Getting juiced

For many years I've been having orange juice with my breakfast cereal. For a while I was even using the juice on my cereal. I haven't been a milk drinker for many, many years. Now I use soy milk on my cereal.

For many years I've been telling myself that orange juice from concentrate isn't much more than orange-flavored sugar water that is fortified with vitamin C.

I've been saying we should get a juicer so we can make wholesome juices that have more than just sugar and flavor in them.

A couple of months ago I was down to one can of orange juice concentrate when we went to Costco. We came home with a new six pack of OJ.

A week later we went to Costco again. I don't remember why we needed to make a return trip in such a short time. We came home with Jack LaLanne's Power Juicer Deluxe. Impulse shopping at Costco is so easy (and fun!).

We have a new gadget! We've used it every day since then!

Carrots. Celery. Apples. Ginger. Pineapple. Pears.

Wholesome juices!

Here is this morning's juice. One glass has been made and one has its raw ingredients still to be processed.

Here are its insides after everything has gone through.

The spinning blade grates the vegetables and fruit into very tiny shreds and the juice is spun through the filter. The pulp works its way to the top of the filter and is flung toward the collection bin. A lot gets stuck in the chute along the way.

The recipe book suggests that we collect the pulp and make tasty treats like muffins. We just compost it. Even if the muffins were good for us there is no way that we could eat enough to use much of the pulp.

Since we've started using the juicer I haven't mixed up a can of orange juice.

What do I do with all that OJ?

Orange you glad you have neighbors with too much produce?

It has happened again!

Our very nice neighbors left two big grocery bags packed with Valencia oranges on our doorstep. Juice! A half-gallon of fresh orange juice! And that's only the first bag of oranges!

And this happened just as my pitcher of orange juice from concentrate was down to its last swallow. Such good timing!

The bag that's left weighs 11 pounds. Another half-gallon of fresh juice is on its way.

A great start to another Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day!

It's off to a great start.

First, we had our espressos.

The coffee was recently roasted with The Roadster, ground in Rocky and brewed in Silvia (why don't I have any posts that really feature Rocky and Silvia?).

Jerry's is in a coffee mug. It has milk and sweetener that wouldn't fit in an espresso muglet. Since this is a holiday, we got an extra treat with our coffee. I made some bizcochito biscotti from a recipe in New Mexico Magazine.

Then we had breakfast.

(A lot of the following is a repeat from last year's thankfulness. We had about the same breakfast last year!)

The pancakes were made with:

• Wheat and oats that we milled this morning with our KitchenAid grain mill
• Vanilla made the BobBIE-Baby Way

On top of the pancakes we put:

• Peanut butter ground in our BlendTec Blender
• Pomegranate syrup made from juice from our bush

We swallowed our morning pills with:

• Pomegranate juice from our bush. The juice is cloudy since it was what was at the bottom of the pitchers where the juice settled (we wanted clear juice for the jelly I made).

I'm thankful that:

• We had a nice, wholesome, home-cooked meal and didn't get overfed
• There aren't a lot of dishes to take care of
• We have all our gadgets that make fairly healthful meals like this fun to make
• I have friends and family who humor me by reading these silly messages
• I have Jerry to take care of all the hard parts of Thanksgiving meals (and the rest of my life)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Now, we're off for an adventure (with picnic)!

I don't knead it anymore

About four years ago the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, had a series of concerts featuring up-and-coming artists. One of them was baritone Thomas Meglioranza. We enjoyed his concert and I started reading his blog where he tells us about his concerts, what he eats and what he cooks.

One of the recipes he raved about was bread that is easy and spectacular. It has flour, a lot of water, salt, and a bit of yeast. You mix (without kneading) the ingredients together and let it rise for 18 hours. Then you form it into a ball, let it rise again, then cook it in a Dutch oven that you've had in the oven while you've preheated it to 450°.

The result is supposed to be a loaf that "is incredible, a fine-bakery quality, European-style boule."

