oatzoto again!

 This is seriously one of my favorite things to make. 1) Because it's super-tasty no matter how I make it. 2) Because it's comforting and filling, and I wish I'd known about it when I was growing up so it could always have been my comfort food. 3) Because it's the epitome of Watcha Got Cooking: literally whatever you have will go well in this wonderfulness.

This time I had Steel Cut Oats, Yellow Onions, Dried Shitake, A can of Peas, Frozen carcass meat* from the last time we roasted a turkey, A chicken stock cube, A Beef stock cube, Nubs of yellow and white cheddar, and some Ching Tsai**. So that's what I used.

Make it like so:
- Soak the mushrooms in warm water for an hour or so.
- Use the mushroom juice as part of the stock-- you'll need about six or seven cups. Boil the stock cubes or measure out the stock ahead of time.
- Chop everything before you start.
- Caramelize the onions in olive oil and about an inch and a half of butter. Don't skimp here: this is where a lot of the flavor comes from, so go ahead and let them get really golden.
- Add more butter, maybe a tablespoon, and throw in a cup to a cup and a quarter of steel-cut oats, and cook them until they start smelling toasty. They might open up a bit, but usually they don't, so don't worry about it.
- Add the stock at about a cup at a time, and cook until it's all absorbed and it stops looking drier as it cooks. You'll see what I mean when you do it. Stir ALL THE TIME. Burnt oats are gross and ruin the whole pan. The first few additions, deglaze the pan by scratching at the bottom before the stock gets absorbed.
- Keep adding stock and stirring.
- Add more stock and stir.
- When the last of the stock goes in, cook a while longer until the oats are not chewy anymore. Add any veggies that need to cook down at this point. This is when I threw in the Ching Tsai and the chopped mushrooms.
- Shred up the meat. Add it to the pot with the cheese and whatever other veggies you're adding.
- Cook until everything is the same temperature and all the cheese is mixed in.
- Eat it all up.

Almost everything in this recipe is trade-out-able. Just stick to these basic proportions and the same style of steps and you're fine:
- Fat: I like butter and olive oil. I've also used bacon fat, and thrown the bacon back in at the end. Duck fat would probably be down right decadent.
- 2 alliums: You want it to equal two whole onions in volume, but it doesn't matter what you choose. I've used onions, garlic, shallots, leeks... they're all good.
- 1 to 1 1/4 c  grains: I like oats best, but I've done this with buckwheat groats, rice and brown rice, and it's always great. If you make it with corn, it's polenta. I want to try red winter wheat and millet next.
- 6 to 7 cups of stock: Any kind, real or condensed, home made or store bought.
- 1 to 2 canned veggies: I like peas, but anything you have will do. Diced roasted red pepper is good most of the time.
- 1 to 3 fresh veggies: Anything. If it's hard, cook it first, or add it earlier to the pot. Mushrooms count here.
- 1 cup of cheese: Any kind. Mix it up! Really strong cheeses like blue cheese might need to be cut so it doesn't overpower everything.
- 1-2 cups meat or other protein: Chop it up or shred it, and cook it ahead of time.
- Seasoning: If you use things that have salt in them, you probably won't need to salt it, but add pepper and maybe some herbs-- I wouldn't use more than one or two, because you're adding all sorts of other flavors already.

* I know it doesn't sound all that appetizing, but I can easily get two pounds more meat off a carcass that's been eaten down to the bone. You just have to know where the tasty bits are, and be willing to sift through all the skin and cartilage and week tiny bones to find it.
** I'm guessing on the spelling. It's supposed to be Baby Bok Choi, but it's actually not even cabbage at all, it's baby Collard Greens, and I like calling it by the Chinese name.

Acorn squash soup

Making the best of leftovers.

It's really hard to take a decent picture of soup on a cellphone.

This is basically a different sort of what'cha'got soup. Normally, I'd throw it all into a minestrone sort of deal or maybe into a Gypsy Stew*, but today, I didn't have the right ingredients for either of those things, so I went for the Ally Method of what'cha'got soup making. I had 2 very old acorn squash, one fire-baked potato, one fire-roasted onion, some shallots, some garlic, some milk, some stock cubes, and a selection of spices and herbs**.

The method!
As usual in situations like this, I didn't measure anything, so you'll have to eyeball it.

