Heritage Table

11/06/2023

Summer fades into fall. Cooking and baking fades from blackberries and peaches to apples and butternut squash. Lots of apples and butternut squash! The butternut squash, in particular, has been plentiful around here after a trip to the Homerville Produce Auction. So we've have roasted butternut squash, butternut squash muffins, and three rounds of butternut squash stoup! (The apples were turned into a gluten-free apple crisp.)

At this point, it looks like there might be a lot of different butternut squash sides for Thanksgiving!

09/07/2023

Summer is winding down so we're in a low-scale frenzy to cook stuff from our local vendors. We got some green tomatoes a few days ago to make green tomato cake. Hey, don't knock it until you've tried it!

I bought a half peck of peaches, part of which got made into a cobbler and the rest into a peach bbq sauce. We've got several big tomatoes sitting around that are waiting to find their way into a BLT sammich. There is a bag of grape tomatoes (I think that's what they are, at any rate) that we've been eating one at a time. And there a re several zucchinis on the counter that I haven't figured out what to do with yet...zucchini bread I guess!

And that's not counting various peppers I buy with no plan that end up just getting all wrinkled before they get tossed in the compost bin. (I did slice up a bunch of serrano peppers to pickle.) Or the basil that I let sit in a glass of water until it shriveled up.

Then there's the urgency around getting in some grilling and smoking before the weather gets cold. I'll get into all that in my next post.

08/22/2023

We live in town in Akron but we're lucky to be near a thriving farmers' market on Saturdays and a number of roadside vegetable stands. Then there's Szalay's, producer and vendor of the best sweet corn in the world, which is down the road just a few miles.

The little roadside stands are the most fun to stop at. Yesterday, I found a bunch of fresh sage for $1 and a box of a few "sarano" peppers for 50 cents at one of my favorite stops.

Another vendor carries a variety of peppers. I saw a few ghost peppers for sale there yesterday. I asked the young woman taking my money (eggplant and a few tomatoes), "Who buys the ghost peppers?"

"Crazy people," was her reply. Hard to disagree.

Mostly, I'm on the lookout for tomatoes because...BLT sammiches! The heritage tomatoes are the best for sammiches.

08/19/2023

It's been a cobbler-type of summer so far. And crisps. And crumbles. And buckles. And grunts. And slumps.

We're lucky in that we live close to several "pick your own" farms that grow strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and peaches. As we all know, there's nothing like summer fruits right out of the patch for good baking.

We hit the strawberry patch several times back in June. Strawberry picking is for kids...too much squatting down and standing up for us (almost) septuagenarians.

We went for raspberries just once.

Lately, we've been hitting a nearby blueberry farm pretty frequently.

And August has brought in the peaches. (These aren't "pick your own" but they are "right off the tree".)

America's Test Kitchen has the best blueberry cobbler recipe. It's the "fruit under sweet drop biscuits" approach. My favorite peach cobbler is the "batter over peaches and butter" version. (There are lots of that recipe around.)

We also made some peach sauce/syrup that should go great over pancakes. It's good in tea, too.

In the past, we froze lots of summer fruit but we'd let it sit in the freezer for...years, in some cases. This year, we're taking more of a "pick what you can use today" approach. It's simpler.

So...this afternoon is peach cobbler....our third in the past month!

We'll let you know how it turns out!

07/11/2023

This weekend, I barbecued a pork butt that turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. What you need to know is that I do all my 'cuing' on a Weber 22" grill. Not a Big Green Egg. Not an offset smoker. Not a pellet smoker. A grill.

I'll be the first to admit that smoking on a grill is a bit trickier than on these other rigs. I smoked some ribs on a Big Green Egg that belongs to our daughter's family and it was pretty much "set and forget". Not so with the Weber. There's a fair amount of checking and tweaking to do to maintain a consistent temperature.

And have you ever watched one of those YouTubes in which they use an off set smoker and regularly lift up the lid to spray on or mop on something or other? You can't really do that on a Weber grill...the air hits your coals and the temperatures that you've worked so hard to get just right goes haywire.

That said, pork butts are fairly easy to do....close to "set and forget". Ribs are a bit trickier and brisket has proven to be tricky as well.

I don't want to make this post too long, so I'll tell you more in my next post about the method I use to keep the temperature pretty consistent.

In the meantime, I'd be eager to hear from any of you who smoke on a Weber grill and how you go about it.

07/06/2023

I once bemoaned the fact that it had been a few months since I posted. Now I see that it's been more than four years! And, you know, I don't really have a good excuse. We still cook. We still think about food, especially Southern, Soul, and Cajun food, a lot. We just don't stop to write it any of it down.

