Chimichangas Chez Boz

Hello my fellow chefs! Tonight I will reveal to you one of my favorite recipes, one which is sure to delight you and those with whom you share your living space. I learned how to make chimichangas from Megan and Jill Carle's excellent book College Cooking. This recipe is based off of theirs. It is also vegetarian, but you can make it carnivorous if you want, just sub out the can of beans and some cheese for a pound of ground beef or turkey. This recipe makes 9 chimichangas - 10 if you don't eat as much of the filling as I did before frying them. They're great to freeze. When you're ready to defrost just pop it in the oven until it's nice and crispy.

Chimichangas

Ingredients

4 cloves garlic

1 onion

1 bell pepper

1 160z jar salsa

10" tortillas (probably ten)

1 can refried beans (or make your own!)

1 can red/black/pinto beans (leave this out if you're using beef)

4 scallions, green ends removed and reserved for broth

~2 cups cheese

1 thai pepper (SEEDED.)

white pepper

salt

dash cumin

olive oil (if veggie, put a decent amount in the wok, if meat, just a dash, 'cause the beef makes its own nice oil as it cooks)

a lot of canola oil

Materials

Wok or equivalent sized skillet

Skillet or frying pan with a goodly sized rim

Knife/cutting board

Wooden spoon

Pincers

Paper towels

Soundtrack

Views from a Train by Richard Wylie, and Richard Goode playing Beethoven's Piano Sonatas Opp. 109-111. If you haven't heard those late sonatas, grab a copy and go listen RIGHT NOW! I don't care if you don't like classical music! This stuff rocks out.

1. Preparation Cut up onion and bell pepper into 1/4-1/2" chunks, finely chop the garlic, dice the scallions, and seed the thai or other spicy pepper. If you use a different pepper you may need to use more, or less, depending on the kind. One thai pepper was enough to make 9 chimichangas pleasantly spicy for us three. And may I emphasize, do remove the seeds or you will find your dish inedible!!!

2. The filling Put some olive oil in a wok, heat it up to medium-high and saute the garlic and spicy pepper for just a moment to let the flavors come out, then add the onion, green pepper, and scallions, and saute this for a bit until the onions are starting to get translucent, just a few minutes. If you are a carnivore, add the beef with the onion and green pepper and cook until the beef is brown. If you are not, add the drained can of beans, some salt and a dash of cumin, and some white pepper. I didn't keep track of how much white pepper I used, but it was a goodly bit. Just keep adding it to the filling at your leisure, until it tastes good. Though don't add too much of the pepper until the very end of this step. What you want to do now is cook the veggie/bean mixture until the onions and green pepper are soft enough to be appetizing, but not soggy, because that's lame. So keep tasting them. It should be maybe 7 or 8 minutes, with you stirring constantly to keep stuff from sticking to the bottom. When the veggies are cooked (or the beef is no longer pink anywhere), throw in your jar of salsa and let that cook for about a minute, then turn off the heat and add the refried beans and your cheese, and stir that around for a while until it's all mixed together. At this point, taste it and it probably will need some more salt, so go ahead and add that and any more white pepper if it needs it. You could also add more cumin if you wanted a more robust flavor. I figured it was already so heavy with the beans and cheese it didn't need any more fortification.

3. The chimichanga Go get out your tortillas and put about 3 large wooden spoonfuls of filling into each of them, then fold them over like the pros do and set them into a nice chimichanga pyramid. Your next step will be to fill a skillet with canola oil - you want a lake about 1/4" deep to fry these babies in. Heat the oil to just under high heat - I used a setting of 8 on a 1-9 burner scale. You probably shouldn't test it with water to see if it's hot enough, unless you want blazing hot canola oil spattering everywhere. Just wait a bit and feel the heat above it with the back of your hand. Then place in the first chimichanga. It should start sizzling nicely. Let it cook for about 2-3 minutes on each side, until it's nicely golden but not so much that it starts blackening. Turn it over with the tongs and be super careful not to let it splash down and spray oil on you. I did this once and got a nasty blister living on my thumb for a while. When it's done, take it out of the frying pan - I actually put two chimichangas in at one time because of the pan's size - and let it dry on a paper towel to get some of that grease out. When it's done drying, set it aside on your cutting board and while it's drying stick in some more chimichangas. Keep doing this until they're all nice and crispy.

