A Case for Burgers

I am a meat eater.  My wife is a plant eater.  I do most of the cooking in our house, and you had better believe that I don't make two different meals.  I am now a plant eater... well, much more than I used to be, and that is an important distinction.  I haven't stopped eating meat, I simply eat far less of it.

On Saturday night, we had my parents over for dinner.  Stephanie made some bread (see Stephanie's recent post on Sourdough), and I made burgers.  We also had some pickles on hand, and Stephanie made pickled onions, which are extremely simple and delicious.  So, when I say I made burgers, I should say that I made falafel burgers.  It seems to have been a hit, so here is the recipe:

1 can garbanzo beans (chick peas) (drained)

    Substitute different beans here if you prefer.

1 onion

cloves of garlic (to your taste)

salt (to your taste)

cumin (to your taste)

curry powder (to your taste)

1 to 1.5 cups oats

Olive oil 1 tablespoon at a time

1.  Combine ingredients into a food processor.  Hold back the oats for now.  Pulse the food processor until the onion, garlic, and beans are chopped well.

2.  Add  1 cup of oats and combine using the food processor.

3.  Add olive oil, 1 tablespoon at a time until everything starts to combine like a dough.  The trick here is to be wet enough for the oats to get chopped and combined, but dry enough so the mixture isn't super sticky.

4.  Once you have found the balance, roll the mixture into palm sized balls and flatten into a burger shape on a silicone baking sheet.  Place in the freezer for an hour or so (or for a couple of months).

5.  To cook, heat up a skillet over medium heat with a bit of olive oil.  We use a cast iron skillet, but you can use what you have.  Add the burgers when the oil is hot enough to give a sizzle.  Fry them on both sides and make sure they have heated through.  

    If you are concerned about burning before the center is heated through, you can throw the burgers in the microwave for a few seconds to thaw them a bit.  Not too much though or you will end up with mush.

6.  That's it!  Serve and enjoy!

On Sunday night we got takeout with our friends.  I ordered a burger.  It was a beef burger because sometimes I eat meat.  We think that is okay from a sustainability standpoint.  Meat is part of my diet, so, when not dining out, we simply try to source my meat from a local farm, raising their animals in an appropriate way.  The argument we usually hear (and the one I made at first) is that it's more expensive.  That is absolutely true.  It takes more time and effort for the farm to raise animals eating what they are supposed to be eating and letting them out where they are supposed to be grazing, so they have to charge more.  So, the meat I buy is more expensive, but I buy far less of it!  When I looked at this more holistically, I realized that we were not spending any more money on food.  It is easy to get caught up on the price of a single item, but once you look at the total budget, things start to even out.  So I buy less meat at a higher quality, so that when I do eat meat, it's typically better for me and better for the environment.  Basically, better, not perfect.

To be honest, we try to apply this kind of logic to many of our decisions.  When we purchase something, there are costs outside of the immediate financial burden.  We put our decisions through this other filter when we ask more questions.  Basically, we just think about it in the context of the environment as well as our own circumstances.

So what's better, falafel burger or beef burger?  I actually like them both.  They have totally different flavor profiles, and a different feel.  They are both filling and satisfying.  Both burgers are gluten free.  I would say that the falafel burger has a little more versatility in that it can be flavored to your taste.  The recipe above can be changed with different spices and herbs.  Let us know what you think in the comments section!

Thanks for reading!

Nate  

Sourdough Crackers & Beyond

Ever since we went to Vermont in October and stopped at King Arthur's flagship store, I've been having fun with the sourdough starter I picked up there.  As you might know, sourdough starters have to be fed with some regularity, and this results in discard, which can be a huge source of waste.  Since I don't bake daily, I've gotten into the habit of refrigerating my starter for most of the week, taking it out to feed as the weekend approaches, so I'll be ready for baking and be left with a more manageable amount of discard.  I also keep a smaller amount of starter on hand, generally, which reduces discard, too.  However, there are plenty of recipes that call for discard, which keeps for at least a couple of weeks in a closed container in the fridge, and I've found it so useful in cooking that I always like to have some on hand.

homemade sourdough loaf

Perhaps the most unusual uses for sourdough discard include brownies (the best I've ever had) and pasta dough, though you can sub discard into almost any recipe by reducing the amounts of flour and liquid called for.  (For example, if your recipe calls for 500 grams of flour and 250 grams of water, you could sub in 100 grams of starter or discard and remove 50 grams each of the flour and water called for.)  But the recipes I make the most using my discard are waffles and crackers.  They're both relatively easy to make, if somewhat time consuming, and they're both convenience foods that normally come wrapped in plastic pouches.  Making them at home allows me to skip the plastic packaging (and all the preservatives and additives that are in the store-bought versions).  While it does take some planning ahead and a bit more time, the results are so worthwhile.  I get to feel good about avoiding packaging, and I get delicious bread products to enjoy--it's a win-win!

