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Bison Chili with sliced avocado — keeping you warm until spring really shows up
I know, I know, I know. It’s MAY. Which is more than officially spring. I should be posting fresh asparagus recipes, or greener than green salads, or something fresh and colorful, right? Instead, I have chili. Seriously? In May?
But yes, chili. See spring is a rather evil season in most of the northern part of the US, especially this year. It’s been a fickle and bitchy season — teasing, taunting, and often freezing. So after spending a few days outside last week in this capricious weather, I am offering a mild and tasty chili (no 18 types of peppers in this version), made lighter with lean bison rather than beef, with a good mix of spices to warm you up and yet not remind you of winter. Hopefully.
Oh, and if you want to vegetarianize the basic chili spice recipe here, I think TVP reanimated with mushroom broth might make a good substitute, but I didn’t try it because of the soy allergy. If you give it a go, will you let us know in the comments?
Mmmm, spring chili. Why not?
Bison Chili
2 Tablespoons oil
2 cups chopped onion (about 1 1/2 medium onions)
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 lb. ground bison
2 Italian peppers, cleaned and chopped (these are more sweet than spicy, long and green)
1 1/2 teaspoons oregano
1 1/2 teaspoons cumin
4 teaspoons chili powder
1 can of chili beans (I’ve been using a can of mixed types of beans, which I kind of love)
1 teaspoon fresh, minced garlic or 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
Heat a large stock pot over medium heat. When the pan is hot, add the oil and let it heat until shimmering.
Add the onion and salt, cook until translucent. Then add the peppers, cook for another minute or two, then add the garlic if you’re using fresh garlic. Stir well.
Add the meat and break it up as it cooks. When the meat is broken up well and mostly cooked, add the dried seasoning (add garlic powder here if you’re using that).
Add the beans, stir well, and then add the tomatoes. When the mixture is at a low boil, turn it down to low and simmer it for at least 40 minutes.
Add toppings and serve! This chili really benefits from a little avocado on top — I think the richness and “green” flavor compliments the lean meat (add just a pinch of kosher salt to the avocado to make its flavor really pop). Leftovers are pretty great over baked sweet potato.
**This spice blend contains sesame. You can leave it out.
Indian food, I so miss Indian food. It’s so yummy, and there aren’t a lot of Indian places that would be safe for me between the dairy and coconut thing, even if the corn thing weren’t an issue. Once of my very favorite appetizers to get were Vegetable Samosas. I love them. It’s been a long, long time, so it was time to get around to trying to recreate a safe version. Now I really wanted them to have that egg roll/fried dough/pastry crust type consistency, but without gluten it’s really freaking hard to do. My attempts ended up either being like bad pie crust when I tried baking them, or they flaked apart in the oil when I tried deep frying them. So, not wanting to wait for eternity until I managed to cobble together a dough in the Goldilocks zone, I decided to try rice paper. I love Vietnamese fresh spring/summer rolls, so I have a ton of rice paper in the house. I knew you could fry rice paper wrapped spring rolls, although I’d never done it before, so I decided to just wing it. Apparently you don’t deep fry rice paper wrapped spring rolls. You ever want to see a spring roll bubble up like it has tumors, just deep fry one of these. After doing research on how you’re actually supposed to do it, they came out pretty good, other than being shaped like spring rolls instead of cone or triangle shaped like samosas. Let me know what you think.
Vegetable Samosas and Cilantro Dipping Sauce
Makes about 14, more or less.
Do the sauce first so that it’s all ready to go so that you can eat when you’re done frying.
Cilantro Dipping Sauce:
2 cups of tightly packed chopped cilantro
1 garlic clove
1 jalapeno pepper (use half a habanero if you want to kick things up a bit) de-stemmed, seeded, and minced
1/2 inch long piece of peeled ginger
1 teaspoon garam masala (I used Penzey’s version, but I’m sure there are a ton of recipes on the interwebs)
1 teaspoon olive oil
4 Tablespoons of lemon juice (or the juice of one lemon)
1/2 teaspoon of salt
Put all the ingredients in a blender or food processor. Blend until smooth. (Ta-dah! That was easy wasn’t it?) Put in a container and pop it in the refrigerator until you’re ready for it. (The picture below is all fancy, you get a lot more sauce than that.)
