Cooking in Summer

Summer is rapidly approaching, unless that week of very hot was it; in that case, fall is rapidly approaching! I think, though, that we'll get more summer soon enough.

I don't like cooking much in summer because my apartment gets hot quickly and cools off slowly, and turning the oven on is not helpful. I have the stovetop, microwave, toaster oven, and air fryer to help (the air fryer is new; it was a Christmas present). Still, I prefer not cooking much.

The normal plan is to have things cooked and ready to be heated up or added to salads or something simple like that. 

The challenge right now is that the freezer is full. Some of it is for the kids (frozen juice boxes and treats for Sunday School and parties; as a side note, the fridge has a case of pop for the kids as well). Some of it is about 20 cups of rhubarb, several small bags of partly cooked potatoes (to be spiced and thrown in the air fryer), and some of it is just stuff: bread, meat, large bags of frozen fruit, general stuff that can be found in the freezer. Also, I don't have a deep freeze in my apartment, just the fridge freezer.

So cooking ahead, beyond what is already done and in the freezer, is out for now. 

On the other hand, it's still cool enough to cook regularly. Today I made a stir fry for this week's lunches. It was beautiful: yellow bell peppers, orange carrots, red onion, green celery and tomatillos, and white mushrooms and chicken. I've been trying to eat vegetables regularly and I love the variety of taste and colour. Pretty food makes eating even more enjoyable.

For summer....well, we'll see. I tend to rely on salads, anything that can be cooked in the toaster over or air fryer (the benefit of living alone is that I only need to cook one serving at a time), and maybe more stir frys. Basically, easy and not too much extra heat in the apartment. 

Barley Bowls

In my on-going search for inexpensive, healthy, tasty meals, I stumbled upon barley bowls. There are piles of recipes online for pretty much any taste. I sometimes us a "proper" recipe for breakfast and lunch barley bowls, including a grilled chicken barley bowl, a barley salad with lemon dressing, or an apple-walnut barley breakfast bowl. I haven't tried the carrot cake one just yet, nor have I tried "overnight barley" (just like overnight oats, another favourite of mine).

Often, though, I just make "whatever-I-have-on-hand" barley bowls. It's pretty much a mix of barley, vegetables, some form of protein, and a dressing. I make enough to last 3-4 days and can either warm it up or eat it cold.

Today's barley bowl recipe:

1. Cook 1 cup of barley in 3 cups of water and a pinch of salt. Bring it to a boil, turn it down and simmer until you can't hear it bubbling. It's about 30-45 minutes, depending on the type of barley.

2. While it cooks, peel and chop the cucumber that's been in the fridge for a couple weeks (the peeling part is only because the peel looks less lovely, but the inside is fine). Also chop up 3 green onions and a red pepper.

3. Earlier in the day, take 3/4 cup of corn and 3/4 cup blueberries out of the freezer so they have time to thaw.

4. Find the leftover already cooked pork stir fry meat and chop it up a bit.

5. Yay, the avocado is ripe! Chop that up too.

6. When the barley is cooked, add everything you've been chopping and thawing, and let it sit for a little while so everything warms up and the flavours merge nicely. 

7. Add some maple Dijon dressing (Dijon, maple syrup, lemon juice, seasonings, apple cider vinegar), and mix well.

8. Remove from heat, put some in a bowl, and enjoy!

Bonus: There is enough for at least 2 and maybe 3 more days. I may heat it or eat it cold; it really depends on my mood each day.

Also: I didn't thing time, but hard boiled eggs are also good in a barley bowl.

Turnips

Earlier this week I made a variation of shepherd's pie. It was actually cottage pie as I was using a ground beef/pork mix instead of ground lamb, but the only recipe that used turnips was for shepherd's pie, so that's where I started. I hadn't made either type of pie and I wanted some idea of how it should go together; also, I had turnips and carrots this week.

The recipe said that it feeds 6, but all it called for in terms of vegetables was one turnip and one parsnip, which did not seem enough.

Although I realized that I don't know how big a normal turnip is. I get my vegetables from the Odd Bunch, a company that rescues produce that isn't good enough to be sold (generally because of size, shape, or minor defects) or overstock. Since that's where my turnips came from, they might be smaller than normal. My only other knowledge of turnips is from Jan Brett's book The Turnip, and that turnip is bigger than any of the animals!

I added three turnips, one giant carrot, and three very small beets. It made enough for five servings and turned out very good.

I still don't know how big a turnip should be.

Cooking Lessons

I have been working on cooking a greater variety of food. I received an air fryer for Christmas, so I'm having fun with that. I also get a box of produce delivered once a week, and there are sometimes things I'm not as familiar with or that I've never cooked with (tomatillos, persimmons, squash). 

