The Autumn Squash Challenge Round #3

OR

Butternut Squash Vegan Mac and Cheese - The First Success

It's ridiculous how quickly time goes by when you're older. Everyone and their grandmother remarks of this at least once in their lifetime - "Back in my day...!" - but it's true that as you grow up days fly by inexplicably faster than they used to. I'm of the belief that it's because we don't mindlessly play anymore; we're overaware of the hours of the day and days of the week and everything we have to do before certain dates. It doesn't help that a good chunk of North Americans have very few, but very commercialized holidays throughout the year. About once a month there's a date we have to plan and buy gifts and make food for, and the stores we buy the supplies from are always two months ahead of us. You want Easter decorations? Start looking on January 2nd. If you're trying to prepare for Thanksgiving, you'd better have that eighteen pound turkey ordered three months ahead of time. Christmas is its own special cup of tea, shoving grinning pumpkins out of the way well before it's reasonable and putting a disrespectful screen in front of November 11th. GF and I actually went to our first Christmas craft show, because we're old ladies like that, just this past Friday (with poppies pinned to our chests, thank you very much). While I understand the jumping of the gun in some respects - craft shows are fun any time of year - it makes us overall more paranoid of time going by.


It was almost a full month ago I decided to learn how to cook squash, and it was with a bit of a shock that I realized I've only made about five attempts since then. Any time now, our craft show reminded me, we'll start getting snow here on the east coast (Manitoba's already had some), and it's a slow decline of fresh gourd availability after then. I've got to get my shit together! Especially now that I've finally gotten a grasp on how to cook pumpkin seeds. That's right, folks, I've finally figured out the trick. Thanks to the tutorial on Oh She Glows, I now know I need to boil - yes, boil - the seeds for ten minutes, then toast them for twenty at 325F. Perfection. Even my mother liked them!

Pumpkin seeds, by the way, not only have magnesium (muscle relaxation), potassium (nerve health), protein (everything) and healthy plant fats (brain and joint strengtheners), but are rich in tryptophan, that amino acid in turkey everyone says puts you to sleep. It is, consequently, beneficial if you suffer insomnia or high levels of stress, and is a precursor of serotonin, the brain's mood-regulating chemical. Folks who have depression often don't make enough serotonin, which is why SSRIs (meds that convince your brain you have more than you do) are so popular for treating it. The added bonus of cooking your own pumpkin seeds is that their hard shell is built of an insoluble fibre, which helps build and move feces along your large intestine. Hear that, everyone? If you're stressed, depressed, or can't sleep or poop, start downing gourd seeds.

My other success, with the actual flesh of a squash, was a batch of vegan mac n' cheese. I've come to the quick realization that I'm not as talented an inventor in the kitchen as I'd like to be, so I've been latching onto recipes and following them to a T, with fantastic results. You'd be surprised at how actual measurements can help make a concoction taste good. This recipe was also from Oh She Glows, although the first time I whipped up a batch I actually used honey mustard instead of dijon, so it was rather sweet. Can't decide which taste I preferred, though. The roasted squash by itself was fantastic, too.

It's a shame I can't claim to have figured out both these recipes by myself, but such is life. Maybe I'll stick to promoting other blogs' food inventions. Appreciate what talents you have and accept those you don't.

In related news, do you realize how many pumpkin seeds you can get out of two cheap jack o' lanterns? Manna from the heavens, I tell you! The world really does provide for us - you just have to know where to look. Now is prime time to start stocking up on homemade pumpkin paste and toasted seeds. Before you know it, the Christmas snowmen will have taken over!

Shortly put,
- Leah

Recipe: Herbed Croutons

OR

Salad Toppings From Bread Heels: A Story of Seagull Deprivation

Have you ever been to one of those really ritzy home decor stores? You know, the kind that're usually privately-owned and tucked into some secluded corner of a city? They sell dishware and tablecloths, as well as beautiful, unique pieces like bronze chandeliers, abstract art, and tablecloths made of the Golden Fleece. The few times I've been in one of these places (wondering what it's like to drop a couple hundred dollars on an ugly horse sculpture without being intoxicated beyond intelligent thought), GF has pointed out objects so ridiculously silly and expensive that neither of us can wrap our heads around them. For example, one Christmastime we saw a silver bonsai tree in a store window downtown I would call "the minimalist style of today's high-class urbanite" in that it was all branches and sparkled something fierce. We were struck both by how pretty and how audacious it was to be asking $200 for something we could make with a walk in the woods and a can of glitter paint. A few months later GF saw spindly silver (it's the "in" colour) decorations that were equally pretty and equally expensive, and was so enraptured with them that she went to the Dollar Store, bought foam and paint, and made duplicates for a fraction of the price. We now have six sparkling silver carbon atoms hanging from our living room ceiling.

