Good ol' goulash gets gooder (again)

Like zillions of other people, I have a collection of recipes passed down from my mother and grandmothers. Although my maternal grandmother grew up in what we'd call a privileged household, she experienced lean years as an adult in the midst of divorce and the Depression.

I'm sure my mom got her goulash recipe from my grandmother. I don't remember how many times we ate goulash - or olla podrida as she called it to give it a fancy twist. (Ironic that she tarted it up in Spanish because the word goulash already has an interesting derivation: It comes from the Hungarian word gulyás, which I think translates to something like "herder's stew.")

As I recall, Mom told us that olla podrida meant "all in a pot." What it actually means, apparently, is "rotten pot" in Spanish. Another irony: Potpourri also means "rotten pot" in French! Ha!

ANYway, my mom's goulash recipe involves ground beef, macaroni noodles, stewed or other canned tomatoes, black olives, and Parmesan cheese. Yum!

Yesterday I made what I first thought of as an updated goulash. I considered it updated because of the pasture-raised, grass-fed, antibiotic-free beef I used, along with the dark, leafy greens and fresh tomatoes (organic). I got to thinking. . . Before the era of factory farming, it's entirely feasible that my grandmother (and maybe her mother's cook) prepared goulash with pasture-raised, grass-fed, antibiotic-free beef, dark, leafy greens and fresh tomatoes (organic).

So, a more accurate name for the following recipe might be "Good ol' Goulash Like Great-Grandmother's Cook Used to Make." But that's pretty wordy.

1 lb. pasture-raised, grass-fed, antibiotic-free ground beef (locally raised, if possible)
1 bunch of organic dark, leafy greens, cut or chopped into big pieces;
toss stems in chicken scrap bowl (turnip, etc.) - rescued from a box of produce slated to go to my chickens
3 or 4 organic tomatoes, roughly chopped - ditto
1 big squirt from a tube of organic basil paste (or fresh basil)
1 big spoonful of chopped garlic
1 big splash of red wine (Trader Joe's Charles Shaw, aka two-buck chuck, works well)
1 cup or so of water
1 big handful of dry pasta (I used lasagne noodles for casseroles - those little ones)
Black olives (nixed in deference to our youngest, who doesn't like 'em)
Secret ingredient with which I may lose all credibility on the organic/locally grown/nutritious front: 1/4 jar or so of Cheez Whiz
Parmesan for sprinkling over individual servings

Brown the beef in a big pot or really big skillet. If it's very lean, I don't drain the fat. Add everything else except the Cheez Whiz and Parmesan. Cover and let cook over medium heat until pasta and veggies are cooked. Stir in the Cheez Whiz and heat a few minutes longer. Sprinkle Parmesan over individual servings, and serve with warmed sourdough bread. This looks fab and fancier if you serve it in big pasta bowls with wide rims.

Here are the leftovers, waiting to be heated up:

Stay tuned for my next blog: Remains of the fridge. . .

Like pulling teeth

A few years ago, we put together a family cookbook as our Christmas gift to each family unit of the extended clan. Let me state: If you're thinking of doing the same, START AT LEAST TWO YEARS IN ADVANCE! (Yes, I was yelling just now.)

We sent out an email request for recipes, pictures and family stories to accompany the recipes; that was. . . oh, sometime in September, I think. When we'd received recipes from exactly two people by late October, I sent out another email. Here follows the exchange, edited to protect goodwill and family relationships:

Hi, all--

OK, since you all ignored the first request, I'll simplify it. Please send 3-5 of your family's favorite recipes by email. Forget the stories and pictures . . . FORGET IT!! Just send the recipes AT LEAST!

The lack of response from my siblings is inexcusable. We, however, thought that we had a few months given the lack of any deadline. We will forward the recipes and pictures soon.

[Name withheld]

I realize I didn't give a deadline, and this was a mistake on my part.
I want the pictures and vignettes last week. Thank you.

I don't know who you people are. Please take me off your email.
-Doug
[Note: Doug is a fictitious member of the family who shows up in family reunion photos and has a place set for him at the holiday table when we get together.]

Dear (if I may be so bold) Doug,
Do you have any recipes to share?

Yes,
Hamburgers, hotdogs, spaghetti, raisins and corn.
Yours truly,
Doug

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I had the following email exchange with my beloved sister, a marvelous and creative cook who worked off and on in the food industry for years (and went to Cheley Camp and Yale):

Dear [name withheld],
I'm on the phone with you right now!
Please email me, stat, some of your favorite recipes-especially ones you've created.