Cilantro Dipping Sauce
Samosas:
3 potatoes, washed, peeled, cubed, and boiled (like you’re making mashed potatoes)
1/2 cup green peas (or whatever other vegetable you’d like in it)
1 teaspoon of grated fresh ginger
1 clove of garlic, minced, or whatever it is when you put it through a garlic press
2 Tablespoons of fresh chopped cilantro
1 jalapeno pepper (or the other half of that habanero if you used it for the dipping sauce) de-stemmed, seeded, and minced
1 teaspoon of garam masala
1 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of cumin seeds
2 Tablespoons of lemon juice (or the juice of half a lemon)
Spring Roll Rice Paper Wrappers (Round 22cm) – the link is here so you can see what you’re looking for, but we’re not affiliated with Amazon in anyway. Also, any brand will do.
safe for you oil to use for frying
Once you’ve got your potatoes washed, peeled, cubed, and boiled, you’re going to want to give them a fairly rough mash. You don’t want them smooth, lumpy is good.
Potatoes, roughly mashed
Let them cool for a bit. In the meantime, get all your other ingredients (except the rice paper and oil) in a bowl large enough for the ingredients and the potatoes. When your potatoes have cooled a bit (you can stick them in the fridge to hurry that along), mix the potatoes with the other ingredients so that they are well combined.
Samosa filling
Now to assemble your samosas. You’ll need a bowl of warm water (I use the water as hot as I can get it out of the tap) big enough for you to dip the rice paper in. You’ll also need a smooth clean surface to place your rice paper after moistening it. I used my dough rolling mat, but you can just use a plate if it’s big enough. Also, you’ll need a tray or sheet pan with some parchment paper or waxed paper on it to store your completed samosas until you’re ready to fry.
Dip your rice paper into the water, making sure that the entire surface is moistened.
Moistening your rice paper
Be careful that you don’t let the rice paper fold against itself, I’ve never been talented enough to get it back apart again, although I’m told it’s possible. Lay the rice paper out flat on your working surface.
Rice paper getting ready for filling
Place some filling on your rice paper. I used about two tablespoons. You can use more or less depending on your preference, you’re just going to make more or less samosas.
Samosa filling on rice paper
Fold the two sides over the samosa filling, making it so that the sides angle in towards the top, making it somewhat triangular.
Sides folded over the samosa filling
Fold the bottom edge up over the samosa filling.
Folding bottom edge up over filling
Roll the filling over the rest of the rice paper, like you’re rolling up a sleeping bag, or a burrito, depending on your arbitrary cultural reference. The end should stick to the roll.
Completed samosa
Repeat the process until you have lots of samosas ready to fry.
Samosas ready to fry
Now we need to prepare a place to stash our samosas once they’ve been fried. Cover another tray or sheet pan, with a couple layers of paper towels, and then place a cookie rack on it upside down so that the cookie rack is laying on the paper towels (more oil gets absorbed this way).
In a frying pan, pour enough oil that when you put a samosa in it, the oil will only go half way up the side of the samosa and does not cover the samosa. Less oil is better than more. Heat your oil over medium low to medium heat. Be very careful to space them out, because if they touch each other the rice paper will rip when you try to separate them, and then you’ll have filling in your oil, which will burn up into little dark bits and cover the outside of your samosas. Look at the pictures and then ask me how I know, haha.
Samosas frying
Also, these are going to take so much longer than you imagine. I don’t know if its the rice paper or if it’s the moisture content in the potatoes, but expect to be frying for some time. Also, don’t go any higher than medium on the heat, otherwise you’ll get really big bubbles on your wrappers potentially causing holes and scorching. As you’re frying turn them occasionally with a pair of tongs to make sure they cook evenly. When the rice paper wrappers look like this, they’re done:
Fried Samosas
Yours will not have the little burned bits on the outside because you will be more careful about keeping them separated than I was, but if you do have little burned bits, they don’t affect the taste of your samosas. Although the rice paper wrapper is a different texture than a dough or pastry wrapper, they had a good bit of crunch and were yummy. Enjoy!
