Tah-Boo-Lee!

I love Levantine cuisine.  Everything from the basic olives, Hummus and Shwarma to the more "adventurous" like Shashlik, Dolma and Kibbeh and if you have never tried Baklava you have never truly lived.  Often some of these foods can be difficult to prepare, I mean who has a Shwarma spit in their kitchen? (one day it will be mine, oh yes it will be mine!) However, one of my favorite dishes from the Levant region of the world is Tabbouleh.  Originally from the mountains of  Syria and Lebanon, tabbouleh has become one of the most popular salads in the Middle East. Traditionally made with bulgur wheat, Tabbouleh is a super easy and delicious salad that can be served as a main dish or a side.  One of the best things about it is that you can make a large amount, store it in the refrigerator in a tightly closed container and its flavors develop more and more as the days pass.  We are trying to reduce the amount of gluten we eat in casa DR and experiment with new grains and seeds so I have adjusted my usual tabbouleh recipe to use quinoa instead of bulgur, this give it a softer texture but I really like the taste and this recipe could be used to make tabbouleh with almost any grain.

Fun Fact!

The largest recorded dish of tabbouleh to date weighed 4,324 kg and was created on 13 November 2009 by the Yaldy Association at Alaayen Elementary School in the Arab town of Shefa-Amr in Israel.

Here is my recipe for a traditional tabbouleh with a few of my own tweaks.

So for this you will need:

1 cup dry quinoa*

3 ripe Roma tomatoes

1/2 long english cucumber

1/2 red bell pepper

1/2 yellow or orange bell pepper

1 bunch Italian Flat leaf parsley.

1 cup kalamata olives

1/2  red onion

2 cloves of fresh garlic

2 whole lemons

1 cup quality olive oil

1 tsp ground cumin

1/2 tsp sea salt

1/2 fresh ground black pepper

*You can make this with either cooked quinoa or raw sprouted quinoa.  To see how to sprout quinoa visit our post on sprouted grains  or if you are going to cook the quinoa, here is a great tutorial on how to do just that! If using cooked quinoa I recommend cooking it at least 3 hours prior to making the salad so that it has plenty of time to fully chill. The best is to let it cool in the fridge overnight.

To begin, put all your cooled quinoa in a large mixing bowl. Chop up all vegetables with the exception of the onion,garlic and cilantro in small cubes, I find the smaller cubes work better than large chunk vegetables to maintain a consistency of texture and to ensure you can get a bit of each ingredient in each bite! Add all chopped veggies to the quinoa.

At this point I attack my parsley.  Usually I will wash it and trim off the bottom third of the steams. Also pick through it and make sure there are no wilted, blackish bits...trust me, you do not want to get one of these in your bite..very foul! After I have made sure it is all good to go I bunch it up tightly together as if I am going to do a chiffonade of the bunch. The tighter you hold it the smaller pieces you can cut it in the first go around, otherwise it tend to explode and go everywhere!

Toss it in with the quinoa and veg. Now, on to the dressing which brings this all together in a mess of tangy freshness.  Combine your olive oil and lemon juice, add in the salt, cumin and pepper. Whisk well so that the lemon juice and olive oil combine.  Cut up onion in a small dice and mince both garlic cloves, add to lemon and oil mixture.  Whisk well to incorporate. At this point my mouth usually starts to water as the heady garlic and onion and the tart lemon scent hits me.  Pour dressing onto salad.

Slice up your olives and combine with your salad, mix well.  Now comes the best part...the taste test.  Take a big spoonful, close your eyes and..NOM!!  This salad just gets better as it sits so usually I will make it at least 1 hour ahead of time and cover it and put it in the refrigerator to chill and let the flavors mingle.  Drop me a comment and let me know how yours turned out and what, if any, adjustments you made.  Enjoy!!

Apple Butter Business

Two weeks ago  I started a campaign on craigslist for canning supplies. Preserving is my cause du-jour at the moment. I am getting super excited about things like canning, fermenting, and dehydrating. Oh the possibilities!

During my quest for free canning supplies, I was contacted by a person that worked for an older gentleman with a plethora of canning business cluttering up his shop since his wife passed on. Boss and I immediately planned a trip out to the nether reaches of the county to pick up our free swag and start the canning fun times.

When we got there, we found the COOLEST gentleman either of us have had the pleasure of meeting since our own grandpa's (who are both extremely awesome mind you). Farmer Jim had not only canning supplies, but an industrial rock tumbler, gads of shiny rocks from all over the US, a stuffed owl and so many amazing handy craft projects I think etsy would blow up if it allowed him to post to their site.

