Helps

I have several very dear young wife, young mom friends who are thinking hard about the food they eat.  Is it healthy?  Is it within the budget?  How do I do all I have to do and provide healthy, delicious meals for my family?

We've had quite a few conversations about this and I try and remember how I did things when I had a house full of little people.  It's easier now, with just Joel and Coty and me at home, but I remember the days of two grocery carts full.  Once the check-out lady at the Stop 'n Shop told me I needed a cow.  Yeah.  That didn't happen.

Back then, I had my strategies for meal planning and shopping, for keeping a well stocked pantry and making sure I had what I needed when I was ready to cook.  I wrote about some of those things here in the "What We Did" posts.

If you want more guidance, Leila has posted a wonderful set of worksheets to help with figuring out how to plan meals and then execute your plan.  She is so common-sense.  She has a big family, though like me, her children are mostly grown and no longer living at home.  She has done the work of putting her ideas down for you to use.  So, if you're needing some help, go visit Leila.  

Caribbean Collard Greens

Honestly, I'm not quite sure why these should be called Caribbean Collard Greens, but that's what the recipe said on the back of the big bag of chopped collards.  Since I know next to nothing about Caribbean cuisine, I'll just go along with the collard greens people. (I just did a little research.  I think it's the cloves and nutmeg).

Here's what you do ...

Saute an onion, 2-3 sticks of celery, and a couple of cloves of garlic in a little olive oil.

When the onions are soft, add a teaspoon of smoked paprika, a pinch to a quarter teaspoon of cloves and nutmeg, fresh ground sea salt to taste, and if you want a little more jazz, a shake or two of cayenne.  Make sure you use smoked paprika.  It has a very distinctive flavor.

Put in, a handful at a time, your collard greens.  I use a very large cast iron skillet or my trusty cast iron Dutch oven.  It's the perfect cookware for collard greens.  Do you notice I'm not giving you measurements here?  I thought so.  That's because I have no idea how many collard greens you want to eat.  We eat a lot of them.  When we had more people living here, I cooked the whole bag.  Now, I cook at least a half a bag,  keep the leftovers in the fridge and happily eat them several days in a row.  You will want to adjust your spices to the amount of greens you cook.  The amounts mentioned above are for half a bag.  Anyway ...

... as you put the collards in your pot, stir them around so the onion, celery, garlic, olive oil, spice mix coats them and mixes all through.  The collards will begin to wilt and cook down and you'll be able to add more to you pot.  Once you have them all in and stirred and coated, add some chicken stock.

Whenever I cook a chicken (or cheat and buy a rotisserie chicken at the store) and have the carcass left over, I make broth.  It's easy.  My friend, tonia, will tell you how.  She'll also tell you how to brine and roast a chicken.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page to get to the broth directions.  It is also not that hard to do.  (I'm going to keep telling you this).

Back to the collards.  You can put in a lot or a little chicken stock.  If you put in a lot, you will have this delicious pot likker bubbling in your pot, into which you can later dip your cornbread.  If you put in a little, your greens may not cook down quite as soft, but that's ok, too.  I like them both ways.

Cover them, turn the heat to low, and let them cook for 10-15 minutes ... or longer, if you want them softer.  The only way you can mess them up is if you didn't put in much liquid and you leave the heat on high and go off to do something very important in another room and forget about your collard greens.  Burned collard greens are not delicious.  How do I know this?  Don't ask.

Since I like to make my plate colorful, we ate these collards with a side of fire- roasted corn (frozen, in a bag, from the grocery store) sauteed with red onion and red and yellow sweet pepper.  A little fresh ground salt and pepper and a little sharp cheddar melted on top - perfect.

Also on the plate - a big chunk of molasses spoon bread.  I made it in the large cast iron skillet so it took longer to cook (as the recipe indicates) -  about 25 minutes.  Just keep checking it til it doesn't jiggle in the center any longer.  We didn't put the honey butter on top.  It didn't need that extra sweet.  (I did reheat a piece the next morning for breakfast and top half of it with fig butter and the other half with a really good marmalade.  Breakfast treat!).

