Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Scratch

My definition of 'cooking from scratch' is slowly changing. I used to consider any cooking that I did myself to be from scratch, and that idea changed eventually to refer to certain ingredients being from scratch. But I still 'exempted' some ingredients, like cheese, bread, broth, pasta, and such. Tonight we had breaded chicken breast cutlets and potato and veggie casserole with a cheese sauce.

The chicken was breaded with our own homemade bread crumbs (ground by Leo in the Cuisinart) made from our own homemade whole wheat bread (made by Leo and Mama yesterday). It was mixed with some store bought herbs and some homegrown herbs and some dehydrated bell pepper powder (homemade from local organic bell peppers last Fall).

The potato and veggie casserole was a mix of various veggies (all store bought, alas this time of year I can't grow these ingredients) and a cheese sauce. The cheese sauce was made from Smart Balance spread and whole wheat flour for the roux, and homemade vegetable broth (made yesterday from our weekly vegetable scrap hoard) for the liquid. The cheese was a spicy herb cheese spread that I made myself from local, organic non-homogenized milk, bell pepper powder from bell peppers I dehydrated last Fall (picked at a local organic farm), and various other homegrown or store bought spices.

It feels very good to be cooking with whole foods. With foods that were not processed before they entered my home. I can point my finger directly at the foods that came to me processed: milk (pasteurized); Smart Balance (concocted in a lab); whole wheat flour (ground); chicken (boned and skinned). I can understand exactly what happened to my foods during processing and understand what the nutritional impacts are of that processing. In these cases, minimal. The only thing that I could have done differently was use butter for the roux. I'll think about it.

Another thought for later: I don't know of a way to make pasta without a pasta maker of some kind, I will have to do some more research on pasta.

Thursday, February 07, 2008

Smock

These pics were taken before I added the spider embroidery on the chest, per Leo's request.






Sorry, this last one is a bit fuzzy, but it shows the pockets on the front.

Next time I make one of these, I am going to skip the binding and just turn and topstitch.

Monday, February 04, 2008

Window Garden IV


Beans


Greens

Still not much spinach. I'm trying to overhead water more often to see if that helps the spinach to germinate better. Still not dill and no more basil. The basil is growing VERY slowly. It must be that it isn't warm enough at 68deg.