Stuffed Sweet Potatoes

All I can say is "WOW"....  where have I been all these 52 years that I have never thought about stuffing a baked sweet potato until I ran across this recipe and tried it.  I am hooked!  All the ingredients are high in nutritional value and it was delicious and very filling.  I ate 1/2 my sweet potato for a meal and was quite satisfied.

If you don't like any particular ingredient in this recipe, it is adaptable and you can get creative with mixing flavors until you have created something out of this world.  Here is how I did it.

Baked Twice Stuffed Sweet Potatoes


Preheat the oven and stab each potato to allow a little steam to escape.  (Of course wash the outside of the potato thoroughly before you begin).  Rub the outside of the potato with olive oil or coconut oil and salt it.  Place them in a glass baking dish and bake for about an hour until tender.

After they have baked and are cool enough to handle, cut the tops off of them like this and carefully scoop out the majority of the soft sweet potato.

 Place all the scooped out sweet potato into a bowl and add the following ingredients:  (These measurements are for 5 sweet potatoes so if making fewer, adjust accordingly)
1 Tablespoon olive oil or coconut oil
1 cup Chopped broccoli
1/3 cup chopped walnuts
1/4 cup dried Cranberries (I used dried cherries)
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon onion powder (I substituted chopped onion for the powder)
Salt and pepper to taste

 Now stuff all that mixture back into your potato shells and cover loosely to bake for about 15 minutes to heat them through.

I added a little cheat to mine.  Before filling them up with the filling I put butter and a drizzle of honey inside each shell at the bottom with some salt to make the skin good enough to eat!  If I would have had some Feta cheese on hand I would have thrown a little of that in too. This made a fantastic meal and very nutritious!!  My body thanked me for the good fuel that day.

Orange Chicken

I believe people may have the wrong idea about how we eat at my house.. we are not on a "diet".  We eat all kinds of real foods.. in fact I would say we eat a "real food" diet, not a calorie restricted one or low on fat or even low on sugar.  When I cook, it is with the freshest and simplest ingredients I can afford to buy and then I combine them myself as opposed to getting them out of a can.

This really makes grocery shopping much simpler for us.  I shop the periphery of the store and always keep milk, eggs, wheat berries, nuts, fruits, and vegetables, and meats put away for use later.  For instance today was shopping day.  Fareway had a sale on spices so I got 3 for $2.00 and I stocked up.  Bananas were .29 a pound and I got a couple of bunches of those.  Pineapples were 1.99 so I bought 2 of them and chicken breasts were 1.99 per pound. ..  Looking at food differently than ever before, I left the store with under $40 and had enough food to feed us for most of the week.

Now this real food diet is not a boring diet... it is quite delicious and fun to make.  Today, for instance, Mike came home after lunch and I served him a gourmet-type lunch (our main meal of the day).  He was greeted with Orange Chicken on a bed of rice pilaf with a side salad of fresh baby spinach and pineapple chunks with homemade Orange and pineapple vinaigrette dressing.

This was not a hard meal to prepare at all.  And I always make enough to have leftovers so we have food for a couple of days time or I can choose to freeze some for another later meal.

When you keep the staples around, you have a world of opportunity in front of you as far as food creations!  If I see a recipe that looks good, I can make it!  So here is the recipe I used for the orange chicken.  When I don't have one ingredient I substitute but I have most raw ingredients at hand now.

Baked Orange Chicken

Ingredients:

• 4 chicken breasts
• salt and pepper
• 1/2-3/4  cup orange marmalade
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• 2 tsp mustard
• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• a little bit of garlic powder
• 1 tsp curry powder

Prep:

Use a good quality oil to spray or coat the baking dish.

Wash, trim, and cut the chicken breasts into serving-sized pieces.

In a separate bowl, combine the marmalade, lemon juice, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, garlic powder, and curry powder and mix well.

Arrange the chicken breasts in the baking dish and pour the marmalade mixture over the top.  You can marinate the chicken first if you would like but I did not do that and it was wonderful. Cover the pan with foil or a lid.

Bake the chicken, covered, in the oven at 375 for about an hour or a little longer.  Baste the chicken in the juices ever once in a while during baking and baste again right before serving.

