a cloth to remove the bran. When the cream boils, slowly sprinkle in the flour, stirring constantly with the whisk to prevent lumps from forming. Keep sprinkling in flour and stirring until you have a thick pudding. Cook until the floury taste is gone. Thin out with warm milk if needed and sweeten with a small amount of honey. Best served warm with some of the melted butter drizzled on it. 

I made this version for an event last weekend and its creamy, slightly sweet flavor got rave reviews.  It is decadent, so serve small portions and use a quart of cream only if you want at least eight servings.  

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Who needs yeast packets to make bread?

Not me! I've been having great success making bread that is leavened only by sourdough starter. 
There is a great bread recipe called "Almost No-Knead Bread" from Cooks Illustrated that I love, but I love using real sourdough even more than the CI recipe for faux-sourdough flavor, so I gave the recipe a sourdough makeover. Granted, the time savings of the CI recipe are gone. Baking with sourdough as the only leavening is for those who like it a bit old-school.

My recipe assumes that you already have a sourdough starter available. If not, you'll need some time to refresh one you've received from someone you know or to start one from scratch. There are several from-scratch processes described in the books The Art of Fermentation and Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz, Sourdough Cookery by Rita Davenport and Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish.

Also assumed: that you own a cast-iron Dutch oven with a lid.

Crusty Sourdough Bread
yield: 1 loaf, approximately 1 pound

Step 1: Refresh the starter 
Stir 1/4 cup unbleached all-purpose flour and 2 Tbsp water into the starter. Leave the container out on the kitchen counter several hours until starter is bubbly and increasing in size. 

Step 2: Mix up the recipe
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour (5 ounces)
1 cup unbleached bread flour (5 ounces)
1 cup whole-wheat flour (5 ounces)
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sourdough starter
1/2 cup water, plus a little more if dough is dry
 
In large mixing bowl, mix the dry ingredients, then stir in sourdough starter with enough water to make the dough into a shaggy-looking ball. Start with 1/2 cup water and add a little more water if dough is dry and not coming together.

Cover bowl with plastic wrap and leave out overnight.

Step 3: Prepare for rising 
Line a flat pasta bowl, a bread basket or an 8-inch cast-iron skillet with parchment paper and grease the paper with cooking spray. Remove your plastic wrap from the mixing bowl and spray one side with cooking spray.

Step 4: Knead and shape
Spread flour over your kneading surface and knead your dough just 10-15 turns until it is smooth and elastic. Gently pull sides down under the loaf to make a ball, squeeze bottom seam together and place loaf seam-side down in the parchment-lined bowl//basket/skillet. Cover loosely with the plastic wrap, oily side down. Allow to rise until nearly doubled in size, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours. About 1/2 hour before the end of rising, turn on the oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit with a cast-iron Dutch oven (lid on) inside it on the lowest rack.

Step 5: Baking a crusty loaf
Sprinkle the loaf with flour, then slash a 1/2 inch-deep line across the loaf with a sharp knife. Turn on the kitchen exhaust fan, if you have one, before the next part. Carefully bring out the Dutch oven, open the lid, pull up the corners of the parchment paper around your loaf, place the paper with the loaf in it inside the Dutch oven. Cover carefully with lid, turn oven temperature down to 425 degrees Fahrenheit and bake 30 minutes. 

At 30-minute mark, remove lid and continue baking loaf in Dutch oven another 20-25 minutes until it is well-browned and center temperature of loaf is 210 degrees Fahrenheit. Cool finished loaf on a wire rack.

Step 6: Eating and storing
I'm assuming that you will already start to eat the bread the same day it is made, as soon as it is cool. Who could wait longer? I won't tell you what to put on your bread, but storage is a piece of cake. Turn the cut side of the loaf down on a cutting board.

Alternatively, you could wrap the whole loaf in foil. If the crust is getting tough and losing its crispness, it can be re-crisped in the oven or toaster. This bread is still delicious on Day 2 and makes great toast for a couple days afterward. 

Keeping a sourdough starter: Once you've got your starter going, you can store it in the refrigerator in an airtight container between uses. I feed mine at least once a week by mixing in 2 Tbsp unbleached all-purpose flour and 1 Tbsp water. I feed it more, still in a ratio of 2 parts flour to 1 part water, if I will be baking often. If I baked nearly every day, I'd just leave the starter container out on the counter to keep those yeasts really active. If I know I won't be baking for a while, but the starter is getting close to filling the container, I discard some before the next feeding.

