Oxtail Stew & Crock Pot Fears

 

Okay, so I've been a bad mommy to this blog.  I've been out of town.  Plus, I got food stamps and have yet to find a dumpster that feels right now that I've moved again. I feel like there are fewer things to write about since I'm sticking to cooking tried and true recipes that I've already posted and I just haven't been dumpstering as often.

That all said, here's a nice recipe for the fall and winter that involves very little effort. I have to start by saying that I'm terrified of slow-cookers and crock-pots. Some part of me just doesn't feel comfortable leaving the house for 8 hours with a heated appliance on. Horrific fantasies of my house burning down because I wanted to make a delicious stew run rampant. Still, I do OWN a crock pot, so I decided I should try to use it more often. My way of getting around fire-by-soup anxieties is to use my crock pot at night when I'm sleeping (the idea being that I would hopefully wake up if my house were on fire). It turned out really well, and now I'm excited to actually keep trying it out more and more...If you don't own a crock-pot, most thrift stores will have one, or you can just try to cook the stew using a slow (time) and low (temperature) method of cooking on a stove or in an oven with a dutch oven. There are guides for how to do this online.

OXTAIL STEW

First off: what's oxtail? It's the tail of some type of cattle, typically a cow. You can get it for much cheaper than most other beef. In my case, I dumpstered some. It comes out super tough unless you cook it slow-and-low, which makes it juicier and more tender. Also, cooking oxtail with the bone in is great because the bones provide more flavor for your soup or stew. I'll use oxtail when I make a stock for Vietnamese pho - recipe forthcoming.

Ingredients:
- 2 lbs. oxtail
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 1 stalk celery, chopped
- 2 carrots, peeled & chopped
- 2-4 whole peeled garlic cloves (depending on how garlic-ie you want it) - 3-4 dried ancho chilis, chopped
- 2 parsnips, peeled & chopped
- 1 turnip, peeled & chopped
- 1 bay leaf
- 1-2 potatoes
- 2 cups of full-bodied red wine
- 1.5 cups chicken or beef stock - you can substitute broth or water if you're out
- Thyme, salt, pepper, & parsley to taste
- A few tablespoons of olive oil

The bottom line is, whatever you have in terms of veggies that would taste good in a stew or that is close to going bad - throw it in there! Also, a word of caution about seasoning - since you're cooking for so long, the dish will really have time for the flavors to meld together, so a little goes a long way in crock pot cooking. Also, if you over-salt, it will just dry out your meat and your veggies, so wait until after everything's done cooking to add the majority of your salt.

Step one: Brown your oxtail in a skillet with a little olive oil.

Step two: THROW EVERYTHING IN YOUR CROCK POT. Leave the oxtail, potatoes, and carrots closer to the bottom. Try to get the liquid covering everything.

Step three: Cover it and leave it revved up for 8-10 hours. You'll know the oxtail is cooked when it easily falls off the bone and the potatoes are cooked all the way through. Try not to take the lid off during this process, since that's what's keeping the hot air in that's doing the cooking.

Step four: If you're health-conscious, there can be a LOT of fatty oil involved in this process. A way to get rid of that is to put your stew in a bowl when it's finished and refrigerate. That will coagulate the fat so it will easily be scooped off the top of the bowl with a sieve or spoon after a few hours chilling. You can remove the bones at this point if you want as well. Reheat whenever and enjoy! It's also possible to freeze this if you make too much to make it last another week or so.

I made this right before a bunch of food was going to go bad. I also knew I'd be meeting up on a climbing trip with some friends. So, I went to their house expecting a fridge to keep it in...only to find that their house had lost power. So, we invited over a bunch of our local buddies with propane camping stoves, cooked it all up, and had a feast! Later that evening, we also made a delicious blueberry-oatmeal crisp on the camping stoves out of the limited amount of food we had. It turned out great!

Items not dumpstered or donated: olive oil, bay leaf, salt & pepper, parsnip, wine

Vegan Radish Greens Soup

It's happened.

SOUP MONTH has returned. As it's gotten colder, I've become obsessed with soups again. I forgot how easy and delicious they are.