This recipe was perfect after today's shopping.  Last week I had about 6 pounds of oranges that I turned into orange marmalade so I had plenty to use today.  The pineapple worked well mixed with fresh baby spinach and the Orange Vinaigrette dressing delicious!  Making your own dressing is really SO easy!  I bought a couple of dressing servers at Goodwill a while back and use the heck out of them.  Here is that recipe:

Orange Vinaigrette Dressing

2 T orange juice ( I used the orange marmalade and some pineapple juice)

2 T red wine vinegar

½ cup extra virgin olive oil

1 t dijon mustard  (I used a dash of regular mustard)

½ t salt

fresh ground pepper

Mix well.   

So.. I am always on the lookout for more tasty "real food" recipes...  if you have any great menu ideas, shoot me a message or if you try one of these recipes and find a new secret ingredient, let me know!  I would love more ideas...  and I love being able to say to my family "the menu today includes orange chicken on a bed of rice pilaf with a side salad of baby spinach and fresh pineapples with an orange vinaigrette dressing". 

This is just like going to a fancy restaurant at a fraction of the price and I am assured of the best ingredients...  wow.. should have been cooking for us a long time ago.   This beat Totino's pizzas HANDS DOWN!!

In the Garden - Soil Testing- a good idea!

So you are probably aware we live in the 'burbs.. which is not what I would choose right now if I had to do it over again.  Now don't get me wrong.  I love being close to the mall and the grocery stores!  But I really want to expand my gardens and grow my own food!  I have also decided that one of our next vehicles should be a pick-up truck.  So for those of you local readers, don't laugh at me when you see me show up in a pick-up... it will be a good practical purchase, I am sure.  I promise NOT T EVER wear overalls (at least in public). 

You see, I really know nothing about gardening except for what I am learning.  I am not an expert, even though I have had a small garden for vegetables for many years (mostly I just love home grown tomatoes) and have grown flowers around the outside of the house.  I grow what grows for me and let die that which wants to commit suicide.  I have never paid much attention to soil quality, fertilizers, and some years barely give them any water.  Let's just say I have not been a good plant mommy in years past.

This year is different.  I want a BIG garden to grow tomatoes, squash, strawberries, lettuce, pumpkins, grapes, peppers, onions, garlic, potatoes, asparagus, rhubarb, raspberries, zucchini, and LOTS of other vegetables.  I want to stay busy all summer canning and freezing and have fresh organic food that I don't have to go to the supermarket to buy!  But did I mention I only have a back yard?  That will change.  I have plans.

We put 8 fruit trees in our fenced back yard this fall and so far, they are doing well.  I followed directions to protect their little tender trunks from animals and weather by using a white plastic covering.  We fertilized them organically when their leaves fell and mulched them to winter them over.  Now to wait for fruit and pray!

I checked in my suburb to see if there was an ordinance stating that you had to have a particular percentage of grass in your yard... there is not.  There are all kinds of "rules" about leaving your garage door open, shoveling your snow, mowing your lawn, and other things, but none about a garden-yard!  Mike is "on-board" with this not only because he sees money to be saved on good food, but I think he figures he will till once in trade for less mowing and trimming each year.

So my plan is to till up a good percentage of the yard and make another garden next spring.  I have 2 little gardens now in either corner of the back yard and there is an old wooden swingset in the middle of the yard that Journey has outgrown so we will place a garden smack in the middle of the yard right under and around that swingset!

Since I want to be a serious gardener and really want my food to grow well, I decided to research soil quality and testing.  The soil needs to be the proper pH and have adequate supplies of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium.  You can buy a soil testing kit (I got mine from Earl May) and it will do all 4 of these tests 10 times each.  It was $20 but I figured it was money well spent.  No sense trying to grow something in depleted soil, only to be disappointed in the yield after months of watering, weeding, and toil.

I figured I would have to check 5 areas of my yard.  I am glad I did because each area tested out differently on its quality and so I will have to treat each area differently and perhaps plan my planting a bit more carefully this year. 

This is a great activity to do with your children who love "experiments".  Journey had a blast with the pipette and putting the capsules of stuff into the testing chambers.  Then she got to watch them change colors and interpret the results.

As I feared, each area came up with different results, which I won't bore you with.  Suffice it to say I am glad I started composting last spring and I spread some of it around the areas that needed more nutrition but will amend some of this soil next spring as we till and plant.  Surprisingly, the area under our grass that will become my newest garden is very deficient in proper nutrients so I have an opportunity to fix the problem before planting there next spring.

I kept careful notes about the results from each area of the garden too... in a garden journal book that I have had for 8 years and never written in.  See, I told you I was not a good plant mommy.  If I can stay disciplined to keep that journal up, I am sure it will come in handy!

