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Got my goat: an adventure in eating

December 1st, 2008 · Food preparation, Food selection, local food, recipes

A few months ago, my friends Bryan and Carolyn gave me a pair of goat sirloins along with my purchase of some of their pastured beef. Although I previously tried and liked barbecued goat ribs, I’d never cooked goat, so when I finally got around to preparing it yesterday I decided to follow Carolyn’s advice. The result: interesting.

Goat, according to the USDA, is getting increasingly popular in this country. Meat from young goats is called kid and from mature goats is called chevon, goat or, even, mutton. I forgot to weigh these, but the two together I’d guess weighed 6 ounces at most.

I’ve placed a quarter next to the two steaks for size reference. Each one was smaller than my hand and barely 1/2 inch thick.

Carolyn warned that goat can be fatty, but that didn’t seem to be the case except for the one chunk of fairly well segregated fat on each steak, which I cut off before cooking. She gave me a general outline, and what follows is what I actually did.

Curried goat sirloin

  • 2 goat sirloin steaks
  • 1/4 cup diced onion
  • 1/4 cup diced red bell pepper
  • 1/4 cup diced green bell pepper
  • 2 teaspoons brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon curry powder
  • 3/4 cup water
  1. Trim fat chunks from steaks. Heat heavy pan over medium-high heat. Add the cut-off fat and swirl to coat bottom then remove fat pieces.
  2. Add sirloins and brown, about 2 minutes per side.
  3. Loosen steak from bottom of pan, and add onions, red and green peppers, brown sugar and curry powder. Stir to distribute ingredients. Add water. Cover pan, reduce heat to low and simmer 2 hours, stirring occasionally.
  4. Serve hot over rice with chutney on the side. Makes 2 servings.

Carolyn said she often does hers in a slow cooker, and she suggested adding some coconut milk toward the end of the cooking. I didn’t have any on hand, so I skipped that step.

Taste test

The meat was tender, in a well-cooked-pot-roast kind of way. It had a distinct but not overpowering flavor that reminded me a little of lamb, but leaner. With the vegetables and rice, plus the chutney accent, it was a nice change of pace. I’m not ready to eat it every day, but, then, I’m not ready to eat any meat every day.

In case you’d like to know more about goat, here are two sources I found in addition to the USDA page mentioned above:

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Mountain conquered without leaving kitchen

November 24th, 2008 · Food preparation, recipes

Some cooking tasks seem so scary that some of us (me) scrupulously avoid them, but when you finally attack them and succeed, well, you feel like you’ve really accomplished something. With this year’s conquests including canning and carmelizing sugar, I was ready for one more: soufflé.

It’s funny how these processes grow big in your mind. I imagined any soufflé I made would fail to rise or wind up as warm, runny eggs or turn my dish into a solid mass of impenetrable, cooked-on egg. I was surprised, therefore, when my friend who helped me eat it commented blithely, “what’s the big deal?” (or something to that effect). It’s soufflé, for heaven’s sake! Famously difficult! Given to collapse! Given to creating humiliation for the host who dares to serve it!

Getting a nudge

Angela’s casual attitude about the individual soufflés started me to thinking that maybe I could do it. And I found myself with an unusual surplus of eggs and some nice greens, so I decided what the heck and invited Sue, a friend who I thought would forgive my cooking failure. She arrived just before I was to put the dish in the oven.

“I used to make them all the time,” she said. This, from a woman who steadfastly insists she’s a lousy cook. She told me to put a collar on the soufflé dish, even if it didn’t look as though it would rise much above it. The collar, she said, would assure more even cooking. Who was I to argue? So, with her help, we tied a collar of waxed paper around the dish and put it in the oven. We sipped wine while I waited nervously. At last, the timer sounded, and there was my beautiful soufflé! Risen! Browned! Beautiful!

If you think you’re ready to try a soufflé, I say go for it. Here’s the recipe I used, a pretty close adaptation of the version in Mastering The Art of French Cooking, Volume One. I won’t repeat all the helpful general information that’s also included in the book, but I think this recipe should work if you want to give it a shot.

Cheese soufflé with spinach

1. Get ready

Coat bottom and sides of a 6-cup souffle mold (see note) with 1 tablespoon butter. Add 1 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese and shake dish to distribute cheese. Set aside. Cut length of waxed paper long enough to encircle the souffle dish. Also, cut a length of cotton string long enough to encircle the dish and tie. Put your baking rack on the middle shelf in your oven.

2. Prepare the savory bits

  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1 tablespoon minced shallots or green onion (I used shallots)
  • 3/4 cup blanched, chopped spinach (I used tatsoi), squeezed of moisture
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt

Melt butter in nonreactive sauce pan over medium heat. Add shallots and cook 1 minute. Add spinach and salt, and stir over medium-high heat for several minutes to evaporate as much moisture as you can from the spinach. Remove from heat, and start preheating oven to 400 degrees.

