Food&Recipes – Page 4 – Mary's Musings

Dehydrating Beans Saves Space

A few days ago, I went to the local Amish farmer’s market to get some sweet corn. I noticed they still had quite a pile of green and yellow beans available. I usually don’t bother to can or freeze plain beans…I prefer them fresh or dehydrated. Dehydrated beans are great in the winter when I’m making vegetable soup. I can add just a handful of dried green beans…they rehydrate in the broth as the soup is cooking.

I thought I’d like to show you how much space (and weight) I save by dehydrating this batch of beans. I filled two sacks of green and yellow beans and brought them home. I snapped them and put them in the fridge while I got the dehydrator ready. The next day, I put each bag on the scales to see the weight I was starting with. The green beans weighed about 3 lbs. 4 oz. The yellow beans weighed about 2 1lb 12 oz…a total of about 6 lbs.

Next, I washed them, blanched them for 4 minutes in boiling water, cooled them in ice water, put them in a bag in the fridge while I did the next batch.

The manual says I should put them in the freezer for 30 minutes, but the fridge worked for me. They dehydrate quicker when they start out cold apparently.

The beans filled all 9 trays of my dehydrator.

The dehydrator sits outside the kitchen door in the garage. It makes noise, has to run for 10-12 hours and is too big to put in the kitchen.

To determine how long to dehydrate the beans, I checked the manual for my dehydrator.

This map shows the general percent of humidity in each region, by season. Pennsylvania is in the green zone in July. The day I dehydrated the beans was damp and rainy so I assumed the time of 11 hours might be more like 12 hours.

The manual describes how to test when the food is dry enough. Vegetables should be brittle.

During the 11 hours, I rotated the trays front to back and from upper levels to the middle several times. The fan is located in the back, so the back of the trays get dry faster than the front edge. After 11 hours, the beans look like this:

Once I determined they were dry enough…because they were brittle when I bent them…I put them in a zip bag and weighed them again. The 6 lbs. of beans now weighed about 9 1/2 oz…a little more than 1/2 lb.

I store dehydrated vegetables in my canning jars, with little packets of oxygen absorbers. They keep the jar sealed on the shelf.

The oxygen absorbers can be purchased at Amazon in several sizes…these are 300cc. I put several in each jar with the beans.

So that 6 lbs. of green and yellow beans are ready for my winter soup. I’ll put about 1/2 cup of dehydrated beans in a pot of soup to start and will add more if needed…depends on the amount of soup I’m making! They need about 30 minutes to reconstitute. Enjoy!

Rediscovering Popcorn as a Snack

I have many fond memories of my dad with popcorn as a snack. I watched many baseball games on TV with a big bowl of buttered popcorn between us as he explained the strategies of the players. Popcorn has always been my snack of choice, even over chips and pretzels.

When we were first married (way back in the late 60s and early 70s), Bert and I had a huge garden with a section set aside to grow popcorn. The process is much like sweet corn but we needed to keep the sweet corn at the other end of the garden…they will cross pollinate and ruin both. Popcorn is taller than sweet corn and often had pink silk. Really pretty!

I will tell you…growing our own popcorn, drying it and popping it as soon as it was dry enough was a lot of work but the taste was amazing! A whole different taste from popcorn that had been sitting in a jar on the shelf for over a year!

For several years we did the work of picking the ears, husking them, laying the ears out on an old sheet in front of the wood burning stove until they dried enough to shell. We learned the hard way to wear gloves because the corn kernels had a sharp point and after a few ears our hands were shredded (at least mine were!).

We often had 5-6 gallons of shelled corn by Halloween and made sure to gift my dad a gallon of corn for Christmas! Most people thought we were nuts!

If you are interested in growing popcorn, there are many articles online about it. Here is one I thought was interesting: https://gardenerspath.com/plants/vegetables/grow-popcorn/

For the last 30+ years we haven’t grown popcorn but I’ve tried to find the best popcorn, and the best popcorn popper rather than growing our own. I’ve tried specialty and multicolor popcorn. The two main kinds of popcorn…white and yellow…seem to be the main choice. The white kernels are smaller and don’t leave a sharp piece of the hull. The big yellow kernels pop up much bigger and have more flavor, but often I’m left needing a toothpick or dental floss to get those sharp hulls that get stuck between my teeth.