It is no real secret that I’m a huge fan of marshmallow Peeps chicks. I do not know what it is about the goofy things that tickles me so, but they have for years. And it’s not their food value — I don’t really like them that much to eat. They’re just ridiculously cute and fun to play with. And they crack me up. My friends all know this, which is why I have the Peeps craft book, a fantastic Peeps t-shirt, and why Jodi took me to the Peeps store about three years ago:
MK at the Peeps store — photo by Jodi Lasky
My friends — they are good peeps.
This year, though, Wilton kind of made my year by partnering up and making a Peeps silicone baking pan. When I bought it, I had visions of making chocolate-covered marshmallow candy. But I’m really more of a baker. So I started making Peeps cakes. This is how the adorableness of the chicks becomes so very very tasty.
I’ve tried everything from doughnut batter to cake batter, and found that something in between worked best. I still don’t quite have the hang of food coloring — they’re not as outlandish as I’d initially hoped — but no one’s complained about being forced to test different batches. And I will say this — we’ve had spring, either in temperature or in general sunniness, since I bought the pan, so they ARE magic, and if you live in the upper midwest, maybe you should start baking, too?
So the recipe below is my favorite version, but here’s how you can adjust it — if you want a larger crumb (stiffer dough), add less non-dairy milk. A smoother, more sponge-cake texture, add more non-dairy milk. The latter is easier to stuff in the molds, but I think somewhere in between is best — this recipe works with as little as a scant 1/4 cup of liquid, and as much as 1 cup. Baking times will vary (obviously). The next batch I test will use chia instead of the Ener-G, which I think will work fine. If you try something different, let me know!
Happy spring, people.
Chicks! In! Space! Photo by Jack Andrews
Magic Spring Cakes
1/2 cup sorghum flour
1/2 cup brown rice flour (I used superfine, which is great if you have it)
1/4 cup potato starch
1/4 cup tapioca starch
1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup brown sugar (I have to admit that I notice a huge difference in flavor with using the Florida Crystals cane sugar version versus the cheapest brown sugar, which is usually beet sugar with molasses added. That could be me being an ingredient snob, but since the FC stuff goes on sale with some regularity, being a snob barely costs me more.)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
2 teaspoons cinnamon
Mix all dry ingredients together thoroughly.
1 Ener-G egg replacer egg (1 1/2 teaspoons Ener-G powder plus 2 Tablespoons warm water, whisked until slightly frothy)
1/4 cup + 1 Tablespoon melted shortening (I used both coconut oil-based Earth Balance and Spectrum shortening, and both worked fine) (ALSO — Melt an additional Tablespoon or two of shortening to grease your pan with)
2 Tablespoons vanilla
2/3 cup non-dairy milk (I usually use almond milk because it’s what I keep on hand, but I notice very little difference using rice milk)
Food coloring, if desired
Use some melted shortening to brush the silicone molds.
IF you are using food coloring, mix all the wet ingredients but the shortening together before adding them to the dry ingredients. This makes the color spread evenly.
If you are NOT using food coloring, no need to dirty another bowl — just add all the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix well. I find that my silicone spatula works best for this.
Scoop into baking molds, and make sure you’ve filled out the bottoms or you lose the detail. I used my spatula to sort of smush and spread the batter into each mold, and then used an icing knife to scrape off any excess. If you’re not using a Peeps mold, you could use another small silicone mold, doughnut pan or a mini muffin tin, and your baking times will be approximately the same. If you’re making cupcakes or a full cake, your baking times will be way off what’s recommended, so I’d suggest checking in 5 minute increments until a toothpick inserted into the center of your cake comes out completely clean.
For the chicks and bunnies, my cakes took about 24 minutes. I will say check after 20, and judge how much more time you need then. When the cakes are done, flip them out onto a cooling rack immediately, and let cool completely before eating. With the oil brushed on the molds, these get a decent doughnut-type “crust” on the exterior, which is excellent.
Store your cooled cakes loosely covered, for up to three days.