Potatoes

Continuing on my "prepared foods" binge, our next topic of discussion is potatoes.  Well, I guess we could call them hash browns... hashed browns?  You can buy them in the frozen foods section of the grocery store, but I like my potatoes out of the ground with a little dirt on them... I can hear my dad saying "man up" already.  

Anyway, I do buy potatoes in the store, or more recently, receive them in our CSA.  Hash browns are half of my breakfast every morning and since we are trying to do better on the zero waste front, I decided it is probably just as easy to make them myself vs. buying them pre-shredded and in plastic. 

Actually, I started this little adventure by making home fries.  I would chop the potatoes into small cubes and par broil them...you know, those were pretty good.  I'll just give you the recipe:

Home Fries:

1.  Cut as many potatoes as you want into 1/4"-1/2" cubes. The smaller the better if you like crunchy home fries like me.

2.  Put them all into a pot, and fill the pot with enough water to just cover them.

3.  The goal is to par broil them, meaning soft, but not falling apart.  Usually they come to a boil and need about 5 minutes.

4.  I keep enough to cook for one meal now, and put the rest in a container in the fridge for the rest of the week.  

5.  Mince some onion and throw it in a skillet with some oil (this is optional, but adds a lot of flavor).  Add some cumin, paprika, salt, and anything else that feels right.  (I stop just shy of the kitchen sink.)

6.  Add the potatoes and get everything well coated.  The longer you cook them, the crispier they get.  

Add a couple of eggs and BAM there's breakfast! (Just try not to bam those eggs all over the floor...)

Anyway, back to the hash browns.  If you have a food processer this should take all of 5 minutes.  If you don't, well, this might not be worth it.  It probably isn't worth your time to sit there and grate 2 full potatoes.  Then again, if that's what you have, go for it!

Hash Browns: 

1.  Wash the dirt off the potatoes.  Seems obvious, but Stephanie had to train me on that one. (that was for you Dad... cue the Tim Allen grunt.)

2.  Cut the potatoes in half so they fit in the food processer with the grater attachment.  (I know this is a silly step to have, but I've got to have more than one step in the process right?)

3.  Grate the potatoes...

4.  Dump some into a pan with some oil and cook on medium heat.  

5.  Place the rest of the grated potato on a silicone mat on a baking sheet.  Spread them out into a single layer.  Don't skip the mat on this one, believe me, they will stick to the pan.

6.  Put the sheet pan in the freezer and give it 4 hours.  When they are frozen, take them out, break them up, and put them in a silicone ziplock bag.  Place back in the freezer for tomorrow.

7.  Quick! back to the pan it's going to burn!  Flip the potatoes and finish frying them up.  Add salt to taste.

8.  That's it!  You have just made breakfast and frozen prepared hash browns for the week! 

Food processer!

Hash browns in the skillet

Frozen hash browns

 

Broccoli Anyone?

We can get any food we want, in almost any location, in any season.  It has been this way my whole life.  Have you ever stopped to think about how amazing that is?  When there is snow on the ground outside, I can buy strawberries, peppers, zucchini, summer squash, avocados, and almost anything else I desire.  Part of this is due to the ability to ship food across the country, and part of it is due to the ability to flash freeze and package.

There is a wonderful book by Barbara Kingsolver called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recommended to me because I want to become a farmer... well, maybe not, but I do enjoy many of the farm tasks like growing vegetables, composting, and moving dirt around.  The book is about the author's family and their attempt to eat only locally grown food for an entire year.  They scour the local farmers markets, grow a surprising amount of their own food, and make it through the year.  The winter of course, is the hardest part as surviving on what can be stored from a fall harvest is tricky, not to mention that root cellars are no longer on the must have list in a new home. (Believe me, I've checked.)

One way of preserving summer and fall vegetables is by freezing them.  Yes this takes energy, not to mention valuable space in the freezer, but things like kale and broccoli don't keep in a root cellar, even if our Wakefield apartment had one. (Which it doesn't, I've looked.)  So I embarked on a project.  Over the summer, my mom has a market garden, though due to COVID, she did not participate in the market, so there was a bounty.  Every week I went grocery shopping in my parent's backyard, picking raspberries, (okay, Stephanie did most of the picking.) kale, spinach, and many other things.  We don't go though all of that in a week, so I started to preserve them.  I'll give the steps I took to freeze things below.