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The Müsli-on-the-cheap experiment

While I was a college student in Germany, I fell in love with the breakfast mixture of whole grains, nuts and fruits called Müsli. It has all the ease of cold cereal – pour into bowl, pour on milk or stir in yogurt. After it has soaked a short while in milk or yogurt (or my favorite soaking liquid of plain yogurt thinned with almond milk), the grain in Müsli softens up as it soaks up liquid, yielding a bowl of tender grains with exciting bits of crunchy nuts and sweet dried fruits in a creamy sauce. It has only as much sugar as the dried fruits in the mix. Unlike granola, Müsli is cheap and easy to make; no baking required, the ingredients don't need to be pricey ones. Also, it does not have the added oil of granola, just the fats that might be in nuts and grains.

I was hoping I could make a cheaper at-home version of my current favorite brand, Seitenbacher. I wanted to vary the ingredients a bit, but keep the texture mix of crunchy and chewy and the flavors of sweet and tart dried fruits.

Original Seitenbacher Müsli #2 ingredients

Rolled oats
Rolled barley flakes
Dried raspberries
Dried apples
Sunflower seeds
Sliced almonds

Raisins

Net weight: 16 oz

Retail price: $4.99 per 16 oz    (sometimes on sale at $3.99)
Price per ounce: when on sale, $0.25 per ounce

                        When at regular price, $0.31 per ounce

New at-home version

Quaker Old-fashioned Oats, 1 lb 2 oz = $3.50, or $0.20 per ounce

Rolled rye flakes (cheaper than rolled barley), 8 oz = $1.03, or $0.13 per ounce
Sunflower seeds, 6.08 oz = $1.17, or $0.14 per ounce
Dried apples, 2.4 oz = $1.69, or $0.71 per ounce
Golden Raisins 15 oz = $4.99, or $0.33 per ounce
Pecan pieces, on sale 16 oz = $8.49, or $0.53 per ounce
Dried raspberries not available (maybe I could dry some from my back yard next year!)

Trial recipe for Müsli-on-the-cheap

7.5 oz oats (cost: $1.50)

5.25 oz golden raisins (cost: $1.73)
4 oz rye flakes (cost: $0.52)
4 oz pecan pieces (cost: $2.12)
3.25 oz sunflower seeds (cost: $0.45)
2.4 oz dried apples, chopped (cost: $1.69)

Total weight of finished cereal: 26.4 oz (1 pound, 10.4 oz)

Total price of finished cereal: $8.01
Price per ounce = $0.30

I think I can still do this a bit cheaper. I love pecans, but pecan pieces had a bit too strong of a flavor along with sunflower seeds, and I decided I’d like a more grain-based cereal with fewer nuts, seeds and apples per spoonful. On my next attempt, I’m going to increase the amount of grains per batch and reduce the amounts of nuts, seeds and apples. I might change the nuts to sliced almonds instead of pecans next time, but I will have less of whichever nut is involved. Perhaps the rolled oats at the natural foods store will be cheaper per ounce than the Quaker oats, too. That store had rye flakes that cost less than my oats!

Update after next grocery run: store brand old-fashioned oats on sale, 1 pound 2 oz for $1.50!

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Recipes to try again later

I promised to share recipes that were successes and failures when I set up this blog. Spectacular failures often come with a good story, which is probably why I've been hanging onto this group of recipes without posting them. They were not highly impressive dishes (or haven't been tested yet) and they don't come with good stories. Despite that, I'm posting them here today because the blog entry is easier to find (and read) later than a little slip of paper with pencil marks on it. Hopefully in the future there will be revisions with photos and more exciting tales. Perhaps someone out there will try them out with the suggested "note to self" revisions and let me know how it goes.

Choco-cherry Smoothie

1 cup cherries from cherry bounce
1 1/2 cup seltzer water
2 cups homemade kefir
1 Tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 Tbsp cocoa powder

Blend until smooth. 
NOTE TO SELF: try with 1/2 cup seltzer next time, possibly less kefir. Great chocolate and cherry flavor, but beverage ended up too thin to be a good smoothie. The tanginess was nice, but perhaps less kefir and/or a teaspoon more sugar would bring taste into better balance. Booziness of the alcohol-preserved cherries sneaks up on you, so warn people if you serve this to others. 