Bacon. It’s bacon, how do you live without bacon? Unfortunately, commercial bacon has dextrose, sodium erythorbate, ascorbates, and other corn ingredients. At the beginning of my corn-free life, I would cheat a bit, but then I would get a blister on my foot a couple days later, and I eventually decided that it had to go. So no bacon. For months and months. And then I started Googling how to make bacon, and looking for pins on Pinterest. It didn’t look that hard. And compared to fermenting (which I very much enjoy, so this is not a slam), it seemed much less evil scientist-bubbling concoctions, and more of a dry rub marinade in the fridge for several days longer than you would normally. What was the worst that could happen? I mean, besides making myself sick, and that was going to happen if I ate commercial bacon anyway. But I still didn’t do it because I was going to have to make a special effort to get some pork belly, and it’s not like I don’t have enough other stuff to do. But one day, Mary Kate and I were dubbing around at the Saigon Market in Nashua and we saw some pork belly all packaged up and ready to bring home. So I bought it, and I made some bacon. It was good, but I thought the recipe needed some tweaking. So I called McKinnons in Salem and ordered five pounds of pork belly. And I then played around some more.
Now that I’m done experimenting, I’ve got two versions to share with you, one that’s a more basic cure, and one that’s a bit more savory. I like them both, but I prefer the basic cure, as I tend to be a traditionalist about my bacon.
In all likelihood, you are going to special order the fresh pork belly. Some grocery stores may be cooperative, or you might have to go to a specialty butcher store.
Making Bacon (two versions)
2 lbs of pork belly, skin removed
3 tablespoons sea salt
3 tablespoons brown sugar
For a basic cure, you will add:
2 teaspoons whole peppercorns
For a more savory cure, you will add:
2 teaspoons whole peppercorns
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tsp rosemary
1 tsp celery seed
1 tsp dried thyme
2 bay leaves
Put the salt, brown sugar, and the spices for your choice of cure in a blender or food processor, with the exception of the garlic clove in the savory cure. Blend or process until the peppercorns are well ground. If you’re using the savory cure, mince the garlic clove and set it aside.
If your pork belly still has the skin on it, as shown below, you will need to remove it. (The picture below shows five pounds of pork belly. I used it to make approximately two pounds of each bacon cure and one pound of salt pork, the recipe for which will be posted in the not too distant future.)
Five pounds of boneless pork belly before the skin is removed
Using a very sharp knife, remove the skin cutting it as thinly as you can manage. You don’t want to waste any of the pork belly.
Removing the skin from the pork belly
Once you have trimmed off the skin, your pork belly will look like the picture below:
Pork belly with the skin removed
Rinse the pork belly in very cold water and pat it dry with a paper towel. If you are doing the savory cure, now is the time to mix your ground salt, sugar and spice mixture in a bowl with the minced garlic. Spread half your salt, sugar, and spice mixture on a large piece of parchment paper, a large casserole dish, or a sheet pan, whatever you have in your kitchen that’s large enough to accommodate your piece of pork belly. Place the pork belly into the salt, sugar and spice mixture, and pour the remaining mixture over the top of the pork belly. Rub the mixture all over the pork, making sure to get every inch covered.
Put the pork belly in a 1 gallon resealable plastic bag, and add any of the excess salt, sugar, and spice mixture from your parchment paper, casserole dish, or sheet pan to the bag. Close the bag and shake it up to evenly distribute and coat the pork belly with the mixture. After shaking, try to remove as much of the air from the resealable plastic bag as you can so that the spice mixture stays on the pork belly and reseal it.
Pork belly coated with salt, sugar, and spice mix in resealable plastic bag
Place the bag on a plate, tray or small sheet pan so that it can be placed in your refrigerator and stay level. Refrigerate for five to seven days, flipping the bag once a day, until the pork feels firm throughout. The longer you let the pork belly cure, the saltier it will be. I preferred a cure of five days.
When the pork belly is finished curing, remove the pork belly from the resealable plastic bag and wash off the salt, sugar and spice mixture thoroughly under cold water. Pat your pork belly dry with paper towels.
