Sauteed beet greens, onions, and mushrooms

Last week I picked up some onions and potatoes at the store, and then realized that I really wanted to roast them. So yesterday I drove over to Traverse City's farmer's market and grabbed some beets and turnips to roast with the veggies I already had.

Now, I'm the kind of person who looks at a plant and wonders "Can I eat that?", so when I got back to the house, I decided to cook up some beet greens, even though I'd never attempted (or eaten) them before. Besides, it would be silly to waste something that I could eat instead, especially on an intern's salary.

$4 worth of organic beets

Sautéed Beet Greens
1 onion
1 clove garlic
1/3 cup vegetable stock
Small handful of mushrooms
Pinch of salt
Coconut oil
Greens from about 5 beets

Caramelize onions in a pan. Caramelizing onions is a time-consuming but not overly involved process of cooking down onions until they're translucent and starting to brown. It kills that raw onion taste and brings out the natural sweetness.

Put some coconut oil in a frying pan (use enough to cover the bottom of the pan, then add some more) and heat over medium heat. Chop an onion up into smallish pieces and add them to the pan.

One onion before

Cook for about half an hour, until the onions are browned (or less time, if you're impatient and just want to eat).

Nice caramelized onions

To that pan (I did it in separate pans today, but one will work) add some more coconut oil, and the garlic and mushrooms and salt. Cook that for a while, until the mushrooms are soft. Add in your veggie broth and let it continue to cook while you get the greens ready.

Chop the beet greens into pieces you would be okay with putting in your mouth without cutting, and wash wash wash them until there is no more dirt or grit on them (I learned this the hard way...). Then throw them into the pan and cook until wilted (about 5 minutes). They take a little bit longer to cook than spinach.

It's a lot of greens

I also fried up an egg to put on top, and stole asked very nicely if I could use some of the rice one of my housemates had cooked for his lunch as a base to put my greens on. It made enough for lunch, and leftovers for dinner.

And lunch!

They tasted a bit like spinach, but were physically more substantial than spinach, something you can actually sink your teeth into and have to chew a little bit (but not in a bad way). My rice at the bottom of the bowl actually turned a little bit pink, which was kind of fun!

Butternut Squash Soup (and roasted squash seeds)

Well, I successfully made it to my internship in Michigan, where I will be doing environmental education for gradeschoolers. The kitchen in the intern house isn't exactly fully stocked with all the right cooking utensils, and we've been sorting through drawers trying to figure out the answers to mysteries such as why there are 50 sharp knives and only one spatula.

On my long drive up last weekend I stopped in Ohio for a few days, and during that time I managed to wander over to the farmer's market in Yellow Springs, where I bought a butternut squash. I'd never made butternut squash soup before, so I decided to experiment.

No promises that this is the best soup ever, but it's not bad!

Soup
1 large butternut squash
Coconut oil
Salt
1 onion
1/2 tsp powdered ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
2 cups vegetable (or chicken) broth
2 cups water
1 cup coconut milk

Preheat the oven to 425F. Cut the squash in half longways and scoop out the seeds with a spoon, saving them to roast. Cover the squash with coconut oil and a couple pinches of salt, then roast in the oven for about an hour (I'm not quite sure on the time, since the oven here isn't the most reliable). When the squash cuts easily, it's done! Take it out to cool.

While the squash is roasting, cut up the onion and cook it in a skillet with coconut oil, ginger, nutmeg, and a pinch or two of salt until translucent. Remove it from the heat, and add in the broth and water.

Scrape the squash into the pot and cook on medium-high until it boils, then reduce to a simmer for about 20 minutes. Remove from heat and add in the milk.

Now comes the tricky part. Scoop all of the squash solids out of the pot and put them in a blender, then blend until smooth. Pour it back into the soup pot and repeat until the soup is smooth. It will take more than one attempt.

Serve hot or cold.

