Roasted Tomatillo Salsa

June 15, 2015 / featherheadlady / Leave a comment

I almost always prefer green salsas to red ones. Unless the green salsa is very hot and the red is not. In New Mexico they use the term “Christmas” when both red and green chilies are used in a dish…or, if you can’t choose your salsa, just tell them you want Christmas.

I like this mild salsa made with tomatillos. Tomatillos look like green tomatoes with a papery covering. Apparently ripe tomatillos are red or purple but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ripe one. When you choose them in the grocery they should be firm but not hard and the papery husks should be open but intact. They have a hint of citrus flavor and, like tomatoes, they add acid to a dish. This salsa is very easy to make.

Salsa Ingredients:

6-7 tomatillos

2 jalapeños (seeded or not)

2 poblano peppers

3-4 garlic cloves whole

1 fresh lime

1 small onion rough chopped

Salt to taste

Wash the peppers and tomatillos, halve them and spread them out on a baking sheet along with the whole garlic cloves.

Roast then under the broiler until they are nicely charred.

Add the roasted vegetables along with their juices and the chopped onion into your food processor. Pulse until smooth. Juice the lime and stir in along with salt to taste.

This roasted tomatillo salsa is great with warm corn chips.

Or on your fish taco. Spicy baked cod, queso fresco (mild Mexican farmers cheese), slaw and salsa.

Or to spice up breakfast. Potatoes fried with onions and peppers, over easy eggs, crispy bacon and tomatillo salsa.

I love cilantro and, if I had had cilantro on hand, I would have added it to this salsa. Also, I seeded my jalapeños but if you prefer more heat leave the seeds. Whatever modifications you make I hope you enjoy changing up your usual red for a little of the green or opting for Christmas.

Super Laundry Sauce

June 3, 2015 / featherheadlady / 2 Comments

Looks good enough to eat but it’s definitely not edible. It’s sauce for doing your laundry. It’s an excellent stain remover. It’s easy to make. And it’s economical. Very economical! You can do 128 loads of laundry for less than $2.00. I like a bargain as much as the next person but the real reason I keep making this is because it works so well.

Ingredients:

1 bar Fels Naptha

3 cups boiling water

1 cup 20 Mule Team Borax Powder

1 cup Arm & Hammer Washing Soda

2 wide mouth quart jars

You’ll find all of these ingredients in the laundry section in the grocery store.

Cut the bar of Fels Naptha in half and then chop each half into little pieces.

Put half the chopped up Fels Naptha in one jar, half in the other. Pour 1 1/2 cups of boiling water in each jar, cover, and let them sit until the next morning.

The next morning you can turn the jar upside down and the Fels Naptha and water will have gelled. Use a butter knife to score the gel.

Add one half cup of the 20 Mule Team Borax to each jar. Add one half cup of the Arm and Hammer Washing Soda to each jar. Put the tea kettle on and add boiling water just up to the shoulder of each jar. Leave about an inch and a half of headspace.

Using an immersion blender blend the mixture until it looks like mayonnaise. Or if your mason jar will fit the base of your blender whip until smooth and creamy. If you don’t own an immersion blender or a regular blender scrape the contents into a deep bowl and whip with a hand mixer. Once it’s whipped use a rubber spatula to work it back into the jar.

One tablespoon is all you need to wash a large load of laundry. Great for front loaders and high efficiency machines because it is low sudsing.

If you have a stain rinse the area with cold water and use some of the laundry sauce to pretreat. Everyone I know that’s made this sauce loves it!

I originally found this recipe on a site called Budget101.com.

Asparagus and Garlic Pasta

May 29, 2015 / featherheadlady / Leave a comment

On one of our weekly shopping expeditions my friend and I discovered the most awesome pasta made in Grand Rapids Michigan by the Local Epicurean. The box says it is “hand made pasta by passionate artisans.” I believe them. There are numerous combinations including lemon dill, asiago oregano, portobello Parmesan, red beet, asparagus garlic and several others. I’ve purchased and cooked many different pastas that purport to contain various vegetables but they seem to only be colored pastas. The Local Epicurean pastas actually taste like the ingredients they are infused with. Each package has cooking instructions and a recipe. This is the recipe, slightly modified, for the asparagus garlic pasta.

Ingredients:

4 T olive oil

1 cup asparagus cut into approximately 1″ pieces

1 cup grape tomatoes halved

1 cup of sweet yellow peppers rough chopped

1 cup mini portobellos

4-5 cloves of garlic minced

1/4 cup shallots sliced

1 cup fresh grated Parmesan cheese

1 package asparagus garlic pasta

Put up a large kettle of salted water for the pasta and bring it to a boil. This pasta cooks very quickly, 4-6 minutes.

