Springtime in Montana and a Cross-over Pizza

A few weeks ago in search of inspiration for nourishing and delicious meals, I found Eat, Live, Run, a tempting website run by a classically trained chef who occasionally gets her blog streamed in the NPR.org Facebook feed. There I discovered some amazing ideas, like tonight's dinner:

Butternut Squash, Arugula and Gruyere Pizza
http://www.eatliverun.com/butternut-squash-pizza-with-gruyere-and-arugula/

I love pizza, so do my kids and I have created and happened across a dozen recipes, all unique and tasty and reasons to NEVER order from the pizza man again. This version I planned for back when it was 90 degrees earlier this week, and then today ended up being 44 and rainy. Springtime in Montana is a precarious time culinarily. Its to early to plant much but too late for many storage vegetables, like squashes and potatoes to still be edible. This pizza is a great cross between the old and the new, incorporating butternut squash (a storage vegetable) and arugula (a Spring green.)  It was light, but satisfying, crisp and crunchy.

Why We Pack Lunch

I work in school that serves hot lunch to its students and offers it to its staff. My kindergartner attends public school everyday where hot breakfast and lunch are offered. My husband works in the evenings at a retail store where there is a food court. We could all eat where we work or go to school, BUT WE DON'T. We pack our lunch, or dinner.

When it comes to my husband and I, we have access to microwaves, and anything is game. The simplest way we pack our lunch is that I cook almost twice what we need for every dinner, so there are at least two servings left over for the next day's work meals. Some days it homemade pizza, some days (like tonight) is leftover cream of asparagus and leek soup with garlic croutons. We never grab anything pre-made unless we pre-made it, and that is a very satisfying way to nourish the soul in the middle of a shift.

WHY? Why don't we just eat what is at work? Well, for one, making a few extra servings of a dinner is cheaper. We save around $12 a day by eating what we bring from home. Try portioning out leftover dinners into single serving plastic containers when you put it in the fridge for the night instead of putting one massive piece of foil over a large container. That way, you can grab and go in the morning. Another WHY? Its healthier. Think about my post on hot pockets and how many unpronounceable ingredients are in that grab and go dinner, or some drive through food.

What about PUBLIC SCHOOL HOT LUNCH? 

Well, I let my kindergartner experiment through the year with hot versus cold lunch. On days that sounded appealing, like pizza, corn dog and turkey and gravy day, my little guy occasionally tried them. 

He did not like them. They were "too greasy" or "too spicy" or just "not as good as home lunch." I am sooooo glad he decided this, and we wanted him to discover it on his own, guiding his healthy choices instead of forcing them. He still chooses hot lunch about once every two or three weeks, but I am happy and proud to pack his cold lunch every day otherwise. WHY? Oh, you had to ask didn't you. Here are FOUR reasons why a homemade (not a Luncheable), home packed (again, not a Luncheable) meal reigns supreme for my kindergartner:

1) The ORGANIC Factor: Yes I will put my plug in here for natural and organic foods. I don't like the idea of my kids eating pesticides, antibiotics and other toxins on their food. I must suggest here that you read Maria Rodale's book, Organic Manifesto to glean more reasons, if you need them, on why organic and natural foods are so good for you and your planet.

2) The MILK Factor: For public school lunch, chocolate milk is an option every day. As yummy as it seems it contains a high amount of refined sugars that cannot be that good for little bellies. In my kiddos' lunch he brings a thermos of organic white milk, hold the sugar please! World famous chef and activist Jamie Oliver 

does a great job exposing the truth of chocolate milk and other nastiness in school food on his Food Revolution website. Please check it out.

3) The CONNECTION Factor: When I pack his lunch, my son knows it, sees it and registers it. One more chance for me to take care of my little guy when he is away from home. I also use his lunch as a chance to leave a little picture or note to connect with him in the middle of his day from across town. You can't do that with hot lunch.

