Wood Stove Cookery & Being Thrifty.

As promised, a little more detail on the soup.

Soup On The Wood Stove, January, 2012.

Some facts: our finances continue to be terrible, we like cooking, winter is cold, soup is good, & we have a wood stove & a lot of cast iron enamel pots.

For most of January, our propane tank was really low & we couldn't afford to buy more, but we are allowed to cut wood off our property, so wood is free. This led to using the propane stove as little as possible, & coming up with creative ways to cook on a wood stove. Solution? Frequently SOUP. 

(We boiled water for pasta & made red sauce & slow cooked bacon a lot too.)

It turned out to be a very good thing that we enjoy roasting a chicken as a cheap but really satisfying Sunday dinner & always make & can stock from any large meat thing we cook. Duck stock? Lamb stock? Yup. We moved a lot of frozen stock over to the new house, & we ate it in January.

Cheap Ass Back Woods Soup:  

Place cast iron enamel pot on wood stove. Simmer an onion & garlic in a bit of chopped bacon from your freezer supply for just these occasions. Add chopped beef from some large cut of meat you have been using sparingly from Stop & Shop. Add homemade chicken stock, a potato if you have one, rice or barley or both, a can of whatever beans you have on hand, season, cumin, oregano, sage, touch of cayenne, or whatever you like. Simmer at wood stove heat, stirring occasionally. Eat, hopefully with free day old bread & expired cheese from your work (one of my perks.)

Delicious. Keep reheating for lunches until gone. Repeat.

A tiny rant: I hate eating cheap meat. That really bothers me. I am a committed meat eater after many years in my teens & twenties of vegetarianism & veganism & my decision to eat meat is well thought out & firm but I hate supporting the meat industry that brings the cheap grocery meat to our tables. But what we can afford is the cheapest thing the grocery store has. 

I can't wait until we get to the producing our own meat level.  It'll happen pretty soon since we got straight run chicks with the intent of eating the males. It will be hard after knowing them from tiny fuzzy babies, but part of my eating meat agreement with myself is I be willing to kill it myself if I am going to eat it. If I can't do this, I guess it is vegetarianism for me once more.

For right now? We eat small amounts of meat & lots of kale (also one of the cheapest things at the grocery store, & way less troubling than the cheap beef).

That was a lot of opinion for one post. Dear me. 

I shall leave you with this: having a wood stove in your kitchen is very nice, & looking out the window while cooking on the wood stove to chickens is even nicer.

There Is Really No Better View Than Chickens.

An out take from Eating & Drawing @ Flying Object, & also a glimpse at our new life in Greenfield.

January 2012: Lunch At My Painting Desk With DR Watching the Chickens.

So having our chicken owning fantasy come true? It is pretty great. After all that time trying to figure out how to have chickens in our community garden plot, or in our tiny slopped front yard on busy South Street, & suffering through terrible chicken jealousy when someone did have them...wow, finding this place with its own resident hen in need of people, Lucy, a very opinionated & bossy & fabulous Plymouth Rock, was one of those moments of luck I still can't quite believe.

In another moment of craiglist brilliance, I found three Rhode Island Red pullets, Amanda Jo, Lulu, & Miranda. This was the afternoon of their second day here at Barton Heights. 

Today's words of wisdom: there is no greater gift to an indoor cat then a nice window seat with a plant & a view of an active chicken coop. 

What was lunch, you ask? As this is a food blog & all? Why homemade beef, barley, & chickpea stew, reheated on our woodstove in a cast iron enamel pot, a huge white vintage one from Denmark I inherited from my mom which is one of my favorite things. Oh yeah, did I mention the cottage came with a woodstove too? I'm really in heaven here. 

More on the soup coming up, to be continued... 

Getting In The Thanksgiving Spirit, aka Cranberry Sauce & Stuffing & Gravy.

Well, it will be Thanksgiving the day after tomorrow. After some (hopefully brief) hours in Grocery Hell, I get to pack up my husband & my dog in the car (sorry DustyRose but you are not a good traveler), & drive to Cape Cod to see my family & eat good things.

 Thanksgiving 2010: The Sides, Part Two.

The (homemade by mum, always) cranberry sauce, the stuffing, & the garlicky green beans.

I lied. These sides are important too.

Anyway, I whine & moan a lot, but I'm grateful. Very very grateful, & looking forward to home tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving almost.

Vegan Spring Dinner. (Ramps & Fava Beans).

Ramps! Fresh Fava Beans! Omg! Spring!

Rin & Dan came to dinner recently, bringing with them ramps (baby leeks), fresh fava beans, & purple garlic. Yes, another Liz/Rin Iron Chef challenge, i.e. other than those ingredients we only used what I had in a relatively bare pantry, which helpfully did include sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes) & pinenuts.

Rin made a ramp/potato/sunchoke/garlic mash (it was amazing). I simmered some summer squash, fava beans, pinenuts, a yellow onion, & garlic in olive oil & pinot grigio, & we ate this on the side. (Rin won this challenge). Throw in two bottles of cheap pinot grigio & the new issue of Cosmo (50 Things To Do With Your Breasts!), & it was a good time.

Sorry for the long hiatus here. Taxes, baby plants growing, work, life, etc. Spring is not a time of year when I like to spend a lot of time on the computer. However, I'll be back soon for fiddleheads! & dry aged beef & kimchi & some of our recent projects.

Southern Style: Black Eyed Peas Two Times.

In light of the coming of SPRING (oh spring! hooray!) & the potential of future drawings of gardens & flowers & fresh beautiful vegetables, I'm attempting to work through my winter sketchbook archives, so I can enjoy spring as a fresh start unburdened by images of cold weather food.

It's been nagging me that my recent New Orleans post contained no southern food. Oh yes, there will be southern food in the coming months, oh oh oh fried green tomatoes & fresh okra & summer squash casserole & tomato/vidalia onion sandwiches oh YES,

but in fall & winter, there were spicy blacked eyed peas.

12.7.2009: with andouille sausage, (frozen) okra, jalapenos, & collard greens, with a side of garlic cheese grits. I usually use frozen peas, because one cannot apparently get fresh black eyed peas north of Virginia & I prefer frozen to canned. Throw everything in a big pot with a chopped onion & garlic, simmer, add a lot of bourbon. Cheese grits = cooked grits mixed with chopped garlic, grated cheese, & an egg, & baked covered for about 45 minutes. Yum.

& then last September, on one of the first chilly September nights, over rice with bacon, okra & sriracha hot sauce this time. Same basic concept, same generous amounts of whiskey. I usually choose sausage, but wow, with bacon, wicked good.
Being formerly married to a Mississippi girl has some perks. Growing up in Massachusetts has others, like comfortably employing 'wicked' as an adverb. But right now I'm daydreaming about garden plots & soil & tiny baby plants & mint juleps in the sun on my front porch...