3. Make the sauce

  • 3 tablespoons butter
  • 3 tablespoons flour
  • 1 cup milk at boiling point
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teapoon pepper
  • Pinch ground cayenne pepper
  • Pinch ground nutmeg
  • 4 egg yolks
  1. Melt the butter in sauce pan over medium heat. Add flour. Stir and cook 2 minutes after mixture gets bubbly, but don’t brown mixture. Set off heat.
  2. Pour in milk all at once, and beat with wire whisk until smooth. Add seasonings.
  3. Put over medium-high heat and bring to a boil, stirring with whisk. Boil 1 minute. Mixture will be quite thick. Set off heat.
  4. Add egg yolks one at a time, beating well with whisk with each addition.

4. Beat and add the egg whites

  • 5 egg whites (yes, one more white than yolk)
  • Pinch salt
  • 1/3 cup grated Swiss cheese, reserving 1 tablespoon for on top
  1. Beat the egg whites with salt until stiff. Stir a quarter of the beaten egg whites and all the cheese (except the reserved tablespoon) into sauce. Then fold in the rest of the egg whites, and transfer mixture into the prepared mold. Sprinkle remaining tablespoon of cheese on top.
  2. Attach collar to dish (see notes), and set on rack in the oven. Immediately reset temperature to 375 degrees. Bake 25-30 minutes, or until puffed and nicely browned. Insert a thin knife or cake tester into center by way of the side of the puff. If the tester comes out clean, remove from oven (unless you like yours a little runny), remove collar and serve. If mixture clings to tester, bake 4-5 minutes more before removing and serving. Makes 4 modest servings.

Notes: A dish 3 1/2 inches high and 5 1/2 inches across will hold 6 cups. Look for one with straight or very slightly flared sides. Ceramic is good, but metal works, too. To attach the collar (which also can be buttered foil or brown paper), wrap the paper around the dish, and fasten it by wrapping the string around the dish and tying it. You also can use a straight pin. Meanwhile, Julia Child says no collar is necessary. You choose.

The next conquest

I will remember that soufflé next time I’m afraid to try something in the kitchen. Few other accomplishments yield such great satisfaction in such a short amount of time. And, I finally realized, if the soufflé flopped, we could salvage it somehow, or eat something else.

Do you have any cooking fears?

An aside

I’ve been absent here for a little while. That’s because I’ve decided to develop a web site that promotes home cooking and that will be more commercial (I hope!) than this blog. I’ll keep you posted on that site’s progress and let you know when I’m ready to really announce and promote it. In the meantime, I’ll try not to be such a stranger here. Now, what was that again about your cooking fears?

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Preservation update: apples frozen; herbs dried

November 12th, 2008 · Food preparation

Simple food preservation techniques—freezing and drying—have taken care of much of my local food bounty. If you still have fresh fruit or herbs available, you can do it, too. Here’s an update on food previously mentioned.

Apples

Remember those ugly apples? They were so delicious that I’d still be eating them, but I got down to the ones really covered with black spots so I decided cooking them and freezing them was in order. I pulled out the trusty apple machine (I must get a new suction cup!), and cranked through the pile—peeling, coring and slicing. They remained plenty firm for the machine. (Soft apples don’t do so well.)

I put the first 4-5 cups in an apple pie, so they’re long gone. As I prepped the rest, I dropped them in a bowl with about 1/2 cup lemon juice plus 1/4 cup water then drained them and froze them in two well-stuffed quart-size freezer bags, enough for two more pies.

Bonus: I captured the lemon juice as it drained off the apples and combined it with the remaining apple-dunking lemon juice and about 1/3 cup sugar, brought it to a boil for a couple of minutes and had a delicious appley-lemonade concentrate that I thinned with a little more water. Very tasty and refreshing.

Herbs

Then there were the late-harvest herbs. I didn’t fuss over them like I did the mint. I just snipped them, rinsed them, let the water dry, then hung them in a reasonably airy dark closet and hoped for the best. Temperatures had dropped, so it wasn’t quite as warm in there as would have been ideal, but it worked. I took them down, stripped leaves from stems and, voila!, enough dried sage and rosemary to share plus a small quantity of oregano and thyme for me. Another potential Christmas or hostess gift in the bag, so to speak.

From the closet

From the top: Thyme, oregano, rosemary-oregano mixture (oops), rosemary and sage

Packaged and labeled

When I took those herbs down, I cut and hung the high-reaching branch from my bay laurel. I need to find three or four jars to store those in for gift-giving, but in the meantime, they’re fragrantly stored in a freezer bag.

Bay before and after

Dried mint footnote: I made myself some tea from the dried mint the other day, and it was lovely.

Cost effective

When I think of how much dried herbs cost and how easy drying them is, I wonder what took me so long to do it myself? I probably paid $2.50 per plant for the new herbs this year, and even though my harvest from them was sparse (save for the sage), they’ll be back. And if they don’t prosper next year, I’ll still have gotten my money’s worth. (Actually, the parsley looks better than ever now with the cool weather. The thyme may need a new location, though. Maybe the oregano, too.)

Added bonus

I keep a compost bin, and not very effectively by serious composter standards. Nevertheless, besides providing a seeming endless supply of good stuff for the soil, it periodically rewards me with food. The biggest haul I got was a canteloupe one year, although its flavor was disappointing. This year’s free plant was a rangy tomato vine. It appeared too late in the season to really produce, but as frost approached, it had several bunches of small green tomatoes. By then, I’d had my fill of green tomatoes. One of the little buggers, though, had a hint of color to it, so I saved it, and it ripened on my counter. Here it is, my tomato harvest. Texture was only so-so, but it was still a treat!

