White Bean Soup with Vegetables

Yesterday I attended the 2011 Bits & Pieces Luncheon held at First United Methodist Church in Salem. It was my first year attending the event, which has been held since 1977, and I was doing so on assignment for the paper. There were foods of all types there and the church is selling a cookbook, for $3, containing all the recipes for those foods. At first I had planned on buying a cookbook but then I acknowledged my cookbook addiction and reasoned that I really didn't need yet another cookbook. However, after attending this event I walked home, got $3, and walked right back down there to get one. This is a recipe from that cookbook.

A photo of the White Bean Soup with Vegetables in little cups, ready for sampling.

Spring in Southwestern Virginia is so fickle. One week it is blazing hot, the next it is (literally) freezing cold. A predicted day of 66 degrees can equal out to a bright sun and temperatures reaching 74 or it can mean, as it did yesterday, overcast skies, random showers, and temperatures that don't hit 50 degrees. Trying to plan a meal, much less a menu ahead of time, is very tricky given these circumstances. Something light and refreshing for dinner or something to warm those chilled bones?

So .. it turns out that soup is wonderful for Spring weather. Usually quick and easy to prepare. Light and yet hearty. Endlessly versatile. Dress it up with some rustic bread and artisan cheese if you'd like. Or perhaps just a salad. Or just let it stand alone and appreciate it's inherent beauty.

White Bean Soup with Vegetables

by Sue Williams, from the 2011 Bits & Pieces Recipes Cookbook

1 T. olive oil

1 large sweet onion, minced

2 medium carrots, minced

2 stalks celery, chopped

2 medium potatoes, chopped

1 medium zucchini, diced

3-4 sprigs parsley, minced

1/4 tsp. each fresh rosemary and thyme, or 1/8 tsp. each dried

6 cups warm chicken broth

2 1/2 cups white beans, soaked & cooked, or 2 cans white beans

1 T. unsalted butter Salt and Pepper to taste

*Heat a medium Dutch oven or stockpot over medium-high heat. Add olive oil. Add onion, carrots, celery, and potatoes. Saute until the vegetables sweat. Stir in rosemary and thyme. Then add zucchini, chicken broth and beans. Cook 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Puree with an immersion blender to desired consistency. Stir in butter and season with salt & pepper. Cook an additional 3-5 minutes.

*Makes 6 servings

*Store in refrigerator for up to 4 days or freeze

Here is our homemade pot of this, after dinner had already been served.

We used homemade chicken stock rather than store-bought broth. We also used 2 cups of grated zucchini in place of the one medium since that is what we had on hand. We forgot the parsley completely but you'll notice it isn't mentioned when to add it anyway in the recipe. We don't yet have an immersion blender (*hint hint to anyone out there*), so we used our blender for this. You could also use a food processor, but ours has been being a pain when it comes to soups lately (another hint hint?), so we tried the blender and it worked wonderfully. Just have an extra bowl handy for the transferring process.

Review: Honestly, we found this recipe a little bland as-is. That isn't necessarily a bad thing though, as it makes it a good recipe for people who can't tolerate a lot of spices such as the elderly, young children, or people whose bodies won't allow them many spices. It also allows a wonderful spring board to personalize it with your choice of herbs and spices. Roasted garlic always calls to me, so I will certainly be adding it, likely along with some garlic powder, to this the next time I make it. And I will be making it again. With all those vegetables in there, how could I possibly resist not doing so?

Scenes from dinner

Homemade dinners should never be under estimated. Ever. They can be as simple or elaborate as you'd like. Here is what we had tonight.

A loaf of sourdough bread made with roasted garlic and Parmesan cheese. It came out of the oven just in time for dinner and to be topped with some homemade raw butter. Delicious!

Burgundy Beef Po' Boys were the real delight of the evening though. Justin began cooking the beef on Saturday in the slow cooker. The aroma of it was sheer torture!! I really thought I might go insane having to smell it and not being able to devour it.

The recipe came from the book Crock Pot Slow Cooker Best-Loved Recipes.

Burgundy Beef Po' Boys with Dipping Sauce:

1 boneless beef chuck shoulder or bottom round roast (3 pounds) ~ we used rump roast

2 cups chopped onions

1/4 cup dry red wine

3 TB balsamic vinegar

1 TB beef bouillon granules

1 TB Worcestershire sauce

3/4 tsp dried thyme

1/2 tsp garlic powder

*Trim excess fat & discard. Cut beef into 3 or 4 pieces. Place onions on bottom of crock pot slow cooker. Top with beef and remaining ingredients. Cover and cook on HIGH 8 - 10 hours or until beef is very tender.

