Cotton getting close to our fresh honey.
A few weeks ago, our friend Tish came over for dinner. She brought us a jar of honey, and a big chunk of honey comb from her friends Judy and Ted in Montana who own a few bee hives. We were super grateful for the fresh honey, but were even more interested in the story behind her honey producing friends. It’s not uncommon to hear about home gardeners, or folks brewing their own beer, but raising several hives of honeybees is pretty cool.
Ever since I read A Book of Bees
We got their email address from Tish, and wrote them asking about what got them into beekeeping. “I brew my own beer and I tried a delicious mead, which is fermented honey water,” Ted writes in his email, “the price of honey is expensive when you have to use five pounds, so I decided to become a beekeeper and have my own source of honey.”
Each hive produces 100 to 150 pounds of honey. The amount of labor isn’t trivial, but it’s not intensive either, “Spring time is the laborsome time inspecting each overwintered hive, feeding pollen substitute, sugar syrup w/medication, and monitoring brood production. It takes about an hour per hive, once a week for about 4-6 weeks. During the summer it doesn’t hardly take any time other than inspecting the hive for honey production and putting on more supers to gather more honey. Summer is the time for the bees to work and me to enjoy watching their production.”
When production ends, the really fun part begins, “Towards the end of summer and early fall it is time to start removing the honey filled supers, extracting and bottling , and attending farmer ‘s markets and craft fairs for selling. Once this is done it is time to make sure I have left enough honey in the hives for the bees and start preparing them for their winters rest. The whole process starts mid April and ends at the end of October.”
Recent reports of honeybees disappearing have illustrated how important the honeybees role is in the great big circle of agriculture. From the New York Times, “one study says that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in US.” When we asked Ted what he thought was causing the nationwide bee vanishings, he suggested global warming. The winter time temperature fluctuations cause the bees to leave the hive too early, “Most hives don’t get monitored very often during the winter while we are in the house reading A Book of Bees, by the warm fire and sipping on our hot tea w/honey and planning our strategy for next season.”
Thanks Judy and Ted for answering our questions, and for the great honey.
Panade, in all its leftover glory.
You’re French, you’re hungry, all you have in the house is a bunch of bread, some water, left over cheese, and an onion. Your name is Brett Cross, you’re hungry, and all you have in the house is a bunch of bread, some water, left over cheese, and an onion. Brett Cross, like a lot of French people, isn’t intimidated by a bare cupboard. If life gives you bread, cheese, water and onions, you make Panade.
Thus begins a new feature here at Tastebud, in which we ask our friends to tell us what to write about. In this case, we went over to Brett and Jill Cross’s house for dinner and Lost. Brett made panade, and took us along to France, via the magic of our imaginations.
But before we get to the recipe, let’s play Q&A with Brett and Jill. Brett first learned about panade from an article in “Food and Wine” magazine. He tried making it on a whim, and it turned out great. So great, that he’s had a hard time living up to that first panade experience. His favorite cooking style is “French to eat, Mexican to cook.” His favorite kitchen tool is his terrifyingly sharp Kyocera Ceramic Chef's Knife, his snooty pepper mill, and his wooden spoons. Jill’s favorite kitchen tool is Brett. Brett is one of the two editors at Victim of Time, Jill takes care of kittens (including ours) at Blum veterinary on Clark Street.
On to the panade. I couldn’t find a direct translation of panade into English, so it’s sort of like burrito, or taco, it’s just “panade.” The idea behind it is to take whatever’s left in your cupboard, introduce it to some water and your oven, then eat. It’s classic French desperation food.
There’s two basic ways to make a panade, both of which Brett demonstrated for us. The first, Brett’s favorite, is as a soup. In a big french oven, put several handfuls of chopped up bread, four cups of chicken broth (or water), and caramelized onions. Put the whole pot in a 350 degree oven for two hours, or until the bread is pretty much disintegrated. Strain the bits and chunks from the soup, top with fresh green onions and cheese, and serve. You get a thick soup with a lot of chicken and onion flavors, but with a bread base that’s really great.
