FReeper Weekly Recipe Thread (March 10, 2012)

FreeRepublic Cooks | March 10, 2012 | libertarian27

[SAJ]

Gina --

Here's the trick to get "key lime" juice when one hasn't any key limes.

Use Persian (regular) limes, juice them, and add lemon juice, in a ratio of 1 part lemon juice per 4 (or 5, to taste) parts lime juice. I generally add the lemon juice in stages, a bit at a time, stirring and tasting until the mixture is sufficiently tart. Works VERY well, I'll guarantee it.

Don't buy that ridiculously expensive bottled key lime juice, sheesh!

[WXRGina]

Hey, thank you, SAJ! That’s valuable information!

[WXRGina]

Besides the answers you’ve already seen, see SAJ’s excellent tip in comment #21.

In my pie, I have just used regular limes I find in the produce section of the grocery store, but SAJ’s “key lime juice” recipe would likely make it even better.

[MissMagnolia]

I debated whether to post this because it is so long, but decided to do it in two posts. I’m posting the first non-recipe part because to me, knowing where a recipe comes from and what it means to the cook who used to or currently makes it adds to the food …. taste, mood, atmosphere …. whatever, it adds.

By way of further explanation, my folks are elderly (79 & 89). Dad has survived a cardiac arrest and has CHF so every single day is a “bonus” day with him. Both folks grew up on farms & both grannies were wonderful cooks. The last couple of weeks, the folks and I have been reminiscing about good food, good times, family no longer with us, and wonderful memories - this has been a great source of joy to all of us. I’ve been cooking quite a few of the recipes and I love it when my dad or mom’s face just ‘lights up’ when they get a dish that their mom used to make.

So, here goes …. and I apologize for such long posts.

My Granny’s North Carolina Brunswick Stew

My mom’s parents made their living and raised their 5 kids on a farm in North Carolina. They grew cantaloupes, cotton, tobacco, and corn. They also ran a dairy, had chickens, hogs, a very large German Shepherd guard dog named Rolf and lots of kitties running around the barn. Granny had a large “kitchen” garden for the family and she spent many hours in a hot kitchen on summer days, canning vegetables and fruit for the winter months. She was an outstanding cook – plain and simple fare, but we all loved visiting and eating at her house.

Once a year, Granny and Granddad would make a Brunswick Stew. It was made in a large black kettle, over a real wood fire, in the back yard. The women prepared the ingredients and the men did the stirring. Mom remembers peeling & cutting up buckets of potatoes. I can still remember standing around the fire while the men stirred and talked, the large wooden paddle swirling the contents of the kettle around and around. It was a magical time for a little kid … the making of the stew.

And then, there was the eating. Nothing, until this week, has ever come close to tasting like the Brunswick Stew out of that big black kettle. Back in those times, a store-bought white bread, with its soft texture, was a treat ….. and so was a Pepsi …. and that is what accompanied a bowl of Granny’s Brunswick Stew. (Note – since you will not be bound by the constraints of childhood memories and traditions, you may want to have corn bread with this stew – it’s wonderful).

Mom has always been on the ‘lookout’ for Brunswick Stew that comes close to the stew made on the farm. There is a well-known brand that comes in a can and it used to be, that doctored heavily with added spice and veggies, it would barely pass muster in an emergency ‘gotta-have-some-stew’ attack – recently, the quality has decreased to the point that it’s not even worth doctoring up. The small town fire departments in the area of the old farm also make stew in black kettles to sell as fund raisers, but now they use a gas fire ….. and the ‘recipe’ just isn’t the same as Granny’s …. similar, but not the same. Lately, the quality of these stews has become a disappointment as well.

So, in the quest for a passable Brunswick Stew, this past week we took Granny’s recipe and using a spreadsheet, broke the ingredients down to proportions that would fit in crock pots (you need two). We made the first batch (later made a 2nd) and let it cook in the crock pots for 20 hours. It smelled like stew, it looked like stew, and finally ….. it tasted really, really close to Granny’s black kettle Brunswick Stew. Nothing will ever match her stew, but this is pretty darn close. Mom is happy and she is the official taste tester and quality control inspector. We broke out the white (wheat) bread and the Diet-Rite Colas (no Pepsi) … and dished up the bowls of stew ….. and took a memory and taste trip back to the farm!

So … here’s the recipe (next post) ….. made (almost) the way Granny made it, in smaller proportions and in crock pots.