So, quick Soup 101:

Almost all European-style savory soups begin with what's called a mirepoix (a French word pronounced meer-ah-pwah), which basically means onions, celery, and carrots sauteed with butter or oil (and usually with some combination of spices added). They create this bangin' set of flavors that create the base to most soups, stocks, and sauces. Without them, your soup just won't taste as hearty unless you're making an Asian-style soup or curry, in which case the flavors are going to be coming from other ingredients (like ginger, chili, curry, garlic, etc).

Next, you just add your main ingredients to your mirepoix, add some water or stock, blend it up, and go. Super easy.

So, this next dish isn't 100% from the dumpster because I had the chance to go to a pick-your-own farm near my house. I ended up getting pumpkins for my curried pumpkin and potato soup (and to put out at Halloween for the kiddies), sweet potatoes, beets, broccoli, and a bunch of daikon radishes, which I had never used before.

I ended up using all the daikon radishes (typically used in Asian dishes) for my first experiments with kimchee (a Korean fermented snack/condiment) and pho (a Vietnamese soup)...however, I was left with a bunch of daikon radish greens that I didn't know how to use. I came up with this recipe, which you can actually apply to a lot of different types of greens if you're over-stocked. The radish greens are especially great, though, because they have a nice peppery flavor to them already. Plus, I had all the ingredients for soup that I had recently dumpstered, so this was a perfect solution for using them.

Unfortunately, there's no picture for this soup because I threw it in a container to take to work right after making it...and then promptly ate all of it for dinner with some bread. Several people saw me eating it and asked for the recipe, so I figured it was worth the share. Plus, my boss is really allergic to dairy, so he appreciated the fact that it was vegan (bonus points)!

VEGAN RADISH GREENS SOUP

This soup makes like 5-6 cups with these proportions, so you'd have to double or triple them if you were going to make a lot for a family:

Ingredients:

- 2-3 tbsp olive oil or butter (vegan with oil)
- 1 medium-large potato
- 1 red onion
- 2 long celery stalks
- 1 medium carrot
- 4 cups daikon radish greens (or chard, kale, spinach or some other kind of yummy leafy green - if it's beet or radish greens, there'll be more flavor since both of those are kind of peppery. For other kinds of greens, you'll probably need to adjust the seasoning of the dish)
- 1-2 red or daikon radishes (optional - I didn't use them because I had used them all up in my kimchee)
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 tbsp fresh sage
- 1 tsp fresh parsley
- 1 tsp fresh thyme
- Salt & pepper to taste
- 1 bay leaf (remember to take it out before you blend it up)
- 4 cups chicken or vegetable stock or broth, warmed up (I used 4 cups water with chicken bouillon because I was out of everything else)

On medium-high heat, heat up the onions, celery, carrots for a few minutes. Add the potatoes, radish greens, garlic, and spices.
Warm up the broth in a separate pot while the other stuff is cooking.
Add the broth, then boil everything. Turn to medium-low and simmer for 5-20 minutes.
Remove the bay leaf.
Put everything into a blender. DONE.

Ingredients not dumpstered, donated, or picked/grown myself: Olive oil/butter, bouillon cubes, bay leaf, garlic, salt/pepper

Vegan Red Pepper & Tomato Soup

It snowed. At the end of October. Unfortunately, I was out in it more than I had wanted to be all day (if you know me you know that cold weather is not my cup of tea). So, when I got home after a full day of work I needed something to warm me up - badly.

I ended up starting a cooking session that lasted a few hours (my housemates were at a Halloween party, so I had the quiet, peaceful house to myself). I ended up using almost all the food that was about to go bad in my fridge, prolonging the life of it a little longer.

To warm up, I decided to make a soup I'd never tried before from scratch, using as many ingredients as I could from my fridge. I had a lot of tomatoes, so I decided to go with tomato soup. It turned out I had a red pepper too, so I threw that in there as well.

