Cranberries popping, Field Roast, Thanksgiving.

I am Thanksgiving. I made cheer. I seized power. I created cranberry sauce, and it tastes and looks and feels exactly like cranberry sauce.

It was very easy to make. I had, let's see, probably about a half-pound of cranberries (fresh cranberries from the co-op). A little bit of orange juice. An apple (Golden Delicious, from the co-op). Sugar. Nutmeg. Cloves.

You heat the cranberries in a pan (cast-iron skillet in my case).


When they start to pop (literally, you will hear them pop and see them splitting - watch....),

add sugar (you will need a lot, so just add some and then as it's cooking, keep tasting and adding more if needed), nutmeg (a little), a few cloves, the apple - diced very small (I used 3/4 of the apple), and splash on some orange juice (I used a very small amount of orange juice; just remember what consistency you want to end up with, kind of gelatinous; you will also probably add more orange juice little by little as it cooks).




Once the cranberries have started to pop, you don't want to cook them any longer than 15 minutes, or the pectin will break down in a bad way and it won't set properly. So add these ingredients, stir it up, start tasting the juices and adding sugar as needed, add a little more orange juice now and then if it's dry and it hasn't cooked for about 15 minutes yet.



When it's sweet and the apples and cranberries are soft and it's getting a little gelatinous, turn off the heat, put foil over the pan and let it sit in the steam and the fruit will continue to soften and the gel will firm up a little. Then you can put it in a bowl and put it in the fridge if you want to serve it cold. Make sure you taste it as it is cooking, so you get it the right sweetness. After you set the cranberry sauce aside, heat up some leftover vegan Field Roast, potatoes, sweet potatoes and asparagus, and throw it on a plate with your homemade cranberry sauce and some apple sauce. Mashed potatoes and gravy would also be a great option. Sweet corn. Green bean casserole. Pumpkin pie. I had a brownie for dessert. :)


Does it look perfect?! And it tastes perfect, refreshing, sweet but not too sweet, gelatinous, the whole nine yards. Wish I had more sweet potatoes, is all. Mmm, can't get over this cranberry sauce.

Fruity Thursday

There is so much fruit in my house right now.

Thursday Shopping List

1 pint blueberries

1 pint blackberries

1 pint raspberries

6 peaches

6 green apples

1 lb. baby spinach

1 bunch curly kale

1 bunch mustard greens

1 quart green beans

3 ears bi-color sweet corn

6 tomatoes

Total: about $30 (berries are pricey but worth it)

The apples are perfect. I don't remember seeing these last year. They're smallish and green. They are very crisp, both in texture and taste. They have a tartness but are not at all sour and with a sweetness to balance it out. They seem like they would be great for pies. Now I just need to try actually baking a pie. I got them from Fahnestock Fruit Farm, the same people I get the peaches and tomatoes from.

I got the mustard greens specifically to try roasting them, as I usually do with kale. I made a bunch of roasted kale and mustard greens when I got home, and there wasn't much difference between the two, except the mustard greens had more of a bite to them. I think this makes them slightly superior for roasting. Again, here's how you roast greens: coat them with olive oil, sprinkle liberally with sea salt, place in a cast iron pan and into an oven preheated to 350, for 30-35 minutes. Greens should be browned (actually, I like to blacken them a little bit) and super-crisp and dry, like very thin, green, misshapen potato chips.

Incidentally they're great for a hangover.

Pancakes with Apple Syrup

buckwheat pancake mix
2 Tablespoons of ground flaxseed
soymilk (or rice milke, etc.)
a small amount of water
cooking oil
apple syrup

I don't know if this is a bona fide recipe, as one of the ingredients is pancake mix. But here's what I had for a delicious Sunday afternoon breakfast.

Put your skillet over medium to high heat, add a little olive oil, spread it around, and let the skillet get hot. My new cast iron skillet is perfect for this.

I started with Arrowhead Mills Buckwheat Pancake Mix. Maybe a cup of that (I didn't measure, just eyeballed it).

Added enough soy milk to mix it up but kept it thick and goopy because I still had another wet ingredient to add.


In a separate, small dish, put about 2 Tablespoons of ground flaxseed (a good source of fat and protein) and add cold water. Let this sit for a couple of minutes. The flaxseed will absorb the water and take on a slightly gooey consistency, similar to a raw egg. That's going to serve the function that people sometimes use chicken eggs for in recipes.

Add this mixture to the mix, and you're ready to fry your pancakes.

I always butcher the first one, even if I've let my skillet get hot. Be sure the cooking surface is hot and ready to sizzle before you pour the batter. When the pancakes start to bubble on top, slide your spatula under to make sure it's not sticking. Be gentle. When you're confident it's not stuck to the skillet, flip it over.

