"Oh, Look! We Have Unexpected Company!" Quick Bread

My husband was really bad about inviting people to dinner and then forgetting to tell me about it until our guests pulled into the driveway. Seriously. Thirty four years of marriage never broke him of the habit. After so many years of magically conjuring dinner for four, or six, or eight out of ingredients planned for just the two of us, I'm really good at it. 

One of the things I learned very quickly about stretching meals is that carbs are your friends. Having a few good quick breads in your repertoire can be a great help when unexpected company arrives at dinnertime.  

Served before dinner, hot from the oven, with butter or with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, a quick bread can buy you some extra time to prepare the rest of the meal. It can help take the edge off appetites too, which means main course protein servings can be smaller and the meal can be more heavily weighted towards vegetables that are quick to prepare. 

Your guests don't have to know any of that. You can keep mum and let them be impressed with what a special treat they're enjoying. They'll love it.

You don't have to re-invent the wheel either. Learn to make a basic quick bread like this beer bread. Beer bread's been around forever because it's easy to make and it tastes really good. 

Almost all beer breads call for self rising flour: a pre-mixed blend that also includes baking powder and salt. It's not an ingredient commonly called for in recipes from this region so I don't go through it quickly enough to use up a bag before it's past its "best by" date. When I bake a recipe that calls for self rising flour I make this substitution:

For every cup of self rising flour called for in a recipe, I use 1 cup of all purpose flour, 1-1/2 teaspoons of baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. 

I've already done the math for you in this recipe, then adjusted so it's less salty and there's no aftertaste from the baking powder.

You're welcome. 😊

To make this bread, you'll need:

• 2-1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 Tablespoon baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 Tablespoon sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon each of onion powder, granulated garlic, ground dry rosemary, oregano, and basil
• 1 12-ounce bottle of beer (I use a lager)
• 1/4 cup olive oil

Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl and use a whisk or a fork to stir them together. (A whisk or fork won't compact the flour. A spoon would.)

Add the beer and then the olive oil. Stir until combined but don't over-mix the batter. Lumpy is okay.

Spoon the batter into a buttered or oiled  9 x 5-inch loaf pan. It'll take about 45 minutes to bake at 375F. 

If you portion the batter into smaller containers you can shorten the baking time. Half pint/125 ml Mason jars work perfectly. The smaller loaves cook in about half the time it takes to bake a 9 x 5-inch loaf, and they're easy to present in a bread basket; no slicing required. 

Beer bread is always best served hot from the oven. If you have leftovers and want to reheat them, you can slice them and toast the slices or you can wrap the leftovers in foil and reheat them in a 350F oven for 15 to 20 minutes.

Now, go forth and fear unexpected company no more. You've got this!

Winning at Dinner

I discovered years ago that sitting down and making a weekly or monthly meal plan doesn't work for me.  I end up buying too much food and then throwing a lot of it away because I don't use it up before it spoils. What does work for me is to make using leftovers into a game. I make a meal with extra portions of the main ingredients and then challenge myself to see how many new dishes I can make from the leftovers in the days that follow.  I call it Winning At Dinner.

I've been posting about Winning At Dinner in my personal feed for a while now and, every time I do that, someone comments that I should be teaching others how to do it. So...Here I am, sharing the idea. 

My thought is that I'll post my week's best series of meals on my Facebook page each Friday and challenge you to share yours in the comments. I'll share the post again each weekday and, when it's time to post the next Winning at Dinner, the person whose comment has garnered the most likes over the course of the week will be announced as winner. There won't be prizes but the bragging rights will be huge.  😉

Here's my Winning at Dinner series for the week:

Day 1: A sheet pan meal of bone-in chicken thighs, cubed acorn squash, and beets, all simply seasoned with salt and coarsely ground black pepper, served with brown rice as a side dish.