You now have a choice to make. You can slice the bacon as is and then cook it, which appears to be the closest to commercial bacon, and was often referred to as “green bacon” in recipes I saw. Or you can smoke or roast the bacon. I don’t have a smoker, so I’ve not tried smoking it. I did do one batch of the roasted bacon, but I think I prefer the green bacon.
Green bacon:
We got a meat slicer as a wedding gift because my husband really wanted one, so it went on the registry. It was really helpful in slicing the green bacon.
“Green bacon” sliced
I fried some in my cast iron skillet over medium heat, as you would normally cook bacon. The home cured bacon seems to take longer than commercial bacon to cook.
Roasting the Bacon: When your bacon has cured, and you’ve rinsed and patted it dry with paper towels, pre-heat your oven to 200°F. Place the bacon in a 9 x 13″ roasting pan and roast until you’ve reached an internal temperature of 150°F. This will take between an hour and a half and two hours.
Bacon roasted in the oven
You don’t want to cook the meat, so once it reaches 150°F, remove the bacon from the oven. Let the bacon cool to room temperature.
Once your bacon has been roasted or smoked and has cooled, wrap it up in parchment paper and put it in the refrigerator until it has completely chilled. Once chilled, you can slice it and fry it up or use the oven method to cook your bacon. In the picture below, I used a chef’s knife and my knife skills aren’t all that great so the slices are a bit thicker than I would have liked. Which is why I decided to drag out the meat slicer in later experiments.
Roasted bacon after chilling and slicing
We cooked the bacon two ways here too, frying it and using the oven method.
Roasted Bacon, cooked two ways, fried and using the oven method
Smoking the Bacon: Again, I have not tried this because I don’t have a smoker, but one of the recipes I found gives the following directions. When your bacon has cured, and you’ve rinsed and patted it dry with paper towels, smoke it over hickory or apple wood at a very low temperature until bacon reaches an internal temperature of 150°F or about three hours. Let bacon cool to room temperature. Once your bacon has been roasted or smoked and has cooled, wrap it up in parchment paper and put it in the refrigerator until it has completely chilled. Once chilled, you can slice it and fry it up or use the oven method to cook your bacon.
My husband and I both preferred the oven method for cooking the bacon and we both preferred the “green bacon”, but you should experiment and see what you like best. Here’s a chart for how long your bacon will keep from the USDA. The bacon cures presented here would fall under “Bacon cured without nitrites.” I don’t want to weigh in on the nitrites being good or bad issue, it’s just that I can’t get seem to get my hands on curing salt that doesn’t also have corn (dextrose) in it.
I hope this helps those of you who can’t get commercial bacon for whatever reason. Enjoy, I did 🙂
Everyone who knows me for a little while knows that I live for potatoes. I will eat them in almost any form, any time of day, and many meals in a row — and multiple forms in one meal, if that happens to be an option. I’ve posted other potato recipes here, but this may be one of my favorite.
See, about two years ago, I found a good hash brown patty. Cheap, no weird ingredients, and while they did not cook quickly, they could be left alone while I did the rest of the stuff that needs to get done in the mornings. But that was two years ago, and I’m still eating them. As much as I love the potatoes, I was actually (shhhhh, don’t call out the heresy) getting bored of the same hash browns every morning. I thought maybe I could work something else out, something that would keep the potato part of my breakfast ritual, but add in some additional veggies.
This is what I worked out — this is a soft potato pancake with a great texture from the zucchini and carrots, and a nice savory profile. If potatoes for breakfast aren’t your thing (heresy!), these make a great side dish, as well.
Cooking Potato Magic
Eat Your Veggies for Breakfast Patties
4 medium potatoes, peeled and cubed (about 1.75 lbs.)
1/4 cup green scallion tops, chopped (about one bunch worth)
1/2 lb. carrots, shredded (organic if possible — this makes a big difference in taste)
1/2 lb. zucchini, shredded
1-1/2 teaspoons dill
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
freshly-ground black pepper, to taste
2 teaspoons balsamic vinegar (beware of malt — gluten — added to cheaper versions)
1 Tablespoon ground psyllium husk
oil of your choice, for sauteeing, less than 1/4 cup overall, but it’ll depend on the size of your pan and how many batches of potatoes you do
Place potatoes in a saucepan and cover with cold water. Add salt. Bring water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook until potatoes are tender. If you salt the water well, you may not need to add more salt to the recipe over all
Chop scallions and shred the carrots and zucchini.
