Tag: recipes

Categories
Writing

Preparing Bok Choy in a Home Kitchen

LAKE MACBRIDE— Yesterday, I brought home a bag of Bok Choy from the farm. It is fresh, in season, grown locally, and the makings of a dish to be served as part of a meal.

I asked a long time chef and caterer how he would prepare Bok Choy. He said he would steam it, and serve with seafood or pork. Seafood and pork don’t work well in the Midwestern semi-vegetarian kitchen, so I pursued another option, which was to use it in a stir fried vegetable dish. The meal idea was to use the stir fry mixture as the serving base for a home made veggie burger. A quick lunch for a working man.

A couple of notes.

If there is hope for a local food movement, it lies inside thousands of home kitchens, where cooks prepare meals for themselves and their families. A home cook’s kitchen has ingredients from all over, providing an individual and local context for ingredients. For example, there are Vidalia onions in my kitchen today. They were grown in Georgia, so not local, but in season.

In the freezer is a large zip top bag of sliced bell peppers. I bought a large quantity of seconds from a local grower last year, cut away the bad parts, and sliced them into long thin pieces. I froze them on a cookie sheet and bagged them to use later for stir fry.

Preparing Bok Choy Stir Fry

Depending upon how the Bok Choy comes (mine were still attached to the stalk of a plant), separate and pick through the leaves and wash them in a bowl of ice cold water. Drain, and if you have one, dry in a salad spinner. Otherwise, towel dry. Cut the thick part of the stem below the leaf and reserve. The stems are good to eat, and take a little longer to cook than the leaves.

Dice one half a large Vidalia onion, medium dice. Prepare the equivalent of one half of a bell pepper in long strips (or use bagged, frozen ones prepared as above).  Here we go:

Heat a wok or large skillet over high heat. When the pan is hot, coat the bottom with extra virgin olive oil. Add the diced onion, stirring constantly. Season with salt and black pepper to taste. Add the bell pepper and Bok Choy stems and stir constantly. When the vegetables are tender, add the leaves and stir constantly until they are wilted. Serve on a plate or bowl, with your favorite veggie burger and condiment on top.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Red Beans and Rice

Red Beans and Rice
Red Beans and Rice

LAKE MACBRIDE— Welcome new readers of On Our Own: Sustainability in a Turbulent World. Since I opened the site up to search engines, people from all around the U.S. have been taking a look and liking and following my posts. I sincerely appreciate the interest, as it inspires me to do a better job when I post here. Believe it or not, I spend time crafting the prose to develop my own voice from a perspective grounded in rural Iowa. One would think there would be fewer typos with all of that so-called writing.

By far, the most immediately positive post was my recipe for Buttermilk Biscuits. Recipes are a solution to problems in life, in this case, how to make a buttermilk biscuit that was light, crunchy and split into layers, and didn’t require the purchase of a quart of buttermilk at a time. If I knew recipes would be so popular, I would have posted more of them. Knowing how to do something, cooking included, is a step along a path of sustainability, so going forward, I’ll post recipes that solve problems in the kitchen from time to time.

Sometimes recipes are a conundrum. Red beans and rice is one of those. The dish is different things to different people, and mine is partly a remembrance of many Saturdays in a motel in Thomasville, Georgia, where I discovered the food network, and Emeril Lagasse’s version of Louisiana cooking. He taught me about the trinity— onion, bell pepper and celery— and my version showcases this basic ingredient. My red beans and rice is also about Midwest semi-vegetarian cooking, and it has become a way of weekend cooking to make extra portions for weekday luncheons. It goes like this:

Heat a dutch oven over medium high heat for a couple of minutes.
Add two to three tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, enough to generously coat the bottom of the pan.
Add crushed red pepper flakes to taste, about a teaspoon for starters, and cook them a minute or so.
Add one yellow onion, one bell pepper and two stalks of celery, medium dice, and sauté for a minute or so.
Season with salt, garlic powder, a prepared dry seasoning with hot peppers in it, and add three bay leaves. Add a few splashes of Louisiana-style hot sauce if available.
Continue cooking until the vegetables are soft.
Squeeze in the juice of a lime and stir.
Add one pint canned, diced tomatoes (fresh if you have them), one cup brown rice, one 15 ounce can prepared red beans (drained and washed), and a pint of home made soup stock. Add several sprigs of fresh thyme.
Stir, bring to a boil, and turn the heat down to just above a simmer. Cook until the moisture is absorbed and the rice is done.
In a separate frying pan, brown eight ounces of seitan in a couple of teaspoons of extra virgin olive oil and cook with thinly sliced spring onions. Set aside.
When the Dutch oven mixture is finished, and all the moisture is gone, re-season as appropriate. Add the seitan mixture and stir gently.
Serves five or six as a main course, more as a side dish.

Thanks again for reading my posts. I hope you will check back often.

Categories
Home Life Kitchen Garden

Buttermilk Biscuits

Buttermilk Buscuits
Buttermilk Biscuits

Here is a new recipe for buttermilk biscuits. It produces a light biscuit with a crunchy exterior, and uses one-half pint of buttermilk, which is the smallest size sold in grocery stores.

Ingredients:

2 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
Scant teaspoon salt
4 tbs cold butter, grated
1 cup cold buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

Combine the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl, grating the butter directly into the dry ingredients using a box grater or equivalent. Using your fingertips, mix the butter into the flour. Don’t over-do it. Add buttermilk and make a dough, which will be sticky.

Turn the dough onto a floured surface and fold in half 8-10 times. This action causes the biscuits to be flaky and separate along the ghost of the fold after baking. Press the dough into a one inch thick slab. Cut with a 2-1/2 inch biscuit cutter and place on a baking sheet.

Bake until the biscuits rise and are lightly browned on top, about 14-15 minutes.