I gave it a try. I wasn't convinced. The dough, batter almost, was probably too wet. It kind of soaked into the towel it was sitting on for the second rising and didn't dump into the hot casserole. I guess it deflated way too much on the way to the pot and ended up a flat, tough loaf.

I was discouraged and never got around to trying it again.

A couple of weeks ago Duck Duck Gray Duck blogged the recipe. I got inspired to try it again.

I had better luck this time but I still think I need to adjust something. The loaf still ended up flatter than I hoped for. For the second rising you're supposed to form the dough into a ball. It was so soft there was no way that it would maintain a "ball" shape. It stayed flat.

But at least this time the dough didn't soak into the towel and easily went into the Dutch oven. The result was a flatish loaf that tastes very nice. And has a crisp crust.

Here's the batter dough after the first rising:

Here it is, formed in a "ball," ready to rise the second time:

Dumped into the much-too-large Dutch oven (the recipe says to use a 6 to 8 quart Dutch oven, which I did...I'll try our 4 quart one next time):

The baked loaf:

The inside of the flat loaf:

I wonder what I should try next time. A little less water? A smaller Dutch oven? (Yes.) Well, those are about the only adjustments possible. Wish me luck.

The recipe came from The New York Times and the accompanying article tells you about the theory of the process.

I hope everyone out there will give it a try and will tell me what I can do to make it even better.

The cranberries are nestled all snug in their bowl

I just made the cranberry sauce for Christmas dinner from a recipe Karen sent in 1996.

1½ cups sugar

¾ cup water

3 whole cloves

3 whole allspice

2 (3-inch) cinnamon sticks

1 (12 oz.) bag cranberries

Zest 1 orange

Bring sugar, water, cloves, allspice and cinnamon sticks to a boil in a 4-quart saucepan. Cook, stirring, until syrup is clear, about 3 minutes. Add cranberries and cook until they just begin to pop, about 5 minutes. (Do not overcook the cranberries; the little pop when you eat them is fun.)

Remove from heat, add orange zest and cool.  Keep in refrigerator at least 3 days before using. Makes 2 1/2 cups relish.

[I cook longer than "until they just begin to pop." You'd have a lot of uncooked berries if you stopped that soon, wouldn't you?]

The chain is going down to a steeping ball that is holding the cloves and allspice. This keeps us from having a surprising little extra crunch.

Thanksgiving is off to a great start

Our home-cooked Thanksgiving meal this year was breakfast.

(food styling by Mr. Bears)

The pancakes were made with:

• Wheat and oats that we milled this morning with our KitchenAid grain mill
• Vanilla made the BobBIE-Baby Way

On top of the pancakes we put:

• Peanut butter ground in our BlendTec Blender
• Pomegranate syrup made from juice from our bush

I'm thankful that:

• We had a nice, wholesome, home-cooked meal and didn't get overfed
• There aren't a lot of dishes to take care of
• We have all our gadgets that make fairly healthful meals like this fun to make
• I have friends and family who humor me by reading these silly messages
• I have Jerry to take care of all the hard parts of Thanksgiving meals (and the rest of my life)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Autumn is Icumen in

Here we go again.

This year's pomegranate harvest was much better than last year's. Last year I didn't grow quite enough pomegranates to make one batch of jelly. This year I got a lot of pomegranates. I made three batches of jelly and one of syrup. Pancakes like pomegranates, too.

That took a gallon of juice. That took getting a lot of little arils out of the tough rinds.

I made a movie of the process.

Thrills ahead!

It hasta be pasta!

One of our stops on our little trip to Orange and Los Angeles Counties was Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. One of the stores there is Williams-Sonoma. We had been to one of their stores earlier in the week on our San Diego-area shopping day. But we thought we had time so why not browse here.

Good thing we did. There is a new KitchenAid mixer attachment! A Williams-Sonoma exclusive!

We picked up the KitchenAid Pasta Press.

