Thursday Cooks

Hello my sweet friend!

 

Just popping in for a moment during lunch.  As I mentioned earlier, I was in a bad mood and needed distraction.  Actually, I hope to make Thursday cooking a main part of my schedule.  I take the babies to youth group on Wednesday night, and run across the street to do my grocery shopping.  That way I can do my Thursday cooking with the freshest ingredients (and the freshest me, since I am a morning person).

 

We did not go to youth group last night (bad mom, I know!), but I had had enough stocked to be able to make almost whatever I chose.

 

So I decided to make enchiladas and burritos (both regular and gluten free) this morning.

 

I truly do not know why more people do not do this--it is so easy!  The enchiladas, specifically, come together so quickly and in a matter of minutes, you can have several meals of enchiladas made and in the freezer!  The burritos were even quicker.

 

Here are a few photos from this morning:

 

These are the ingredients for the enchiladas.  I used more cans of chicken and ended up adding even another brick of cream cheese and more chicken and chilies :).

 

Canned chicken and chilies.  I will add the cream cheese to this, but this shot was prettier :) 

 

 

For Precious, here are the gluten free tortillas that I used.  On the right you can see fully assembled enchiladas in aluminum tins and in quart baggies.  I mark hers with pink tape so we know which is hers and which isn't.

 

Here is a photo of the assembly line :)  Scoop the filling, roll the tortilla (not folding the ends, so that there is numminess all the way through without large folds of tortilla)....Two per mini loaf pan/

 

Using a ladle, I put a scoop of salsa verde over the top.  Then sprinkled with cheese.

 

 

Voila!  I made 6 sets each of burritos and enchiladas for Precious, and many more for TWS.  Not bad for an easy morning of scooping, laughing, taking photos, and texting :).

Catfish and "You Can't Believe The Internet...."

Good morning sweetie!!

Fished, cleaned, and cooked catfish from the pond yesterday....MY GOODNESS what a blessing it was!  I have never EVER tasted such mild fish.

The funny thing is that everything I read on the internet about mudcats (flathead catfish) warned about the flavor of mudcats being subpar to channel or blue catfish.

Seriously, if channels and blues are that much better than my mudcats, they must taste like chocolate dipped in honey.

Let me back up a bit.....

As I had posted previously, I need to figure out what fish stay and what fish go in the pond.  We wanted to try the mudcats in our pond to see if they were edible or truly not.  We still plan to put channel cats in instead--they are much less destructive--but we were not sure if we would be eating the mudcats or the dog would.

After a bit of feet dragging on my part, I finally fished for cats to eat.  Mostly we just catch and release.  

All excited about my newfound determination to catch and eat, I started fishing.  And...nada.  Not a nibble.  Now, mind you, these catfish are normally always begging for food as soon as you step foot on the dock.  In fact, one time Sooper was running across the grass and his footfall was so heavy that the fish came to the surface for food.

This time, however,  no matter how many times I stomped on the deck, there were no fish.  I walked around the pond trying to catch  bass or cats and nothing at all bit.  I decided that perhaps live bait might work where lures weren't and remembered that Precious had mentioned crickets at the upper pond.  I began my soggy trek through the muck with a net and a cricket basket back to the upper pond.  It was incredibly humid and there was a haze of hot, wet air between me and the treeline.  The sun was high and bright, the clouds were billowy and intensely white.  It was gorgeous, but was the type of weather that somehow seemed to sap your strength with each step.  

I walked around the pond once....twice....staring at the ground.  I am sure our neighbors must have wondered what I was looking for.  Finally, on the second go round, I caught a grasshopper in my net. Then a couple more crickets.  Not many, but enough to even see if live bait would entice my recalcitrant catfish.

I had planned on cooking the catfish for dinner, but I was so late that the plan changed to catfish for supper.  After a quick dinner (with a chocolate covered coconut ice cream bar...you know...for extra stamina ;) ), I headed back to the dock.  At first nothing except a thieving bream.  I did not want to catch the bream, I wanted to keep them and fish out some of the mud cats and bass.  One bream in particular was determined, and I had to reel in faster than he could swim, as he chased my bait til it left the water.

Eventually though, my bobber (remind me to tell you about my love of bobber fishing :)) went way, WAY under water and I knew this was no bream--not even my big guy who lives under the doc.  The fight was on with a decent sized catfish.  At one point I thought he was going to snap my rod in two, the tip was so bent over.  The mudcats that I caught all tried to make their way back under the dock I was standing on, making line breakage a definite possibility.

In the end, though, I ended up with 5 catfish (two were huge for our pond!).  I sent Sooper out to catch bass, as he has quite the touch, and he came back with a decent enough bass for us all to try.

(I will not go into the cleaning of the fish right now, though I probably will do a post on it later.  Let's just fast forward this story to the good part....)

With eagerness and not a little trepidation, I began to cook the meal.  The only thing I KNEW would be edible were the oven roasted potatoes (much less spicy this time...which is good because we are out of homemade ice cream ;) ).  I tried to look up gluten free hushpuppies, but the ingredients were much more involved than I was interested in, so I took a shot with deep frying my cornbread recipe instead.  The first two hushpuppies came out perfectly, but the oil got hot, and the rest came out fairly dark.  However, they were delicious (need more onion, but truly not a bad freshman effort).

