Buttermilk Pie (Inspired by Threadgill's)

I never appreciated living in Austin while I had the chance.

I mean, it didn't help that I was 11 years old and not keen on appreciating much (other than my wicked scooter and the ice cream truck), but still. I lived in Austin. Had parents who loved to eat at the original Threadgill's and I'm pretty sure I pouted every time I was there because they didn't have chicken nuggets or an ice cream truck.

But they had buttermilk pie.

And now, my family has buttermilk pie.

It's a southern thing and now that we're out of Alaska, it's a family thing.

It's delicious, despite my first attempt browning a skin on it waaaay too quickly. The trick is to cover the top of the pie with a bit of foil for the first 30 minutes...similar to tenting a chicken.

Happy eating, ya'll!

Buttermilk Pie

Ingredients:

1 10-inch pie shell unbaked

3 Cups Sugar
 1/4 C flour
1/2 lb (2 sticks) butter, melted
 6 eggs
1 C buttermilk
2 Tbs water
1 Tsp lemon juice
1 Tsp vanilla extract

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350.
Whisk sugar and flour into melted butter, then add eggs one at a time.
Add liquid ingredients.

Pour filling into pie shell (I always seem to have extra filling that I bake in a dish)Place shell on cookie sheeet in preheated oven
Bake for at least one hour or until filling is set in the center of the pie.

Learning to eat: GMOS (Part I)

It's a strange time to be a foodie, isn't it?

Gluten free, dairy free, vegan, vegetarian, hormone free, cruelty free, foods versus "food like" substances...

The list is long and pretty daunting and sometimes I don't know where to start.

Lately, there's been a lot of talk about genetically modified (GM) food. I don't pay much attention, really. Up to this point, I've never bought anything organic on purpose. Not that I have a problem with organic, I just didn't have the pocketbook power to learn more about it.

But I guess you can only stick your head in the sand for so long before the earth starts rumbling below it and you can't hide anymore.

I've been doing a little cursory research into what exactly GM food is, where it comes from, why there was a big honkin' fight over it in California (and one to follow soon in Washington), and what it could possibly be doing to my family and I.

I'm pretty sure I'll never know everything I need to...that would require a Ph.D. in chemistry that I just don't have. But I know more than I did yesterday. And I'll know more than I do today. I started this journey for knowledge after reading an article in this month's Mother Earth Living. From there I went down the rabbit hole of GMOs and I'll probably never come back.

Another resource was a Netflix gem I stumbled across called "Hungry for Change." It was hard to hear at points because my sons were locked in a death match over a lego, but what I was able to hear was pretty thought provoking. And scary. As hell...

The basics of GMO (as I've found it so far)

Let me state this disclaimer (again): I'm not a scientist. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a farmer. I'm a mama. I'm a food eater. I'm a student of this all. I'm chronicling this as a journey of what I discover, not as a thesis of any sort.

Phew. Glad that's over.

GMO foods contain genetically modified organisms. They've been around for a couple decades and are, from what I've found, everywhere. Evvvverywhere. They can be found under the monikers genetically engineered (GE), transgenic, recombinant, gene-altered, bio-tech...it goes on.

Most cotton, corn, and soybeans grown in the U.S. are modified in someway...most likely to make them pesticide resiliant. Some estimates put the amount of GMO foods consumed by the average American in an average year to be about 190 pounds. (Does that seem like a lot? It did to me.)

Scientists take a gene for a characteristic they like from one plant (able to resist cold?) and place it in another plant's DNA.  According to watchdog groups, its an imprecise science that even the scientists don't really have a handle on yet.

The risks? So far, in independent studies, GMO foods behave differently when consumed by lab rats. Side effects included stomach lesions. There's so much more to it than that and I encourage anyone with the time and interest to find the study in "The European Journal of Histochemistry." If you find it, pass it along, will ya?

Mother Earth Living quotes a Michael Pollan essay:

"These new crops are revolutionary enough to deserve patent protection and government support, yet at the same time the food made from them was no different than it ever was, so did not need to be labeled." Mother Earth Living offers a link to this and other reading materials at motherearthliving.com/GMOs.

In the next installation, I'll talk a little more about the major players and what's at stake (money?). And then? I'll talk about my own personal journey and how I'm shifting from one way of eating to a new, more conscious way. It's not immediate and it's not easy, but the more I learn, the more I think it's worth every ounce of effort.

...happy eating!...

If You're Gonna Eat in Texas... King Ranch Casserole

Part of initiating my family to their new lives in Texas includes the culinary aspect of the Lone Star State. This has included a week-long stint at Taco Cabana (until we found our favorite taco stand, mind you), a few chicken sandwiches at the original chicken sandwich joint (you know, the one with the clever cows), and Whataburger. I never said I had super fancy tastes...and eight years in the wilds of Alaska with no Whataburger or Taco Cabana can do a number of awful things to your tastebuds.

King Ranch Chicken

Another aspect of this initiation includes Texas favorites we can make at home. Including King Ranch Chicken. I never had it growing up in El Paso, but once I hit college, I was lucky enough to eat it pretty regularly when I'd go home with friends and visit their families for the weekend. This dish was everywhere. And now it's in my house.