Finding popcorn that is fresh with the right moisture content to pop well is tough. You have no way to know how long ago the popcorn was harvested and how it was stored. Sometimes, popcorn does better if it is stored in the refrigerator or freezer. Here are two brands that work pretty well for me. I always assume some of it will not pop and be left in the bottom of the bowl. I do miss the flavor of the popcorn we grew…but these will do:

The next challenge was finding the right popcorn popper. My dad used a popper similar to the one below and loved it so much he took it with him as he moved into assisted living.

This had a Teflon heat surface with a rotating arm that stirred the popcorn. I had a popper like this too for a while, but it was just too big and bulky and hard to store.

I seem to have quite a collection of popcorn poppers (I sold the air popper at a yard sale a long time age). At the moment I have 4 choices of poppers:

Popper #1

For many years, we used this popper. The handle crank and gears let us stir it as it popped, and frankly made the best popcorn. We still use it if we have company and have to make a lot of popcorn. I’m pretty sure I got this at Lehman’s of Ohio (from the catalog online). It’s solid and works fast.

Popper #2

For a while I was determined to find a popper that worked well in the microwave. I picked up this clay pot, made in Chile but sold by a company in the Midwest that sold popcorn. It does well but it gets hot and is kind of slippery. I’m always worried I’ll drop and break it. I’ve had it sitting on a shelf since that first try.

Popper #3

This clear glass popper is turning out to be my favorite because it has a handle I can grab with a hot pad and I can see how full it is as it pops.

Popper #4

Recently, I was enticed to pick up a small popper at the health food store that would make just one small serving:

Two minutes in the microwave…

This made a single serving of popcorn. I wish I could have seen through the container to see how full the cup was as it was popping but it did leave some of the corn unpopped.

So, my quest to find the best popper continues. I have tried the air popper but it put out so much air it blew the unpopped kernels right out before they had time to pop. It seems I often choose the white corn without sharp hulls and a popper that gets hot like #1 above.

I suggested to Bert that we try popcorn next year in the garden…and all I got was smirk and a reminder of how much work it was to shell. Guess I’ll just buy popcorn by the jar! Enjoy!

Tomatoes-Too Many or Not Enough

One of the joys of gardening is to be able to eat fresh produce we grew ourselves. I also like to grow enough extra so I can preserve my favorite foods for the winter. The three foods I like to have on my shelf include pizza sauce in 1/2 pint jars, sweet pickle relish in pints and the pickled 4-bean salad in pints. (see https://marykisner.com/revised-four-bean-salad-recipe-for-canning/ )

Each of those foods are things we use and if we don’t grow it, the farmer’s market usually has an abundance of tomatoes, cucumbers and green and yellow beans at some point in the summer.

I work around the available volume of produce to decide when it’s time to can. Right now, we have way too many tomatoes to just eat them…they would spoil even if we both eat 1-2 tomatoes every day! However, the pile is not quite enough to make a batch of pizza sauce to can.

So, we eat what we can work into our meals, and before the tomatoes rot on the counter, I cook and freeze the rest. When I have enough frozen to make a batch of pizza sauce, I thaw out the cooked tomatoes and continue on with the recipe. I now have about 11 pints of cooked tomatoes frozen.

I will continue cooking tomatoes in smaller batches for another week or two. when I see tomatoes being sold at the farmer’s market by the box or bushel, I’ll decide if I want to save my frozen tomatoes for soup and other recipes, or clean out the freezer and use them to make the pizza sauce. I have choices! If you’d like to see how I make the pizza sauce I posted about it here in 2021: https://marykisner.com/time-to-make-pizza sauce/.

In case you don’t do projects like this, here are some pictures of how I cook the tomatoes to freeze.

First, the tomatoes are washed. Then I cut off the top of each tomato and score an X on the bottom.