Typically, we  also get an assortment of frozen vegetables when we go food shopping, but they come wrapped in plastic.  While things like broccoli are not strictly in season right now, I thought it is at least better to buy the unpackaged stuff rather, so we tried it.  We now have a re-usable bag full of frozen broccoli and a little less guilt about how it got there.  In the future, we will either grow it ourselves, or buy locally grown and preserve it.

Preserving the broccoli.  This system will also work for other vegetables like kale and spinach.

1.  Cut the vegetable into the size you would like to have later.  I use the broccoli florets and keep the stem for broth.

2.  Blanch or steam until 75% cooked.  Don't cook it all the way because when you reheat it, the veggies will get soggy and gross.

2.  Place a single layer of broccoli on a silicone baking mat which is in turn placed on a cookie sheet. (Now I want cookies).

3.  Let it freeze completely.  I usually leave it overnight.

4.  Place in a reusable bag or container and return to the freezer.  

5.  That's it!  Just take them out of the freezer and add to whatever you are making at the last minute because remember, they are already mostly cooked.

Processing, steaming, and placing in the freezer took about 15 minutes, so this is an easy one!

In the end, we still bought out of season, but have plans for something better next year.  We still have raspberries from last summer in the freezer.  I take them out now and again to make jam or a topping for some delicious dessert.  Maybe I'll do a post on raspberries sometime.

Homemade English Muffins

For a little over a decade now, I've eaten basically the same thing for breakfast every morning: black tea, Greek yogurt, and two English muffins, toasted and with butter.  What can I say, I'm a creature of habit!  

The Greek yogurt at least comes in a container that's readily recyclable, and I've finally found a company, Arbor Teas (not an affiliate link, though if they're reading this and want to give us money...) that offers loose-leaf tea in fully backyard-compostable packaging--yay!  

The best muffins I've made.

I'm not aware, though, of any company that sells English muffins without a plastic bag and cardboard that's almost certainly coated with something (plastic, wax) that's not really recyclable or compostable.  So, inspired by one of Nate's friends who tried making her own English muffins at home, I embarked on a journey to, first, find the perfect recipe and, second, perfect my ability to follow it.

After trying several recipes, the one from America's Test Kitchen was the winner.  (I think I found it in their Cook It in Cast Iron cookbook at the library, but I'm honestly not positive.)  It offered the best chance for actual nooks and crannies (the other recipes I tried gave me a more textured bread, but not quite nooks and crannies), and it avoided the beeriness that I found in some other recipes that called for longer rising times.

I've modified the recipe to accommodate some whole wheat flour, adding a little extra water to make up for the denser wheat flour.  I'll substitute a whole cup of white whole wheat flour or half a cup of regular whole wheat flour for an equivalent amount of bread flour.  This gives a nuttier taste and offers a (slightly) healthier final product.  

I also use cream instead of whole milk--this consistently gives me English muffins that stay moist for longer, an essential quality for homemade bread, which tends to dry out quickly.  (What do they add to store-bought bread that prevents this from happening?  It can't be good, whatever it is.)  Whether or not you use any wheat flour, I strongly suggest substituting cream (heavy or light, half and half would probably do) for the milk.  Don't even think about using skim milk or low-fat.  It just won't be good, and since these take four hours, it's worth it to use the right ingredients for the job.  Cream is essential, and it keeps practically forever in the fridge.  (Now if only I could find a readily available brand of cream that comes in a recyclable package instead of those horrific, unrecyclable cartons.  It's the one ingredient I add with totally irredeemable packaging.)

The rising is where things get the most tricky, and this is where I'm still working on my technique.  Let them rise too long, and they'll fall in and deflate, resulting in fewer nooks and crannies, though they'll still be tasty and fine for toast, which is the only right way to eat English muffins, after all.  Don't let them rise enough, and they'll also not have the nooks and crannies so key to English muffins, though, again, they'll be serviceable.  I've taken to preheating the oven to the lowest setting (170 degrees F in our case), then shutting it off, letting some heat escape, and placing the dough inside to rise.  I think the second rise is more essential to good texture: you've got to stop before they start to deflate.  Check after 45 minutes for sure.  But I haven't yet made anything inedible, and with each bake, I'm improving my intuitive sense of when the dough looks ready to cook.  The two photos below show what happens when I let the dough rise too long (overproofing, in baking parlance).

overproofed dough = flatter texture

Normally, they should be far puffier, like rolls.

