Category: Odd Bits

Adventures in Cooking

February has been a crazy month, with various events prompting me to look more into preparing various food stuffs from scratch rather than buying them from the store. I started with bread last month, finally getting to the point this month where they don’t deflate like a spent balloon in the oven. For those bread loaves less than perfect, I found a use for them as breading for home made stuffing mix. Waste not, want not, as they say. Finally satisfied with the results, I decided to move onto home made saltine crackers.

I’ve been making soup for quite some time now, but what’s soup without a few crackers? I went to the following website: https://www.servedfromscratch.com/saltines-from-scratch/. I used cake flour and since I didn’t have any vegetable oil, I substituted lard. The resulting dough was difficult to work with, especially after leaving it in the fridge overnight like the web-site suggested. Using a rolling pin just didn’t get it as flat as it looked in the pictures, never mind getting the nice, neat squares she showed. After baking them in the oven, this is what I wound up with. Those little suckers would just not compress.

Saltines-first try
My first attempt at home-made saltine crackers

Hmmm, definitely not nice flat crackers! However, they did taste like saltines, and were actually quite good, so I figured I was headed in the right direction. It’s possible the measurements given weren’t quite accurate or maybe using lard instead of oil affected it.

So, I tried a different recipe. This one is from Homemade Saltine Crackers – The Mountain Kitchen . It has fewer ingredients, uses unbleached flour instead of cake flour and doesn’t have the overnight resting time in the fridge which the previous recipe suggested. One ingredient was 7 tablespoons of water, but I found I needed to add a few extra tablespoons to make the dough more workable. The dough ball flattened out much better under the rolling pin. After cutting out roughly square shapes and using a fork to make the classic indents, I basted them with butter and added Celtic Sea salt to the tops. After baking, I achieved the result below.

second try of saltines
Results of the second try at home-make saltines

This effort was much better and had a good flavor. I may experiment with a few more variations before settling on a favorite. Since I only use crackers intermittently, I had run into the problem with store-bought crackers going stale before I used them up. Home baking allows me to make small batches as needed. I haven’t tried assessing the cost of making these but I’m sure it’s more economical than buying the store brand and ending up wasting some because I didn’t use them up quick enough.

Hope this inspires any readers to make their own stab at home cooking.

Have a safe and happy March.

Cooking stuff

Year’s End: Food For Thought


Now that the year is nearly out, the Christmas bacchanalia has receded, so things are quieting down. New Years usually doesn’t get celebrated by me. I gave up on watching the ball drop in Time’s Square years ago as I found getting a good night’s sleep more desirable. With the Winter Solstice past and the chill this time of year settling in, I find myself thinking more about food.

Cooking stuff

I like cooking from scratch, something I took up when my late mother began having too much difficulty moving about. It tastes far better than prepared foods since I can make meals from fresh ingredients without all the additives which make commercial foods questionable.

The old Rival crock-pot which my mother rarely used, though a bit beat, still works and get a lot of use making soup stock, so much so that I never buy commercial soups anymore.

Rival crock pot

Making stock (or broth, I’m not sure on which to call it) is astonishingly simple. Just save up bones and skin from poultry, beef or pork. I use a zip-lock freezer bag. When I have enough collected, I thaw and place in the crock-pot along with some chopped onion and celery, add water until it’s just barely covered then turn on the pot. It has a low and high setting so I use the high setting to start with. When it reaches a simmer, I turn it to low and just leave it. Four hours for poultry, six or so for beef or pork. For bone broth, simmer for at least 24 hours with beef bones or ox-tail. Be sure your meat is of good quality.

Some people may express concern about the fat content of poultry skin or bones but if you get meat from pastured animals rather than battery raised, the fat profile is far more healthy and should not be a matter of concern for you. Fat has been demonized for so long that it’s hard to get across that it’s not the enemy. Locally produced meat, which I have access to, has far less to travel and if you have a farmer’s market near you, you can become acquainted with the farmers who raise these animals. Healthy animals translate into healthy meals for you.

Years ago, I made loaves of whole wheat bread. The loaves came out dense and chewy but good. However in the press of work and looking after aging relatives, bread making fell by the wayside. Now with food prices looking to rise, I want to resume bread making. This time I will be looking to lighter bread, with some whole wheat but enough unbleached bread flour to make sandwich breads or rolls.

You-tube is an interesting source for bread recipes and methods of making loaves as I re-familiarize myself with bread-making. As with all their how-to videos, it’s a mixed bag with some just using it as a venue for showing themselves off. Others can’t seem to hold the camera completely steady, a non-starter as I am prone to motion-sickness so a herky-jerky video is pretty much unwatchable. But more than a few do a good job demonstrating their techniques.

Now which is the best technique for making a basic loaf of bread? Well, my come-away is that they all work. Some use bread-making machines but others do it by hand, which is my preference. It doesn’t seem to matter if you knead or don’t knead. Not kneading tends to give you a rougher more artisanal type loaf, while kneading and shaping produces the traditional rectangular loaf. Ingredients may vary but basically are wheat flour, salt, sugar or honey and yeast. Sourdough can get a good rise without yeast but maintaining the sourdough starter is more work than what I want.

So, once I settle on a good recipe, I will begin baking and with any luck add to my repertoire of recipes.

bread loaf goal

Happy New Year!

