Debi: Shhh! Don't tell anyone!

Stori is right; I have the much-appreciated blessing of plentiful sources for fresh produce. In fact, the only things I buy in the can are beans, and that's just because I am too lazy to soak dried beans. I buy frozen peas, I suppose, but I don't know many people with kids who DON'T buy frozen peas. What else do you serve with macaroni & cheese?!

My favorite place to shop for fresh produce is The MarketPlace on Oakton, only about 4 miles from my house. My husband and I jokingly refer to it as "The Mafia Market," because the produce there is so cheap and of such high quality that we can only assume that it is a front for some other type of more nefarious business. (Note to police and any other interested parties: I have absolutely no evidence of this!) We shop here for produce in the winter months, when nothing much can grow locally. It is a miracle of a store, catering to many ethnic restaurants and shoppers, and so the selection can be exotic and exciting. Gigantic, frozen durians hang in bags above enormous, overflowing displays of oranges and apples and peaches and melons and pineapples and cherries; avocados are often 75 cents and rest in mounds next to crates of mangoes, just across the aisle from hundreds of pounds of every variety of potato, onion, and squash you can imagine. I can fill three enormous grocery sacks for less than $25.

I love to take my daughters to this market, where we can imagine any number of delicious meals and try new things. The last time we were there, Ronni had been clamoring for sweet potatoes, so in they went, along with leeks, broccoli, green beans, apples, pears, peaches, canteloup, pineapple, mangoes, grapes, garlic, dates, russet potatoes, and portobello mushrooms. Since the store also sells dry goods from all over the world, we browsed further and came home with canned green olives from Israel, clover honey from Wisconsin, soup noodles from China, pastry dough from Greece, and a big block of tofu from lord-knows-where, since it wasn't labeled.

But. Back to the sweet potatoes.

We are a big soup family here, and I'll put just about anything into a soup to see how it tastes. Though I'd never had sweet potato soup, one night last week, I took a look at the sweet potatoes and figured it couldn't be that hard to make a soup with them. I baked the potatoes before leaving the house for our after-school activities, figuring it would get me a step ahead for the dinner that would have to be quickly prepared when we got home. I found a recipe on the internet that looked like I could adapt it to my non-dairy, vegetarian needs, and voila! Between that and a pan of cornbread, hastily mixed and tossed into the oven 30 minutes before dinner, we had a great start. Here's my version of the recipe:

Sweet Potato Soup

2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons salted margarine
3 cup water, mixed with 3 tsp vegetable broth powder
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
3 cups cooked, smashed sweet potatoes
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 cups vanilla soymilk

Make a roux-like mixture in your soup pot with the flour, margarine, and broth. Add the brown sugar and heat to a boil. Add the potatoes and spices and cook for 5 more minutes, then turn off the heat. Using an immersion blender, puree the potato mixture, then add the soymilk and heat again. Serve with CORNBREAD!

What to eat with this? Soup and cornbread is a nice start, but we need more than just this. A frantic bout of trimming green beans, and then a rapid-fire steam in the microwave, followed by liberal dousing of them with salted margarine and a tiny sprinkle of dried dill, was just what we needed. An overflowing bowl of chopped mango rounded it out nicely.

All in all, the prep time was perfect for a busy evening where dinner had to come together in less than 40 minutes. I won't lie; there are nights like this where we all eat cereal or yogurt for dinner, but having a fridge full of beautiful, bright fresh produce does inspire me to dig just a bit deeper for the creativity it takes to make a meal more than just fuel. Thank you, Market Place on Oakton!

Stori~ poor planning is the true mother of invention

Since we raise, butcher, and process our own meat, I am required to take out and plan for supper several days in advance. I fully admit, I am not good at this. I rarely know what I'll be in the mood to fix or eat till the day of. Within a year's time, we have usually butchered at least one if not two full sized sow pig, one moose, and maybe a beef cow. That much meat takes up a ton of freezer space, so my mom and dad keep the moose over in their freezer, I have claim to the pork and beef. Because my dad is an expert planner, we are never without moose thawed out. I really wish I had inherited that gene. Now, I say all that, just to say this.