[MissMagnolia]

My Granny’s North Carolina Brunswick Stew

Crock pots: two, 6-7 quarts each (each will be about ¾ full of stew)

Ingredients:

1-1/2 lbs of chicken (we used chicken breasts)
1-1/2 lbs of stew beef (bought it already cut up for stew)
1 onion (medium to large), diced
2-1/2 lbs of potatoes, peeled and diced fairly small (red potatoes are what we used)
60 ounces of canned tomatoes - we used 2 (28 oz) cans of diced tomatoes & ½ cup of crushed tomatoes (you could leave this ½ cup out or just use more diced tomatoes & probably be ok)
2 (15 oz) cans of (small) lima beans (drained)
2 (15 oz) cans of corn (drained)
32 oz. chicken stock
2 Tablespoons + 1 Tablespoon of sugar (or to taste)
2 Teaspoons of ground black pepper (or to taste)
2 Teaspoons of salt (or to taste)
¼ cup of butter (4 Tablespoons)
Optional: 4-6 shakes of Tabasco sauce, Texas Pete or whatever you like (or to taste)

Directions:

The beef/chicken can be fresh or frozen. Put the stew beef and chicken breasts in a large pot, add two cups of water and boil it all until the chicken is very tender. The stew beef will still be tough at this point, although it will be totally cooked through. Dice up the chicken meat and split the chicken meat and stew beef between the two crock pots . Take the juice left over in the pot and split that between the crock pots as well.

Peel and dice the potatoes & put half in each crock pot.

Peel & dice the onion and put half in each crock pot.

Drain and put 1 can of corn and 1 can of lima beans in each crock pots.

Put a can of diced tomatoes (undrained) in each crock pot.

Put 1/4 cup of crushed tomatoes in each crock pot.

Add two cups of chicken stock to each crock pot.

Put 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 teaspoon salt & 1 teaspoon black pepper in each crock pot.

Add 2 Tablespoons butter (¼ stick) to each crock pot. (Note: don’t leave this out – I skimped on it in batch #1 & mom immediately said ‘something is not right’. Just as butter ‘finishes’ a sauce & gives it a rich, good ‘mouth feel’, the butter has the same effect on the stew, plus I think it helps keep the stew from sticking/burning to the sides of the crock pot)

Stir all to combine.

Turn crock pots on high for 1-2 hours until stew is really cooking, then turn crock pots down to the next setting (medium or low - however your crock pot works).

Let the stew cook for at least 20 hours total. Stir occasionally and add chicken broth if the stew gets too thick and looks like it needs more liquid to avoid burning (it will probably get a dark ring around the edges). Of course, you can cook it for a much shorter time, but you won’t have anything near a real Brunswick Stew. This long, slow cooking is critical to the taste and texture of the stew.

After 20 hours, take a potato masher and mash the stew until the meat is broken up and at least half or more of the potatoes are mashed. The stew will be somewhat thick yet still have some chunky vegetables.

To do the final seasoning adjustment, we combined the stew from both crock pots in the bottom half of a roasting pan and adjusted the seasoning for the batch as a whole.

Taste test the stew – add the 3rd tablespoon of sugar if you think you need it and the Tabasco or hot sauce (if you like some heat). Thin the stew with some chicken stock if it is too thick for your liking. Note: my mom is going for a particular taste remembered from childhood …. to stew batch #2, in addition to the seasonings mentioned in the ingredients, she added another teaspoon of black pepper, another teaspoon of sugar and we used a salt shaker to lightly sprinkle on a little salt (maybe an 1/8 of a teaspoon?) before she liked the final product. Since you are not trying to get to a ‘memory taste’, just season (or not) until you like the result.

COOL the stew within two hours & refrigerate or freeze. We set the roasting pan in a large cooler on top of 5lbs. of ice that was dumped in it. We stirred the stew every ½ hour. After one hour (two stirrings), the stew was cool – we let it go one more half hour & it was a bit ‘chilled’ and ready to put into smaller containers for eating over the next couple of days and/or freezing (it freezes well).

This makes about 5-6 quarts of stew.

[Gabz]

They are awesome! I’ve played with this recipe so many ways from Saturday it’s not even funny. The original recipe called for 1/2 stick of butter, but to me that is not enough to really get caramelized onions and that’s the way I like them. It works just as well with cheddar or the mexi-blend shredded cheese you can get in the store. whatever you have on hand.

the blue cheese one I made up with just what I had on hand one day and the cranberry ones are great wrapped in the red (tomato?) wraps. I even tinted the cheese pink in those for a friend to take to a “pink party.”

They are all easy, but fair warning, it can get tedious spreading and rolling them - which is why I seek out the teenage slave labor to help!!!!

[Gabz]

If you hadn’t posted it before, I’m glad you did now!!! I do believe I will be adding that suggestion to my repetoire! Thanks.

[Gabz]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm - that sounds wonderful!

[Gabz]

Nope, can’t blame ya a bit!

But I hope you understand my logic :)

[Gabz]

WOW!!! Cool!!!! Thank yo for that info!

[Gabz]

Wow, just wow! I love the story about the recipe more than the recipe itself, but that is just me - I’m not a fan of poultry/beef mixtures. But thank you so much for sharing the history of the recipe.

[rightly_dividing]

It just so happens that my wife is making roll ups for tomorrows study group. They were a hit when she made them once before. Hers has

Cream cheese 1 1/2 pkgs
Green onion
Black olives
Red bell peppers
Green olives
Dry ranch dressing mix

[MissMagnolia]

You’re welcome. BTW, I think you could leave out the beef and double the chicken and the stew would be quite good ... just call it Chicken Brunswick Stew!

