Guest Chef! Charles McE. Cooks

Charles, a physicist by day and avid cook by night (a blogger all the time) needed little persuasion to guest chef at the Spouse House. His MO is all-in-one meals, especially "stu" (aka stew). For this venture, he was determined to step it up a notch with a side dish. We brainstormed ideas and came up with a cabbage salad, as I had a great quantity of crispy savoy cabbage from our Featherstone Farm Winter CSA share.

Charles stirs the stew while I mash the potatoes and parsnips, and toss the salad.

This evening, the stew included black pepper bacon, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, green beans and sundry soup making staples (onions, broth, and the like).

Mayan-Inspired Corn Pone

This recipe was inspired by a childhood favorite of mine from Laurel's Kitchen: Tennessee Corn Pone. I wanted to make something that would complement acorn squash with a cranberry stuffing.

Acorn squash and onion from Mhonpaj's Garden CSA.

I also wanted to incorporate the pumpkin puree that was on the Spouse House "Nom Nom Me" list. So I fiddled with the spices, adjusted the cornbread topping, and voila!

Mayan-inspired corn pone. I was overly judicious with the spices - this could have used a lot more oomph in  the flavor department - but it's a gentle introduction to the pumpkin-pinto bean-corn world of Mayan cuisine.

Mayan-Inspired Corn Pone
Serves four hungry adults as a main dish.

4 c pinto beans, cooked
2 c black beans, cooked

2 tsp canola oil
1 small onion, diced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tsp oregano
1/4 tsp allspice
5 cloves, ground
1/4 tsp chili powder
1/4 tsp salt

2 c cornmeal
2 eggs
2 c milk
1/2 c pumpkin puree
1 T baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp oregano
1/4 tsp allspice

1. Preheat oven to 375. Lightly grease a 9"x13" baking pan.
2. Heat the oil in a cast iron skillet and sauteed onions until soft. Add garlic and saute one minute more.
3. Add the spices; stir well to coat. Cook another minute or so.
4. Add the beans and enough of the cooking water to nearly submerge them. Let heat through and simmer while you prep the topping.
5. Beat the eggs in a large bowl. Add the milk and pumpkin puree and whisk thoroughly.
6. Sift the dry ingredients into the wet and fold in with quick, light strokes.
7. Pour the beans into the prepared pan. Pour the cornmeal mixture over it evenly.
8. Bake until golden brown, or a toothpick inserted near the middle comes out clean, about 30 minutes.

Just a heads up - some people strongly prefer / only eat this dish with salsa.

Vegetables with which I Struggle: Fennel

This installment of Vegetables with which I Struggle is featured on my new good foodie friend Jillian's blog, ginger spoon. Here's a snippet:

While I profess to love vegetables, there are some that I would never buy for myself. And for better or for worse, those very vegetables regularly turn up in my CSA share from Mhonpaj's Garden. Last week it was fennel.

They look so relaxed.

Fennel's strong licorice flavor of has never pleased me...

Keep reading at ginger spoon for the full story and recipe! 

Guest Chef! Kate E. Cooks

Kate is no stranger to homemade dinners, favoring build-your-own themes (crepe bar, anyone?) and trading dinner duties with her sister occasionally. For the Spouse House, however, she had something different in mind.

Slicer tomatoes meet their destiny amid the carnage of floret'd broccoli.

Under her fingers, and with Alec's help, two pizzas rose: fresh tomatoes atop a white bean puree with overtones of smoked gouda and a green mountain of broccoli and arugula capped with feta and mozzarella.

Kate keeps an eye on Alec's work.

Into the oven they went, and out they came again, melted and tantalizing, ready to join my second attempt at enjoying fennel in a salad (read about my first, wildly successful attempt).

Beets work their overpowering magic on fennel, one of my struggle vegetables.

Come back soon, Kate!

Guest Chef! Thomas W.W. Cooks

Thomas came to the Spouse House kitchen with a favorite recipe that he was willing to tweak: broccoli chicken stir fry with a crunchy peanut butter sauce. We tried sauteing the onions first rather than with the broccoli and marinating the chicken for about 20 minutes before cooking it, with good results.

I also taught him how to cook beets (from Mhonpaj's Garden) in the pressure cooker.

Thomas slips the skins off beets.

Perhaps "teach" is a strong word. I am still figuring out beet-size to cooking-time ratio, and it took two tries to get them to an acceptable softness. I improvised a curry dressing to doll them up.

Thomas invited two guests. Danny brought V8 Fusion juices and we tried to guess what was in them.

Henry and Hannah read food labels.

The answer was on the bottles, of course, so we read the ingredient lists simultaneously. Of course.

Guest Chef! Kathy J. Cooks

We lured Kathy J. into our kitchen with promises of fresh, organic produce from Mhonpaj's Garden.

Kathy likes to talk while she cooks. 

She tied on her apron and jumped right in. Appetizers first: sauteed Parmesan-stuffed Swiss chard packets with a balsamic reduction and kale chips.

Swiss chard wrapped around a hunk of melted Parmesan.

 Then a pause as the polenta was prepared.

Kathy puts the finishing touches on the green beans
while Lani stirs polenta and reads To Kill a Mockingbird.

The main course was worth the wait: creamy polenta with roasted vegetable and mushroom ragout, mixed beans with grilled corn, and a caramelized red onion olive tart with a whole wheat crust.

Looks good, tastes good.

Another pause before dessert: brownies made from scratch by Kjersti with chocolate-chocolate and/or blackberry ice cream.

