Fishing for ideas to avoid wasting food

Ordinarily I’m writing about dishes we make with the meat we raise here on the farm, or garden veggies we raise, or some combo thereof . . . this is a little different tack, as it involves fish, which we don’t raise OR catch.

Our neighbor, who is an avid fisherman and hunter, gifted us with a large bag of frozen coho salmon. I thawed out this monster portion of fish with trepidation – we love fish, particularly salmon, but this was about 3 pounds or so of fish – could have fed six people! We had a meal using two of the smaller filets that came out of the thawed pile, but there were two enormous chunks – probably 1 ½ - 2# of filets that I had cooked and then wondered what to do with. I have never before made chowder, but I like it, so I looked up a bunch of recipes for fish chowder, making mental notes about things that sounded good to me. Here (approximately) is what I put together, which turned out to be a quite-savory fish chowder. Darrell whipped up a batch of his corn muffins that incorporate more of our good garden corn – warm from the oven, they were a great complement to the chowder!

 

Fish Chowder

1.5 – 2 # cooked fish (salmon, some sort of white fish, whatever you have), deboned and broken into bite-sized chunks

4 medium potatoes, cut into chunks

2 medium to large carrots, cut into chunks

1 stalk of celery, chopped

1/3 cup chopped onion

1 chopped garlic clove, or teaspoon of chopped garlic from a jar

1.5 quarts of chicken broth (or, if you have or want to make fish stock . . . )

¼ # or so of fresh salt pork, cut into small pieces

1 package of frozen corn, or one can of corn (I used frozen corn from our garden)

1 – 2 Tbs of dried oregano (to taste)

1 – 2 Tbs of dried parsley (to taste)

Couple of dashes of Tabasco sauce (to taste)

1 good dash of Worchestershire sauce

Salt & Pepper to taste

2 cups milk

½ cup heavy cream

4 Tbs flour

3 Tbs butter

In a large heavy-bottomed pot, on low heat, brown the salt pork until crispy. Add the chopped onion and celery and sauté until tender; add the chopped garlic and sauté for about another minute.

Add the broth or stock, stirring to loosen up the bits from browning the salt pork. Add the chunks of potatoes and carrots, the corn, oregano, parsley, salt & pepper, Worchester sauce, and Tabasco sauce (careful with this, as it’s spicy hot and you can always add more). Simmer this until potatoes and carrots are tender. Add in the chunks of fish and keep on the heat for a little while more just to release the fish flavor into the rest of the mixture.  If you want to eat this right away, go on to the finishing steps, but most chowder recipes reference that it's better the next day. I refrigerated this overnight at this point, then did the finishing step the next day to have a hearty lunch on a cold day.

Finishing: (Begin re-heating the chowder while you do this step)

Melt butter in a heavy saucepan; slowly add flour to make a roux. Stirring constantly to prevent lumps, add the milk and cook until it begins to thicken.

Add this flour/milk thickener to your heating chowder and stir in well. Add the heavy cream and stir in well.

Reheat the chowder on a low to medium heat to just bubbling, stirring frequently to keep the creamy broth from sticking. Serve hot. This recipe should serve 5 – 6 people. 

Thanksgiving Turkey transformed to Turkey Pot Pies for the freezer!

After our Thanksgiving gathering (turkey, Darrell's fabulous stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, butternut squash  and creamed corn from the garden, fresh cranberry/orange relish, homemade applesauce, the Fall Harvest Salad, and the ubiquitous Crescent Rolls without which my step-daughter could not survive Thanksgiving dinner), I pulled all the meat off the carcass and put the bones in a big pot to simmer for several hours, creating a wonderful broth.

I spent a chunk of Saturday afternoon cooking carrots in some of that broth, cutting up turkey into bite-sized pieces, adding corn (from the summer garden) and peas, and then blending the broth, left-over potatoes and stuffing into a thick and wonderful gravy to create the pot pie filling (see our recipe for Turkey Pot Pie for all the instructions here).

Sunday afternoon, Darrell made pastry crusts and we assembled pies, ready for the freezer. Yum! Easy-peasy winter meal that can bake in the oven while we're out doing chores!

Fall Harvest Salad with Butternut Squash, Brussels Sprouts, and Beets

I created this for a Thanksgiving 2012 get-together, wanting to focus on hearty fall garden veggies. It was a big hit at the table!

One small Butternut squash, cut into cubes (or half of a medium squash)

20 Brussels Sprouts, cleaned and cut in half

One small beet, cut in halves or quarters

3-4 slices of bacon, fried crisp, drained and cooled, broken into small pieces

One smallish head Romaine lettuce, split into quarters and chopped chunky

3-4 smaller leaves of kale, washed and torn into bite-sized pieces

2 green onions, sliced thin

1/2 cup walnuts or pecans

½ cup dried cranberries

¼ cup Grated Parmesan cheese

Brown sugar

Honey

Salt

Vegetable or olive oil

Balsamic or Red Wine vinegar

Coarse black pepper

Toss Butternut Squash cubes in a little oil in a bowl to coat them and spread on a baking sheet. Roast at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes (depending on the size of your chunks) or until nearly done. Return to bowl and add about 1/3 cup brown sugar and a pat or two of butter, toss to blend and melt butter, return to baking sheet and roast for about 10 more minutes, or until just barely tender all the way through. Don’t over-cook – you don’t want them mushy. Return to bowl to cool. Chill before mixing.

Toss Brussels Sprout halves in a little oil in a bowl to coat, and spread on a baking sheet. Roast at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes, remove and toss/turn over, and roast for several more minutes, until they are nearly tender – again, don’t over-cook. Better that they be a little crunchy in the salad than not. Return to bowl to cool. Chill before mixing.