The second way of making panade is Jill’s favorite. Take another couple of handfuls of bread and put them in your french oven, add two cups of broth, some caramelized onions, and a few handfuls of cheese, Gruyeres is great for this, as is any semi-hard stinky cheese. Put the whole thing in your 350 degree oven for forty five minutes. What comes out is still sort of soup like, but it’s closer to a casserole or stew.
Either way is really excellent, very easy to make, and provides a great base for variation and experimentation. It was a great night. It’s a shame that Lost is sort of tanking this season, at least we can console ourselves with French leftovers.
Tulip gets close to the cereal.
We’re fans of breakfast. As much as we’d like to have eggs and pancakes every morning, we don’t have time, and we don’t want to weigh 500 pounds. So, for practical reasons, we mostly stick to toast, or oatmeal, or yogurt and muesli. About half the time, we eat cold cereal and milk. Which isn’t as unhip as it used to be, given that we recently paid $5 for a bowl of cereal at a cereal-boutique in Evanston. What follows is a run down of our favorite breakfast cereals. Most fall into the super-crunchy-healthy category, but there’s also some sugary good stuff in there as well.
Milk
A quick word about milk, a year or so ago we switched to organic milk, and we’ve never looked back. It’s richer, more milky flavored, and better for you. We encourage you to try out whatever brand of organic milk you can try. We like it. As a double-aside, Camri barely puts any milk on her cereal, I drown mine. I like having a glass of milk in the bowl when I’m done. Then the kittens get to lick the milk residue off the side of the bowl. When I have cereal, everyone gets a little treat. Now, on to the cereals.
Organic Optimum Power Breakfast with Flax Soy and Blueberry
That’s some title, eh? If you’re thinking, “this stuff probably looks like twigs,” you’re right. It totally looks like twigs. To an extent, it also tastes like twigs, except with berries. It’s good. It gets a ten on the crunchy fiber scale. Be forewarned, if you’re not big into fiber, and you have a big bowl of this stuff, you might…uh…not want to make any plans. It’s going to clean you out. Optimum. Power.
Quaker Essentials Oatmeal Squares
This is Camri’s favorite. The Quaker Oats man decided to make little cinnamon squares. He’s good at it. They taste great, have a nice crunch, and don’t get soggy in milk. However, they’re sort of deceptive, they’re not really as good for you as you’d think. If you stacked them up against a sugar cereal, like…say…fruity pebbles, you might be surprised that they’re not that far apart in terms of fiber, calories and fat. Which leads us to…
Fruity Pebbles
Early in our relationship, we had the inevitable, “what was your favorite breakfast cereal when you were a kid” discussion. It’s a tense time in any relationship. What if she liked something dumb like Lucky Charms? What if he was only allowed to have Grape Nuts? It turns out, we both picked Fruity Pebbles as our number one kids cereal. It’s crazy good. Lots of color, absurdly sweet, makes your milk turn funny colors. Shockingly, it’s really not that bad for you. It has a good amount of fiber, is pretty low cal, and has a teeny bit of fat. Plus, it has wacky games on the box. Fruity Pebbles doesn’t stop at keeping your body fit; Fruity Pebbles exercises your mind. Plus, as far as we know, Fruity Pebbles is the first breakfast cereal to feature a rap as a jingle, “I’m the master rapper and I’m hear to say, I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way.”
Total Raisin Bran
It’s Raisin Bran, under the Total umbrella. You know what’s in raisin bran…raisins…bran. It’s good, it’s classic, why mess with it? I can’t tell the difference between it and every other raisin bran on the market, but Camri insists that Total is the best. It’s like the Mercedes of Raisin Bran. More sugar per raisin, more bran per flake. Give yourself a treat, make your raisin bran Total.
