Cold Comfort Food

This is a kiddie fave, banana pudding pie, right before baking.  

Avoiding grocery shopping and using up everything available to eat?  Make something cold and tasty and sweet and nutritious.  

This is a marriage of a stove top cooked blanc mange pudding with a baked egg custard, depending more or less on your available milk/eggs, and uses up as many ripe bananas as you like.  

Because it's ant season, I have been hastily using up all of my sugar/molasses/maple syrup/honey, so I finished off the sugar with this one too.  

Not only did I have ripe bananas on hand, because my daughter who does not eat bananas does my shopping, and when I put bananas on the list, she thinks we can stock up for several months....in stocking up on "comfort food" treats to maintain coffee break variety for my adult children working from home, I had purchased FOUR POUNDS of animal crackers.  

This was overly optimistic because the novelty wore off after a handful.  We crumbled them on ice cream or yogurt.  I crunched them up and used them as the "crust" and topping for our banana pudding pie.  

Line the pie tin, bowl or baking dish with a layer of crumbled animal crackers, (or graham crackers, yeah we have four boxes of those too), or vanilla wafers.  

On the stovetop cook:

About a quarter cup of flour or cornstarch 

About a cup and a half of milk

2 Tablespoons butter

A cup of sugar 

Cook on low, stirring, to cook off the flour taste and thicken the pudding.  This is the blanc mange part.  

While you simmer, whisk up a little of the hot milk mixture into a small bowl of two egg yolks, and then add back to the pot, continuing to stir.  

Add 3-5 ripe bananas, sliced.

Pour the pudding onto your cookies, crumble some more on top to cover, and bake in a 350 degree oven about 15 minutes.  That's the custard part.

Chill and then eat. 

Another way we used up the animal crackers?  In the best granola bars we've made yet!  My family loves these, and they are even better the second or third day as the flavor ripens.  

Mix your choice of (I used all these):

2 cups crumbled animal crackers (or graham crackers, or skip this altogether)

peanuts

walnuts

chopped figs

raisins

dried cranberries 

3 cups of old fashioned or quick cooking oatmeal

ground flax seed (1/4 cup or less)

poppy seeds (a tablespoon)

orange zest

cinnamon

ground cardamom

peanut butter (I had just a quarter cup)

maple syrup (I had about 3/4 cup)

2 eggs

I did not salt, but add if you like

Line a 9x13 pan with parchment paper, spread mixture and bake at 350 for 15-30 minutes, until dry to the appearance and touch, and just beginning to brown.  

Let cool and cut into bars.

Ok, one more cold comfort food with the overstocked survival shopping you completed:  

Swiss Miss Ice 

My daughter does not drink coffee but likes hot chocolate from an instant mix.  She is sensitive to some dairy products but finds the dried nonfat milk in hot chocolate mix works for her.  Because my kids were going to be trapped at home for awhile, and because ingredients including milk were kind of hard to find at the beginning of all this, I sprung for a package of Swiss Miss in the canister, so I could scoop out the cocoa/sugar/milk mixture to use for her, and for....things.  Baked goods, maybe.

Except the delivery of one unit of this Swiss Miss included about five years worth of hot cocoa servings.  I have about 10 lbs. of it.  I have the canisters tucked away everywhere!  

So we made hot cocoa ice last night.  I followed the directions for a cup of cocoa and made a quart of it, with boiling water.  Then freeze!  Mix occasionally while freezing, or use your ice cream maker, we did.  Return to the freezer until hard, then run your spoon over the top and collect the chocolaty ice shavings in a paper cup.  Better than Rita's!

Mother's Day Brunch by the Boy

Our Guest Editor today invented this lovely brunch modeled on a photo he saw but for which he could not find a recipe!  He says:

It's literally just baguette slices with a sunny side up egg on top.  The sauce is balsamic vinegar and blueberry jam mixed together.  Serve with fruit and yogurt.

Happy Day!

My Favorite Food

Lazy Cole Slaw

cabbage, coarsely chopped

grated carrots

lemon juice

mayonnaise

salt

black pepper

caraway seeds

When stocking up, oh it was before St. Patrick's day, I picked up a cabbage because I know how long they last in the refrigerator!  Good old foods from the lands of long winters and short growing seasons, cabbage, potatoes, root vegetables....Anyway a little cabbage goes far, in soups, salads, as a vegetable, so I still had 3/4 of my cabbage and finally got around to making my favorite food, cole slaw!  Cole slaw feels like spring so is perfect for the Easter table, and was terrific on our turkey and rye bread sandwiches.  

I can eat my cole slaw like candy, I can eat the whole bowl, now how else could you enjoy so much cabbage?  I prefer homemade over the classic because I add NO sugar.  The carrots and cabbage are sweet enough.  What is necessary for cole slaw flavor is lemon juice and mayonnaise.  Carrots are optional, though beautiful for color and vitamins, and sometimes I generously add caraway seeds, and coarse salt.  I don't usually salt anything, even soup or pasta, (except in baking bread or cakes, because in there, salt is crucial to the chemistry as well as flavor), but Lazy Cole Slaw is a special treat.  