My first two were messy but the second two were beautiful.


Enjoy with your favorite syrup. I used my apple syrup, made right here in PA and bought at the Clark Park Farmers' Market.

Saturday: purple kale, mushrooms, and winter apples

Got to the market late today, not until after one o'clock. My sleeping has been a little off, due to training institute getting underway this week, and the wave of excitement and anxiety that came with it. I got my practice teaching assignment and started to practice the daily routines that will become familiar to me over the next four weeks. Early morning, trolley, subway, walking a few blocks in my old neighborhood, checking in at the principal's office, taking a tiny elevator up to the fourth floor. Then, after a day in the classroom, taking the subway north to gather in a hot, second-floor high school classroom for framework sessions with other new teachers like me. I did not really meet, but sort of briefly glimpsed, some of the students who will be kind of my students over the next four weeks. They're not mine for keeps. I'll meet those students in February and they'll be mine until June. I don't know where they'll be, what age, or what they'll need. All of these questions require good nutrition to gather and answer. Which brings us to this sunny, cold Saturday.

Saturday Shopping List

Several bunches of purple and green curly kale
A paper sack full of carrots - orange, purple, and white
4 big yellow onions and 2 small shallot-sized yellow onions
About a quart of white mushrooms
1 Portobello cap
3 sweet-tart apples
a 12-oz. jar of apple syrup
a 23-oz. jar of apple sauce

total: $25.40

No one had any leeks, but I still have one from last week, for a soup. We are all stocked up on potatoes. We still have about half a head of cauliflower and a little broccoli. No one brings beans anymore. I guess the bean people have quit for the winter. The spice lady seems to have packed it in until spring as well. I need to find a place to get fennel seeds. That's how I flavor my breakfast mushroom scramble. That's the key ingredient that makes that breakfast taste like breakfast. We have beans, though. We were fairly well stocked on those. We have kidney beans, black beans, and red lentils. We do need to make a trip to Trader Joe's for flaxseed and tea, along with a few household basics like dishsoap.


One thing you'll find in abundance at the farmers' market in winter is apples, in various forms. One table has nothing but apples, apple cider, apple sauce, apple butter, and today for the first time, apple syrup. The lady says it's good on pancakes, just like any other syrup. We have buckwheat pancake mix. This may necessitate getting some rice milk or almond milk and making pancakes this week.



The kale in winter seems frail, less juicy. Maybe it's been frozen, I'm not sure. We buy it from a different person now. It's still curly kale, but it's more in a bunch or bouquet, rather than a "head" formation. And he has the dark purple kale you saw in the picture above.

When I got home, Mark was in the middle of juicing some carrots and kale (leftover from last week). I threw some purple kale into the mix, and when he ran it through the juicer, it gave off a sweet smell, almost like fruit. The resulting juice was the best-tasting juice we've made so far. It seemed to have mostly the flavor of carrots, rather than greens. The carrots were dark purple, and the dark purple kale I'm sure added some sweetness as well. That purple is good for you. The purple comes from flavonoids.

Here is how our juicer works, working on the kale:



So, what do we have to eat this week? The menu will probably shape up to look something like this:

potato-leek soup
lentil soup
bean and vegetable stew
mushroom hoagies
baked potatoes
fried potatoes with mushrooms and gravy
noodles with mushrooms
raw carrot snacks
carrot and kale juice
pasta with marinara and mushrooms
onion-pepper quinoa
buckwheat pancakes with apple syrup
oat bran
apple tarts

That's it for this week's groceries. Write me with any questions. Comment, bookmark, or otherwise follow the blog. And, as always, remember the animals. Have a great weekend!

The best dollar-fifty I ever spent: A pint of tomatillos

Imagine the taste of a raw green pepper mixed with a strawberry. That's how a raw tomatillo tastes.

I removed the skins of these three (save the skins for your soup stock), cut them in quarters and threw them into the skillet for the last two minutes to heat with my curried blue and white potatoes. Start by cooking the potatoes thoroughly with olive oil, onion, and salt. At the end, add the curry powder (don't be shy about it), and I added a little rosemary as well.

Then add the tomatillos. They taste so good raw, it nearly breaks your heart to cook them, so only add them at the end, give them a little heat and toss them around to coat them with the other flavors, but they've got plenty of flavor inside, so don't lose that.

We're going to have these with a breakfast sandwich. Most of the time, we don't have things like soy sausage (or any fake "meats") or tofu in the house. We do eat tofu hoagies from Fu-Wah probably at least once a week, but as a general rule, the kitchen is stocked with vegetables, grains, beans, and fruit, not manufactured nonsense. However. I've been craving these soy sausage on English muffin sandwiches like crazy lately.