4) The FRUIT AND VEGGIE Factor: When I pack a lunch, I insert a fresh, raw fruit or vegetable and this gives my kiddo one more chance to have at some natural vitamins and fiber. But there is fruit at school with hot lunch. True, but its often canned in extra syrup, always non-organic and optional. When you pack a sack lunch and the contents are a sandwich and a sliced apple and milk, there's not a lot of room to skip the fruit if you want to be full, and my 6 year old knows this. 

Feeding Ravenous Soccer Players and a Recommended Read

Yesterday was our the first soccer game of the season for our six year old. This was the year that everyone started to really know how to play! No more running in a bee hive formation and picking dandelions, this year they ran like little champions. As is tradition, after each game there are the coveted snacks. We signed up as the first snack purveyors.

On Fridays I grocery shop after work is over. I don't have any meetings in the afternoon and it nice to leave my school and shop our local Real Food Market solo. I enjoy shopping with my kids but when shopping for food, it seems to be a meditative experience for me and one I enjoy on my own. As I wandered this past Friday I repeated "soccer snacks" in my head over and over again. At one point I grabbed two boxes of some sort of pre-made chocolate granola bars and thought a very inaccurate thought to myself, "At least they are organic."

They were also $7 a box, pre-made with ingredients I could not pronounce and the easy way out. I put them back and instead bought a pound of long cook organic oats (89 cents) 1/2 pound of chocolate chips ($3) 1 pound of pasture butter ($4), 1/2 pound of raisins ($2), and 1 pound dried apricots ($4). I spent the same as I would have on just soccer snacks, but what I had in mind for my ingredients would only be one use for them.

Saturday morning I made Oatmeal Cookies. My plan was to sneak whole grains, fruits and energy back into a bunch of 6 year olds, and it worked. There were 9 kids playing, I brought a bag with about 30 cookies, and came home with 6 left.

Oatmeal Cookies with Chocolate chips, Raisins and Dried apricots

(Adapted from a recipe in my Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook)

Ingredients:

3/4 pound pasture butter, room temperature

1 cup brown sugar (organic tastes like molasses and is so much softer)

1/2 cup unrefined cane sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoons baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon 

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

2 pasture raised eggs

1 teaspoon good vanilla extract

1 cup all purpose flour

3/4 cup whole wheat flour

2 cups organic long cook (instead of quick cook) rolled oats

1/2 cup raisins

1/2 chocolate chips

1/2 cup dried apricots, snipped into small pieces

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. 

In a stand mixed with the paddle attachment, beat your room temperature butter on medium high together with your sugars, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and cloves until smooth and creamy. It will look like the consistency of creamy peanut butter.

Turn the speed down to slow and add one egg at a time to the mixture and cream it together again until smooth. Drizzle in your vanilla and beat again until evenly mixed through. Leaving your mixer on low, add your flour, one cup at a time and mix until incorporated. I then turn off my mixer to add the oats, all at once, so they don't fly out as the paddle is turning. I also add the raisins, chocolate and apricots with the oats, then insert the paddle into the mixture and turn it on, mixing until evenly distributed. 

I greased my cookie sheets with butter but you can also use parchment paper for even cooking. My favorite tool besides my stand mixer for making cookies is my disher. It looks like a mini ice cream scoop but is awesome for evenly distributing cookies so they all cook at the same time. I put about 12 cookies to a cookie sheet as these do not spread much and baked them for 8-10 minutes, checking to see if the edges were brown often, which meant they would be done!

Get Inspired with this Recommended Read

If you are in need of some inspiration this spring to start a garden, buy locally or eat well, I recommend reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kinsolver. Its is an easy and inspiring read about a family's real journey with food. Below is an illustration from the book that I love.

Adorable Muffin Tin Pot Pies

Chicken pot chicken pot chicken pot pie!

One of our favorite chicken leftover uses, this is a scrumptious way to indulge in something warming, nutritious and delicious! We use leftover chicken from roasting a whole hen, which for the five of us, roasting a $10.00 five pound hen gets us four different uses at least. If my math is right, that's 50 cents a person, a serving, a lot cheaper than nugget mystery meat!

