| Summary | Posts | Stats | Info |
|
Recipes
Latest Update
(view all)
|
Search User's Recipes
Recent Comments
(more)
Top Recipe Tags
(more)
|
|
Matriarchy: I want figure out how to make "canned soup." For instance, to make a cooked concoction, pressure can it in pint jars, and then be able to add water, stock, or milk to have 3-4 cups of soup. Cream of cauliflower or broccoli, for instance, so I can take advantage of that season. I want to see if I can make up the recipe without the dairy, can it as "condensed" soup, and have shelf-stable homemade soup. Anyone doing that?
Margaret : Never tried to make my own canned soup, but I do use a lot of dried ingredients in soups (mostly beans). Those last for ages and ages. Let me know how this works for you though... I'd be interested in hearing about it. Sorry I can't be of any help.
16 hours ago
Matriarchy: It is the broccoli and cauliflower that got me thinking. I froze a lot last year, but it comes out mushy and I end up making soup. Seems like I should just make the soup and be done with it. But it will take up a lot of jar space, so I was thinking how to condense it so I could add water/milk later. Love the season where I can pay $1 for a giant head of local broccoli, but I have not yet settled on a way "put some up." We buy broccoli year-round.
16 hours ago
Margaret : Can you dehydrate broccoli? We usually get it fresh, but I have some frozen that I use in soups or stir frys. Or maybe you could pickle it, but that won't work in a soup application, I'm afraid. Hmm....
15 hours ago
Write a comment
Matriarchy: We ate all the strawberry jam and apricot preserves I made. None left for winter! I'd better make the most of the peach season.
Matriarchy: And in the future, I need to do a better job of both making more, and stashing some away where no one remembers to use it until February, when we need to remember that spring is coming.
21 days ago
Dawn Knowlton: I am down to only two jars left of the strawberry jam that I made in the spring! I have a bad/good habit of giving my jams away because everyone keeps asking me for some. :o) I think I may stash one of those two jars deep, deep, deep in the back of the freezer in our garage so I find it many months from now. *lol*
18 days ago
Matriarchy: Next spring, invite all those jam-eaters to a group canning session, so they can help make their own, and stop mooching. LOL
18 days ago
Matriarchy: Just made a long forum post about Pantry Building. Please add suggestions and resources!
Lorrae Bradbury: great post! Thank you for the tips, and your suggestion for refrigerator jam! That's been working great for the ones I'll use at home. Thank you!
27 days ago
Matriarchy: TIP: I am sure everyone else already knows this, but *I* just discovered it. If you freeze snack-size bags of chopped onion in half-cups, it's really easy to add it to what you are cooking, without getting all onion-y. Chop a couple onions all at once, and cook for weeks. I keep the baggies inside the frozen core of my ice cream maker in the back corner of the freezer, so I can find them.
Matriarchy: Accidentally left a huge turkey thigh in the crockpot when I went to bed! Woke up dreaming of Thanksgiving at 1am. But I might be onto something here. Made marinade out of whole-berry cranberry sauce, Dijon, cayenne, and onions. After about 6 hours on high, it's like pot roast. Have to work on the pan sauce tomorrow - needs salt, pepper, and the fat skimmed. Sage?
I started with a recipe in my collection, but it's going someplace else right now. Sweet-n-Spicy Turkey Thighs
Matriarchy: We added salt, pepper, sage, and thyme to the sauce, and ate it with mashed and corn-on-the cob. It was fabulous! I am changing that recipe to turn it into this!
41 days ago
Matriarchy: My 13yo loves to make pizza, but will only use canned sauce. Drives me nuts. She doesn't even have a brand preference. Turns her nose up at homemade sauce that everyone else loves. I adapted this recipe from a recipe on the Tasty Kitchen blog. I liked the easy ingredients, but they used a few tablespoons of this and that. I want a recipe that lets me use standard can sizes. A 28-oz can of tomatoes and a small can of tomato paste. So, I multiplied and tweaked until it fit that standard.
Testing starts tonight.
Pizza Sauce #2
Matriarchy: Made a batch of hummus last night. Making a batch of pizza sauce tonight. Found California blackberries and local apricots on sale. Going to make some small batches of jam this weekend. Been eating Ranier cherries right out of the bag this week. And local corn is in. I barely need to "cook" anything. We only turn on the oven for 15 minutes to make pizza.