I love grocery shopping. I take to it like some girls do to shopping for clothes or makeup. Be it at the local supermarket, farm market, or convenience store, I get a huge thrill out of picking out food. I love trying to figure out what my most cost-efficient option is. I love filling up carts and baskets. I even love paying for it (gives me that accomplished feeling). I get the warm fuzzies from shopping for necessities. I am totally for hire if somebody wants me to grocery shop for them. Dream job, I'm telling you.

What I don't especially love when I'm shopping is finding pre-fab food I could make myself. I get that convenience is king for most people, but who doesn't have time to make mashed potatoes? It's just silly and a little bit frustrating, in a way. Why would I pay three dollars more for something that would take three minutes to do myself? (That would be an excellent job, too. A dollar a minute? Talk about rolling in the dough - pun intended.) There are some things I absolutely refuse to buy just because the Average Joe could make it in under ten minutes. Ready-for-baking tinfoil-wrapped potatoes, pre-layered salsa chip dips, pre-cut vegetables of any kind, salad kits, and pre-seasoned meats top the list.

Also, croutons.

Like with her ingenious crafting, GF has become a pro at mimicking recipes on cookbook pages, meal boxes, and sample tables. I'd like to say she's the art girl and I'm the inventive chef, but this is real life and I've long since accepted that the only things I'm especially good at cooking are pasta (which is bad for me in large quantities) and quiche (which I should really make more of, but responsible eggs are expensive). Still, I'm quick to learn, so when GF showed me how to make real croutons from scratch, well... I actually promptly forgot, and will probably get the finer details wrong the next eight or so times I make them. But I promise I got her to double-check this recipe before I posted it.

Croutons (and for that matter, stuffing, but I'll pick on Stove Top another day) are stupid easy to make. In the same way I can't fathom spending $400 on carbon atoms for my ceiling, I likewise can't reason why anyone would spend $3 on a salad topping. Croutons are entirely made of stale bread. Birds don't pay to eat your hot dog bun ends - why are you paying to eat overcooked bread heels? Croutons sit in the same boat soup stock does; they're made of scraps.

To make croutons, stop feeding birds. It's bad for them anyway. Hoard your bread heels, broken toast pieces, freezer-burnt slider buns, and the cheesebread logs your cousin brought for tea. Pop them in the freezer in a Ziploc bag next to your stock chunks. When you need them, yank'm out of the cold, preheat your over to 325F (so they can witness their impending doom), cube/rip them up, dump them in a bowl, add enough vegetable oil to coat them, douse them in spices (we usually use garlic powder and Italian seasoning), then sprawl the oily nibs on a cookie sheet ("Draw me like one of your French breads!") and cook them for about fifteen minutes, until they're toasty and brown.

Or, if you're me, put them in the oven, forget about them, cook them for too long, eat the black ones, and save the nice bits for your girlfriend.

Oops.

 Summing it up:

 1)
- Save up bread scraps and freeze until needed
- Preheat oven to 325F
- Rip or cut bread chunks into bite-sized pieces
- Place breadcrumbs in a bowl and coat with vegetable oil
- Add seasoning (garlic powder/Italian spices/whatever)
- Spread on cookie sheet
- Bake for 15 minutes, give or take, until they're golden brown
- Eat

 2) We have sparkley silver carbon atoms on our ceiling and GF is very proud.

 Cheaply crunching,
 - Leah

A Note On Orts

OR

Wasting Not When You're Already Wasting Not

Don't you just hate when people give you conflicting messages? I know I do. "We really want you to get an education!" say the universities, "But we're going to charge you thousands of dollars to do so!" or, "As a charity, we want to provide the funds to help these unfortunate people live/heal," say the TV ads, "But we're going to keep 89% of the money we get for advertising!" Mixed messages are frustrating because they're oxymoronic; you tell me to do one thing, but then tell me something that is the complete opposite, yet you say both are true? What do you mean?

Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a hypocrite and a wee bit forgetful. Today, whilst making soup, I realized I'd forgot to mention something regarding the construction of stock, and wanted to reiterate so we were all on the same page. I'm about to deliver a few mixed messages of my own. (But I promise I'll try to make them clear.) Sorry.

