Cook Fresh, Eat Well
Goat and Lentil Stoup
Joining a CSA has been a lesson in open mindedness for us. You never realize how much you’re set in your foodie ways until you get thrown a curve ball or two. Goat meat is a curve ball. When we opened our CSA...
Brown Sugar Glazed Butternut Squash for Two
When it comes to butternut squash, I like to keep it simple. I wasn’t even sure I liked this type of squash until a couple of years ago and since then I’ve gone through several different recipes. I always knew it had potential but I...
Shaking Beef
For most of life my life I’ve never really cared where my meat came from. As long as it’s hermatically and hygenically packaged and reasonably priced, I didn’t question it. “All Natural” and “grass...
Cinnamon Raisin Oatcakes
One of my food goals this year is to eat cleaner. Clean eating isn’t about low fat, low carb, or gluten free. It’s about replacing highly processed, chemical laden foods with natural, whole foods prepared by hand. Author Michael...
2012 – Wiping the slate clean and starting over
Starting a new year is the equivalent of being handed a clean sheet of drawing paper and a box of brand new crayons. It’s a fresh, new, blank slate with endless possibilities. While I’m not a fanatic when it comes to new years...
Basic Butter Cookies
A few years ago I went through a cookie and cake decorating phase. I took all of the Wilton classes at Michael’s and bought tons of decorating supplies – bags, tips, food coloring, etc. I had a vision of starting a side business...
Cranberry Hootycreeks
I love a good food gift. Several years ago I worked with a very nice man whose family would make big Christmas goody bags that he would pass out to his coworkers. They were wonderful - cookies, candies, cakes, all sorts of homemade treats....
Chocolate Espresso Cookies
This is a cookie that I made in a baking cooking class at Viking Cooking School. It has a delicious deep dark chocolate flavor with a hint of coffee. Use the best quality chocolate you can find for these since it’s the dominant flavor....
The Week of Cookies – Peanut Butter Temptations
There’s been alot of cookie baking around my house lately and I wanted share a few of my favorites. This has been officially deemed the week of cookies. What are your favorite holiday cookies? I first tasted these years ago at an office...
Rest and Relaxation
We don’t take the opportunity to relax nearly as much as we should. When not working our day jobs, there always seems to be plenty of obligations, projects, and housework to fill up the rest of our waking hours. Instead of taking a...
Goat and Lentil Stoup
Joining a CSA has been a lesson in open mindedness for us. You never realize how much you’re set in your foodie ways until you get thrown a curve ball or two. Goat meat is a curve ball. When we opened our CSA bag and started sorting out our haul, I was slightly taken aback by the package of ground goat meat I found nestled underneath the chicken and ground pork. What the heck do you do with goat? I was scared it would have that gamey strong taste that you sometime get with lamb. Well goat doesn’t really taste like lamb. It’s more of cross between lamb and beef and it’s delicious.
When in doubt with ground meat, make a soup – or stoup in this case. I’m calling it a stoup because it’s a really thick hearty soup – more like a stew. I threw in a handful of parsley to brighten this up but you can use whatever fresh herbs you like. If you can’t find goat, ground lamb or ground beef would work well too.
Recipe: Goat and Lentil Stoup
Ingredients
- 1 pound ground lamb or goat
- 1 small onion rough chopped
- 3 carrots sliced into quart inch medallions
- 1 tsp dried thyme
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp dried rosemary
- 4 cups low sodium vegetable broth
- 1 cup water
- 1/2 cup chopped flat leaf parsley
- 1 cup dried brown lentils
Instructions
1. Heat about 2 tablespoons olive oil in a large pot. Add ground meat with salt and cook until no longer pink. Remove from pot.
2. Add onions and carrots to pot and saute until onions start to get soft.
3. Add broth, water, and lentils and bring to a boil. Add bay leaves, thyme, and rosemary. Turn down to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes. Then add ground meat and cook for another 10 minutes or until lentils are done. They should be soft but not mushy.