Amazing, really, because I'm not the biggest fan of that jellied, gelatinous goop we like to call Cream of Mushroom soup. It's really just an excuse to dump fat and salt in our food...but it's so good in this recipe.

The casserole went over successfully last night...kind of like a mild, deconstructed enchilada. Without the enchilada sauce of course, and with a lot of cream of salt soups. Ha!

Texas King Ranch Chicken Casserole

Ingredients:

1/4 cup butter
1 medium green bell pepper, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
1 can (10 3/4 oz.) condensed cream of mushroom soup
1 can (10 3/4 oz.) condensed cream of chicken soup
1 can (10 oz.) RO*TEL Diced Tomatoes & Green Chilies
2 cups cubed cooked chicken
12 corn tortillas, torn into bite-sized pieces

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Melt the butter in a large saucepan and add the green pepper and onion. Cook until softened, about three minutes. Add soups, tomatoes, and chicken and simmer for about five more minutes. Remove from heat.

Spread a layer tortilla pieces along the bottom of a greased 9X13" casserole dish. Top with a layer of the chicken and soup mixture, followed by cheese. Repeat for three layers. Bake for 45 minutes.

Welcome to Katy and Super-Top-Secret Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

WOW!

I'm back.

The break was great and well deserved...(we had baby number 4 and moved back home to Texas, ya'll!!) but I sure missed thinking about food, writing about food, looking at food, and talking about food. Missed. It. So. Much.

The transition to Katy, Texas hasn't been too hard, minus the fact that it's a bit difficult to get into turning on your oven when your house skyrockets to the mid-80s when you do. That means I bake in early mornings and use my grill pan in the afternoons to save my sanity. Oh, and I love my crockpot. True story.

But enough of my reintroduction, eh? Hi. My name is Megan. I took almost nine months off to have a baby and sell everything I own and relocate from Alaska to Texas. And now I'm back!

Let's talk about this week. My oldest returned from his summer visit to El Paso and he started third grade. His lunch lacked a little TLC this week, so I dug out my recipe box (oh, I love my recipe box) and found my husband's top secret chocolate chip cookies. The three older kids (Ages 8, 3, and 14 months) helped me bake and for the first time in a long, long time, I let all cares out the kitchen window and we had a messy, flour-covered blast. It was so, so good for my soul. The kids were happy. The husband liked the surprise when he came home from work and the third grader got a respite from the fig newtons for the two days the cookies lasted. Success.

A little cookie backstory: The hubs spent a few months last year perfecting this recipe based on the old Toll House equation you find on the back of your chocolate chip cookie bag. I never knew there was a baker in the man, but I guess when you think about how picky of an eater he is (read it: highly developed palate) and how awesome he is at math (read it: highly developed recipe swapping ability) it probably always made sense.

He likes a straight butter recipe. I like halving the butter with shortening. He prefers the taste of brown sugar, so he upped that while dialing down the regular sugar. Up with the vanilla a smidge, and be sure the eggs are beaten before you add them. Simple as pie. And probably more delicious.

Though we diverge on the ingredients a bit, our thoughts on what makes a great chocolate chip cookie (or bar) run parallel. There has to be a perfect balance between the crisp and the chew factors. Crisp on the edges, chewy on the inside...even (ESPECIALLY) on day two and beyond. Make sure there's a bit of savory (salt) to heighten the sweet. Yum.

I first wanted to publish this recipe last year, but he wouldn't let me. But now, I think he's forgotten and after the kids and I turned the cookie recipe into bars, well, it's fair game.

Without further ado...

P.J.A.'s SUPER Top-Secret Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

Ingredients:
3/4 c. sugar
1 and 1/4 c. brown sugar
1 c. butter, room temperature
1 T vanilla
2 eggs, beaten
3/4 t. baking soda
2 and 3/4 c. flour
chocolate chips

The bake:
Preheat to 350 degrees. Combine butter and sugars. Add egg and vanilla to butter mix. In a separate bowl, combine flour and baking soda. Add dry ingredients to wet and mix until just incorporated. (Many a cookie have been sacrificed on the altar of overmixing. Don't do it!)

Bake 10 to 12 minutes per batch, depending on oven.

Do your best not to shove the entire first batch in your mouth when you pull them out of the oven. It will hurt and your family will not trust you with the rest of the finished cookies from that point on. It's true.

Happy baking!

Sorting it out for 2012

Hi gang! I took some time off over the winter break and decided to put this lovely project on hold for the first part of 2012. I have a lot of "real" projects around the homefront to tend to (namely, my three gorgeous, active baby birds) and will be back in the spring with energy and focus.

Happy eating!!

Thursdays with Kermit: Curried Butternut Squash Soup

I know, right?

It started when Full Circle Farm sent me kale a couple weeks ago and dared me to try it. And it was delicious.

So last week, when a large, unassuming butternut squash showed up in my Wednesday pick up, well, I figured Full Circle had issued the challenge. Thrown down the gauntlet, if you will.