It makes your spaghetti. It makes your bucatini. You want fusilli? You got fusilli. It extrudes your macaroni (both large and small). And it makes rigatoni.

We made rigatoni for supper last night. Jerry made tomato cream pesto sauce from Betty Crocker's Pasta Cookbook that came in one of the more successful General Mills Christmas C.A.R.E packages.

Everything turned out very nice.

I've created yet another YouTube video in the How To & Style category that shows the extrusion process. I didn't bother with the mixing of the dough. Jerry makes a cameo appearance.

Here it is!

And here is supper with its sauce.

Mmmmmmmmm!

Making Butter

I recently expressed regret at not trying the butter my first grade class churned. I was such a picky eater. In a comment, Poss suggested that a KitchenAid mixer might be used to make butter.

Well, duh!

I did a simple Google search and found many web sites that explain how to use a mixer to make butter. You essentially make whipped cream and don't stop when you reach the proper stiffness for whipped cream.

Jerry and I went to Trader Joe's for some cream. Their whipping cream wasn't just cream. It has carrageenan to do something like stabilize the finished whipped cream or something. We didn't want stable whipped cream, we wanted butter.

So we headed over to Jimbo's. They had whipping cream that is simply cream. We got a couple of pints and came home and put them on the counter. Apparently you want your cream at room temperature. Ideally, you want it to have gone sour for more flavor but we were in a hurry. Maybe the sour version will happen some day.

I made my first batch of butter today.

I whipped the cream beyond stiff peaks. Moments after the cream reaches the stiff peaks stage, the foam suddenly disappears. You've got a bowl full of butter and buttermilk.

This will come a no surprise to most of you: I made a YouTube video of the process. My subscribers are hungry for new content from me. Here it is:

I forgot to add salt. I like salted butter on my toast. But our first slice of toast was tasty.

We got almost a pound of butter out of that quart of cream. Yum!

I'm drying, man.

Time for another YouTube experience!

I've shown you photographs of bananas. I've shown you our dehydrator.

Now you get to see the dehydrator in action! Yes, you heard right, you're going to see how bananas are peeled and prepped for dehydrating. Oh, I hope you can watch this without having your minds blown.




Were you blown away?

8 bananas, 1 peel

It's banana dehydrating time again. This time I decided to do something new: peel all eight bananas of a bunch and leave the peel intact.

I was successful!

When I took them off the hook some of the ends started falling off. But, for a few minutes eight bananas were out of a single piece of peel!

I am so talented!

One more crack at this

I made the cheese crackers again. I did a few things differently:

• I used a different cheese (some Pecorino Romano left from our crack and cheese experiment)
  
• I rolled them thinner using KitchenAid Mixer's pasta roller attachment
• I cooked them on uninsulated sheets
• I took them off the parchment paper while they cooled on the rack
• I forgot to sprinkle the coarse salt on them :-(
  
• I MADE A MOVIE!

They're much crisper than the first batch. Some are browner. Much browner. (I was watching the videos of the process while they were baking and I should have been watching the crackers.)

The first, thicker crackers had more flavor. I don't know if that was because the cheese had more flavor or if I used more cheese or if the extra thickness and slight undercooking made them more flavorful. Or maybe it was the added coarse salt.

Much of the problem with the flavor is that I think I might have made them too thin. I ran the pasta rollers down to the fifth setting. That makes some pretty thin sheets of dough. Maybe I should have stopped at three or four. But I'd better stop making these things altogether. I just eat them up.

There are several people who have subscribed to my YouTube channel. I haven't made a movie since August. To give my subscribers (and you, I hope) a thrill, here is my latest movie. I made it with my new MacBook Air. It came with iMovie and that makes movie making easy and snappier. I hope you like it.

You crack me up!

I shouldn't read the New York Times' food articles. I don't look for them but when they show up in the list of most popular stories, I just have to check them out. This time it was Parmesan Cream Crackers. I made them tonight and they are tasty.