Ultimately, the homemade English muffins have a bunch of benefits that store-bought just can't offer.
1) They taste better than store-bought, even if they don't always have quite the same nooks and crannies.
2) I'm avoiding the waste from the English muffin packaging.
3) I'm saving a bunch of money.  (I'm something of an English muffin snob, and the name-brand I liked, in its whole wheat variety, was running me about $8 per week, which ends up totaling to over $400 per year on English muffins.  I haven't yet done the math, but I'm pretty sure the ingredients I use cost less than $8 per week.)
4) I know exactly what goes into my English muffins, and it doesn't include any preservatives or weird chemicals.  (While I've never been super concerned about additives, listening to this book made me more aware of considering the potential effects of what I put into my body.  Plus, it was a great book.  You can check out my book blog if you want to know more about what I'm reading.)

English muffins are just one of many items that I'd never considered cooking for myself until I met Nate, who is more daring in the kitchen than I am.  We'll be posting lots more about our various home-cooked recipes in the future, and I hope some of you might be inspired to try cooking something that you didn't know you could make at home.  Reduce packaging, save money, and have a tastier product: not perfect, but definitely better!

The baked English muffins should be puffy.

Look at the nooks!

Vegetable Broth

Flavor.  It’s what many of us forget about when cooking a weeknight meal on a tight schedule or a tight budget.  I’m not talking about cooking for some special occasion (though please refer back to this post when you do).  I’m talking about the everyday rice and veggies or slow cooker soup you are going to eat all week for lunch.  They aren’t fancy meals, but they get the job done. 

This post is about stock--more specifically, vegetable stock.  Vegetable broth can add a new dimension to your cooking by simply using it in place of water.  Stock is available at the grocery store, but it comes packaged in one of the worst containers possible.  It is some kind of paper/plastic/foil box that is not recyclable, compostable, or any version in between.  It cannot be taken apart easily to recycle its component parts, so it goes to landfill every time.

The answer, of course, is to make it yourself.  I understand time is a factor, but we have discovered a couple of simple ways to make it that really couldn’t be easier or cheaper.

It all starts when you are cutting up an onion, or carrots, or zucchini, or tomatoes, or whatever vegetables you are cooking with.  Dedicate a container or four (we use old takeout containers) and keep them in the freezer.  Add your scraps to the container every time you cut up a vegetable.  If there are rotten bits, don’t save those, just compost them.  Over time, you will amass lots of frozen scraps that can be used directly for your vegetable stock.

The process is simple and does not require many tools.  I recommend a large pot, a glass container with a pour spout, a strainer, and a couple of mason jars with lids. 

Stove Top

1. I start by pulling my frozen veggie scraps out of the freezer and finding some onion and carrot.  You can also use celery at this point, but we don’t care for it and don’t usually have any on hand. 
2. Add the onions and the carrots to the pot with a small amount of your oil of choice.  Let that heat up and sizzle for a little while.  You will get a boost of flavor from the onions, and a bit of sweetness from the carrots.  Basically, this is the same starting point for most broth-based soups. 
3. Give the onions and carrots about 3 or 4 minutes and then add half of the total water.  We have an 8 cup pot, so I add 4 cups of water at this point. 
4. 
   Next, add more frozen vegetables.  A mix of things is nice.  Try not to add more than 20% bitter items like carrot tops, kale cuttings, broccoli stems, etc.
5. Add the remaining 4 cups of water.  Cover the pot and bring it just to a boil, then turn the heat down to simmer.
6. Let the concoction simmer for about 40 minutes to an hour and then turn off the burner.  I just let it sit and cool a bit.  Honestly, I let it sit until I have about 10 minutes to spare during my work day.
7. Last, I strain the newly made stock into the glass container with the pour spout, and distribute the stock among the mason jars I set up previously. 

Slow Cooker

1. 
   Sauté onion and carrot in a frying pan with a little oil for 3-4 minutes.  We want to release the flavor in the onion and sweetness in the carrot.   
2. Add the sautéed onion and carrot into the slow cooker and add water to fill the basin ¾ of the way.
3. Finally add the rest of the vegetable scraps from your container, making sure to add only about 20% bitter items.
4. Turn the slow cooker on high for about 4 hours.
5. Last, strain the newly made stock into the glass container with the pour spout, and distribute the stock among the mason jars previously set up. 

We use the stock to make everything from soups to risotto to plain rice.  We even tried it at thanksgiving for the stuffing.  It is an easy way to recycle your vegetable scraps one more time before composting them. 

Anyway, we got this recipe (roughly) from a cookbook called Thug Kitchen.  (We realized we had no idea who the authors were, and, when looking, found out they were a white couple from L.A., which was not what we had assumed.  Check out this excellent essay by Bryant Terry, a Black food advocate, for his take on this misrepresentation.)¹

 

1. https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/10/living/thug-kitchen-controversy-eatocracy/index.html