4. Remove from heat and add chopped parsley.
Number of servings (yield): 6
Embracing Uniqueness
Hubby and I have started to casually look for our next home – mainly refining and clarifying our likes and dislikes. Do we want to live in a new neighborhood or an established neighborhood? Do we want to live on the southside of town or the west side of town. So many questions to be decided. We’ve started doing subdivision drive bys. If we’re out riding around and see a subdivision that looks interesting, we’ll drive though it for a quick assessment and look up available homes and prices when we get home. We’ve done this enough that all of them are starting to look alike with very little to differentiate one subdivision from another. There’s a cookie cutter sameness in new subdivions that makes old homes with character, infinitely more attractive to me. I want our home to have unique character and not look exactly like 25 other homes in the neighborhood.
My dream home - an arts and craft style bungalow from the turn of the century.
Blogging should be like that. My little corner of the interweb should be been unique. It should have been the place where I share my true personality and the things that inspire me so we can get to know each other. That hasn’t happened because of a fear of being different. When I started blogging I really hadn’t intended it write a recipe factory. I love cooking but there were lots of other things to talk about. As I got into it more, I found more really cool food blogs and started self editing based on what I was seeing or not seeing. Post ideas would be rejected if I couldn’t remember seeing something similar on other food blogs. If no one else is talking about it must not be interesting right? I had subconsciously rejected uniqueness in favor of following the herd and fitting in with the crowd. The passion I felt for my blog has waned under the pressure of fitting into that cookie cutter.
Now I’m at a blogging cross roads. Do I continue on the path I’m on currently and split my non food related musings onto a personal blog? Do I incorporate my other interests into this blog and completely deviate from what “a Cook at Heart” implies? Do I have time to realistically maintain two blogs? It’s tricky and I’ve been giving it ALOT of thought and I’m still undecided.
What do you think? Would you rather a food blog stick to food or do you like to see diverse topics? Let me know what you think.
Read MoreBrown Sugar Glazed Butternut Squash for Two
When it comes to butternut squash, I like to keep it simple. I wasn’t even sure I liked this type of squash until a couple of years ago and since then I’ve gone through several different recipes. I always knew it had potential but I couldn’t find a recipe that knocked my socks off. After all the work it takes to get a squash prepped and ready, I wanted to feel like my time and energy was worth it. I stumbled across this recipe on Cooks Country’s website. Truth be told it ended up being butternut squash for one. It was so good I ate it all before my husband got home. Two cups is about half of a medium squash. If using a whole squash, double all of the other ingredients.
Brown Sugar Glazed Butternut Squash for Two
Ingredients
- 2 cups butternut squash cut into 1-inch chunks
- 1/8 cup packed dark brown sugar
- 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
- 1 teaspoon cider vinegar
Instructions
- Heat oven to 425 degrees. Cover rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil and coat lightly with cooking spray.
- Mix sugar, butter, salt, vinegar and pepper in large bowl. Add squash and toss until well coated. Spread out on baking dish. Put in oven and stir every 15 minutes, until squash is well browned and completely tender, about 25 – 30 minutes.
What I’m Reading – Make the Bread, Buy the Butter
I’m always on the hunt for cookbooks that will teach me new skills not just give me new recipes. When I heard Jennifer Reese on The Splendid Table podcast, I immediately downloaded this book to my Nook. It’s is a wealth of information for anyone that wants to cook more from scratch. There are 120 recipes divided into 13 chapters in categories like breakfast, cured meats, and restaurant foods.
How it’s written
Jennifer’s style is straightforward and easy to read. She’s a great storyteller and talks alot about her family and their urban homesteading tendencies. There are parts of this book that are laugh out loud funny. The story about her family keeping chickens had me on the floor laughing.
