Freezer Food

I'm not sure if this post goes under work, home, or eat; but I must thank my friend Cristina for teaching me the ways of the homemade frozen dinner! All you need for delicious, nutritious meals on the go, is a 5 or 6 recipes for large meals (serving at least 8), 5 or 6 hours, and a pal to share the latest gossip, work, mess, and bounty. It was one of the better Sunday afternoons I've had in a while! Since Cristina was already a pro at this, she came with some recipes that had already proven themselves to be tried and true. I on the other hand, had to do a little research. Behold, my internet guide to freezer friendly recipes:

Martha Stewart, patron saint of WHE

Food Gawker

Also, Alton Brown frequently gives instructions for freezing food on his show. These instructions aren't included in his books, or in the recipes on foodnetwork.com. So watch carefully and take notes!

In the end we decided on a menu of Cristina's stew, Martha's beef enchiladas, Martha's bean burritos, and the Pizza Pops from food gawker. Yummy!

We did alter the freezing instructions a little, so that every dish was just portioned out as an individual serving in some containers, ready to microwaved at a moment's notice.

You have no idea how proud I am to show off my freezer full of goodies!

As you can see, I also have some frozen foods, that aren't homemade. I call these store bought essentials the Big 3, and my freezer is never without them:

1. Spinach filo pie- no prep, or even dishes, just an hour of foresight required. This is one of the few freezer meals I buy at the store because it's usually not full of "unknowns".
2. Gyoza- It is fun to make these authentic Japanese dumplings while shooting the breeze with your favorite people for an entire afternoon. However, this method is much more reasonable during the week. I like the Trader Joe's brand, but there are lots of them out there.
3. Frozen Veggies- throw them in a soup, in a stew, in a stir-fry, or next to a store bought rotisserie chicken.

I hope to keep up with this habit, as I do go through days with all the time in the world followed by weeks of insanity! I'm not sure about how long these are supposed to last, but Cristina says she usually gets about a month out of her meals before she has to restock, so we know they'll at least stay fresh for that long. :o) Do you freeze ahead? Have any good recipes to share?

Stay tuned for next month's installment of freezer food, when we make quick bread, cookies and freezer jam!

Spring in Florida

There are two things I love about spring in Florida:

• Plant City strawberries!
• Patio containers with flowers

We Tried It: Productivity Apps

My fiancé, Brad, is starting out as a real estate agent and he has to keep track of a lot of appointments as well as other tasks. He recently bought a smart phone to make his job easier, and has tested out several Productivity Apps to keep him on track and on time. I have tried out a couple of them myself, because organizational skills don't really come naturally to me and I can use all the help I can get.

Google Tasks

Pros: Free. Simple to use. Works best in conjunction with Google Calendar (which sends reminders and has time scheduling abilities). Compatible with various phone syncing programs. Allows users to share/assign tasks.

Cons: Maybe too simple. Only actions available are to enter tasks, due date, and very brief description. Cannot schedule times. No reminders.

Producteev

Pros: Syncs with Astrid -a popular to do list app for Android. Free if you have fewer than three people using it, as it is geared toward small businesses or teams. You can share/assign tasks as well as have private tasks. Has it's own calendar view. You can set up e-mail and phone reminders. Syncs well with Google Calendar.

Cons: Doesn't handle natural language well. Cluttered interface (in Brad's opinion). Organization and prioritizing process is too complex. There is a fee for having three or more users on a "work space". No editing for notes. Notes are like a facebook comment, once it's there, you can just deal with it, or delete it and start over.

Remember the Milk

Pros: Free on your computer. Simple to use. Handles natural language well. Extra features are really good, but require a paid account. You can set it up as a Google Gadget for free. Easy to edit tasks.

Cons: No calendar view. "Awkward and irritating integration with Google Calendar"-Brad. What he means is, instead of just putting the time and task in the square of the calendar date, you just have a blank calendar with a check mark button on all days of the month. You have to click the button to see your task. Otherwise they all look the same and it's not much of a reminder. Fee to sync with mobile devices.