I've learned some things along the way:

Butternut squash is very good in soup. I don't generally like squash (it's a texture thing), but I like it cubed in soup. I may try roasting it and then blending it to make soup.

The carrot soup is good. I used a pile of carrots, a handful of tomatillos, half an onion, and a small red pepper, all cooked and blended together. It likely did not need the ginger, as the other spices would have been enough. It's a bit spicy, but not too bad.

Pretty much any vegetable can be turned into a stir fry if you try hard enough. I made an eggplant and choy mue stir fry with some pork strips that I had cooked in the air fryer and a couple packs of udon noodles. It was a pretty good stir fry.

Pretty much any fruit can become baked oatmeal. So far, I've made blueberry/apple, blueberry/banana, blueberry/rhubarb, plain blueberry, plain apple, and plain pear baked oatmeal. I haven't tried blueberry/pear yet.

Most leftover veggies can be made into soup. Some can be added to scrambled eggs or used to make an omelet. Other's can join a barley bowl or pasta sauce.

Most fruit makes a good smoothie. My basic "recipe" is milk, some sort of frozen fruit (or fresh, in the case of the persimmons and sometimes apples), and a frozen banana. I often add some combination of peanut butter powder, yogurt, and spinach. I might add some honey or maple syrup if I think it needs to be sweeter.

Having a mix of fruits and veggies has forced me to be creative and search out new recipes. I'm enjoying learning about new ways to cook things and trying new flavours.

Cooking

Cooking for one has challenges and benefits. The challenge is that I only know how to cook for 4-6 people, most recipes are for 4-6 people, and most ingredients come in large packages. The benefit is that I don't have to cook very often. I'm okay with leftovers and freezing meal-sized portions for later.

This is my busy time, so I have been cooking only on Wednesdays and Fridays, the two days that I'm home to cook. I realized, though, that my freezer is getting full, so now I'm only cooking on Wednesdays and eating leftovers from the freezer for part of the week.

I've been trying some different recipes. I have a subscription to a produce delivery service which means that I get a variety of fruits and vegetables each week. Today the box contained 3 baby bok choy, 4 apples, 2 pears, 2 bell peppers, 2 English cucumbers, a small container of tomatoes, 4 mandarins, a pomegranate, a head of lettuce, and an acorn squash. This is the box for one person and it's plenty for me. I still have onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and a bit of celery from previous weeks!

The squash has been coming regularly lately. I don't generally like the texture of squash. Zucchini and spaghetti squash are fine; all others feel wrong. Lately I've been trying, though, to like the squash, with mixed results.

One week the squash was zucchini, and I made zucchini marinara and it was so very good.

There were two weeks of kabocha squash, which was new to me. I tried stuffed squash one week and it was okay. Then I tried maple roasted squash and nope. It still has that squash texture. I ate it because it was all nutritious and stuff, but I probably won't try it again.

Now we're at acorn squash. I roasted one, mashed it up, and made acorn squash muffins. That works for me, although I'm going to try a different recipe. The one I used seems a bit dry and could use some spices to add flavor. I also roasted the squash seeds with a little oil and salt, and they taste quite good.

I have one more acorn squash to figure out. Will I roast it? Bake it? Make it into soup? Make more muffins (although I have some squashed acorn squash in the freezer as well now). I have no idea!

Next week is ham and bok choy stir fry (I also bought a good sized ham at the beginning of October and have a lot of that in the freezer). 

After that....it depends on what the box brings!

Ham

It is almost Easter, so ham was on sale. I got an almost eight pound ham on Saturday.

Today I cooked the ham. I also made fried potatoes with carrots, onions, and bell peppers. I ended up with enough dinner for 6 meals (based on the amount of potatoes and veggies).

I saved some ham to make fried ham and eggs for breakfast on Saturday.

I put enough in the fridge to make ham and pineapple on rice on Friday (enough for at least 4 meals and maybe more).

The bone and some bits are in a container in the freezer for future soup (several more meals).

And I have another container of ham in the freezer that can be made into sandwiches or a casserole or whatever I want at a later time (even more meals).

At a conservative count, that ham will help me make 21 meals.

It's a good thing I like ham!

New Recipe

I had some leftover ham and a can of pineapple chunks, so I looked for a recipe that used both of them. I ended up with a multitude of results from simple to way too complicated (I don't mind cooking, but I'm not interested in anything with twenty ingredients and three pages of steps to follow.) Eventually I found a very simple recipe and almost followed it.

It was basically ham, green onions, and pineapple chunks. The sauce was pineapple juice, cider vinegar, brown sugar, mustard, and corn starch.

