Salmon Dip

Salmon dip is a fantastic way to use up leftover salmon, which never tastes quite a good warmed up again as it does when you first make it.  If you are anything like me, however, you never have leftover salmon because you ate it all the first time around.  This is why I sometimes buy salmon specifically to make dip.

Here's what you need:

Salmon (duh)
Sour cream
Mayonnaise (For the love of Pete, do not try to substitue Miracle Whip.  So gross.)
Seasoned salt
Fresh dill or Capers
Lemon juice

If you are starting from scratch (no leftover salmon here), you need to cook your salmon first.  Any method is fine, but this is what I do:

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.  Line a cookie sheet or sheet pan with foil (this isn't absolutely necessary, but I do it so I don't have to scrub salmon skin off my pans), and lay your fillet out.  Drizzle with some lemon juice, then sprinkle with seasoned salt and dry dill weed.  I don't use fresh dill at this point because it gets either wilty or brittle, and isn't very tasty in the dip.

Bake until the internal temperature reaches 140 degrees (or 145 if you are a little paranoid).  You can either use a probe thermometer like I did, or just bake it for about 20 minutes and check it.

Put the salmon into a bowl and break it into chunks.  It should peel off the skin easily.

Add equal parts sour cream and mayonnaise.  How much depends on how much salmon you started with.  You are looking for a tuna salad-like consistency.

If you are using fresh dill in your dip, mince it.  I usually prefer capers, but I happened to have a large bunch of dill in my CSA box last week.

Add the dill (or capers), lemon juice, and seasoned salt.  Fold it all together.  How much lemon juice you use depends on how tangy you want your dip, so give it a taste.  If you use capers, you won't need as much salt.

Word.

I have noticed that, when using capers, it takes a few hours before the salt in the capers makes its way throughout the dip, so don't go overboard with the seasoned salt when mixing this up.  You can add more later if it seems bland.

And we're done.  I usually eat salmon dip on crackers (rice crackers are my favorite), but you can also make a salmon salad sandwich with it, or toss a spoonful with some buttered noodles.

Living Joyfully: A lesson from my dog

There are days when I am not as grateful as I should be.  There are days that I feel resentful.  Sometimes I find myself wishing I had more (time, money, unnecessary stuff).  Then I look at my dog, Langston.  I think I could learn a few things from him.

Toys are great.

Squeaky mouse.

Dagron!!

Dino-rawr!

But people are better.

Langston with Damian, the night we brought him home.

Langston with me, the night we brought him home.

Much more recently, accepting pats from Damian and tolerating Julian playing with his collar.

The little things in life can be the most fun.

A net float he found on the beach.  A.K.A. "The Best Toy Ever."

A stick, a.k.a "The Best Toy Ever."

Play stops being play when you call it exercise.  Run for joy!

Running!

Running with a friend!

Have faith, and trust your friends.  Try new things, even if they are a little scary.

The steep slope was scary, but he did it because we did.

He was willing to scramble up the clay bluff so he could come with us.

Just because God didn't give you wings, doesn't mean you shouldn't try to fly (at least a little bit).

Taking off!

Keeping your feet firmly planted on the ground is clearly overrated.

It's okay to look silly.  The people who matter don't care.

Slobber eyebrow.

Someone walked in tar and had to wear socks for a while.

Why?  Why the bandana?

Sharing is a good thing.

Langston shares his toys with Julian.

Julian shares his snacks with Langston.

Don't bully those who are smaller than you.  No one wants to be friends with a bully.

Langston plays nicely with Finn and Julian.

Feeling grumpy?  Take a nap.

A nap fixes a lot of things.

It doesn't really matter where you're going, so long as you have good company.

Going to the beach?  Going to the vet?  Who cares!  I get to go!

Walking with his friend, Silver.

Being part of a family is THE BEST!

Langston's first beach vacation.

Stay joyful, my friends.

Thanks for reading!

