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

Spicy Slow-Roasted Tomato Hummus & Pita Chips

It's been a while since I posted an actual recipe, so here goes:
Sometime in 2010, I made an incredibly delicious spicy tomato hummus that looked like vomit but tasted like heaven (coining the term heavom).  Since then, I've been on a quest to recreate the recipe since I didn't write the original down.  Finally, two years later, I think I've approximated it (more or less).  I give you: Spicy Slow-Roasted Tomato Hummus with Homemade Pita Chips!

STEP 1: SLOW-ROASTED TOMATOES

Slow-roasted tomatoes are really very easy - it's kind of the same process as making raisins out of grapes - you're just slowly drying the tomatoes out.  They range from hot and flavorful to sun-dried, depending on how long you leave them in the oven for.  Basically, you just put those suckers on a baking pan, coat them in olive oil, salt, and pepper (you can add other spices or garlic if you want to get fancy).  Then, you leave the tomatoes in the oven for a very long time (2-3 hours) at a very low temperature (around 200-250 degrees Fahrenheit).  Just check on them after the two hour mark and take them out when they're at the desired chewiness.  I'll usually use 1 package of dumpstered cherry tomatoes for this, but any type will suffice.  You can also use slow-roasted tomatoes in breakfast dishes (divine with a poached egg), bruscettas, tomato sauce, etc.  Add some garlic in the pan to roast for fun. 

STEP 2: SLOW-ROASTED TOMATO HUMMUS

 Using the slow-roasted tomatoes, the next step can either be very hard or very easy, depending on whether or not you have a food processor.  If you do, you're in luck - you get the easy road.  Otherwise, get ready - you're in for a lot of cutting, mashing, and pain.

Ingredients:
- 1 can chickpeas
- Your slow-roasted tomatoes
- Juice from 1/2 an orange (or OJ from the carton in a pinch) - this is crucial as it brightens the flavor of the hummus considerably
- Juice from 1/2 a lemon or lime
- 2 tbsp tahini (the first time I did this, I made my own tahini, which involves roasting sesame seeds and painstakingly hand-crushing them while adding olive oil.  I don't recommend making your own tahini unless you're a sadist)
- 2-5 tbsp olive oil
-1-2 cloves roasted garlic (optional)
- 1-3 cloves fresh, peeled garlic
- 1-3 tsp cayenne pepper (to taste)
- 1 tsp cumin (to taste)
- salt & pepper to taste
- If you're not using tomatoes, sometimes a tsp or two of water will be needed.

Throw it all in the food processor.  Otherwise, have fun mashing and mixing the ingredients.  If you choose this route, there's a high likelihood that you will be crying by the end of the process.

Makes roughly 6-8oz. 

STEP 3: HOMEMADE PITA CHIPS

Homemade pita chips are perfect for when your pita bread is starting to go slightly stale, or if you got way too much from the dumpster.  You can use pita chips like any regular salty snack by themselves, or you can use them for dipping in hummus, salsa, or cream cheese based dips.  It's really simple (I wonder why people buy pita chips at all): cut your pita into 8ths, then use a brush to brush olive oil on each side of each chip, laying your chips on a tin foil-covered baking sheet when you're finished.  Add salt, pepper, and whatever else (garlic powder, basil, oregano) to taste.  Next, put your pita wedges in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 10-20 minutes, depending on your oven.  Check on them every so often to make sure they aren't burning, and flip them about half way through.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, spices, tahini

Vegan Banana Coconut Milk "Ice Cream"

My friend Gerry served this at a dinner party. I was so jealous I didn't get any (it went fast) that I decided to try my hand at making a batch of my own! This is a great way to use up bananas that went straight into the freezer when you dumpstered them. Also, it's a healthy dessert since there's no added sugar and potassium galore! Now that the weather is getting warmer, I don't feel quite so bad about posting an "ice cream" recipe...there's a few more sorbets coming up in the future too...

Ingredients:
- 6 bananas, pre-frozen
- 1 can coconut milk (I hardly ever dumpster this stuff, but I got a few dented cans/boxes recently, which got me really excited!)

Stick it all in a blender until it's smooth-ish (no more banana chunks). Stick it in a container. Stick it in the freezer in an air-tight container. THE END. Makes roughly 1 pint.

When I went through my pint, I would drizzle a little honey and made a blackberry reduction (literally just sticking blackberries on the stove and cooking off the liquid until it's a sauce. You can easily do this with pretty much any berry) to put on top of it with some mint since I was eating this stuff for a long time and wanted to spice it up, but it's really nice plain too, or with a little nutmeg.

A warning about not eating the "ice cream" right when you make it: this stuff hardens up like a rock in the freezer since there's no added sugar or liqueur (the stuff that makes sorbets easily scoop-able), so you'll probably want to leave it out to thaw at the beginning of dinner so it's scoop-able by the time dessert hits. I also had some luck with putting it in the microwave to thaw it out, but that method was less reliable.

Items not dumpstered or donated: ZERO!

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)

BANANAS!

I have the good fortune of dumpstering bananas often, usually in large numbers. Even dumpstering 1/8th of the bananas in the dumpster will usually yield up to 10 bunches.

Bananas are great, because they're pretty easily frozen and keep for a long time, regardless of how ripe they were when you got them initially. You can use them for smoothies, vegan banana ice cream (just mash up with a little cinnamon, brown sugar, and nutmeg. Freeze it and you're set), or one of my personal favorites: banana bread.


Banana bread is great for a lot of reasons.

1) I'm poor. Gift-giving times like pot lucks, birthdays, or Christmas can be difficult on the rent money, so finding cheaper, home-made alternatives to give as gifts is awesome. If you make a seriously yummy loaf of banana bread and wrap it with a jar of Nutella (less than $3) to spread on top, you just made someone's tummy very happy.
2) As stated before: banana bread + Nutella. GREAT.
3) Banana bread can be used as breakfast food AND snack food AND dessert food. Look at that versatility!
4) Overripe or defrosted bananas are actually ideal for making banana bread, so it's a dumpster diver's dream!