Classic cole slaw grates the cabbage and carrots very fine, but I often (usually) just do Lazy Cole Slaw, roughly chopping the cabbage across the grain, and tossing the whole thing.

This gets even better over time in the fridge, though it never lasts too long!

Retro Turkey Soup

What is more retro than something which in the good old days would have been called Turkey Carcass Soup?  Yes!  Everything old is new again, including last night's turkey.  When is the last time you ate a recipe called "carcass"?  Yes, this is one honest recipe.

Now that we are all home with limited access to marketing, we are cooking again like our grandmas, making things go further than ever.  At least we have the time; what have we been missing out on!

Last time I shopped, I bought a frozen turkey breast, for lack of any other choices, and roasted it earlier this week with salt and pepper, onions, herbs, carrot and celery.  Now we have a meat thermometer so I didn't even overcook it.  It was so good, and we are still eating it sliced in sandwiches.

But most special of all, I re-used the turkey carcass post-roasting for this soup, which is so good and tastes even turkier than turkey!  The house smells more like Thanksgiving this April than it ever has.  Turkey soup seems somehow lighter than chicken but is so rich in flavor, we just drink cup after cup!

Simmer the turkey carcass a good while until the remaining meat falls clean from the bone, with a few carrots, a stalk of celery, a garlic clove and an onion, quartered, and desired herbs, (thyme, and pepper). 

Remove the carcass and vegetables.

In a separate pot, cook rice or other starch of your choice.   Traditionally this is made with white rice, as I remember it, but I only had brown rice and it turned out nuttily delicious.

Add back the boiled carrot, sliced, the rice, and I added some mixed frozen vegetables.

We have been enjoying this as a light supper for a change, after so much grazing over the past few weeks!  Light, feel good comfort food with so much flavor, it satisfies all on its own.  I guess that's the secret to the popularity of the bone broths.

Job done!  Dinner accomplished!

Today's Daily Soup Special

Everybody's currently working from home, and whew, don't you really work so much harder at home!  The day goes so fast, especially when you're planning and preparing the next meal and cleaning up from the last and there won't be any going out to eat if you didn't get to it.

We're trying to eat so healthfully, too, to keep immune systems strong!

So Today's Daily Soup Special is really how to make leftovers new again, without saying "leftovers" to anyone.

This is the second iteration of homemade chicken soup, (my chicken soup answers to "Liquid Gold").
The soup was originally rather strongly flavored from all the immune-boosting spices I included, so this was the perfect mod to make today's desk lunch for the folks working from home offices in our little home.

Ingredients:
leftover Liquid Gold chicken soup*
leftover egg noodles stored in the leftover chicken soup
leftover cooked broccoli florets  (optional) (these had been frozen, cooked in bag and not served last night for  dinner, since we ended up having sandwiches and baked potatoes and there wasn't room on the plate or menu for more broccoli, hence refrigerated overnight)
leftover crisply overdone thin boneless pork chops (or use crisply cooked bacon) (optional)
leftover blanched Italian cut green beans (optional)
juice from half a lemon
dollop of sour cream
coarse salt, (optional)
black pepper
dash of paprika as garnish (optional)

Heat it all up, add the lemon and sour cream last, mix in, serve.


Liquid Gold Chicken Soup:  This is of course totally health food; chicken soup is often affectionately called, "Jewish penicillin", and this one even includes garlic, "Russian penicillin".

1. Bring to a boil, then reduce to simmer, one whole chicken, OR chicken necks and backs, quartered chicken pieces with bone in, etc.
2.  As the foam rises and floats on the surface, skim-skim-skim it off with a spoon, discard.  (I collect it all in a medium size bowl and then discard.)  Skimming makes the end product clearer, but you can skip this step and remove the fat from the surface after you chill it, if you can't skim.  It isn't actually that bad, you only have to skim a few times.
3.  After all the skimming, you can add:
carrot
celery (leaves; also stalk, celery seed)
onions
garlic
ginger
bay leaf
ground cardamom, or float the whole seed
a clove or two
black pepper
dash of turmeric
your choices:  marjoram, basil, parsley, thyme, rosemary, sage...
a star anise (this is optional and is a slightly different, peculiar flavor and smell of licorice, though the soup will still be mostly chicken-y; I added it because star anise is reputed to be a source ingredient for Tamiflu! and why not, I will try any home remedy and old wives' tale to make us strong!  It is also an ingredient in Chinese 5 Spice and also reportedly in  some Vietnamese soups...I have learned how to dare combining some warm, "sweet" spices with the herbs or savory, spicy spices since trying to cook some Middle Eastern/African dishes for my son's tastes.)
salt* (optional)
lemon juice at end before serving (optional)
lemon/orange zest (optional)

When simmered long enough to turn "liquid gold" and the meat falls off the chicken bone, remove the chicken and the vegetables, and serve as broth, or add what you like to serve as "chicken soup", e.g., egg noodles, pasta noodles, dumplings, rice, mixed vegetables...

*Most soups benefit from the taste of salt, and quite a bit of salt, but I don't use it at all in soup for my own health, my family adds it at the table if they like; I find this flavorful enough that it doesn't even need it.

To your health!