I am also glad that I bought a couple of organic gardening books last week.  That helps a lot... this is the information age and it is possible to learn anything if you study.  I know that because I can now actually cook!

Ricotta Cheese

A few weeks ago I tried to make ricotta cheese... you may have read that it was a dismal failure... but I learned from it.  I kind of like having a few failures in the kitchen because whenever I fail, I learn a little bit about what NOT to do!

So for ricotta...  what I love about it is that it can be made from leftover whey after making other things.  This week I made cottage cheese from a gallon of milk and that gave me a little less than a gallon of beautiful yellow whey.  Then I made some cheddar cheese curds from a little over a gallon of milk and ended up with another gallon of whey.

What is a girl to do with 2 gallons of whey?  Go figure... I made ricotta cheese.  See I have been hungry for homemade lasagna for a few weeks and I just stay hungry for it.  When I say homemade, I mean make every part of it myself except for butchering the cow (yuck - count me out for the animal slaughter part of farming).  So I needed to make the red sauce (have canned tomatoes from the garden), make the ricotta, make the mozzarella, make the noodles (just found a homemade noodle recipe) and put it all together from whole and fresh ingredients.  mmmm......  some people call this too much work... I call it heavenly eating and well worth it!

The first step in making ricotta is to leave the whey out on the counter for 12 - 24 hours.  That idea repulsed me a bit but I did it anyway.  Haven't we all been trained not to eat things left at room temp for a long time?  Then to put the whey (2 gallons of it) into a big pot with a thick bottom and heat it to 203 degrees.  Once it reached 203 degrees I took it off the heat and left it covered until it cooled again to room temp.  This took a few hours for 2 gallons of whey.
But here is what it looked like when cooled:

BINGO!  I was so excited to see that white curdy stuff in my pan!  I made the usual exclamation to Mike when I have success with something "Mike, I am actually making ricotta cheese"...  He hears a lot of those kind of exclamations during my cooking expeditions, as well as the ones where I am mumbling or cursing quietly because something has gone awry.  You see, Mike works from home as an independent contractor and I stay home doing what I do, so we have a lot of together time.  This is really helpful some days and I thank the Good Lord that he is a supportive man and I get to have him around.

As I watched the curds form in the whey, I realized some of what I did wrong the last time I tried to make ricotta.  I tried to strain that mess through a cheesecloth and colander but the small bits of ricotta are really SO FINE that I basically drained it all away.

This time I was prepared with a tea towel and colander.  The tea towel provides a tight weave.  Several weeks ago I bought a chunk of muslin, washed it, cut it into several towel sized pieces and serged the sides so that I could use them for things like this.  It provides the perfect weave for fine filtration!

It took quite a while to drain the whey from the ricotta through this tea towel.  The fine ricotta kind of gummed up the drainage but I persisted and drained and squeezed all the whey out until I found this in my cloth:

HOMEMADE RICOTTA CHEESE!  Yippppeeeeee.. first successful step towards the lasagna!

But what was I to do with the leftover 1 1/2 gallons of whey?  Why, I fed the compost bin, of course!  Might as well give all that nutrition to the vegetables and fruits we are going to grow next year!

Homemade Noodles

Who knew that making noodles was so easy?  It never looked easy to me... I remember years ago I bought a fancy pasta machine that extruded noodles in any shape.  It looked like a Play-Doh toy and I never really used it.  Back then I did not understand the value of good fresh food to my body.  I don't know where I missed that lesson in nursing school 30 years ago, but I appeared to have done so.  Perhaps it was a lecture during one of the extended lunch breaks I took at the local brew pub... or one of the classes I slept through.  I remember a nutrition class where they taught us that vitamins A, D, E, and K were fat soluble vitamins and you could overdose on them but that is about all the nutrition information I took from formal training so long ago.

It was a few years later, which was also many years ago, that I sold that pasta machine or gave it away, hardly ever touching it.  Oh, what I could do with it now!

Earlier this week I was hungry for beef stroganoff.  Not the kind from a package... the kind that starts with fresh meat, homemade cream of mushroom soup, sour cream, and seasonings... and over a bed of noodles.  Noodles sure seemed intimidating but I considered the stroganoff noodles a trial run for the lasagna noodles I knew I wanted to make soon.