I drop them gently into boiling water for about 1 minute to loosen the skin.

Then I move the tomatoes to a bowl of ice water. That stops the cooking action and really gets the skin to start peeling back.

Then I take each tomato, peel off the skin and chop the tomato into chunks. I place the chunks into a pot on the stove. Our tomatoes are pretty solid, so I add about 1 cup of water and let the tomatoes simmer and soften slowly. I the temperature is too hot at the beginning, the tomatoes will burn at first…ruins the whole batch! Ask me how I know!!

It takes about 2-3 hours on low to boil off some of the water and get the tomatoes cooked.

I scoop the cooked tomatoes into freezer boxes and put them in the freezer.

At least the tomatoes are safe in the freezer until I decide if I want to use them to make pizza sauce later. For now…it’s back to the garden to pick some more tomatoes! Enjoy!

Revised Four Bean Salad Recipe for Canning

Fresh green and yellow beans are abundant right now…at least at the Farmer’s Market! Since my poor bean plants were dried out and then drowned, if I wanted my four bean salad for the winter, I had to count on the Farmer’s Market to supply them. In one quick trip to the local market I was able to bring home 6 lbs. of green and yellow beans, onions and red peppers. I also had celery, kidney beans and chickpeas ready to go.

Here is the original recipe:

For this next batch of Four Bean Salad I doubled the recipe. I started with 6 lbs. of green and yellow beans, snapped and washed.

In this post, I’ll try to edit the recipe so you can see what I need to change the next time. I was hoping to make 19 pints, which would fill my canner. However, at 16 pints I ran out of the pickling solution. I decided to just put the extra blanched vegetables in jars and put them in the fridge. I’ll use the bean mixture in soup or over rice as is.

The original recipe called for chopped celery, red pepper and onion. I did not care for how the onions turned out last time (kind of stringy and slimy) so this time I chopped the onions like the peppers. (Picture below is from last year!)

I wanted more chickpeas in the mix, so I added three cans and 2 cans of kidney beans.

I did double the recipe for the pickling solution, but I was still short about 3 cups.

Bert got us into production mode with the propane tank and the canner!

Here are the finished 16 jars ready for the shelf. I’ll wait a month or so before I try this batch…give the pickling solution time to work!

The three extra jars are in the refrigerator ready to heat up and eat!

Here is the revised recipe:

Since I was short about 3 cups in the pickling solution, I added more vinegar, sugar and water to the recipe.

Next time should be better but I’ll sure enjoy these!

What To Do With 30 Pounds of Blueberries

You might never need to deal with 30 pounds of blueberries all at one time…unless you can get them like I did, through the local Kiwanas. Every year they have a fund-raising sale and bring in 10-pound boxes of blueberries, fresh-picked from New Jersey. the berries are beautiful! After washing all 30 pounds, I think I had to discard less than a cup because of blemishes. This year’s crop was delicious!

If you check back on my blog to one year ago exactly, I processed 20 pounds of blueberries. I don’t need to repeat the description but you can read about it here: https://marykisner.com/blueberries-galore/

So, the first 20 pounds of berries I washed and packed into zip bags, 2 cups in a bag:

So, what do I do with all these frozen blueberries?

First, they are great on cereal or oatmeal. the frozen berries roll out of the bag like marbles and within a minute or two they are thawed enough to eat!

Second, I can toss about 1/2 cup of berries into my breakfast smoothie along with frozen banana slices and two scoops of my vegan protein powder. The frozen berries act like little bits of ice and thicken up the smoothie.

I wrote about freezing bananas here: https://marykisner.com/freezing-bananas/

This is the protein powder that I like, but there are many to choose from.

The third thing I do with these frozen blueberries is make blueberry muffins. You can read about my favorite muffin recipe here: https://marykisner.com/the-best-vegan-muffin/

I make these especially for me because they are vegan and they have bananas and walnuts in them.

I’m now working on another muffin recipe that has only blueberries…no bananas or walnuts. After I give the recipe a try, I’ll post it for you.