Microsoft Outlook 2007*

Pros: The original. Integrates e-mail, contacts, tasks, and calendar. A lot people are already familiar with it. Has a lot of useful features. Allows users to share/assign tasks.

Cons: You have to buy the program, and it's expensive. Has a lot of useless features (like a journal). Doesn't sync to anything. Old fashioned (not in a nostalgic way). Not cloud based (meaning information is not saved on the internet, but downloaded to your hard drive) so you can only use it on the computer with the program. You can't access it from any other computer.

* We did some looking around, and we don't think much has changed since then.

Todoist

This is a little different than the rest and is being reviewed as such. It is pronounced like "to do list" without the "l". It's project oriented. To use it you make an over arching project and then you have sub tasks for each step in your project completing journey. Brad doesn't really do projects so we can't give a full review sine we had no need to use the program as it was intended. For someone with multiple, ongoing projects this might be good.

In the end Brad has settled on Google Tasks in conjunction with Google Calendar, and he likes it very much. I'm using Remember the Milk, because I really like the check list aspect. I don't really need the reminders for time and I actually get things done earlier than the times I set for myself! I just find the act of checking off a list very satisfying and it motivates me to do more things each day so I can add to my list of completed tasks. I am thinking about switching to Outlook since I already use it for my e-mail, but I think the name Remember the Milk is so charming (yes, it I'm really that easy to entertain) and so I keep going back to it.

I hope this is helpful for those of you who need a little help either keeping up with the time, remembering all there is to do, or who (like me) just need the confidence boost of seeing all that you have achieved each day.

Any recommendations for apps we missed, or further reviews of Todoist would be most appreciated!

Nissa and Gordon's Cottage Pie for Brad

Boston is famous for it's high concentration of Irish Luck, especially on St. Patrick's Day. This is my first St. Patrick's Day celebration in Boston so I'm looking forward to the parade on Sunday, and I enjoyed the exodus from the bars in my neighborhood late last night. It was highly entertaining. My fiancé's family has some Irish heritage to speak of. He has a blond patch in the middle of his dark brown hair. His family jokes that it should have been red, like his grandmother's, but it wasn't mixed properly! So last night, in his honor, I edited Gordon Ramsay's Shepherd Pie recipe into a cottage pie (it's only shepherd pie if you use lamb)with a nod to the Irish, rather than the English, lineage of the dish by changing some of the ingredients. Here is the original recipe, with a video to clarify some of the directions regarding the method, and below is the recipe with my modifications.

Mash

1.5 lbs Yukon gold potatoes

1/4 cup cream

1/2 cup grated Dubliner Cheese, plus extra for sprinkling on top

2 egg yolks

salt and pepper to taste (I omitted them completely though)

Mince

1.5 lbs ground beef

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 onion, finely grated

1 carrot, finely grated

1/4 cup stout

1 small can tomato paste

at least 2 tbsp Worcestershire Sauce (I'm not sure how much I added, but I was liberal with it)

3 sprigs fresh thyme, removed from stem

1 sprig fresh rosemary, removed from stem and finely chopped

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.

Peel and cut the potatoes into roughly 2 inch cubes/chunks and put them on to boil in salted water for about 15 minutes while you prepare the mince.

In a large (maybe 10 inch) pan, brown the beef over medium heat, stirring constantly so it's nice and crumbly. Drain the fat and return the beef to the heat. Add the garlic, onions and carrots. Add the stout, tomato paste, and Worcestershire Sauce. Finally add the fresh herbs. Taste it and adjust the seasonings accordingly. Turn off the heat and set it aside.

Drain the potatoes and return them to their pot. Ramsay put the potatoes through a ricer, but I just agressively stirred them with a wooden spoon. An electric hand mixer would probably do a nice job for these if you didn't use a non-stick pot. Add cream, yolks and cheese. Whip until thick.

Put the mince in a 9 inch cake pan...or some such vessel. Spread the mash over the meat, sealing the edges the best you can (if you don't the juices from the meat bubble over the edge when you put it in the oven and makes a mess. I learned that the hard way.) If you can't just make sure there's a layer of foil or something underneath the pan to catch the drippings. Sprinkle some extra cheese on top and fork through the potato gently so the peaks can brown.