Lemon-Chicken Pasta

3/4 pound thin spaghetti, cooked in boiling salted water
2 cups shredded leftover roasted chicken with lemon-pepper-garlic seasoning
75 g bunch parsley, chopped
juice and zest of 2 Meyer lemons
5 Tbsp olive oil
grated Parmesan cheese to taste

Whisk together the lemon juice, zest and olive oil. Toss with chicken and pasta and parsley. Sprinkle each serving with grated Parmesan. 

NOTE TO SELF: I'm sure that this dish could be done with plain salt-and-pepper roasted chicken with just the addition of a minced clove of garlic and some pepper to the sauce. Next time, consider using at least 1 Tbsp less oil. This version was a little too oily. 

The Large-Crowd Meatball Experiment

5 pounds ground beef (85% lean/15% fat ratio)
1 large onion, minced
2 Tbsp minced garlic
4 oz fresh bread, processed into fine crumbs
3/4 cup vegetable stock or milk
3 eggs, beaten
2 oz (by weight) sour cream
1 1/2 Tbsp kosher salt
2 tsp freshly-ground black pepper
2 Tbsp dried Greek oregano
2 Tbsp dried basil

Place ground beef in large mixing bowl. Saute minced onion and minced garlic in olive oil. Moisten breadcrumbs with vegetable stock/milk in a small bowl. Add sauteed onion/garlic and moist breadcrumbs to meat along with all other ingredients and mix thoroughly. Form into meatballs and fry in oil or bake.
NOTE TO SELF: These would taste great with ground lamb or beef-lamb mix. Salt was not quite overpowering, but could easily be cut to 1 Tbsp plus 1/2 tsp. Dried basil and oregano amounts (especially oregano) should probably be cut in half. Devote another blog entry to this experiment and its theoretical variations with Korean, sweet-sour, American meatloaf and Middle Eastern flavor profiles. 

Bloody Mary Meatballs

3 pounds ground beef (85% lean/15% fat ratio)
1 1/2 cup rolled oats
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp freshly-ground black pepper
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup minced onion
1/4 cup Bloody Mary Mix
1 Tbsp prepared horseradish

Saute onion and garlic in olive oil and mix thoroughly with meat and other ingredients. Form into meatballs and fry in oil or bake. Serve in a Bloody Mary sauce I haven't written a recipe for yet or make Bloody Marys and eat meatballs as snack with cocktail.
NOTE TO SELF: Mixed parts of three different recipes together to create this one, can't try it out until there is a sharing occasion to make this with a Bloody-Mary-inspired tomato sauce to serve them in.

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Two more ways to use a mountain of chili powder

I taught a fermented foods workshop here at our house in July and, in the course of researching recipes and techniques, decided I had to finally try to make kimchi/kimchee (choose your favorite English spelling, it's 김치 in Korean).

The three different batches of white radish kimchi I made before I got one that was edible (sorry about that still-super-salty batch you were subjected to, Mom and Dad) is another story. This story is about the chili powder that goes into kimchi.

There's an Asian grocery here in town that I like to frequent called Shanghai Market. The proprietor always knows which item to recommend. You see a shelf with five different types of soy sauce in several brands from three different countries and don't know which you want? This guy can tell you what the Japanese cooks are using, what the Chinese restaurants prefer and what sweet soy sauce is good for, plus let you know the run-down from least to most expensive. He helps me translate the labels on  pickled vegetables so I know what's in the package and hasn't yet said "I don't have that" to my occasional requests for unusual ingredients.

He can also sell you the right Korean chili powder to make kimchi. The only question you have to be able to answer is, "Would you like five pounds or three pounds?"

Once I took a minute to get over my disbelief that any ground spice would be sold in such massive quantities, I decided on three pounds and immediately started thinking about how to give away at least two pounds. This is the gallon jar I stored it in when I got home. It’s sitting on the table next to a 12-oz glass. 

Of course, I had to start giving it away to everyone I could think of who might be even just a little bit interested in trying some. And for every person who said yes, there was at least 1/3 to ½ cup. And I still have enough to make several batches of kimchi at home. Heck, I’ve made three batches already and still have more than a cup of chili powder left. I figure the original three-pound quantity must be enough to make batches of kimchi for a family of eight to eat every day for an entire year. And have enough powder to make each batch really spicy.

So, clearly this chili powder needs to turn up in some other dishes, too. The first was a savory rice porridge, since I was inspired to try more savory breakfasts after reading Fuschia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice Chinese home-cooking book this summer. 