Frosted Mini Wheats, Big Bites
For whatever reason, we rarely hear about people eating the big bites. Everyone wants their mini wheats to be mini. Why? Live a little folks, get the big bites. They totally break the typical breakfast cereal mold. They’re huge, they’re covered in sugar, yet still manage to be pretty good for you. They’re my favorite 9pm cereal as well. Something about the big biscuits in milk, half coated in sugar, makes me think I’m eating dessert. Don’t get those strawberry mini wheats though, they’re terrible.
Thursday night, Camri and I went to the opening of the Second City’s 94th revue, Between Barack and a Hard Place. Our friend Ithamar Enriquez is in the cast. During one of the improvised scenes, Ithamar got the suggestion of “Posole,” which kicked off a pretty funny song, and a couple of minutes of funny talk between Ithamar and Joe Canale. It’s funny because there’s no chance that Posole would have been the suggestion, except for on a opening night. Opening night audiences are typically more improv-savvy, so the suggestions aren’t the typical stuff. It was a funny scene.
It was doubly funny because Camri and I had been eating Posole all week, and had planned on writing this article. So, clearly, Posole is on everyone’s mind as of late. It’s a very popular stew in the Southwest US and Mexico that has it’s origins in pre-Columbian Mexico. Just like beef stew, or chili, there’s hundreds of variations in the recipe, but there’s a few typical bits that make it Posole: chunks of pork or chicken, hominy, and some sort of soup stock.
Our recipe went something like this, a pound of chicken, a cup of our homemade turkey stock, a can of hominy, a handful of chopped aromatic veggies, a can of diced tomatoes, and a small can of hot jalapeños. Throw it all in the crock pot on low for seven hours. Dish it up, add a slice of lime, and you’ve got a spicy stew that’s just exotic enough to make you feel like you’re on an adventure. Very good stuff.
For a more in depth history of the dish, check out the posole page on wikipedia.
Our cats like to lick stuff. It happens a lot. We’ll be eating breakfast, and one of them will lick the countertop for no obvious reason. It’s odd, strange, and makes us nervous. What are they licking? What did we use to clean the counter-top? Does it have something that tastes delicious but is actually poison?
Sometimes we drop our toothbrushes in the sink. Sometimes a plate isn’t as convenient as putting a slice of bread right on the table. Sometimes we might eat a piece of popcorn that fell on the floor. Are we eating little bits of poison each time we do this? Meh…maybe…a teeny bit. If nothing else, it made us think, “what’s in our cleaning products? Are they safe? Could we take a big swig of our laundry detergent?”
We take extra steps to try and eat organic fruits and veggies, so shouldn’t we do the same for our cleaning products? We started by buying the book, Organic Housekeeping
This all happened about a year and a half ago. In the meantime, we’ve tried a bunch of different products. Some have sucked, others are good. In some cases, the organic alternative cleaner just wasn’t good enough to justify its use, so we’ve stuck with conventional cleaners. What follows is the breakdown of products we’ve liked, organized by the area it cleans.
Surfaces
There’s a ton of surface cleaners out there in the world. They’re typically broken down by the kind of surface they’re meant to clean. You don’t spray 409 on wood. We were big 409 fans until we started on the organic kick. We tried a couple of different things, and found that we liked the Method brand of cleaners from Target the most. They have different stuff for wood and counter-tops, as well as cleaners for sinks and granite. They’re gentle, effective, and smell nice. We’ve never felt the need to wear gloves. It’s sort of dangerous, but if you get some 409 on your hands, you know what we’re talking about. 409 sort of burns. Method wants to be licked. It’s like we’re cleaning our counters with ice-cream.
We also have a bottle of very diluted bleach water under the sink for cleaning cutting boards. You make it by adding a cap of bleach to a gallon of water. It kills bacteria that can collect on a cutting board. We use it before and after we use the cutting board.
Floors
Our place is mostly hardwood floors. We were really excited to find out that Murphy’s Oil Soap is considered to be an organic cleaner. It’s biodegradable, and smells great. Remember that Murphy’s Oil Soap commercial with the lady cleaning pews in a church? No? I do. I love the smell of Murphy’s. Your house ends up smelling like a really nice library. Great stuff.