Smoke 'em if you got 'em: Pork butt!

I love when Damian cooks, because things like this happen:

Yeah.  That's four pork butts.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We are fortunate enough to have a great big chest freezer, which we keep stocked with tasty food for us to eat.  Also a lot of dog food.  Our dog eats chicken backs, and you do not want to get the people food and dog food mixed up.  But I digress.

One of the varieties of tasty food we like to keep in the freezer is smoked pork butt.  It can be thawed out quickly, and it is a lot easier to resist ordering a pizza on those too-lazy-to-cook days when you know you can have a pile of pulled pork without much effort or cost. 

Anyway, we ate the last one about a month ago, so it was time to smoke another.  We usually cut one in half, eat half, and freeze half.  But really, if you're going to fire up the smoker, why not load it up?

The first step (after procuring your pork, of course), is to build your brine and get those butts soaking!  Damian uses Alton Brown's recipe, and it is fantastic.  These guys get to hang out in the drink overnight.

The next day, you fish your butts out of the brine, apply your rub, and plop them in the smoker.  We are total cheaters and have an electric smoker with an integrated probe thermometer.  It even has a remote control.  If you are hungry, this is going to be a very long day.  I was out planting garlic after eating what turned out to be a rather unsatisfactory lunch, and it took some self control to not rip the smoker open and grab a hunk of meat.  What I'm trying to say is that it smells like heaven, if heaven happens to smell like smoking pork products.

At the end of the day, this is what you've got.  So pretty.  And it's cheaper than hamburger.  At this point, you can either do what we did and cool it down completely before cutting each butt in half and wrapping them (in a layer of cling wrap followed by two layers of heavy duty aluminum foil) to freeze, or you can start pulling and dig in!  A cool time-saving trick we've learned for pulling pork is to remove the bone and fat cap, then toss the meat into the bowl of our stand mixer.  Use the dough hook on a low speed to pull the pork.  You might not get the perfectly uniform little bits that pulling with a few forks would give you, but it only takes about 30 seconds, and you are much less likely to burn yourself.  You can either eat these in pulled pork sandwich form, or do what I love to do:

Potachos!  That's right.  Potato chips, pulled pork, barbecue sauce, and queso.  So bad, but oh so good.  (Please don't judge me too harshly.)

Planting Garlic

My garden:  It's a mess.  The whole thing froze about a month ago, and I am most of the way done with tear-down.  It's kind of a bummer time of year; the harvest is over.  No more fresh tomatoes.  But wait!  It's the perfect time to plant garlic!  I put garlic in darn near everything, and nothing beats garlic from the garden! 

First I churned up the soil in my chosen garden box.  Garden Goose keeps watch.

Next I got my garlic.  This is my second year growing my own garlic.  My Plan A had been to use some of this year's harvest as seed garlic, but I decided that I would rather eat it.  I ordered 3/4 of a pound of garlic online.  I chose two varieties of Porcelain garlic, hardneck garlic with only four to five large cloves per head. 

Then I separated the cloves.  Forty big, fat cloves of garlic.  Oh, did they smell good. 

I decided on spacing next.  Four rows of ten seemed like easy math to me.

 

My favorite tool for creating the little ditches for the garlic to live in is a pointy trowel, by the way.

I tucked the little buggers in.  This should be obvious, but make sure the cloves are set pointy side up.  They don't like to grow upside down.

 

Lastly, I tossed a layer of leaves over top for mulch.  Garden Goose will keep an eye on my garlic for me this winter, and with any luck I'll see delightful green shoots come spring!  Ah, something to look forward to.

 

Few things make a girl (or this girl, at least) happier than getting to play in the dirt for a while. 



Oatmeal Bread

I love homemade bread.  Some of my most cherished childhood memories involve coming home from school on a rainy day to the smell of bread baking.  I love cooking, but baking can be a little...fiddly.  Knead, rise, punch, rise, knead, proof....