Prep all of the vegetables.

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet and add all of the vegetables stirring occasionally. Cook 5-6 minutes until vegetables are tender. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

While the vegetables are cooking grate a generous cup of parmigiana reggiano.

Once the pasta is cooked drain but do not rinse.

Add the pasta, cheese, and about 1/2 cup of the pasta cooking liquid to the vegetables.

Toss until well combined and serve. Enjoy every bite.

You can add shrimp, scallops, or thinly sliced chicken breast but I served it as a vegetarian meal. It could also be garnished with some fresh parsley or basil. Serve with a nice salad and some good bread and you have a meal that you’d be proud to serve any guest. And how easy was that! If you cannot find this particular pasta the recipe would still make a very tasty dish.

I was recently at Eataly in Chicago with my daughter and was inspired to make my own pasta. I haven’t made pasta in a very long time. Years and years. I just think it would be great fun especially if I can talk someone into doing it with me. Maybe that will be one of my next blogs. We’ll see.

Baby Shoes

May 27, 2015 / featherheadlady / 2 Comments

I love making these little felted baby shoes!

1. They are adorable.

2. Everyone who has received a pair says they stay on baby’s feet amazingly well.

3. They are a wonderful use for odds and ends of 100% wool yarn.

4. They are an extremely portable knitting project.

and

5. They make up quickly providing nearly instant gratification.

Liver-Palooza

May 27, 2015May 27, 2015 / featherheadlady / Leave a comment

Liver-Palooza…..not for the faint of heart or lily-livered.

The urban dictionary defines palooza as “an all out crazy party.” One of the tweets referred to palooza as “a big Norwegian festival.” Not sure either of those are entirely appropriate but this week was a Liver-Palooza for me after a long liver hiatus. I do have a lifetime of liver memories. When I was a child one of my mother’s requirements was that we cleaned our plates. That was not a bad thing if you liked what was on your plate. But that wasn’t always the case. Like when she decided to serve liver and onions for supper. My dad will not eat liver and I know for a fact my mother never required him to clean his plate on liver nights. I remember her putting strawberry jam on our liver to help it go down. I’m probably correct in assuming that I am the only remaining person in my family that actually voluntarily eats liver.

Anyone who was on Weight Watchers in the early 70s like I was will remember Jean Nidetch decided that, to lose weight successfully and to get the body’s requirement of vitamins and iron, one meal a week had to include a serving of liver the size of a deck of cards. By then I was able to eat it without the strawberry jam.

My husband frequently tells people about one of our first dinner dates in Chicago when he took me to the Italian Village, a favorite place of his, and I order liver and onions. As I recall, the Italian Village did a great job on the liver!

This most recent liver palooza came about as a thank you to a good friend for a huge favor he did for me. I typically don’t cook liver because it is one of the very few foods my husband won’t eat. Liver and Lima beans. (I don’t cook Lima beans either.) I invited our friends to dinner Saturday night and cooked liver and onions and bacon for him and for me and I made some pretty awesome chef salads for his wife and my husband. The liver tasted great. The trick is to not cook it for so long that it looks and cuts like a piece of shoe leather. It should be a little pink in the center and tender. I soak it in milk for about a hour, dry it off, dredge it in seasoned flour and fry it in my cast iron pan in some of the bacon drippings.

Lots of onion and good quality liver.

Tuesdays are grocery shopping days and we stopped at a little Amish market for organic milk. My friend and I both spied Koegel’s Braunschweiger in the cooler and we both purchased a piece. It’s been a couple decades I think since I had Braunschweiger. Which brings me to today’s lunch.

Braunschweiger is a German word that, in America, refers to liver wurst. I started to read how liver wurst is made and then I stopped. You might not want to read about it either.

Today for lunch I made myself a sandwich.

Sour dough bread, Hellmans mayo, red onion, tomato, lettuce, and, of course, my liver wurst. Some assembly required.

I ate my sandwich along with a nice hot cup of coffee on the back porch. A solo picnic. In honor of Jean Nidetch I substituted lettuce for the top of my sandwich.

After this week I will probably have another long liver hiatus. Except perhaps for the occasional crackers and pate.

Blueberry Buttermilk Pound Cake

May 22, 2015May 22, 2015 / featherheadlady / Leave a comment

It has been a couple weeks since my last post. We’ve been doing some traveling and most recently I spent a week in Chicago with my daughter. A perfectly wonderful celebration of Mother’s Day and my birthday. As they age a lot of people stop celebrating birthdays or lie a little about their age. My theory is, the older we get the longer we should celebrate. This year the two middle weeks of May are my birthday and next year it may be the entire month! Birthday lunches and dinners with family and friends, toasts, presents, cards, FB greetings…embrace your age, embrace the attention, wear a tiara, eat cake. If no one bakes you a cake, bake your own. That’s what I did! While I was in Chicago my daughter and I made this cake. A new experiment. And a successful one. I decided to replicate this delicious cake for my birthday.