Also, you can load pot pie filling with lots of yummy veggies to increase the vitamins and give your kiddos a balanced and fabulous meal.

In the beginning, every good meal starts with a cutting board.

Time start to finish, roughly 50 minutes

Ingredients for the Filling:

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 large sweet onion, chopped

2 large carrots, chopped

2 ribs of celery, chopped

1 cup fresh chopped broccoli

1 cup cooked chicken, shredded of chopped into small pieces

1 1/2 cups homemade chicken stock

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup cornstarch mixed with 2 tablespoon water

1 cup Italian breadcrumbs

For the Pastry:

1 cup white all purpose flour

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1 cup vegetable shortening

2/3 cup cold water

Melt the butter in a large cast iron skillet or frying pan and add the chopped onion, cooking them on their own for five minutes to caramelize it a bit and sweeten it up. Add the chopped carrots and celery and while they make your mouth water, start your pastry dough. 

Put the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl and cut in the vegetable shortening with a pastry cutter or two forks. Add in the cold water and mix and knead it together until it forms a soft ball, not sticky but also not falling apart. 

Put your dough in the refrigerator while you continue your filling. Add your stock, salt, pepper, broccoli and chicken to the pan and stir them together. Allow the filling to simmer for five minutes, then add your cornstarch and water mixture to thicken the mix, stirring as you drizzle it in. After it thickens, turn off the pan. 

Turn your oven on to 375 degrees and get your dough out of the fridge. Grease 12 large muffin tins with some vegetable oil. Pull off small balls of dough, about the size of a golf ball, and flatten them out in your hands, then press them into the muffin tins. Fill to the top with filling. There may be extra dough and filling, and that's fine! Save it for another day or eat the filling on its own!

After all tins have pastry and filling, sprinkle the tops with Italian breadcrumbs and bake for 30 minutes, checking often after 20 minutes to make sure the breadcrumbs are not burning. When they brown, they are usually done!

Decadent Strawberry Cupcake Discovery!

I know that I promised to post my absolutely fabulous whole wheat muffin tin chicken pot pies. Well, while we were busy meal planning my husband and I ended up with a stomach bug that pushed our meal rotation back a day as we ended up having toast and bananas last night. Tomorrow, I will definitely share my recipe, but today as a consolation I wanted to pass along a link to EatLiveRun, another great blog I received from my PBS feed on Facebook.

One way we try to make the weekend a special food event is by making dessert one night. This week it was Fresh Strawberry Cupcakes, and they are superb! Click on the link below and I guarantee you'll love it!

Recipe for Strawberry Cupcakes with Fresh Strawberry Frosting

Many Uses for One Chicken

In my fantasy world, I have a hen house in my backyard, some Rhode Island Reds for laying fresh eggs and a butcher block in my garage for when they get too old. Oddly, two blocks away from my house, in the portion of East Helena that doesn't have paved roads but does get mail delivered to their street, you are allowed to keep chickens. This is still something I may secretly try when I get the gumption someday. Until that day, I have to rely on the grocery store to provide me with Hutterite Hens that, while they were not raised organically, are very local, very fresh, and very delicious. 

Tonight, dinner is chicken, which, oddly, is on the menu only occasionally. We don't get fried chicken from the store, don't get nuggets from McDonalds and have a freezer full of lamb, venison and pork. To buy a chicken and ready it for use is an event in our house. One five pound carcass if going to get used at least 4 different ways. 

The First Incarnation: 

Tonight, its roast lemon and garlic chicken with beets and potatoes. There are so many great recipes for roasting a chicken out there. One is from that master herself, Julia Child. Julia Child's Roast Chicken. Another, that we enjoy, is from a well used and much loved cookbook by Alice Waters called The Art of Simple Food. She takes three pages to explain the art of roasting a beautiful chicken. Alice Water's Roast Chicken as taken from Ladies Home Journal. We mix an adaptation of these two and include tons of lovely garlic, minced and rubbed under the chicken skin. It sweetens as it roasts and add a delicious element to the stock.

