Karl’s Muesli

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. I’ve had blog fright: I felt like what ever I put up here had to be spectacular. In other words, “blog worthy”. And I’ve been busy! Cut me some slack people, I’ve been planning a wedding! I’ve also started a food and nutrition book club since my last post. I’ve been reading a lot more. But enough with my excuses. I promise to blog more frequently – on my food experiments or anything else I find interesting. Maybe even my books!

So Karl’s favorite breakfast – Quaker Simple Harvest – disappeared from store shelves a few months ago. It was a great product. Instead of the packets of powdery, instant oatmeal with tons of sugar and fake fruit pieces you normally see, it had whole rolled oats, nuts, real fruit, and less sugar. Not sure if it was discontinued or what, but Karl was in a bind. He is a man of routine. He can eat the same thing every day for years. Really. He’s been eating a CostCo frozen bean burrito, a Stonyfield Farm yogurt, and an apple for lunch every day since 2003. I try to tell him that variety is the spice of life and that he might be missing out on some key nutrients, but he likes his lunch.

So he was at a loss at what to eat for breakfast. He tried cereal, but he went through too many boxes and it got expensive. Also, none of the brands he was buying met my nutrition standards and the ones that did “tasted like cardboard.” Sheesh. I like wheat twigs and kamut puffs. I told him he should make his own granola, but it’s hard to find a recipe without loads of either fat or sugar. So he created his own muesli recipe! Such a problem solver : )

First, let me ask, how does one pronounce muesli? “Muse-lee”? “Muse-lie”? We still haven’t figured it out. Whatever the pronunciation, it’s my new favorite breakfast. We start with a base of toasted rolled oats. We buy the huge canister and toast the oats in batches in a rimmed cookie sheet. Bake for 300 degrees until they’re crispy and a shade darker. It will smell nice too. He then adds dried fruit, chopped nuts, coconut, and a handful of dark mini chocolate chips. He makes it with different fruit and nuts each time which is comforting to me. At least he’s getting some variety with breakfast!

It’s important to note: store in an airtight container. Our first batch got really stale. We now own two tall, airtight cereal containers with pour spouts. Karl likes to eat his with low-fat lactose-free milk. I add water and nuke mine. It doesn’t get creamy like regular oatmeal – more like mush. I think it has something to do with the toasting. It changes the oat starches. Still tasty though!

Maybe his burritos will be discontinued next. I would love to see his solution for that!

Camp cuisine

Karl and I went to West Virginia on a mini-camping trip this past weekend. Normally, we go camping for two nights at the beach during the summer. We’re pros at summer camping – what do you need besides food, a tent, a swimsuit, and beer? It’s light outside until bedtime. But, due to my intense aversion to mosquitoes, we’ve been experimenting with fall camping. We were cocky last fall and drove to Pennsylvania on the coldest weekend since March with an air mattress and a bunch of blankets. Sleeping on an air mattress is like sleeping on an icy, cold cloud. No amount of blankets will keep you warm. We shivered through the night and didn’t sleep a wink. We hiked the next day and drove home. We learned our lesson though and invested in some new fall camping equipment: zero-degree mummy bags and tent pads.

We’ve been slowly accumulating the rest of our camping equipment over the years. We have a really nice, two-burner camp stove, a fold-up skillet and two lightweight saucepans that we use for the most important part of camping: eating! I love coming up with “camp-friendly” recipes. Dehydrated meals? How boring! Hot dogs on a stick? Gross! I’ll bring my spice rack, half the pantry, and two coolers for one weekend over traditional camping food any day. This time however, I wanted to go a bit more low key. We were only going for one night and it was just the two of us. No need for the big cooler. So, I came up with a menu that required no refrigeration.

First up? Saturday lunch. We ate at a restaurant in quaint Seneca Rocks when we arrived. That meal doesn’t really count, but it’s worth a mention because of what we ordered. Never order the “vegetable appetizer platter” in West Virginia. Heaping piles of greasy, deep-fried zucchini, mozzarella sticks, and cheddar-dipped cauliflower florets. The server gave us a weird look when she came pack for the plate and saw we had only eaten the insides of our appetizer. Only the vegetable-shaped, deep-fried batter “exoskeletons” remained.