So I googled a recipe for noodles.  Oh my goodness... all that is in them is flour, eggs, and a little salt!  After grinding a few cups of white wheat berries, I turned on the KitchenAid and asked it to produce some noodle dough for me.  And it did.

I really did not like the way it was mixing up so I added a little milk to it.  Perfect and it felt SO CLEAN!!  Like real food should.  Simple and delicious.

I soon realized why noodles were so intimidating.  I had to roll them skinny so I could cut them.  Now that was a workout!!  I was exhausted when I got that first batch of noodles rolled out.. and they were not thin either!  My hands gave out early on and I was leaning my forearms on the rolling pin pushing with my upper body weight.  It seemed as soon as I rolled the dough one way, it sprung back when pressure was let off.

Nevertheless, we ended up with some long fat noodles that night!  The instructions called for boiling them for 15 minutes.  Mine were so fat that I boiled them for about 25 minutes before they were tender.

Just like all the food I have been making from scratch, the beef stroganoff over whole wheat noodles was FANTASTIC!  Nothing can compare to the flavor derived from using fresh ingredients, real butter, whole milk, and whole wheat.

Here is the ingredients to make a batch of noodles:

3 cups flour
4 - 5 eggs
3/4 teaspoon salt
4 - 5 Tablespoons water (or milk)

mix it up, roll it out, cut it up, and boil for 15 minutes. 

In the Kitchen - Cottage Cheese

In my quest for making all my own food I wanted to turn out a really good batch of cottage cheese.  Cottage cheese is one of my favorites and I always LOVED the taste of Anderson Erickson 4% cottage cheese... that is until I wanted to go organic and my distaste for the questionable additives and quality of original substances used in these things made me quit buying it.  But ever since then I have tried to re-create it myself.

Using the whole milk from Pickett Fence Creamery, I finally produced my own cottage cheese that is even better than AE.  It was super easy too!

Starting with one gallon of fresh Pickett Fence whole milk, I poured it in a large heavy pan and over medium heat, heated it to 120 degrees.  Removed from the heat, I slowly poured in 3/4 cup of white vinegar and stirred until curds began to form.  Then the pan was covered at room temp and allowed to rest for 30 minutes.

Once rested, the mixture was poured into a colander lined with a tea towel and allowed to drain the whey for about 5 minutes.  When that was done the tea towel filled with the curd was lifted and rinsed under running cold water for 3 - 5 minutes while the curd was broken apart and separated.

DONE!  Curd transferred to my favorite AE cottage cheese container and 1 teaspoon of salt was added (non-iodized) and mixed in.  After refrigerating the curds for a few hours, I added part heavy cream and part whole milk back into the curds to make the most delicious cottage cheese ever!

It passed my test and the Mike and Journey tests... best cottage cheese ever and quick and easy.  I am comforted to know that I know exactly the presence and quality of all the ingredients used.  This truly was quick and easy to make and homemade food just tastes better.

Weaving - I love it!

Winter is the perfect time to find a hobby or craft that keeps you productive, warm, and entertained.  I found mine.  It has kept me pretty busy.. so busy that it has kept me from blogging much since Thanksgiving, but that being said, I have turned out 8 rugs since then and love to weave!

My friend Shari has a big floor loom and I fell in love with it when I saw it.  She makes beautiful rugs.. mostly fuzzy ones from carpet warp and they turn out so nice that I wanted to do it too.  She graciously helped me find a loom, advised me on type, helped train me to use it, gave me my first cone of warp thread and a training video, and has been so supportive.  I thought she deserved credit for that!  She has an Etsy shop called Creations Looming and you can see some of her work here:  http://www.etsy.com/shop/Creationslooming?ref=ss_profile   Now you see why I fell in love with her art. 

I have always been someone who loves threads and fabrics.  I used to sew a lot and still have a sewing room set up in the basement with a large fabric and yarn stash, especially since my mother-in-law left me a very large inventory of fabric and yarn.  So weaving looked ideal to me!

It took me a little while to get Mike on board.  A floor loom suitable for making rugs is big.. almost the size of a small piano, and it is pretty expensive if you buy it new... somewhere in the range of a few thousand dollars.  Pretty steep for us and I am sure he did not see the practical application for this new toy I wanted.  I don't blame him but I had to wear him down.  I had to make enough money to afford getting into this new hobby so while I was searching for the right used floor loom, I sold almost all my Silpada Sterling Silver jewelry collection on ebay.  I really needed to be able to buy what I needed with my own money.. such is the dilemma of a woman who has no real income to call her own... it was a pride thing.