The Second Incarnation:

After dinner, I will strip the remaining meat from the carcass and put it to simmer in a pot with carrot, celery, garlic and onion to make a deeply nourishing and delicious stock for use the rest of the month. There is something unique about homemade stock that also makes it highly nutritious. Simmering the bones releases gelatin and proteins that contribute to making chicken stock the cure all it seems to be. Alice Waters also gives a great tutorial on how to make stock but I love the explanation by Nourished Kitchen on the how and why of stock.

Nourished Kitchen's Chicken Stock Recipe

The Third Incarnation:

My husband, who stays home with our two youngest children during the day and works in the evenings, loves when we roast a chicken because it means some of the best lunch sandwiches you can fathom. Fresh roasted chicken with pesto and provolone, or chicken salad with raisins, curry, and homemade mayonnaise are soooo much better than a piece of bologna. My six year old, who brings his lunch to school, agrees.

The Fourth Incarnation:

Our busy Tuesday is on the schedule again this week and in my hour window to make dinner we plan on mini chicken pot pies. We make ours in muffin tins with whole wheat bottom crusts and cover them with bread crumbs for individual serving sizes. Please visit this site again on Wednesday for my Chicken Pot Pie recipe!

This Morning Smelled like Butter Fried Apples and a Dutch Baby Pancake!

One of the members of our breakfast rotation is a Dutch baby pancake, that is, one big pancake baked in a cast iron skillet instead of many small pancakes fried on the griddle. This recipe is not my own, but one of the awesome breakfast recipes from Nourished Kitchen, and fabulous website dedicated to nourishing and traditional foods and how to get them back in your home. 

As a time saver, I chopped the apples the night before and put them in the cast iron skillet with butter. Apples are naturally sweet, very inexpensive, and easy to keep on hand for long periods of time if you can store them in a cool place. 

When I returned from yoga this morning, I turned on the pan, mixed the batter, and assembled this sweet, savory and beautiful creation in less than 10 minutes, baking it for about 30 and eating it covered in melted butter and honey. 

Dutch Baby Pancakes with Butter and Spice from Nourished Kitchen

Busy Busy Tomorrow = Cracked Whole Wheat Venison Pasties for Dinner!

Tomorrow is going to very incredibly busy for us, something rare for us honestly. We spend a good portion (well, most) of our evenings together at home, for ease of my sanity and ease of our family time. We don't often eat out, we run our errands outside of family time as often as we can, so when a busy night hits us, we usually have a few days of warning.

Tomorrow after school my oldest has a church activity followed about an hour later by his first soccer practice of the season. We will have limited time between commuting for some sort of nourishment, and for the love of Peter, Paul and Mary this does NOT mean McDonald's. After reading Michael Pollan's experience of McDonalds and the raw truth of the food and the institution in his book, In Defense of Food, I hesitate to return to the place from my childhood I recall sentimentally.

In our given time tomorrow, we will feast on pasties! Pasties are meat and potato pies wrapped in a crust. Everyone in Montana has their own version, and ours smells just like the state I grew up in and cherish. The whole wheat flour is from Wheat Montana, whose farm is located near Three Forks, about 40 miles from us in East Helena. The ground venison is a doe my brother hunted this fall. When these bake, they make your mouth water! 

I have the two components (filling and crust dough) pre-made tonight so tomorrow I can put them together later tonight or tomorrow without much fuss.

Ingredients for Crust:

1 cup all purpose flour

3 cups whole wheat flour

3/4 cup vegetable shortening

1 teaspoon salt

sprinkle garlic powder

1 cup ice water

Filling ingredients:

3/4 pound ground venison

1 teaspoon beef bullion dissolved in 1/8 cup hot water

4 Yukon gold potatoes, diced small

1/4 onion diced small

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1/2 teaspoon salt

Combine all dry ingredients for the crust together and use a pastry cutter or two forks to cut in the shortening until small like pebbles. Drizzle in the ice water and use your hands to mix it into a ball. It should not be too sticky, but wetter is better and you can always add more flour if you need to.