I found a recipe for oatmeal bread in my most recent copy of the Penzey's spice catalog.  It looked like a winner because (A) it invovled whole wheat flour and oatmeal, and I really like whole grain bread, (B) I actually had all the ingredients, and (C) it looked really easy.  As it turned out, it was easy, and quite good, and I even had it ready before my husband got up for work (don't be too impressed, he works a late shift).

Yesterday was rainy, and my bread was nearly gone, so I decided to make another batch.  When it comes to cooking in general, I treat recipes more like guidelines.  I improvise.  I wing it.  In my mind, at least, I improve upon the original.  I'm a free spirit, man, and it drives my husband crazy.  He of the scientific method questions how I can possibly know what the recipe was supposed to taste like if I never follow it.  He has a point, so I try to make a control sample, following the recipe.  You know, for science.

But this was batch number two, so I took a stroll through the pantry to see what I could find!

 

The Original Recipe for Oatmeal Bread

(as published in the Thanksgiving 2012 Penzeys Spice catalog--Donna Timm, contributor)

 

1 Cup regular oats (I took this to mean rolled oats)

2 Cups boiling water

2 Tbs yeast

1/3 Cup warm water

1 tsp cinnamon

1tsp salt

1/2 Cup honey

2 Tbs canola oil

2 Cups whole wheat flour

2-2 1/2 Cups white flour

 

The first batch was sweet, moist, and suprisingly cinnamony considering it only had one teaspoon of cinnamon between two loaves of bread.  It was really good, but I am incapable of leaving well enough alone.  The things I found in my pantry to jazz it up included:  molasses, maple syrup, flax meal, and pecans.

 

First I put the cup of oats in the bowl for my stand mixer and poured the two cups of boiling water over it.  Looks good, right?  Mmm.  Soggy oats.  Bonus points for doing this while a one-year-old crawls around your feet playing with some tupperware.  Where did he find it?  The drawers are locked.  This needs to soak for about 30 minutes.  In the  meantime, assemble the rest of the ingredients, and try not to trip on the baby.  I am using instant yeast, so I don't bother to bloom it.

 

 

Dry goods!  Two cups each of wheat and white flour, one teaspoon of cinnamon, and one teaspoon of salt.  I added about a quarter cup of flax meal on a whim later on.

 

Sugar!  Instead of a half cup of honey, I used a quarter cup of maple syrup and about an eigth cup each of honey and molasses.  And it was good.

The recipe tells me to mix it all together, adding more white flour as needed to acheive a "nice consistency."  With the first batch, I had a dough so sticky it was almost a batter at this stage.  This modified batch is still sticky, and I added about a half cup more of white flour, a tablespoon at a time.

With the addition of the extra flour, my dough started to come together and make a break for freedom.  This is when I added my chopped and toasted pecans.  I used up the last of a bag I found in the back of the pantry, about a third of a cup.

I put my dough in an oiled bowl and draped a damp tea towel over it to rise for a couple hours.  The baby was napping, so I got my dishes done a put away, played on Facebook, Pinned a bunch of things I'll never bother trying, and took a short nap myself.  This is the best part of dough rising/baby napping time.



Mmm.  Lumpy dough logs.  I mean rustic.  Rustic dough logs.

When my two hours of awesome time were up, I put my malformed logs of dough into two loaf pans and left them alone for about a half hour to rise again.  Yes, I could have rolled out my dough and formed it into nice, plump little loaves, but I am a lazy baker.  I cut the dough in half and tossed it in the pans.  I will call it "rustic."  In the meantime, I preheated the oven to 350 degrees.

I baked the bread for 30 minutes, then turned it out onto a cooling rack. 

They're not very pretty, but they sure do taste good.  This batch was not as sweet as the control sample, nor as cinnamony, but it has a toasty, nutty flavor that I dig.  I'll be making this again, but since I'm me, it will probably be different.  Again.