We bought fennel seeds at the market today, so I embedded some of those into the Gimme Lean soy sausage patty. I also cooked some thin, thin slivers of portabella mushroom. This is all cooked in the olive oil with the leftover tastes from the curry potatoes and tomatillos.

We're going to slice a tomato to top this with and put it on a toasted white-wheat English muffin. As these are cooking, you've got the potatoes setting aside. When you take the soy sausage and mushrooms off the heat, throw the potatoes back on for a minute or two to reheat while you put the sandwich together.


I have to be someplace tomorrow at 9 am and I have to be there all day. So I'm going to bring some raw tomatillos for snacks (remember, they're high in Omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, so they're nice and filling), along with some raw carrots, maroon, orange, and white.

Right now, I've got a butternut squash and three apples baking in the oven with olive oil, cinnamon, and brown sugar. They're not for tonight. I'm going to make fried apples pies in the morning to take with me, and wrap the squash (stuffed with apple) in foil and bring that as well. I'm moving up in the world, I now have big, re-usable aluminum pans to bake in, rather than folded aluminum foil. One day, I'll own a casserole dish. I will.

Nor'easter weekend baked butternut with apple.

It looks a little like certain varieties of dulcimer. I could call it an Apple Dulcimer. At the end, I mush it up, though.

This is a butternut squash from the market this morning, stuffed with apple (I don't know if the apple is an Autumn Crisp or an Empire, I didn't keep them separated).

I cut it (carefully) in half, with my tiny knife. I need to buy a larger knife for baked squash season. Cut the squash in half, scoop out the seeds and pulp.

This pretty butternut squash is a good source of calcium and various vitamins. It doesn't even seem to know that, the dear little thing. It smells like a pumpkin.

After you scoop out the seeds and pulp, you're going to fill the empty bowls with apple, drizzle with olive oil & molasses and sprinkle with cinnamon & brown sugar.

You've been pre-heating the oven to 375 degrees. You're going to cover the two squash halves with aluminum foil or something and bake them for about an hour. Do something else while they bake, they'll remind you they're baking by filling your home with a wonderful, pumpkin-pie smell.


That's the squash before it goes into the oven. When a fork slides into it like it's butter, the squash is finished baking.

I added a little more molasses and brown sugar to mine, mashed up the squash and mixed the apple in with it. You could also eat it as shown at the top of this post, as a baked squash with a side of baked apple. Mine tasted like pumpkin pie with hints of apple pie.

Progressive Pumpkin Baked Squash

Ambercup Squash. Is what this is called, as I understand it.

So that no one else falls prey to not knowing about the Ambercup Squash (or pumpkin-like squash, as I've come to call it), here is a little guide to squash, which I found helpful. If you scroll down and look on the right, you'll see a picture of the little darling you see here to the left.

What we've done with it is we've cut it in two, with a puny little knife, which is what we have right now, so it looks a little hacked, but that shows the texture off better in a later picture, so that's OK. Cut it with a big, sharp knife if you have one (don't hurt yourself, for crying out loud), because it was really hard cutting it with the little one. Anyway. You don't put the apples in right away.

Just set those apples aside for now. You're going to fill the bowl of the squash with a little olive oil, molasses, and cinnamon (brown sugar, if you have that, I'm delaying going to the grocery store, so I am currently out).

Save the seeds and pulpy stuff. You can boil them down for stock for a light, squash-flavored soup (good with quinoa or rice, and corn). Nope. Seemed like a good idea, but it didn't work. We tried boiling these down as soup stock, it started stinking to high heaven, I thought the sink drain was backed up. I have no idea why that would happen. I'll have to look into this. (update, 10/8/09, 11:20 p.m.)


Cover each half with aluminum foil and bake at 350 for about half an hour. Then you're going to take it out, fill the bowls with the diced apples, drizzle with a bit more oil, molasses, sprinkle with whatever you like, whatever you have, cover it back up and bake for about another 30-40 minutes.


When a fork goes in smoothly and easily, it's done, eat it.

You've probably noticed that I talk about molasses a lot. That's because a.) it's a smoky sweet acquired taste that I have soundly acquired and b.) two tablespoons of it contains 20% of my "recommended daily value" of iron, of calcium, and of vitamin A. I don't even know what vitamin A does, but I'll take it. I know what iron and calcium do, those are good, at least plant-sources of them are good.

Keeping your bones strong depends more on preventing the loss of calcium from your body than on boosting your calcium intake.

Some cultures consume few or no dairy products and typically ingest fewer than 500 milligrams of calcium per day. However, these people generally have low rates of osteoporosis. Many scientists believe that exercise and other factors have more to do with osteoporosis than calcium intake does.

Use molasses liberally. (Progressively, even.)