Bathroom
We have natural stone floor and wall tile in the bathroom, we haven’t found any cleaners that we trust. Instead we bought a terrifying steam cleaner. It’s called a Scunci steamer
Pots, Pans, Plates
This is where we couldn’t really hang with organics anymore. We tried some organic dishwasher detergents, they all pretty much sucked. We had to scrub everything before we put it in the dishwasher. We’re sorry hippies, we couldn’t do it. We switched back to normal Cascade.
As for hand washing, we use Seventh Generation Dish Soap. It smells like lavender, and gets stuff clean. For our stainless steel stuff, we use Bon Ami scouring powder. You can’t use it on teflon coated pans, but for stainless steel it’s great.
Laundry
We went 100% with the Seventh Generation brand of detergents and fabric softeners. Instead of using drier sheets, we switched to these Laundry Balls (as seen on TV)
That’s all we have for now. It took a little bit of work to evaluate what we really like when it comes to cleaning products, but it’s been worth it. Although we still think the cats licking the counter-tops is weird, at least we’re not worried it’s hurting their tender little kitty bodies.
I was in sunny Dallas this past week at a geek conference. When I got home, Camri presented me with a jar of Dundee style marmalade
Although it’s uncited, the wikipedia offers this explanation of Dundee marmalade:
The Scottish city of Dundee has a long association with marmalade. The oft-related story of how this came about begins sometime in the 1700s when a Spanish ship with a cargo of Seville oranges docked in Dundee harbour to shelter from storms. A grocer by the name of James Keiller bought a vast amount of the cargo at a knockdown price, but found it impossible to sell the bitter oranges to his customers. He passed the oranges on to his wife Janet who used them instead of the normal quinces to make a fruit preserve. The marmalade proved extremely popular and the Keiller family went in to business producing marmalade. However this is almost complete fiction. The truth is that in 1797, James Keiller, who was unmarried at the time, and his mother Janet opened a factory to produce “Dundee Marmalade”, that is marmalade containing thick chunks of orange rind, this recipe (probably invented by his mother) being a new twist on the already well-known fruit preserve of orange marmalade.
For a long time, Clarks on Belmont was our favorite place to get breakfast. When we moved to Lincoln Square, it just wasn’t as convenient, so our visits dropped off. Our favorite thing to get there were the pancakes. It took us a while to figure out why they tasted so much better than other places. After some subtle investigation (we asked the waitress) we found out they used malt in their batter.
For years, we occasionally tried to recreate the Clarks pancakes. We added malted milk, malt syrup, malt extract, anything that had the word “malt” in it. Malt is a tricky devil. The wikipedia article on malt explains, “Malting is a process applied to cereal grains, in which the grains are made to germinate and then are quickly dried before the plant develops.” Malt is used in lots of things: beer, whiskey, movie theater candy, and pancakes.
After countless experiments, we pretty much gave up. Then, out of the blue, we ran across Carbon’s Golden Malted Pancake Flour
Mystery solved. If you want malted pancakes, try out the flour that specifically says “malted pancake flour.” Duh. We’re still going to try and make the flour for ourselves, as we’re ornery like that, but for now, we have a good go-to for pancake-Saturdays.
Chicago is buried under a couple of inches of snow this week. I’ve been getting up every morning to shovel our sidewalk. It’s been a lot of work, but not all bad. Because we leave so early in the morning, I’m usually shoveling around 6:15 am. The sun is just starting to peek over the horizon around then. It’s quiet, no one else is shoveling, and the snow throws a lot of sparklies. A little quiet labor that early in the morning isn’t so bad.
Food-wise, we sure miss our Honeycrisp apples. Normally, we wouldn’t even be thinking about them around this time of year, except Jewel started to stock Ambrosia apples, which are an awful lot like Honeycrisps, but not quite. Just like Honeycrisps, Ambrosia’s are one of the newish super-apples developed by mad-cross-breeding-scientists in the 80′s and 90′s. For a little more information on Ambrosia apples, check out the government write-up.
