Posts Tagged ‘cooking’

The Best Minnestrone Soup

Friday, October 26th, 2012

minestrone-soup

My friend Carla from church came over several years ago to help me do Once-a-Month Cooking. She and I were in my kitchen for five hours, cooking and freezing enough food for a month. It was wonderful not to have to cook from day to day.

This minnestrone soup has been requested by many people and is perhaps her best recipe. She did not give me exact amounts, so years later I have attempted to list the exact proportions of each ingredient. I would take out the 1 1/2 cups of sliced carrots because unless you make it at the beginning of the day, the carrots will still be crunchy when you serve it. (I made this soup recently four hours before dinner, and it tasted delicious except for the crunchy carrots. So skip the carrots if you are not letting the soup simmer the entire day.)

  • 1 pound of ground beef
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • a teaspoon of crushed garlic
  • Italian seasoning to taste
  • 16-oz. can of diced tomatoes
  • 1 green bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 1/2 cups peeled and sliced carrots
  • 3 beef bullion cubes dissolved in 4 cups of hot water
  • 3 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce
  • 2 16-oz. cans of kidney beans, not drained
  • 1 can of corn, drained
  • 1 can of green beans, drained

My friend threw the onion, garlic, and at least a tablespoon of Italian seasoning into some olive oil in a pan on the stove. We caramelized the onions for about two minutes before adding the ground beef. (I always cook the ground beef and onion together, so this step seemed strange to me. But she definitely knew what she was doing because her soup was so darned good.) After browning the ground beef in the onions and garlic, we dumped the contents of the pan into an enormous crock pot. (The pot has to be enormous, or the contents won’t fit. You could always simmer it on low on your stove in a large pot if your crock pot is not big enough.) Dump all the ingredients into the pot except for the green beans. Add the green beans during the last half hour. At the end of the day, your house will smell delicious. This soup is enjoyed best with freshly baked bread.

Making Your Own Flavored Popcorn

Wednesday, October 17th, 2012

making-your-own-popcorn

Autumn is a great time to experiment with making your own flavored popcorn. If you pop it yourself in a large pot on your stove, it costs way less money, and it’s super fun for your kids to look through a clear lid to see the popcorn kernels popping around like crazy! It’s not that hard, really.

First pour 1/4 cup of vegetable oil into the pot to coat the entire bottom of the pot. Put it on medium heat. Pour 1/2 cup of popcorn into the pot. Don’t forget to put the lid on the pot. One time I was making popcorn at my friend’s house with her kids, and we were watching the popcorn on the bottom of the pot. The phone rang and for some reason we all walked out of the room without covering the pot. Five minutes later there was popcorn all over the kitchen! The air was full of flying popcorn! And it was impossible to put the lid on the pot when it was spitting out boiling hot kernels in all directions. We laughed hysterically, accidentally crushed popcorn under our feet, and finally got the lid onto the pot. It was a lot of work to clean up.

So don’t do that. Remember to put the lid on.

popcorn

Let me back up to say that you need to take the pot off the heat for one minute after you hear the first popcorn kernel pop. Then return the pot to the heat. Shake the pot continuously back and forth, taking turns with anyone else in the room, making sure their turns are longer than yours so that you do less work.

As soon as the popcorn stops popping, shut off the stove, open the lid, and dump the popcorn into a large bowl. If you are having a party, everyone can make their own toppings in their own bowls or paper bags. My favorite flavor of popcorn is cheese popcorn, you know, the kind that actually looks orange. Well, I had no idea that you can get the same basic flavor by shaking Parmesan cheese on some air-popped popcorn. And it’s not bad for you, because it’s real cheese. It contains calcium and protein. Of course cheese has calories, but at least they’re not empty calories.

If you eat the air-popped popcorn with salt on it, it has almost no calories at all. Only do this if you’re on a diet, because it’s a whole lot better with butter. Real butter. Melt butter either on the stove or in the microwave, and pour it on top of your popcorn. Yum.

I’ve tried making mixtures of chili popcorn by using chili powder, garlic powder, and cumin, but I didn’t really like it that much. Maybe if you mix it with Parmesan and don’t go overboard on the chili powder, it would be more delicious, if you are in a spicy sort of mood.

make-your-own-popcorn

Of course, the grand finale is caramel popcorn, which takes longer to make, but it’s delicious. Cook 1 cup of brown sugar, 4 tablespoons of margarine, 1/4 cup of corn syrup, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt in a saucepan under medium heat, stirring continuously. When it bubbles, stir another five minutes. Pawn this task off to your children, who have way more energy than you do. At the end of five minutes, stir in 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda. Then pour it over the popcorn that is on a foil-lined cookie sheet. Bake an hour at 200 degrees, stirring every 15 minutes.