Bake for 18-20 minutes.

This is a good meal to hide veggies from finicky eaters (if you're in to that sort of thing). Do grate the carrots and onions, even if you like chunky veggies, because it makes a really flavorful sauce. Add more vegetables if you want, but do that in addition to what is already in the recipe. I'll definitely make this again with some sliced carrots, sliced mushrooms, chopped onion, and peas. Also, you might notice that I omitted the olive oil from my recipe. That's because the beef was quite fatty enough on it's own, and I didn't want greasy cottage pie. I also omitted the chicken broth. That's because the author of the other blog did so, and found that it turned out fine. One less ingredient! Haha! One final tip, please be sure to do all your chopping, peeling, and grating before hand, as the cooking process moves quite quickly once it's underway.

"Jamaella"

Help.  I have fallen into a cooking black hole and all the creativeness of cooking is being sucked out of me.  I figured that I've cooked roughly 10,000 or more dinners in my lifetime and all I can say is that's a lot of cookin'.  Lately, I've been cooking the same old tired dishes over and over and they just don't taste so good anymore. Did I lose my touch for cooking?And what was I going to make for dinner when what I had on hand was shrimp and some Andouille sausage that I had purchased on a whim?  I began to think about when I was younger, and all the meals that I received compliments on, like those dishes that took me back to my English and Italian roots, or new meals I tried after watching a favorite television cook.  As I reminisced with my laptop in front of me, I thought about those pioneer television chefs like Julia Child, Martin Yan and Justin Wilson.

Justin Wilson...

When my husband and I were first married we used to watch Justin's cooking show and loved listening to his humorous anecdotes about Louisiana Cajun life.  We loved his thick Cajun accent and his catchphrases like "How Y'all Are"?  and "I gar on tee."  He was a modern renaissance man, a cook, engineer, politician, humorist, and a song writer.  I found his jambalaya recipe online and spent the rest of the afternoon watching excerpts from his show on YouTube.  By the time I had finished amusing myself, I realized that is it was too late to go to the grocery store to purchase some of the ingredients that I didn't have on hand before my husband came home.  I realized I had to make some substitutions to the dish.  The biggest substitution would be omitting green peppers.  My husband hates green peppers and he can taste even the smallest piece of diced pepper in a dish.  I ended up substituting with okra instead.  He likes okra which many people dislike, but won't eat green peppers, go figure.

What I ended up with, was a very different recipe.

• Onions, raw, 1 cup, chopped 
• 1 cup of sliced okra
• Garlic, 4 cloves , chopped 
• 6 green onions, sliced
• Canola Oil, 3 tbsp 
• Petite cut diced tomatoes, 28 oz can
• 6 cups Chicken Broth, 
• 1/2 lb. sliced Andouille sausage, browned and cooked
• 1 to 1 1/2 lb. shrimp, peeled and deveined
• Parsley, dried, 2 tbsp 
• Tabasco Sauce, 2 tsp 
• 1/4 cup Andrea's Steak sauce
• Thyme, ground, 3 tsp 
• 4 cup of white rice (I used short grain)

Directions

Saute: onion, in 3 Tbl. canola or peanut oil until soft.  Add garlic and stir one minute.
Add: tomatoes, okra, green onion and chicken broth
Simmer about an hour. 

Add: sausage, shrimp and Parsley. Bring to a boil.
Add: Tabasco, Worcestershire, Thyme and 2 cups of rice.
Add 2 cups uncooked rice and stir and simmer for 25 minutes or until rice is tender.
13 - 1 cup servings

When my husband came home we ate dinner. "That's good Paella," he said.  I told him it was Jambalaya but he insisted it tasted more like Paella.  I disagreed, but dropped the subject.  The dish really didn't have much in common with paella except the short grain rice and the seafood.  So maybe we can say for my husband's sake that the dish is Jamaella.  Justin Wilson once said this about Cajun cooking, "What it is, is creating what you have to offer, putting it together using common sense, imagination, and the proper amounts, and it comes out as good food." 

That's what I did and it came out as good food.  I GAR ON TEE!