Beet can be roasted or steamed until just tender. If you prefer roasting, cut it in half or quarters and roast with the Brussels Sprouts, then slice into small julienne strips after it cools.  Chill before mixing

Put dried cranberries in a small bowl and sprinkle lightly with a little of the balsamic vinegar. They will absorb a little of the liquid and not be so chewy, and they will absorb the flavor. Once the cranberries are tossed and coated with the vinegar and have absorbed for a few minutes, you can add them to the roasted squash while it continues to cool.

Toss nuts in a little honey and toast in a slow oven (250 degrees or so), for about 10 minutes. Watch carefully, as nuts will overheat and burn, especially with the sugar from the honey on them. Cool completely.

Put chopped/torn greens and sliced green onion into a large salad bowl. Add the Bacon, Cranberries, chilled Squash, Brussels Sprouts, and julienned Beet, and honey-toasted nuts. Sprinkle with some coarse black pepper (to taste) and Parmesan cheese. Add the Brown Sugar Balsamic Vinaigrette to taste. Toss lightly before serving.

Brown Sugar Balsamic Vinaigrette

¼ cup balsamic vinegar (or red wine vinegar)

¾ cup vegetable oil

¼ tsp. salt (maybe a little more)

½ cup brown sugar (or a little more)

Blend ingredients in jar with a tight cover that can be shaken well.  Add enough salt to balance the sweet. The measurements for this dressing are estimates, as I was just adding and mixing. May have actually had a little more brown sugar. Taste until you like the balance of tang to sweet.

This jar of dressing will probably dress at least twice, if not 3x the salad ingredients listed above. Store unused dressing in the refrigerator.

Monsters in the Garden . . .

So I've been working on digging the potatoes out of the garden before it freezes - finding a couple of dry days in a row so they can lay in the sun and dry and harden off has been a real challenge. At least we're getting some moisture back in the ground after the drought this summer, but all the rain is wreaking havoc with finishing up in the garden - no idea if it will dry out enough to till down all the new weeds that have sprung up with the rain, or if they'll just have a big head start next spring!

Anyway, found this odd potato which looks like the maw of some undersea creature, ready to gobble up any small thing that comes its way. Don't know what it was eating underground - maybe grubs and such.

Odd Pods, revisited

Last year, I was bemused by the strange looking seed pods that formed on our radishes after they had gotten overgrown and flowered. I posted a photo of them then, and had mentioned them to someone recently who said the pods, when they're fresh and green, are good to eat! Raw in salads or such, or sautéed lightly was what I was told. So this past Monday, right before going traveling for 3 days, I was doing some last-minute gleaning in the garden and looked at the radishes. There are still lots of the pretty little white flowers, but many of the flower stems had beautiful green pods. I picked one and ate it - not unlike a sugar pea in its pod! And a very subtle taste of radishes as an after-note. So I harvested a bunch of them, put some in a salad for dinner that night - nice little crunchy addition! The rest are in the vegetable crisper - don't know how long they'll keep and be usable, but it was fun to try another idea to get even more yield out of the garden!

Homemade Ketchup!

I picked a bunch of tomatoes over the course of a few days, then cooked them down, ran them through the KitchenAid strainer to remove the skins and seeds (in the blue bowl) and got this lovely pulp (in the glass pitcher). Love that strainer attachment!

Darrell then strained that through a cotton bag (pillow case) to get rid of all the extra water, then seasoned it and made 18 pint jars of ketchup from a recipe in an Ohio Amish cookbook. The recipe calls for a huge quantity of pulp, but he recalculated and makes this batch with about 4 1/2 quarts of drained pulp.

This late in the year, I don't know if I'll get any more tomatoes off our plants - a slight frost caught me off-guard a couple of nights ago - weather forecast said it wouldn't get colder than high 30s, so I didn't cover the plants. Some damage, but probably can pull some tomatoes to ripen in the garage if it ever stops raining. I'd like to can some more tomatoes, or do the same process as with the ketchup, only can the strained pulp as paste - not sure that's going to happen, though!

Can't believe the garden is almost done! Still have beets out there, which I've been pulling, and any we don't get to will go to the hogs. Need to dig the potatoes, but the rain right now is preventing THAT from happening. Still a lot of kale, and pumpkins galore, which he is feeding to the hogs and we are giving to friends with kids for Halloween. We need to can some pumpkin for pies and such, too, so canning isn't done yet!

Surviving and Thriving - Serendipitous Broccoli!

Late spring, when I finally got the garden planted (about 2 -3 weeks later than planned!), I put in 4 broccoli plants. Within a couple of days, some little creature had munched them all down. When I was tilling the garden, little weeds were sprouting in the area they had been in, so I ran across it to clean it up and turned up the little stub that was left of one, still rooted in the soil it had come it. I looked at it and realized there was a little leaf and some green in the stem, so I re-planted it, watered it and watched to see if whatever had decimated the 4 plants came back. That didn't happen, but this little plant was so set back, I figured I would be lucky to get any broccoli off it at all. I looked at it a week ago (early September!), while doing some weeding, and there was no sign of any heads forming, but the plant had grown large and healthy-looking. This Saturday, I re-checked - lo and behold, not one, but TWO nice big heads! Apparently the little surviving stub managed to put out two main stalks (for the uninitiated, you usually get one large head on a stalk, then, after you cut that, the plant continues to produce side stalks and smaller heads until hard frost). Two main stalks on a plant is unusual in my experience. So before cutting these beautiful heads, I had to take a photo. With chicken distribution Saturday and doing tomatoes all day yesterday, I didn't get them cut. You can see the faint yellow where they were getting ready to blossom - pretty tiny little yellow flowers when that happens!