Yesterday I woke up with a plan in my hand and hankering for spaghetti for supper. I make my meat sauce out of pretty much any burger (beef, moose, pork, caribou). About 3 days ago I took out some pork to thaw for the week, thinking I was grabbing a roast and a package of burger. My spaghetti supper ingredients (so I thought) were taken care. So there I go to the fridge to grab my burger out around 3 in the afternoon only to find no burger package. Pork chops. What? Pork chops? But I didn't wanna make pork chops! I didn't have enough potatoes over at my house for mashed. They were still in cold storage over at Papa's. Besides the fact I really wanted pasta! There I was, time to get supper going, nothing thawed out, my pasta plans dashed. So I go to my pantry and do like any good cook does, I stare at the shelves and cuss at myself. To be honest, I felt a little iron cheffy at that point. The clock is ticking, 6 hungry people to feed, no meat thawed out, one craving for pasta....GO! I notice a can of artichoke hearts..hmmm, oooh then fire roasted diced tomatoes, ok, oh! penne pasta~ Colt's favorite! Things are starting to come together. What about the protein for my carnivorous family? Canned chicken breast! Yes! So, by guessing, and tinkering, tasting, and guessing, I accidentally came up with a dish that Marc has requested to be put in the supper rotation!

Unlike Debi, I do not have at my disposal several fresh and raw food markets to choose from. Alaska winters are not friendly to fresh produce, and a "quick" trip to the grocery store would take about 2 hours. If you could look into my pantry you would find row after row, shelf after shelf of canned goods. These may not be as tasty as fresh, but they work great for my family. Besides canning our own home grown, I always keep a fully stocked pantry filled with canned food. And, they don't go bad! So out of the basic staples I have on hand at all times, I was able to come up with a very heart warming, belly filling, taste pleasing meal.

Penne pasta bake with artichokes and red sauce
(feeds family of 7 with leftovers!)

3 large cans white chicken breast, drained and broken up
1/2 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 can fire roasted diced tomatoes
1 can artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
3 cans tomato sauce (not spaghetti sauce, just plain tomato sauce)
1 can v-8 juice
2 1lb. boxes penne pasta
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
kosher salt, pepper, sage, oregano, thyme

In a large heavy pan, saute onions and garlic in about 2 tablespoons olive oil. Add drained chicken and brown, stirring constantly. Add undrained tomatoes and chopped artichokes. Brown just a tiny bit more. Season with a couple pinches of kosher salt, some pepper, about a tsp. ground sage, and 1/2 tsp both oregano and thyme (pre-made italian seasoning would work too). Pour in tomato sauces and v-8 juice. Stir, turn to low, cover and let simmer. Can slowly simmer for several hours if you like. Cook pasta in salted boiling water, but only for about 7 minutes. You don't want it all the way done. Drain cooked pasta and mix with the sauce. Transfer mixture to a big casserole dish, I used a 9x13 stoneware and that wasn't quite big enough. Top with mozzarella cheese and bake at *350 for around 30 minutes.

Note to Debi ~ this sauce would be great meatless too!

Stori ~ death by bean

The temperature is a brisk -46 below zero today. Temps that low cause everything to slow down. The well in the barn froze up this morning causing my poor Dad to haul water from the house. I decided against our weekly Tuesday ice skating date for Colt and I, it's not worth the risk to travel this cold. Paige will have a "carry your coat" day at school. That simply means that the students are required to carry their cold weather gear everywhere they go in case of an evacuation emergency where they would have to go outside. At least they will have indoor recess, they usually mandate that at -20 below.

Weather this cold would usually call for a full blown, 5 dish, hot meal to warm and fill bellies. Unfortunately, I have a fridge full of leftovers. I have been accused this week of trying to kill my husband via beans. I lovingly refer to my family as carnivores. With the exceptions of my son who has a problem swallowing, and my general disgust and distaste, they are a meat eating group. While trying to both combat the constant required meat every meal and me battling my winter weight gain, I turn to beans as a protein source. Although I'm sure the entire family will pay dearly for it tonight, once again, we have beans to eat up. The menu tonight is leftovers. We have a huge supply of very tasty and very low calorie Taco Soup (loaded with 4!! kinds of beans ). There is pinto beans and rice on corn tortillas. I still have a bowl leftover of black bean chili. And finally, to the relief of my husband, chicken breast and sausage jambalaya (no beans in that one, but it is loaded with rice!). Hopefully after supper with 7 people, my fridge will once again have a little more space to add more leftovers! Tomorrow, pork roast with mashed potatoes and gravy, roasted carrots and parsnips, and green beans. With everything having been provided by our land, it's one of my mother's favorite meals.