The last 10-pound box of blueberries will be kept fresh just to eat. Ted’s family will be visiting next week and the berries will be good to munch on! Enjoy!

Making Sweet Potato Yeast Bread

Just one more recipe using the mashed sweet potatoes I made the other day…see https://marykisner.com/prepping-sweet-potatoes-for-other-recipes/ I froze the mashed sweet potatoes in 1 cup containers so I can easily make this recipe and the previous one that made buns. The sweet potato buns recipe can be found here: https://marykisner.com/making-vegan-sweet-potato-buns/

Making Sweet Potato Yeast Bread

The recipe I made yesterday made two large loaves of bread that were light and delicious. The recipe did call for butter and one egg, so if you are vegan, use plant-based butter and eliminate the egg. Here is the recipe:

I was very interested that this recipe uses half whole wheat flour. It was still very light and held together after baking. It was also an easy recipe that could be made in just one bowl (I used my stand mixer bowl).

The recipe called for whole wheat flour. I usually grind my own whole wheat flour, using white whole wheat berries, so I was glad to find King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour at the grocery store. That saved me a step.

Mixing everything in one bowl reduced the clean up time!

This did make a very nice soft dough.

I did not do a very accurate job of dividing the dough into two loaves. I had to cut the biggest one in half to fit in the bag for the freezer. Next time I might make three loaves instead!

Look how beautiful the bread is! Delicious too.

Keep this recipe in mind when you cook sweet potatoes…cook an extra, mash it and freeze it. Makes a special loaf of bread! Enjoy!

Prepping Sweet Potatoes for Other Recipes

I’ve been hearing through the grapevine that the recipe I posted for vegan sweet potato buns is a hit! Thanks C.N. and T.N. for the feedback! You can see the recipe at https://marykisner.com/making-vegan-sweet-potato-buns/

It got me in the mood to bake some myself but of course I didn’t have any sweet potatoes on hand. Cooking one sweet potato to get 1 cup of mashed is very inefficient…so I stopped at the store today and picked up 4 large sweet potatoes. I cut them into rounds and then peeled and chopped each round. I guess I could have bought a can of Yams…but that feels like cheating!

It took about 20 minutes to boil the chunks until soft.

I could have hauled out the food processor, but my handy (low tech) potato masher worked just fine. Then I scooped the mashed potatoes into containers and put them in the freezer. Now I’m set to add sweet potatoes to the bun recipe above.

I now have five 1-cup servings and one 2-cup serving (good for a double batch!) in the freezer.

My plan is to make a batch of buns like these:

Then I’d like to try putting some into my Oatmeal Bread recipe…either in addition to or instead of the oatmeal. I sense an experiment coming! Enjoy!

Making Cookies for a Bake Sale

During the Memorial Day weekend activities, the Ladies Auxiliary to the Boalsburg Fire Company has a bake sale in the fire hall. The small carnival is held in the parking lot behind the fire hall and the firemen sell barbequed chicken. The fire hall room is available with tables and restrooms during those activities. What a perfect time for an assortment of baked goods to be available for sale in that room!

Over the last few days, my goal was to crank out some cookies for the sale. Of course, I don’t bake cookies very often…that seems to be Bert’s specialty at Christmas…but certainly I could produce something! Cookies for this bake sale needed to be sturdy enough to last in a zip bag that will get shuffled around for 5 days. I chose two recipes…oatmeal raisin cookies and snickerdoodles. You can use any favorite recipe you like!

It was quite obvious I don’t bake cookies very often. They were too big (who knew they would spread out so much!). I can see if I did this more often, I’d figure it out. I’m sure Bert would recommend more flour, chilled dough and smaller scoops of dough. I may try again today, but for now let me share how it went.

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Here is the recipe:

Wet ingredients, dry ingredients and raisins ready to assemble. The mixer did all the work!

Of course, I don’t have a 2-Tablespoon scoop so my cookies look a little ragged! It’s on order so next time…

Of course, only two cookies fit in a sandwich bag. At least they look homemade!