Breakfast Porridge “Better Luck Next Time”
Serves two, or one VERY hungry person who doesn’t mind the taste

1 Tbsp butter or vegetable oil
1 tsp Korean chili powder
2 cups water
1 cup leftover cooked rice
1 Tbsp miso paste with dashi included
10 sorrel leaves
2 eggs
toasted sesame oil to taste

Melt butter or vegetable oil in a large pan. Cook Korean chili powder in the oil. Pour in water and rice. As water nears boiling point, stir in miso paste. Drop in sorrel leaves and crack eggs on top. Let eggs poach without stirring them as the rice and sorrel cook. When finished, drizzle with toasted sesame oil.

Sadly, I would not recommend making this one again the same way. I liked the look of the reddish stew with cooked rice and the poached egg on top, but sorrel was the wrong choice of vegetable for the dish. Too sour. I was going for a salty-fishy flavor with the miso that has dashi in it, but this was an odd combination with lemony sorrel. Sorrel is also not good with toasted sesame oil, so clearly a different green is important for the next try.

The next soup was a light dinner inspired by a pork and tofu soup recipe in my Korean cookbook. It uses some of the same ideas from the breakfast recipe, but meshes them with this much better soup recipe’s ingredients and some Malabar spinach from our weekly vegetable box. This attempt turned out to be good enough that Andrew and I each wanted seconds and he asked me to make it again whenever we get the same greens in the CSA box. 

Malabar spinach is not actually spinach, but a different equatorial plant that has a spinach-like flavor. Its texture is a bit slippery like okra when cooked in soup. 

Here are some of the soup ingredients lined up on the cutting board, waiting their turn to go into the soup pot:

Asian-style Rice and Vegetable Soup with Malabar Spinach 
Serves 2 to 4

2 Tbsp canola oil with 1 tsp dark sesame oil
½ cup small-diced onion
2 garlic cloves, smashed
2 cups Malabar spinach leaves, measured and then chopped
4 oz shiitake mushrooms, thickly sliced
1 cup leftover cooked rice
1 tsp Korean chili powder
8 oz firm tofu, cubed or cut in strips
2 Tbsp miso with dashi included
3 cups water
soy sauce 

Heat oil, cook onion until tender, add garlic and cook a minute or so. Stir in chili powder. Add mushrooms and cook until tender. Add rice, separate the grains with your spoon, pour in water and add tofu. Bring to a boil. Stir in miso paste and Malabar spinach and cook until spinach wilts. Serve with soy sauce on the side so each diner can season to taste.

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Summer Skillets are back!

The corn, squash and beans "Three Sisters" are ripe and ready to eat this month. We've eaten sweet corn, zucchini and "beans and greens," in addition to plucking the backyard green beans and eating them straight off the bush when they are small and tender. I love summer squashes like zucchini and pattypan and cucumber, and I'm waiting impatiently for the winter squashes to ripen on their long vines stretching out of my garden box toward the house.

All of these "Three Sisters" taste great with another of the summer/fall staples in our area, cooking greens. This year, one Swiss chard plant from some pretty old seeds was successful in the backyard box. It's time to ramp up the enthusiasm for greens because from here on out in the CSA box, I predict there will be a minimum of two greens each week.

The ubiquitous and ever-flexible zucchini teams up with our county's major export product, corn, and a bit of earthy chard in this summertime skillet. The quantity is large enough that the Dutch oven or chicken fryer is a more appropriately-sized cooking vessel. It's quick to prepare, provided you've cut off the corn kernels and kept them from a previous meal of sweet corn this week.

Smoky Summer Vegetable Skillet
2 to 3 Tbsp olive oil
1/3 cup sliced onion
3 cloves garlic, smashed with flat side of knife
1 foot-long, fat zucchini (scrape out seeds if it has tough, mature seeds in it)
handful of Swiss chard, approximately 8-12 oz weight
the kernels cut off from 6 ears of cooked sweet corn
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp Spanish smoked paprika
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oil over medium-high heat in a large, deep skillet/Dutch oven. Saute onion in oil. While it is cooking, cut zucchini into long strips and dice. Add garlic to the onion and stir one minute. Add diced zucchini and stir occasionally. While zucchini is cooking, clean chard and strip the leaves off the stems. Chop the leaves, save the stems for another dish or compost them.

Put corn into pan with cumin and smoked paprika when zucchini is somewhat translucent. Stir in chard when corn has started to heat through. Stir and cook briefly until chard wilts. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serving suggestions: by itself; on rice, quinoa or couscous; with bread or on top of toast; topped with a fried egg.

