Cheap & Cheerful Suppers: Late-January Garden Harvesting

Friday

Friday

homemade pepperoni and mushroom pizza (using the end of the Costco mushrooms)

crabapple-applesauce (homegrown crabapples turned into sauce mixed with commercial applesauce)

mashed winter squash

Saturday (just 2 of us at home, so I made an easy meal)

chicken breast diced and cooked with canned tomatoes, onions, garlic, and herbs

brown rice

frozen broccoli

Sunday

Sunday

bean burritos, made with scratch flour tortillas and home-cooked, sprouted pinto beans

canned carrots

Monday

Monday

pot roast, potato wedges and gravy

honey-mustard glazed carrots

garden fresh kale and homegrown sprout salad

crabapple-applesauce

Tuesday

Tuesday

ham and eggs

garden fresh kale, sprout and cranberry salad

roasted pumpkin cubes

leftover potatoes and gravy

Wednesday

Wednesday

split pea, leafy green (frozen carrot greens, frozen celery leaves) and ham soup

dinner rolls (scratch, leftover from New Years and kept in the freezer)

canned pineapple

Thursday

Thursday

teriyaki chicken thighs with garden fresh Brussel sprout leaves and frozen turnip stem pieces

brown rice

Another week of dinners cooked at home. Not only does cooking at home save money, but I've grown to really prefer my own cooking. I can make foods exactly as we need them to be cooked, omitting ingredients that one or more of us can't eat while bumping up the vegetable content. Having a tummy that feels good after a meal is worth more than the leisure of meals out.

I'm trying something new. I'm sprouting dried pinto beans before cooking them up. I only sprout until they have tiny "tails". I've read that beans may be more digestible if sprouted before cooking. This was the first week I'd sprouted pintos for cooking, so I'm not sure if I can say whether or not they're more digestible. I'll be doing this once per week and see what I think over time.

Our garden is producing some leafy greens for us right now. If the weather doesn't turn horribly frozen, we should be able to harvest some greens several days per week for a few weeks.  We have mache, 2 kinds of kale, and Brussel sprout greens producing. In addition, the chives are coming up in a pot I put on the deck. Some years are like this, where we can harvest from the garden beginning in January.  

On the bad news side, we found some tiny bugs in the brown rice container. These are teeny, tiny bugs, small enough to fall through the mesh of a sieve. So, in addition to storing all of the brown rice in the deep freeze, we're also rinsing and straining the rice before cooking. I rinse about 3 times in a bowl of water, about until the final rinse has virtually no tiny bugs. A few bugs won't harm us, right? We'll be eating brown rice more often to try and use this up soon.

That's about it for our meals this week. What was on your menu?

Have a great weekend, friends!

Baking Soda Got Lumps?

As I've mentioned before, I use a combo of baking soda and vinegar in place of baking powder. I also sometimes use baking soda with cream of tartar when needing a dry version. And of course, I have several recipes that call for baking soda itself. I find myself using baking soda several times each week.

While I love how simply effective baking soda is in baking, it does have one drawback, lumps. Those pesky little lumps can be small enough to miss by sight but will show up in the finished product, lending an off taste to a bite of cookie or muffin. I've been asked a couple of times how I prevent these lumps, especially in cookie dough. 

There are 2 ways I've dealt with soda lumps. One option, I mix together butter, sugar, and soda in the initial step of any cookie recipe that calls for creaming butter and sugar before adding other ingredients. This little trick works well in cookie dough. My other method for handling soda lumps in batters and doughs is to use this small tea strainer. I add baking soda directly through the strainer, pressing any lumpy bits through the mesh.

I've been gifted many tea straining devices and tools over the years. I decided to dedicate this particular one to baking soda. Because I now only use the strainer on soda, I don't wash it after use, but instead I simply shake and tap it (mostly) clean afterward. And it's small enough to squeezes in alongside the container of baking soda in my cupboard.

So that's my little trick for dealing with lumps in baking soda.