After the dough is made, refrigerate it from 10 minutes to overnight to give the shortening time to come back together after melting a bit from the body heat of your hands.

Combine the filling ingredients in another bowl and mix together. Divide the dough into 5-6 balls and roll them out with a rolling pin until they are round discs. Add a palm full of filling to the dough and fold the dough over into a little pie, crimping the edges to reflect the picture above. Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet for 35-45 minutes.

We like dipping ours in ketchup, but gravy is another option.

Make breakfast! Eat yam-cakes!


If you thought I was just weird about dinner, you are mistaken. Consider this the first entry in my also being particular about breakfast! Especially if you have little ones that eat at home before they head to school. If your schedule allows it, I highly recommend feeding your children at home before school, too. Its one more chance to sit as a family, together, and share about the coming day, enjoying each other's company before the hectic beginning of things. We vary breakfast, have a rotation of about 8-10 go to meals we run through every two weeks and eat them all, as I mentioned, together. We have three young kids to get up and feed in the morning, so I don't have time for an IHOP style buffet, but did you know that the awesome pancakes I made from scratch this morning with a full serving of vegetables in them only took 30 minutes to conjure up, and 15 of those minutes were the yams boiling on their own while I took a shower!

This morning we were out of cereal (which accounts for maybe one breakfast a week anyhow. We already cooked oatmeal this week. Already had parfaits. What now? This morning, it was yam pancakes. My four year old called them yam-cakes, my six year old yum-cakes. I called them super nutritious. Yam are high in vitamin B6 which protects against cardiovascular disease, potassium which can help keep blood pressure down, and fiber, which fills you up and keeps you full longer. Yam's have a natural sweetness to them that you don't necessarily need to add any additional sugars to the batter, just the yam itself. I recommend tasting the batter before you cook it and if needed, add a tablespoon or two of honey and mix it in.

I based our yam cakes off the following recipe that calls for sweet potatoes, but added 1 teaspoon of cinnamon to the mix and used about 2 regular sized yams, boiled until soft and then hand mashed with a fork. I also used half white all purpose flour and half whole wheat flour to up the nutritional goodness.

Yam Cakes recipe base from all-recipes.

 Try these drizzled in butter and honey (skip the Aunt Jemima stuff, its mostly corn syrup!)

Homemade Hot Pockets with 16 basic ingredients, not 56

Hot pockets, fresh from the box and microwaved in their little cardboard containers live ambivalently in my memory. I lusted after them as a teenager but immediately regretted eating them after the biologically programmed desire for salt and fat wore off and my body tried to schlogg through 56 ingredients lovingly mixed by a machine.

Take a peak at the picture below, a poster by graphic designer Jason Perricone via Huffington Post. I think I counted 56 ingredients in the standard ham and cheese hot pocket.

Gross I say. Gross.

Recently, my cravings for hot cheese and meat in a pocket called like a siren from my past, and I embarked on a journey to make my own. Tonight, alongside fresh orange slices, we yummed down homemade turkey, Havarti and cheddar hot pockets. I want to share my recipe with you.

This makes 5 large or 6 smaller hot pockets and they reheat nicely. The dough takes five minutes to make, anywhere from 20-60 minutes to rise, depending on how much time you want to give it, twenty minutes to fill with good things, and ten minutes to bake. So, 25 minutes active time, 30 minutes inactive.

If you worry you are too busy to commit the time, you might surprise yourself if you try. My oldest had a church activity this evening, and after I put in a day of work I walked a mile to church (and another mile back) with my two other children and still managed to make dinner and eat it by 6:00.