Soup in general is an awesome dumpster chef's tool because you can freeze most soup for a few weeks up to a few months (depending on if it has dairy, what's in it, etc). This makes it pretty easy to polish off the rest of the dumpstered food in your fridge before it spoils. Plus, reheating your frozen soup in the microwave takes no time at all on days where you just want to eat without any prep work because you're freaking hungry.

RED PEPPER & TOMATO SOUP

Ingredients:

- 1 large tomato
- 3 small roma tomatoes
- 1 medium red pepper
- 2 long stalks celery
- 1/2 large red onion
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 3/4 cup chicken or vegetable stock (bouillon is also fine to use if you don't have any previously frozen or bought stock)
- A large bunch of fresh basil
- 2-3 cloves of garlic
- 1 bay leaf
- Ground cumin (2 dashes), nutmeg (2 dashes), salt (a crap-ton), pepper (a smaller crap-ton), yellow curry powder (very small pinch), cayenne pepper (2-4 dashes), & cinnamon (very small pinch) to taste.

Makes about 2 dinner-sized servings.

Put olive oil in the bottom of a pan. Heat onions, celery, red peppers (you can roast your pepper ahead of time, which can give it extra flavor), tomatoes, and garlic at medium-high heat until they all soften up (you can leave it covered to keep some of the moisture in).
Add the bay leaf and a bit of salt.
Simmer for 20 minutes.
Add basil about 5 minutes before you take the pan off the heat.
Remove bay leaf (it will suck if you don't).

Put it all in a blender. Blend until smooth.
Put the mixture back into a pot and put it on medium-low heat.
Heat up chicken or vegetable stock (if you use vegetable stock, this recipe is vegan). Add it to your pot and thoroughly stir it in.
Add your spices to flavor the soup as you like. I like mine with a BIG punch of flavor (and the spiciness gives a little heat on those cold days), so I added a bunch (quantities delineated above). Garnish your soup with a little sprig of fresh basil and you're set! I also like to eat my soup with a piece of buttered toasty bread so I can dip it in the soup and savor it even longer.

Once everything's finished, it's time to curl up with the cat and savor the soup's warmth before I'm forced back out into the cold again.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, garlic, basil (from garden), stock, all other spices, butter (on bread)

SO MANY POTATOES AND ONIONS

It's really hard to turn down free stuff. We all know it. So, when a dumpster is full of potatoes and onions for the taking, I figured "why not just take most of them? I can get inventive."

1 month later, I still have a full bag of potatoes and at least 20 onions (the good news is that both of these ingredients don't spoil easily).

The lesson learned? When dumpstering, you need to exercise a lot of restraint. Free stuff is free stuff, but overestimating what you'll eat is unfair to other folks who dive your dumpster and ultimately makes you just as wasteful as the stores you're scavenging from.

That said, sometimes you end up with a surplus of a few things. For me, potatoes and onions are my most prevalent dumpster finds. Potatoes can get pretty BLAH after a while, so you have to find ways to spice them up.

In case you needed some inspiration, here's a long list of potato and onion-related dishes and two potato recipes:

- Smashed Potatos (best w/ red potatoes - boil, smash with fork. Stir in butter & salt). Stir in homemade pesto to spice it up.
- Mashed potatoes (best with Yukon Golds. Boil, blend with milk, butter, & salt)
- Roasted potatoes (best with red) Coat bottom of a tin-foil covered pan with olive oil. Cut up potatoes into 1-inch pieces, put in the pan & coat with oil. Cover in salt, pepper, fresh rosemary, and whole garlic cloves (or garlic powder). Bake in the oven at 375 degrees until the potatoes are soft on the inside and crispy on the outside.
- Potato Latkes - perfect combo with homemade applesauce (recipe forthcoming) & sour cream.
- Potato Chips
- Hash browns - diced or shredded (for variety)
- Making soups heartier
- Baked potatoes (w/ sour cream, bacon, chives)
- Potato salad
- Gnocci (seems hard to make but is actually pretty easy - it just takes a little time to get ratios right)
- French fries (you can make them in the oven - you don't need a deep frier)
- Potato skins
- Veggie kabobs

GRUYERE POTATOES

My dad travels a lot for his work. So, he's eaten at a LOT of restaurants. A long time ago, he got into the habit of carrying around a food journal whilst voyaging. If he likes what he eats at a restaurant, he asks for the recipe so he can make it again for himself.