Day 2:  A stir fry of onion, carrots, and cabbage in a sauce made from homemade vegetable stock flavoured with a little garlic black bean paste. Once the veggies were tender-crisp I stirred in the meat from one of the chicken thighs, and some canned green beans.  I thickened the sauce with cornstarch, then I served the stir fry over some of the rice from the previous night, reheated in the microwave.

Day 3:  I needed a change from chicken so I had macaroni and tomatoes, with a celery salad.

Day 4: Poulterer's pie: I like a crust on the bottom of my meat pies so I made the pastry from my quiche recipe and used it to form two individual pies in extra large muffin cups. I par-baked the crusts then filled each pie with the meat from a chicken thigh, diced roasted squash and beets, sauteed onion, and the last of the canned green beans, in chicken gravy. (I used a packaged mix.) To encourage the top to brown nicely as the pies baked, I topped each pie with mashed potato brushed with a little melted butter. I had one pie for supper, with coleslaw on the side, and put the second pie in the freezer for another day.

Bonus: I made a soup from homemade vegetable stock, the leftover gravy from the pies, the leftover stirfry cut into smaller pieces, the rest of the leftover roasted squash and beets, finely diced, the meat from two chicken thighs, the last of the brown rice and some poultry seasoning. The soup was divided into three 2-cup portions.  I froze them so I'll have something for lunches or evenings when I don't want to cook.

Please share your best dinner or series of meals in the comments on my Facebook page and then share the heck out of this post so others can like your comment and participate with comments of their own. 

Let the challenge begin!

Stretching Leftovers: Turkey and White Bean Soup

Last weekend was Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada. If I'm honest about it, Thanksgiving's never been a really big deal for me. It's always nice to have an extra day to visit with family and friends. Other than that I can quite happily let it slide by without any sort of observance, even more so since my husband passed away almost seven years ago. Cooking a traditional turkey dinner for just me seems more work than it's worth, and it's 'way too much food for a single person.

This year, I planned to have macaroni and tomatoes on Thanksgiving, with a salad on the side. That would've made me quite happy. It's quick, simple to prepare, inexpensive, and comforting. I did end up getting a turkey dinner though. On Sunday night, I had an after-dinner visit with friends and they sent me home with a generous plateful of leftovers from their Thanksgiving feast.

I'm all about making the maximum number of meals from whatever protein I'm cooking with, so I looked at that generous dinner - roasted potatoes and carrots, Brussels sprouts, stuffing, and turkey - and decided to figure out a way to make at least two meals of it. 

When I got home that evening, I put some dry white beans to soak overnight.  The next morning, I treated myself to the veggies and stuffing for breakfast (so good!) and I used the beans and the turkey to make a soup for supper that night. 

When it was time to make the soup, I gathered these ingredients: 

• The pre-soaked white beans
• 4 cups of homemade stock (I used an all-vegetable stock this time but chicken or turkey stock would be good too.)
• A bay leaf, a couple of sprigs of thyme, some parsley, a couple of sage leaves, and 2 cloves of garlic, peeled
• 1 cup of gravy (I used leftover chicken gravy from the freezer but if you have leftover turkey gravy, all the better)
• Approximately 1/2 cup of diced, cooked turkey breast
• A few chives for garnish

I put the white beans in a saucepan and poured the stock over them, then bundled the bay leaf, thyme, parsley, sage, and garlic together in a piece of cheesecloth, tied it off with some butcher's twine and added it to the pot too. I brought the pot to a boil, turned it down to simmer, put a lid on it, and walked away.  I returned after half an hour to begin checking on how tender the beans were and kept checking every 10 minutes or so until I decided they were at the right texture for me. (It took about 50 minutes.)

Once the beans were cooked I drained them, discarding the cheesecloth bundle of aromatics and reserving the stock I'd cooked the beans in. 

I set aside about 1/3 of the cooked beans and transferred the rest to my blender.  I added in the gravy together with enough stock to allow the blender to do its work, and hit the puree button. I checked the thickness of the puree and added in enough stock to thin it to a soup consistency.

The last step was to return the puree and reserved beans to the pot, stir in the chopped turkey, and reheat the soup. 