Roasted Squash Seeds
This should work with any winter squash. A winter squash is any squash that grows in the summer and develops a hard, thick skin by the time it's harvested. Because of this thick rind, it can be safely stored for long periods of time (like into winter). Butternut squash, acorn squash, spaghetti squash, and the very familiar pumpkin are all examples of winter squashes.

The skin is inedible, but the flesh is pretty tasty and nutrient-rich when cooked, and the seeds can be roasted and eaten.

Roasting squash seeds is incredibly easy, and a way better use of resources than throwing them out (though if you compost them, you might get exciting squashy surprises next summer!) I like to roast mine just using coconut oil and salt, but there are other toppings you can try.

Preheat the oven to 400F or so (you can roast the seeds at the same time as you roast the squash itself, if you want). Scoop the seeds out of the squash and put them in a bowl filled with just enough water to cover the gloop. With your hands, go through the gloop and seeds and throw anything that's not a seed into the compost. Take the seeds and rinse them off, then pat them try with a towel. If possible, leave them out for a while to dry. If you're impatient (or doubling up oven usage) they'll cook just fine even if they're slightly damp.

Put the seeds into a bowl and pour in a little bit of coconut oil and a little bit of salt, then stir to coat. Put them in a layer one thick on a baking sheet, and roast for about 15-20 minutes. They'll darken, but if they start to brown on the edges, they're burnt.

The easiest way to tell when winter squash seeds have finished roasting is by sound. When you start hearing popcorn-like noises inside your oven, they're done and you need to pull them out quickly before they burn.

Moroccan grilled salmon, roasted brussel sprouts

Grilled Salmon

Modified from the Food Network

1 1/2 cup plain whole-fat yogurt
Juice of 1 lemon
3 Tbsp. Extra-virgin olive oil
6 cloves garlic (roasted)
4 1/2 tsp. ground coriander
4 1/2 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp salt

2 lbs Salmon fillets

Stir together the yogurt, lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, coriander, cumin, and salt in a medium-sized bowl. Place the salmon in an 8x13 baking dish and cover with half the sauce, turning to coat. Cover, and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Lightly oil a grill pan and preheat on medium-high heat. Place the salmon on the grill skin-side down and cook until opaque in the center, about 6 minutes per side.

Serve with some of the reserved yogurt sauce.

Edit: you can use raw garlic (in fact, the original recipe calls for raw garlic), but you will be immune to vampires for the rest of your life, in addition to losing all the other flavors underneath a wall of garlic taste.

So, my little siblings get just as excited (maybe more excited) about roasted brussels sprouts as they do about dessert. If you have never eaten brussels sprouts, or if you think of them as nasty over-boiled things, then you need to try them roasted.

Roasted Brussel Sprouts

2 lbs raw (not frozen) brussels sprouts
a couple large spoonfulls of bacon fat (or a stick of butter)
Salt

Preheat oven to 400F. Cut off stem ends of brussels sprouts and cut them in half. Melt bacon fat (or butter) and toss brussels sprouts in bacon fat until covered. Sprinkle with salt and put in oven for 40 minutes (until browned), stirring once.

Roast Chicken and Chicken Stock

One of the things everyone should know how to do is roast a chicken. I am very sure that I am not an expert in the art of the roasted chicken, so I will just give a basic overview.

At our house, we play pretty fast and loose with measurements when it comes to food like this, and as my mom has said more than once, "If you don't like dinner, it's okay because we'll never have it again. If you do like dinner, sorry, but we'll never have it again."

I do not have pictures of the cooking process, sadly. Also, our secret weapon is a jar of bacon grease we keep in the fridge and add to whenever we cook bacon.

First, cut up your vegetables. Tonight we used turnips, beets, golden beets, sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, cauliflower, and broccoli for the vegetables. Cut them up into pieces the right size for your dinner party (because of all the little people at our house, we go for pieces about dice-sized), and mix them up with some garlic and bacon fat and a little salt until they are covered. Put them into 9x13 baking pans (or anything large and high-sided suitable for the oven) and then get the chicken ready.