When I went off to college, he started sending me one of these recipes with each letter.

So, this recipe is from somewhere in France and is uber-yummy.

Ingredients:
Potatoes (Yukon golds or equivalently large baking potatoes are best)
3-4 cloves of garlic
Butter (unsalted)
Salt, Pepper, & ground nutmeg
Gruyere Cheese (and any other cheese if you'd like)
1-1.5 cup Beef bouillon or stock (if you don't have it or are vegetarian, you can use water)

Get a pyrex baking dish (or equivalent). Peel enough potatoes to fill half the dish. Carefully slice the potatoes so that they're paper-thin.

Peel and cut your garlic cloves in half and rub the garlic all around the bottom and sides of the baking dish, then take a stick of unsalted butter and coat the bottom and sides of the dish.

Next, put a layer of potatoes, some salt & pepper, ground nutmeg, and pats of butter over all the potatoes, followed by a liberal portion of grated Gruyere cheese. Repeat the layering process until you're out of potatoes, making sure the cheese is the last thing you put in the dish.

Pour boiling beef bouillon over the mixture.

Put the dish in an oven at 400 degrees. The dish will be done when the cheese on top turns golden brown - but don't let the cheese burn. If the potatoes aren't fully cooked, turn the temperature down to 300 until they're soft.

POTATO & ONION SOUP

Ingredients:
4 slices of bacon, diced (optional)
3 onions, chopped
3 tbsp butter
1/2 leek, chopped
6(ish) potatoes, peeled (I used Yukon golds)
Garlic powder, salt, black pepper, & cayenne pepper to taste
Water (approx. 6 cups)
2.5 tbsp flour (or more to thicken)
1 sprig basil

Cook bacon until brownish in a large pot.
Add butter.
Throw in chopped onions & leeks on medium heat until they're soft.
Put in the garlic powder, salt, & pepper.
Add flour slowly, sprinkling in.
Add water slowly, continuing to stir. Bring to a high boil to thicken the soup a bit.
Once it cooks down, add the potatoes and let them soften. Smoosh them with a spoon or potato masher to unleash their starch. This will thicken the soup a little more. At this stage you can add a cup of red wine and/or a few cups of (soy) milk or cheese. Don't use vanilla soy milk, though. It will taste disgusting. You can also throw in some rice, quinoa, pasta, or kale to make it more hearty.
Add one chopped potato at the end while the soup is simmering to add some textural variety.

Makes 2-4 bowls.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Butter, spices, bacon, flour, basil (from my window garden), (soy) milk

Soup Month - French Onion Soup

I still had onions. LOTS of onions. I needed to figure out what food mainly uses onions (this is difficult). One of the only options is French Onion Soup.

Since I'd never made anything like this before, I decided to try the most basic and classic version of the soup from frenchonionsoups.com. There are vegetarian variations on there as well.

FRENCH ONION SOUP



Ingredients:

6 Onions (any variety)
1 box of beefstock (approx. 32 oz.)
3 tbsp butter
Gruyere cheese (as much as you want)
3/4 cup of red wine (optional - I used a Shiraz)
Salt & pepper to taste

Cut up all the onions, then put them in the bottom of a big pot with the butter.
Caramelize the onions. If you've never done it before, put the stove at medium-low heat until the onions are golden brown (but not burned).
Add the beef stock and bring the mixture to a boil.
Add the wine (let the alcohol cook off).
Simmer for 20 min. to let the flavors mix.
Put in an oven-safe container (I used a metal casserole pan).
Slice or shred gruyere cheese on top of the soup's surface.
Broil in the oven for 5ish min. until the cheese melts.
Stir cheese in, then grate more cheese on top.

Makes 2-4 large bowls.

I put toasted naan with the soup in lieu of crusty bread.

I've never remembered liking French Onion Soup when I've ordered it at restaurants (so I have no idea why I made it in the first place), but my version is delicious! It makes me wonder if I should try it again out in the real world...

