Cookbook Countdown and a Fond Farewell...

Here's something I've been wanting to do for a while...a Top 10 countdown of my all-time favorite cookbooks.  These are the ones that if something happened to them I'd immediately re-order...the ones that if I were a pioneer, heading West in a covered wagon, and it was too heavy for the horses to pull, I'd make the family get out and walk...the ones that are utterly, completely, and undeniably the best of the best.  Now mind you, I have a cookbook collection that numbers about 70 books, and that's all I have space for, so when I get new books I go through and cull out any that are not being used--this list is the 10 that will never get culled.  Here we go:

#10  From Asparagus to Zucchini, a Guide to Cooking Farm-Fresh Seasonal Produce 3rd Ed., by Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition.

This book is a real gem of a reference book.  I got it a few years back when we subscribed to a local CSA, and MAN, is it ever useful.  It's an alphabetical listing of every veggie you can imagine and how to cook them, and ways to use them.  Because sometimes unusual things like "garlic scapes" show up in your CSA box.  Each section has cooking tips, storing tips and recipes for each veggie.  Score!

#9  Barefoot Contessa, Back to Basics, by Ina Garten.  Who better to give better instruction on all the basics of simple and fabulous food?  Gorgeous pictures and beautiful, real, simple food.  Enough said.

#8  Putting Food By, by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg, and Beatrice Vaughan.  A classic.  The cover says it all: "The classic work on the best ways to can, freeze, pickle, dry, cure, and preserve."  Yup. That about sums it up.  When I come home from the farmers market with a box of some veggie treasure and need a quick run-down on how best to preserve it, this is a go-to reference.  Like when I'm wondering "do I need to blanch these before freezing, and if so how long?"  The answer is always here.

#7  Preserve it Naturally:  The complete Guide to Food Dehydration, by Excalibur.  For those who don't know, Excalibur is a brand of dehydrators.  I have two, and I absolutely love them.  This book is the classic companion to my beloved dehydrators.  It gives times and temps for anything in the world you might want to dehydrate, along with pictures and recipes for using those dehydrated foods, and also includes creative and fun snacks like fruit and yogurt leathers, and even dog treats, and crafts like dried flowers and salt dough ornaments for the Christmas tree.  LOVE IT!

#6  Make it Fast, Cook it Slow, and More Make it Fast Cook it Slow, by Stephanie O'Dea.  O.k. I know that's totally cheap, and may be considered cheating, but yes, I just slipped two books by the same author into one spot on the countdown!  (And I'm gonna do it again in a minute...).  All the recipes in these books are gluten free, and it's pretty much got every slow cooker recipe known to man in there.  Sometimes I gotta adjust the times, especially with chicken recipes, like HALF the time listed!  But that's the case with any slow cooker book.

#5  Miss Vickie's Big Book of Pressure Cooker Recipes, by Vickie Smith.  Of all my pressure cooker books, this one makes the cut because of all the charts which list time, and release method for any basic food you want to pressure cook:  chicken, whole or parts, any meat, veggie, bean, grain.  The charts are worth the cost of the book, for sure.

#4  Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon, with Mary Enig, PhD.  This book almost crept into the #1 spot because it's just flat-out AWESOME reading.  This is an encyclopedic work of traditional food preparation techniques and the #1 best book I know of, anywhere, on nutrition.  This is how I learned how to soak and dehydrate nuts for maximum digestibility and fantastic crispy flavor.  Keeper.  This book will be with me all the days of my life, Lord willing.

#3  Spunky Coconut Cookbooks, by Kelly Brozyna.  (Grain-Free Baking, Dairy Free Ice Cream, and The Spunky Coconut Cookbook).  Kelly is super-innovative.  Her grain-free cakes (coffee cake, yellow cake, scones) are to die for, and guess what?  You'd never guess...they are made with beans and coconut flour!  No refined sugar in sight, woo hoo!