"Vegetables"

The remains

After burning off our lunch hiking to the top of Seneca Rocks, we drove to the campground to set up camp and start dinner. On the menu: white chili with grilled onions and skillet cornbread. I was in the mood for chili and Karl felt like stew so we compromised. The white chili was a snap:

"White" chili

Garnish

•    1 jar of salsa verde
•    1 can of diced tomatoes
•    1 can of corn
•    1 can of white beans
•    chicken broth
•    cumin
•    coriander
•    oregano
•    garnish with avocado and lime

Not the freshest meal I’ve ever made, but hearty and healthier than your average camp fare. The avocado and lime were a nice touch (so were the Fritos Karl snuck in from town). The skillet cornbread was a good idea that was poorly executed. I’m a huge fan of those corn cakes you get at Tex Mex restaurants. That’s the idea I was going for. I used just a box of Jiffy corn muffin mix and a can of creamed corn. At 50 cents a box, you can beat Jiffy. But after taking a peek at the ingredients list, I’ll ever buy it again. It’s fully of chemical and hydrogenated oils. I accidentally left the corn cake on the fire too long and ended up with a corn Frisbee. We picked at it before have some fun with it and throwing it around camp.

Just like a frisbee

I amaze myself sometimes...

Breakfast was a keeper recipe. I made just-add-water whole wheat pancakes with oat bran and bananas. No eggs or oil. The night before we left, I mixed the following in a large baggie:

Just-add-water pancakes

•    1 cup all purpose flour
•    2 cups whole wheat flour
•    ¾ cup oat bran
•    ¼ cup ground flaxseed
•    ¾ cup dry milk
•    1/3 cup sugar
•    1 teaspoon salt
•    1 tablespoon baking powder

The pancakes were so good, I woke up a little early this morning to make them again before work. Yeah, really.

Overall, it was a successful camping weekend, both for comfort and eating. But we did discover one drawback to not bringing a cooler: warm beer and no place for leftovers! Some raccoon out there is enjoying a feast of chili and a cornbread frisbee!

Happy Oktoberfest!

I had big plans this weekend. It’s Oktoberfest, and while I have never been, I wanted to celebrate by making beer and a nice German meal. I love good beer. While I spent many Saturdays in college drinking Miller Light from kegs and thinking it was delicious, as I get older and learn more about beer, the more I like darker, full-bodied, hand-crafted beers. My palate continues to evolve. I used to hate IPAs due to their bitterness. But, recently, I’ve started to appreciate their floral taste and I’ve been drinking them more often. Like all food, hand-crafted beer maintains more nutrients than heavily-processed, store-bought beer. Not that I am calling beer a health food, but like wine, there are benefits to drinking beer. Moderate beer drinking lowers your chance of stroke and heart disease and some beers have just as many polyphenols as red wine.

I went to a microbrew festival on Saturday and attended a seminar on making beer. I have helped Karl make two batches before. The first didn’t turn out, but the second, an English brown ale, was delicious. That was about three years ago. Funny story about that batch: I was still living in Boston and visiting Karl for the weekend. We spent the day making beer. I remember hearing from someone that if you fill the bottle too much, there is a risk it could explode. Imagine – a glass bottle so full of CO2 that it explodes and sends glass shards everywhere. A few days later, I was home alone, reading on the sofa. I hear “ping….glug, glug, glug.” Pure panic set in. All the bottles were in a box under the dining room table. I walked over and again, I hear “ping….glug, glug, glug.” I saw a puddle growing larger under the table. I had no idea what to do. I imagine letting the soggy box just sit there would not be good for the brand new laminate floors. So I did what anyone would have done: I put on two sweatshirts, a jacket, a ski cap, sunglasses, and scarf to protect my jugular, and I carefully moved all the bottles to the back porch. Of course Karl comes home right at that time and just about died laughing. I suppose I was a bit over-dramatic, but I was only protecting myself!

We were going to attempt batch number three this weekend. It’s a holiday ale and would be ready just in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas. However, Karl bought the kit a while ago and the brewing yeast was expired. After learning about the importance of good yeast in our seminar yesterday, I wasn’t about to risk it! We’ll order some more yeast and make beer next weekend. We still enjoyed an Oktoberfest feast though. My sauerkraut is ready – just in time! I bought bratwurst from the farmers’ market and small red potatoes. I braised the bratwurst in beer (naturally!), served them with sauerkraut, and made warm, German potato salad. One day I’ll make it to Munich (next year Natalie?), but until then, “Prost!”