I've been watching a barbecue competition show on Netflix lately. As is the case with The Great British Baking Show, I watch to get ideas for dishes and on techniques.

This season, several of the contestants have put together charro beans for their sides. It turns out that charro beans are pretty easy...and pretty tasty. There are lots of recipes on the interwebs. Some of them get pretty involved but I just used pinto beans, onions, some roasted poblanos that I had in the freezer, chicken stock and a cajun spice mix from one of my cookbooks. (I also threw in some cubed smoked ham from my freezer. Been there since Easter!) Everything turned out fine.

So, if you haven't tried charro beans, give 'em a go. Heck, you might end up on a barbecue show!

02/05/2019

I think I've mentioned that our kids gave us an Instant Pot for Christmas back in 2017. One of the reasons I was most excited about getting that appliance was around its anticipated ability to cook dried beans in a short amount of time. Turns out, that's the only aspect of the IP that we've been disappointed with.

It seems the beans that we pressure cook get either too "done" or not "done" enough and we can't seem to hit that happy medium. (Too "done" is mushy and not "done enough is al dente and sometimes even a bit crunchy.) Especially disconcerting are the trials in which some of the beans are mushy while others are still al dente.

We've found this to be most true of beans that we don't pre-soak. But the whole idea was to go from dried bean to perfectly cooked bean in one easy step. It's not like pre-soaking is difficult but... it's an extra step. If I'm gonna pre-soak, then I can just toss those beans in with the soup or chili and simmer that until the beans are done. Yeah, that takes longer but, Instant Pot or stove simmer, it's not like we're standing there watching for the beans to get done. Either way, we're watching Oprah, right?

We're going to do a bunch of experiments to see what we might be doing wrong. We're gonna try longer cook times, higher and lower pressures, all sorts of stuff. And pinto beans are cheap, so it's not like these experiments will cost us much. In any case, we'll give you a report on what we find.

In the meantime, if any of you are having better luck cooking beans in your Instant Pot, we'd sure like to hear what your secrets are!

01/29/2019

OK, so, at church every year, we do this Birthday Potluck. We bake some cakes, bring some casseroles and side dishes and you sit with folks who were born the same season as you were. (In Wellington, we were able to divide it up by birth month because we had more people.) I used the opportunity to go all in on Southern.

First, I made an honest to goodness caramel cake. Now cake mix or "Easy Caramel Icing" recipes. This was from scratch and the icing was the real deal. I'm berating myself for not taking a picture but, trust me, it was great. The hard part of getting caramel cake right is getting the caramel icing just right. If you don't cook it long enough, it's just melted sugar but if you cook it too long, it can taste like chewing on a burned stick. But not the one I made for the Sunday church lunch! I should have taken a picture of it. Anyway, the recipe is below. Like the instructions mention, it's kind of involved. But worth the trouble.

We also whipped up a black-eyed pea casserole. It had cornbread on top, cheese under that, and black-eyed peas and ground beef under that. What's not to like, right? Here's a link to a similar recipe (I cut the one I used from a magazine.)
https://www.keyingredient.com/recipes/3682815033/black-eyed-pea-casserole/

We're definitely going to be making it again.

This ultra-classic Southern layer cake is, honestly, a bit complicated. But with patience and practice, you can pull off a stunner of a dessert.

01/22/2019

As usual, I get to thinking, "Seems like it might have been a few weeks since I last posted at Heritage Table." Then I look and it's been...almost six months!

And, of course, the holidays is always a great time to talk about cooking, so...what's my problem?

We did do a good bit of cooking over the holidays. We did two "big" meals...Christmas and New Year's. We always do a smoked ham for Christmas that we get at a local butcher shop, Sherman's Provisions. It's a bit more expensive than what's available at the local grocery but LOTS better.

On New Year's, we do a combination of Northern and Southern traditions...pork and sauerkraut for the native Ohioans, Hoppin' John and greens for the Southerners. Everybody eats everything, of course, and everybody gets pretty full.

Since the holidays, we've gotten into bread making. We like the whole "knead, let it sit, fold, let it sit" approach. Yeah, it's a bit of trouble but the results have been worth it.

Winter is also a time for us to make chicken stock, mainly because we can use our garage as a refrigerator to cool the hot broth.

OK, I promise it won't be seven months before my next post.

08/22/2018

Well, its been a busy week over the stove. Here's the story...we went by the County Line Produce Auction over in Homerville last Wednesday and bought:
16 quarts of okra
5 pecks of peaches
4 half bushels of roma tomatoes
2 pecks of poblano peppers.

All of which was ripe and going bad from the moment it was picked. Circumstances prevented us from getting to it all before the weekend. At that point, it was time to really get going because all that organic matter wasn't getting any younger.

