Everyday Meals: Soured Oats and Eggs

While we normally post the highlights of our culinary endeavors, I feel like it serves to reason that we can share the kinds of meals that we eat with regularity - dishes that we have in between the venison pot pies and the more extravagant creations such as buffalo chicken calzones and braised oxtail. 

Christa can attest that when I make food for her and for myself that I make it from scratch, but we don't always have time for elaborate meals that take 6+ hours to prepare.  There are two ways that I ensure that we always have good homemade food during the week even when we are both crunched for time:  batch cooking and quick go-to meals.

Batch cooking is very useful, because it allows me to spend the same amount of time that I might otherwise use to make 2 meals and instead prepare 8 meals.  It doesn't necessarily take any longer to increase the amount of food prepped in one recipe, and in the long run it saves time as I am only cooking for two.  By cooking a whole roast, several quarts of soup, or entire roasted chickens, we can then get many meals out of that one recipe by eating leftovers during the week and also by freezing portions for use in the future.  Freezing and storage is particularly handy as it allows for us to have a variety of meals, rather than eating the same thing all week (which can get boring no matter how good it tasted at first).  I'll get more into ways to maximize the efforts of freezing and storage of batch cooking in the future, but let's talk about the other simple way to always have fresh, real food at hand.

Quick go-to meals are more the focus of this post.  These are things that can be thrown together quickly, and often times do not benefit from longer cooking at all.  This are the kind of meals that we make for breakfast while getting packed for work; the kind of meals that we'll make on a rushed evening when there's nothing cooked in the fridge (like this week after returning from a 4-day weekend vacation).  They're also usually cheap...much cheaper than prepackaged convenient foods, and more importantly, they're health real food.

Most mornings, I put together oatmeal for Christa.  She prefers the cracked oats as opposed to the rolled, and we both prefer to sour our grains before cooking (unless they're sprouted).  Soaking the oats to sour them makes cooking much faster in the morning.  Just put them in a put or a jar, add three times as much water as oats, add a splash of raw vinegar, and leave them covered on the counter at room temperature for 1-2 days.  Put them on the stove in the morning and the soaked oats will cook up in less than 5 minutes into a creamy and exquisitely flavored porridge.  Add butter and/or maple syrup to taste, and serve them with a glass of whole creamline milk and a pair of gently cooked pastured chicken eggs for a really excellent start to the day that costs less than a "fast-food" breakfast and is infinitely more nourishing.

15 minutes of actual cook time for something that we could eat every morning

So, for those of you that are more curious about what it is that we're eating, and want a closer look at the philosophy and reasoning behind it, stay tuned for updates on everyday meals.  When we slow down enough to take a picture, we'll be sure to write about them.

Sprouting Grains

It is only fairly recently that I have begun incorporating sprouted grains into my own diet, and now by extension we have both begun to enjoy them with some regularity.  It wasn't really the mystery of the process that had prevented me from attempting to do so in the past, but rather the lack of any real need.  Personally, I don't have a great deal of desire for most breads or cereal grains.  Once I changed my dietary habits years ago, I found that I didn't really miss bread all that much, and that while I have no issues with gluten or any other component of wheat, I just rarely had the desire.  This is not to say that I don't appreciate a good piece of bread (or pizza  or pie crust) every now and again, and I did go through a serious baking kick a couple of years ago where I finally figured out how to consistently produce good leavened breads in my own kitchen, but given my own natural food predilections, I could and do easily go months in between having any baked good or really any grains in general.  The one exception to this is oats; I really like oats and I eat them all of the time (usually soured), but oats are good enough for me and I never grow tired of them.

Christa likes bread a whole lot, though.  She is also generally a big fan of cereal grains and pasta in particular.  It was partially due to this that after putting together a batch of tabbouleh together one afternoon that I started to consider some healthy grain options that we could both enjoy together.  I like the idea of sprouting grains for the same reason that I like to sour my oats - make the nutritional quality greater for the same amount of calories with just a little extra investment of time.

Grains are cheap, too, relatively speaking.  This appeals to me, because quality pasture raised animal products (meat, milk, eggs...) are not.  It's good to be able to make up the balance of one's caloric needs with something that only costs a couple of bucks at most per pound.  I decided to go with hard winter wheat berries, as they were only about $1.50/lb and I thought that we might be able to use them in much the same way as bulgur.