I have no new faves other than our family recipes. None. The turkey. Corn/tom casserole. Colcannon. Dad's carrots. The baked beans.
Nothing new here for years. I don't cook anymore. Haven't for a long long time.
Can we still be related?

Dad's baked beans. Good thinking!

Mom's dilled cuke salad. Dad's cole slaw.

The cuke salad with garlic salt? We make that all the time!
Are you thinking of a diff one with dill? Remind me, please!
Cole slaw=yes, but I need you to construct the recipe, please.

And here is the recipe she sent. It's good, too. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Fine shredded cabbage
Salt
Dill weed
One fine chopped onion (optional)
Diced garden toms
Mayonnaise (NOT Miracle Whip or some form of salad dressing)
Green olives (optional)

The majority of the recipes came in too late to publish the book for that Christmas. Two Christmases later, the book made it under everyone's tree.

Soup's on!

Today's hand-me-down food haul includes 2 packs of portabella mushrooms that have seen better days, an aged onion and a loaf of party-sandwich-sized sourdough that needs to be used pronto or stuck in the freezer.

The kid isn't eating dinner with us tonight, so I'm making one of his un-favorites: mushroom soup. It's not a favorite of mine, either, but I'm going to make it creamy and unctuous and convince myself that I love it because my dinner buddy really does. :-)

BTW, "unctuous" doesn't have a flattering dictionary definition. However, I prefer to think that unctuousness will enhance our mushroom soup experience.

Alors, revenons à nos moutons, as my French friends say.

According to Produce Pete, portabellas may taste "richer and more intensely mushroomy" as they mature. So, it sounds like it's an asset that I'm using portabellas somewhere on the senior side of things. (Take note, whippersnappers.)

I cut out anything that looked suspect on the mushrooms, put them in a pan with some olive oil and started to sweat them over medium heat. (The pot belonged to my Norwegian-American grandma, a wonderful and generous cook.)

After checking out a recipe from Anthony Bourdain on Epicurious (just for the basics), I added some butter and the elderly onion, cut into slices.

Speaking of butter: Do you save the wrappers in the freezer to butter pans for baking?

Mais, revenons à nos champignons.

When the mushrooms and onions were damp and not browned, I zapped a jar of frozen homemade vegetable broth (from hand-me-down veggies) in the microwave and added the broth to the pot. It's all simmering now.

OK, I'm back. After simmering the soup for at least 30 minutes, I spun it in the blender in batches. Seriously, DO blend hot liquid in batches if you're blending a big saucepan full of it, and HOLD DOWN THE BLENDER LID, for Pete's sake.

The soup tasted pretty intensely mushroomy, indeed, when I tested it. I added a splash of red wine (having no sherry, as suggested by Anthony Bourdain), a little milk and a tsp. or so of salt, heated it gently, and served it garnished with snippets of chives from our garden, which has been waking up for the past couple of weeks.

I warmed the sourdough loaf in the oven and sliced it to go with.

I shall call this dish "Mushroom Soup on the Fly."


As a non sequitur - and this is a little embarrassing to admit - our two rescued cats are starting a diet, effective today. Our vet called them "chubby." She said they are likely motivated by food, "as chubby cats are." Prescription cat food and a measuring cup are sitting on the kitchen counter. O.P. and Dubh have been weighed and found to be too. . . er. . . portly. One came to us that way, but the other was a scrawny little guy when our daughter found him. Four years later, his stomach swings from side to side as he walks. We're hoping the diet helps do away with cystitis for one and sore hips for both.

Also by way of a non sequitur, don't use Oven Cleaner to take the grease off the painted surface of your stove vent. . .

Work vs. work

Huge, huge props to Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, whose life-changing book Your Money or Your Life articulates a distinction that most of us may have missed for much of our working lives. In pointing out the two different roles we in the "developed" world have assigned work - (one) to get us money and (two) to provide fulfillment of our desires for duty, creating things, socializing, service for the greater good, prestige, success in doing something well and so on - the authors note that expecting our job to satisfy both these roles creates a problem with the idea of work.

As they write, "The real problem with work, then, is not that our expectations are too high. It's that we have confused work with paid employment. Redefining 'work' as simply any productive or purposeful activity, with paid employment being just one activity among many, frees us from the false assumption that what we do to put food on the table and a roof over our heads should also provide us with our sense of meaning, purpose and fulfillment. Breaking the link between work and money allows us to reclaim balance and sanity."