Heat a skillet over medium heat, add a tablespoon or so of oil — you want enough to coat the bottom of the pan, but not deeply. Add the carrots, dill, and garlic powder, stir and sauteé over medium for a few minutes. Then add the zucchini, stir well, and when the carrots are tender but still have a bit of crunch, you’re done.
In another pan, over low, heat the non-dairy milk and margarine or fat just until warm and melted.
Drain the potatoes and mash with the non-dairy milk and margarine. Then mix in the scallions, carrots, zucchini in with the mashed potatoes, adding the turmeric, psyllium husk, and vinegar, and mixing very well. Taste and adjust the seasonings if you need to.
Form patties of about 1/4 cup each — I used a measuring cup to scoop and then formed the patties with my hands. This made about 15 patties, which is so perfect for a work week of breakfasts. The patties are all cooked, but to make them awesome, you’ll pan fry them right before eating.
Now, you can cook these immediately, if you’re a morning person and did all this in the morning, but you can also refrigerate the patties you just made (put wax paper between the layers and cover them, airtight) and pan fry them fresh and hot in the morning.
Either way, heat your skillet first, over medium, then add a skim-coat of oil. If you’re cooking them just after making them, 2-3 minutes per side should give you a nice golden brown crust on each side. If they are coming out of the fridge, it took 8 minutes for the first side, 6 for the second, using a cast iron skillet over medium heat, to get a perfect crust and thoroughly heat the patties throughout.
Before the food allergy apocalypse hit, I was a sucker for those huge 9 x 12 inch gorgeously photographed 200 page cookbooks that were always on sale for 5 or 6 bucks on the clearance tables at Borders (when it still existed) or Barnes & Noble. I have about six of them. When Mary Kate and I were talking about what we should develop for the coming months, it fell to me to develop a soup from the Roasted Vegetable Stockthat Mary Kate was going to post. I tend to use more beef and pork (no more chicken for me, sigh) in my every day “normal” cooking and most of my standard soups have a protein in them. So to get ideas, I went looking through my cookbook collection and found Best Ever Soups: Over 200 Brand New Recipies for Delicious Soups, Broths, Chowders, Bisques, Consommes on the shelf. I took it out and went for a spin through it. Now, about half of the recipes in the book are now off limits to me, but I can see a lot of room for modification and de-allergizing, which is a lesson in and of itself. I don’t have to look at the cookbooks as off limits because I can’t eat that stuff anymore, I can use them to get inspiration for my new way of eating. I can look at them as a way to say, “hey, I still want to eat something like that, how do you think I can tweek it?”
So using the recipe in the book and making a few minor tweeks, I give you a soup with potatoes, Mary Kate’s Roasted Vegetable Stock, and roasted garlic. Because how can that be bad? Other than roasting the garlic, the rest of the prep is relatively simple. This would make a good weeknight dinner if you threw the garlic in the oven while you read the mail, check your email and change into your pajamas (oh wait…does everyone else do that just after you walk in the door too?). Or it’d make a nice side or appetizer for a weekend dinner. I’m serving it with a mustard and maple syrup marinated pork loin and a green salad.
Potato and Roasted Garlic Soup
Serves 4
2 bulbs of garlic with the tops trimmed off, but unpeeled (or 1/2 cup of already roasted garlic that you may have on hand, see below)
1 Tablespoon of olive oil
4 large potatoes or 5 small to medium potatoes, peeled and diced
8 cups of Roasted Vegetable Stock (I’d avoid using the dill in the stock for this soup, but any of the other herbs should work fine)
1 small onion or one half of a large onion, peeled and diced
salt and pepper to taste
a dash or two of hot sauce (a Tabasco style hot sauce would be lovely)
fresh parsley to garnish
Pre-heat your oven to 375°F. Trim the top of the garlic bulbs just so the tops of the cloves are showing.
