Pheasant & Kale Soup

I didn't take a picture of tonight's supper. I ate it all before I thought to take out the camera!

I had some leftover pheasant that my husband got in South Dakota lately. I had some kale from the plant that my boss gave me this summer. Both were in the fridge and needed to be used.

I searched the Internet for soup ideas involving chicken and kale and made up my own version. I didn't measure much, so some of this is a guess:

Pheasant & Kale Soup
2 carrots, diced
2 TB diced onion
1 TB oil
3/4 C chopped cooked pheasant or chicken
6 C chicken broth
1/4 tsp dried dill weed
1/4 tsp salt
4 kale leaves, torn, with stems removed
1 large clove garlic, minced
2 handfuls fine egg noodles or broken spaghetti

Saute the carrots and onion in oil. Add pheasant, broth and seasonings and bring to boil. Add kale, garlic and noodles and cook until everything is to desired tenderness.

Even my picky eaters ate this up and said it was great.

Salsa Struggles

I finally had enough tomatoes, between my garden and my mom's, all at once, to make salsa. I've made salsa before with my sister-in-law's recipe. It was good.

I started out fine. I remembered to peel the tomatoes first this time. I put them in boiling water for 30 seconds to loosen the skin. My daughter peeled them and cut off the the stems:



She did really well. She's an efficient girl.

Then I found that I was short on vinegar. So, do I run out at suppertime to get more, or do I find a substitute? I read in multiple places on the Internet that you can substitute lemon or lime juice for vinegar in a salsa recipe, and some even recommended it instead because the flavor will be better. I thought lime was a natural choice for Mexican food, so I filled in the rest of my needed vinegar with lime juice.

Well, that made it taste very sour, and I could really taste the lime. So I added a bunch more sugar and kept adding spices. There was also a bitterness I couldn't figure out.

Turns out I burned it on the bottom. My stove top is overly hot, and I was not cautious enough with my settings. I really can't turn it down enough for some things. I'm used to cooking on electric stoves, but I don't care for this one.

So I did the best I could in seasoning it to taste, well, acceptable. It's nothing like I've made in years past, though. It even looks dark in the jars.



I'll work up the courage to serve it to the kids once I buy some new tortilla chips. But I don't think I'll be sharing these jars with anyone else.

Pullet Eggs

We've started getting eggs! Here's a picture of the first one I found:



The hen pushed the hay out of the corner of the coop and lined the spot with a few feathers, then laid the egg there. So then my husband and son got to work building nesting boxes! The hens mostly use those, but usually one egg a day is just laying out on the chicken coop floor. That can't be a very good mother hen, at least not yet.

Pullet eggs start out smaller than a normal egg. I should have taken a picture of the teeniest one we found. I wasn't even able to use it, because the membrane inside was so tough that it wouldn't break without shattering the shell. I decided a teaspoonful of egg probably wasn't enough to fight over.

At first there was one a day. We've worked up to usually four a day now, with ten young hens laying.



They are still mostly small eggs. We've gotten two that were like typical large eggs, but the one I've used had a double yolk; that makes an egg larger.

I've used them only once in baking, because it's hard to figure out exactly how many to use. I did measure a large egg in a liquid measuring cup so that I could approximate the volume when using the pullet eggs for cookies.

We're going to be bringing most of the hens over to my parents' soon, where they were always intended to go. But we're going to keep three hens, which theoretically will give you about 2 eggs a day on average, according to a chicken book I looked at. We've got a light on a timer in the coop now to encourage them to keep laying even though the days are getting shorter.

Those little eggs make cute, miniature fried eggs. Normally I can fit three large eggs in my frying pan, but on this day it held five:



The yolks are so orange from all the fresh greens the chickens are eating (and my red tomatoes, those darn birds). The pancake batter and chocolate chip cookie dough I made lately were deeply golden.

Pizza Night

Friday night is pizza night for our family. It got started back when my kids were very little. We'd order pizza to give me a break from cooking and to feel like the weekend was starting; I stayed home with kids who didn't go to school yet. But it was a waste of money to order pizza every week, so we started trying every frozen pizza. We didn't really like any, so my husband suggested I try making homemade. I didn't think I liked homemade pizza, but I gave it a try. And we liked it!

I got the dough recipe from my mom; it's pretty much the same as Betty Crocker's.

Pizza dough

2 1/4 tsp active dry yeast
1 C warm water
3 C all-purpose or bread flour
1 t sugar (optional)
1 t salt
2 T vegetable/olive oil

First combine the yeast with the warm water in a large bowl:


Let it stand 5 minutes. Then add the flour, sugar, salt, and oil:



Mix it as well as you can with a wooden spoon, then knead it until the dough is well-mixed and smooth. I do this right inside the bowl. You can also use a stand mixer for the whole process. You don't have to knead it as long as you would regular bread dough:



Then you can use the dough immediately or cover it and let it stand up to a couple of hours. It gets a nicer texture when you let it rise, but there isn't a big difference:



If you're using metal pans, grease them. You can also use a pizza stone, preheated in the oven.

Divide the dough in two and shape the crusts on your pans (or cornmeal-dusted pizza peel, if using a stone), pinching the edge to raise it. Spread sauce over your crusts; I like Contadina:



Add your toppings. I use about 1 cup of shredded mozzarella per pizza. Usually I add Hormel pepperoni, and sometimes I use precooked sausage. Sometimes I add onion, black olives, mushrooms, and/or green pepper. Once in a while I do Canadian bacon and pineapple. But most weeks, it's just easiest to do pepperoni.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees while you're shaping and topping the pizzas. Bake for 6 minutes, then switch the position of the pizzas (assuming you have one pizza on the bottom rack and one on the rack above) and bake for 6 minutes more.