Matriarchy: Too hot to cook. Heat index going up over 100 today. I have been eating melon, yogurt, sandwiches, tortellini from frozen. Making hard-boiled eggs for tuna salad. Does anyone have go-to recipes for hot days? I just put this chicken recipe in the crockpot to try later tonight: Slow Cooker Island BBQ Chicken
Carolyn Beck: This recipe sounds delicious - just bookmarked it to try this weekend - thanks !!
72 days ago
Matriarchy: Been making jam! Got together a group of 8 at my church for a Strawberry Jam Session, and produced 27 pints. Today, I made a batch of Sunshine Jam with a very ripe pineapple. Cooking down some leftover strawberry mash to make some no-pectin preserves.
Meadowlark's Sunshine Jam
Traci Downing: You are incredible!!! I've never made jams but have always wanted to. I'm just afraid of the canning process. Do you have any recommendations?
128 days ago
Matriarchy: Be fearless! If a batch comes out runny, consider it yogurt or ice cream topping. If it overgels, melt it in a pan and use it as pastry glaze. Experiment! Make small batches of one or two jars and just put them in the fridge, to get started. Buy a "Ball Blue Book" found with the canning jars at your grocery store or Walmart. If you don't have a canner, put a round wire cake rack in the bottom of a stock pot and use that to boil your jars for 10 min. I experiment with less sugar, no sugar, no pectin. There are lots of recipes to be found online. Food blogs, here on WGE, canning sites, you-pick orchard websites. I started just a year or two ago, and I love it. In a water bath canner, I do jam, chutney, pickles, applesauce, tomatoes. I have a pressure canner, but have not tried it yet - I want to can homemade stock and soup. Look for a canning group near you - ask at your local university cooperative extension service; they might have classes. Even a high school home economics teacher might be able to help you.
128 days ago
Carolyn Beck: I love making jelly/jam...my oldest son is diabetic, so I often substituted Splenda for the sugar in my jam recipes, so he could enjoy strawberry, apricot, peach, and even rhubarb jam on his toast and bagels w/out adding any extra carbohydrates.
81 days ago
Matriarchy: OK. so I can't find a brisket. I got two packs of country-style beef ribs. Since they are also intended to braise, I think they might work. And I am doing this in a crockpot, so I can go to a movie without worrying about leaving something on the stove. We will see how it works in 8-10 hours!
Passover Brisket
Matriarchy: Turned out very tender! And the Spinach Pasta Bake I am inventing had a good first trial run. All-in-all, not a bad day in the kitchen.
152 days ago
Matriarchy: I have more than 500 recipe bookmarks that I have not yet cataloged on WGE. I am going to start spending 15-30 minutes each day adding recipes, to get through that backlog. As I actually cook them, I will add notes, rate them, and remove the ones I don't like.
Janice Cook: What do you mean by catalog the bookmarks? As far as I can see the bookmarks stay in one giant pile. The ones I enter myself I rate as soon as I make them and remove the ones I don't like (or mark them as 2 stars so I can remember to remove them later). But I haven't seen a way to sort the bookmarked recipes. I just try to plan a menu from that section every couple of weeks instead of my core cookbook. Tell me more about your plan - maybe I'm missing something.
152 days ago
Matriarchy: Sorry. That was misleading choice of words. I meant that I have them externally bookmarked in Delicious.com, the bookmark manager I use for web browsing. I don't always have time to immediately enter an interesting recipe discovery on WGE, so I just tag them as "recipe" and save them to my bookmarks. I need to sort through them and enter them on WEG, so I remember to start trying them. The bookmarks on WEG itself - no, I don't have a way to sort or re-tag them in my own tag categories. I only "see" them if I am using Search. If I am just looking from my own tags, I forget to check my WGE-bookmarked recipes. I like your plan of deliberately planning menus from the bookmarks. Wish we had a way to flag them in some way once we try them. I guess the alternative is to re-enter it our own recipes so we can tag and rate it. When I try a recipe that isn't perfect, but I want to try it again with tweaks, I put my suggestions in a note and rate it with 3 stars. I can't do that with bookmarked recipes.