Garlic bulb with its top trimmed
Place the bulbs on a small roasting pan or sheet pan and drizzle the olive oil over the trimmed garlic bulbs.
Garlic bulbs drizzled with olive oil
Roast the garlic until for 45 minutes or until it’s soft in the center of the cloves. (Or if you want to make your life really easy, if you have some roasted garlic already prepared {here’s how to do it, takes an hour, do a bunch ahead of time and store it in a jar in your fridge or freeze it so you can use when you want it without the aggravation}, use half a cup and mash it up before adding to the soup.) Once your bulbs have roasted, take them out of the oven and set them aside to cool a bit.
Roasted Garlic Bulbs
Add your roasted vegetable stock and the peeled and diced onion to a large stock pot, and simmer on medium high.
Stock and onions in stock pot
Then peel and dice your potatoes.
Peeled and diced potatoes
Par-boil the potatoes in another pot in salted boiling water for 10 minutes.
While the potatoes are cooking, squeeze the cooked garlic out of the bulbs (I found it easiest to do it a couple of cloves at a time) into a prep bowl.
Roasted Garlic removed from bulbs
When all the cooked garlic has been separated from the bulbs, add the cooked garlic to your roasted vegetable stock, and stir it well.
Once your potatoes have finished cooking, drain them.
Par-boiled potatoes after draining
After draining, add them to the roasted vegetable stock. Simmer for 20 minutes and then season to taste with salt, pepper and hot sauce. Serve topped with a bit of parsley to make it look pretty, and enjoy!
I know. It’s spring. Or, rather, “spring.” The thing is? It’s still pretty cold here, and on top of that, damp. So, basically, it’s still soup weather, and rather than being cranky about it, let’s just make some good veggie stock to cook up some of the vegetables that might, in a perfect world, soon be coming out of the ground. Or, maybe, going into the ground. Man, this whole seasonal blah is really not inspiring me! But I’m hungry, and soup is good.
So. Soup stock. As with Denise’s Roasted Beef Stock, this vegetable stock gets a lot of its flavor from caramelizing the sugars in the vegetables by roasting them first. Deglazing the roasting pan with white wine or sherry adds a little extra hit of flavor, but if you don’t have or don’t want to use alcohol, water will work. Just make sure to scrape the bits up really well — there’s flavor in there.
This stock can be the base for pretty much any soup, though if you’re going for a specific flavor profile, consider that when choosing your herbs. I’ve given very specific measurements here because part of the reason we’re posting basics like stock is that we know that some people have always purchased stock, either in bouillon cubes or in boxes or cans. Allergies take away that option (damn allergies) or make it difficult, so if soup stock is part of your learning curve, we’ve got it covered. BUT. Stock is inherently flexible, so feel free to play with the recipe. You do not need exactly what I’ve used, and the measurements are overly precise (unnecessarily so) just in case you’re a newbie and want that. I weighed everything that was roasted, just for you, and since I was doing that, did metric and US weights. I don’t actually know metric measurements otherwise, so they aren’t included other than that. Sorry about that.
A note on ingredients and prep: in a stock, you’re extracting flavor. So you want the best produce you can buy, and you want to alter it as little as possible. Because of this, when possible, I buy organic vegetables to roast, and I wash them well. I don’t peel them. Chop them roughly, and remove only parts that are bad or brown, and any parts that might burn (onion skin).
Ungarnished Broth. Photo by Jack Andrews
Roasted Vegetable Stock
There are two sets of ingredients in this recipe. The first set get roasted. The second set go straight into the stock pot.
Roasted Ingredients
To go into the oven:
7 carrots (9.5 oz, 269g)
7 stalks of celery, plus core (15 oz, 425g)
2 apples (12 oz, 345g)
1 onion (8.5 oz, 237g)
4 large shallots (1 lb., 453g)
a handful of garlic cloves, about half a head on a typical US-sized clove (2 oz, 64g)
1/4 to 1/3 cup olive oil
1/2 Tablespoon salt
1/4 cup of white wine, red wine, sherry, or water (reserved — use this after roasting)
Preheat your oven to 400°F.