*Remove beef from crock pot, allow to cool slightly. Shred with 2 forks. Let cooking liquid stand 5 minutes to allow fat to rise. Skim off fat and discard. Spoon beef into Italian rolls. Serve the cooking liquid as dipping sauce.

We served it with some corn and with the roasted garlic bread on the side.

Soooo good!!

Thoughts from the Kitchen

It's been nearly a month since I blogged on here, yikes! Sorry 'bout that y'all. But I'm gonna sit down now and look around the kitchen ~ which sadly means no photos today, just thoughts.

Right now I have a moment somewhat to myself. The Sourdough Starter has been fed. Beer bread is in the oven baking. The kids are occupied and the dogs are playing.

Thought 1:
I love to cook. I love to bake. I love real food, slow food. I read cookbooks for fun and dream of dishes yet to be made. However, life can really through a kink into that desire .. especially when you're a mama .. even more especially when you have a finicky 4 year old at the table.
You lose the whimsically magical delight of "Hmm .. what shall I create today?" as you spin around the kitchen in a too-cute apron.
Instead, the sink is full of dishes, the dogs are slobbering on the floor, the counters are cluttered, you're wondering how you keep your shirt so damn dirty, and what the hell are you going to make for dinner that your 4 year old will take one look at that (sometimes not even that, just as soon as he HEARS about it) and begin absolutely SCREAMING "BUT I DON'T LIKE THAT!!!!"
"You've never had it before" you soothingly reply.
"BUT I HATE IT!!!" he screams back.
"It's made with stuff you like" you reassuringly begin to plead.
"NO I DON'T" he screams back again amid his dramatic sobs.
"Well, that's what is for dinner and you can eat it or not, so there." Because no matter how old you are saying "So there" and sticking out your tongue (even if you only do that part in your mind because you don't want your kids doing it back to you) feels REALLY good.
And this whole scene plays out first in your head, because you know it is coming, and then again as soon as dinner is announced, and then again once more as an encore when dinner is served.

Thought 2:
Real food rocks. It can go from being the easiest thing to find to the hardest thing to find. It seems like I'm always finding out new reasons why all these things in the grocery store are really poisoning us. But even through these trials, real food just rocks.
It makes me swoon & drool like some Rock Star Hottie flashing me his baby blues & six-pack abs. Raw Milk Cheese. Spent Beer Grain Bread baked in Flower Pots. Home-cured Ham. Pasture Raised meat on the smoker. --- oh, I am so swooning and drooling right now. Hello Pavlov.
This morning I had a breakfast of two eggs (thanks to the Blue Nymph Biddies, our backyard chickens) fried up in a cast iron skillet on top of a pad of raw milk butter (made here at home), topped with some delicious Irish cheese.
Right now the heavenly aroma of beer bread is filling the kitchen. I made it using Ruby's Deep Winter Stout (a dry Irish stout). I am already envisioning it, fresh out of the oven with butter melting on it as I dig into it for lunch.

The other day someone mentioned a whipped cream cheese to me, as it is lower in calories. I responded that I cared more about real food and didn't bother with calories. And I realized something really freeing: I don't care about calories. I don't even think about them.
Of course I care about health and wellness but, when it comes to food, I realize that I think differently than a lot of people ~ and a lot more like a hopefully growing number of people!
I think about where the food came from. How was it raised and grown? What processes did it have to go through to be the food it is in my kitchen? Is it natural? Does thinking about it and tasting it make me salivate or does it make my mind go "well, it's supposed to be better for me?" in that voice that sighs and silently says "ugh" and resigns itself to this food-like stuff.
I refuse to acknowledge that voice anymore. That voice isn't a happy one. Real food squashes that voice flat and has me singing in a flower-filled meadow.

Thought 3:
I am dreaming of my gardens over-flowing with produce. I am out of homemade ketchup and can't wait to make more. I long to see what the gardens produce this year.
I wasn't ready to welcome Spring. I love the snow and we didn't get it this year, so I've been pretty bummed about that. Now it is still February and I've noticed that my lilac tree has the beginnings of buds on it. So I am letting Winter go and looking forward to Spring. And my gardens. Which will fill my kitchen with fresh, organic food and stock my pantry full.

Thought 4:
What the hell is for dinner tonight?

Beer Bread = Heaven

We brewed beer today which is always a wonderful delight. This time, instead of letting all the spent grains go to the chickens or the compost pile I decided to make some beer bread with it. The color of the bread is reflective of the type of beer we brewed and therefore the grains we used.
I'm not going to write out a lot here, I'm just going to let the photos speak for themselves.

Can you smell that aroma? The bread fresh out of the oven, warm and topped with butter that melts as soon as it touches it. Are you drooling a little bit? You should be.