Ingredients:

For the dough

1 cup all purpose flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 packet yeast

1/2 tablespoon garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon dried dill

1 cup warm water

1 generous tablespoon olive oil

Pinch salt and pepper

For the Interior

Deli turkey, from a good deli (not plastic container from Wal-Mart turkey)

Dill Havarti Cheese (I used Denmark's Finest)

Sharp cheddar cheese (I like Tillamook)

1 avocado, sliced thin

1 tomato, sliced thin

Using an electric stand mixer, combine all the dry ingredients for the dough, attach dough hook and start stirring the dry ingredients on low setting while adding, slowly, the cup of warm water. Make sure it is not hot water, as scalding water that burns your finger will kill your yeast. Allow the dough hook to mix until your dough is together and form a coherent ball. Slightly sticky is OK. Coat the ball of dough with the olive oil, cover it with a dish towel, and allow it to rise in a warm place from 20 minutes to 1 hour. If you are short on time, 20 minutes is just fine. Tonight ours rose for an hour and it seemed to be more supple after baking and less chewy, something I liked. 

When you are ready to start assembly, preheat your oven to 425 degrees. After your dough has risen, flatten it out on a cookie sheet or stone with your hands. it will be slightly sticky, be careful not to mash it too thin so it starts to tear apart. Cut into 5 or 6 sections. Start layering each piece with the interior ingredients. I put down a slice of Havarti cheese, two slices of deli turkey, three slivers of avocado, three slivers of tomato and ended with a slice of sharp cheddar. Carefully fold your dough over the top of the ingredients, spreading and pinching until it is all encompassed in a pocket-like item. It might not be pretty, but it will be yummy. Try not to leave any holes.

I like to sprinkle a pinch of salt and pepper over the tops of the pockets before baking them for 10 minutes at 425 degrees. Sometimes the cheese finds a way to spill out onto the cookie sheet, but when I take them out it makes a nice treat for the cook!

"Company Cake"

Here's a super simple, super quick and super delicious recipe for old fashioned cake I received a few weeks ago from my PBS.org feed. We make a little something special when we get visitors and my parents gave us a lovely excuse to make something scrumptious. We've made it before and have found that it does make a difference what kinds of ingredients go in. Margarine is not the same as butter is not the same as "Amish butter", a delicious two pound lump of lovely that's wrapped in wax paper and sole at the Real Food Market and Deli and Van's IGA near Carroll College if you're in the Helena area. Also, pastured (not "pasteurized") eggs with yolks the deep orange color of saffron, taste uniquely different.

In the recipe when it mentions buttermilk, I'm not going to fib, I don't keep buttermilk at home. But I do always have lemon juice on hand, and a quick substitute for buttermilk is adding 1 tsp lemon juice to every cup of milk and it with suffice nicely. Eat this. It is splendid!

Cinnamon Buttermilk Cake,

Become a Co-Op Member!

How do we save money on organics? One way is through using the co-op system. That is, contributing to a large pool of farmers and producers and walking away with produce and other food. This winter we have been  eating frozen vegetables from my parents huge garden that they helped us put up in the fall, but also discovered and started taking advantage of Bountiful Baskets. For $26.50 a week, we pick up a box of fresh and delicious organic veggies and fruits. We also add on organic nine grain bread every other week, five loaves for $12 from a bakery in Arizona. 

Bountiful Baskets has been a money saving resource for the winter when we've run out of frozen veggies and Montana won't hit its growing season until May at the earliest. I priced out all of our basket one day as what I would have paid for it all at the Real Food Store in Helena, and for organic produce we were saving at least
$15 a week. For bread, $13 every two weeks we saved. 

The downside to Bountiful Baskets is that it isn't local. Nowhere close to local, which I am a big believer in. But thanks to some fabulous and food conscious friends, we found an awesome local growers co-op. If you live in Montana, I encourage you to look into Western Montana Growers Co-op.. We are signing up for a full summer share soon and there are profiles of each, local and often biodynamic farm on the page you can research.