AMEN!!

The book doesn't suggest that we should float around living off of someone else's labor and spouting platitudes about excessive materialism while we take advantage of other people's hard-earned materials. Instead, it redefines much of the stuff we all do outside those eight hours of paid work. Planting a garden? Sewing new curtains? Repairing the broken recliner mechanism for the fourth time? Driving your kids to a live theater production? Creating a great necklace? Organizing your photo albums? Taking a class on food and wine pairing?

These are real work, baby! You're not unemployed just because you're out of a paying job. If being unemployed means not getting paid for the work you do, then most of us are unemployed about 14 hours every day and on the weekends! Do you really stop doing meaningful work once you walk out that door at your job?

My friend Angie, a business coaching consultant at The Coaching Continuum, and I have mulled over this subject together many times. Both of us feel underemployed in the sense that we do a lot of work in a variety of arenas and get paid for a small fraction of it. Get paid with money, that is. We decided to list our skill sets that would aid us in a particular venture; independently, we tackled these lists by writing down the obvious skills first - what we are trained to do through formal education and years of job experience. But those lists seemed artificially short to us. Remember, we were creating our lists independently to share with each other at our next meeting. At that meet-up, we pulled out our notes and saw what we had both done: After the first list, we had each given ourselves free rein to make a lengthy inventory of some of our strengths that serve us well every single day in any situation: nurturing, repairing, encouraging, writing scripts, gardening, thinking critically, playing piano, helping others clarify goals, cooking, fundraising, economizing, networking, self-marketing, beadweaving, puppet-making, organizing disparate items, volunteering, reading music, identifying needs and resources, etc., etc., etc.

These are skills used in everyday life, but because there's not a paycheck attached to most of them for each of us, we don't tend to view the results they reap as work. Yet they help us care for people around us, make the world a nicer place, run our homes, avoid buying unhealthful or unnecessary items, create beauty, support friends and organizations, and so on. Is there a better purpose for work?

Yes, we need money. Money is a symbol of value that helps us assign worth to material objects and to our own work. But if money is all we're after from our jobs, then let's stop apologizing for what we do outside our paying jobs if what we do is creative, helpful and pleasurable. Let's stop calling our hobbies "guilty pleasures" if they make ANYBODY'S lives that much more pleasant. Let's view the food basket we put together for an ailing neighbor as representative of some of our best life work.

Too, let's turn the tide on our expectations for our jobs. There's a wealth of satisfaction to be gained from what you do at home for your nearest and dearest - and the folks at home won't escort you to the front door with a cardboard box containing all your desk tchotchkes when the budget simply has to be cut or your productivity just didn't hit the mark last year. It's great to get kudos at work for the tasks everyone else sees you do. But how about all those little unfinished (or unstarted. . .) jobs at home that no one but your family sees? Are they really less important than what the boss wants you to do?

Are you trying as hard at the other work in your life just because it isn't paid?

Life is just a bowl of lemons

It can feel that way during the winter months in California, anyway. That's when lots of citrus comes ripe.

At our house, we have a Meyer lemon tree that grows more like an exuberant shrub and produces an abundance of fruit every year. As I love to tell people, this particular tree was little more than a stick when we put it in our garden several years ago. When we moved to our present house, the long hedge under the front window consisted of two Meyer lemon trees pruned into a low hedge. We pulled them out and replaced them with privet, intending to get the lemon trees into the ground in the garden.

We waited so long that they became mere shadows of their former selves and looked like they were dead. We tossed one into the compost heap and, for some forgotten reason, kept the other. An older gardener friend wisely told us to plant that remaining Meyer lemon and it would come back. Although we didn't believe him 100%, we stuck it in the ground. Lo and behold, it blossomed forth into a massive plant that has supplied family, friends and neighbors with lemons for years.

Have you ever tasted a Meyer lemon? It's thought to be a cross between a "regular" lemon and an orange--perhaps a mandarin. The flowers are deeply, gloriously fragrant and the leaves are a lovely dark, shiny green. The fruit is rounder than a true lemon, without the pointy football ends. The skin turns from yellow to almost orange when the fruit is ripe, and the fruits can stay ripe on the bush for many weeks (dare I say months?) in cold weather. The fruit is sweeter than true lemons and adds a wonderful taste to dishes--especially baked goods. I freeze a lot of juice each year for lemonade, but, to be honest, I prefer regular lemons in lemonade because they're tangier.