It’s 2007, hummus is like a 1987 burrito, still sort of a teeny bit on the edge of common American food. Almost everyone has had it, but you’ll occasionally run into someone who’s never heard of the stuff. Seriously, it’s rare, but it does happen.
Hummus, wikipedia tells us, is “a dip made of chickpea paste and tahini (sesame seed paste), with flavorings such as olive oil, garlic, paprika, and lemon juice.” Hummus, like many words of Arabic origin, has a few different spellings. These: houmous, hommus, hummous or humus, are all the same. You can find tubs of it at Jewel for a couple of dollars. However, making your own is easy, fun, and gives you lots of room for experimentation.
Camri first started making her own hummus in high school. Camri bought the book, Cooking with the Dead
The recipe that Camri based her hummus on is courtesy of a dead-head named, ahem, Amilius (his name means “Spark from the Light of God”). Amilius explains that, “[he] began making hummus sandwiches because he felt it was important to sell healthy food, because that was what he was committed to eating himself.” Thanks Amilius.
So, young High School hippy Camri took Amilius’ recipe and made it. She liked it. She discovered that hummus is a blank slate. It begs to be fiddled with. Over the next ten years she toyed with the recipe until she finally found what she believes to be hummus perfection. Here is her formula, she presents it to you because she “feels it’s important to sell healthy food, because that was what she was committed to eating herself”:
In a mini food processor combine the following until a creamy hummus'y consistency is achieved: 1 can garbanzo beans (drained and rinsed) 1/4 cup Tahini 1/4 cup lemon juice (or the juice of 2 lemons) 4 cloves garlic, minced 3 tablespoons olive oil dill, oregano, cayenne, thyme, salt and pepper Serving suggestions: pita chips, pretzels, hummus sandwiches with feta, green peppers, red peppers, onions, or a Daily Bar & Grill style pita sandwich with sprouts, goat cheese, and balsamic vinaigrette dip.
About that mini food processor
It’s winter at your English country estate. A fussy old lady is solving the murder of your wealthy father. You’re checking your stocks in the Times, while you munch on a piece of toast. Quick! What’s on your toast?
Butter?
Sure.
Marmalade?
You bet.
You are Master and Commander of Her Majesty’s Ship “Indefatigable”. The wind roars outside your cabin windows. You flick a weevil off a ship’s biscuit, and spread what across its dry surface? Marmalade? Ahoy!
The point is, if you’re English, marmalade seems to be a part of your story, if not…it’s just sort of a quirky jelly that most people don’t like. Why? We don’t know. Camri doesn’t like it, she says it tastes like children’s Tylenol, I love it, in the winter time it tastes like yummy sunshine. I decided I wanted to make my own. I checked into the history of the stuff on Wikipedia, then I found a couple of recipes online. All of them used seville oranges, which are hard to get in the US. You can order big cans of them, which would yield several pounds of marmalade. I don’t need several pounds.
I considered making a bunch and giving away jars, but it turns out, I don’t really know anyone that likes marmalade. Then I thought, “hey, maybe I should make it with regular oranges!” It turns out, seville oranges have more pectin in them, meaning that I’d have to add pectin to a regular orange marmalade, and get into funky canning. Plus, if there’s any chance that the oranges you use were treated with pesticides, you’ll end up having really yucky jam. You need to find organic oranges.
What is this all building up to? I totally failed. I didn’t make my own marmalade. This is a story about giving up. Sorry folks. I stone cold gave up. I bought a jar of marmalade at the grocery store and called it a day.
Despite my failure, I can still live out my marmalade fantasies at breakfast. If you haven’t tried it, I suggest you do. If I can get a couple more people into orange-y jelly, I can justify ordering a big can of seville oranges and make a few pounds of marmalade.