If you are impatient and want to eat the caramel popcorn without baking it at all, go ahead. It’s a lot stickier, but it’s still yummy. Especially if you’re pregnant and you have a craving for caramel popcorn, you definitely wouldn’t want to wait an entire hour!

 

Multitasking Burns Your Dinner

Saturday, June 30th, 2012

multitaskingAs I was cooking dinner one night, I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss the buzz of the dryer, because the load contained shirts that I didn’t want to wrinkle. Meanwhile my husband called and said he was going to be home late because of traffic. I hung up the phone, and my 11-year-old son started talking to me while I said, “Just a second. Rachel! Set the table please!” and I heard a “Yes, Mommy.” Meanwhile my son was talking, but I have no idea what he was saying because I heard the dryer buzz. I set down my spatula from the stir fry to go to the dryer. I quickly and efficiently folded all the shirts as fast as was humanly possible. My head felt thick as my son continued to jabber on and on. I still wasn’t listening to him because… oh, no! Dinner was burnt! I lifted the pan and turned off the burner, looking toward the dining room to make sure that my daughter had obeyed me about setting the table. She had. I set the pan down. I decided to serve the dinner burnt.

We have come to think of multitasking as being efficient with our time. Especially as mothers, we tend to be doing between three to five things all day long. We try to juggle to get everything done, but the truth is that we have forgotten to focus. And we have forgotten how to live in the moment. The saddest part of all this was that the only thing of eternal value in this scenario was my son’s open heart to me, wanting to share something with me. He is soon going to be a teenager, and if I don’t listen to him now, he won’t bother to tell me things in the future, the things that matter. Because what’s important enough for him to say to me, I ought to be able to listen to. But it seems like I don’t have time or brain space. My brain is juggling six things and can’t input more information without dropping something; in this case, burning dinner.

Actually, whenever I focus on only one thing, I get a lot more done. This includes being with people. When I am in my room, sitting on a chair, and my son wants to talk, I can focus great, and we have the most wonderful, deep spiritual conversations. Like the other day he was telling me how frustrated he was with his brother, who would over-react. This would infuriate him, but he had enough self-control not to show his anger. I told him he didn’t need to give in to the temptation to become angry; that God always provides a way out so that we don’t have to sin. “Look for the way out,” I said. We brainstormed ways to do this. Then we prayed that God would transform all of our hearts to help us to overcome sin. You see, I was paying attention to him because I wasn’t multitasking.

Being scatterbrained is no way to live. I was never scatterbrained until I became a mother, and I felt like there was no choice. But we do have a choice. We can choose to do laundry at the beginning of each day so that it doesn’t interfere with dinner. We can ask God how to eliminate action clutter, things that don’t matter that we happen to be doing. And we can learn to be present, to live and breathe, and to do one thing at a time.

Strawberry Crepes

Thursday, May 24th, 2012

strawberry-crepes

These heavenly strawberry crepes taste delicious. They just melt in your mouth. I made them for the first time last summer, after my children picked fresh strawberries at a local farm.

First mix 8 oz. Mascarpone cheese, 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar, ½ teaspoon of dried basil, and 1 teaspoon of lemon juice. Fold in 1 ½ cups of sliced strawberries. Put it in the refrigerator for half an hour.

Meanwhile, get the topping ready. Mix 2 cups of sliced strawberries, ½ cup of sugar, 2 tablespoons of orange juice, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla.

Now make the thin pancakes, which are called crepes. Mix together 3 eggs, slightly less than 1 cup of milk, ¾ cup of flour, 5 teaspoons of melted butter, 1 tablespoon of sugar, 1 teaspoon of vanilla, and ¼ teaspoon of salt.

Heat up two 8-inch frying pans over medium heat. Put a tablespoon of oil into each of them. Pour about ¼ cup of batter into each pan. Flip when lightly browned. Brown both sides.

Place the crepe on a plate. Put the Mascarpone mixture inside the middle and fold the two sides over. Pour the topping over it. Enjoy your strawberry crepes.