Recipe: Spaghetti Soup

Spaghetti soup

2 quarts water
2 quarts homemade spaghetti sauce (or could use 2 jars of store bought stuff)
1 1/2 sleeves of yam noodles (1 1/2 pounds dry noodles) (or could use 1 1/2 pounds spaghetti noodles of whatever type you like)

Put in large slow cooker on high for 4 hours. At 3 hours use kitchen shears to chop up noodles.

At 4 hours, stir in 24 ounces sour cream and 6 ounces shredded Asiago and parmesan cheeses. Should be consistency of stew. If too thick, add water, sauce, or milk.

Serve with grain free bread and green veggies.

Cooking Tip: to shred cheese when hands are hurting. Chunk with a knife. Drop into a blender. Pulse until little crumbles.

Makes 5-6 quarts. Freezes well.

Easy Egg Salad for hurting hands

I wanted to make egg salad this weekend, but with the weather changes, my hands are definitely hurting a bit with fibromyalgia and arthritis flare.  SOOOO.... time to problem solve.

And the answer was ...  Use the oven.

Break raw eggs into a glass baking dish.  (I used 20 eggs and can definitely state that cracking eggs is MUCH easier than peeling boiled ones!!).

Cover with a layer of parchment paper to reduce development of tough layer of baked egg. (The layer that forms when baking eggs is kind of like taffy and gets stuck in your teeth.  The parchment paper fixes this.)

Put glass baking dish in oven and turn onto 350 degrees fahrenheit.   Bake for 45 minutes (until completely baked in the center).

Remove from oven.  Let cool.

Chunk up and drop into a food processor or blender.  Pulse to mince up the egg into bits.  Dump into a mixing bowl.

Add mayo and mustard to taste.  Stir.

(For me, I make my mayo and add mustard powder to it so that I only have one thing to add.  Also, I mix the mayo/mustard into the eggs in the same food processor - so no by hand mixing.)

To make your own mayo:
1 raw egg. (If raw eggs flip you out, this works just fine with pasteurized egg-beaters or other egg substitute)
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon (or maybe 2 teaspoons) onion powder.
1-2 teaspoons mustard powder.

BLEND.

1/2 tablespoon or so lemon juice. (the longer you wait to add lemon juice the hotter the mustard powder develops)

BLEND

DRIZZLE SLOWLY into blender mixing on high speed 3/4 cup oil.

The oil makes an emulsion with the egg mixture.  Drizzling it in slowly is the trick to getting your mayo mixture to solidify.

You can also add other spices or herbs to the mix instead of the mustard for southwestern or italian or other types of dressings.  Vinegar instead of lemon juice and sugar = sauce for crab salad.

Broth x 3

A local store has 10 pounds of chicken legs and thighs for sale at $0.68 per pound (a total of $6.80).  So, I got a couple sets.  In a LARGE stock pot, I put chicken, onion, garlic, and a bit of salt.  Filled the thing up with about a gallon of water (which is why I use a large pot), and let that simmer (with a lid on it) for about 8 hours.

Strained out the chicken, onion and garlic.  Boiled the gallon of broth down to less than 1/6 of the starting amount.  Cool.  Freeze in ziplock bags or in mason jars.  This is broth 1.



Cool the chicken pieces and the onion and garlic.  When cool enough to work with, pick the meat out of the skin and off the bones.  Put skin, bones, joints, and onion and garlic back into the large pot.  Fill with 1-2 gallons of water.  Simmer for 12 hours.  Remove the solids and boil down to 1/6 the amount of liquid.  Cool.  Freeze in Ziploc bags or in mason jars.  This is broth 2.

Crack the bones (use a meat hammer).  Put the remaining solids, the cracked bones, an onion, some celery, and some garlic into the large pot.  Add a gallon of water.  Bring to a boil.  Reduce heat and put a lid on the pot.  Simmer for 12 hours.  Remove solids and discard the solids.  Boil the broth down.  This is broth 3.  For broth 3, the flavor is less intense than in broth 1 or 2.  So this is the perfect broth to use for delicately flavored soups, to use for boiling potatoes for mashed potatoes, or for cooking fish.

