Tag Archives: recipes

Fresh, Healthy Food — Homemade

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I might not be “cooking” since I returned home, but I am keeping busy in the kitchen.

I’ve been back home just over a month now. I haven’t done much cooking — frankly, I’m eating out so often with friends and bringing leftovers home that I have no need to cook. I like cooking, but cooking a meal for one just isn’t much fun.

But I don’t mind fooling around in the kitchen to make other things. A week or two ago, I made a double batch of my oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for the folks at Peachpit Press, who just moved into new offices in San Francisco. They were apparently well-received.

The other day, my friend Tammy posted a recipe on her blog, Happenings on the Hill, for homemade yogurt. It sounded very easy. Since I’ve been consuming quite a bit of yogurt these days, I figured I’d give it a try. I successfully made a quart-sized batch on Monday; when that runs out, I’ll do it again. So easy!

Today's Breakfast
Today’s breakfast: homemade yogurt with pumpkin granola and a few fresh raspberries.

A few days later, Tammy posted a recipe for pumpkin granola, which she suggested as an accompaniment to the yogurt. With main ingredients of oats and almonds, how could I resist? I made a batch this morning. Because of my limited collection of baking pans, I had to modify the recipe a bit to ensure the granola dried out properly while baking. The results are yummy.

If you like to make good, healthy food from scratch, I recommend Tammy’s blog. You won’t find those crazy involved recipes that are so easy to screw up. Instead, you’ll find simple recipes for good, healthy food. And if you try any of them, be sure to leave a comment on the recipe post there to let Tammy know how you did.

Cherry Vodka, Revisited

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More cherries, more cherry vodka.

This was a weird year for cherry growers. An overabundance of cherries near the end of the season caused the market to tank. Cherries that normally would have been picked for sale were left on the trees.

Including a lot of rainier cherries here at the orchard I’m working at.

I hate letting food go to waste. Especially amazingly delicious food. Like these slightly-past-prime-picking-time-super-sweet cherries. So I started picking in the evenings, taking home about 2 pounds a day.

There are only so many cherries a person can eat. I reached my limit.

Cherry VodkaSo I fell back on last year’s recipe for cherry vodka — or cherry liquor, as some people like to call it. So far, I’ve filled 4 pint jars and 2 other jars I’d been saving in the RV.

They look delicious. I’m very interested to see how they hold their color over the coming year. They’re best eaten — perhaps served over ice cream? — after at least 6 months in the jar. Last year’s cherries, which I blogged about here, were a mix of red and rainier cherries, but all the cherries in the jars turned dark red. They taste okay, but I probably should have added some sugar when I jarred them. This year’s are super-sweet and I don’t think sugar will be necessary.

By the way — I always use decent vodka. Most of these were made with Absolut, but I switched to my favorite, Ketel One, when I ran out.

Snowballs from My Oven

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Another recipe from my annual baking extravaganza.

Every year, I bake cookies for my favorite clients. They always include my famous helicopter sugar cookies and my favorite oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. And sometimes they include so-called “magic cookie bars” or brownies.

Snowballs from my OvenThis year, they include “Snowballs.” This is a small spherical cookie made primarily of butter, flour, and finely chopped nuts, dusted with powdered sugar. Tasty without being too sweet.

Here’s the recipe for four dozen. I doubled it and got just under 8 dozen.

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup butter or margarine, softened. I used half butter and half margarine.
  • 1/2 cup powdered sugar.
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla.
  • 2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour. I use unbleached.
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt.
  • 3/4 cup finely chopped nuts. I used walnuts which I chopped almost to a coarse powder in my food processor.
  • More powdered sugar.

Instructions:

  1. Heat oven to 400°F.
  2. Beat butter, measured powdered sugar, and vanilla in a large bowl with an electric mixer on medium speed.
  3. Stir in flour and salt. I did this in the mixer on lowest speed.
  4. Stir in nuts. Again, I did it in the mixer. The dough ends up being rather dry and does not cling to the side of the mixer bowl.
  5. Shape dough into one-inch balls.
  6. Snowballs before BakingPlace balls about 2 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Because these don’t flatten out, you can get quite a few on a standard sized baking sheet or jelly roll pan. Although my first sheet had only a dozen (see photo), I was able to get two dozen on subsequent baking sheets.
  7. Baked SnowballsBake for 8 to 10 minutes or until set but not brown. I judged that they were done when the tops began to crack ever so slightly.
  8. Snowballs Dusted with SugarImmediately remove from cookie sheet and roll in powdered sugar. Now although I tried this, I soon discovered that this was a very messy way to go about coating them with sugar. So instead, I put them on a wire rack with some newspaper (okay, it was Trade-a-Plane) under it and used a tea strainer to sift powdered sugar over them.
  9. Cool completely on wire rack.
  10. Roll in powdered sugar again. Now although this is part of the recipe, I didn’t do it. Too messy!