The procedure is very simple, and I'm happy to say that even on my first attempt that I had a great batch of wheat sprouts.  I usually sprout about a cup of wheat each week, which gets us through for a couple of servings.  In order to sprout wheat, or by extension just about any other whole grain, you'll need a jar of some sort with a semipermeable cover that will allow water and air to circulate while containing the grains.  I use an old glass jar that I saved and make a makeshift cover out of a rubber band and some cheesecloth. 

The first thing that you'll need to do is to soak the grains in warm water for about 8-12 hours.  This will rehydrate them and initiate the sprouting process.  You can see below how the grains have plumped up a bit after the initial soaking period.

Now, pour the water off of the grains, rinse again with warm water, drain, and place them in a dark spot (I used my food dehydrator because it is on the kitchen counter already and is quite dark inside).  Any box or even a paper bag would be just fine.  Lay the jar on its side as shown, in order to give the grains room and to allow air to circulate around them to avoid growing mold.

Now, every 12 hours simple rinse off the grains with more fresh warm water, drain, and return them to dark storage.  The rinsing keeps them moist without soaking them (an entirely different process).  Within 2-4 days, depending on the grain and the temperature, the grains will have sprouted.  You can see below how these have just barely begun to sprout.  Note the small white protrusions. 

In another 12-24 hours, they look like this when I do wheat:

This is when I stop the process by placing the sprouts in the refrigerator in a covered container to be used in cold salads (toss with parsley, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar), or steam them and coat with butter and salt, or maple syrup, honey, or anything else that you might put on a hot breakfast cereal.  Use your imagination with these; wheat is a fairly blank canvas (though the sprouted wheat does have a really excellent flavor and texture without the addition of anything else).  The sprouts will keep for several days once refrigerated.  

Maple Butter Oatmeal

This is my favorite food right now. I have it for breakfast, as a midnight snack, and everything in between. The butter melts and combines with the maple syrup and cream into a rich, heavenly good-for-you treat. It's like pancakes in a bowl.

Once the oats are prepared (look for an upcoming post on that), it's quick and simple to make. Just stir and enjoy!


Maple Butter Oatmeal
1/2 cup cooked steel-cut oats
1-1/2 T grassfed butter
2 T grade B maple syrup
2 T grassfed cream

Combine the warm oats with the butter, maple syrup, and cream. Stir until combined.

Green Smoothies

This is my go-to smoothie. On days where I'm short on time, I'll often throw the ingredients in my magic bullet and take it to-go. It's super customizable, too. You can add or subtract flavors, or substitute similar ingredients. I like to make mine with unsweetened, unflavored kefir. Check out my version below.

Green Smoothie

Ingredients:
1 frozen sliced banana
1 tablespoon all-natural peanut butter (just peanuts and salt)
1-1/2 cup unflavored kefir (adjust to achieve desired consistency)
1 tablespoon honey
a handful of baby spinach

Directions:
Blend all ingredients until smooth.

Makes 1 serving

Adapted from Iowa Girl Eats

Skillet Potatoes

Realizing that the bag of potatoes that I had in my pantry should really be used up as soon as possible (when did I actually buy those things???), I decided to throw something together that would also use up some other extra perishables that I had in the fridge.  What came together was a delicious melding of starch and fat and flavor...I'm actually a little bit bummed out that I finished the last of it today as a side dish to my venison lunch.  Without further ado, here's a recipe that I recommend you try right away, given how easy it is to make in just one pan. 

Ingredients:

• 6-7 medium sized yellow/butter potatoes
• 1 large spanish onion
• 1 large green bell pepper
• 1/4 cup of leaf lard
• 1/4 cup of tallow
• Salt, pepper, paprika

1. Dice all of the vegetables up into small cubes.
2. Fry the diced vegetables in the hot mixture of fats in a large skillet (stainless of cast iron)
3. Once everything has browned to crisped perfection, season liberally with salt, pepper, and paprika and place (covered) in a 275F oven for 45 minutes to finish cooking

While the initial frying will not cook the potatoes through, the trip in the oven really gives the tubers the opportunity to soften up and absorb all of the fat and flavor while the onions and peppers become merely a soft and deeply caramelized reminder of the crispy lives that they once led.  I served these along side fried eggs and tossed them with ground venison.