Snickerdoodles

Here is the recipe I used:

Once again, the mixer did the work but when it came time to roll the dough into balls, I misjudged and they got too big! When was the last time I had a whole walnut sitting around to help me visualize the right size!

Oh well, I rolled the dough in cinnamon and sugar and put them on the cookie sheet.

Once again…too big! Oh well, they sure did taste good!

What Did I Learn?

Consider adding more flour to the oatmeal raisin cookies.

Chill the dough before baking.

Use a dough scoop to get better shaped cookies. (mine is on order!)

For bake sale cookies, make smaller, more consistent-sized cookies that will fit better in a zip sandwich bag.

If you are asked to make cookies for a bake sale, any contribution will be appreciated! Choose your favorite recipe and make a dozen or two.

Enjoy!

Cooking Tofu, Second Attempt

As a follow-up to my first attempt to cook tofu (https://marykisner.com/cooking-tofu-first-attempt/) I’ll try to adjust a few things to try to produce better cubes of tofu. My advice to myself the last time said: cut bigger cubes, add more seasoning and reduce cooking time. I started by doing a search online about recipes to season tofu. While I found and printed out about 10 recipes, I chose a simple recipe of olive oil and Italian herbs so I could use the seasoned cubes in a salad or even put them in soup.

I started with a block of extra firm tofu:

Next, I got out my tofu press and placed the block of tofu in it. This block was not as firm as the first time and felt “fresher.”

The instructions said to place the tofu block between the two flat inserts in my palm, drop the container over my palm…and then turn it right side up. This keeps the tofu from breaking apart.

After 20 minutes the whole block was half as thick and submerged in liquid. I poured off the water and opened the press.

This time I cut the block into larger cubes than the first time.

I mixed Italian herbs with olive oil and poured it into the bag of cubes. After gently mixing them up to coat each cube, I put the bag in the refrigerator for 2 hours.

Cubes were now soaked with oil and herbs.

Into the frying pan with a little more oil.

After 10 to 15 minutes on medium heat, the cubes were browned but still soft enough to stab them with a fork.

Drained on a paper towel and sprinkled with salt they tasted pretty good right out of the pan!

These cubes are still soft enough to put a fork through them. I think this way of cooking allows me to keep from overcooking them. Now they’re ready to put on a salad or add to soup! Give it a try!

Please comment or email me directly at marykisner@comcast.net.

Cooking Tofu, First Attempt

It all seemed so simple! For someone like me, with a not-so-refined palette, the first time I try a new food I depend on the instructions in a recipe to do it right. Adding tofu to my “plant-based” meals seemed like a good idea, even though I’m still including meat and a few eggs in my meals. However, I have no baseline experience about how tofu tastes, how it cooks and even where to buy it in the grocery store! This adventure was a learning experience!

I read a little online about the different kinds of tofu…from silken to extra firm. What I wanted was flavored cubes of tofu that I could put on a salad. It appeared I needed to start with a firm or extra firm block of tofu. Since I really wasn’t interested in figuring out how to press it with a stack of heavy books, I ordered a “tofu press” from Amazon.

Instructions to assemble the press. Looks like Lego instructions!

The press, assembled with a block of tofu.

Next, I went to the local health food store to find tofu. They didn’t have any at that moment and said I should go to the grocery store and look in the produce section. Who knew!!

I found several choices high on the shelf above the lettuce and near the wonton wrappers. I took a guess and brought one home.

The package said it was already drained and it was very firm.

I unwrapped the block and put it in the press…even though it said on the package that it had already been drained. At least I could see how the press worked. After 20 minutes or so, there was about a tablespoon of water in the bottom of the press. I dumped out the water and removed the block.

The press came with a little cookbook with a few recipes. The first recipe was for crispy tofu…sounded exactly like what I wanted.

I substituted onion powder for the garlic powder (because I had it and I don’t care for much garlic flavor).

I thought I bought Rice Wine Vinegar…and it turns out I bought Red Wine Vinegar. Oh well. I did have maple syrup and soy sauce. I used olive oil instead of toasted sesame oil. Probably with all these substitutions the tofu won’t taste right.