Tail End of November

It’s amazing how fast this month has come and gone. So much has been happening, it’s hard not to be left a little dizzy by it all. A Thanksgiving Day storm allowed only one of my brothers to come for dinner. It was a quiet meal as we avoided politics and stuck to mundane topics like odd family relatives, cat hijinks and how easy it really is to replace the battery in a watch.

The weather in the earlier part of the month was mild enough to I was able to snap this picture in mid-November of a dandelion plant, near the edge of the road, sprouting a pair of bright yellow flowers.

dandelions in November

There have been enough frost so that it’s unlikely pollinators will be visiting these blossoms. But dandelions are rugged little beings. If they could talk, they would say “We don’t need no stinking pollinators.” They can self fertilize and set seed. The seeds can lie dormant in the soil for up to five years before sprouting. The plant can re-sprout from bits of small taproot left in the ground. No matter what you do to them, they can bounce back from any blow.

Now there’s snow staying on the ground so winter is here, at least for now. But take a lesson from the dandelion. It’s possible to bounce back from anything. If a lowly weed can do it, so can we.

Peace and long life.

Columbia, Spirit of Liberty

Spring Equinox Tidbits

Well, last month the main topic was the abnormally warm weather we’ve had this past winter. That continued to be the case right through March up to and a bit past the Spring Equinox. Then this past Saturday, winter decided to take one last whack at us. Beginning early in the morning, a fine snow began falling at a great clip, rapidly accumulating. Weather forecasters had already put out the winter storm warning so I was stocked up grocery-wise in case I was snowed in. There had been a snow-fall several days before of about four inches.

By the time the snow had tapered off Sunday morning, there was sixteen inches of fresh snow on the ground on top of what we already had. Some places got as much as two feet. In all, I think we got more snow the first week of spring than fell all winter. Global wierding indeed.

Robins must listen to the weather forecast as they showed up in the front yard, the day before the storm, filling themselves up on berries from my two hawthorn trees, dislodging some cedar waxwings which had begun to feed.

Robin in winter plumage

The robins still had their winter plumage, which consists a large white patch at the base of their tails, spreading up to their abdomens, giving them the look of wearing their long undies. Being larger than the waxwings, they dominated the trees, though a few pine siskins and a house finch managed to sneak in a few bites.

Several weeks prior to this, I saw several small flocks of geese migrating overhead on their way back north. Thanks to the mild winter, there is open water for them to land on when they stop to rest. Lake Winnipesauki had ice-out declared on March 17, beating the old record of March 18 set back in 2016. Never mind what the calendar says, spring seems to be coming earlier every year. To add to the wierdness, Easter falls on the last day of the month with April Fools Day coming the very next day.

Now the weather has warmed above freezing again, melting away the snow. It should be mostly gone by Easter, just over a week after it dumped on us. A solar eclipse will be happening on April 8, but given how mercurial the weather is here, it may be cloudy when it happens. What next?

Giant rampaging kaiju rabbit

Well, here’s to hoping April won’t be too crazy. Have a happy Easter.

February Holidays

At the beginning of each month I use Open Office to create a calendar day for that month which gets stuck on the fridge. The Drawing program is the best one for building a month. I insert a picture, usually a humorous one, near the top, then using the Insert Table function, I create a table for putting in the days and weeks of the month.

Calendar page for January

I then mark in some holidays of the month while leaving other days open so I can note appointments and other events on them.

For February, there’s Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day. Groundhog’s Day (February 2nd) is an odd holiday which we inherited from the Pennsylvania Germans who emigrated here back in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The notion was that if the groundhog (we call them woodchucks here on the US east coast) comes out of his burrow and spots his shadow on this day he will return to his hole to hibernate another six weeks, while no shadow meant an early spring. The fact that there are precisely six weeks between February 2 and the Spring Equinox, irregardless of whether or not the weather is clear doesn’t seem to matter. That is apparently beside the point. It’s an excuse for a small group of men to dress up in formal wear and drag out some poor woodchuck and hold him up the waiting cameras.

Groundhog Day

February 2nd is also known as Candlemas, a Christian feast day celebrating the presentation of Jesus at the Temple purportedly 40 days after his birth. It is also called Imbolc or Saint Bridget’s Day although traditionally that is actually celebrated the day before. The origins of Imbolc are a little more uncertain than Candlemas but it seems to go back to early Medieval times.

February 14th is Valentine’s Day, also a Christian holiday commemorating the martyrdom of Saint Valentine. There were apparently several men named Valentine, dating back to late Roman times. The custom of giving flowers, sweets and other gifts seems to have originated in Britain. In Slovenia Saint Valentine was the patron of spring, good health as well as of beekeepers and pilgrims. This sounds far more benign than the current commercialized bacchanalia of chocolates that cram store shelves around this time, soon to be displaced by the avalanche of sugar poured out in celebration of Easter and Mother’s Day. Small wonder we’re all turning into diabetics.

Valentine's Day Heart

There are a few lesser holidays such as President’s Day, celebrated on the third Monday of the month. If you do a Google seach, you’ll discover a plethora of holidays for each day of February: Carrot Cake Day, National Homemade Soup Day, National Peppermint Patty Day and so forth. Who comes up with these and more importantly why?

I prefer to keep it simple. Celebrate the birth of Saint Bridget, light a candle to her. Celebrate Saint Valentine’s Day the Slovenic way with perhaps little displays honoring good health, the spring to come and yes even beekeepers everywhere. Don’t forget to eat a bit of chocolate in their honor.

Happy Curmudgeon’s Day!

Great grandmother Labonte