#2  The Dehydrator Bible, by Jennifer MacKenzie, Jay Nutt, and Don Mercer.  Along with the Excalibur book, this one is an absolute necessity as a dehydration reference. 

And...drumroll please...

#1  The Whole Life Nutrition Cookbooks:  The Whole Life Nutrition Cookbook and Nourishing Meals, by Alissa Segersten and Tom Malterre.  These books are a MUST in any gluten-free home.  All recipes are gluten-free, dairy-free, refined sugar-free, most are egg-free, and all are super, super NOURISHING whole foods.  They have a new edition of the Whole Life Nutrition Cookbook coming out in April...oh yeah. I've already pre-ordered it.

Well hey, this has been so fun...not just the cookbook countdown, but blogging and chatting with you dear devoted readers (all 5 of you, haha!)  I started this blog to explore how to get dinner done, allergy-free, using whole foods, without letting it rule my life, and here are the conclusions I've drawn:  cooking whole foods is a lifestyle.  It's just going to always claim a certain portion of my time, and that's a choice.  But breaks are important!  Sometimes ya gotta compromise--maybe use some convenience items life pre-made GF tortillas and pre-cooked beans, and that's ok.   Whatever keeps Mama sane and the food rolling along is a good thing.

Speaking of Mama's sanity...I'm about to make some changes to simplify my life a bit. Make some room for other things.  First and foremost, I'm getting off  Facebook.  I've only been on a month or two, but I'm not very good at multitasking and, to me, facebook feels like an extra task, rather burdensome to keep up with.  I'm not a huge fan of any additional "screen time" in my life, so facebook just isn't a good fit. 

And along those lines, I feel some great closure about this blog too.  I have LOVED writing it, but it feels done to me.  So, onward!  I'm about to free up a little time for some things like the afore mentioned dehydrating projects, home improvement projects, hiking and biking, and a long, long book list, as always!   Who knows, the mood may hit and I may just return to converse about food and life some more.  But for now, a fond farewell and blessings to you my friends.  Nourish on!

Jumbleberry Fruit Bake with Pecans, for Dessert or Breakfast.

Here's a little something fun that will help you use up any frozen berries and fresh apples you may have hanging around.  It's good hot or cold, and could be dessert, breakfast, or a fun and healthy lunchbox treat. 

  

I started out with a recipe out of one of my favorite cookbooks The Whole Life Nutrition Cookbook, by Tom Malterre and Ali Segerston.  Their recipe was for apple-cranberry crisp (which is a fantastic recipe!  I've made it lots of times in the past...highly recommended!), but I didn't want the topping (can't tolerate oats), and I wanted just a very quick and simple baked fruit dish, so here's what I ended up with, loosely based on their recipe:

Preheat oven to 375

• 3 very large organic Fugi apples, or 4 or 5 small apples, fairly thinly sliced
• 3 cups mixed berries (I used Costco mixed berries--blueberries, blackberries and raspberries)
• 2 T arrowroot powder (a natural thickener, available in health food stores)
• 2 T. lemon juice
• 2 T. sucanat (Sucanant is a dehydrated, unrefined cane juice: or you could use other sweetener of choice--pure maple sugar, or coconut sugar would probably work just fine too...)
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg

Mix together in a large bowl, then transfer to a 9x13 baking dish.  Top with:

• a handful of chopped pecans.

Bake, about 40 minutes, but may take more like 45 or 50 minutes depending on how thick your apples were cut, and how thawed your berries were--my berries were frozen solid, so it took about 55 minutes.  Cover if it starts to brown on top.  It's done when the juices look bubbly and the apples are tender.

I call this Jumbleberry Fruit Bake because when I tasted it, it tasted exactly like a dessert they serve at our favorite local restaurant. They call theirs Jumbleberry Pie, but it's just basically fruit baked like this, nestled into a pretty martini glass, and topped with pretty, artfully-shaped pieces of pie crust instead of pecans.