First, we pickled most of the okra. We now have somewhere between 15 and 20 pints of pickled okra...I lost count. When we got tired of hot packing okra into wide mouth jars, we blanched and froze the rest.

OK, about the freezing...our usual approach is to put the stuff on cookie trays, freeze it, then pack it in Ziplock bags. But not this time...we bought us one of them fancy vacuum sealers! It works great on dry stuff (already frozen okra) and far less well on wet stuff (unfrozen peach slices). It seems the vacuum is effective at pulling moisture out of the peaches and preventing a good seal. So, we're developing some work arounds (including sticking with our "par freezing" step for some things) and we like our vacuum sealer.

Then we started on the peaches. First, there was peach butter, which we overcooked and now is being made into peach barbecue sauce. Then there was peach jam which we have trouble getting to actually gel but, what the heck...it's peach jam. Or peach syrup. No one cares.

Then there was sliced peaches. Lots and lots of sliced peaches. Finally, there is gonna be more peach butter...or more peach barbecue sauce if we don't get it right again. (Got it in the slow cooker at a lower temperature this time.)

Oh, yeah...those poblano peppers? They got roasted on our gas grill, then put in the freezer. What are we gonna do with two pecks of roasted peppers you ask? Ummm...can we get back to you on that?

Now we're to the tomatoes. They will get put through a food mill and canned. But they're going to have to wait just a bit because we're tired!

08/08/2018

Sorry we've been away for a bit. "Summertime...and the living is easy." And all that.

We made a trip down South to visit relatives, as we do each summer, and loaded up on ingredients that are hard to find around here in Akron, OH. Stone ground grits. Stone ground corn meal. Country ham. White Lilly flour. Duke's mayonnaise. (Though, I see my local grocer here has started to carry Duke's!) Yellow-eyed beans. Sourwood honey. You know...all the essentials!

Two regular meal stops on I-77 are Tamarack in Beckley, WV, and The Dixie Pig in Rock Hill, SC. The Greenbriar Resort does the cooking at Tamarack and it's never failed to satisfy in our dozens of visits. We just found The Dixie Pig a couple of years ago and it's become a regular. It's just a mile or so off of I-77 and easy to get to. The 'cue is very good and the wait staff is friendly and efficient.

We didn't make it there this time but another regular feeding stop is B and J's Steaks and Seafood, off of I-95 in Darien, GA. They have a good Southern buffet but skip that and get the fried shrimp. Best we've ever had.

06/29/2018

I think I've previously mentioned that we received an Instant Pot as a Christmas gift. Those things are really handy. I'm not sure they always save time but they make food prep easy and the results are pretty darned good, taste-wise. And, gosh knows, there are a lot of recipes specifically designed for multi-cookers online.

We've found that our Instant Pot is especially useful for whipping up something for breakfast that's healthy and good tasting. A bit of background first: we've both been watching our nutrition lately (actually, Lea has always paid good attention...I just recently started). We've found that keeping the various nutrients balanced requires careful attention. For example, getting lots of protein AND lots of fiber while controlling calories can be tricky. What's a body to do?

Well, it turns out that there's a non-meat, high protein, high fiber combination that's easily accessible and custom made for Instant Pot. And, oh yeah, the combination has been the basic meal of many cultures over the past thousand years or so. It's beans and rice.

It turns out that beans and rice have complementary proteins. There's a myth that they MUST be eaten together to take advantage of this fact. You could eat the beans for lunch and the rice for supper and get the same benefit, but what fun would that be? The fact is that beans and rice are popular because they taste good together. The fact that the combination is so healthy is an added feature.

So, back to Instant Pot...we've taken to cooking up a bunch of beans and putting them in the fridge or freezer. Black beans, pintos, red kidney beans, chickpeas (hummus!), crowder peas, yellow-eyed beans, mung beans, and lentils have all found their way into our pot. We've made curries, stews, and soups. We generally cook up the rice separately (most usually, brown rice...it has more fiber and nutrients) and put it in the fridge or freezer as well.

A recent favorite is a meatless spin-off of red beans and rice. Whip up a batch of the Trinity (you know...onion, celery, and bell pepper), saute it with garlic and spices of your choice (I started using some African spice mixes), add a can of diced tomatoes and three cups of broth. Dump in a couple of cups of any kind of cooked beans, and simmer for awhile. Put a cup of this stew over a half cup of cooked brown rice and it's goood eating! (You can add about any kind of meat you want, of course, if that's how you roll. I added a couple of tablespoons of cooked chorizo sausage to my bowl last night and it was a definite plus.)

As a variation, we've added a pound of sweet potatoes cut into 1-inch pieces. That really ups both the nutrition and the flavor.

So, crank up your Instant Pot and get you some beans and rice!