Category Archives: Food

Food

Candy Beans

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Candy Beans are very possibly the least healthy way to eat beans ever, and a favorite way to eat them in our house. Our son has a little dance he does when he finds out they are for supper, and if I ask what bean dish anyone wants, this tops the bill.

What follows is how I make them in my Instant Pot

, which I purchased many many years ago because it was advertised on the back of a bag of beans. It makes making beans faster and easier. These beans can be cooked on the range, in the oven, or in a slow cooker as well. They can even be cooked next to a campfire.

Ingredients:

1 pound of white beans of your choice. Navy, Pinto, Lima— I have tried them all. The Instant Pot is supposed to allow you to skip soaking, but that’s up to you. They don’t come out right for me without soaking, unless I add a lot of time to them. I would soak with any other type of cooking. The photos show unsoaked beans.

That’s homemade sour cream on the right and brown sugar in the middle. The Teriyaki container to the left of the sugar is molasses. The other day our son opened a container and was shocked to find what was in it was what it was labelled.

1 stick (1/2 cup) melted butter. Oh, it gets worse. You want it melted so it mixes in well with the beans. If you are doing this in the oven, you can just stir it in. In the Instant Pot, I merely set it to sauté as I’m prepping everything else.

1 Tablespoon powdered dry mustard

1 teaspoon ground black pepper

¼ teaspoon salt (I did use salted butter as well)

1 chopped onion (something healthy!)

1/4 pound chopped bacon Honestly, I have completely forgotten to put the bacon in occasionally, and have heard no complaints.

Now for the much less healthy stuff. Yes, worse than the above.

¼ cup molasses

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup sour cream I have on occasion replaced this with yogurt to make this marginally healthier. It came out fine.

Mix these in. Now, you need to add water, but you don’t want the result too soupy. If you have presoaked beans, barely to cover in the Instant Pot ought to be enough. In the oven, crock or range, just keep adding water until the beans are ready.

I set the beans to the ‘bean’ button (or crock on low, or in a 325 oven) for 40 minutes, (or crock for 10 hours, oven for 6 hours) and let it naturally release pressure. You want the beans to mush with the back of a spoon.

 

That’s it. Serve with steamed or pressure cooked brown bread and you have a good, tasty, filling meal. That’s not a bit healthy. But still full of fiber!

Food, Uncategorized

cooking new things.

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I have discovered, in cleaning up my to do lists, that I have enough recipes clipped that is I make a brand new trial recipe a day, I will probably die before I finish trying them all.

 

Obviously, not all of them will be worth trying— I have been clipping recipes to try since I was about 7 years old (I was that weird kid who bought the cookbook at the souvenir stand when everyone else was buying the squirting cameras and the space ice cream), but I am going to make an attempt because I love cooking, it *normally* calms me down, and I currently have a 13 year old son who is never NEVER not hungry. Yay for me!

 

So I packed up a box of loose clippings and I have a 2 foot pile of books with recipes flagged (the whole book is not one I want to keep) and I am going to put forth as much an effort as I can to see what I can make.

 

Today I am making a meringue-y frosting, because we have 10 egg whites in the fridge, 2 from I don’t know what, 6 from an attempt to make Almanzo Wilder’s ice cream (3 were a mistake and 3 were from the SUCCESS— it’s so good!) and 3 were from a cooked Amish dressing from a souvenir cookbook from 30 years ago. Yes, I know that’s 11 egg whites. The recipe calls for 10 and I play loose and fast that way.

 

I am also attempting to make a ‘carmeled sugar’ a friend sent with a ‘hey, this looks interesting.’

 

So, wish me luck.

 

I am also trying to clean my studio, because it has become a mess, I have my exam for Surface Embroidery looming (hence the studio) and bills and taxes and a messy desk and my parents’ estate stuff to clear up. Yes, I am bonkers. But as I said above, cooking makes me happy and I deserve to be happy.

 

So… here I go.

 

Eggs, Food

Eggs, part one. Of many.

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Eggs part 1

 

Eggs are amazing. Even merely as a foodstuff, they are just incredible.

 

They are portable, healthy, convenient, cheap, tasty, and easy to cook or incredibly showy, depending on what you do with them. And they are one of the original ‘fast foods’— when we domesticated chickens 5000 years ago a side effect was a calorie dense, protein rich, portable food.

 

They are full of the amino acids that help build muscle (leucine). They have choline which is helps your brain think, focus and motivate (wow— I think I need more eggs for breakfast!). Choline also helps your liver do its job.

 

And if you remember the scare about eggs and heart disease in the 1980’s (possibly like me you had a mother who threw them all away at that point, along with bacon and ham and whatever other food was being vilified at the time), it’s interesting to note that they are now saying that apparently there is no measurable increased risk of heart disease with moderate egg consumption (7 whole eggs a week) unless you are a diabetic. In a study of nearly 120,000 people, that’s what they came up with.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10217054?dopt=Citation

 

And actually, if you are at risk for macular degeneration and eye cataracts, you’re best to eat eggs, because eggs protect the eye.

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16340654?dopt=Citation

 

However, they do say that is you have heart disease already, or have already had a stroke, then you may be good avoiding more than three eggs yolks a week. That leaves you all the whites you could want, though.

 

So, as with pretty much everything you’ll see from me, eggs are great in moderation. Eat them without fear, but not all of them at once. And watch what you eat them with— They™ are thinking that since eggs are often served with high fat, high sodium foods, it could be merely that eggs like associating with trouble makes, not that they are in themselves troublemakers.

 

Right now, I will start with what makes them one of the most magical foods we can eat. The chemistry in the simple egg, that makes it into the magician it can be.

 

Let’s start with the yolk. The gooey, rich golden part that dribbles onto the potatoes or that you dip your toast into for breakfast foods. But it’s not just the xanthophyll— the yellow in the yolk that can add its color to make food pretty

 

It’s also capable of convincing acid and fat (two of my favorite things) to stick together, to get their combined flavor into your mouth in an unctuous smoothness. Every one knows that oil and water don’t mix, but we also know that things like mayonnaise and hollandaise are delicious, and most of us know that eggs are part of that. And it’s the chemistry of the egg yolk that does it. Eggs have some amino acids that repel water, and some that attract water. But it’s not just that. The lethicin, which is a phospholipid (part fat, part salt) is sort of like a tadpole, who likes sticking it’s head in water and its tail in fat. So you have your mayo and hollandaise so irresistible.

 

So when you mix that egg yolk into your butter and lemon juice combination, you get the double force of the amino acids and the lethicin working to make some parts of the yolk stick to the lemon juice while other parts will stick to the butter, and you can dip your tater tots into a little bit of heaven.
I’m paranoid about my eggs, and like them cooked, so I make my hollandaise sauce in a double boiler, although many people will say you can do it fine in a blender. If I had a friend with chickens, I’d do that, but I don’t right now.

 

½ cup of butter, cut up into dice. Reserve ½!

2 egg yolks

1T lemon juice

1 tsp minced garlic, shallot, green onion, whatever you have

black pepper

melt the ¼ cup butter in the double boiler. Add the rest of the ingredients, and mix well. When it is all melted and mixed, add the last of the butter and remove from heat while stirring. Serve immediately.