And you're done! This goes nice with a little caesar salad to balance the heavy fried goodness of the chimichanga. Mm, very filling, and so tasty. Couldn't hurt to have a nice brown ale with it, too. Me, I just had some ginger ale because I was feeling a bit under the weather. Sabor!

Lentil Shepherd's Pie

Howdy everybody!

Iain here today. With November in full swing and the weather getting... well it's not actually getting much colder at the moment (damn you global warming!!), but in any case, it's time for some cold weather, warm-you-up-on-the-inside dishes. This one is an old favorite (I think it's the old Scottish blood that keeps me coming back. I'm probably compensating for the fact that I have no sheep of my own to raise) that my family makes back home in Chicago with sage grown from our own back yard. Since I have depleted my supply of said sage, I got some from our friends Annika and Dakota, who have been farming and gardening like crazy down in Northfield, so yay them!

Lentil Shepherd's Pie

Ingredients:
4-8 medium potatoes (depending on potato size and how thick you want the potato layer)
2 cups dry green lentils
1 medium onion
At least1 tbs of crushed, dried sage
A healthy pinch of oregano
A pinch of cayenne
salt
milk
butter

Materials:
2 medium or large pots
wooden spoon
potato masher or fork
whisk
1 baking pan (about 9x13 works well)
rubber spatula
knife and cutting board

Music Listened To:
I think I had a Cherish the Ladies Pandora station going...


Step 1: Prep. Start by putting the lentils in a pot and submerging in water. Bring to a boil and simmer for an hour. Give them plenty of water to start with, but if they dry up halfway through, submerge them again. Once that's going, peel and chop the potatoes and start them boiling in the other pot. Leave them to boil for at least 10 minutes. In the meantime, dice the onion.


Step 2: Assemble. Preheat the oven to 350. The potatoes should be done before the lentils. Drain them and mash with salt, milk and butter to your preferences. The more butter, the better the top will brown. I also tend to whisk them for a little fluff. When the lentils are done, drain them and mash with the onion, sage, oregano, salt and cayenne. You don't want them to become a paste - just a little cohesive. Spread the lentils on the bottom of the pan. Spread the potatoes on top, being careful not to mix with the lentils or churn things up. A delicate touch is necessary here. If you have some cooking spray, spraying a little on the top can help browning as well.


Step 3: Bake. In the words of the great Jamie Oliver, whack it in the oven for 20 minutes. You don't really need anything but the onion to cook, per se, you just need everything to come together. At the end, turn the oven to broil and open the oven door to keep an eye on things. As soon as you see the top beginning to turn brown, pull it out (if you wait too long, it can go black in seconds). Serve up and enjoy!


You can modify this recipe however you like. I know some people really enjoy carrots and peas mixed in with their shepherd's pie. My housemates seem to think cheese is an appropirate ingredient, which just confuses me... Obviously, if you are a carnivore, feel free to make this with ground beef or lamb, which is the original way to do it, but don't turn up your nose at the way of the lentil! While I enjoy beef shepherd's pie from The Celtic Knot pub in Evanston, IL, I always opt for the lentils when I make it myself because of their amazing flavor. I recommend serving this with a green salad and a good ale. Good times! Cheers!

Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread!

Happy Weekend to all!

Weekends are a really precious commodity here in the realm of AmeriCorps employment. I'm so busy trying to get my hours during the week that, even if I (Emily) have time to cook or bake elaborately, I don't often have time to blog about it. But on a Saturday I have time to bake and blog and it's lovely.