This next recipe was today's lunch, created and eaten hastily when I issued a spontaneous lunch invitation to two of Andrew's friends, who were passing through to drop him off on their way back home from Indianapolis. 

Tart, tangy tomatillos are probably cheating on my low-acid diet, but they are so good with rice and beans and I didn't want to waste this treat from the CSA box. I tried to leave most of them in the serving dish and only put a few slices on my plate. Sharing is better than eating them all myself, right?

When paired with a large salad, this dish served four. If it were a one-dish meal, I'd say it is two portions.

Tangy Tomatillo-Bean Skillet

4 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp smoked Spanish paprika
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1 pint tomatillos, washed
1 cup leftover cooked rice
One 15-oz can black beans, rinsed and drained
salt and pepper to taste

Cut tomatillos into thick vertical slices, then cut each slice in half to make half-moon shapes. Heat olive oil to medium-high heat in a nonstick skillet. Saute onion until starting to become translucent, add garlic and stir one minute. Add tomatillos and spices and stir frequently until tomatillos are tender. Add rice, stirring and cutting with spoon to separate rice grains. Add black beans and heat through, stirring frequently, and season with salt and pepper.

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Pork, cabbage, apples, grains: several stews

In August, I taught a class I called "Early Period Cooking Demo: Recipes for 10th Century England" at an SCA event. I've been trying to push myself this year to create recipes that could be appropriate for my 10th Century Saxon/Norse persona and to practice starting and controlling open fires for cooking.

My desire for the class was to offer 1) a demonstration of the ways in which a fire for cooking is maintained differently from a fire for warming a room, 2) a demonstration of different cooking methods known to people in 10th Century England, 3) recipes that could be appropriate to the time and place I'm portraying, a task complicated by the lack of recipe books for this period, 4) recipes I could reproduce on camping outings to reduce my reliance on modern recipes and foods.

The following recipe is influenced by two things: reading about food combinations in Ann Hagen's Bible of early English cooking, Anglo-Saxon Food and Drink: Production, Processing, Distribution and Consumption; and thinking about combinations of foods that would be in season together for a culture that was restricted in dietary choices by seasonal availability of foodstuffs. Bacon is a pork product that can be kept a few months in a cool place after the slaughter of a hog, so it's not tied to only one season. Apples, cabbages and fresh herbs are fall foods known to Anglo-Saxons as well as modern Americans. It's possible that my choice of kale for the later two versions of the stew is more authentic than heading cabbages, but I'm not certain the heading cabbages were unknown to 10th Century England.

Pork, Apple and Cabbage Stew
serves 4-6

1/2 pound wood-smoked bacon or other fresh or preserved pork, chopped
lard or bacon drippings or butter, if needed
1 large or 2 small onions, chopped
1 small green cabbage, cored and chopped
1 pound apples, peeled, cored and chopped
2 to 3 sprigs fresh thyme
1 small sprig fresh rosemary, chopped fine or 1/2 tsp dried rosemary leaves
1/2 cup barley, oat groats or wheat berries
chicken broth or water
salt and pepper to taste

Cook bacon in pot until it starts to crisp, or cook other pork in fat until browned. Skim some fat with a spoon if desired. Add onions and cook in fat until translucent. Add cabbage, apples, grain and herbs, then cover with water or broth and bring to a low boil over open flame. Move pot over to cooler area of fire and simmer with pot covered until the grains are tender. Stir occasionally. Add more water/broth if stew starts to become too thick and sticks to bottom of pot. Season with salt and pepper.

On the first cooking attempt, this stew was tasty. The apples were an interesting sweet contrast to the savory bacon and herbs. It was a little watered down because I added probably twice the amount of broth that would be necessary to keep the grains moist. It may have been more flavorful had I left in the bacon drippings, but I spooned them off to use in making a flatbread for the class.

Later at home, I tried out a similar stew to combine leftover bacon from the class, some rice that had been left from a previous meal, and kale from a friend's garden. Kale is a member of the same family of vegetables as green cabbage, so I figured I couldn't go wrong. The herbs are replaced by cumin, one of my favorite spices.

With this photo, I learn that really good food photographers wait until the stew is done steaming to take the photo so the food shows up clearly. Unlike those really good food photographers, if I let the food cool off first, I have to eat a cold supper.