Debi: (Just Enough) Squash & Black Bean Empanadas, with Neighbors

Last week, I decided that we had been eating entirely too much purely beige food. After a cooking frenzy over the holidays, I had grown tired of standing in my kitchen chopping and sauteeing and frying and baking and plating, only to come back an hour later and spend almost as much time scrubbing and wiping and wrapping and sudsing. I stepped back for about a week and we ate a combination of leftovers, boxed macaroni & cheese, pancakes, and take-out. By last Thursday, I decided that enough was enough; we had to eat something good.

One of my favorite cookbooks is Veganomicon, a vegan cookbook with some recipes so complicated that I put it aside for months at a time, exhausted by the prospect of "patshken zikh mit," a Yiddish phrase that translates roughly to "messing around with tiny details forever until you go nuts." However, I had rested my cooking brain for long enough to decide to attempt a recipe like that, and so I settled on "Roasted Acorn Squash and Black Bean Empanadas."

Ever roasted a squash? That actually takes as much time as preparing some entire meals. You have to chop it open, which, even with a good knife, should be considered a dangerous athletic event. Then roasting it, in your oven, takes an hour. Then it has to cool long enough to scrape the seeds out, and then there's cutting it up into the right size pieces for your recipe. And for this recipe, that's just to get past the first line in the ingredients: "1 roasted squash."

Fortunately (and I use that term ironically), in my house, the day often begins just after 6am, when my youngest wakes up. I had that squash roasted before taking my older daughter, Ronni, to school at 8:45. Nope. I'm not kidding.

So, the next thing on the list was to make the empanada dough. I mixed up a batch while Sammi, the resident 4 year old, watched cartoons, then set it in the fridge to chill. After a morning of lounging, playing the occasional board game, coloring, and eating a beige lunch, Sammi and I commenced the rolling process. This may very well be Sammi's whole reason for being alive. She loves to roll dough. Last year, for Hannukah, we gave her a little child's size set of real baking implements, and I think she'd sleep with her rolling pin if we gave her the chance. On a chair dragged to the kitchen counter, she rolled and rolled, dribbled the surface with flour, rolled again. She sang a cheerful tune to herself.

It is such a peaceful experience to bake with her -- both of us industrious, the kitchen warm and good-smelling, our hands busy and purposeful. This may be why she and I did not find our groove together until she was old enough for a "project." It's like we need a common cause, outside ourselves, to take the focus away from our early struggles as mother & daughter. She was such a sick and unhappy baby, and unable to tell me why -- and then I was such a distraught, helpless mother, unable to fix the trouble. Now we can talk and work together to roll out that dough, smooth out those lumps, mix in the herbs and leavening to make our friendship rise, sweet and spicy, in just the right amount of time.

So. Dough rolled out, it now needed to rest in the fridge, chilling until closer to dinner. It occurred to me in mid-afternoon that my neighbor's birthday was the next day. A quick call to confirm with my husband that he approved, and she and her husband were invited to join us for dinner. I added a cake to my mental list of things to make after picking up Ronni from school at 3:35.

We bundled up and dragged ourselves out into the snowy day to get Ronni, then dragged ourselves back. Ronni and Sammi sat at a small table in the kitchen, snacking and working on homework and coloring, while I began the process of making the empanada filling. There was that squash again -- and then I added black beans, oil, seasoning, lemon, maple syrup...almost done...time to roll out the dough again.

Sammi, in all her glory, rolled thin the squares I cut from our dough, spooning the filling into the middle of each while Ronni grumbled over another set of math problems. Oh my. That sure didn't look like much food. What to add?

I keep my laptop on the kitchen counter, so I quickly looked through my fridge and freezer for a complementary vegetable to serve with the empanadas. Finding corn, I quickly located a good recipe on Vegweb.com: Spiced corn. It was easy to make, and easily doubled. Done.

What was I forgetting? I have an hour before dinner, the empanadas are ready to go into the oven. What else?

Oh.

Cake.

Not enough time to make and frost a birthday cake. Not enough time to make and frost a birthday cookie either. Dessert in our house can't have any chocolate -- Sammi has GERD, so the acidic foods stop appearing after mid-afternoon -- so I quickly located a recipe for white chocolate and dried cranberry dessert bars (with some substitutions -- I used margarine and vanilla almond bark), and goaded Ronni into finishing her homework quickly enough to help me mix the ingredients. Flash - into the oven just as the empanadas came out, and as our neighbors arrived, and just minutes after the phone call from my husband that he wouldn't be coming home from work in time for dinner, after all.