152 days ago
Janice Cook: OK - I just wanted to check. Right now when I get a new cooking magazine I read it and enter in all the ones I want to try immediately (within a day or two). I try to also sit down for a chunk of time each weekend and entered in my "tried and true" recipes or my collection of recipes I want to try that accumulated before I started using WGE but it's hard to catch up. Thanks for clarifying.
On those weeks that I cook from bookmarks I delete ones I didn't care for. If I did like it, I make a comment to the person who shared it, and then enter it in as my own recipe so I can rate it (I usually put their name in the title to remind me where I got it from).
152 days ago
Matriarchy: I think I have most of my tried-and-true in here now, but I have a big backlog of clipped recipes, and now a large lot of family recipes from cleaning out my mother's house. And the internet recipes just keep coming! I promised myself not to save any more until I catch up, so hopefully I will stick to my plan to enter a handful every day.
152 days ago
Janice Cook: Oh I have no restraint with saving recipes. What if that had the potential to be my new absolute favorite recipe!! I have like 10 recipes that I can't imagine my life without and all of them were surprises. I can't tell yet when I make something for the first time what it's potential is. Good luck with your project!
152 days ago
Matriarchy: We recently got a Walmart superstore near us. Normally, I am not a Walmart fan. But they are getting better press about their produce lately (see Atlantic article below). But my favorite thing is this frozen pizza dough they get from a NY bakery. We but about 10 at at time, for $1.18 each. There is always dough thawing in our fridge, and we all make our own specialties. No one likes mine as much as I do. I make thick white sauce with Parmesan and a lump of frozen pesto, spread it on pizza dough, and topped it with cheddar and bacon bits - sometimes leftover chicken. But the weirdest was when I spread cold, thick, Ham-n-Bean soup on dough, and sprinkled it with cheddar. I though it was like a handy way to eat bread and soup. Everyone else thought it was gross.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/the-great-grocery-smackdown/7904/
Eunice : how are you, Matriarchy? just saw this article and thought of you. "Fresh ricotta in five minutes or less"
Matriarchy: Thank you! For months, I was kind of overwhelmed with the task of de-hoarding my mom's house. Food got less homemade. But now I gettin gback into some of my old patterns of better cooking. Not quire ready for cheese-making. Hoping to start making yogurt again this week. I did find lots of vintage cooking and serving pieces. Nice to have "heirloom" cast iron, canning jars, and cake stands.
171 days ago
Matriarchy: YAY! The nice folks at WeGottaEat gave me a Pro membership for having a ridiculous amount of recipes. LOL... I am posting that on Facebook. Maybe I can introduce more people to the Joy of WGE.
Dave Weaver: Actually it was because you have done a lot to help shape the direction of our website. But you do have a ridiculous amount of recipes ;)
1 year ago
Matriarchy: I am going to try to get more involved again. Lots of great stuff happening here at WGE. I have been distracted.
1 year ago
Matriarchy: Time to get back to adding new recipes! I have been using WGE regularly to look up my favs, but not adding much. I starting a new cooking phase. I want to keep cooking real family food from scratch with the best quality ingredients, but I need to lose some weight. I will be going through my most-used recipes and calculating calorie content and portion size. Not giving up food, just dialing it down. Most weight loss plans are built around packaged food and chain restaurant menus, oddly enough. People need to learn to cook, not eat 100-calorie packs of bad cookies!
Eunice : Happy New Year to you, Matriarchy! hope things have quieted down for you a bit for you. it's freezing out here in Chicago!
Matriarchy: Things have been weird in my household, what with the demented mother and the long-distance parenting partner. But he is coming home tonight and we are all going to spend 5 days in a beach house in Delaware with his family. My kitchen is rocking to day - as I am sure many of yours are. Loud music. Stockpots and crockpots bubbling. Things roasting and baking. I wish I could bottle this smell.
Eunice : what a lovely idea! bottled aromas of food!!! so you could make us all even more jealous and our stomache all grumbly for the wanting of eating your food. sorry that you have to shoulder so much though.