Pork, Apple and Cabbage Stew play-at-home version
serves 4

1/2 pound hardwood-smoked bacon, chopped
2 small onions, chopped
1 bunch kale (large handful of stems), destemmed and chopped
2 large apples, peeled, cored and chopped
3 cups chicken stock
1 tsp cumin 
1 heaping cup leftover brown rice
salt and pepper to taste

For home stove, never mind the bits in the directions about moving the pot around on the fire.

While camping out this past weekend, I made the stew from memory over our little campfire and added in some fresh radishes from our weekly box from Henry's Farm. Once again, kale from our friends' garden substitutes for green cabbage. Thank you, "vegetable fairies" Viv and Nicole! I didn't chop the bacon in order to keep my cutting board from having both uncooked meat and raw veggies on it. Because I cooked it very crisp, it fell apart into bite-sized chunks as I stirred it around the pot with other ingredients. I forgot to bring onions, so this stew was yet another variant of the original. I left in the bacon grease because there was no other recipe to use it in later. The finished stew needed very little salt.

Pork, Apple and Cabbage Stew another way
serves 3 very hungry people
 
1/2 pound hardwood-smoked bacon
8 small radishes, chopped
2 large apples, cored and chopped, but with peels on
1 pound kale, destemmed and chopped
1/2 cup barley
3 cups chicken stock
2 tsp fresh thyme leaves stripped from stems
freshly ground white peppercorns and salt to taste

Follow directions as in first stew, but leave all the bacon drippings in the pot and omit the step of cooking onions in bacon fat.

Everything tastes better when eaten outside, and this stew is no exception to that rule. On a chilly fall night when dinner wasn't ready until after dark, it warmed me and my two camping companions physically and emotionally from the inside out.
 

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Try a different grain for breakfast: bulgur wheat

This dish was my second response to the challenge posed at work by an entire batch of bulgur wheat that I had overcooked. (First response: mixing it with parmesan cheese to make a crust for quiche). It was just a little bit too exploded and sticky for the tabbouleh for which it was intended, but it was still fine to use for something else. If only we had another bulgur wheat recipe...

Bulgur Breakfast Pudding
makes at least 6 one-cup servings, more if served in small ramekins

3 cups cooked bulgur wheat
2/3 cup raisins
1/3 cup dried cherries
1/3 cup craisins
1/3 cup pecan pieces
2 cups whipping cream*
1 3/4 cup whole milk*
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ginger powder
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1 Tbsp flour

* lower-fat options: 2 cups half-and-half and 1 3/4 cup 2 percent milk OR no cream and 3 3/4 cups whole milk, but resulting pudding will not be as thick when hot and won't taste as creamy

Mix all ingredients in large saucepan except the flour. Bring to a simmer SLOWLY over medium-low heat. Stir frequently. When the mixture is hot, add flour by stirring in small amounts with a whisk to avoid lumps. Simmer on low heat until mixture is thick like oatmeal, stirring frequently to avoid scorching the bottom. Spoon into cereal bowls or ramekins. Serve hot or cold. Keeps a shape if chilled in a greased mold.


Note on cream: for best quality and flavor, don't bother with creams that have anything besides dairy products listed on the package. Filler ingredients make both the price and the quality lower.

It's sad that I could never eat this for breakfast myself as the dairy in it would make my guts very unhappy first thing in the morning. I really enjoyed the little tastes I took while creating the recipe.

Although I intended it to be a stand-alone breakfast food, I'm sure a small serving would be a nice addition to a brunch or make an interesting molded dessert.

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Mmmm, oatmeal.

Nothing too complicated about this one, just simple, tasty, healthy breakfast goodness. Oatmeal is not just for growing kids, and it does not have to taste boring. It's the perfect thing for weekend mornings when we wake up late and don't want lunch yet, but I'm not ambitious enough (or feeling too post-party queasy) to make my usual special brunch item, French toast.

What's in the cupboard? oatmeal for two

heaping 2/3 cup quick oats or old-fashioned oats
2/3 cup water
2/3 cup unsweetened soy milk (use more if oatmeal gets too sticky)
1/4 cup dried apple slices
1/4 cup dried cranberries
2 or 3 Tbsp pecan pieces
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1 or 2 Tbsp maple syrup per portion

Put oats, water and soy milk in 2 qt pot. Add dried fruit and ginger. Heat until simmering, cook at a low bubble until oatmeal is at desired level of tenderness and stickiness, stirring often, adding more milk if desired. Cook time will be longer for old-fashioned oats. When oatmeal is finished, stir in pecan pieces and pour into two bowls. Drizzle each portion with maple syrup to taste.

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