The recipe I used said it made 3 loaves of bread. Obviously I adapted it a little and made flowerpot bread. The bread wasn't out of the oven though and we had already eaten well over a loaf's worth of that bread. It was divine.

Fromage Blanc

For our second cheese we decided to make Fromage Blanc, as a friend (thanks Angie!) had given us a package of Fromage Blanc starter.

~the starter packet, with directions~

Fromage Blanc is a soft cheese and is considered an easy cheese for beginners to make. It is French in origin and literally translates to "white cheese." It has the consistency of cream cheese but with a fraction of the calories and cholesterol.*

To Make Fromage Blanc:
Heat 1 gallon of milk to 86 degrees & mix in 1 packet. Let sit at room temperature (72 degrees), undisturbed, for 12 hours or until thickened like yogurt. Gently ladle the curds into a butter muslin lined colander, hang & drain for 6-12 hours. Refrigerate and enjoy!

We followed both the directions on the packet & the directions in Ricki Carroll's Cheese Making book.

Heating the milk went well, as did adding the packet. We covered the pot and moved it to the dining room, near the radiator, to sit overnight. This was about 7:20pm. ~ Our house isn't kept at 72 degrees, we keep it colder. Also, trying to find a place where it can be undisturbed for so many hours can provide a bit of a challenge. (Since this worked well I am now thinking of going and sitting in the dining room near the radiator when I need undisturbed time to myself)

A little after 8am the next day I ladled it all into the colander to drain. Since I don't have butter muslin I used 4 layers of cheesecloth, which seemed to work well. It drained nicely and, as soon as I could, I hung it up to continue.

~hung up & draining~
~a close-up shot of the whey draining off~

In Ricki Carroll's book she states that a shorter draining time will produce a thinner, more spreadable cheese whereas a longer draining time will produce produce a cheese that is more cream cheese like in it's consistency. We let ours drain almost 10 hours, in part because I wanted the cream cheese consistency and in part because of how our day was going .. it just worked out better for us this way.

Adding the herbs.

Of course we couldn't just let it be as it was. It was good, but the temptation was too great. We followed the recipe for "Herbes De Provence Cheese Spread" that is found in the same book. The recipe called for 1 TB herbes de Provence per 1 cup fromage blanc.




As you can see, we got about 2 1/2 cups of cheese out of the gallon of milk.

We added two heaping tablespoons of Herbes De Provence.

It was easy enough to mix by hand, which is always nice to be able to do instead of using the KitchenAid.

This photo is the same as above, just without the flash. You can see the herbs a lot better here though, so I included both.

The Fromage Blanc with herbes de Provence was met to two thumbs up. Always a good sign.

We also decided to add a head of roasted garlic and then a good tablespoon or so of honey.

We took this cheese along with some baguettes to our brewers guild meeting. We came home with only 1/2 the cheese left (and there was a lot of food there!). ~A good sign.


Recipe Score:
Fromage Blanc - our 2nd cheese. Absolutely delicious!! Fresh, herby, tangy, and sweet. The flavor is simple and yet complex. We will definitely make this again! We also look forward to experimenting more with draining times (and how it affects the consistency) along with add-ins. Simply delightful.

PS ~ We used the leftover whey to make ricotta cheese. That'll be the next blog!

LATE EDIT:
So we JUST realized that while we used the entire package, we only used 1/2 a gallon of milk. This is a common thing to goof up on when your milk comes in 1/2 gallon jars. It's easy to visually grab one jar and assume it was one gallon. This might explain why it was extra crumbly. However, it was still friggin' delicious!!! And, that means that we got 2 1/2 cups of cheese out of only a 1/2 gallon of milk!!! We're now looking forward to making it again even more!!!

Real Buttermilk Cheese

Justin and I are in love. Not just with each other, but with cheese. A love affair with cheese is a wonderful thing. And, of course, we can't just leave it at buying cheese. We want cheese made from raw milk. We want to continue our pursuit of being self-sufficient and make our own cheese. So .. we are.

We got the book Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll. It is a highly recommended book when you desire to make cheese.

The first recipe we tried was "Real Buttermilk Cheese." This is made using real buttermilk, the product leftover from turning cream into butter, not the buttermilk you buy at the store. Since we had some of this on hand from butter making we decided to give it a whirl. Here is how it went.


It began with a little over 3 cups of real buttermilk. The recipe called for 1 gallon, but we used what we had and decided we'd be ok with less cheese as a result.

On the left, the buttermilk heating up on the stove-top. On the right, cheesecloth over the colander, which is sitting inside a bowl.