This is a recipe I associate exclusively with autumn. I don't remember when my mom first started making it, but I was pretty young. When I acquired my own kitchen last fall, I asked her for the recipe and found, to my delight, that it was not her creation but my favorite preschool teacher's. I was a rather hyper child, but Harriet at the Richmond JCC totally understood me. She'd get me to follow her around on errands and stuff. My three-year-old memory has nothing but fond associations with her. And I don't think she'd mind me sharing this recipe with the world. So, without further adieu....

Harriet's Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread

Ingredients
Note: I am giving all of these for a one-loaf batch, but the recipe my mom gave me actually makes two, so feel free to double this. I just don't want to take up more freezer space, so I made one loaf. It freezes beautifully though.

• 2 eggs
• 1 cup of white sugar
• 1/2 cup oil
• 3 TBS water
• 1 cup pumpkin puree (I am lazy and use the canned stuff, but I'm sure if you use your own it'd be even better!)
• 1 3/4 cups flour (part whole wheat ok)
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 3/4 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 3/4 tsp ground ginger
• 1/4 tsp. cloves
• a dash of nutmeg
• about 1/2-1 cups chocolate chips (or mini chocolate chips)

You can also make this bread without the chocolate chips. Increase the spices and add 1/3 cup raisins and 1/2 cup walnuts, if you like.

Procedure

• Preheat the oven to about 300°F to 325°F. My oven's a bit wonky and I found 300 to be too low. More on this later.
• Beat the eggs and sugar together and add the oil, water, and pumpkin puree. Your mixture should look wonderfully orange.
• Again, it says to mix all the dry ingredients separately, but I just throw them in with the wets. Either way, mix everything together. Taste a bit and add more spices if that seems wise.
• Stir in the chocolate chips. The batter should be thick at this point.
• Pour into a greased loaf pan and bake for about 1 1/4 hours, until a knife comes out mostly clean. The chocolate chips will obviously get all over it. As I said, this is where it gets complicated. I found 1 1/4 hours on 300°F to be far from sufficient and ended up turning it up to 375°F or so. But experiment. I certainly wouldn't put it over 375, but it might be better to start it around 325 or 350, depending on the strength of your oven. These can also be made as muffins. One loaf should equal 12-18 muffins, depending how big you make them. Bake for 20-25 minutes.
  
• Let cool on a wire rack. Or, if you're like me, cut into it right away and get crumbs everywhere. It might turn out crumbly. That's ok. It still tastes awesome. Enjoy! And I highly recommend milk.
  

Musings on Poverty and Cooking

So this isn't going to be a recipe post. Sorry for those hoping for one! No, this is just me (Emily), sitting on my couch on a Thursday evening, eating apple sauce still warm out of the pot. We had about 10 apples left from a trip to our friend Annika's hobby farm a few weeks back, and most of them were not so great for eating plain since they had a lot of weird stuff on the peels (no pesticides for the Johnson family!). However, these apples were great for saucing and making into pies and stuff. I just used up the last of them and would like to point out that homemade applesauce is so much astonishingly better than the stuff from a jar that it's hardly the same food. Also, I lied about this being a no recipe post, because applesauce is just too easy. No pictures though. So:

Homemade Applesauce

Ingredients

• 5-10 apples, peeled (or not-- I usually do half and half), cored, and chopped into thin slices or small chunks
• 1/4-1 cup water
• cinnamon to taste--probably between 1-3 tsp. Or a cinnamon stick if you've got one
• brown or white sugar to taste. I usually put in 1/3-1/2 cup, but some people like more or less. It depends on the number of apples and how tart they are.
• a dash of lemon juice. (completely optional, but I like it.)
• a little drizzle of molasses (this is useful if you don't have brown sugar, or if you don't want to use brown sugar in your applesauce, since it's more expensive than the white stuff)

Procedure

• Put the apples in a pot and cover with the water. I'm bad at judging amounts here, but basically you want it to be enough that you can bring the apples to a simmer. Don't go overboard though, since the apples will produce a lot of water themselves. Throw some of the cinnamon and lemon juice on top, remembering that you can always adjust proportions later. Bring to a simmer and let it hang out for a while, probably 15-30 minutes, until the apples are pretty soft.
• Use a potato masher or a food processor to mash up the soft apples (I prefer the former, but I like really chunky sauce).
• Add the sugar, turn the heat up a bit, and let it cook uncovered for a bit. Stir it a lot. It should thicken. If not, dump out some of the excess water and adjust spices. Or you could let it sit longer until the water evaporates, but I'm not patient.
• And there you have it. Fresh, relatively healthy, pretty cheap, ridiculously tasty applesauce!