To buy local, or not?

Before I moved to Boston, I worked at my local farmer's market in Virginia. I became pretty spoiled with such easy access to fresh, local, organic, seasonal produce with an unofficial employee discount to boot! I also developed an understanding for the importance of being an informed shopper. Here it is not so cheap to buy local and organic so I have to make due with what is available to me. When I buy produce I always buy seasonally (If I want something out of season, I look for its frozen counterpart), then I shoot for local produce, and finally organic. Sometimes there are things I just can't get locally, and then I skip to organic...but I'll buy non-organic if the price is right. I also try to shop as locally *as possible*. For example, there are no orange groves in New England, so if I want oranges I buy Florida oranges, not California oranges. Is there some sort of threshold where far is far? Should I just buy the darn things as long as they are grown in the US? Maybe. But grew up in Florida, and I also insist that Florida oranges just taste better. :o)

I do most of my shopping at Trader Joe's which is known for making an admirable effort to supply local and organic produce at affordable prices. This week I was surprised to find 11 oz containers of Blueberries for $2.99 at my local TJ's. Thoughts inspired by this simple sign: That's cheap, even for in season blueberries. How are they getting blueberries in February? The season, in the US anyway, is June-September. Are they even going to taste good? Is that why they're so cheap? Maybe there's some crazy New England variety of Blueberry that is ready for harvest in the winter...nope. Shipped in from Chile. Wow, TJ's bad show. Wait. Am I a produce snob? No. I'm trying to be environmentally friendly with my food, and support my local economy. But don't those farmers need money too? Am I going to potentially let this food go to waste for some mildly hoity-toity principle? Is it really hoity-toity? My friends in Virginia work really hard at their craft and are greatly under-appreciated...it went on like this as I wheeled my cart around the entire store.

In the end I went home without the berries. In the meantime, I 'll be having my taste of summer in the form of a cobbler made of some nectarines in my freezer from last summer. It was a good year for stone fruit.

What about you? Do you buy local, organic, seasonal, or any combination thereof? Do you buy based purely on price? Or do you just buy what you want? Are you like me, and have a ranking system? (Which, I realize makes me a little eccentric.) Would you have bought the blueberries?

I Tried it: Dish Soap as a Bathtub Cleaner

As stated in the section about me (Nissa) I just moved into an apartment built in the 1920s, so it comes with this really great clawfoot tub. I love it, but I was so scared to clean it with any harsh chemicals, lest I burn a hole right through it! So I did a little research, and found that a lot of people with porceline finished tubs use plain old dish soap to gently, but effectively clean their antique bathtubs. I was a bit sceptical at first, and you can't believe everything you read on the internet. Why would anyone even buy a separate, and super harsh bathroom cleaner when they had perfectly good (and cheap!) dish soap in the kitchen? But, it did seem gentle enough, and what's the worst that could happen? It doesn't get my tub perfectly clean and I'll have to try something else?

Their arguments were sound enough:

1. Dish soap is made to break up grease and food build up. (Read oils and proteins, which are the scum part of soap scum)

2. No harmful chemicals/fumes= no skin irritation or need to open the window in the middle of the Boston Winter to ventilate.

3. It's very inexpensive

4. It multitasks, meaning I only have to keep one small bottle around for both dish washing, and cleaning the tub, instead of two bottles. (Hey, that matters with 400 square feet of space!)

5. I trust it to be powerful enough to clean the dishes off of which I EAT, so why would it not make my tub clean enough for me to stand in it while I shower?

So, I tried it.

Here is my tub with two weeks worth of dirt, scum from bar soap and bathrings from my olive oil enriched salt scrub.

>

And here it is after I hit it with some Palmolive antibacterial dish washing liquid:

It worked like a dream! No smell, no tough scrubbing(just the normal amount of scrubbing involved) , no peeling hands, no bleach spots on my clothes! It was just fantastic! I'll never go back! I was so happy with the results of my tub, I cleaned my sink too!

Just a word of caution: I'm sort of enamored with my gleaming bathroom now. I like to stop in every hour or so, just to look at it. Maybe you're not as weird as I am, but you have been warned.