Pureed, Pickled, and Stewed (Contains 3 recipes!)

No, we didn't have a wild night out on the town. Here are the stories:

Pureed

The Carrot Soup I reported on in the my last post spent the entire night cooking on low. Seems that carrots take a really, really long time to slow-cook to a consistency that can be pureed with a stick blender. They did, eventually, get there, however, and I whipped them into submission along with the potatoes and garlic that they were cooked with.

At that time, I added probably a cup-worth of cauliflower florets, and a couple teaspoons of dill, as well as about 4 dashes of Pete's Red Hot Sauce. Not enough hot sauce to make a spicy dish, but enough to help bring out all of the other flavors. You wouldn't even know it was there if I didn't tell you.

After another hour on low, this was the result - a thick, creamy orange soup with chunks of cauliflower in it.

Lightly sweet, oh-so delicious!

Nice thing about a Carrot Potato Soup like this - you can also serve it cold. Makes a great dish for the hot weather we've been having. I'm pleased with how this one came out.

The recipe, scaled down to fit a single crockpot:

Garlicky Carrot and Potato Soup

Ingredients:

1 lb. carrots, cut in 1-inch chunks

1 lb. potatoes, cut in 1-inch chunks

1 bulb garlic, separated in cloves and peeled

1 cup cauliflower florets

1 tsp. dill

Hot sauce to taste

Instructions:

Place carrot chunks in bottom of crockpot. Follow with potatos and garlic. Add water until vegetables are just covered.

Cook on low until carrots are fork tender. Using a stick blender, mix entire contents of crockpot to a smooth consistency. (You can also use a food processor or conventional blender, but the stick blender is less messy.)

Add cauliflower florets, dill, and hot sauce. Cook on low one more hour.

Serve hot or cold.

Folkcat's Tip: Sometimes an ingredient can make a huge difference in flavor without being noticeable as a flavor note itself. Case in point: the hot sauce in this recipe. Add it a dash at a time, stirring in well, and taste before and after each one. At some point, you'll realize that the flavor jumps from so-so to pow!, yet you would never know the hot sauce was there if you hadn't been the one to add it.

Pickled

This week at the Wilton Downtown Marketplace (our Farmer's Market), I picked up something I wasn't even looking for - pickling cucumbers. I have no fondness for pickles myself, but Gryphon loves them. A few years back, I used to pretty routinely make a recipe for refrigerator Bread n' Butter pickles that we got from a book called Lean & Lucious and Meatless.

I decided it would be a nice surprise for Gryphon if he came home from work and found that I had made a batch of pickles. I knew I still had the ingredients in the house. Big problem, though - the cookbook is still packed away somewhere, inaccessible.

Well, not so big a problem. I've gained a lot of confidence lately in my ability to figure out or make up a recipe, or adapt one to suit my needs by studying similar ones. So I hopped off to my favorite recipe website, RecipeZaar, and hunted up refrigerator pickle recipes.

There are a few to be found there. 238 come up on the search, to be exact. So I started popping the recipes up one by one to see what they were like. I eventually found a couple that seemed similar to the recipe I used to use, and I began adapting.

Here's what the resulting pickles look like:


Tangy Yellow Goodness

I experimented a fair bit with the recipe. None of the ones I was adapting included turmeric, and I remembered that from my original. Also, this type of pickle typically calls for a lot of sugar. I chose to substitute Splenda to create a "sugar-free" version. I also cut in half the amount of sweetener I was finding called for in the recipes, using only 2 cups of Splenda instead of 4.

In the end, the proof of my experiment is in the tasting, and Gryphon has declared these to be a winner. Sounds like I got it right on the first try! Here's the recipe as it came out:

Folkcat's Refrigerator Pickles

Ingredients

2 lbs. pickling cucumbers
3 cups distilled white vinegar
2 cups Splenda
1/8 cup kosher salt
2 tsp. whole mustard seeds
3 tsp. whole celery seeds
2 tsp. ground turmeric

Instructions

Cut the cucumbers into slices, 1/4 inch thick. Place them in a glass container, large enough to hold them all with an inch or two to spare.

In a non-reactive pot, mix the remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil.

Pour the hot vinegar mixture over the cucumber slices until they are covered. If you come up a little short, you can add a little boiling water to raise the liquid level.

Cover the container, and let cool to room temperature. Place in refrigerator and keep chilled.

The flavor develops over time, but Gryphon found these perfectly tasty on the second day. These keep well, too - I've heard some people say that, if they don't get eaten up, they can keep in the refrigerator for up to 9 months.