And that's just my point really. Fresh food is usually healthier, tastier, and well...I wouldn't say always cheaper, but certainly it's cheaper than buying prepared food of a similar caliber. And it depends so much on what one's hobbies and leisure activities are. For Iain and Bozzie and me, food is a recreational activity. Cooking is a way to have fun. It's a way to come together and enjoy one another's company. It's a way to relieve stress. And, I think in part because cooking is all of that for us, our other pleasures tend to be less pricey. They're, for the most part, simple. We read aloud, we watch movies, we play instruments, we write. Sure, we go out for coffee and all, but much of what we love is close to free. That feels good, and it gives us more excuses to spend on good food.

Our food focus has also affected dramatically the items we make ourselves. For example, yesterday I got home from work, realized that we didn't have any regular sandwich bread, and didn't even think of going to the store. Instead I just grabbed the yeast and mixing bowl. Now I have two awesome wheat loaves, each of which would probably have run me $3-$4 in a bakery and instead cost me a couple bucks tops for ingredients and oven time. Sure, I can buy cheap sandwich bread, but this stuff is hearty, has nothing bad for me in it except canola oil, and tastes so much better. Plus it's great for gifting to people.

Now, don't get me wrong-- I understand that baking takes time. People who have more demanding jobs than I and kids and whatnot don't necessarily have time for all this. But for me, and for my housemates, it's becoming a matter of course. We laugh about it. Pizza for us means homemade dough and tomato sauce. Curry doesn't come out of a jar. A "quick fix dinner" sometimes means thai kitchen or mac and cheese, but it often means omelets and potatoes or something. Whole foods (not the store but real, unprocessed ingredients) make up the bulk of our pantry and fridge. And I'm wondering now how soon that's going to change, or if it will at all. Is that what our society is moving back to? Many of our friends are acting similarly, putting priorities on real food and simple pleasures and a slower life. Not that I plan to give up the internet anytime soon. So is this just what it is to be young and have time, or is this the seed of a greater shift in the way Americans treat food? I hope we are experiencing a shift. Places like the Seward Co-op deserve our patronage, and ingredient labels should be short and ingredients recognizable. At least that's what I think.

I work in an elementary school, and I adore my job, but I noticed the first day that the school lunches come individually wrapped, like airplane food, and the quality doesn't seem much better. There's a 10 day rotation, so the kids go through their entrees quickly before the cycle starts over. Some options, like the pizza and mini cheeseburgers (complete with plastic wrap), seem pretty popular, but there are days where almost nobody eats his or her main course in its entirety because it's just plain unappetizing. There is no cooking at my school; I'm not even sure if there are ovens. Instead everything comes prepared and is zapped before the kids pick it up. I can't comment on the nutritional content of the food, but there's little done to make the veggies appetizing, so more often than not they're thrown away. I do have to give the menu planners some props for including a lot of applesauce, but even that is corn syrup-filled, and some of the other produce options are completely incomprehensible to me. Seven-year-olds do not like raw yellow squash slices, even with ranch (another brilliant stroke as far as getting kids to eat their veggies is concerned). Heck, I don't like raw squash. But that's just it-- the veggies aren't incorporated. They're left out as these strange things that many of the students aren't interested in. And while I think there's great value in veggies as themselves, I first learned to appreciate the variety of veggies on this earth through stir fries and curries and pasta primavera. I hope that these kids will get the chance to do the same.

Maybe I'll continue on this thought sometime, but I think I'm done for now. It's all so interesting to ponder.

Pasties

So, when I (Iain) start talking about pasties, people usually ask me one of the following two questions:

1) What's a pastie?