I'm still experimenting with finding the best banana bread recipe, so I'd encourage you to find one online or through your family that seems to be popular or to your liking (vegan, gluten-free, low-fat, etc.) until my recipe is fine-tuned enough to post.

To prepare you, most (non-vegan) banana bread recipes call for:

Ingredients:

- 3-4 bananas
- Butter
- Sugar (brown or white)
- 1 Egg
- Vanilla
- Baking soda
- Pinch of salt
- Flour
- Chocolate chips (optional)
- 1 loaf pan (most grocery stores will sell recyclable/disposable loaf pans if you're giving the bread as a gift or taking it to a pot luck).

If you're defrosting the bananas - be forewarned - there's usually some liquid at the bottom of your container once they defrost. This is NORMAL. Just discard the liquid and add maybe 1 more banana than your recipe called for (like, if it says to use 3, go with 4).

Also, I usually freeze bananas with their skins on. This just means that you need to cut them off before you put them in a smoothie or make vegan ice cream.

Also, don't be afraid if your bananas have brown spots. This is also normal.

Items not dumpstered or donated: Butter, egg, vanilla, baking soda, salt, flour (from the sadly now-defunct Beet Food Co-op)

May Bounty

With the coming of spring means MORE PRODUCE! MORE VARIETY!

I had forgotten about this until I went dumpstering a few nights ago with my friend Ellis...we came out with the most ridiculously awesome variety of produce EVAR.


There are a few items in this bunch that I've never really cooked with before (noted with a *), so I'm excited to experiment and learn from them.

- 1 pkg julienned vegetables (red onion, carrot, red/green/yellow peppers, zucchini, squash, oregano)
- 8 oranges
- 2 bags of apples (12 apples)
- 15 bananas (10 frozen immediately, skins on, for later banana bread/smoothie/vegan ice cream usage since I'm going out of town this weekend)
- *1 head cauliflower
- 1 eggplant
- 3 green peppers
- 1 cucumber
- *3 heads (is this the right word?) of bok choy
- 3 pkgs strawberries (strawberry season again!!!! SO HAPPY! Cut & froze 2 pkgs immediately)
- *2 pkgs cherry heirloom tomatoes
- 3 pkgs cherry tomatoes
- 5 bags green beans (4 bags cut and frozen immediately - the best instructions for freezing green beans are here)
- 3 pkgs tropical fruit medley (pineapple, mango, papaya - cut & froze 1 pkg immediately)
- 8 dinner rolls (frozen immediately)
- 1 loaf sourdough baguette
- 1 southwestern salad (eaten by Ellis)
- 1 chicken & field greens salad (Eaten by me at work)
- 1 bag organic sugar
- 3/4 bag penne pasta

I froze more than I normally would with this batch since I was going out of town for the weekend (however, I also was bringing a lot of produce for the trip). Scheduling your dumpstering around times you'll be at home (as opposed to out of town or at work a lot) is probably a good idea...

Also, use cut fruit & veggies quickly, since it goes bad first (duh). I used the julienned veggies in an omelet the day after dumpstering, and a lot of the fruit went toward breakfast smoothies.

I can't wait for more exotic produce as summer hits.

Failure & Ugliness (Gnocci)

I STILL had yukon gold potatoes left over from January (I promise it's not as gross as it sounds. Potatoes, when kept in the fridge, last super-long). However, their continued presence in my life was beginning to become a nuisance to my fridge space.

Since I'd never made it, I decided to whip up some simple gnocci (a pasta-ish dough thing made of potatoes). There's plenty of videos on the internet describing the process of making it. However, it takes a few tries to figure out the correct potato to flour to egg ratio. Gnocci is awesome because it's made of potatoes, which already last super-long, PLUS you can freeze it for up to 3 months MORE once you've made the dough nugget things.

I ended up pairing my gnocci with a home-made tomato sauce I had canned a while back, adding extra sauteed veggies (onion, tomato, whatever's in the fridge), garlic butter, Worcestershire sauce, & folded in some Parmesan cheese with salt & pepper to taste (leave the Worcestershire out if you want the meal to be vegetarian).

The good news was that the gnocci + sauce combo tasted GREAT! The bad news was that...well, it looked like someone blew chunks in a bowl, and my gnocci resembled stillborn cats more than food.
Thankfully, the gnocci made me fondly remember the first hummus I'd ever made and still the best hummus I've ever eaten. It was a spicy roasted tomato hummus that a friend dubbed heavom (tasting like heaven + looking like vomit).
One of my largest regrets in life is not writing down the exact recipe for that hummus. I can basically approximate it (and probably will for a future entry), but it's never been as good as that first batch *le sigh*

I try to make my food aesthetically pleasing (especially when serving it to others), but when you experiment with making things you've never made before, sometimes you end up with something that doesn't taste or look very good. Still, you try to fix your mistakes and avoid them in future batches of a dish. For example, I now know that hummus needs more tahini to coagulate better and gnocci needs a crapton of flour to keep from sticking to its neighbors (I will hopefully write a post soon to redeem my gross gnocci). Lessons learned.

This brings me to one of the coolest things about having groceries out of the trash: I'm more willing to take risks with the food I make. If I mess a dish up and it's inedible, it won't really matter because half the world thinks food out of dumpsters is inedible anyway and I never paid for the food, so it was just time lost. So, I primarily try to make my food into something I enjoy the taste of. If it looks like mush, so be it!

Items not dumpstered or donated: Olive oil, butter, garlic, salt, pepper, flour, egg

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