Here's a healthy, tasty concoction for coughs and sore/strained throats: 2 T. of lemon juice (I use a whole Meyer lemon), 2 T. of honey or real maple syrup (gotta love the antibacterial properties of honey!), and a sprinkle of dried cayenne pepper.

I came into some free oranges, blood oranges, limes and true lemons a few days ago.

I juiced the limes and lemons separately and froze those juices, then juiced the remaining citrus together.

The juice was a gorgeous, jewel-like red from the blood oranges. Very, very pulpy, but we like it that way. Suffice it to say that it didn't make it into the freezer.

Rinds went out to the chicken yard, where the chickens will help compost them by pooping all over them and grinding them into the dirt. :-)

At this point, since this is a kitchen blog, I feel compelled to share my mom's delicious lemon bread recipe. It's a tea bread, so please practice crooking your pinky finger as you read.

Oven at 350. Find a loaf pan.

1/3 c. melted butter
1 c. sugar
2 eggs (unbeaten)
1 1/2 c. sifted flour
grated rind of one lemon
3 T. lemon extract (I don't always add this)
1/2 c. ground almonds
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1/2 c. whole milk

Mix sugar with melted butter. Beat in eggs. Mix and sift all dry ingredients together. Add dry ingredients alternately with milk, and beat just enough to blend. Fold in lemon rind, lemon extract and almonds. Bake 50 minutes. Remove from pan to cool after 20 minutes. While still hot, drip juice of one lemon mixed with 1/2 c. sugar over top. Wrap in aluminum foil. Do not cut for 24 hours. (HA!) This is a teacake that can be served plain or toasted, keeps well, and freezes well.

If my mother could see me now. . .

I used to cringe at my mother's thriftiness. Born during the Depression and raised singlehandedly by her own mother after her father left his family for another woman, my mom knew how to save with the best of them. We joked that it was in her Scots blood. Mom scrimped, saved, reused, recycled, made do or did without, questioned waitresses about receipts, sent in for $1 refunds, waited until items went on sale, and pinched pennies so hard they screamed.

Man, did she embarrass me.

And then I became her.

You see, after my mom passed away several years ago, I realized that she had managed to save - out of my parents' modest income - enough money for my dad and her to travel to Europe several times. . . to give extravagant gifts to her grandchildren at Christmas and birthdays. . . to feed a horde of single friends at Thanksgiving. . . to support organizations that battled against hunger and animal cruelty and for human rights. . . to give regularly to her church. . . and more. All of this from the woman who kept her skivvies together with safety pins on more than one occasion.

She had to have been doing something right, I figured.

Nowadays, while I save safety pins for other uses, I find myself skimping and scrimping a lot like Mom did. I enjoy my pet indulgences (see my beading blog, for instance), but I really do weigh most purchases carefully before deciding yea or nay.

Recently, I became acquainted with a wonderful woman who rescues animals scheduled for destruction at shelters and finds new homes for them. She also collects food for various local groups that serve homeless people and others experiencing hard times. She keeps some of the food that's really long in the tooth for a hog farmer and for her own chickens, and she now shares some with us for our chickens. (We raise them for eggs, not meat.)

She also passes along produce and other items that are past their sell-by date or cosmetically icky but still safe to eat. This is food that needs to be dealt with quickly.

After receiving lots of apples (organic, no less!) that were beat up but usable,

I put in a session of slicing/peeling/coring on my indispensable slicer/peeler/corer (note the little pile of apple labels next to the peeler, headed to the garbage can),

threw a big bowl of peels, cores and rejected apples into the chicken yard,

cooked the apple slices with a little water, lemon juice (from our Meyer lemon bush), agave syrup, lots of cinnamon and a touch of salt,

blended it all up with an immersion blender, put several jars of applesauce into the freezer and shared a couple with family members. Some of the sauce in the freezer will go into baskets my women's group assembles for families experiencing difficult situations.

Roundup: Instead of being tossed into the garbage and added to the solid waste stream at our local dump, the apples were collected from a retailer and sorted for use as human or animal food; the ones for human use were then sorted further and processed, with the scraps going to our chickens, who will use this feed as fuel and will produce eggs as well as droppings for garden fertilizer.

A very productive circle!