"Try this," the farmers seemed to be saying, despite knowing full well that I just don't do squash.

A few minutes on the ol' Internets netted me a couple recipes I was interested in--namely some squash latkes via Hungry Girl. (I still plan to try those--they looked awesome!)

 But my dad had suggested trying squash soup recently and since every time I say I hate something without trying it, I end up loving it...I thought I had very little to lose.

Add to that, the fact that by the time I got around to making this, my squash was starting to look like it was going to give up its fight for life. And I can't have my produce going bad, you see. That would just be a shame.

I've never had Butternut Squash Soup, let alone the curried version, so I had very little to base my experience on. For all I knew, I did everything wrong and this is decidedly NOT an authentic version.

But pay no mind to my worries because, friends, this was delicious. The original version calls for a scant one teaspoon of curry powder which I thought was a little on the small side. I doubled that, and for the second teaspoon, I used Summit Spice and Tea's hotter, earthier Madras curry powder. It's fantastic stuff.

On to the soup, shall we?

Curried Butternut Squash Soup

Butternut Squash, roasted and chopped
2 cups chicken stock
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 teaspoon Madras curry powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder
Salt and pepper to taste

Optional:
Sour cream mixed with 1 teaspoon lime juice, as garnish

Directions:
Simple enough. I don't have an immersion blender (hint to my lovely husband hoping to find me an inexpensive Christmas present? Ha!), so I piled the roasted squash and chicken stock into my normal blender and let it work its magic until it was a smooth, creamy consistency.

To ol' Kermit the Pot the soup went, where I added the seasonings and the salt and pepper. Be sure to taste your soup as you season. I happen to love a lot of garlic flavoring--you may prefer more curry. It's all pretty subjective and all about personal taste. Make the soup your own!

Can it get much simpler? When it's warm enough to eat, it's ready! As a bonus, I mixed a scant teaspoon of lime juice with some sour cream I had left over from enchilada night and garnished the soup with a few delicious dollops. Magic!


Happy eating, and many thanks to my friends at Full Circle Farm for another great week of produce!

A Mill and a Dream: The Alaska Flour Company

"Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands."

–Thomas Jefferson, 1785

It's not by accident that I'm publishing this piece on Thanksgiving Day. 

I actually had the pleasure of interviewing Delta Junction farmer Bryce Wrigley last week and have been thinking about the adventure he and his family are undertaking next month quite a bit. Every time I glance at my flour canister, each time the local grocery is out of milk, whenever it snows extra hard and I remember the things we talked about.

Alaska Flour Company rolls out on the first of December. It's the first milling operation, to the best of my knowledge, in Alaska. This is a big deal, and the more I recount what we talked about, the more folks may be apt to agree with me.

The Wrigleys came to Alaska more than 30 years ago.

"We're from Idaho," Bryce said. "And we came up here to try our hand at farming."

Over the years. the crops have changed, but the Wrigleys stayed, raising a family up along with the produce, grains, and animals that crossed their soil.

But flour? Where on earth did the family get that idea?

"We've talked about it for years, but this June we were visiting Idaho and had the opportunity to tour two large-scale flour mills."

While the scope of the Alaska Flour Company is smaller and more artisan in nature, encouragement from people in the business helped the Wrigley make the decision to begin the process. The last pieces of equipment arrived just a few weeks ago and the packaging material hit Alaska last week.

"We're on schedule," Bryce said. And the response so far?

"It's been instant. I put together a Facebook page and we were getting hits before I'd even finished. People are so excited to be a part of this. It's encouraging."

From here our discussion veered toward talk about food supply. I'm new to the local food movement, but when the Alaska Flour Company mission includes doing a part to help Alaska be more food secure, I was interested.

"Right now, Alaska has no emergency warehouse or stores of food if something were to happen," he said.  "We've got what's on our store shelves and what's in our own pantries. If something prevented that weekly barge from arriving in Anchorage's port, the effects would be felt pretty quickly."

A local flour company is a step in the right direction. They'll mill Sunshine barley and wheat they grow themselves in Delta Junction. As the enterprise grows, it's their hope to purchase grains from other farmers to keep our country's roots in agriculture strong. The more people who know the earth, who know how to grow the food we depend on, the better. And cities full of anxious consumers ready to support them? Even better.

"We're starting small, but our aim is to grow bigger and bigger. The less we have to depend on the Outside for our food, and at the moment, we ship in 95 percent of our food, the better off we'll be."

The family hopes Alaskans will embrace the mill as their own.

"We could have named it Wrigley Flour Company, but I wanted Alaskans to know this was for them--for all of us." 

Bags will hit shelves in early December and will be available in various sizes, including 5 and 10 pound resealable bags from home use. The company is compiling a list of retailers who will carry their flour on their shelves, and the company web site will keep an updated list as it becomes available. The site will also feature an online store for folks not able to track down the flour in their towns.

My son and I have been baking a lot this season. Cupcakes, spice cookies, and breads. And each time I spin the lid off my flour canister, I think about the Wrigley family and their hard work. And I can't wait for their product to make it to market so I can be a part of it, too.

Happy eating!