Don’t let me be a bad influence on you. I’m pretty sure deli meat is the devil incarnate. But…well…let’s talk about the olive tapenade. What else can one make with olive tapenade? This is all I ever use it for and it seems a terrible shame.
Bumstead Sandwich Recipe
This recipe is adapted from The Last Minute Party Girl by Erika Lenkert.
I love this recipe for parties because I can do almost all of the work ahead of time and we still get to eat a satisfying warm sandwich.
1 large whole grain baguette, halved lengthwise
2 tablespoons butter, softened
3 tablespoons black olive tapenade
1/3 cup goat cheese
1/4 pound of thinly sliced turkey
1/4 pound of thinly sliced salami
5 slices of pastrami
1/2 cup jarred roasted red peppers, rinsed, patted dry, and sliced into strips
1 cup spinach, washed and dried
Scoop out the innards of the baguette leaving the crust intact. Feed the innards to the kids.
Slather the butter on the top half of the baguette. Slather the bottom half with the olive tapenade and goat cheese. Load the meats, red peppers, and spinach onto the bottom half of the baguette. Cover it with the top half of the loaf.
Wrap the sandwich tightly with plastic wrap. Refrigerate until it’s party time (up to 48 hours).
Preheat the oven to 300 degree Fahrenheit. Place the unwrapped sandwich on a baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes.
Slice on an angle into about ten 2-inch wide segments. Hold the sandwiches together with a toothpick and serve immediately.
Yield: 10 sandwiches
Prep-time: 15 minutes
Bake-time: 15 minutes
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Overall, I’m amazed at how easy chickens are to take care of. But sometimes the whole situation reminds me of breastfeeding. Everyone’s so busy talking it up and saying how great it is that they forget to mention that there are moments when it truly sucks.
For instance:
1. Culling
Sometimes a chicken that was supposed to be a girl turns out to be a boy. In fact, I think it happens about 1 out of 10 times since chicks are so difficult to sex. After about a month of non-stop crowing for a half hour every morning, something had to be done (see above photo). What we thought was a butch hen was quickly becoming a rooster with a capital ‘R’.
Turns out there isn’t a drive-through slaughter house in our area catering to wimpy wannabe farmers. Even though we were fond of Miss Rooster, the rest of world saw her/him as a disposable entity that we needed to deal with ourselves. Gulp.
Apparently there will be more culling in two to three years when our hens are past their prime. They can live for several years, but if you’re in it for the eggs like we are it doesn’t make sense to keep them around. I’m not looking forward to it.
2. Start up costs
We found our little blue coop on craigslist, but it was still $500. I’ve seen fancy new coops for $1500. Then you have to build a yard around it. We used a healthy amount of hardware cloth to build ours so the yard cost somewhere between $100 – $200 more. Then there’s the food and the bedding. I don’t even want to do the math to figure out how many eggs our hens would need to lay to make up the costs. And I really don’t understand how farmers manage to make any money off of this kind of stuff.
The good news is that the chicks cost next to nothing.
3. Maintaince
Chickens poop a lot. So far it hasn’t gotten too smelly. But I’ve heard it can be a real stinkfest.
So all in all, I’ve discovered that keeping chickens is not always a pastoral love fest. But then when you’re cleaning out the coop for the millionth time, you find one of these:
I’m still a newbie, so it still feels better than Christmas morning to find a little egg hanging out in the nest box. It’s a miracle. I wonder if it will ever get old.
Thank you little hens.
Right after college, one of my roommates got a bread maker. After a couple months of excitement, she started to complain about feeling alienated from her bread. The machine was quietly tucked away never to be seen again.
Given this experience, I resisted getting a bread maker for a long time. But a few years ago I ended up with one and haven’t looked back. I have a Zojirushi which seemed like a good idea because it has two paddles and produces a traditionally shaped loaf. But now it’s pointless because a couple years ago I decided to use the machine to make the dough and then bake it in the oven. Those paddle holes in the bottom of a loaf are disheartening. And the crust always came out way too dark in the machine.
Just in case there are some other folks out there who are as pre-occupied with bread as I am, I thought I’d share my stand-by recipe. It’s mostly whole grain and is the main source of flaxseed in our diet.
Whole Wheat Flax Bread Machine Recipe
This recipe is inspired by Flax Prairie Bread from Ameriflax. I usually use King Arthur’s all-purpose flour for this bread, but if you have bread flour by all means use it instead of the all-purpose flour. It delivers.
1 1/4 cup water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/3 cup ground flaxseed
2 tablespoons safflower oil
2 tablespoons honey
1 cup all-purpose flour or bread flour
2 cups white whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons instant yeast
Put the water, salt, flaxseed, oil, honey, and flours in bread machine pan. Create a small well in the top of the flour and pour in the yeast. Run the machine on the Dough setting. When the dough is ready, punch it down and form it into a loaf shape. Place the dough in a greased bread pan. Cover with a light-weight towel.
Allow the dough to rise for an hour or until it is doubled in size. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 28 minutes. Remove loaf from pan by turning it upside down and catching it with an oven mit. Allow the loaf to cool completely on a cooling rack. If you put it away before it cools, it will get soggy. Store in an airtight container.
Yield: one loaf of lovely bread
Prep-time: 10 minutes
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Over the weekend my husband was out cutting down some deadwood and found what looked like an old garden plot. We moved to our current house under a year ago and we didn’t notice the plot because it was buried under an intense patch of thorn bushes. It’s probably been at least 20 years since it was used.
After a couple days of clearing out matted and prickly vegetation of all sorts, we have a roughly 20 x 20′ patch of semi-terraced dirt.