Beer kit

It contains all the ingredients you need

Our Oktoberfest feast

Yogurt Success!

I did it! I made yogurt. After going to bed last night feeling defeated and disappointed, I woke up this morning to thick, creamy, tangy, homemade yogurt. I had a difficult time controlling the temperature yesterday, hence the negative outlook. I could not maintain 100-110 degrees, the magical bacteria-spawning range. In lieu of buying a thermometer, I used a meat thermometer to heat the milk to 185 degrees. Since our meat thermometer doesn’t go below 140 degrees, much to Karl’s dismay, I used our human thermometer to test the warm milk’s temperature. I wanted to buy a new thermometer, I really did. But it was $16 for a dinky, cheap one at Safeway and I am trying to budget for the wedding. I put a digital candy thermometer on the registry instead!

After heating a half gallon of organic 1% milk to 185 degrees, I let it cool for an hour. I then measured the temperature with the human thermometer and discovered that it doesn’t go above 110 degrees. It beeped at me, probably a warning to get to the hospital pronto because your fever is astronomically high. I waited another half hour and finally got a reading of 105 degrees. Perfect. I whisked four tablespoons of plain, non-fat yogurt into the warm milk and transferred it into two large, glass jars. I created an incubator on the kitchen counter with the ole crockpot. Before you reprimand me for using the crockpot again, I had what I thought was a brilliant plan. I figured if I lined it with towels on the “keep warm” setting and left the jars of milk uncovered, I could get below 140 degrees and into the 100-110 range. Nope. I probably fried my human thermometer by sticking it into the now hot milk too many times! “Beep! Beep! Beep!” every time I checked. I knew I couldn’t get it too hot (over 140) because then all that good bacteria would die. Karl wandered into the kitchen after hearing all the commotion (beeping, me swearing…) and improvised a new contraption. It somewhat resembled a rabbit trap.

Karl's a genius!

After balancing the two glass jars on a cooling rack on top of the crockpot and draping a towel over them, we managed to stabilize the temperature. But still, I worried that the milk had gotten too hot and I was going to wake up to a smelly, nasty mess again, which is why I didn’t leave myself much time this morning to finish the project! But, I woke up to creamy yogurt with a nice, thick layer of whey on top. When I realized I was successful, I raced into the bedroom and cut up an old pillowcase to line a colander. It was surprisingly thick already, even without adding the powdered milk that some of the recipes called for. I dumped the yogurt into the colander to drain the whey and I put the colander into a bowl to finish draining in the refrigerator. I went to work (late!) dreaming of a delicious afternoon snack. Well, I came home to a surprise – too much whey had drained off and I ended up with not Greek yogurt, but yogurt cheese! It’s wonderful spread on toast or straight from the bowl, but definitely not what I was expecting! Note to self: next time it does not need so much time to drain!

I’m relieved that my second attempt at yogurt well relatively well. It really is tasty yogurt and I feel good that we can cut back on all those little plastic yogurt containers. I might play around with new ways of keeping it warm (cooler with pitchers filled with hot water perhaps? That was one idea I’ve read). But, I did put an automatic yogurt maker on my registry too :p

Whey

Draining the whey

Yogurt Mishap

We eat a lot of yogurt in my house. I don’t eat a lot of other dairy – a little milk in my coffee, some high-quality cheese once in a while – but I’ve found that eating yogurt helps my seasonal allergies. Those probiotics are powerful! And Karl? He eats one Stoneyfield Farm yogurt cup a day in his lunch. He is addicted. Blueberry or strawberry every…single…day. I like to experiment with different brands and styles – always organic though. I’ve recently become obsessed with Greek yogurt. It has twice the protein and less sugar than regular yogurt. And even the non-fat is so rich and creamy!

Lately, I’ve been thinking about all those little yogurt cups in the trash/recycling everyday. And all the sugar and additives in store-bought yogurt – even the good stuff. Why not make yogurt myself? I’ve already been successful playing around with bacteria by making sauerkraut. And I know others who have made their own. Karl’s sister Rachael has a yogurt maker that sounded intriguing, and a Greek friend from grad school always made her own the old fashioned way – on the stove and then wrapped in a blanket to stay warm. After some research, I decided to kind of combine both methods. I was going to make yogurt in a crockpot!