I spent a lot of time on Craigslist and eBay searching for a loom.  There were a few that came up within a reasonable distance but they were either way more than I wanted to spend or not quite the right type of loom.  I networked with other women who weave in addition to Shari and then a loom DROPPED IN MY LAP!  I knew it was meant to be when 2 or 3 different people sent me an email letting me know there was a LeClerc floor loom 4 harness, 6 treadle for sale in Waukee.  I was ecstatic and went to see the loom.  It had belonged to a lady who has been gone for many years and her husband, being elderly now had to move from his home to assisted living.  He wanted someone to have the loom that would love it and I promised!!  I did not spend much at all!

We had to figure out how to then get it out of his basement.  Mike had to practically take it apart to get the pieces through the doorways and into the minivan but he did it while I prayed we would remember how to put it back together.  He did a fabulous job of moving it to our living room.. close to the rest of the family and close to the kitchen, since I always have some project going in there too.

When we got it home and all the pieces figured out.. and the instruction book out.. I discovered that it had never even been used!  There were some critical pieces of it still in the box and never touched.  Being about 30 years old, it had waited this long for someone to use it.  So the learning process came.  I watched countless videos and read books.  I visited my friend Shari to see hers in action again and I slowly figured out how to "warp" it and how to weave.

Here it is warped with 140 threads, each about 10 yards long and strung through little "eyes" in the beater and the heddles behind it.. then they are wrapped snugly around a round beam in the back so they can progress through the loom.  There is a run in progress on this one.

To warp 140 threads that are each 10 yards long, there is quite an elaborate process to be followed or strings would knot everywhere (that kind of happened the first time I tried).  It requires a "warp board".  Here is a picture of Shari's and then Mike made me a warping station in the basement fashioned after hers.  He is turning out to be quite the woodworker.  :)

My "warp board" is attached to the beams in the unfinished basement in an unfinished closet.  I love it in there.  I couldn't have picked a quieter place to count and wrap a bunch of string.  Mike pounded those dowels in the boards and then built a thread stand so I could warp up to 6 colors at one time without tangling them.  I have a hook to the left of my warp board that holds my pattern.

So now I make rugs.  I intend to make a LOT of rugs.  I have to buy the warp string and put my time into it.  One rug takes me several hours of work but I love how they are turning out.  The first one was not a pretty or as well done as the subsequent ones but Journey snagged it up quickly, saying it was her colors and she put it outside her bedroom door in the hallway, hanging a sign on her door that says "Please wipe your feet".

Journey's rug.  Greens, blues, and pinks.. made with fabric from mother in law's stash.

I made this rug in browns and neutrals for in front of my fireplace.  I love it there.

This rug is about 20" X 30" in greens.  $32

Pretty rug in reds and browns.  20" X 27".  $33

20" X 32" in reds and brown stripes.  $35

20" X 32" - stripes of brown/olive with dark brown, red, and beige.  $35

Variegated browns, beige, reds.  20" X 32".  $35

21" X 40 ".  Variegated beige with blue and red accent colors.  $40

I am pretty excited about my rugs.  I will be giving some for gifts and putting the rest up for sale.  My mother has several of them in her antique shop in Valley Junction now to see if they sell there.  Antique-lovers love the rustic look of handwoven rugs and they are not too common to find.  I also intend to do some vendor events with my rugs in the months to come.  I will need an inventory for that.  But mostly I just need to make money to continue to buy more warp threads and try different mediums for the weft.

I am excited to make some denim rugs!  I know they are popular and I wouldn't mind having a few of them myself!  I have asked family and friends to save old worn out jeans and denim clothes for me.  The wonderful thing about re-purposing into rugs is that even the stained and ripped worn out clothes are good for rugs!  I thought about experimenting with terry cloth towels, sheets, t-shirts, and fleece too!  Imagine all the color combinations and possibilities for someone who loves textiles like I do!

Mike is on board now.  He has been working hard to keep my expenses down by making me shuttles and the warp room you saw in the picture.  He built me two different kinds of shuttles and I love them!  He just has to see a picture and get the concept and then off to work he goes.  Gotta love a hand man!  Now I am working on getting him to envision and build a cheese press.

So, if you are interested in rugs, I take special orders or have those above for sale.  OR if you have some old clothes/sheets/t-shirts/towels laying around that you are going to throw out, consider sending them this way and let someone, someday, walk on them.