Items not dumpstered or donated: Beef stock, butter, red wine, spices

Soup Month - Jeremy's Soup & Homemade Vegetable Stock

So, I drove my man-friend Jeremy to the airport for the holidays, and to my surprise, included with my Christmas presents was a Tupperware with all the food that would go bad before he got back! Most of what was in the Tupperware were ingredients for a soup he makes often (and is freaking delicious). I didn't have all the ingredients to make the soup quite like he does, so I made some variations. I made the soup a few times, so I ended up making vegetable stock from scratch for the second batch of soup. I made two versions of this soup, so I've included all the variations possible.

JEREMY'S SOUP

Ingredients:
Veggie, Chicken, or Beef stock (I started w/ 2 veggie stock packs from Trader Joe's, donated from Jeremy)
1 tbsp olive oil
3 min. noodles (or other dumpstered pasta)
Green Onions or Shallots
Onions
Green Curry Paste (canned)
Ginger
1 Egg
Water
Carrots
Mushrooms
Juice from 1/2 a small lemon
Salt & Pepper to taste

Cut up veggies & ginger & throw in boiling water/stock/olive oil combo. Cook until tender.
Throw in a spoonful or two of curry paste (to your liking), lemon juice, & salt/pepper.
Put in pasta of your choice. Cook until tender.
Turn heat to medium-low and crack 1 egg into soup. Cover and let sit for a few minutes - don't let the egg yolk cook. Stir egg around in soup.
Eat up!

Other incarnations can involve rice, sesame oil, honey, bacon fat, basil, or coconut milk in lieu of water.

If you don't have veggie stock at hand, here's how to make it from scratch:

HOMEMADE VEGETABLE STOCK

Ingredients:
1 Large stalk of celery
1 medium onion
2 tbsp olive oil
A few pepper corns/ground pepper
1 bay leaf
2 large peeled carrots (or 6 baby carrots)
Salt
Water
Garlic (optional)

Sautee everything in olive oil (except the bay leaf) until tender. Add water & bay leaf. Bring to a rolling boil. Simmer for 30 min-2 hours. Remove bay leaf.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Green curry paste, Egg, Spices, Celery

Soup Month - Curried Pumpkin Potato Soup

Apparently, I mostly made large batches of soup in December with my dumpstered food. It's warm and comforting in the cold, and lasts awhile. So, forgive the copious number of soup posts coming up in the future. I promise this blog will not exclusively cover soup. December just turned out to be soup month. Also, I think I got a little overexcited about my new food processor/blender combo that my landlord gave me.

The cool thing about soup is that you can freeze it, elongating the meal's life while you use other ingredients from your fridge that may spoil sooner.

Right after Halloween and into November, there were a lot of un-carved pumpkins hanging around. My mom had two on her counter at Thanksgiving which she was going to throw out anyway, so I took them home. They stayed on my counter as decoration for about a week, but they screamed to be eaten. Then there was the challenge of using up my insane supply of potatoes. Something had to be done.

CURRIED PUMPKIN POTATO SOUP
(Vegan, Gluten-free)

Ingredients:
2 small-medium pumpkins
1.5 bags Yukon gold potatoes (approx. 8 potatoes)
2 cups of chicken or vegetable stock
1 tbsp butter or olive oil
3-4 cups of vanilla soy milk (you can also use milk or cream with a little vanilla extract)
3 tsp brown sugar
1/2 medium onion
1 stalk celery
1 carrot (optional)
3-4 cloves garlic (I used 6 in my original recipe, but it was SUPER garlicy)
Sprinkle of sage
1 tsp ground cumin
1.5 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp salt (or more to taste)
1/2 tbsp ground pepper (or more to taste)
3 tbsp pondicherry curry powder (can substitute w/ curry paste too)
1 additional cup of water or stock
1 sprig parsley (from my window garden)

Step one: Roasting the pumpkins.
Remove the stems and leaves from the pumpkins.
Puncture with a knife a couple times.
Roast pumpkins at 375 degrees for 2 hours until the skin is brown and the pumpkins begin to cave in, like this:


Skin and seed your pumpkins. Put the seeds aside to make toasted pumpkin seeds to garnish the soup.