Farmer Jim loaded us up with jars and a canning set up and also sent us home with a HUGE bucket of apples to start off our adventure in canning. Boss now has his old gentleman mentor, and I now have my canning supplies...all in all, a prosperous trip.

[caption id="attachment_943" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="above: a veritable shit ton of apples"][/caption]

When I got home,  I couldn't decide what it was I wanted to DO with these nifty canning supplies and all of these apples. We are big fans of apple muffins in this house, but it seemed a little silly to make 600 of them just to use up my apples. After a quick offering to the Oracle, it was decided that apple butter would be the coolest thing we could make with the ingredients we already had on hand.

The process begins with a veritable shit ton of apples. We used two bags from the grocery store as well as 10 of Farmer Jim's far superior apples. We filled the crock pot with tiny chunks of apples and thought smugly...this shall make thousands upon thousands of gallons of delicious apple butter! MWHAHAHAHAHA! It of course made...2 pints of delicious apple butter. According to the interwebs, if youw ant to make gallons of the stuff, you will need to keep adding apples as it cooks down and you will need far more than like 30 apples. SO the recipe I am posting here is for a small yield batch that you can do in a weekend with your crock pot. The apple butter purists will do it in gigantic pots over fires and such. I am no apple butter purist.

Let us begin.

Ingredients:

A bunch of of apples (30 or so) -cored and chopped. I leave the skins on because they cook down and it doesn't make any difference to me. Plus...the lazy...

[caption id="attachment_944" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="like-a-so"]

Sprouted What Now??

Have you ever heard of sprouted grain bread? Yeah, me either, until Boss mentioned something about it one night whilst basking in the romantic light of my laptop. Apparently he was quite fond of a certain type of bread called "Squirlley Bread". It is a bread made with sprouted grains, which according to http://www.organicsproutedflour.net is like the best thing ever. The website has a big ol' list of health claims most of which amount to "this is both tasty and good for you!"

Boss began waxing poetic about this bread, making me desperately want to try them. At $3.00 or so a loaf I of course was skeptical (and also cheap). So rather than rush out to the Co-Op searching for this bread, I did what I now often do and said "Shit, I can do that. To Google!"

Whilst Googling, I found a recipe for making your own sprouted grain breads, the method for sprouting said grains and the tools with which to grind the resulting sprouts. I had all of the things, shit was gone get sprouted up in this joint.

The recipe for sprouting grains is located HERE  at the mother of all DIY awesomeness, Mother Earth News . The basic principle is to get the grains to sprout little tails, which means they are rehydrated and growing again. You can apparently do this with any unprocessed seeds or grains. Our first endeavor involved red wheat berries. The resulting bread was...damp? but sweet and nutty, also delightful with soup. The next goal was to make a gluten free version of this delightful buisness so we tried our hands at Quinoa sprouting.

Thing the first: Do not use the jar method that is mentioned in the Mother Earth article. Apparently with the smaller grains like quinoa  (and possibly others but for sure this particular grain) it is easier to sprout them, and drain them by laying them flat on a cookie sheet. Please see below for step by step pictorial instructions!

Step One- Pick a grain!

We picked Quinoa becuase its gluten free and  I have a fetish for feeding the starving. A cup of grains will sprout into about a cup and a halfish of sprouts and that will make one small loaf or 8 small rolls.

[caption id="attachment_875" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="nom nom various grains"][/caption]

Second: Soak the grains over night in a jar

(this is where the picture would go if I had taken said picture)

Third:

Drain said grains and move them to a flat surface with which to sprout

[caption id="attachment_876" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="cookie sheets are flat!"][/caption]

Fourth: rinse the grains twice a day shuffling them about so they don't congeal and make yicky mold thingys until they start to make tails. This takes about two days. There is not a photo of the tails because I only have a shitty point and shoot camera with no macro setting right now. So..here is a drawing of what they look like with tails.

[caption id="attachment_878" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="NOTHING else"][/caption]

Fifth:  After they have the tails, you can grind the ever loving shit out of them. We use the meat grinding attachment for my Kitchen Aid and it works perfectly. I am sure there is an alternative method so you don't have to go buy a Kitchen Aid...but you should just go buy a Kitchen Aid because they are seriously the greatest things ever in life. I hug mine when no one is watching...Anyway...put the sprouts in the grinder and smoosh them through creating this odd, hamburgery like substance, you can add some flax, some seeds, some other stuff, whatever sounds good to you. When we did the wheat berries, we added flax but when we did the quinoa we kept it pure.