Ronni, Sammi, and I sat around the table with our neighbors -- a dear married couple who we've adopted as our extra brother- and sister-in-law, though they are no relation -- and enjoyed the fruits of a day's labor. As the oven beeped to tell us the dessert was ready, C (the husband half of the couple) came into the kitchen to help me McGyver our 5 and 6 birthday candles into a 2 and 9 for B's 29th birthday. My flour-spattered, pink-cheeked daughters sang enthusiastically, and their daddy arrived in time to eat the last 3 empanadas.

So, there's the ambitious dinner we tried last week. The verdict? Too much "patshken zikh mit," for a recipe with no leftovers. However, there was just enough love and fun for a winter's day in the city.

Back inside!

Dare we slink back onto our blog and try to pretend it hasn't been six months since we wrote?

We are both sorry. We want to try again. We got distracted by being outside, by our hobbies and our families and the things that brought us together as friends in the first place: the beauty we both find in the every-day, our attempts to make the mundane meaningful, and our occasional struggles to find inspiration in what looks quiet and unassuming. Does anyone want to read about what they already know and do every day?

The answer to that, we both realize, is yes. Otherwise dooce.com and Erma Bombeck and Mothering Magazine and the Roseanne show would never have made it. So, here's our plan:

Twice a week, each of us will attempt to write a post about the most mundane of all motherly pursuits, the one that is the ubiquitous task of housewifery all over the world: dinner. We'll tell you what we're making, and why, and how it went, and what our home was like while we were making it. Sometimes it will be a recipe and a nice dinner. In my case, sometimes it will be what I call "subsistence food" on the way to or from some sort of activity. Either way, it will give you a taste (pun intended!) of life at home, here in the city or there in the country.

Wish us luck.

Stori ~ just checking in....

So once again, the frantic Alaskan summer has over ran my blogging. I figure I would do a little multi-tasking and jot down some updates while I eat a quick (read pathetic and easy) supper.

My mare Heidi is coming along quite nicely this summer. Although not completely dog broke, she still gives the occasional buck, she is catching on to her lessons beautifully. At the beginning of the year, I had grandiose plans of shooting off of her in competition by now, reality took over and I'm able to be happy with what we have so far. This past weekend, my son Colt rode her in his first gymkhana. He rode in the lead line class of course, but that was also perfect for her. She's at her best when she has me on the ground leading her way. She did have a little episode of excitement in the second game of clover leaf barrels. She gave a small buck which did end up causing Colt to fall off. It was her first competition and his first buck off. Although it scared him a little bit, he was a little cowboy and climbed right back on (after a juice box of course). This picture caught her buck in action.

A couple weeks ago we had the opportunity to visit an old -and still running- gold mine up in Livengood Alaska. We have a friend who used to mine up there with her then husband who has since passed away. There was

very old buildings that were falling down that she allowed us to dig around in. One of the buildings was an old blacksmith shop that had collapsed and filled with treasures for Marc. It was a really neat trip up there. My dad also came along with Marc and I as well as the kids. Such stories surround places like that.

Twice a week we have been going to mounted shooting practice. It's a great experience for Heidi and my oldest daughter Paige has started riding and competing again. Since she is just 11, she rides in the wrangler division which does not allow her to use guns. She runs the course on her horse for time and pattern accuracy only. A friend of ours has offered Paige the use of their retired shooting horse, Baron. Baron and Paige are a great match. He's 25 years old and such an old hand at most all things. Apart from being afraid of cows (only in Alaska would a horse have the chance of being afraid of the scary unknown cow!) he is an amazing babysitter. He's been helping Paige gain time in the saddle and her confidence back. I have rode a friend's horse, Ace, in the competitions that last couple times and am having a blast at it! The only horse I had the chance to ever shoot off of was my appy Jake, and he fought me the whole way. It sure is a lot funner to shoot off a horse that isn't trying to kill you along the way. I have been riding Heidi at the practices.

We have had an absolute beautiful summer so far. Very dry and extremely hot! Last summer we were plagued by heavy rains all summer and a couple years prior, heavy smoke from large wild fires. Although Alaska has several big fires going on now, we have only had a couple days of smoke bad enough to keep us inside. With temperatures in the mid to upper 80's, the heat has been pretty extreme for us. I don't know if I could handle the real heat in the lower 48 anymore.