While you're roasting your pumpkin, when you have about 10 minutes left, quarter and boil your potatoes until tender (don't worry about skinning them).
Blend potatoes, butter, stock, and 1 cup soymilk in a food processor until smooth. Put in a pot and cook on ultra-low heat on the stove.
Blend pumpkin separately, then add to your potato mixture.
Blend raw onion, garlic, carrot, and celery together. Add to mixture.
Add spices, remaining soymilk, and water (or stock) to taste.
Warm everything up again.

TOASTED PUMPKIN SEEDS

So, the hardest part of toasting pumpkin seeds is cleaning them. This is especially hard if you've already roasted your pumpkin like I did. Pumpkin snot is the least attractive texture in the world to me. However, I did a batch of pumpkin seeds that were really well cleaned, and a batch that wasn't well cleaned. The difference is real. Clean your seeds. It's worth it.

Put about 1 tbsp of olive oil in the bottom of a pan with tinfoil on it.
Sprinkle your seeds on the pan.
Sprinkle water and salt on top of the seeds.
Put your seeds in the oven or toaster oven at 350 degrees for 10-15 min. until golden brown.
Shake the pan a few times while the seeds are toasting to make sure they aren't sticking together.

Once you've toasted your pumpkin seeds, use a homemade potato chip (recipe forthcoming), toasted pumpkin seeds, and parsley as your garnish so that your food is as nice to look at as it is to eat.


You can probably blend cooked lentils into the soup for protein if you want to bulk it up too.
Makes a HUGE pot of soup. I froze half my batch and broke it out around Christmas for a meal I cooked for my Dad and Stepmom. They loved it!

Items not dumpstered or donated: veggie stock, olive oil, brown sugar, soy milk, garlic, spices

Turkey Stock & Turkey Soup

After Thanksgiving and Christmas, there were a lot of leftovers.

My mom donated her leftover turkey (and turkey carcass) to me after both holidays. This isn't necessarily dumpstering-related, but free food is free food.

I did end up eating some of the turkey, but decided to make turkey stock from the carcass, and modify my dad's chicken soup recipe (which is fucking awesome) to make turkey soup. (so you can do this whole process with chicken too)

TURKEY STOCK

Ingredients
1/2 Onion
1 large carrot (or 6 baby carrots)
1 large celery stalk
Turkey carcass
1 bay leaf
Pepper & salt

Cover the bottom of a large pan with olive oil. Cook all your cut-up veggies on medium heat until tender.
Fill your pot with water, then drop in the turkey carcass and spices.
Bring to a boil.
Simmer for a minimum of 2 hours (the first batch I made I simmered for 5 hours, the second for 3). Skim off any scum on the water's surface.
Strain the turkey stock. Remove any bones & the bay leaf from your strainer and throw the veggies back in the stock. Remove the meat off the carcass's bones and set aside for your soup.

TURKEY SOUP

Ingredients:
2 tbsp olive oil
1 onion
2 carrots (or 6 baby carrots)
1 large celery stalk
1 can diced tomatoes (or boil and de-skin/de-seed your own tomatoes by running them under cold water)
2 large potatoes (optional - makes a heartier soup)
2-5 tbsp rice (wild rice is my favorite in this recipe)
Turkey meat
Turkey stock (you can substitute canned chicken stock if you don't want to spend 3 hours making your own)
Salt & Pepper to taste


Repeat the same process of softening your veggies as you did when you made your stock (leave the tomatoes & potatoes out).
Pour in turkey stock, tomatoes (with or without the water from the can), and turkey meat
Bring to a boil.
Throw in potatoes, then cook until they're soft.
Throw in rice.
Cover and cook under medium heat for about 30 minutes (or until the rice is done).

This soup tastes especially good with bread and butter that you dip into it.

Et voila!


Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, can of diced tomatoes, butter for bread, and rice (which I got from The Beet Food Co-Op)