As kids, we were SO lucky to have grandparents that lived on farms. Mom’s parents were on a more traditional farm with all the animals. Dad’s folks were spread between 3 farms and the ‘home place’, although it had a kitchen garden, was mainly used for pasture.

It used to “kill” my NC grandparents’ routine when we would be visiting. They would be up at 5 to milk the cows and get all the morning chores done. As kids, we loved collecting eggs, watching Granny squirting kitties in the face with milk as she hand-milked 3 or 4 cows for their own use (the rest were milked with machines in the dairy). Granddaddy was German, didn’t have a lot of patience and the cows weren’t used to us .... so when they saw us watching in the dairy, they would start backing up in the doorway, afraid to come in. We would try to hide, but that just made it worse .... then we looked (to them) like we were going to ambush them!

Granny & granddad would do their best to be very, very quiet in the morning & to sneak out for chores without waking up ‘us kids’ ..... it hardly if ever worked. Granny would give us a homemade cinnamon roll and make us some oatmeal .... the milk was from the cows she milked and unpasturized, kept in a mason jar in the fridge. I have never been able to duplicate that oatmeal - it was just incredible. Then, we were off to follow them around on the chores - even though we made things hard for them, they always let us participate and watch & never complained (but the cows who wouldn’t go into the milking parlor definitely got yelled at in German!).

As I said before, we kids were so very lucky to have a chance to see how it was to live life on a real farm and to have some great adventures.

[Gabz]

YUM!

I’ve got all mine mixed, now I just have to get up the gumption to start spreading and rolling!

[Gabz]

What wonderful memories you have!!!!!!

I grew up in NYC, so I don’t have that type memories.

We now live in the country and this afternoon my daughter and I went down the road to a neighbor who has lots of animals. I get my eggs from him, and my husband and I had been there last night for a party last night. They told us that shortly after I left Thursday afternoon one of their llamas had a baby and I already had seen the new piglets. 13 year old girls just LOVE baby animals. (so do 51year old moms) We had a blast over there becuase they also have new goats, including some kids, and a whole mess of chicks and ducklings!!!

[Silentgypsy]

Slings has a wonderful kitty thread....

[Red_Devil 232]

Everybody! Thanks to a post by MissMagnolia over on the gardening thread I have found a program that will allow me to save FReeper recipes I might want to try someday. I just do a copy and paste it in the new program called RedNotebook.

Quote from: MissMagnolia "You can post pictures and links. It is SEARCHABLE ….. there is a ‘word cloud’ so you can click on a word, but I use the ‘tags’ extensively that they allow you to set up. For instance, I have a tag called “Gardening”. If I put ‘Gardening’ in the search box, it will pull up every entry made under that tag, in date order. Today, I have had two entries, both about the new camellias we bought. I can look at the date list under ‘Gardening’ and see exactly when we got those camellias. I can also just search under the word ‘camellia’ and every time I used that word, the entry will show up."

I have just started using it this morning and have (copied&paste) saved a couple of recipes from last week thread. Here is a screen shot of the program:

The center area is where you enter comments into your Journal, you can have as many Journals as you want (cooking, gardening, projects, hobbies) about anything you would want to have a searchable journal for. The right side is for your Tags and the left side is a calendar that shows the entry date below the calendar is a search box and below that is a word cloud click on a word and it will bring up all your entries that contain that word.

Thought some of you might like to try it. It is FREE.

Download the freeware for RedNotebook from here.

At the top of the RedNotebook page if you click on Screenshots it will bring up a demonstration video (it is hard to follow because the commenter moves fast through the demo.)

This is a screenshot from the RedNotebook web page showing an inserted picture and some statistics.

[MissMagnolia]

So ..... you really, really like it? :-) This just makes my day!

[MissMagnolia]

BTW, don’t know how you are setting up your ‘tags’, but you could have something like ‘Recipes - Vegetables’ & then tag all of your vegetable side dish recipes (for example) with that tag. A recipe could also have multiple tags ..... ‘Recipes - Casseroles’, ‘Recipes - Super Simple’, Recipes - Favorites (Tried and True), etc. I am assuming that you are doing the recipes in a multi-use journal (recipes, gardening, etc.)

If you set up a separate journal on RedNotebook JUST for recipes, you could leave the ‘recipes’ off the tag and just have ‘Vegetables’ or something like that. You may find if you go this simple route, that you need to make the tag ‘Vegetables Tag’ or something other word added like that ....otherwise, every time you search for your ‘Vegetables’ tag, it will pull up every instance of the use of the word ‘vegetable’, in addition to the list of Recipes under that tag. I learned this lesson the hard way when I listed all of my hikes under the tag ‘Hikes’. I had to change it to ‘Hike Tag’ - then I got only a date-order listing of all my hikes.

[Red_Devil 232]

Yes I really do! I am going to make another Journal for web sites I visit and I am interested in saving the page for reference later - Just save it as a link in the Journal with a little description. Easier to search a topic/word and find the page again. How to videos on gardening and recipes and many other topics. Better than my long list of Bookmarks. Neat little program.