Not Quite Guinness

I've now made Irish soda bread several times, and while I have no idea how great it is by Irish standards, by my family's standards, it's delicious. But it's definitely better when you use the buttermilk you get from churning butter instead of the thicker, creamy cultured stuff in the jug at the supermarket. Whatever that stuff is, it's not buttermilk. The bread comes out okay, but...just okay. Having made it both ways, I kid you not--there's a difference. So I guess we get soda bread just twice a month, since that's how often I churn butter, and it only yields enough buttermilk for one loaf of soda bread and a tiny bit left to put in pancake mix in the morning.

My daughter commented last week that our pantry looks empty compared to how it used to look. She's right. I recently reorganized it, and there's a lot less of certain things, such as commercially produced cans of food. There are more bags of beans, some flour, jams and jellies the Huz and I processed...things like that. But a lot less of the ready-made food that the kids were wont to eat for their lunches. I can't remember when we last had a can of Campbell's soup. We've been making all our own soup for weeks or even months now. It's mostly bean soup, but there is also the occasional treat, like the carrot soup I made last night after digging up a few of the carrots out in the garden. It's the perfect root cellar. When the ground's frozen solid, you can't get them out without great damage to trowel and carrot. But when it hovers just around the freezing point or a little above, then the earth loosens its grip and you can tease the carrots out. Last night I got a big fat orange one I didn't know was there--it hadn't much top left, but the root was pretty hefty. That and the larger of the white ones I dug last time made the soup. I watered it down some and then added more onion, garlic and dill to flavor it, and ended up with just enough soup for each person to have two bowls. Needless to say, the soup did not last the night, so today, everyone was hungry again with no ready-made food available. And I haven't had time to make any bread but the soda bread, so I need to bake regular whole-wheat bread tonight.

It's hard to look into the fridge and not see much food there. But we had a bit of stew meat thawed out in the meat drawer, and a few smaller carrots left over from my garden foraging the day before, so again I turned to my Irish cookbook. There's a stew recipe that you make from stew meat chunks and carrot chunks, and it fit perfectly the materials I had available. I had one onion left, since I haven't been anywhere to buy onions over the past couple of weeks, but that and some garlic went into the stew. And then we needed a can of Guinness. A can of Guinness! Not something we happened to have sitting around--like my homemade meatloaf, they don't tend to hang around in the house long on the rare occasions we have them. But there was some other kind of beer that hadn't been gotten into for months--not quite what was wanted, but reasonable. So we used it in the recipe in place of the Guinness. It'll probably be great. Anyway, once again we're about to have a feast made from almost nothing. Oh, and I do have a small crock pot of beans cooking, so we can make more of those burritos we liked.

When I look at that near-empty fridge, I have to remember that there's actually more food than it looks like--it's just that we have to cook almost everything from scratch now, so there's fewer of the ready-made things that we used to take for granted. And it might also be that the from-scratch food is so much more delicious that it's just getting decimated where before, leftovers used to sit for a week or more. Now they get eaten up within a couple of days. Just a couple of days in the life of a family on a tight budget and a couple of kids on growth spurts.

From Scratch

While I was helping my younger daughter finish up her sixth-grade material for her correspondence school, we had to make our own refried beans for a project/assignment on the Aztecs. I'd never made refried beans before--they were always something that came out of a can. But make them we did, and the corn tortillas, too. I used up the last of our black beans, and they were surprisingly good.

Now we've done it again, and this time it wasn't for an assignment. I cooked some Idaho-grown pink beans in the smaller slow cooker. Then I mashed them up like I did the black beans and fried them in a pan with a little extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO). We made them into burritos using thin-sliced and chopped Idaho ham and shredded Idaho cheddar, and commercial whole-wheat tortillas made without saturated fat, trans fat, or hydrogenated oils. So everything but the tortillas and EVOO qualified as local.

I think the thing that surprised me the most (after the taste, which was out-of-this-world delicious) was how easy it really was to make the refried beans. At this point, I don't know whether it was actually cheaper to make our own or buy the cans, since I haven't done the math yet. But it was fun and delicious, and this way the beans were local. That, and they had no additives to speak of. No preservatives, no salt, and no spices that the Huz is allergic to. Just beans, water, and EVOO. Those burritos were easily twice as good as anything we've purchased at any of the fast-food Tex-Mex chain restaurants. It was such a wonderful change from bean soup. We all liked them so much we couldn't stop eating them...until we ran out of tortillas, anyway.

Jack -O-Tureen

At this point, with the economy being what it is, I can't afford to waste anything that might be food for my family. That includes pumpkins intended as Halloween jack-o-lanterns that were never actually carved.

The week of Halloween, I was swamped with book revisions, among other things. I managed to take the kids to the pumpkin patch to pick out pumpkins for jack-o-lanterns, and I even brought back a pumpkin myself, plus four little pie pumpkins. But I didn't manage to get my pumpkin carved. As a last-ditch attempt at Halloween decoration, I took out a black Sharpie and drew eyes and a mouth on my pumpkin, then set it outside the front door.

That pumpkin sat through November and December in the nice cool garage because I really didn't know what to do with it. I mean...we've always associated pumpkins with pie and custard and little else. But then I remembered that Barbara Kingsolver, according to her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, had tried to make pumpkin soup in the pumpkin's own shell. (Apparently, the pumpkin collapsed, but the soup was great.) Well, by this time in early January, my family was still willing to eat bean soup but getting a bit tired of it. I had a Deborah Madison cookbook with the recipe for making pumpkin soup in the pumpkin shell, and I had a big ex-Halloween pumpkin that I had never intended for food. We all had a craving for some kind of food that was different from the ever-present bean soup. So I tried that recipe.

I hollowed out the pumpkin and scraped the innards out, then had my older daughter pick out all the seeds for roasting later. Then I rubbed the inside of the pumpkin with salt and set it aside. The milk mixture, I had to cobble together from a couple of cans of evaporated milk, since all we buy is 1% and the recipe called for whole milk. But I did have a bit of cream on hand for making butter, so I used just a little of that in with the rest of the milk, which I reconstituted by adding water. I used my big roaster pan to set the pumpkin in so that if it collapsed it wouldn't be lost to us entirely. Then I left it in the hot oven for about an hour or a little more, and crossed my fingers.

Low and behold, it came out intact. All it did is sag just a little on one side, and I think that's because I left it in maybe just a little too long. But when I scraped its sides, it didn't collapse, and it held the soup and pulp just fine. The pulp was a little stringy, so when we had lowered the soup level a little, I went ahead and pureed the last of the liquid and pulp together until it was creamy and smooth. My younger daughter loved it and the oldest even found it likable enough, though they both preferred the smooth, pureed variety. The Huz liked it with the pulp intact. Shrug. To each his own. I agree with the kids; I prefer it pureed smooth.

In any case, it worked, and it was food, and at least one Halloween pumpkin didn't go to waste this year. But because it wore a jack-o-lantern's face, it also wore that face into the oven. It made a humerous sight sitting there in the roaster pan with its crescent-moon eyes and its little surprised "o" of a mouth, with aluminum foil draped over its head to hide one eye while supporting the lid we'd cut out of its top. From pumpkin to jack-o-lantern to soup tureen. I'd say it led a full life.