Enjoy!



Sorry, this is not the prettiest picture!  You can see where I already impatiently delved into the lower right-hand corner. :)

Mulligatawny and Freezer Series Wrap-up

Well hey there.  I bet you thought I'd dropped off the face of the earth...been abducted by aliens...broke my hand in a bar room brawl and left unable to type.  I'm happy to report that none of those scenarios actually occurred.  No, my long absence from blogging, while less colorful and scandalous, is pretty much what you'd expect...the busy-ness of life.  Blah, blah, blah...you know the drill. 

But hey!  I've still got blog posts roaming around in that space between my ears.  And I've been dying to wrap up this whole "Freezer Series" so we can get on to other topics.

Alright, I've gotten most everything used up from my freezer stash, except I still have tomatoes and peppers, and I'm in no hurry to use those up and then have to pay $2.00 each for peppers in the store that are grown thousands of miles away, picked too early, have traveled in a truck for days or weeks, are overpriced, and of low nutritional quality.   I'd rather keep eating peppers I can get in season, a few miles from my home, picked fully ripe that morning, and stashed away in my freezer that same summer afternoon.  (Just as a side-note,  I pay about .30 to .50 cents each for peppers in peak season at the farmers market, as opposed to the aforementioned $2. EACH in the store mid-winter.)  So...I'm holding steady on the peppers and tomatoes I have left...we've still got a good 5 or 6 months til the next local harvest.

Lately I've been focusing on the pantry items--dry beans and dehydrated foods.  Now, let me just clarify, for the record, that I'm not a "Prepper".  Have you heard this term?  It's basically when people store tons and tons of food in their house, like long-term food storage (years!), incase of some sort of catastrophic event.  Ok, I get that.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with being prepared for life's emergencies, and in fact, it's probably a great idea to have some stuff stored away--I mean, what if you lost your job?  Would you have several months worth of necessities saved up and enough $ in the bank to get by for several months until you recovered?  Or what if there was a storm and power outage...would you be able to survive away from the grocery store for a week or two?

However, in terms of food storage, my personal philosophy is solely focused on getting the most nutrition possible for the least amount of money, which means, yes, I will dehydrate and freeze foods in season to eat when they are out of season in order to ensure superior nutritive value, (and save a lot of $ at the same time).  However, by the time the next season rolls around, I want the previous year's crop to be totally eaten up.  So I do not store very much of anything very long--just enough to get from one season to the next.  I can't stand a bunch of extra "stuff" hanging around.  I'm just a simple girl.  I like my home to be simple, clean, and organized as much a possible.  Collecting a lot of "stuff" I'm not using is burdensome to me.  My family lovingly calls me "the anti-hoarder" because if anything is not earning the space it takes to keep it around here, it's gone.  Clutter and I are not compatible housemates.

I see no point in dehydrating and freezing (or canning) any more food than I can use up before the next crop comes in.  Why would I want to still be eating 2013 tomatoes past the time when 2014 tomatoes are ripe and abundant?  And nutrients do start to decline the longer you keep stuff, so, essentially: I like to eat stuff that's ripe, freshly picked and local as much as I can while it's in season, then stash some away for winter.  Simple as that.  (If you like the idea of keeping food longer than that, you may want to purchase freeze-dried food, which is something people like for backpacking and camping because it is light and compact, but that's not what we're talking about here.)  What I'm focused on is not keeping food forever, but rather stashing a few super-nutrient-packed items with summer sunshine still alive in them, just long enough to nourish us in the cold months until the earth wakes up and starts producing again.   

We're getting down to the time when I need to make sure I'm using up anything I saved from 2013 harvest so I have space to start this process over for this coming season.  That said, we won't see any good local crops around here until June, at the earliest, so I still have 4 months to slowly and steadily, use up whatever I have left from 2013.