I didn't have any green onions, so I used the bit of red onion I had in the fridge. 

I didn't have enough pineapple juice but I just adjusted the amounts on the sauce and had less of it. That worked well, actually, because the picture in the recipe had a lot of sauce and I was just as happy with less sauce.

I didn't have enough pineapple (as with the juice, it's simply that I only had one small tin of pineapple), but that was okay because I had most of a small bag of matchstick carrots that I added.

I don't have any cider vinegar; instead, I used some red wine vinegar.

That's only 4 changes (and one was just a reduction in the amount of sauce so it barely counts). I think it still counts as the same recipe!

At any rate, I made some rice to go with it and it turned out to be a very good meal. I have enough leftovers for tomorrow and three individual meal-sized containers in the freezer. It's definitely something I will make again when I have leftover ham.

Trying New Recipes

In my quest to be more healthy, I've been trying new recipes. Happily, the internet is full of recipes that claim to be some combination of healthy, cheap, and easy. Although sometimes we have differing definitions of "easy" and anything that requires fish is not going to be cheap! At any rate, it's been fun trying new foods with various degrees of success.

The Stuffed Peppers were pretty good, but next time I'm either going to use fresh chopped tomatoes with some Italian seasoning instead of the canned ones or I'll get the canned ones that are seasoned. And rather than order peppers in my regular online grocery order, I'll go to the store and buy them so I can make sure they are big enough!

The Modern Tuna Casserole was a bust. It wasn't terrible and I didn't mind eating it, but lacked flavour. I guess I could fix it by adding more spices of some sort.

Caramelized Beef with Rice was good, but I think if I make it again, I'll cut back on some of the seasoning.

Saucy Tomato Pork Chops were good and I'd make them again, but I have two other pork chop recipes that I still want to try!

This week was a very "chicken" week because chicken breasts were on sale. I had Chicken Strawberry Spinach Salad (very good); Chicken Stir-Fry (also good, although I changed up the veggies a bit); and Pineapple BBQ Baked Chicken Foil Packets (such perfectly moist chicken; it was amazing).

This week's meals were very good, but I think I'm going to take a little break from chicken next week and try some other sources of proteins! 

It Made Me Laugh

Okay, you have to go and read this:
Boys in the Kitchen

Be sure to check out the recipe for carrot sticks.

Jam

This fall I decided to learn how to make jam with varied results. I'm done with jam making (I'm almost out of jars and need the last few for apple sauce) so here's how it went:

Strawberry jam: was renamed "strawberry sauce" for it's refusal to set. Later, though, I learned that after it had been in the fridge for a while it acted more like jam; Mum told me I had made "soft jam." It's good on toast.

Blueberry jam: most of it is also "soft jam" but still very good. I love blueberry jam!

Mint jelly: was only made because I grew mint on my balcony and needed to do something with it! It's pretty and seems to have set okay but I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it!

Raspberry jam: I found the easiest recipe and it worked like a charm. I haven't tried it yet, but it smelled good and it looks good.

Peach jam: was an interesting experience. I didn't have quite enough peaches for any of the recipes so I had to guess at the amount of sugar to use. I think I used too much (because with too little it doesn't set so I was worried about cutting back too much) so it's sweet and somewhat sticky. It's good, though, and I would make it all the time just for the smell of cooking peaches. Plus, peach jam is so pretty!

That was my end of summer fun. I really like making jam and I like eating homemade jam! Plus, all the jars sealed nicely much to my delight!

This One's Really for Patty

I present to you: Monkey Bread

Start with:

1 tsp granulated sugar
1/2 cup lukewarm water
1 pkg (1 tbsp) yeast

In a large bowl, disolve the sugar in water and sprinkle the yeast on top; let it stand for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile scald:

1 cup milk
1/2 cup butter

until the butter is melted; cool to luke warm. Mix the yeast briskly with a fork and add the milk/butter. To this add:

1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
3 eggs, beaten
3 cups all-purpose flour

Beat well. Gradually add more flour (up to another 2 1/2 cups, but not necessarily that much) to make a soft dough. Knead it well and place it in a greased bowl, turning the bread to grease the top as well. Let the bread rise until doubled (about 1-1 1/2 hours).

Punch down the dough and roll it out to about 1/2" thickness. Cut it into 2" squares (more or less; it doesn't matter if it isn't perfect). Melt 1/2 cup butter and dip squares into the butter; arrange them in a 10" (4 L) tube pan. Cover and let it rise again until doubled (about 1 hour).

Cook at 375 for 45 minutes.

Rip pieces off and enjoy!