1 year ago
Matriarchy: My DH is home for the weekend - the first time I will see him in 2 months, and I won't see him again until Thanksgiving. He has been living on canned food, take-out, and cereal, so I am stuffing him full of home cooking! (Not my only plan for him, of course.) Steak, mashed, real gravy, broccoli, and brownies tonight - fundamental man-food. Breakfast is eggs, cheese grits, scrapple, and toast with homemade peach jam. Lunch is his fav broccoli-cheddar soups, and grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. Dinner might be homemade pizza. Sunday breakfast is waffles and bacon. Non-stop family favorite food, until he can barely fit back in the bus back to grad school. And some baked goods in his luggage.
Matriarchy: Just made a batch of something I am tentatively calling "All-Purpose Peach Topping.
http://wegottaeat.com/matriarchy/recipes/allpurpose-peach-topping
Matriarchy: Birthday prep, today. My 12-yo turns 13 tomorrow. I was going to make her favorite, cheesecake, but their is a local outlet for a national restaurant-quality dessert manufacturer that has their plant in our town. I got a huge Ricotta cheesecake for $8. I can't even buy the ingredients for that. I bought pizza dough from a bakery, and got mozzarella to shred. She likes to make pizza with our homemade sauce. I also roasted squash to puree for pie this morning, and soaked beans to put in the crockpot tomorrow. Need to go stop at out freezer (temporarily living my brother's garage) to get bones to make stock - almost out of my frozen supply. OK - off to make rice crispy treats to take to soccer tonight.
Matriarchy: Oooo... I just put in a pan of Everyday Bread Pudding, with sliced peaches mixed in. I can hardy wait for it to bake. The peaches were so ripe that the skins just about slid off, and the juice dripped off my fingers.
Matriarchy: Interesting NYT article about "crowd-sourcing" recipes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/dining/23recipes.html
Matriarchy: Made about 150 little cream puffs this morning, from a couple batches of Eunice's Choux Pastry recipe. Now I am waiting for the custard to cool, so I can fill them for a memorial service this afternoon. Out late friend apparently loved the puffs I made for a church event a few years ago, so her daughter asked me to make some for the reception after the service. RIP, Isabelle - bet they serve cream puffs every day, wherever you are.
Eunice : my grandmother taught me how to make the cream puffs. she passed away last December and i think of her every time i make them. so to think that it's made in commemoration of someone else...i'm getting weepy typing this.
1 year ago
Matriarchy: It was a lovely service for a beautiful woman who mothered many people and was universally loved. She and I were on the board at our church. People sang and read poetry and shared stories. I found out that she got her a pilot's license when she was 16 - in 1939. She died in April at 86, and it took until now for her family to feel that they could handle a memorial service. It was well worth your grandmother's cream puffs (and getting up at 6am to make them). I made two batches of small puffs - only took 22-24 minutes to cook. I let the custard cool while I went to church, then came back and filled the puffs with a pastry syringe right before the service, so they would not be soggy. Everyone loved them, even though the competition was tough. Isabelle was known for her pie, and her family members brought lots of it. I am getting Isabelle's recipe for very good Shoo Fly Cake. I love having recipes from people I know - it's a memory I can visit over and over again.
1 year ago
Eunice : i hope that in my mumbling weepiness, it didn't come off as disapproval on my part. rereading my post, i can see that it might have sounded that way. i'm so glad that the cream puffs were used for her memorial and proud! and it was beautiful that everybody else contributed with recipes for which she was known. this is a testament to the love that your friend inspired in people. you are so right! there's something special about recipes from people you know and love, especially from those who are no longer are here for you to share the bounty with. my heartfelt condolences to your friend's family and friends. my grandma struck quite a figure in our huge family and going back to visit...it's just not the same. so the fact that a recipe that brings so such a flood of memories to me is used to commemorate somebody else's great life, did cause me to be weepy, but only because of the appropriateness that it was used that way, to memorialize somebody who is greatly missed and still dearly loved.
1 year ago
Matriarchy: Oh no - I did not read disapproval in your message. Just giving you more details to weep over. :-)
1 year ago
Matriarchy: That vintage Vita-Mix blender of my Mom's DOES work. I just pureed a batch of Curried Split Pea Soup from overnight in the crockpot. Lovely velvety green with chunks of soft carrot and deep pink smoked ham. Teeniest bit of bite from curry and lots of black pepper. Mmmm.