This morning I knocked out a bunch of pantry staples all in one shot:  my home-dehydrated carrots, dehydrated onions, raisins, canned fire-roasted tomatoes, rice--and frozen items:  chicken thighs, chicken stock, and some fresh stuff I had that needed to be used up:  apples and a lemon.  What could all these random items come together to make?  Drumroll please...mulligatawny!
 

If you like curry you will love this soup.  If you hate curry, you will probably hate this soup.  I am the only one in my family who loves curry and loves this soup, so I don't make it very often, so when I do make it, I get it all to myself.

You know I'm not about to sit here and re-type what's already up on the web, so here's the link for you.  This recipe is from Stephanie O'Dea, author of the Make it Fast, Cook it Slow books.  My tweaks are:  double the chicken thighs, reduce the curry by half (for those who are not big curry fans), maybe you will need a few extra cups of stock or water, and make this in a 4 qt crock.  I go "High" for 3 hrs, then add in the rice and go about 45 minutes more.

I've been sick with a cold this week--first time in, I dunno...years?  I can't actually remember the last time I was sick.  I made the mistake of stating that fact out loud last week.  Don't ever do that people.  Because not more than a week later I was sick.  I guess I forgot my old friend "Murphy", and his "laws" about these kinds of things!  Boldly boasting about your awesome immune system is the surest way to catch a cold.  So, I've been a soup-making machine all week, and grateful for my stash of chicken stock, which is now almost depleted--time to make more. 

First it was "Red Lentil Soup" from Shaye Elliot over at The Elliot Homestead.  The minute you are done reading this blog post, do yourself a favor, click on the link and go get that recipe.  It.  Rocks.  I love Shaye's book by the way.  You can see it on her website.  My whole family is crazy about that soup and requests it for their lunches. 

Then mid-week I made a chicken tortilla soup, with black beans, and I also threw in some chopped spinach and zucchini, just cuz they were hanging around and needing to be used up.  It was really good.  Everyone loves that soup.  I just make it out of whatever I have, but the basis for the recipe comes from Sarah Fragoso's book Everyday Paleo Family Cookbook.  Sorry, I don't have any link to give you on that one.

O.k.  Here are the last of the freezer principles: 

#4 Keep the Freezer Full for Maximum Efficiency:  I line the bottom of my freezer with gallon-size water bottles (remove a little for headspace so they don't split when they freeze).  This helps for times like right now when there's not much left in there.  And in the summer when it starts to get packed I can always remove the bottles for extra space.

#5 Diversify Your Preservation Techniques:  So here's something I need to keep in mind next year.  For instance, zucchini.  This year I simply dehydrated chopped zucchini.  But there were times recently when I wished I had some frozen chunks that could be used immediately instead of having to re-hydrate, like in a soup.  And there were times I wished I had some shredded and frozen for muffins.  So next year--diversify.  Freeze some in chunks and some in shreds, and dehydrate some--both chunks and shreds.  Also, if you have a freezer failure, or something happens, like moisture gets into your jars of dehydrated stuff--at least you still have some left in another form.  (By the way, you may want to get a freezer alarm--I am going to get one as soon as my freezer gets full again. That will protect you from any unnoticed freezer failures that would result in a ton of lost food--so sad!)  And next year...I need to diversify the foods I choose to save.  This year it was a lot of some things and nothing of others, which gets old round-about January.

And last but not least...#6 Make Kits as You Go:  Here's something I discovered last year and have LOVED reaping the benefits this winter.  Make kits.  Like, fajita kits:  Onions and peppers are ripe at the same time.  Buy a box of each, come home and combine your peppers and onions, sliced and portioned out for individual meals. Then all you have to do it add the chicken when you go to use it.  Or Apple Crisp Kits:  Prep the apples and berries in one container, crisp topping in another, keep them together, then all you have to do is dump it in the pan, add the topping and bake.  Any steps that you can "front load" will really pay off when it comes to prep-time and dishes later.

Okay...I've got Mulligatawny to eat.  Over and out.