Folkcat's Tip: You can use this same brine mixture to pickle other vegetables as well. Try peppers, sweet onions, cauliflower, carrots, green beans...the list is endless! Check out the commercial pickles available in your supermarket to get ideas.

Stewed

Friday's grocery shopping showed that you can gain a lot in your cuisine if you're prepared to be flexible. I've developed a habit of looking at what I call the "distressed produce rack" in our local Market Basket Supermarket. This is where all the produce that's on it's last legs is placed, usually at a 50% discount. The items are still good, though they may be a little bruised. The catch is, you want to be ready to either use them or freeze them immediately.

On Friday, I looked at the rack and realized I was seeing packages of carrots and potatoes that looked pretty good. They were each about 1 to 1 1/2 pounds. And I'd been wanting to do a nice beef stew.

The brain went into gear. I bought a green pepper and some whole, canned, peeled tomatoes. I cruised the meat counter, and realized that the pre-cubed stew beef cost $2.99 a pound, while the same cut of meat as a whole roast cost only $1.79 a pound. Guess which one I bought? Not only that, but I had the audacity to ring the butcher's bell and ask him to cut the roast into stew cubes for me! And he did it!

I knew I was going to be improvising on this one. I didn't bother to look up any recipes for a guide. While at the Wilton Downtown Marketplace that afternoon, I also picked up a pound of fresh-picked green beans to add to the mix.

I spent time that night preparing ingredients; cutting peppers and potatoes into chunks; slicing carrots; snapping the ends off of green beans and breaking them into three (they were long ones!). The plan was that we'd set up the crock Saturday morning and let it cook all day, ready for a late dinner around 8:30 or so.

Here's how the stew wound up:

Thick and Beefy!

And here's the recipe; some amounts will be approximate. I actually suffered from "eyes too big for the crock" syndrome again, and bought more than would fit in just the big one. I felt I had the right amount of beef, though, so I simply used about half of the vegetables. I'm not going to give this one in the traditional format; rather, I'll explain how I built it.

Chunky Crockpot Beef Stew

The method I'm going to describe will work in a 6 1/2 qt. crockpot using 2 lbs. of stew beef, cut in 1-inch cubes. Other ingredients that I used include: about 1/2 lb. of carrots, cut into slices; 1/2 to 3/4 lb. potatoes, cut in 3/4 inch cubes; 1/2 lb. green beans; 1 28-oz. can of whole, peeled tomatoes in juice; 2 cups of hot water with 2 tsp. of beef soup base added to make a broth; 1 bay leaf.

How I did this: Place the vegetables in layers, starting with the carrots, followed by the potatoes and then the green beans. You want your layers about one piece of carrot (or potato or green bean) deep. Place about 1/4 to 1/3 cup of flour in a large plastic bag; add the beef cubes and shake to coat them. Spread the beef cubes out over the vegetables.

Open the can of tomatoes. Strain the juice into the crock through your fingers, catching the tomatoes as they come out of the can and crushing them in your fingers before adding them to the crock.

Use your own favorite version of 1 - 2 cups of beef broth. I use Minor's Beef Soup Base; you could use homemade stock or canned, or even some bouillion cubes. Or simply add some hot water, counting on the other ingredients to be flavorful enough. Whichever liquid you choose, add it to the crock now. Finally, tuck in one good-sized bay leaf.

Turn the crock on low for 10 hours. After about 8 hours, check the pot and see how liquid the stew is. If it's thinner than you like, add some brown rice. Rice will effectively soak up about the same volume of water as the quantity of rice you add. For instance, if you were to put in 1 cup of rice, you'd reduce the volume of liquid by about 1 cup. Be cautious - it's very easy to over thicken the stew by adding too much rice, and then you start see-sawing back and forth between adding more broth, adding more rice...there isn't room in the crock to do that!

After the full ten hours, taste the stew and consider seasoning. For today's batch, I found I didn't need to add anything, even salt. Season with salt, pepper, or whatever else you feel it needs to suit your own taste.

Eat with some nice, hearty bread. Enjoy!

Folkcat's Tip: Learning how to "construct" a stew or soup in this way can help you to take advantage of unexpected specials at the supermarket. Be flexible, and you can save a lot of money while providing your family with healthy, nutritious foods. Be creative, too - instead of white potatoes, consider sweet potatoes or squash. Try zucchini or summer squash instead of green beans; consider turnips instead of carrots. Barley instead of rice would be a classic choice. Whatever choices you make, try to keep a variety of colors and textures to keep the stew interesting.

Ultimately, when you begin to understand how the ingredients in a recipe work together, that's when you can start to make smart choices for how to change the recipe to suit your own desires or the ingredients you have on hand. Do that enough, and your friends and family will start to think you're a kitchen wizard!