Skip to main content

Relish Magazine - interesting resource!

relish Magazine is an insert into Sunday papers around the country. My mom passes it on to me frequently, and I've seen many interesting things in it. They tend to promote natural, healthy foods, although, ironically, most of their advertisers are of the prepared food variety - you know, the type of ads where you start with some prepared item and create a dish.

Anyway, the January 2011 issue has, among other interesting things, an article called "The Pantry Project - New Year - 19 New Dishes". They then list what they term "bold and basic" pantry items to "turn dinner into a new adventure".

We are great proponents of having a well-stocked pantry of what we consider "basics", and I was pleased to see that many of their "essentials" have a home in our pantry already . . . they do list a few that we don't stock, but would not be afraid to use if required for a recipe.

They then have 19 recipes in the printed magazine that draw from this list of basics. When I decided to write about this, I went to their web site, thinking I would find the whole list and the 19 recipes there . . . I was disappointed to find that, while the list of ingredients were there, they did not reprise the recipes from the print magazine, but rather had added some new ones. However, a tour of their search engine proved that the recipes in the print magazine ARE in their recipes index . . . just not gathered together under The Pantry Project.

At any rate, for those of you who already love to cook, you'll enjoy comparing your basics to theirs, and perhaps find something new and inspirational, as I did. For those of you who are venturing into cooking, this list will provide some guidance of what you should have beyond what we joked about growing up - the Dutch Spice Rack, which contained only salt and pepper!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Leftover Thanksgiving Turkey - fun with Corn Chowder!

Many of you who know us know we usually make Turkey Pot Pies (see the recipe on our blog) with leftover Thanksgiving goodies. We still love Turkey Pot Pie, but we still have so many from last year (an even bigger bird than this year!), we decided we would do other things with this year's leftover turkey (we roasted a 33# bird from the flock we raised). So I made a Turkey Corn Chowder that is savory and yummy out of part of the leftovers. Here's how it came to be: Finished Turkey Corn Chowder First, right after Thanksgiving, I put the turkey carcass, from which most of the large meat pieces had been removed, into our 22-quart stock pot, along with some carrot, onion, and celery, to make turkey stock. When the stock was done simmering, I had pulled the carcass bones and all the meat that had cooked off out of the pot, picking out bones from the meat. I had about 2 quarts of small chunks and bits of turkey, most of which was the very tender, sweet meat that is around t...

Big turkeys from our farm - happy customers at Thanksgiving!

Well, our turkey raising experiment this year went well - probably a little too well. We had a lot of orders for birds in the 15 - 25# range and our smallest bird was over 21#. They REALLY thrived out in the pasture. We plan to raise more next year, but probably start them somewhat later (these birds were 22 weeks old) and manage their feeding protocol a little differently. We used the two biggest birds - 41.25# and a whopping 41.90# guy . . . whew! Darrell had written an informational piece about " How to Handle Roasting a Big Turkey ", and I had some of those big disposable roasting pans to give to people who feared their regular roaster wouldn't cut it. So, several of our customers shared their story of what they did with the bird and send some photos. There're also photos at the end of what we did with the two monsters. Leah C. sent these photos and a note about their experience. She had been leery of doing a big bird, so Darrell's instructions and ...

The blessings of friends

Today we rented a huge wood chipper and had sent an email to everyone who had offered to help with cleanup. We needed to clean up a downed tree and tons of branches that were between our house and the pasture so that the professional tree people can take down the hazardous still-standing tree parts, and get the branches off the deck, which is what our insurance will pay for . . . all the rest is our problem. 32 people from 4 counties turned out at our farm today - some for 2 or 3 hours, some all day. Some were neighbors, some were people we work with, people from Barbershop who Darrell sings with, people we know through other affiliations, a cousin, her daughter and grandson and their friends - I'm completely awed by how hard everyone worked, in spite of the heat and brutal humidity. And even more amazing is what we accomplished with a Bobcat, a Kubota tractor with a bucket, chain saws, and just plain hard work feeding that monster chipper. Here's a photo of our side yard ...