Orts are an old 15th century English word for "morsels from a meal" or "scraps", the same things I've been telling you to scrounge whenever you can from other people's houses and your own finished meals. They are the bones, decorate pieces (lettuce leaves, parsley), vegetable tray and sandwich platter leftovers. They are the bits that nobody else knows what to do with, and plans to throw out. But we say "nay!" (I'm getting a little too into this old English crap, I think) and take them back to our own kitchens to construct new foods out of.

In my How To Make Stock post - which was not called that at all - I noted that my mother never cooks the meat (in animal-based soups) with the bones and cartilage while making broth. This is a tried-and-true method of keeping your meaty bits tasty. When you boil something, you suck all the nutrients and taste out of it and force them into the water like a bad swimming teacher. So if you boil the crap out of bones that still have the meat on them, strain the lot of it, then pick the meat off the bones and throw it back into the soup, the meat is going to be pretty tasteless. Therefore, if you're making a meat-based soup, always pick the good parts off before you cook the bones.

Now's where I contradict myself.

Exhibit A: Separated broth and chicken
 bones/sweet potato peelings

The other day I was at my parents and we had a roast chicken for dinner. Mom had already taken the majority of meat off the bird bones, and had no desire to make broth. "I can always go buy another bird," she said. Not all of us are that lucky. So I asked if I could have the orts of the meal - the chicken scraps. They sat in my freezer for a few days, then I cooked them up (along with some veggie scraps) and made myself a stock. Once I'd strained my finished stock, I realized the bones still had a fair bit of meat on them. Therefore I contradicted what I'd said a few posts ago, picked the meat off, and threw it back in the pot.

There is a reason for my madness. The meat may be mostly tasteless at this point, but it is still edible. I decided against using the potato peels (even though they're fine to eat once they've been cooked), but I saved the meat because it's crazy expensive, I wanted something to help fill up the pot, and it becomes one of the two main filling-bits in the soup as the main source of protein. (New potatoes were the main source of carbohydrates, if anyone was wondering.)

The short version:

Exhibit B: Chicken meat separated from the bones.

1) Keep the majority of your meat out of broth preparation, but if there's meat left on the bones you've boiled, pick it off and put it back in the pot.

2) Always take free leftover meat bits (if you include them in your diet). They are expensive, they contain useful nutrients, and these foods are too resource-intensive to be wasting. It takes much more food, oil, and energy to produce meat than it does for grains or plants. Chucking useful bits of meat into the trash is a middle-finger salute to the Earth and the poor animal that was dinner. (This being said, animal products, especially those raised the conventional way, can contain antibiotics, hormones, adrenaline, bacteria, and are harder than plants for your body to digest, which is why I stick to broths. They also leave an acidic residue in your alkaline intestinal tract. Go easy on the animal products for their health and yours.)

Controversially,
- Leah

Please, Sir, May I Have Some More?

OR

How Putting Bones In The Freezer Helps Keep You Fed

I'm one of those people who knows the words to 90% of the songs that come on the radio.

Ask me who the song's performed by or what it's called and I'll stare at you like a deer in the headlights, but I can generally memorize at least the tune of a song the first time I hear it and know a good chunk of the lyrics by the third. I have no idea how I learn them, I just do. 

Like how double-jointed people don't know how they freakishly dis-form their limbs. Ugh.

In my tiny apartment freezer I have a bag of green bin-worthy vegetable scraps, and, until recently, a bag of leftover chicken bones and skin. They get tucked away on the freezer door or in the back by the compost*, ignored until I find potatoes that are going soft (always cut them open before you toss them! If they're still white they're still good!) or score free veggie tray leftovers from a party. Then I pull one out and make myself some soup.

Making stock from scratch is one of those things an alarming number of people don't know how or are too hesitant to try to do. It's not hard, but the convenient cartons or cans of broth at the grocery store are just so much easier, and make the task of making from scratch seem, especially to a busy student, worker, or parent, really daunting and unnecessary.

Not to knock the canned stuff - we do keep a couple cartons on hand when we need something quick, and for flavors we don't really have bones around for, like beef - but while homemade may not be necessary, it is worth it. Not only is homemade stock 100% less salty (figures are just pulled out of my arse) but it has no preservatives, hasn't been pasteurized, and often has more, or an actual amount of - in the case of meat-based stocks - gelatin, which is super good for those of us with achy joints. Plus it tastes better, and is made of things you already have lying around, instead of costing you an extra $2.29.