How about you? Did your yard or garden surprise you this year?

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Market’s closed, but local food still available

November 9th, 2008 · Farmers markets, local food

Yes, though I’m sad that my regular local food suppliers (Rolling Prairie Farmers Alliance and the Lawrence Farmers Market) are closed for the season, that doesn’t mean local food is at an end. You can catch multiple vendors at the following markets:

  • Nov. 22-23, Holiday Open House at Pendleton’s Country Market. The Pendletons will be hosting more than a dozen producers 9 a.m.-5 p.m. at this market the weekend before Thanksgiving. If you’re there on Saturday, you can even get a local turkey from the Clark Family Farm for your holiday feast as well as chestnuts for your dressing (from Chestnut Charlie’s) and pecans for your pie (from River Field Farm). Lots of other good food and crafts will be available, too.
  • Dec. 13, the Lawrence Farmers Market‘s holiday market. It’s 8 a.m.-3 p.m. at the Knights of Columbus Hall. So far, no list of vendors. If I come across one, I’ll let you know.
  • Year-round. The Community Mercantile and the Casbah Market both make a point of offering local goods for sale.

In addition, you often can buy direct from producers at their farms. You can find some of them at Local Harvest and others on the vendor list of the farmers market. Orchardist Floyd Ott and his helper, for example, were telling customers yesterday that they would still have apples for a while, so give them a call.

Local Harvest, by the way, has listings nationwide. And look for pastured meat producers here and across the country at Eatwild.

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Farmers market season ends…mostly

November 8th, 2008 · Farmers markets, Food selection, local food

Today was my last chance to take advantage of the local bounty at the Lawrence Farmers Market—at least until the holiday market—and take advantage I did. I bought all I could carry the half-mile or so home and spent $28.50. And what a haul!

The take included 2 good-sized butternut squash, three carnival squash, 10 pounds of “field run” sweet potatoes (“field run” meaning out of the field and into the bag without washing or curing), a bunch of pretty purple mustard greens and seven pounds of apples, about a third each York, Golden Delicious and Honeycrisp.

I’m quite pleased with my purchases, as I hadn’t gotten any butternut squash through the Rolling Prairie Farmers Alliance this year for assorted reasons. Now, I’ll be able to make Butternut Vegetable Soup, one of my favorites.

Sweet potato cure

Haven’t decided whether to attempt to cure those sweet potatoes or not. According to Karen Pendleton and web sources, curing entails holding the potatoes as follows:

Before storing cure the sweet potatoes to promote healing of wounds and improve flavor. Place the sweet potatoes in an area with a temperature of 80 to 85 F and high relative humidity for approximately 10 days.

The Pendletons use their greenhouses for curing, but it hasn’t been sunny enough. I guess I may try the set-them-next-to-the-furnace method. My basement is plenty humid, but I don’t think it’s all that warm next to the furnace. Still, I’ll give it a try, as curing allows you to store the potatoes for considerably longer than uncured potatoes.

By the way, don’t store sweet potatoes in the refrigerator. They don’t like to be cold.

Market farewell

So that’s it for the 2008 Lawrence Farmers Market’s regular sales. (Holiday market to come.) From my point of view, it’s been a great year because fruit returned after last year’s terrible crop loss, but it’s hard to say goodbye, especially since this year, I’m also saying thanks and farewell to coordinator Mercedes Taylor-Puckett (right). She has done a great job promoting the market but is moving on to the Kansas Rural Center where she’ll be boosting farmers markets statewide (if I’ve got that right…). She promises we’ll see her at the market next year, but as a shopper.

Meanwhile, there are still opportunities to buy local produce direct from the producers. I’ll tell you about them tomorrow.

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Sometimes life requires feeding things besides belly

November 4th, 2008 · General

Circumstances have been conspiring against blogging—and cooking for that matter.

  • The Rolling Prairie season has ended.
  • The weather has been gorgeous and therefore demanding my time outdoors.
  • I’ve been doing election campaign volunteer work during times I usually would be blogging.

Nothing to do about the end of the CSA deliveries except to wait for next year. Sigh. I’ve been getting the Rolling Prairie produce for so many years, you’d think I’d be better at the transition back to the supermarket for produce, but I’m not. Maybe I’ll see what’s available at the Farmers Market tonight. At the moment, my refrigerator is bereft of fresh vegetables except carrots, and I have only a few apples left. (I’ll have to tell you the disposition of the other apples in another post.)

Nothing to do about the weather, either, except to enjoy it while it lasts.

The election campaigns, mercifully, are in their final hours. I will go work for a couple of hours today and then keep myself busy and away from the television and radio until this evening, when there will be nothing more I can do about it, either. Perhaps starting tomorrow I’ll be thinking more about food and cooking. Fortunately, I like cooking and eating dried beans, so I expect I’ll be able to feed myself regardless of the outcome.

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