Cut the acorn squash in half, clean out the seeds and the worst of the fibers, and microwave for about 6 or 8 minutes under damp paper towels until soft enough to scoop out.

While that's nuking, sautee your fire-roasted onions (previously cooked for about a half hour in in tinfoil in the embers of a fire pit), your shallot and your two or so cloves of garlic in a mix of olive oil and butter until everything is sweet and caramelized. The roasted onion gets a jump on that, but if you don't have one, you can caramelize from raw, it'll just take longer.

Put your stock cubes in hot water and make it into stock. I had one each of veggie, beef and chicken, and added five cups of boiling water (which is one cup less than the stock instructions called for, but that's how big by bowl was and it seems fine).

Scoop out all the meat from the squash and just drop it right into the onions. Don't burn yourself too much. Stir it all around and mash it up some with the spoon. Chop up the old baked potato with most of the skin taken off, and throw that in, too.

Add all the broth, stir it up real good, and mash it some more. I used a potato masher. Start seasoning. I have no idea how much I threw in, but it was about two rounds of the following: Fresh cracked black pepper, sea salt, thyme, a little saffron (this only went in once because it's expensive and I don't have much), cinnamon, nutmeg, five spice powder, sage, cayenne, bay leaf, . Old squash are apparently not as sweet as fresh, so I added some wildflower honey (local, of course, because I'm a honey snob). Cook it a lot.

While it's cooking, periodically mash it up more and stir it vigorously to get it all breaking down. Check on flavorings. It should be sweet and savory.

Mine started burning on the bottom of the pan, and that really just added to the roasty flavor and gave it a nice orangy-brown color, but I wouldn't let it burn too much.

Once everything starts looking like it's not going to mash up any more without help, you can blenderize it or use one of those motorboat blenders. Our blender was mouldy and we don't have a motorboat, so I ran the whole giant batch through a fine-mesh sieve***, which took way too long and used up, like, three mixing bowls, but came out with a nice texture.

Throw it all back into the pot, stir it until it's smooth and check on seasoning. Add about 2/3 to a whole cup of milk (less if you have cream) and some more butter, and heat it back up until the butter is totally melted.

Gobble it all up like woah. Perfect fall soup, and would likely work with almost any squash, or sweet potatoes, or root veggies. Ally frequently makes her's curried, and that would have been nice here, too, except I unaccountably couldn't find the curry powder, so I went for thanksgivingy seasonings instead.



*Gypsy Stew is defined by old room mates as anything you can beg, borrow or steal, thrown into a soup pot. In practice, it's usually chicken or veggie broth based, and almost always thickened with rice and beans, and usually eaten communally out of small cups with many servings.
**I think you can judge how much people like cooking and eating by how many spices they have. Our collection outgrew anything as simple as a spice rack and now resides in the entire knife drawer beside the stove. We have literally dozens of distinct herbs and spices, almost all bought individually for specific meals we've been making over the last few years, not as kits or anything like that.
***Someone should buy me a hand-powered food mill for Christmas. Or an immersion blender, but I kind of like the freedom of old-fashioned tools.

What To Do With Leftover Punch

We like our easy punch: rum, sprite and sherbet, the cheaper the better. This time it was raspberry. But after the party (Memorial Day), there was still most of the second bowl left. What's a group of eaters to do? A, brilliantly, poured the whole thing into a freezer box, and kept it for several weeks, until we were over for Game Night and decided we wanted something boozy to drink, but there was nothing in the house with which to make our usual Lolly Holloways (like a banana daquiry, but cooler). So we pulled out the frozen old punch, blended it with fresh ice, and had probably the best mixed icy drink ever. It tasted like pink lemonade and still had enough punch that the one cup each of us got was more than enough.

Yay summer and frozen drinks!

Leftovers: Fishpocket Miso Soup

Remember the fishpockets from the grill? Even after D made the stirfry, there was enough leftover for one little packed lunch: Miso soup with the leftovers.

I get my Miso from J-List (which I’ve probably mentioned before). It’s a moist instant, not a powder*, and all you need is hot water. It lasts for ages and doesn’t need refrigeration, too, so it’s perfect for lunches.

I added sesame seeds, Kastuo bonito furikake and alfalfa sprouts, then mixed the miso and added the grilled veggies and catfish, and there you go! Lovely lunch!