If you have two baking sheets, I recommend using them both. It took me about 8-10 minutes just to roll up the next batch of cookies, so I was able to have a sheet in the oven at all times. This really saves energy when you’re running an oven at 400°F.

If you try this recipe, please let me know what you think. I love them.

Maria’s Almost-Famous Clean-Out-the-Cabinet Stuffing

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It was a good year.

Every year, when I make Thanksgiving dinner, I also make one of my favorite so-not-on-my-low-carb-diet dishes: stuffing (AKA, dressing). I like this dish so much that if you took away the turkey and all the other fixings and just gave me a dish of this, I’d be very happy. What’s more is that the way I make it, it includes food from all the food groups except dairy, so I can argue that it’s a meal in itself.

Because the recipe varies from year to year — depending, of course, on what ingredients are handy to toss into it — I never know how it’s going to turn out. Last year was probably one of my worst concoctions. But this year was one of my best.

If you’d like to try your hand at this, here’s my basic recipe, along with a list of what I tossed in this year.

Base Ingredients:

  • 1 pound sausage meat. I use breakfast sausage and I prefer Jimmy Dean sage sausage. I don’t buy the low-fat kind; it usually doesn’t generate enough fat to need draining.
  • 1 medium or large onion, chopped. I usually use a large one.
  • 2 stalks celery, trimmed and chopped. I generally don’t like celery, but it’s one of the “aromatic vegetables” I include.
  • 2 large carrots, chopped. Or chopped up baby carrots, which is what I use.
  • 1 apple, chopped. Any kind of apple will do.
  • Turkey or chicken broth. Use the amount you’d need to prepare the rice (if included, see below) plus the amount of stuffing included (see below).
  • Prepared stuffing mix bread cubes or crumbs. This year I used Pepperidge Farm that I bought last year and didn’t use. I don’t use Stove Top brand. If I use a stuffing mix that has a separate seasoning packet, I throw that packet away. Sometimes I use a small package of cornbread stuffing with a small package of “herb seasoned” stuffing. Never the same two years in a row.

This Year’s Toss-Ins:

  • Brown or wild rice. Or a rice blend. I usually find a package in the cabinet with less than 1/2 cup left in it and toss that in.
  • Chestnuts, cooked and chopped. Trader Joe’s sells them prepared and that sure does make life easier.
  • Almonds, chopped. I used blanched slivered almonds this year. Sometimes I use pecans or walnuts — whatever is leftover from baking earlier in the year.
  • Raisins. Another clean out the cabinet item; this year I found some golden raisins that were turning brown.

In the past, I’ve also included bacon, ham, turkey giblets (the stuff in the bag stuffed into the raw bird’s chest cavity that most people throw away), garlic, yams, parsnips, turnips (I sure do love my root vegetables), other nuts, oatmeal (not sure what I was thinking there), dried cranberries, dried cherries, sesame seeds, flax seed, etc. I can’t remember them all. The key is to go through the refrigerator and pantry and decide what might “work” in the mix. You can’t really get it “wrong” if it’s something you like — the big exception being something silly, like chocolate. (There’s a time and a place for chocolate and T-day stuffing is not the place.)

Cooking Instructions:

  1. Brown the sausage meat together with the onion and celery. Be sure to break apart the meat and stir it good. Unless there’s a lot (more than 1/4 cup?) of fat in the bottom of the pan, don’t drain it off; it’ll mix in and add flavor.
  2. Add the carrot and any other hard vegetable likely to need a little extra cooking. Simmer everything on low heat until the flavors are melded.
  3. All all other ingredients except the broth and stuffing mix. Stir it up well while simmering.
  4. Add the broth and bring the mixture up to a boil.
  5. If the mixture contains rice, cook until rice is mostly done.
  6. Add the stuffing mix and stir well to make sure all bread is moistened. Cover until ready to use/eat.

I don’t make the turkey — that’s my husband’s job. I make the stuffing. We don’t put the stuffing into the bird. The main reason for this is that we always make turkey soup the next day — indeed, my husband is prepping that now — and when the bird has been stuffed, boiling the carcass to make soup yields a cloudy broth that simply isn’t appetizing. Besides, the argument that cooking the stuffing inside the bird makes the stuffing more flavorful just doesn’t apply here. The stuffing is flavorful because of all the flavors cooked into it.

Yesterday’s stuffing came out very good. I had some for lunch and then had some with my turkey dinner later in the day. My guests seemed to enjoy it. Of course, because I put so much stuff into it, I have a ton of it leftover — not the best situation when I’m trying to cut carbs — but it freezes tolerably well and can always be pulled out later in the year to enjoy with another meal.

Do you make your stuffing like this? If so, why not share a few of your add-ins?

And if you make your next stuffing with my recipe as a rule of thumb, please do share your thoughts about the results.