Ingredients:

1 cup butter at room temperature

2 cups sugar

4 eggs

3 cups flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp almond extract

2 cups blueberries

Preheat your oven to 325 and grease a bundt pan.

In a mixing bowl cream the butter until light and fluffy.

Gradually add the sugar and beat until well blended. Add the eggs, beating after each addition.

Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt. Add to the creamed mixture alternating with the buttermilk. Begin and end with the dry ingredients.

Stir in the extracts. Stir in the blueberries.

Spoon the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 1 hour. Allow the cake to cool for 10-15 minutes, invert the pan and plate the cake.

Now sometimes the things I bake are works of art and sometimes they’re not. Today this cake was not a work of art!!

This is the cake I baked last week with my daughter.

This was the birthday cake I baked myself. Oh my. I really should be embarrassed to post this picture. I’ve had problems with things sticking in this pan before but this was ridiculous. We are eating the cake and it tastes SO much better than it looks. But the pan is in the trash! I need to buy myself a new bundt pan. Maybe a birthday gift to myself.

This cake is great with a scoop of vanilla or butter pecan ice cream or a generous dollop of whipped cream. Happy birthday to me!

Shepherd’s Pie

May 7, 2015 / featherheadlady / 2 Comments

Shepherd’s Pie is a dish that works well with countless variations. I, in fact, just sent a recipe for a Pizza Shepherd’s Pie to my brother who is a pizza aficionado.

I’m leaving to spend a week with our daughter soon and I’ve been making dishes that result in leftovers so my husband will have good eats while I’m away. Last night it was Mac and Cheese. Tonight Shepherd’s Pie.

Ingredients for base:

1 lb ground beef

1 medium onion rough chopped

4-5 cloves of garlic

1 T beef Better than Bouillon

2 T flour

1 pint stewed tomatoes

2 cups vegetables (I used corn and asparagus)

1/4 cup fresh parsley chopped

1 tsp dried thyme

salt and pepper to taste

Ingredients for Potato topping:

2 lbs of potatoes peeled and cut up

5-6 carriers peeled and cut up

3-4 cloves of garlic

cream or half-n-half

3 T butter

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

salt and pepper to taste

Peel the potatoes and carrots, rinse well, add the whole garlic cloves and cook until the potatoes and carrots are tender. While the potatoes cook begin preparing the base.

In a heavy Dutch oven cook the ground beef until it’s no longer pink.

Remove the cooked beef to a bowl and leave approximately 2 T of the drippings in the Dutch oven. (My meat was very lean and I had to add a little olive oil to the pan.) Add the onions and garlic to the drippings and cook over medium heat until the onions are tender.

Stir the flour into the onion garlic mix and cook for a couple minutes stirring constantly. Stir in the tomatoes, thyme, and the Better than Bouillon. Cook over medium heat stirring occasionally until mixture begins to thicken.

Stir in the ground beef and the chopped parsley. Add salt and pepper to taste. Thoroughly combine and pour into a casserole dish. Preheat oven to 400.

Distribute the vegetables over the meat.

Once the potatoes and carrots are tender drain the water and whip or mash adding butter, cream and cheese. Add salt and pepper to taste. I usually mash the potatoes, always mash them for my daughter who likes a lump here or there, but for this casserole I like to whip them.

Evenly distribute the potato mixture over the casserole.

Bake for 20 minutes or until the meat mixture starts to bubble around the edges. Scoop onto your plate and enjoy. Serve with a salad and some good crusty bread. We both had second helpings and there is still plenty left for two good meals while I’m away.

NOTE: Lamb or a combo beef/pork mix would be good substitutes for the beef. Fresh mushrooms are a good add to the onion/garlic mixture. Peas, green beans, spinach are some of the vegetables that can be substituted for the corn and asparagus. A little horseradish or another type of cheese change up the potato icing. Anyway you mix it up, it’s an easy, hearty meal. A little bit classy, a little bit trashy.

Quilted Pillow

April 30, 2015 / featherheadlady / 5 Comments

A few weeks ago I lost a dear family friend, Peggy Johnson. When I went through one of the boxes of sewing and knitting supplies I inherited I came across four quilt squares that she had hand sewn appliqués on. She did a meticulous job. And I wanted to do something with them. So, a pillow it is. One of my Knit Wit friends quilted around the appliqué and sewed the squares together. I don’t think in that order. Quilting isn’t my expertise. I sewed the backing on, put the pillow form inside and hand stitched the opening.