I should have rolled them out thinner and baked them longer. They're a bit soft. But that's not going to stop us from eating them. Once again we have a rich snack.

I need to learn how to roll the dough into a nice rectangle. I guess I could have rolled it out and cut the irregular edges off and rolled out the edge pieces again. (The article says that additional working of the dough makes them flakier.)

My first batch of crackers:
I should have scored them into smaller crackers. But then I would just eat a larger number of them.

An advantage to making these crackers with the Parmigiano-Reggiano we get at Costco is that I can cut off chunks and scarf them down while preparing the crackers. I can eat that stuff all day and not get tired of it.

Parmesan Cream Crackers

Time: About 20 minutes

1 cup all-purpose flour, more as needed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup finely grated fresh Parmesan cheese
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup cream or half-and-half, more as needed
Coarse salt, pepper, sesame or poppy seeds, minced garlic or whatever you like for sprinkling (optional)

1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or lightly dust with flour. Put flour, salt, cheese and butter in bowl of a food processor. Pulse until flour and butter are combined. Add about 1/4 cup cream or half-and-half and let machine run for a bit; continue to add liquid a teaspoon at a time, until mixture holds together but is not sticky.

2. Roll out dough on a lightly floured surface until 1/2-inch thick or even thinner, adding flour as needed. Transfer sheet of dough to prepared baking sheet (drape it over rolling pin to make it easier). Score lightly with a sharp knife, pizza cutter or a pastry wheel if you want to break crackers into squares or rectangles later on. Sprinkle with salt or other topping if you like.

3. Bake until lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Cool on a rack; serve warm or at room temperature or store in a tin for a few days.

Yield: About 4 servings.

I'm not sure how thin they meant to say to roll out the dough. Half of an inch is definitely not right. Mine were about 1/8 inch and they were still too thick.

Crack and cheese

Recently, one of the items in the list of the most-E-Mailed stories from the New York Times caught my eye. It was their food blogger's quest for the best macaroni and cheese recipe. The one she settled on as the best is Martha Stewart's "Perfect Macaroni and Cheese."

Last night was nobody's birthday but we decided that we'd try it out.

It's the cheesiest! It has about 12 ounces of cheeses. (We halved the recipe.) According to the NY Times blogger, this stuff is nicknamed "Martha's crack-and-cheese" because it is so addictive.

The Crack-and-Cheese fresh from the oven:

And on our plates:
You'll notice we had some wine with supper. Because of this, after supper I took a nap from about 7:00 till I went to bed around 11:00. Then I slept through the night. It doesn't take much wine to put me out.

Jerry said the mac-n-cheese is "rich." He says that when people want just a sliver of a cheesecake because it is so rich he has no trouble eating a large helping. So you know this mac-n-cheese is rich.

But it's not going to be part of our birthday celebrations. We'll stick with our traditional mac-n-cheese recipes. In the meantime, we'll have to try some of the runners-up in the mac-n-cheese quest.

Speaking of Martha Stewart, she sure does live a charmed life. In a recent posting on The Martha Blog, she told us how convenient it was that she "happened to be in the Tampa area" for a book signing one Saturday and the Super Bowl was played there the next day. "Gee, since we're in the area, why don't we just drop in and watch the game?" So she watched the game from the 50-yard line right behind the Steelers. Too bad they put up some sort of screens around the half-time show so she didn't get to see Bruce Springsteen. But she tells us that he sounded good.

I never have such good luck.

And what's more, baby, I can cook!

Every Friday, Jerry and I have scrambled eggs for supper. We usually have toast and sausage patties with them. We've been using the double boiler method from Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here for the Food" for cooking the eggs for a long time. I was using a stainless steel mixing bowl on a sauce pan. When the eggs were cooked they'd leave a very tough coat of dried eggs on the bowl. It would always take a lot of effort to clean the bowl. And a lot of the eggs went to waste!

What I needed was a non-stick bowl.