Debi: Local Produce

Last summer, our family (well, ok, since I do all the grocery shopping, it was mostly me) decided to limit our produce purchases to local produce during the natural growing season in the midwest. I start this adventure for us in June, when we start receiving weekly boxes of produce from our CSA, Angelic Organics, and I end it after we've used up most of the produce from the last box, usually sometime in November. It's a short chunk of the year, relatively speaking, and we don't have the setup Stori does to preserve food during the winter, but I feel good about doing at least what we do.

Our commitment is very simple: if we can get local produce, we don't buy produce from, say, California. That means summer is a time without bananas and mangoes, and that asparagus, which grows in the spring, doesn't grace our grill in August. Our sources are abundant: the CSA box arrives on Wednesday, with vegetables only, usually enough to last the week and some items into the next; there is a small farmers' market on Wednesday evenings, two blocks from our house, where we buy fruit; and there is a HUGE farmers' market on Saturday mornings in downtown Evanston, another place to buy fruit and things like honey, preserves, fresh bread, flowers, etc. Most of the time, we don't need to buy any produce in between.

Until, of course, the berry monsters invade the house and eat up all the berries in one day.

My daughters are fruit FREAKS. They can eat more fruit than anything else, will absolutely gorge themselves on it. I've seen them polish off half a canteloup in one sitting. Berries are no exception, but I was sure that four pints would get us through the week. No such luck. On Wednesday, we bought a pint of blueberries and a pint of cherries. The blueberries were gone by mid-morning on Thursday. On Saturday, we bought a pint of blueberries and a pint of raspberries. The raspberries were gone by nightfall and the blueberries were gone by mid-day on Sunday. We currently have six cherries in a sad bowl in the fridge. Today's harvest from our one raspberry bush and four little strawberry plants can be seen in the picture to the right.

No farmers' markets until Wednesday.

In dismay, I ran into the local Dominicks grocery store (a Safeway chain here in the Chicago area), hoping they might have berries from Michigan (which is where our local farmers' markets get their berries anyway -- it's only a couple of hours away). I was thrilled to see a huge sign that said "LOCALLY GROWN!" In fact, that sign was on half a dozen large displays of produce. However, when I grabbed for the beautiful carton of strawberries, I recognized the Driscoll's Farm label. Driscoll's is a California company.

I urgently reached for another product under the "LOCALLY GROWN!!!" signage. Blueberries -- also grown in California. Same with watermelon, raspberries, blackberries, and cherries. I found a store employee and asked him about it, and he pointed to a sign with a map of the country, explaining to me that the "LOCALLY GEOWN!!!" signs were only meant to alert customers to the fact that the produce department did sell some items that were locally grown. It was not meant to indicate that the items underneath the sign were locally grown. This week, according to the map, the locally grown products were the blueberries and the scallions.

Except, of course, I noticed that the blueberries were from California. I pointed this out to the employee, and he offered to get his manager. I agreed. The manager came out and explained to me that the corporate headquarters of Safeway requires him to put the "LOCALLY GROWN!!!" signs up, and that the real test of whether something is actually locally grown is to look for the white and green signs above the produce that say, in small letters, "local." He pointed this out on the sign above the scallions. I looked, and it did indeed say "local," except right below it, it also said, "a product of Mexico."

I said, "Define local, please."

The manager stammered, apologized, said it was mislabeled, and that he agreed that the signs were perhaps misleading. He suggested I fill out a comment card that could be sent to corporate HQ in California.

I thought I'd do him one better. Does anyone else out there shop at Safeway stores that label their produce this way? Does anyone else find this demeaning, misleading, annoying, and just plain wrong? I understand that, in economies of scale, produce currently has to be shipped around the country. I just don't want to shop that way when I have an alternative, and being misled by the store about this makes me wonder if I am being misled about other things. Is the "ORGANIC" produce really organic? Is the "LOWFAT" muffin really lowfat? Is the "LETTUCE" really lettuce?

Please visit your local Safeway store and check your produce (unless you live in California, in which case everything is probably local -- though if you see Michigan blueberries, don't tell me; I might scream). If it says "LOCAL" but it isn't -- talk to the manager. Ask about it. Let it become an issue. Let other people overhear you. Hey, Safeway, don't sell local produce; that's your right -- but don't lie about it to your customers. That's your wrong.