It's like Mr. Christie VS Grandma. Christie's stuff is pretty good, but there's nothing like a homemade chocolate chip cookie, Grandma-style. Not that my grandmothers really baked chocolate chip cookies, but they did make homemade bread, and that stuff is beautiful.

Making stock is stupidly easy, too. I was going to say that GF taught me how to do it, but actually, I think it was my mother. Mom's a very "throw stuff together and hope it works" sort of cook, but she's good at it. "Mix and match" suppers and "The Great Fry-up" are specialties of hers. She also makes a damn good turkey soup. She once showed me how to make that soup, but never told me how to make the broth. I must have gleaned the technique from watching her every Christmas day.

It's like the music thing. I don't know how I know it. I just do.

Start by saving the crap everyone else tells you to throw out (unless it's fuzzy or blue or smells bad). Those almost-slimy lettuce pieces from a salad. Onion skins that aren't quite brown. Celery leaves or asparagus bottoms or the tiny roots on beet greens. If you roast a chicken or have another sort of meat product with bones, keep everything you don't eat, including the cartilage or leftover meat. You can mix the veggies and meat or keep them separate. I generally keep mine apart (in case of vegetarian guests), but I recently made a ham and pea soup with a bunch of veggies and half an apple-roasted ham as the base (plus ham I'd scavenged from the dinner table of a family get-together).

Before

Once you've got a medium-sized Ziploc bag full, dump the contents into a big pot (no need to defrost) and fill it with water. You can put as much water in as you'd like, but the more you have the more diluted your stock will be. A 2-to-1 ratio is usually good. Feel free to add bay leaves or any other spice you'd like. Turn on the stove to about medium heat and let the suckers boil!

After

(Maniacal laughter)

Depending on what you're boiling, this step could take one to five hours. Bigger animals = more time (a good analogy for digestion, by the way). Give beef bones four to five hours, pork three to four, poultry one to two, and vegetables one to two, depending on how potent you want your stock. Once your water's turned a rich colour (anywhere from gold to brown to red, if you used beets), strain your stock through a colander - or just tilt the pot while holding the lid at an angle - into another pot. TA DAA. The pretty leftover liquid is stock! You can use it right away or freeze it or... drink it, I guess.

On an ending note, for all you folks who fit the "I'm too busy" category, remember:

1) Homemade stock is free, especially if all your scraps are scavenged instead of bought.

2) Homemade stock isn't loaded with salt (unless you dump it in there) and contains lots of vitamins and minerals that the process of preserving canned stock kills off.

3) You don't have to make stock right away (although you can; Mom always started making turkey stock as soon as the bird had cooled and been picked over). Even freezer-burnt meats and vegetables make tasty stock, so you don't have to stuff soup prep into an already busy day. Wait for a lazy Sunday.

4) An excellent tip from Mom: If you're making an animal-based soup, don't put the meat in with the stock bones. Add the meat last (because it's pre-cooked anyway) during your soup construction to keep it flavorful! 

Sweet Simmering!
-Leah 

*We keep it there to avoid smells and fruit flies. The apartment is so warm in the summer that vegetables, fruit, and bread will go bad within a couple days if we keep them out of the fridge. There's such thing as silicone buckets specially made for folks with our problem, but a reused plastic bag is way cheaper than a $50 tub, thank you very much. 

Embrace Your Inner Seagull

OR

Scavenging Whenever The Opportunity Arises (And Being Prepared To Do So)

You know that saying, "You eat like a horse?"

That horse is me. I am that horse. Someone in seventeen-hundred-whatever saw into the future and called me a horse (an endearing term, I think, when horses were a main form of transportation) and made up that saying when they saw how much I eat on a daily basis. I'm not just being dramatic, either - coworkers, friends, and my grandmother have all told me I eat ridiculous quantities of food. Part of it is nutritional deficiency, I'm sure; as much as I try to eat healthy, the fact is that I'm a student making minimum wage, and vegetable are fricking expensive. Someday I'll earn above $10 an hour and get to shop the crap out of the farmer's market, but today is not that day.