When it was heated through again, I tasted the soup to see if I needed to add salt and decided to leave it just as it was. All that was left to do after that was to ladle it into a bowl and snip a few chives over the top.

Simple, right?  It was surprisingly tasty.

This recipe made just over 3 cups of soup; enough for my supper and for lunch the following day.  

There was stock left over from cooking the beans so I cooled it, put it in the fridge, and used it to cook rice a couple of days later. Beans are rich in solable fiber so the stock not only brought flavour to the rice but added nutritional value as well.

I hope I can encourage you to think about ways to stretch a small amount of animal protein over a larger number of servings. With meat and poultry prices being what they are, it's a useful skill to have. 

If you have any questions about this recipe or suggestions for ways to use less meat to make more servings please do share them.  I always learn so much from you guys!

Over-Salted Food? Here's What To Do About It

 

The other day, my friend Donna told me she was mad at herself.  She'd made a huge batch of tomato soup and, because she was really tired, she'd accidentally over-salted it.  We've all done this at one time or another, right?  It's so easy to do: A moment's inattention or a misread recipe and there you are.

The last time I over-salted a batch of soup I went on Pinterest in search of solutions. I found lots of ideas there, some of them quite outlandish. The one that made the most sense to me was adding potatoes, the idea being that the potatoes would absorb some of the extra salt as they cooked. I tried it. Maybe I didn't put in enough potatoes, but the potatoes alone didn't fix the problem. 

If I'm honest, I already knew what needed to be done with the soup, I just didn't want to do it. I could add more ingredients until I arrived at a balance I liked, or I could use that salty soup to season other dishes. I didn't want to be eating soup for days and days so I opted for the second choice.  

I strained out the veggies and refrigerated them then ladled the liquid into small jars and froze it.  

I used the veggies in a cottage pie and, infused into the pie's gravy, their extra salt seasoned the entire dish. It turned out really well.  

Over the following weeks, I used the frozen liquid from the soup to cook rice and to poach chicken.  I used the poaching liquid from the chicken, diluted with some unsalted veggie stock, to make a new soup.

Because I usually don't realize my mistake until after I take them out of the oven, finding a way to use over-salted baked goods can be challenging.

If I've added too much salt to bread or biscuits, I usually reduce them to crumbs in my food processor. I use the crumbs as breading or as a topping for casseroles or gratins.  

If I over-salt a batch of pastry and realize my mistake before I've put it in the oven I'll roll it out into a sheet, dock it, score it into squares, brush it with an egg wash, and bake it without a filling. Because I don't add sugar to my pastry dough, I can either use baked pastry sheet for crackers or, if proves too salty for that, I can process it into crumbs as mentioned above. Unfortunately, if I've made a pie with that pastry before realizing my mistake, the best I can do is save the filling. The crust is, sadly, destined for the compost bin.

If a sweet baked good is too salty I often look to either caramel or chocolate to help restore balance.  I'll portion out some cooked fruit and/or ice cream, top it with a caramel or chocolate sauce, and then crumble my oversalted muffins, cake, or cookies over the dish. 

Dealing with an excess of salt in pie filling or pudding is more problematic. Really, the only thing you can do with the pudding is set it aside, make another - unsalted - batch and mix the two together. 

Salty pie filling is much the same. Scoop it out of the pie crust into a bowl, cook a second batch of pie filling on the stove top with no salt at all, and then mix the two together.  You can use the adjusted filling to make new pies but if you do that, having been cooked twice, the filling will have less texture. I prefer to use the amended pie filling between layers in a cake, or as the fruit layer in a trifle, or to mix it into my breakfast oatmeal over the course of several days. You can also fold it into a muffin batter if you first cut the fruit into smaller pieces.

I hope some of these ideas are helpful to you. I'm always pleased to learn new ways of reducing food waste so if you have a remedy for over-salted food not mentioned here, please feel free to share it in the comments. I'll look forward to reading your suggestions.