My first try was a bust – a $4 half-gallon of organic 1% milk literally down the drain. And a stinky kitchen to boot. What went wrong? I was lazy and overconfident! I threw the milk in the crockpot, heated it on high for an hour, stirred in a few spoonfuls of plain yogurt, turned it to “keep warm” over night, and I expected magic to occur. After all the food science courses I’ve taken, I should know that a thermometer is a necessity in kitchen experiments! I should know better. I’m spoiled by the ease of “dump and stir” sauerkraut. After much more research today I discovered a few yogurt-making basics:

• The milk needs to reach 185 degrees. This changes the milk protein in a way that allows it to culture and firm up.
• After bringing the milk to 185 degrees and adding the culture (plain yogurt), it needs to stay at 110 degrees for at least six hours. This is the ideal temperature at which the bacteria multiply.

Duh. In my food science and dietetics courses, we learned about the “danger zone.”  Bacteria love the 40-140 degree temperature range. A good crockpot would never drop below 140  degrees. The bacteria didn’t have the chance to multiply, hence my smelly, sour milk. I feel silly. And determined to get it right! Stay tuned for more yogurt…

Laborious Labor Day

It was a very laborious Labor Day this year. I have started a tradition with Karl’s sisters of canning tomatoes on or around Labor Day weekend. This was our third year. I’ve become quite the canner in the past two years. Last year, in addition to tomatoes, I made and canned barbeque sauce, sweet-and-sour sauce, and two types of jam. I even put a pressure canner on my wedding registry! Next year, we’ll be able to can twice as much in half the time!

While making and canning jam is simple and not very time-consuming, tomatoes are another story. Canning tomatoes involves many hours in a kitchen, in the summer, with all the stove burners going. Hot, hot, hot. With jam, you just throw everything in a pot, boil, and pour in jars. Tomatoes need to be skinned, diced, and cooked before canning. Tomatoes also need more time in the water bath – 35 minutes for pints and 45 for quarts! We had three timers going at one point.

We canned 75 pounds this year – a record for us. We’ve become faster, but we’ve also become smarter: Karl’s sisters processed 2/3 of the tomatoes the day before! We have more jars, bigger pots, and better tools, although we still use an aluminum pie plate with a hole as a funnel! At least we now have a jar lifter. Last year, I was using tongs and an oven mitt – not very safe at all!

Why do I do this, you ask? We not just buy Hunts tomatoes at Safeway and call it a day? Well, BPA aside, I like knowing where my food comes from. Where were those tomatoes in the can grown? How were they grown? I can just ask the farmer at the farmers market. Also, I think home-canned tomatoes taste better. No tinny can flavor to contend with. And honestly, what tastes better – a tomato in August, fresh from the vine, or a tomato from the grocery store in February? When I can tomatoes, I know I am getting the best-tasting, freshest tomatoes possible.

I also have this idealized notion of bonding over food. It’s why I enjoy dinner parties, potlucks, and barbeques so much. Women used to spend many late summer days canning the end of summer’s bounty. Mothers, daughters, sisters – they would pass the knowledge on to their children. Karl’s sisters grew up watching their mom can. I’ve learned from them and, given my interest in food and nutrition, learned some on my own too. I hope to can with my kids one day (and bake bread, make sauerkraut, and all the other weird food hobbies I do!). Just my luck, I’ll have kids who would rather watch TV or eat cupcakes than can with their mother. At least I’ll have three great sister-in-laws to can with : )

My turkey adventure

I cooked a turkey – on a week night! No, this isn’t one of those posts where I am going to tell you how easy it is to do blahblahblah on a week night. Cooking a turkey is freaking hard. But, I must say, it can be done! And since I have never cooked a turkey before, it was a culinary experience I could check of the list.

Let’s back up. So Karl’s mom had bought some turkeys on sale at Wegmans. The sisters all received a turkey when they were up in NY a while back. We were at Karl’s sister Rachael’s house last weekend for a BBQ and she desperately wanted room in her freezer back and convinced me to take it. I hate seeing food wasted, and I thought, “I’ll just chop it up and throw it in the oven! And we can eat turkey sandwiches for lunch everyday!” I’m trying to budget to pay for wedding things, so I’ve been bringing my lunch to work everyday. And leftover turkey sandwiches are one of my all-time favorite foods.