 

*Here’s what it looks like:

Leftovers: Lentils and Smoked Ham

Once we got down just to the rinds of the ham from Thanksgiving, we couldn't make any more sandwiches or meals out of them, but they still smelled so good that I couldn't bring myself to throw them away-- so I threw them in the freezer until something caught my eye. Like the green lentils I had sitting on a shelf.

I love lentils. I love how they look and taste and smell, and I especially love how they feel pouring over my hand. I think I started cooking just because of the feeling of lentils and rice and dry beans.*

This was maybe two thirds of a cup of lentils, one ziploc baggie of frozen turkey stock that I made when we'd vultured the corpse down to bones after TDay, a few cloves of garlic, half an onion, salt, pepper, alot of thyme, a bay leaf or two, and a few chunks of smoked ham. The ham plumped back up as the lentils cooked, and the turkey flavor was entirely taken over by the wonderful hammy smokiness-- this is a fall meal like woah. If I'd had mushroom stock or mushrooms to cook in, I think it would have been even better. Just watch the salt-- ham's almost salty enough, and it's easy to over-salt, even though lentils will take alot before they start tasting briny.

*I actually started cooking because my mom got sick and I had to learn how or starve. But I KEPT cooking because of dry goods.

Leftovers: Fried Mashed Potatoes

You know how three day old mashed potatoes kind of glom up and get all stiff? I was playing with a chunk a little after Thanksgiving, and I thought, this would be great fried. And really, what wouldn't?

So I heated up, like, an inch of veggie oil and mushed the mashed potatoes into three little paddies like felafels, and fried them for a minute or two on each side until they were this lovely golden color just sort of too dark. While they were draining, I salted them like french fries, and then ate them as-is, right off the paper towel. They were awesome. Like french fries, but softer. I think they'd be great with something yummy inside. I was going to put turkey inside, but I got lazy. 

I don't regret it at all.

Leftovers: Thanksgiving Bento

Wow, that's a cruddy picture. My phone determines of it's own free will how big a picture will be, and this one kinda got jipped.

Anyway, we have tons of leftovers, still, and so when I had to make my lunch for the third day, I decided to make it pretty. The balls are roasted garlic mashed potatoes, which would have had turkey inside if I'd had the time to pick it off the bones (so I've put that idea aside-- I want to fry them with turkey and gravy and maybe some cranberry inside), and the yellow square is AH's amazing creamed corn. Then two deviled eggs, a divider made of cream-cheese and roasted walnut-stuffed celery sticks, and then greenbeans.

The corn was made with frozen corn, since it's past fresh corn season around here, cooked up with bacon grease and butter, than topped off with a whole block of light cream cheese and the bacon cooked to get the grease. Salt and pepper. No measurements, just sort of throwing stuff together. It was great. The only thing I would change, is that I'd like there to have been more bacon flavor; the cream cheese mellowed it a little too well. But it's fantastic hot and fresh, and almost as fantastic the next day when it stands up under it's own thickness, and it's really good cold in a lunchbox.

The greenbeans were big fat Italian ones cooked in a crock pot all day with butter, salt, pepper and a smoked ham bone and whatever hammy bits were taken off the bone, until they were that soft olive color of well-cooked beans.

And even on the third day after thanksgiving, this deceptively-small amount of food lasted me all day.

Leftover Curry

Because of our local British Pub, we like our thicker curries with mashed potatoes instead of rice, so last night I made a vegetable-chicken curry with mashed redskin potatoes.

Start with chunked chicken and onions, and cook them together until the chicken is cooked through and the onions are sweated. Add chopped carrots sometime at this stage. Once it's all cooked, add the other veggies-- in this case, broccoli and corn. The curry base I use for this is Golden's-- a sweet, mild Japanese curry that comes in blocks like baker's chocolate. For a batch big enough to serve everyone, I used four cubes and a coffee-cup of water, and continued cooking until it was thickened up. The mashed potatoes are just plain-- butter, milk, salt and pepper.

This curry base is easy and rich, not too salty, and thick like gravy-- in fact, over potatoes, it kind of tastes like gravy, too, but with more interest then just a regular brown. It's not a light curry like a thai one; it's closer to a British pub curry, especailly if you shred the chicken. I've used it by itself, and it's a bit salty for that, but it's fantastic with veggies and chicken, and pretty good with mini meatballs.

ps: I apologise for the crappiness of my pictures-- the viewscreen on my camara broke, and these are all taken blind.