2) Aren't those English??

I think Neil Gaiman did a good job explaining the origins of the pastie in American Gods, but here's my synopsis. Pasties originally came from Cornwall, in England. Many people from Cornwall came over to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to work in coal mines, taking the pastie with them. It was ideal for the miners, because they were hearty, filling and came in a nice pastry pouch that they could hold in their coal-covered hands and then they could toss the coal-y bits when they were done. I'm not sure how far apart Michigan pasties and Cornish pasties have diverged, although from what I understand, Cornish pasties contain mostly meat, while Michigan pasties tend towards the more veggieful side of things.

My mom's family is from Michigan, and so whenever I go to the North Woods, I need to have me some pasties. This last time, I was determined to spread the love of pasties to people far and abroad, starting with my housemates, and now you!

Being me, my pasties are vegetarian, although often they are quite good with meat.

Vegetarian Pasties

Ingredients:

Crust:
1.5 sticks of butter
3 cups whole wheat flour
1 hearty pinch of salt
5-6 tablespoons cold water or milk

Filling:
1 cup of sliced manly mushrooms
1 splash of white wine
1 splash of cider vinegar
2 splashes of milk
1 hearty pinch of flour
1 tablespoon of butter
1 manly carrot
1-2 manly turnips or rutabegas
1/2 a manly medium-sized winter squash (I used carnival squash)
2 manly potatoes
1 manly onion

*Note: yes, the manliness is required for all ingredients. How else are you going to survive the coal mines?

Materials
Cutting board
1 large, SHARP knife
2 large mixing bowls
1 wooden spoon
1 medium skillet
1 rolling pin
1 or more baking sheets
2 butter knifes or a pastry cutter.

Music Listened To:
Old Crow Medicine Show: "Big Iron World"

This will make about 6 pasties. If you have extra filling, make more pastry or just cook and eat it.

Step 1: Make the crust. Put all 3 cups of flour into a mixing bowl with the salt and half the butter. Cut the butter into the flour with the butter knives or pastry cutter until relatively fine. Cut in the rest of the butter until the bits of butter are about pea-sized. Sprinkle the milk or water bit by bit onto the flour and mix it in by hand until the dough is relatively cohesive. Wrap up the dough in plastic wrap and let it sit in the fridge for half an hour.


Step 2: Make the moist bits. With all those manly vegetables, we need something to have it all stick together. Normally, the meat takes care of the moisture for you, but alas, we don't have that luxury. This is going to resemble mushroom gravy. Saute the mushrooms in butter in the skillet. Sprinkle a little salt on there to coax out the juices. Cover it to minimize the loss of moisture to steam. Pour on a little white wine and apple cider vinegar to add to the moisture, as well as the milk. Put in a bit of flour to thicken it. Set aside.


Step 3: The manly veggies. Chop up the potatoes, onion, carrot, turnips/rutabega and squash into little 1/2 inch cubes. Place together in a bowl with plenty of salt and pepper. Add the mushroom stuff and mix thoroughly.


Step 4: Assemble. Now is a good time to pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees. Divide your pastry into 6 balls and roll them out to about a 6 inch diameter. Be patient with rolling the crust - pie crusts can be structurally fickle, so add moisture and/or flour as needed to get it to cooperate. Getting the crust right will pay off. Dollop about 1 1/2 cups of the veggie mixture into the middle of each pastie and fold the crust in half. If you want to add or remove filling, do it as needed. Roll the edge and press down with a fork or fingers. (Sorry for the blurriness of the picture)

Step 5: in the oven! Bake on the baking sheet for about 40 minutes. Test the veggies to see if they're done - if the potatoes are still too firm, give them a while longer. Ideally the potatoes should be soft but a touch al-dente, but if there's any crunch, they need more time.

Step 6: Find the nearest mine to get the coal to bake the next batch!

I hope you enjoy this North Woods treat as much as I do. They freeze well (before baking), and so even though I made these over a month ago, there's some cooking up in the oven right now! I'm going to go eat the