Did you know that you're probably starving? Even if you're 200 pounds overweight and eat like me (the horse), your cells are probably screaming for things you're not giving them. Imagine your insides are babies. Err, wait, imagine your cells are little baby heads? This is a terrible explanation, but work with me on this. Your trillions of body cells are babies, okay? Imagine that. These babies are being little shits and making a huge racket, so you give them a cup of water to drink, because they're not pooping, so they're probably hungry. They drink the stuff (they know the importance of being hydrated, after all), but they continue to make a fuss because they want MILK, and water is not milk. But you keep giving them water. Eventually their screaming drives you berserk because they never stop (and that would get really annoying). That's kind of what happens every day when you don't eat well. Your body goes, "I want vitamin B! I want carotenoids! I want fructose that doesn't come from purple Koolaid!" and you say, "Too bad! LOL! Have some meat and overcooked broccoli and french fries!" So they make you fat. The little bastards.

If you're a person who eats "well", you're probably a bit offended right now. Sorry. But the fact is our living bodies love living food. The more raw or single-ingredient food you can plug into yourself (minus meat - it takes forever to go through your super-long digestive tract and makes your insides all acidic), the better off you'll be. I'm no raw foodie (it makes me too cold and I'm not especially fond of crunchy food), but it's well-known scientific fact that basic - and especially uncooked - fruits and veggies have more of the "milk" your guts want.

Which comes back to me being a starving student. I can't afford the living food I function best on. I eat like a horse, but only because I'm trying to pump myself with nutrients I can't get from breads and junk food. I - and my screaming baby cells - are constantly hungry. Therefore I make a point of searching out things I wouldn't be able to consume normally. If I'm eating in a restaurant I'll order something full of veggies, and make sure I take all my leftovers home if I don't finish. I'll eat off other people's plates (at my own table, okay, not just at random). I'll fill up on the fancy pre-main course bread or salad.

I grab good food anytime I get the chance. Recently I went to a family potluck, and my family is huge (my mom has 97 first cousins) so there was a lot of food made, and therefore a lot of food left over. Not only did I spend a good chunk of my time at the party standing by the dinner table eating fruit, but I purposely brought Tupperware with me to pack leftovers in. I came home with a bowl of couscous, half a ham, some chicken breast, and a full container of whatever I could snatch from the veggie tray. These things provided me with two salads, two lunches, a breakfast, and a giant pot of soup. For free.

Most times the leftovers from parties (especially staff parties) get thrown out when everyone goes home. I make an effort to be the first (and often only - what's with that?) person to ask, "Can I take some of this?"

 I am a seagull in horses' clothing. Err, fur. Whatever.

Test time! What would you pick from this spread to bring home?

When you can't afford fresh food, that food becomes a huge treat. I can grab 36 cookies for $6 at the grocery store, but a handful of blackberries costs the same amount. When you have $50 to feed two people for two weeks... well, you say "screw you" to both options and buy a $3 pack of rice. But the point remains that fruit (and for that matter, vegetables, especially when you try to buy from within your own country) is a luxury to me. So when I find myself at a function of some sort, I take what I can. I come prepared. I don't expect to get anything, but the general rule is "ask and ye shall receive". This doesn't just apply to berries, either. Sandwich quarters, chicken bones, bread, sad-looking veggies from the supermarket vegetable tray someone bought last second - all of these leftovers are perfectly good to eat. Even the yucky-looking stuff, if you know what to do with it.

Do yourself a favor, though: a leftover plate of Oreos may be delicious, but it's only going to make you sick. Junk food is the water your baby cells don't want. Whole foods - things that were pulled out of the ground or picked off a tree and don't have ingredients listed - are the kind of things you want to seek out. They are the "milk". These are the things that are good for you, and, nine times out of ten, they'll be the things that are most simple and most expensive. They are the luxury. Your body thinks of good food in the same way my Dad does: "You can have as much salad as you want." I eat like a horse, but I haven't gained weight in years.

Developed countries waste more than a third of what they buy in food. Feed yourself and help stop the waste. Eat like a horse. Be a seagull.

Step by step:

1) If you know you're going somewhere where there will be leftovers, bring containers to put them in. That may sound Crazy Old Baglady-esque, but the party hosts will be more willing to dole out scraps if they don't have to donate dishes.

2) Grab whatever you know you'll eat. Even stuff that looks shoddy. Old veggies and less than prime cuts of meat can be made into stock for soup!

3) Don't whip out the Tupperware right away. That's rude. Fill up on as many whole foods as you can during the event and ask to take things home after the food table has been mostly abandoned.

4) Grabbing free tiny tubs of butter/jam/peanut butter from restaurants is not frowned upon. If might make you look a little desperate if you scoop handfuls into your bag, but hey, it's another peanut butter toast breakfast you don't have to pay for.

Yours Hungrily,
- Leah