Then it came time to cook the catfish.  Remember, pretty much everything I had read exhorted the subpar flavor of mudcats.

First of all, there was NO fish smell at all.  None.  Period.  The only scent the raw catfish had was....spring fed pond--almost scentless with the tiniest hint of mineral water.  Very, very pleasant.  I simply seasoned cornmeal with pepper, salt, and a light hand of cajun seasoning.  They fried up beautifully (I had the oil adjusted this time).  One bite was all it took to have me convinced that the dog was going to be eating Iams and not homemade catfish dogfood. 

I am pretty easy going when it comes to eating fish.  I am not very picky.  However, Precious, as normally stalwart about foods as she is, does not enjoy fish much at all.  The catfish, though, got a "Yes, I could eat this again" vote :).  The internet, my friend, is not to be trusted :).

To compare, we also each got a bite of the bass.  I did not mind the taste at all, but the scent of the fish cooking and the taste of the fillets was definitely more "fish".  It was not terribly strong--my kitchen does not smell of fish today--but the difference in flavor between the mudcats and the bass was "cornmeal battered fillets of spring water happiness" vs "cornmeal fried fresh fish". 

So the dog might get the bass ;)

 

Cheesecake Strawberries

Hey Sweetie!

I am so tickled--the sun is finally shining after several days of rain!  While there has been much flooding, even some in the fields at our farm, the water drains fairly quickly and I expect to be out digging in the dirt soon.

When we moved here, I had many things I wanted to get better at.  One of them was cooking delicious and healthier food and more often.  Before we moved, I had spent hours coming up with menu plans for each week of the summer.  As I mentioned before, we make dinner (lunch) our big meal, and then we have a lighter supper.  Pinterest has been my go-to for meal ideas.

Well, the best laid plans, etc, etc.  I am finding that it is more cost effective for me to buy on sale then to go with a set list of ingredients for specific meals.  Since we do not have our freezer or pantry built up and our garden is not even planted yet, let alone producing, I have very little in the way of flexibility in terms of "Oh we are supposed to have flank steak, and I bought that on sale back in March".

Additionally, my menus were made before we realized that Precious has celiac disease.  This means many recipes will have to be tweaked or tossed.

I must say on many things I am flexible, so this is not too big of a wrench :)  I will just cook what I have, and someday the menu and the stocking will meet up. :)

One thing I really wanted to do is to have a nice snack at about 3 pm.  I love the idea of having a small perfect bit of numminess to take the edge off before our light supper.  One of my first snacks were cheesecake strawberries--a recipe I got off of Pinterest.

Cheesecake Stuffed Strawberries

1 Lb Large Strawberries (I used one of those clamshell sets of strawberries)
8 oz cream cheese, softened
6 TBS (to taste) powdered sugar (the recipe calls for 4-5 TBS, but I found that not quite sweet enough)
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
Demerra Sugar (the recipe calls for graham crackers, but we did not have any gluten free ones)

Pick large, firm strawberries.  While it is tempting to try to use the more flavorful medium or smaller or very ripe ones, that does not really work with this recipe.
Core the strawberries.  I used one of those "apple peeler/corer" things and it worked wonderfully.
Mix all the ingredients except the demerra sugar.
Place in a piping bag (or, do as I do, and use a quart sized ziplock with a LARGE decorator tip pushed through a corner and secured by a ring).
Squirt the cheesecake filling into the strawberries.
Sprinkle with demerra sugar.

Easy peasy. 

This was a pinterest success story.  Not only was it easy, it was quick and tasted wonderful.  And it is pretty enough to serve to guests.

The Gluten Free Adventure

Good morning!

For those who might not know, we are 90% certain that Precious has celiac disease.  Truly it was not even on our radar--I am a HUGE bread baker!  In fact, baking is one thing in cooking that I do relatively well.

However, severe health issues, rashes, etc led to many dr visits which showed some sort of autoimmune disease, and most of the biggies were ruled out (and the rash was a giveaway).  So she asked to be put on a gluten free diet.

That poor, sweet girl!  This started right before we were moving, traveling across Canada.  She had had enough, and we were still trying to piece together what was wrong with her, and she asked if we could just try the gluten free diet, just in case.  I went that day to the commissary and bought all sorts of gluten free prepackaged food.  There were not a lot of choices in Alaska, so she basically had cookies, fruit cups, corn tortilla roll ups, and hot dogs (no bun).

Now that we are down in the Lower 48 there are so many more options!  And now that we are settled in our house, I can tweak recipies.

One more note:  we talked about how this would affect her and the family.  I explained that the entire family could not give up gluten foods just to keep her from feeling "left out".  It is important, I think, to not expect the world to work around us, but for us to understand that we have to work in the world.  HOWEVER, that being said, there is no reason why I can't try to make her gluten free journey as enjoyable as possible :).  She understood fully.  So if we get krispy kreme donuts for breakfast, she might get a milkshake for breakfast--something delightful and "treat"-y.

So far I have tried making gluten free chicken and dumplings.  They turned out pretty well, but needed an egg binder.

Yesterday I made gluten free lasagne, fried chicken, and potato soup.  The lasagne and potato soup I put in individual containers for when I need a quick meal if I have been out working the land or something.

Here are photos of the assembly process.  Sorry for the greenish hue--there is one light in our kitchen that is exceedingly green colored for some reason.  Yet another project we are going to get around to :)