One day we were at the kitchen shop in our local mall that was holding a quitting business sale. One of the things they had was a Nordic Ware nonstick double boiler insert! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Now we get to eat all of our eggs and cleanup is easy!

One Friday after a tough day at work I was not looking forward to cooking our eggs. I was beat. Somehow Jerry must have known because he was all set to fix the eggs, breakfast patties and toast. He had recently gotten a bunch of herbs and spices from Penzeys Spices and was going to try something new. He added some Fox Point Seasoning to the eggs. I was in heaven! Not only did I not have to cook but I got to eat a delicious new dish.

I try to remember to add Fox Point when I cook the eggs. I remembered tonight. Here they are:
This is:

• Six eggs
• 4 tbs. half and half
• ½ tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. Fox Point

Remember, if the eggs look done in the pan, they'll be over-done on the plate. They were about right when I stopped to take the picture and they got a bit more done looking by the time I got them on the plate. Oops!

Jerry cooked us some potatoes and onions. Mmmmmm!

The eggs were cooked on our new Fagor portable induction burner. Induction cooking is supposed to be the most energy efficient way to cook. Almost all of the energy it uses goes into heat in the pan. Gas and electric stoves heat the air and that heats the pan and a lot of the heat just misses the pan. So maybe we're using a little less energy now. In any case we have a new gadget!

Mac and Cheese! And Brownies!

Today was another Mac-n-Cheese day! Happy Birthday, Jerry!

Delicious dinner (hot from the oven and still bubbling):
This is from the same recipe as last year's birthday dinner but the actual recipe is included in today's picture for your dining pleasure. The brownies were from Bunny's birthday by way of Marcy's. Three birthdays for the calories of one!

The recipe calls for 8 oz. of macaroni. So, when I was assembling the ingredients, I grated 8 oz. of cheese. Oops! It was the cheesiest (but I did leave a couple of those ozzes out). Yum!

Tomorrow we continue our celebration with a trip to Palm Desert. El Paseo, here we come!

I've been macerating all day and, boy, are my arms tired!

It's that time of the year again...time for The Dreaded Fruitcake.

For several years I've been making fruitcakes using Alton Brown's Free Range Fruitcake recipe. He's tweaked the recipe for his book "I'm Just Here For More Food" (I'm sure you can get it at Otowi Station) and I've followed those tweaks again this year.

Last year I made three fruitcakes. One for Jerry and Me and two for my New Mexican family members to divide four ways. This year I decided to be more ambitious.

Today I made six fruitcakes. One for each of my sisters and my mother. And one for Jerry and me.

The day started with macerating the dried fruit in rum.

After the fruit has plumped up it is cooked in apple juice, apple cider (hard), sugar, and butter.

After it cools for half an hour, eggs are mixed in and the wet ingredients are added to the flours, leavenings, and cinnamon (using the Muffin Method (see AB's book)). The cakes are baked for an hour. After they come out of the oven they are doused with brandy.

Here are the first two fruitcakes.
It was another hot day (it got up to 91°F) so they got baked in the convection oven out in the garden room. I have three big loaf pans so I baked a third cake after the first two came out of the oven.

They have to cool completely before taking them out of the pans so I couldn't bake the other three right away. And big fruitcakes take a long time to cool. But they finally cooled and I got to do it all over again.

This time I baked in the kitchen. It cooled off by evening time so I didn't mind heating up the house. I baked them in two shifts again since I didn't want to crowd the oven.

It's been a long day and I'm beat. The sixth fruitcake is about to come out of the oven and I'll be able to finally take a nap!

So, unless I hear pleas from any of you sisters or mother demanding otherwise, you should be getting a fruitcake in about a month. That's how long it takes for me to finish the process. Brandy spritzes, you know.

Harvest Time

It is autumn and that means pomegranates are getting ripe. Today was pomegranate harvest and canning. Here's the bush before the harvest.

Too bad it didn't perform as well as it did last year. This is the entire harvest.