[caption id="attachment_879" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="No one knows of our secret love Kitchen Aid..."][/caption]

What Step am I on?

Smoosh the resulting pulpy stuff together to make little balls or a loaf and place on a sheet pan. We also rolled ours in sesame seeds because...why not?

[caption id="attachment_880" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="even his hands are handsome...*sigh*"][/caption]

I have completely lost count at this point:

Put a pan of water on the lower shelf of the oven, and the sheet pan on the upper rack. This keeps your bread from drying out. Bake at 250 degrees for...well the recipe said to do it for 2.5 hours and we found that this worked fairly well with the wheat berry bread, but was a bit too long for the quinoa. So, I am going to say check it after 2 hours and push on the top, if it is crusty but springy, its done. If its still fairly smooshy, give it another 10 minutes. There really isn't an exact time to this. The resulting nibbles look something like this:

wait...I forgot to take a picture of that too... well they look like the ones boss is rolling only cooked.

The judgement:

So, we quite liked the wheat berry bread, particularly when paired with soup. It was nothing like the squirlly bread, we think becuase they not only sprout their grains, but then dry and mill them or mix them with other grains to make flour...basically its more like bread. These loaves taste breadish, but in the case of the wheat berry bread, its very wet on the inside and hard on the outside. We may not have squeezed out enough of the water from the grains before smooshing them. As for the quinoa, we over cooked them but they had this very pleasent nutty flavor that we think would make an excellent cookie. We plan to incoporate some brown rice syrup next time and see what that is like.

Over all, sprouting: successful! Using said sprouts to make bread: Moderately successful and definately boast worthy. I mean, who do you know that is running about sprouting things and making stuff from them? Not enough people that is for sure!

Give it a try, use some other grains and let us know how it goes. What works best for you? Any alternative grinding methods? Next up, sprouted grain tortillas Oh yeah...that is happening!

Food! F*ck Yeah!

Like many of my generation, I have spent most of my life eating what can only be called "processed food type products." Everything I learned to cook was either soaking in cream of stuff or smothered in cheddar cheese.

Oddly enough, I have often not felt like the healthiest person in town. Having one time been something of an athlete,  it was right surprising when I became a grown up and doing my own cooking coupled with far less of the sports things, and then found myself exhausted, breathing hard, and often unnervingly sweaty.

I have made many a half hearted attempted at healthy living, and have made a few full hearted attempts at self sufficient living. Usually I have given up after a few short weeks and a couple of misshapen bread loaves.  The reason these experiments fail varies, but overall I think the uniting factor has to do with my reasons behind doing so.  When I would try to eat healthy it was because I wanted to lose weight, go on a trip and look like what I decided pretty was. When I would try to make my own foods it was because I was broke or needed some kind of escape from a crappy life.

When Boss moved in, we both expressed our desire to start living more healthy lives. We wanted to have more energy, be less reliant on processed foods and have a better understanding of what it was that we were putting in our bodies.These seemed like better reasons than any I had had before.

The decision made, putting it into action became something else entirely. As I mentioned, I was raised on mayonnaise based salads and margarine, my idea of eating healthy was buying things full of health claims and shiny photos brought to you by Nabisco and Winston Salem. I was still desperate to find the food loop hole that would allow me to continue eating cheese as often as humanly possible and feel awesome about my choices while doing so. Unfortunately,  that loop hole does not exist, and believe me, if it did, I would have found it. I fucking LOVE cheese.

We went back and forth and in and out of good habits, nothing really sticking for any significant amount of time. We would buy the better versions of boxed foods, skinless boneless frozen chicken parts, and things smacking of Omegas and what not. We didn't feel any better, our wallets were still pretty damn empty and we couldn't tell you from one day to the next what exactly it was that was going into our foods. This seemed counter productive.

*Tangent*

As poor people, we have been told again and again that we don't deserve to be healthy, that we don't deserve to have delicious, healthy foods to put in our bodies that don't come from brightly colored boxes. Healthy, organic foods are not affordable, not readily available and not marketed to your "average" family making only slightly more than minimum wage. The shelves at Wal-Mart (where all us poor folk shop) are chock full of chemical laden sugar drinks and vegetable flavored fried corn puffs. As there is no money to be had in actual carrots, rarely will a carrot be seen (the carrot lobbyists are few and far between).