After spending my lunch break at work researching the best way to cook a turkey, I felt confident and prepared. Man, am I naïve! First of all, thawing it out sucks. It took forever. I had to plan it out perfectly because I had a busy week and I was going away Labor Day weekend. I took it out of the refrigerator when I got home from work and it was still somewhat icy. Second of all, chopping it up was no easy task. I wanted to cut it into pieces because it would take less time to cook. I watched all these Julia Child videos on youtube to psych myself up. Julia does it in like five minutes and there’s no mess. When I was finished 35 minutes later, it looked like there was a murder in my kitchen. I can’t imagine how much salmonella is all over everything.

I roasted it in pieces in a Dutch oven with red potatoes, carrots, fresh rosemary, and lemon. Wowsers. It was to die for. The house smelled divine. Karl was in meat-and-potatoes, manly-meal heaven. He likes my kale and quinoa type meals, but this was a real treat! And I even made stock with the carcass! I felt so homey. I can now officially host Thanksgiving at my house. But I’m not sure if I want to! I like Grandma’s turkey too. And I don’t want to touch a raw turkey again for a LONG time!

Sauerkraut season

It’s almost autumn, my favorite season. I love fall for the weather, festivals, and the holidays, but also for the food! I go nuts for apples, pumpkins, cider, beer, and sauerkraut. “Sauerkraut?” you ask? As the weather cools, my mouth waters for hearty meals like potatoes and sauerkraut and chicken sausage with sauerkraut. And not just any sauerkraut, mind you – raw, crunchy, bursting-with-goodness homemade sauerkraut.

Once a year, usually around the end of August or sometime in September, I make a big batch of sauerkraut. I got the sauerkraut “bug” after eating it homemade at my fiance’s parents’ house years ago. It tasted nothing like the mushy, canned stuff I remembered eating as a kid! It was tangy and crunchy and good enough to put on a sandwich – by itself! And as I learned more about nutrition, whole foods, and fermented foods, I started making it myself and eating it regularly.

Once I got a Harsch crock, it made it even easier to make sauerkraut and experiment with recipes. Today, I stuck with a classic recipe: cabbage, salt, and caraway seeds. I also experimented with using a food processor. Wow! Where have you been all my life?! No more slaving away over a tub on the floor with a kraut board (big mandolin). It does take some of the “workout” out of making sauerkraut (no more buff arms!), but the time savings is so worth it! I made 10L (2.6 gal) today in less than two hours. Still messy though. I have cabbage in my hair and the cat is swatting it under the rugs. I will be picking up random pieces of cabbage that we’ve tracked all over the house for weeks.

Anyone can make sauerkraut. I started off years ago making it in a Home Depot bucket with a cement block weight! On a countertop in glass jars is more practical for beginners : ) For more information on making sauerkraut and the health benefits, check out my article is last winter’s Edible Chesapeake magazine. I’ll have to wait a few weeks before I can eat today’s food science project, but thank goodness there is some leftover cabbage for a salad for dinner!

We Be Jammin’

It’s Monday night as I write this. 8:30pm to be exact. I got home from work around 5:30, went through the mail, had a snack, and I made jam. And I canned it. I am done and the kitchen is clean. Not to brag, but I also made went on a walk and ate dinner. I am not supercaffeinated – it’s just THAT easy to make jam. And when you have a product like Pomona’s pectin, you can even make healthy jam.

Most jam recipes call for loads of sugar. Pectin, the ingredient that makes jam gel, requires a certain amount of sugar to set. But Pomona’s pectin doesn’t require any sugar. It allows you to cut back on the sugar or use alternative sweeteners. But with all the summer fruits in season right now, you barely need any added sweetness because they are so sweet on their own!

Don’t be scared off by the canning aspect. If you can boil water, you can can. You don’t need a lot of space. I live in a condo and I have space to can. You don’t need a lot of fancy equipment either. You just need a jar lifter, some Mason jars, and a huge pot. I use a lobster pot, but you can find pots specially made for canning. I started off canning tomatoes a few summers ago, but I would recommend starting with jam. It’s easier. It’s helped that we’ve been having a very mild summer in DC, so it’s not too hot to can!