And here is what was inside the fruits.
The pomegranate is a "Utah Sweet." This type has very sweet, light pinkish pulp and nonstaining pink juice.

I made pomegranate jelly. First I had to get the juice out of the seeds. I fed them through the food strainer attachment of the KitchenAid mixer. I made a little video of the process and shortened it so show only the start and the finish. Blogger's video processor thought it was still too long and sped it up a lot. That's OK, you get the gist of the process. They didn't speed up the audio part. So, if you have 47 seconds to spare, you can watch my latest little movie.



I ended up with 3¼ cups of juice.
The recipe for a batch of jelly calls for 4 cups of juice. Since I knew the harvest was not great, I had a contingency plan. I bought a bottle of Trader Joe's pure pomegranate juice from concentrate. I added some of that to bring the juice up to 4 cups.

I then stood over the hot stove on this hot day (it got up to 88.4 today) stirring the juice, pectin, and sugar and ended up with six half-pint jars of jelly.
Yum!

Under pressure!

We've had an old-fashioned WearEver pressure cooker for some time (the date stamped on the bottom is 6-94). It's the kind with a vent in the lid that you put the weight on to regulate the pressure. When it gets up to pressure the weight wobbles and lets out some of the steam. We then have to fuss with the burner to make the weight wobble every few seconds. You don't want it to constantly wobble because that would mean it's too hot and you don't want long pauses between wobbles because that would mean it's not hot enough inside. You have to hang around to make sure the burner is at the right setting.

The last few times that Jerry made us beans in the pressure cooker the weight decided not to wobble at all. It just got stuck open and let out a constant, high-pressure steam jet. That seemed to be worse than constant or infrequent wobbling. And it was scary.

Jerry got fed up with this old technology.

We decided to go with the high-tech approach to pressure cooking. We got the Cuisinart Electric Pressure Cooker. It minds the temperature and pressure for us so all we have to do is fill it with the ingredients and tell it how long it is supposed to cook under pressure. And tell it whether we want low or high pressure. It adjusts the temperature to maintain the proper pressure and we just sit around waiting for food.

Tonight we used it for the first time. We had Pasta e Fagioli.

Pasta e Fagioli

This device isn't just a pressure cooker. It did all the cooking steps for the soup. It has a sauté setting. Jerry put in the olive oil, onions, carrots, celery, garlic, and Italian herbs and sautéed away. Then added the water and dry beans, put on the cover and set it on high pressure for 35 minutes. When it got up to pressure the timer started counting down. When it got to zero it beeped and started cooling. Once the pressure was down (about 25 minutes later) it let us open it and he added the vegetable stock, tomatoes, and more Italian herbs and pushed the "Brown" button. That brought it to a boil. In went the pasta and it boiled for ten minutes.

Then we ate. Yum.

The recipe was for the full capacity of the machine. We have a lot of leftovers.

I'd have thought that we wouldn't be getting too many new kitchen gadgets. But we have another gadget planned already. I need to do some more research on that one. I'll keep you posted.

Orange you glad you've got a BlendTec blender?

A couple of days ago I was gloating over my good fortune to have neighbors who have more oranges than they can use. In one of my comments I said that we'd probably try using the Whole Juice setting of the BlendTec Blender to see if juice made by the blender would be any good.

It wasn't.

We threw in the peeled oranges and blended away. What came out was a thick, frothy, slightly bitter juice. I'm sure it was more nutritious than juice that doesn't include all of the orange (minus the rind). But it was bitter from all the pith from the rind that stuck to the segments.

Anybody out there who is lucky enough to have a BlendTec Blender should not waste any oranges this way.

I'm one who tries not to waste good food so I put the leftover juice in the refrigerator to have with my breakfast this morning. I didn't have juice, I had a chilled orange souffle. All the pectin in the membranes did its job and turned the juice into a semisolid.



The rest of the oranges will be juiced in the traditional manner.