As fat people we are told that its our fault we are fat, that we can't possibly be both healthy AND fat. Society tells us the two are mutually exclusive. We are told that the only way to be healthy, is to be thin. That the only way to be thin, is to give our money to a diet organization, or subscribe to some new chemical fad that will change our bodies to work in a different way. Does NO ONE see how FUCKED that is? If we give money to someone to make us thin, does that someone benefit in any way from actually making us thin? If we are all thin and staying that way, where will they get their money? Will Jenny Craig just brush her hands off and say "ahhh, now that was fine days work, on to cure cancer!" WHY would we willingly alter the chemistry of our bodies and reroute our internal organs in order to eat less shitty food, but shitty food all the same, instead of leaving our bodies the perfect energy plants they are and filling them with real, actual food that is also fuel? And why can't that be fun?! and social?! instead of a source of contention and angst?

We as a society have been told that we are helpless slaves to multinational corporations that know what is best for our families and that the food we have always eaten isn't good enough, or healthy enough. That their lobbyists and scientists know better than our bodies and our ancestors do. Do you see Charles Ingalls eating re-hydrogenated food type products? HELL NO! Charles Ingalls would be like, I want chicken, I'm gonna go get me an actual chicken. Caroline, grind me some flour! You know why? Because Charles Ingalls is THE MAN....

*End Tangent*

SO the point I was getting at is, we got sick of it. We started making changes.

Change the first:

Stop buying what has commonly been referred to as "bread" but is really a mishmash of refined chemicals and flours and a metric ton of sugar compressed into a bread like shape. That one was easy. I love making my own bread. Its this very zen thing for me. I knead the dough and become one with it, there is nothing but me, and the dough. I have begun the search for the most epic of all bread recipes. Stay tuned for that adventure.

Step the second:

Vegetables are expensive and keep spoiling before we eat them, this is both wasteful and annoying. Solution? Don't buy any meat, then you have to eat the vegetables and also have more money to spend on them! We also turned to the family oracle (Google) and found better ways to store our veggies and things to do with the bits we don't eat (stay tuned for this also!) So no veggies are going to waste!

Step the third:

Foods that contain less chemicals seem to be more expensive, this is what we in this house refer to as "bull shit". Solution? figure out how to make it yourself. Again, the family oracle provides us with solutions. Want gluten free bread? Don't want to pay 9bazillion dollars for 12 kinds of flour? Make sprouted grain breads.  Have a hankering for egg salad, don't know what "disodium edta " is and don't particularly want it to be part of your dinner? Make your own mayo. The internet is literally SWARMING with people aching to share their recipes and tips for making the perfect whatever. This has become what I call culinary truth or dare, and what Boss calls "Food Alchemy". I have saved about $100 a month by cutting out meat, and making my own everything but vegetables, yeast, almond milk, and flour. And if that grain mill comes in for my kitchen aid at a reasonable price...

Step the fourth and final:

Quit fucking apologizing for being awesome at life. We feel amazing since we have started instituting these changes in our lives. The energy shift in our home is palpable. Pinkone is happier, cleaner, and is far less of a goth kid in training. Boss and I are playing with her again, teaching her how to do the things we are doing and are able to use every meal as a science experiment or math lesson. There are some days where I start to feel silly, or self conscious for going to the co-op buying bulk quinoa or grinding my own oat flour or...whatever. Like suddenly I am one of those people from California Woody Allen makes fun of. Then I stop and think about it. Fuck You Woody Allen! (not really, I seriously love you Mr. Allen) But, really, that kind of thinking is me apologizing to (someone?) for living the kind of life I want to live. Living this way only looks ridiculous and feels like work when I decide it is ridiculous and feels like work and don't remind myself that not only is being relatively self sufficent super fun, but a great way to keep my brain in shape learning new things. Fuck Yeah Learning!

So basically what I am saying here is that my family is making the choice to engage in food related anarchy and non conformist living. We would like to share that with you, the people of the internet in the hopes that you might find it informative, entertaining, or at the very least, amusing. If you have any awesome ideas for self sufficent living, food related anarchy, or just a general comment or gripe, please feel free to send it to the following address: pinklilybit@gmail.com

Stay tuned for more adventures in MediocreParenting, in which your hero continues to feel less Mediocre by the day!