Matriarchy: Oh ho! I have been invited to a family bake-off! My husband's family (who I have only recently begun to know) is renting a beach house in Delaware for Thanksgiving weekend. Us (me, hub, two teen girls), two of his aunts, and a couple that is friends with the aunts. His aunts are the younger sisters of his late mother - they are like having two mothers-in-law. Another uncle from California is also invited, but he has had a minor heart attack, and might not be able to travel. So, at least 8 people, at this point. And they want to try deep-frying a turkey!
My mind reels with possibilities. I think my daughters and I can blow these aunts out of the water. But is that the best strategy? And let's not forget that hub makes a kick-ass Coconut Sweet Potato Pie. The baking skills of the other couple are not known to me.
This weekend, I will be making about 200 hundred tiny cream puffs to take to a memorial service for an old friend. Good practice for my pate-chou skills. I think I will experiment with savory puffs - maybe fill them with eggs and cheese, or creamed chipped beef for breakfast.
Doris Clark: mmm...Coconut sweet potato pie sounds yummy. Would the hubby share the recipe or is it privileged information.
When you start cooking, the aunties might as well sit down.
1 year ago
Matriarchy: But I wonder... should I let the aunties win, and beg for the recipes, to preserve family harmony? It would be OK if the favorite nephew won.. but the nephew's mouthy woman? On the other hand, I want them to know I have mad skillz.
1 year ago
Matriarchy: That pesto from a few days ago - still working! I found I had no pine nuts or any other nut close at hand. Today, I reaasembled all the ingredients, loading it into Mom's food processor, and pushed the button. Nothing. Nothing in a different electrical outlet. It's dead. So, I scrape the pest stuff into the vintage 14-speed chrome Waring "Super Robot Blendor." It starts up, but then screeches to a halt and starts producing copious amounts of black electrical smoke. Dead. I'm eyeing the vintage Vita-Mix blendor, but I don't have high expectations.
Matriarchy: I decided to go use my brother's food processor. So, now I have pesto to freeze in lumps. When we moved here, I packed most of our kitchen into storage to bring the least possible to Mom's stuffed house. And, I knew she had appliances. But they hadn't been used in 10-15 years, and obviously did not hold up well. I'll go dig out my food processor.
1 year ago
Matriarchy: Sorry for the long absence. We've moved in with my mother for year, to organize and renovate her house so she can stay in it. Cooking has been difficult this summer, and often performed in other people's kitchens. I didn't garden or can. Lots of sandwiches and too many prepared foods. But, I am starting to do things again. Making a big batch of pesto for the freezer today. Hoping to bake banana bread and cookies later tonight. I want to send care packages to a few people.
Eunice : glad you're back, Matriarchy! would love to send out a care package to you as it sounds like you've had a very full year and could use some homemade nourishments.
1 year ago
Doris Clark: It's great to have you back, Matriarchy. You have been on my mind so much and wondering how your mom is. (I left my home in Chicago to be my mom's caregiver)It's a tough go. So glad you are past the transition, hope things will be easier now. I look forward to the news from your kitchen.
1 year ago
Matriarchy: Highlights of the week: 3Qt Broccoli Cheddar Soup, 2Qt yogurt, 2Qt applesauce, chicken Caesar salad with honey-mustard steamed carrots, lots of oatmeal breakfasts, roast turkey thigh for sandwiches. DD12 made chocolate chip cookies, and kept us supplied with stove-top popcorn for movie watching. DD16 made good burrito filling out of a package of freezer-burned meatloaf mix we found in the bottom of the freezer - way to reduce food waste!
Eunice : the honey-mustard steamed carrots sounds great! do you have that as part of your gi-normous list of recipes?
1 year ago
Matriarchy: Nope. Just julienned them, steamed them while I made the salad, then tossed the carrots with a bit of butter, a squeeze of honey, and a dab of Dijon.
1 year ago
Matriarchy: We've added my 82-year-old mother to our household, and are working on developing new cooking and eating habits that involve her in our kitchen life. She is an experienced low-fat eater and a great lover of fruit and vegetables. I think she will be good at helping to keep the fridge stocked with cut-up summer fruit and veg for snacking. She is already great at helping to keep the sink clear of dishes!