This is a good-tasting, inexpensive pizza that isn't difficult to make. For me, probably the best part is knowing that, every Friday night, my menu is already decided and everyone's going to be happy with it!

French Toast with a Flamingo

How do you like my Magic Tree House-like title?

This morning my little one made french toast sticks from the kids' new cookbook. New is a relative term, since I gave it to them for Christmas. But we've just started using it.

First she cut up the bread:


Then she mixed up the eggs and milk:


Then when she was dipping the bread and then rolling it in crushed corn flakes (we followed the recipe even though we don't normally make it that way), her feet got tired, so she adopted her flamingo pose:



She has such long, thin legs that she really reminds us of a flamingo when she does that.

We did not care for the corn flake crust. Daddy's french toast is much better.

Cookbook for Boys & Girls

My kids have had the 1950s Betty Crocker Cookbook for Boys & Girls for a few years now. I remember looking at the original with great fascination when I was a child; I think my mom had had one. Ours is a reissue with a few notes about the recipes involving raw eggs.

We just finished working our way through the whole thing.

I'm rather compulsive about cookbooks. (Maybe I need to go watch "Julie and Julia.") I like to work my way through them methodically, almost like I'm using them as a cooking class, trying recipes and techniques I haven't attempted before. Then I make marks next to them so I'll remember how much we liked them. In my cookbooks, I stick to recipes that look good and don't involve too many unusual or expensive ingredients. In the kids' cookbook, we made everything except the ones involving ingredients we couldn't get, which did happen with a cookbook written decades ago. Betty Crocker does not appear to make a cream puff mix anymore. Oh, and we skipped the recipes involving peanut butter and nuts. Some recipes are still good if you leave out the nuts, but some are just boring without them, so I mostly don't try those recipes.

It was really interesting seeing what 1950s ideas of food were. The best recipes were totally basic things, like beans & weiners, grilled cheese sandwiches, and butter frosting. I don't think we'll refer to it often for recipes, but it sure was fun to try things. Now the kids are moving on to the newest Betty Crocker kids' cookbook. The first recipe was good - blueberry pancakes!

Campfire

Last night we made s'mores over a fire. The weather was perfect yesterday - heaven on earth. My husband and the kids got all kinds of work done while I was at work. We did a little more after supper. Then we decided to have some fun, since the kids had worked so hard and so willingly. So we made a fire in our backyard. Usually we wait until the sun goes down, but we decided not to this time. It is easier to see what you're doing with the food when it isn't dark!

I had finally gotten some Campfire marshmallows and Hershey bars, both of which I feel comfortable feeding to my peanut-allergic daughter. So we had a great treat. And we only got bit by mosquitoes a few times. Those have finally hatched since we had some rain.

Eating Green

I found this Minneapolis Star-Tribune article very interesting yesterday:
50 Ways to Eat Green

I don't come close to doing it all, but it intrigues me. I could take some steps. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and some other things I've read have raised my awareness.

I do think that saving energy by turning your teapot off before it whistles is a bit over the top. That's a matter of seconds. You might let your spaghetti sauce cook an extra 15 minutes or your soup an extra hour. Leaving your oven on too long is wasteful, but I'm not going to worry about my tea kettle.

Easter's On Its Way

Today we colored eggs. I like to do it the basic, old-fashioned way: food coloring with vinegar and boiling water. I've never used a Paas kit and I have no inclination to. This year we got slightly adventurous and tried putting rubber bands on a couple of the eggs.



But mostly, it's just a pleasure for kids to set the eggs in the cups of colored water and baste them and turn them until they reach the desired color.




Sometimes it's fun to make them two-toned:





However you do it, and even if it's a little messy, coloring eggs is so fun.



Thanks to Jo for being our photographer today!

Cakes on the Griddle

I cook breakfast on the weekends. On Saturdays I alternate between pancakes and waffles, often accompanied by sausages or bacon. Sometimes my husband sings a bit of the John Denver song: "I've got me a fine wife, I've got my old fiddle, when the sun's comin' up I've got cakes on the griddle....Thank God I'm a country boy." (Yes, I asked him if I can tell people he does that, because no one else would ever hear him do such a thing.)

Calzones

I make homemade pizza every week. But I hadn't ever turned it into calzones before. My son spotted a picture in a cookbook and requested them, so I gave it a shot. It was my normal pizza dough divided into smaller sections and rolled out. I topped it with pizza sauce, shredded mozzarella, pepperoni, and, for some, black olives and sliced mushrooms. I folded it over and pinched it like the edge of a pie crust, then brushed it with beaten egg. They take longer to bake than a pizza does, since they're thicker. But they were good. Not better than regular pizza, but a fun change.

Any kind of homemade bread is usually good!

Venison Can Be Good

We've been eating a lot of venison this winter. My husband got a deer last fall. It was young enough and farm-field-fed enough to be quite tender and mild-tasting. I know vension can be gamey, and I can taste that this isn't beef, but this meat is good.

This was an economical way for us to get meat, too. My husband went deer hunting on our land, so there were no travel costs. And he and his brother processed the deer themselves, so we didn't have butcher shop costs. We didn't even have any sausage made. But he and I still need to thaw the bag of scraps and grind it into hamburger.

Good Eggs

I buy eggs from my parents, who have free-range chickens: beautiful Buff Orpingtons.

The best eggs in the world are farm-fresh from chickens that have eaten a natural, varied diet. Especially when the weather is warm and they're eating green things and insects, the eggs have so much flavor.

Two of my kids had never eaten an entire fried egg in their lives. They thought they were yucky. The first time they tried the free-range eggs with dark yellow yolks, they loved them and cleaned their plates. Fresh eggs also fry and poach much more neatly, so they look nicer, too.