RetroRevolution

Well the green beans have been coming in really well for about three weeks.  While we all love fresh green beans, we can only eat so many steamed and buttered green beans.  I decided to start coming up with some different recipes.  This one is a nice combination of some starches and vegetables.  It makes it a bit more filling than the straight green beans by themselves.  Another thing that makes this recipe particularly excellent is that 100% of the ingredients come from the garden or our pantry.

The ingredients:

• Fresh Green Beans
• Fresh Yellow Potatoes
• Bacon Flavored Textured Vegetable Protein (Bacos)
• Minced Garlic
• Dehydrated Onion
• Olive Oil

Dice the potato into 1/4″ to 1/2″ cubes and boil for a few minutes.  The goal is to cook them without letting them get too soft.  Slightly undercooked should be about perfect.  Drain and set aside.  Begin steaming the green beans.

In shallow pan heat the olive oil and begin to sauté the garlic and onion.  Add the potatoes and lightly brown the outside edges of the potatoes.  After the potatoes have browned, add the drained green beans.  Mix well and serve.

Finished Beans and Potatoes

It’s peach season here in Michigan and we’ve bee drying, canning, and in general eating peaches.  Tonight for dinner I made the girls some peach muffins.  What is wonderful about this recipe is that you can use just about any fruit you want with it to give it come variety.  Dried fruits work wonderfully with it too.  I suggest you slightly rehydrate the fruits first, but if you were to add a bit of extra water things should turn out just fine.

Peach Muffins with Oatmeal Cookie Topping

Simple Muffins (Makes 6 small muffins)

• 1 cup flour
• 1-1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup of milk
• 2 Tbsp oil

Preheat the oven to 400F.  Combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar in a bowl and mix well.  Combine the egg, milk, and oil in a second bowl and mix well.  Fold the flour mixture into the egg mixture and stir very lightly.  Do not over stir.  Add your fruit of choice now.  Spoon into muffin pan or cups and bake for 25 minutes.  Muffins are done when a knife inserted into the center of the muffin is clean upon removal.

Good Fruit Choices

• 3/4 cup of diced peaches
• 3/4 cup of diced apples
• 3/4 cup of blueberries
• 3/4 cup of raspberries

You can also put a spoonful of any jam or jelly into the center of the batter in each cup if fresh or dehydrated fruit isn’t available.

I have some questions for you today.

• How many butchers are in your hometown?
• How many cheese makers?
• How many mills to grind grain into flour?

While self sufficiency is great.  Can we realistically expect everyone to butcher their own chickens?  Grind their own grains?  Make their own candles?  I just don’t think we can be a great nation with a few million self sufficient islands that never talk to each other and need no help from each other to make it through the week.  Local farmers and gardeners are the first thought that comes to mind when people think “Eat Local”.  The reality is that the farmer is but one link in a local chain that needs to be reestablished if the local food movement is to gain any significant ground.  Small local bakeries, mills, deli’s and creameries need to be established and utilized if the movement if to gain ground.

As a community we need to find a balance between buying bread baked in Kansas City and shipped throughout the US, and everyone having their own little patch of wheat, grinding it into flour, and baking it into bread in their back yard.  Maybe if farming isn’t your cup of tea you need to consider becoming a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker.

Chicken breasts were on sale this past week and we enjoy the convenience of canned chicken.  When I started canning meats a few years ago, I canned all the chicken the same way; in a bath of boiling water with a bit of salt added.  I then gradually started adding a few things until I ended up with two types of chicken in the pantry.  The first was my old mainstay of plain chicken, and the second was basically chicken noodle soup without any vegetables or noodles.  We continued canning chicken this way for a long while, but then one day it occurred to me that I could add other things to the jar before I started canning.  The first thing I tried was to add some barbecue sauce.  It worked great and we could have pulled BBQ chicken sandwiches without any prep time.  The next thing I tried was adding taco seasoning to the chicken.  Now we could have chicken tacos and burritos with minimal preparation.  Pretty soon I had about 8 different varieties of chicken canned in the pantry for quick easy meals.

This past week I tried a new recipe.  Chicken Scampi.  Scampi traditionally means shrimp in Italian-American cuisine. Although the actual word for shrimp in Italian is gambero or gamberetto, plural gamberi or gamberetti. Scampi, by itself, is also the name of a preparation of shrimp grilled in garlic butter and white wine, usually served over pasta or rice. However the word scampi has evolved as a style of preparation rather than a dish or lone ingredient, with that preparation being called shrimp scampi.  From this simple idea chicken scampi was born.

I got the recipe itself from the Creative Canning blog.  Cyn has some great recipes and isn’t afraid to share her successes and failures through her blog.  The recipe as Cyn posted it can be found here.  Ever the tinkerer I felt the need to modify it a bit for my family’s taste.

Chicken Scampi

• 8 lbs. of chicken breast, boneless and skinned, cubed in 1″ chunks
• 2 tablespoon butter
• 4 tablespoons minced garlic
• 4 cups Chablis wine

Brown the chicken and garlic in the butter and then add the wine.  Simmer for a few minutes.  Pack the chicken into 6 or 7 pint jars.  Split the juice between the jars.  To each jar add the following:

• 1/2 Tbsp minced garlic
• 1/4 tsp of salt
• 1/8 tsp oregano
• 1/8 tsp basil
• a pinch of red pepper flakes
• 1/8 tsp of coarse black pepper

Cover with boiling water and process the pints for 75 minutes.

You can serve the chicken as it is over pasta or rice with some Mediterranean vegetables, or you can mix the can water with some heavy cream and a thickener like flour and serve over pasta for a dish similar to Alfredo.

Last winter I had a surplus of potatoes and I was pretty sure that there was no way we were going to use them before the potatoes went soft.  The potatoes in the garden now are just jutting above the soil and I hope to have a similar problem again this winter of too many potatoes.  I’m trying to grow the potatoes in tires again this year.  The technique is pretty simple and straight forward.

Home dried potatoes

• Place a piece of cardboard on the ground
• Place a tire on top of the cardboard
• Put about two inches of soil in the tire
• Set a couple seed potatoes in the soil
• Cover with 2-4 more inches of soil
• When the leaves are well developed add more soil to the tire until the bottom leaves of the stem are covered
• After the plant grows some more repeat the above step until the dirt has filled the tire
• After the tire is filled, stack another tire on top and add more soil as above
• Repeat until it is time to harvest in the fall.  You will probably have 5-6 tires stacked up.

Potatoes in Tires at Planting Time

You can easily get 50 pounds of potatoes per stack using this method of intensive gardening.

One of the things I like to do with the potatoes is make Latkes.

• 2 cups of re-hydrated shredded potatoes
• 1 tbsp re-hydrated onion
• 3 eggs beaten
• 2 tbsp flour
• 1-1/2 tsp salt

Stir all ingrediants together and form into patties.  Fry over a medium heat until golden brown.  Serve hot with sour cream or a side of apple sauce.

I especially love this recipe because it can be made with so many of the things that are easy to produce yourself or store.

Home Dried Potatoes Cooked as Hashbrowns