Chop the carrots and celery into about 1 inch chunks — remove any greenery from carrots, and remove and reserve all the celery leaves (see below). Quarter the apples and remove the part of the core containing the seeds. Quarter the onion and halve each quarter — remove all the papery skin. Same with the shallots (note — I used shallots here because they looked good at the store when I was buying the veg — you could just use another onion or two here, but less in weight than shallots, as shallots are milder). Remove the skin on the garlic cloves.
Place all the veg in a baking pan or roasting pan with sides, metal is preferred. Douse them with olive oil and salt, and turn everything around in the oil until it’s well-coated.
Put the pan in the oven and set the timer for 30 minutes. You’ll need an hour, possibly an hour and a half to get a good caramelized brown all over all your veg, so plan accordingly. Check every 30 minutes, and beware of sticking your head close to the oven as you open it — there’s a lot of steam in there. And yes, I forget that every.single.time.
Now, your second set of ingredients for the stock — the ones that do not get roasted.
Into the stockpot:
another handful of garlic cloves
all of the celery leaves — don’t waste them!
1/2 a bunch of parsley
3-4 sprigs of dill, or another fresh herb that looks good at your store and is soup-appropriate (rosemary, basil, oregano, thyme — all would be good options)(optional, but adds freshness)
2 bay leaves
2 teaspoons dried thyme
1 Tablespoon whole peppercorns (this does NOT make your stock hot — the peppercorns aren’t broken, so most of the oil stays in, but it adds a nice flavor) (if you are Denise and you’re making this, you would likely add dried chilies here instead, but those will be hot — if that’s your thing, do it!)
about 10 cups of water
Get all this (MINUS the water) ready in your pot while everything else roasts.
When the roasting is done, scrape the roasted veg directly into the stockpot. Deglaze your pan with your water or wine by pouring the cold liquid on the hot pan and using that to scrape up all the roasted bits stuck to the pan. Add that to the stock pot.
Then add water, enough cover all the stuff in the pan by about two inches. Bring this to a boil, then reduce and simmer for 30-45 minutes.
Strain out and discard the vegetables and herbs, and either use it to make soup right away, or store it. This should keep in the fridge for about a week, or store it in the freezer. With 10 cups of water, I got not quite 3 full quart jars of stock.
This recipe is part of my campaign to get some candy back in my life, although in all likelihood, at a much reduced rate of intake than was so prior to the corn thing. To start out with, I used a recipe for No Corn Syrup Lollipops from Snappyliving.com, but since I can’t use artificial flavoring or vegetable food coloring (problematic for people allergic to corn), I modified the recipe to use fruit juice and my homemade extracts to give the lollipops their flavor. (Most extracts use corn alcohol to make the extract. I used the zests of the citrus fruit and Luksusowa Vodka because it’s made only from potatoes, whereas some vodkas may also use grain or corn. See this post for directions.) The color is naturally occurring from the carmelization of the sugars and lime juice together. It’s best to have a candy thermometer to use to make this recipe.
Lime Lollipops
2 cups of sugar
2/3 cups of lime juice (about 3-4 limes)
1/8 teaspoon of cream of tartar
1 Tablespoon of lime extract
Put the sugar, lime juice, cream of tartar, and lime extract in a sauce pan with a candy thermometer. Over medium heat, stir until the sugar is dissolved.
Candy Mixture before boiling
Bring the heat to medium high, and continue to stir, boiling the mixture until it reaches 290°F, or until it forms a hard bead when dropped in cold water.
Candy mixture boiling
Spray silicone molds or ice cube trays with a neutral, safe for you cooking oil. I used a light olive oil in a mister. You don’t want an oil that tastes like anything. Carefully pour the mixture into your molds and add Popsicle sticks, as the mixture hardens enough to hold the sticks in position.
Candy in Silicone Muffin tray with Popsicle sticks
Let them cool overnight before taking them out of the molds. If not properly hardened, they stick to everything like cement. Ask me how much fun it was to get them off the plate below, once I was done taking the picture…Enjoy!