Voila. I have a beautiful pillow that is so awesome it took 3 people to make.

Mediterranean Orzo Salad

April 30, 2015 / featherheadlady / Leave a comment

Some of my favorite recipes are from my Knit Wit girl friends. We have the most incredible pot lucks! All of us love to cook and bake and feed people. This recipe showed up at one of our feasts and I make it often. It’s a great side dish but last night it was my entree with a piece of crusty bread I made a couple nights ago.

Ingredients:

1 cup uncooked orzo (prepared per package instructions)

2 cups baby spinach chopped

5 oz jar sun dried tomatoes in oil

3 T red onion chopped

1/2 cup sliced kalamata olives

6 oz jar marinated artichoke hearts undrained

14 oz can small artichoke hearts chopped

3 oz feta cheese

NOTE: I used sweet white onion because I didn’t have red. And I was out of feta cheese…which is really a good addition. But the salad still tasted really good even without the cheese. 😊

Bring two cups of salted water to a boil, add the orzo and cook for about 5 minutes. Drain and set aside.

Rough chop both artichokes and put them in a salad bowl. Set the marinade aside.

Rough chop the tomatoes (reserve the oil) and dice the onion.

Add the tomatoes, onion, and sliced olives to the salad bowl.

Add the orzo to the salad bowl. I like to do it when the orzo is still warm. I think the orzo observes the flavors of the marinade and oil better.

Rough chop the spinach and add it to the salad bowl.

Toss the salad along with the marinade from the jar of artichokes and some of the oil from the sun dried tomatoes. Add 3 oz of cubed feta cheese (remember, I was out of feta) and salt and pepper to taste. I prefer this salad at room temperature but it’s also good chilled. Either way, I’m sure you will enjoy it.

This salad is great served with lamb chops, fish or even a good burger. This afternoon we had left over salad with tuna melts.

Citrus Chicken with Vegetables

April 27, 2015April 27, 2015 / featherheadlady / 3 Comments

This recipe is an amalgam of different recipes that I, at one time or another, tore out of magazines and filed away. I get several food magazines and I used to see recipes that I thought looked especially good so I saved the entire magazine. When I decided I wanted to try that special dessert or salad or soup that I’d seen I could never remember which issue or even which magazine I’d seen it in. So, instead of saving all the magazines I get, I now try to tear out the recipes I want to try and file them in spiral binders by category. If I try them and they are fails I throw the recipe out. Keepers stay in the binder with a 😊 on them. It’s my attempt to utilize my somewhat rusty organizational skills. Occasionally I sit down with one of the spiral binders and look for a recipe that strikes my fancy and that I have all the ingredients for. The latter is what sometimes inspires me to combine recipes or just ad lib on a concept. This chicken dish is one of those amalgams.

Ingredients:

Whole chicken cut into pieces (or whatever parts you prefer)

3 T olive oil

1/4 cup chicken broth

4 T fresh squeezed orange juice

4 T fresh squeezed lemon juice + 1 lemon cut into thin wedges

4 T whole grain mustard

4 T honey

1 tsp red pepper flakes

5-6 cloves of garlic chopped

1 large onion sliced

2-3 sweet potatoes peeled and cubed

4-5 carrots peeled and cut into chunks

Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the whole lemon in half, then in quarters, and finally cut each quarter into 4 wedges. Put the lemon wedges in a cup or so of boiling water and simmer for about 5 minutes. Drain and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 425. In a large roasting pan or jelly roll pan lined with tin foil spread out the potatoes, carrots, and onion.

Generously salt and pepper the chicken and scatter the chicken pieces, skin side up, in with the vegetables.

In a medium sauce pan combine the citrus juices, olive oil, mustard, honey, broth, red pepper flakes and garlic.

Whisk all of the ingredients together and bring to a simmer. Pour the sauce evenly over the chicken and vegetables and add in the lemon wedges.

Bake uncovered. Take care not to overcook and dry out the chicken. Use a meat thermometer and remove the chicken pieces once they reach 155-160 degrees. Keep them warm on a platter covered with foil. Return the vegetables to the oven until they are tender. Once the vegetables are done spoon the vegetables and sauce over the chicken pieces and serve.

I have a thing about cranberry sauce with chicken dishes; see my cranberry sauce on the plate at 3:00. I also had some leftover Amish egg noodles and served the chicken, vegetables and sauce over the noodles. You can change up the vegetables in this dish based on personal preference or whatever you have on hand… Cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, sweet peppers, green beans, turnips or parsnips. Any of those would be good. Your kitchen will smell wonderful while this is cooking!