The soil looks good. I just placed a giant seed order at Burpee’s for corn, carrots, flowers, pickling cucumbers, slicing cucumbers, four kinds of tomatoes, herbs, dino kale, swiss chard, and sugar snap peas. Now all we need is a fence to keep the critters out and a way to safely ignore the fact that we have a bit of a slope. Shouldn’t be a problem, right?
In Defense of the Childhood Treat by Liz Synder at Fed Up With Lunch
‘Do No Harm’ Snacking from It’s Not About Nutrition.
How to Make a Better Grilled Cheese by Ruth Reichl for Gilt Taste via The Kitchn.
Asian-ish Shredded Chicken Salad from Dinner: A Love Story.
And last but not least I have a guest post on Savor the Thyme titled ’10 Things You Didn’t Know About Me’.
Once or twice a year I am overcome by a mounting sense of desperation over what to feed my family. I just start coming up blank more often than I’d like. (I probably should just be keeping a dinner journal to help myself remember what has and hasn’t worked. That would be a good idea. It would be fun to use a 5-year journal.)
Last Spring I bought a copy of The Family Dinner while I was looking for answers. I ended up getting a lot more than I hoped for. While the recipes are great, I hadn’t counted on such a serious dose of inspiration and guidance for staging family dinner.
Family dinner sounds easy. Make dinner. Eat together. But the book opened up a new world of possibilities to me. We’ve always actively avoided after-school activities that cut into the dinner hour. But we still needed an extra push to make family dinner a strong part of our family’s routine where we would eat together but also linger afterwards. The book showed me how it’s done. It reminded me how inspired parenting and building a family can be. Along with her own examples, David shares stories from the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mario Batali about what their family dinners were like as children.
As a result of my reading the book, we started memorizing poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. Along with the list of recommended reading from the book, we have some general and nature reference books. These are kept by our dinner table at arm’s length and have proved useful when my kids started asking crazy questions like “What is electricity?”.
When I first read the book I was on a mission to make family dinner happen every night of the week. Now I just go with the flow and am happy if it happens more nights than not. We’ve become slackers in the poem memorizing department too. But the bottom line is that the book has had a huge impact on the health and happiness of my family. We’ve started building memories at the dinner table. Hats off to Laurie David and Kirstin Uhrenholdt!
One of the best (?) parts of being a food blogger is keeping tabs on millions of other food bloggers. This means that I’m exposed to unending stream of tempting recipes. Some of the gems that have become a part of our regular rotation are listed below. These are meals/sides that most of the family is happy with most of the time. Thank you fellow bloggers.
Ponyo Noodles from Cook Play Explore. Rent the movie. Run out and find some lidded soup bowls the next day. Make some of the funnest and easiest noodles around.
Simple Seasame Noodles from Pioneer Woman. When I am completely unmotivated to cook and the refrigerator is bare, The Pioneer Woman comes to the rescue.
Roasted Broccoli with Lime from seaweed snacks. A small part of me is excited for the onset of winter each year so that the unending stream of roasted vegetables can begin.
Dilled, crunch sweet-corn salad with buttermilk dressing from Food 52. I don’t think Food 52 is really a blog, but I’m including it anyway. This salad is unbelievable.
Broccoli Slaw from Cook Play Explore. Quick, crunchy, and delicious.
Kale and Pear Smoothie from Joy the Baker. Yum!
Apple Caramel Pie from Pioneer Woman. My husband insists upon this pie at Thanksgiving.
Curried Lentil Soup from Molly Wizenburg at Bon Appetite. Lentils used to be the kind of food I really want to be crazy about but I just couldn’t truly embrace them. This recipe, however, makes me love them.
Chipotle Roasted Vegetable Salad from Perry’s Plate. This is a picture of my salad. I put all the fixings in bowls on the table the and the kids make their own “salads” and everyone’s happy.
Tuna Melts from The Pioneer Woman. I normally turn my nose up at gooey mushy tuna melts. But this version is loaded with crunchy veggies which keep the tuna and its mushy nature at bay. They’re perfect.
And last but certainly not least, Butterscotch Oatmeal Cookies from Baking Bites.
First there was the best of 2009. Then the best of 2010. Here are some of our favorites from the past year.
Wheat Thins
Salted Chocolate Almonds
S’more Bites
Warm Applesauce with Butter
Popcorn on the Cob
Best wishes to one and all for a happy and healthy new year. Thanks for reading.
The people of Spain who originally came up with this concoction are clearly culinary geniuses. I’m in love with this dip right now. I usually have all the ingredients on hand and it takes no time at all to make. Plus it’s vegan and doesn’t feel as heavy as the usual diary-heavy party fare.
Romesco Dip Recipe
This recipe is minimally adapted from Allison Fishman’s You Can Trust a Skinny Cook. Love this cookbook. Everything I’ve made from it has kicked some major arse.
1 slice bread, whole wheat or otherwise
1/2 cup sliced toasted almonds
1 garlic clove, peeled and smashed
1/2 cup jarred roasted red pepper, dried with a paper towel
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons water
Place the bread, almonds, and garlic into the bowl of a food processor and whiz until the almonds are finely ground – about 30 seconds.
Add the red pepper, vinegar, salt, red pepper flakes, and olive oil and process until smooth. Add the water in a steady stream through the feed tube with the processor running.
I find that this dip thickens up nicely if refrigerated overnight in an airtight container. Serve at room temperature with bread or vegetables. Spread it on sandwiches. Serve it with grilled chicken, fish, or vegetables.
Yield: 2 cups
Prep-time: 12 minutes
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