When strawberries were in season last month, Karl and I spent an afternoon picking at a local U-pick farm and made a delicious, low-sugar strawberry jam. That was my first jamming experience and now I am hooked. Today I made raspberry vanilla jam. I went wild raspberry picking over the weekend and managed to pick just enough to make jam (10 cups). Please don’t ever go wild raspberry picking unless you are a glutton for punishment. Between the gnats, the thorns, the spiders, and the mosquitoes, I would much rather buy fruit at the store or farmers’ market!

First things first: run all your jars through the dishwsher to sterilize them and place the lids in a bowl of hot water to soften the rim. Set water in the huge pot on the stove to boil. Wash all the bugs and dirt off your berries. Mash them, stir in some calcium water (powder included in the Pomona box), and boil. Mix the pectin with your choice of sweetener (this time I used agave and stevia), then stir it into the boiling berries. The pectin reacts quickly with the calcium water, so unless you want chunky jam, stir vigorously! Take the berries off the heat, funnel into jars, screw on lids, lower into boiling water for ten minutes, and that’s it! I swear! I didn’t even make that big of a mess this time (last time I had red stains all over my white countertops which required bleach and elbow grease to remove!).

All the measurements are on the box. There are recipes too, but after my first successful batch last month, I made up my own recipe tonight. I added a few glugs of vanilla extract to the boiling berries. I was trying to be creative. Karl thinks I ruin things when I try to get creative in the kitchen. We’ll see.

I’ll be jamming until there are no more fruits to jam. Next up? Peaches. Friends and family: expect a few jars for your birthday and at Christmas.

Fireworks

Sorry for the lack in posts. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this blog and have come to no conclusions. So, for now, I will be writing about whatever strikes my nutrition fancy. It’s a work in progress people. Enjoy. And I promise to post *regularly.*

I spent the long Fourth of July weekend at the beach. I did not bring my laptop because I’ve been feeling like I have a unhealthy relationship with computers lately and I decided I needed some time away. I am continually talking myself out of an iPhone or other smartphone because I’m afraid that if I were that “plugged in,” I would forget how to talk to other humans. So my beach trip was total relaxation (no computer-withdrawal shakes!). Eight hours of sleep a night, bike rides, swimming, lounging, and cooking. Yes, cooking! When I think of beach food, I think of saltwater taffy, pizza, burgers, and ice cream cones. All good, yes, but my beach food this past weekend was way better! We could have eaten at many of the tourist traps that line the boardwalk and main road, but we chose to make good use of the beach condo’s fully-equipped kitchen. Thankfully, I tend to travel with like-minded, health-conscious people who can cook, so we ate three delicious, veggie-full meals everyday.

If cooking on vacation sounds like the opposite of vacation to you, think of it this way: the worst part of cooking (to me, anyways) is the clean-up. We made a rule that those who cooked did not have to clean up after that meal. I love to cook, but cooking during the work week isn’t much fun. After a long day at work and then exercise, I’m usually not in the kitchen until 7pm. By then, I am hungry and tired. Fast and easy, thrown-together dinners are the norm.

Cooking on vacation gave me the opportunity to try out recipes I’ve been collecting. I made breakfast every morning, my favorite meal of the day. The whole-wheat Belgian waffles (yes, I packed my waffle iron. Don’t leave home without it!) and spinach fritatta were hits. Cooking on vacation also gave me time to experiment. I helped Karl with his Fourth of July dinner and I made beans. I’ve been wanting to try cooking beans from scratch for a while. My aunt and Mark Bittman say it’s so easy! All is takes is some planning. An overnight soak and and hour or two on the stove and they’re good to go, right? I soaked, I boiled, I simmered (2+ hours), and then sauteed them with some garlic, onions, and chipotle sauce. The sure did taste good. A little firm, but I thought, hey, canned beans sure are mushy in comparison! You all can probably guess the rest. We were in fetal position later that night, stomachs in knots, cursing Mark Bittman. There were a lot of fireworks both outside and inside the house.

I wish I could be more of a “minimalist.” I do try to reduce my consumption of packaged foods, but canned beans will be staying on my grocery list for the time being. At least until I get a pressure cooker (Mom, birthday?).