I asked Kathy if she followed a recipe for the ragout. She said she did, once, but has since reinvented it with every preparation. "I cook more from recipes than some of my friends," she said. "That's how you learn."

It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are. 

Wendell Berry 

Web Design Contract Consultant

After three months, I'm finally ready to explain what my current job is. Here it is in a nutshell:

I am updating the University of Minnesota Extension Health and Nutrition program website.

Let's break apart that kernel of a sentence.

Extension: I didn't really know what extension was all about before I came to the University of Minnesota, but it has a long history. Basically, the "cooperative extension"  of a land-grant university brings research-based knowledge to (rural) communities with the intention of making community members' lives better.

University of Minnesota: My local land-grant university. The Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 gave land to the states for them to develop or sell; proceeds went toward establishing colleges that would focus on teaching agriculture, science and engineering.

Health and Nutrition program: Extension usually focuses on the areas of agriculture/food, home/family, the environment, community economic development, and youth/4-H. At the U of M, Health and Nutrition (H&N) falls under the Family Development area (agriculture and food tends to address the production side versus consumption). 

About 90% of H&N's energy and resources go toward Simply Good Eating, Minnesota's delivery system for SNAP-Ed. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - Education is a federal/state partnership that supports—you guessed it—nutrition education for people eligible for SNAP benefits. H&N has Extension Educators (EEs) and Program Coordinators (PCs) distributed across twelve regions of Minnesota, managing paraprofessionals called Community Nutrition Educators (CNEs) who do most of the actual educating.

Updating: Extension's website is migrating, program by program, from a more rigid, cramped template...

UMN Extension's front page in January 2010, courtesy of the Way Back Machine.

...to more open, flexible template.

UMN Extension's front page today.

Part of my job, then, is to take all the content currently on the H&N page, review it, and figure out how to make it look good using the new template. But that's not all. H&N wants to expand their site, creating big "buckets" (categories) of information that make sense for its various audiences. But that's not all. H&N also wants to develop more and better content, to become a destination for health and nutrition information for Minnesotans.

This means I work closely with a number of people. I take orders from the H&N program director about the big picture. I follow rules and regulations laid down by the Family Development project manager. I asked EEs and PCs for ideas, clarification, and feedback. And I rely on my best buddy, the web production assistant, to take my Word documents full of URLs, cut-this's, and change-that's, and turn them into functional web pages.

Website: I'm building a framework, which is only half the battle in this Age of Social Media. And it's plenty of work for now.

There you have it. I'm being called a consultant years ahead of schedule, I'm managing multiple projects, and I'm learning valuable new skills. For what more could I ask?

Turning a New Leaf

The past five months have brought many changes and milestones for this former dietetic intern. Let's take a month-by-month review, shall we?

February - Joseph and I move into a house with another married couple with whom we went to high school. Plans to garden commence immediately. I get trained in as HEN web co-chair.

March - I finish my clinical rotation at Abbott Northwestern, making two presentations ("Registered Dietitians and the In-Patient Treatment of Eating Disorders" and "Tetraplegia, Pressure Uulcers, and Malnutrition: A Case Study") and riding the plateau of the steepest learning curve I've experienced to date.

April - My groupmates and I present our final project to our TEP preceptors: "Eating, Moving, and Your Body: An Eating Disorders Prevention Curriculum for 6th-8th Graders." High fives and diplomas all around. 

May - I hunker down for some serious studying and light gardening (beans, basil, tomatoes, kale, beets, corn). RTB welcomes me back to record the show Nutrition and Health. I apply for an instructor position at HECUA (no go) and a web design contract consultant position (so go!), which has its own sharply inclined learning curve.

I can ha-RD-ly believe it!

June - I sit the registration exam for dietitians and pass, just as everyone told me I would. Mhonpaj Lee of Mhonpaj's Garden offers me work managing communications - I pounce. The chair of the Hampden Park Co-op Board of Directors encourages me to apply for an open position on the board - I do so and am appointed forthwith.

I can hardly believe how blessed I am to have become gainfully employed straight out of the internship, with work that is not only gainful, but also thoroughly engrossing. Each one of my positions includes room for tremendous growth of varying degrees - now I just have to figure out how to do it all!

SPOR

I had the pleasure of baking rolls for my family this Easter. Usually I defer to Trotter's Cafe and Bakery and buy their Sweet Potato-Oat-Currant (SPOC) bread for the holidays. This year, however, I was on my own.

Two-thirds of the way through kneading.

The head baker graciously allowed me to snag the SPOC recipe. Not able to leave well enough alone, I used raisins soaked in red wine instead of currants.

Housemate's digital scale made me feel like a professional.

I cut nubbins off, rolled them into balls, and tucked them three at a time into muffin tins.

Naked SPOR rolls.

Sprinkle with oats, pop in the oven...

Not nearly enough to satisfy aunts, uncles, AND cousins.

...and I was ready to delight my family.

Nabemono

Winter's chill begs for certain meals to come to the table.

+Caren Grantz Keljik  prepared nabemono, a Japanese winter stew cooked at the table. You can see the portable stove with a ceramic pot, filled to the brim with a lightly flavored stock, slices of daikon and napa cabbage, chunks of tofu, caps of shiitake mushrooms, and lengths of green onion.

After each batch of ingredients cooked, we fished them out of the pot with chopsticks and bathed them in the stock of our individual bowls, flavored with soy sauce, fresh lemon, and green onion.

As the meal progressed, the daikon absorbed more and more flavor, and the "lightly flavored stock" became the most delicious savory broth you could imagine.

We were happy campers.