Clearly, I am not a food photographer, but there it is ...

Caribbean collards

Roasted corn and sweet pepper saute and

Molasses spoon bread

Enjoy!

Extra Spicy Gingersnaps with Chai Frosting

I have, in the past, been called a creative cook, but you wouldn't know it from the dearth of blog posts here in the last few months.  I mostly think I am a good copy-cat with a can-do attitude and some years of experience reading recipes and cooking for a big family.  I have learned how to tweak and adapt to suit my tastes.  I am not afraid to improvise.  I have been known to say, when describing a successfully adapted recipe or cooking idea, that "I just ... did this or that."  That's what happened when I made gingersnaps recently. "I just" added more spices, made a frosting, and came up with a way to serve it as a dessert treat.

I'm going to keep try and keep track of some of those "I just" recipes here.  Coming back to this space and trying to gussy up the old header, however, I discovered my lack of decent, recent food pictures.  So, until I take some, the header will look rather dull.  That's how it is when you are reworking something, right?  You have to go through things being moved around and out of place and not really what you want while you work to get it just right.  So, bear with me.

In the meantime, I offer you my new favorite cookie recipe, with my very great thanks to Irma, whose original recipe I have tweaked, and to Coty, who gave me my copy of Joy the very first Christmas I knew him.

Extra Spicy Gingersnaps with Chai Frosting 

1 1/2 cups softened butter (3 sticks)
3 cups sugar
1 cup molasses
4 eggs
3 tsp. balsamic vinegar
7 1/2 cups flour
3 tsp. baking soda
2-3 Tablespoons ground ginger (yes, I know that's a lot, like the title says, extra spicy)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Preheat over to 325.  Cream the butter.  If you forget to leave it out to soften, you can do it in the microwave for a few seconds.   Don't melt it, just get it soft.

Add sugar to the butter with electric mixer.  I use my Magic Mill - best mixer ever, still going strong after 20 years!  Mix in molasses and vinegar.

In a separate bowl, sift together the dry ingredients.

Add to wet ingredients and mix til blended.

Roll into 3/4 inch balls and place on greased cookie sheet.  Bake 9-11 minutes.  The cookies get that gingersnap crinkle look as they bake.

Remove from oven.  Place cookies on cooling rack.  They will be soft-ish.  That's OK.  You want them soft and chewy.  At least, I do.

Chai frosting

I buy chai spices, also called Tea Masala, already ground and mixed together at the Indian grocery.  There are recipes online, like this one, if you want to make your own.

This is one of those "I just" recipes.  No measurements.  I just add some chai spice powder (about a teaspoon, maybe more, depending on your taste) to some powdered sugar, let's say a quarter of a cup, maybe more. I know I should have measured.  Sorry.  Add enough half and half to make a smoothly flowing icing, not too think, not too runny.  Put it in a small plastic bag, snip off one corner to make a small hole, and squeeze the icing artistically over your cookies.  Be sure the cookies are completely cool before you do this.

If you want to take these cookies a step further, into the decadent dessert department, try this...

Make some homemade caramel sauce.  Really easy.  I promise.  Just follow the directions.

After your sauce is made, break a couple of cookies into chunks in a bowl.  Soften them by warming them in the microwave for 10 seconds.

Take them out and put a scoop or two of your favorite vanilla ice cream on top of the warm cookies.

Spoon caramel sauce over the cookies and ice cream.  Yes, it is very good.  Joel and Albert agree and Albert even brought a half gallon of vanilla ice cream to my house this afternoon in the hopes that there were still cookies and caramel sauce left.

Another sticky, messy version of this dessert if you're out of ice cream and just happen to have marshmallows in your pantry is to place a marshmallow on top of the cookies, soften in the microwave at the same time, and spoon caramel sauce on top of that.  Ooey gooey once in a blue moon treat.

It's a little strange for me to start writing about food again with a cookie/dessert recipe since we don't eat a lot of sweets around here.  When I make something sweet, though, I want it to be worth the calories.  No kind-of-good cookies around here.  If I'm going to eat them, they have to be special.  These are!