Each recipe has an honest assessment of the hassle factor and the cost of making it versus buying it. She gives you her opinion on whether it’s worth your time, energy, and dollars. Don’t expect a bunch of pretty pictures because it’s not that type of book. It’s about the stories and the food, not glossy pictures.
Who should buy it
Anyone that’s interested in moving away from processed store bought foods to wholesome made from scratch staples should get this book. It’s a DIYers guide to scratch cooking so if you like kitchen projects, this book is for you.
Read More
Shaking Beef
For most of life my life I’ve never really cared where my meat came from. As long as it’s hermatically and hygenically packaged and reasonably priced, I didn’t question it. “All Natural” and “grass fed” were foreign terms and price was often the determining factor when it came to choosing our purchases. A couple of months ago hubby and I decided to take some steps to improve the quality of the food we purchase. We joined a CSA.
We bought a half share in a farm here in Tennessee and every other month from November to March, we pick up a 20+ pound package of meat. We get all natural, grass fed beef, pork, goat, and chicken that was humanely treated and raised without any antibiotics or hormones. I was hesitant about joining and procrastinated for months. I was afraid it would be way too much meat for two people to consume in a reasonable about of time but a half share is perfect for us. This CSA has been a double win for us. We feel really good about supporting a local farm plus knowing the family that produces our meat has given us peace of mind about what we’re eating.
This recipe was made with beef from our CSA. Grass fed beef tends to be leaner than grain fed beef so you have to be careful about not over cooking it. Cut your meat in uniformly sized chunks so they cook at that same rate. If you fish sauce, use 4 tsps of that instead of soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce.
By the way, this isn’t our CSA farm. This is a farm relatively close to our house. I have a thing for shooting pictures of cows and barns.
Shaking Beef
Ingredients
- 6 cloves garlic, chopped
- 2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
- 2 tsp low sodium soy sauce
- salt
- 3 tablespoons canola oil
- 3/4 pd beef sirloin cut into 1 inch chunks
- 3 green onions diced
- leafy salad greens lettuce watercress, etc
Dressing
- 1 1/2 tsp olive oil
- 1 1/2 tsp low sodium soy sauce
- 1/4 salt
- 1/2 sugar
- 1/4 black pepper
Instructions
- Mix garlic, worcestshire sauce, soy sauce, 1/2 salt, sugar, and 1 tablespoon oil. Add beef and refrigerate for 2 hours for full flavor.
- Heat skillet over high heat and add 2 tblspoons oil. Add beef in a single layer. Don’t over crowd the skillet or the beef will steam and not brown. Allow beef to sear and brown on all sides – about 1 minute minute per side. Beef should be medium rare (pink in middle)
- To make dressing – add all dressing ingredients to a small glass jar and shake well. Set aside.
- Arrange salad greens on plate. Add beef on top, drizzle with dressing, and sprinkle with green onions.
Number of servings (yield): 4
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Recipes galore? How I keep them organized
I’m a recipe junkie. Between cookbooks, magazines, and online recipe sites, I have several hundred recipes saved, dog eared, or tabbed for future use. Keeping up with them can be somewhat of a challenge. It gets hard to remember which Cooking Light contained that great cake recipe when I have 15 back issues of Cooking Light on my bookcase.
One day I stumbled upon a great organizing website – OrganizedHome.com. They have a great set of free downloadable forms and templates to help with everything from meal planning to spring cleaning. I’m a big fan of forms and lists. I’m an even bigger fan of free forms and lists. My two favorites are the Recipes to Try and Favorite Recipes forms. When I’m going through a magazine and I find a recipe I want to try, I put it on the Recipes to Try list. If it’s good, it graduates to the Favorite Recipes list.
To help keep like items together, I have seperate lists for main dishes, sides, and desserts. I only use this for my paper recipes but you could use them for your online recipes too. I’ll talk about how I manage my internet recipes in a seperate post because that process is a little different. When I’m not using them, I keep them in my household notebook so they don’t get stained or torn plus I always know where they are. How do you keep up with your recipe collection?