Chickens from the grocery store tend to come with a packet of giblets (the neck/heart/liver) inside, so you want to take those out and set them aside for making stock later. Then take two lemons and cut them in half, and put three of the halves inside the chicken's cavity (use the other half for your tea or water or something). Then get some more of the bacon fat in your hand, reach under the skin of the chicken, and massage the bacon fat into the muscles of the chicken. Do this until you start to feel a little silly about covering your hand in bacon fat and wearing a dead chicken like a puppet.

Pour a little bit of garlic salt into your hand and rub it under the skin just like you did the bacon fat, then rub some more on top of the skin.

The chicken can either go on top of the vegetables or in a separate dish. Then the chicken and the vegetables go in the oven at 475 for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, drop the temperature down to 400 and cook for about an hour, or when a thermometer put into the thickest part of the thigh reads 165F.

The heat and salt gets the skin crispy, and the lemon inside the chicken keeps it moist.

The next question, of course, is what to do with the chicken carcass. It's kind of silly to throw away a chicken carcass and buy chicken broth later on in the week for soups or something. We usually make broth with the leftovers, which means picking the carcass clean and putting the bones/skin/fat/everything not the meat into a stock pot (including the giblets you set aside earlier).

Then to the stock pot you add some onions, carrots, celery, and garlic. Add enough water to almost (but not quite) cover the bones, and cook on medium heat about two hours or so (breaking up the bones with a spatula occasionally) and let some of the water boil off. There's no real sign of doneness, just let it go until it looks like chicken broth should look.

Cooking might be chemistry (or alchemy, depending on who you ask) but it's not an exact science. Unless you're baking, it's important to trust your senses rather than the recipe. If you follow a recipe and it doesn't taste quite right, change things until it does!

Ranger Cookies

Slightly modified from the Bread Becker's Recipe Collection.
www.breadbeckers.com

Ranger Cookies

• 1 cup Butter
• 2 cups White Sugar
• 1 tbsp Molasses 
• 2 Eggs
• 1 tsp. Vanilla
• 2 1/2 cups Wheat Flour (we have a mill and use hard red wheat)
• 1 tsp Baking Soda
• 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 2 1/2 cups Rolled Oats
• 1/2 cup Shredded (unsweetened) Coconut
• 1/2 cup Millet (or nuts, but millet tastes better)
• 1/2 cup Raisins (or chocolate chips, or 1/4 cup of each)

Preheat oven to 350F.

Mix butter, sugar, and molasses together until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla and beat well.

Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add to butter/sugar mixture and mix well. 

Stir in oats, coconut, millet, chocolate chips/raisins and mix well.

Put parchment paper on a baking stone and drop the cookies on it by tablespoonfulls (or use an ungreased cookie sheet). Cook for 10 minutes (or so, our oven needs about 15) until light golden brown.

Pull out of the oven and let them sit on the cookie sheet for about a minute, then transfer them to a wire rack to cool. 

Makes about 2 dozen cookies (I haven't ever managed to get an accurate count since they get eaten so quickly).

I have no idea why they're called Ranger Cookies, but I'm kind of hoping it's less "Park Ranger" or "Army Ranger" and more Aragorn son of Arathorn...

Here is a picture of Clarence the Neon Bird for no other reason than because he loves millet as much as I do (and almost as much as he loves his reflection).

"Chocolate Eclair Icebox Dessert"

 From deliciouslyorganic.net

Very good! Siblings promptly devoured it and asked when we were going to have "Clares" again. One sister was very confused by apparently having a dessert named after her.
 
Some small alterations to the recipe, I doubled everything but the pudding, since the original only calls for half. Didn't use the recipe for graham crackers since we'd just bought some at the store the other day (which makes it not paleo, but oh well). Cut out the butter completely because we were out, just plain skipped it in the pudding, and used coconut oil for the chocolate topping (in half the called-for amount, because wow that topping called for two full sticks of butter). Coconut oil does not actually work well in the chocolate, it didn't mix in with the other ingredients.

I will probably use the pudding recipe in the future, maybe even for eclaires, but the chocolate simply does not work well.