The challenge will be adjusting our cooking habits, which are not particularly low-fat or low-salt, to her dietary needs. I made Broccoli-Cheddar Soup last night, with Kraft's new lower-fat 2% white cheddar. It was a success - but really, was that a big fat reduction? The recipe uses butter, half-and-half, and cheese. Perhaps the key will be moderate consumption for things like that - served with a big salad and a piece of whole-grain bread.
Matriarchy: It's weird. My mother's normal healthy diet worked for years. Her cholesterol is 190 and her blood pressure is low. The carotid artery testing said she has almost no plaque, and she has no heart problems. But now that she had the mini-stroke (probably brought on by heat exhaustion), they put her on BP meds and a statin to lower her lipids, saying that diet already got her as far as it would, and that they wanted her readings to be "below normal" to reduce her stoke risk. So - is the medication going to do the heavy lifting? The "Heart Healthy" diet they recommended was already how she ate. I'm not sure I want her to starving for the last few years of her life, just to stick to "the standard regimin" for stroke patients. The literature a refers to patients that already had health problems and ate poorly. It seems to have nothing to sat to patients that did all the right things for decades - and had a stroke anyway! I think she oughta be able to eat the occasional cup of decent soup.
1 year ago
Eunice : oh that's harsh...and so unfair. i recall reading somewhere how fat in moderation is actually good for you. i need to see if i can re-find that article and send that info to you.
1 year ago
Carolyn Beck: Unfortunately, now that your Mom has had her first stroke, statistically her stroke risk is automatically elevated, despite "doing all the right things". Right now the statin is the important additive to her regimin to keep her lipids on the low side, but I say go for the occasional cup of decent soup as well! (I am an RN who manages the Stroke Registry at the hospital I work at) Even if you do all the right things, people can have strokes despite your best efforts at maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It sounds like you and your Mom are doing all the right things, so I bet that you will find a way to incorporate your delicious recipes into your mom's lifestyle. Good luck !!
1 year ago
Matriarchy: Thanks, Carolyn! At some point, it's just "your time to go," no matter how many right things you do. She's 82, so I have a limited interest in making her last years a miserable effort to achieve some magic blood test numbers, at the cost of her enjoyment of life. Personally, I think I would rather go quickly from a stroke than linger with cancer or a degenerative illness. Now, fortunately for Mom, some of her favorite things are also very good for her - fresh green beans from the garden, crunchy salads, fresh fruit, baked sweet potatoes, etc.
1 year ago
Eunice : ahem...just so you know, you're still queen, Matriarchy. you scored 146 hits on the last tallied full day and your highest on April 9th was 353 hits! pretty much blew everybody outta' the water.
Eunice : it's part of your Profile on the tabs on the right...a whopping 353 hits! you still reign supreme. site is looking pretty nifty, don't you think? hope you and your family are doing well. how's your mom?
1 year ago
Matriarchy: Hey! I will be back, but I have some work to do first. Unfortunately, my mom had a mini-stroke yesterday. She is recovering nicely, but we are scurrying to speed up our house-transition plans so we can keep a somewhat closer eye on her. It's gonna be a heck of a summer. I am still trying to at least get some strawberry jelly canned this month.
Eunice : you are one inspiring powerhouse, Matriarchy...in awe with all the things you've managed to accomplish with all these events swirling around in your life. wishing you and your family much good vibes and all that.
by the way, everyone should check out Matriarchy's blog. it's excellent! http://rampingup.blogspot.com
1 year ago
Matriarchy: Things are still swirling, and it's been raining a lot, but I hope to pick strawberries on Saturday morning, and crank out some jelly in the afternoon.
1 year ago
Matriarchy: Oh, and Bing Cherry picking opens next weekend on my birthday! I love me some cherries!
1 year ago
Eunice : hey Matriarchy! hope all is well with you and your family. can ya' dig it? Dave has enabled posting direct comments to members. so just sending a hey and hope to see you back at WGE, soon.
|
From you...
Top Posters / Commentors
|
Recipe Views Over Last 90 Days
|
Recent Recipe Viewers
|
|
Coming Soon
|
RSS Feeds
|