Quick and easy mashed potatoes: The perfect use of a Ninja...

When your hands hurt - or you have a stomach bug and allergies enough you cannot take advantage of instant potatoes...  Here is a great way to make quick and easy homemade mashed potatoes.

Rinse several potatoes.

Put on glass baking dish.  Set into oven.  Turn onto 400 degrees Fahrenheit.  Let bake at least a hour.  Done when soft to the touch.

Pull glass dish with baked potatoes out of oven.  Using silicon mitt to protect your hands, split the potatoes and squish out the insides into a bowl.  Either set the skins aside later for baked cheese skins or dispose of the skins.

Into Ninja (I used the small pitcher and the dough blade), dump the tater insides.  Add butter and milk to taste.  I used about 1/3 cup milk, 3 medium potatoes, and 2 tablespoons butter.  Put the lid on and process like you would dough.  Scrape down the sides once or twice if needed.  Add salt, garlic, sour cream, etc. to suit yourself.

The actual work time for this - about 6 minutes all told.  The total time from start to eating... about 1 1/2 to 2 hours.  For me, with a stomach bug today... I took a nap for the time it was taking to bake the potatoes.

Even better - the dishes all went into the dishwasher... so no fuss, no mess, and something gentle on the tummy.

Dehydrating Watermelon, doing household tasks, putting up broths.

Today - dehydrating watermelon and dehydrating pear sauce (makes fruit leathers).  -

• Cut the watermelon into strips.  
• Pour the pear sauce (pears from neighbors trees, cinnamon, all spice, nutmeg, honey, water - cooked 24 hours on low in the crockpot, processed through the ninja, sieved of chunks/skin/etc; makes pear sauce.  Same can be done with any fruit) into a liquid tray of a food processor.  
• Dehydrate both for 16-24 hours on 110.  Makes very tasty fruit leathers and pieces of watermelon "leather".  

Unhappy moment of the weekend - I think I am starting to react to cinnamon. Tried several different sources and all cause mouth burning and twinge my head. So, cinnamon is on the no-go list for a couple months. Will try it again about Christmas time/January 2014.



BROTH
CHICKEN

• Cook Chicken in a VERY LARGE stock pot with onion, garlic, salt, other seasonings as preferred.  
• When chicken is pull off the bone tender, remove chicken.  
• Boil the broth left down to 1/3 of the level it was when you removed the chicken.  
• Put in fridge overnight.  
• Skim off fat if you want to.  
• Bag in ziplocs or in freezer storage containers.  
• Freeze.  
• Good for 6 months in a deep freezer.  

VENISON - Same with the venison broth.

TINY STORAGE OPTION FOR BROTH:
You can reduce further, spread on the liquid tray of the dehydrator and dehydrate to store in smaller containers

USES FOR BROTH:
Then, Take the broth and use it to cook beans that you have soaked.  Once done, remove the beans and eat those.  Then use the leftover broth for making dumplings.  (I make grain free dumplings).

All broths from cooked veggies and meats can be AWESOME to save to increase nutritional value of your foods.


THE DAY'S SCHEDULE ... AND THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS
Happy Moment - Got the things packed from the kitchen. So, when I find a job, and start having money, a little more packing is done for moving out. YAY!


Today's list - laundry and hanging out clothes, Coursera Class starting (free class, topics of interest to me...) Global Health. Dishes. Freezing Chix broth and venison broth. Packing a couple boxes of books. giving the dog a bath.
We will see how far I get!

Monday - final signatures for internship and submitting the final paperwork. Job interview.

Tuesday - Job Fair, meeting with pastors of youth groups.

Wednesday - depending on how I am feeling, hiking or maybe just level ramblings about the outdoors.