So, the recipe says to heat the buttermilk to between 160 degrees, at which point it will separate into curds and whey. If it fails to do so, heat it to 180 degrees.
The recipe had also advised setting the buttermilk out at 72 degrees for 24 hours to sour it some, but said that this step was optional. Since we had already let it sit out once (after it was made) we used the buttermilk straight from the fridge.



Where things began to go wrong.

The buttermilk didn't separate out into curds and whey. I began to wonder what the hell curds and whey even looked like because all I could keep thinking of was Miss Muffett and that damn spider. I came up with a rhyme of my own:

Little Miss Dreadie
sat oh so ready
waiting on curds and whey ..

Here is my first photo of the buttermilk once it had reached it proper temperature.


See how it just has skin on it?? This is all it would do.

I decided to let it cool down then reheat it. I did this a couple of times and all I got was skin.

I was taking notes as I went. Here they are:

This is taking a long time and I am beginning to doubt curds will form. It's been over 10 minutes and I've just got hot buttermilk.

2:27 - heated it back up to 180 and decided to then cover & turn off heat as we have an errand to run. It began boiling on me. I'm worried. But it is covered and the heat is off and we'll see what it looks like after my errand.

4:30 - No change. Heated it back up and got same results. Finally decided to add 1tsp rennet diluted in 1/8 cup water.

4:50 - Hanging it to drain. ~ 1 gallon was supposed to make 1 1/2 lbs. I used 1/4 gallon, so this might actually be the results I was supposed to get. That's a lotta friggin' whey leftover!

This was all I was able to get as far as any notion of "curds" go. I broke down and added rennet, which shouldn't have been needed since this was cow's milk and not goat's.

So, I drained it through and then hung it up. I usually have a basket hanging from a hook over my KitchenAid but I took it down and hung this up. It worked really well actually.

After letting it hang for 4 hours, this is what I got. You can see the container is a tiny one, but of course I only used 3 cups of buttermilk, so whaddya expect??

The "cheese" has the consistency of cottage cheese. The house had begun to smell like cooked milk so it's taken me until today (I made this on Saturday) to try and taste it without immediately tasting cooked milk. However .. it still tastes like cooked milk to me.

Perhaps if we had added herbs or honey or something like that it would taste better. But that will have to wait until next time.

Recipe Score:
Real Buttermilk Cheese - 1st attempt - Going to the chickens.

Home-Cured Ham

We get our meat from a local farm and we get 1/2 a hog twice a year. The meat is fantastic, it is pasture-raised and organic (though not certified). We know the farmers and they are some of the kindest people we've ever met. But .. there was a problem. How is it possible that we get an entire pig a year and yet we have to go out and buy ham for Hokie Ham Biscuits (http://mamataneyskitchen.blogspot.com/2010/01/mama-taneys-hokie-ham-biscuits.html) or for holiday meals, or just for any ole reason?? Something just ain't right!

You can imagine my delight then when I found a website that gave step-by-step instructions for curing your own ham at home!! You use a wet cure rather than a dry cure. *Traditional Virginia Ham is dry cured.* I had talked to my farmer-lady and she told me that some of the other folks who get meat from her have tried dry-curing it, but that it can be very tricky. Wet-curing is the solution folks. (pardon the pun)

Here's the link for the website: http://hubpages.com/hub/How-To-Cure-Ham-at-Home

Today I put four 3lb ham roasts out to cure. Here's how it goes.

Hello ham!! Pork Fresh Ham Roast is what the label says. We get ours cut to the size we want. The 3lb size makes it easy to work with.

Four Hams in a pot.

The ingredients & the brine. Sounds like a fairytale. 2 liters water (re-using an old soda bottle makes measuring easy), 1 cup packed brown sugar, 3/4 cup sea salt (if you're gonna cure your own ham, use good salt!), and 1 tsp DQ Curing Salt. The DQ Curing Salt is what gives it the rosy color and also ensures you don't get botulism.

Ham soaking in brine. I weighed this down with two plates to make sure that the ham stays moist & covered with the brine.

I then put this into a small dorm-sized fridge that we have. The site says it cures at a rate of roughly 2lbs per day. I'll leave this in for a week. After we take it out we'll smoke it as well.

One of the really great things about this recipe is that you can do it in batches of most any size. Whatever you have room for. I love it.



TA DA!! The finished product!! Ok, well the finished product from our last batch. You know you're on to something when the ham hops off the smoker and says "HOT DAMN I look good!!" Literally, it did. It tasted even better.

I've never really cared for ham at holiday dinners, but we're planning on serving some alongside the turkey this year. It really is that good. Mouth-watering, moist, just the right mix of salty & sweet. Damn delicious.