Polenta with Turkey Sausage and Greens

This dish came out very tasty. Even the kids liked it. I was worried that the green stuff and the texture would be met with curled noses and tears. This recipe came from a Weight Watcher's cookbook that I found at a yard sale for a quarter! It is called Everybody Loves Chicken. It is a great cookbook and way worth the quarter.

Polenta with Turkey Sausage and Greens
Serves 6
1 cup of coarse ground cornmeal
4 cups of water
1/2 tsp salt

6 spicy Italian turkey sausage (I used sweet Italian because of the kids)
14oz can of mustard greens (just greens and water!)

Bring water to a boil, slowly whisk in cornmeal. Keep whisking and simmering until it is as thick as you like and smooth. It will thicken more as it sets.

Squeeze sausage out of casing into a skillet sprayed with cooking spray. Crumble and brown sausage until cooked through. Add can of mustard greens (Liquid and all! The liquid has lots of vitamins.)stir over low heat until greens are cooked through.

If counting Weight Watcher points measure out 1/2 cup of polenta into a bowl. Top with approximately 1/6 of the sausage and greens mixture. Sprinkle with 1/2 TB of parmesan cheese. 6pts.

Tastes good the next day for lunch too! Just heat it all in the microwave and chow down.

Cornmeal and canned greens are great food storage items. I buy popcorn (not microwave popcorn, the real deal!) in 50lb bags at Sam's. I grind that in my grain mill for cornmeal. Grind as needed to retain vitamins and to keep it as fresh as possible. If you grind more than you will use then freeze the rest.

This looked very pretty in the bowl. Kind of Italian Country comfort food. Unfortunetly I was too hungry to go find my camera! Instead I am posting a picture of the canned greens I buy. They are cheap and simple. No additives.

This meal is a great budget stretcher too.
Greens .59
Sausage reduced for quick sale - $2.00 (at my grocery store they ALWAYS have quick sale turkey sausage)
Cornmeal:  Pennies for 1 cup of cornmeal.

Under $3 for the entire meal or aproximately .50 per serving.

Save those jars!

I have the jar adapter for my foodsaver so I can use mason jars but I am finding that I would rather save the mason/canning jars for actually canning. Those jars add up and are more precious than gold around here! Save your canning jars for canning and use the jars from store bought foods for vacuum sealing.

The sound starts off a little wonky on this video so turn it down if you are using headphones.

Oh Cherries!

Cherries! Oh how I love thee,
plump and juicy, still clinging to a pip
with a perfect little green stem for holding
slightly warmed by the sun
sweet nectar
Cherries!

Okay, so poetry about food isn't really my gift! Making poetry with food is more like it. I was tickled...cherry red to take advantage of the super cherry sales this last week. I bought about 25lb of cherries. I ate about 10lbs while pitting (do the british call it pipping?) the rest. FYI don't eat 10lbs of cherries while pipping/pitting the rest unless you plan to stay real close to home the following day!

I canned cherries in white grape juice to use in cooking. I made Black Forest jam which is cherries in a chocolate amaretto sauce (see photo above) I dehydrated cherries and I ate cherries. I even saved all the pips, boiled them clean of any remaining flesh and dried them to use in a Pip Pillow that can be heated in the microwave.

I know George Washington did not chopped down a cherry tree, who would do such a thing?

Tomato What??

A few months ago (ok last November!) I planned to can some spaghetti sauce. I bought a #10 can of tomato sauce for this project. Well, as with most of my plans something came up and I put the project on the back burner. Fast forward 7 months and now I am ready to do my spaghetti sauce. I found the big can and dusted it off. I rifled through drawers looking for my hand held can opener and finally was able to open this monster can. Uh oh, something is not right! I looked at the front of the can and realized I purchased tomato paste! Tomato paste being a thick paste is much more tomatoey than I needed for spaghetti sauce! As anyone that knows me knows, I just hate hate hate to waste. This tomato paste would probably equal about 90 gallons of tomato sauce if I watered it down.
I suppose I could have still made spaghetti sauce but since the fam was asking for encharitos for dinner and that required enchilada sauce I
decided to try canning that instead. I used about 2/3 of the can on my enchilada sauce. It made 13 - 12oz jars and 3 pint jars of sauce. Yeah! I used up almost all of my paste! I still had about 4 cups left and that went into another project.
I wish I could share a recipe but I just make my enchilada sauce by adding this and that and tasting it until it tastes the way I want it to. I pressure canned it just to be safe. It contains beef broth and a few other low/no acid ingredients.
It turned out great and the encaritos were a hit as usual! Now I will be able to make this family fave more often because I have the enchilada sauce on hand.

Dehydrated Hash Browns

I love playing with my dehydrator. If I can find a way to preserve food and save space I am a happy Farm Girl Wannabe! I grated and dried 10lbs of potatoes into instant, shelf stable hash browns. I peeled and grated the potatoes using the shredding attachment for my bosch universal kitchen machine. I set the shredded potatoes in a big bowl of cool water until all the potatoes were finished. This seemed to keep them from turning brown. Once they were all sliced I sat them in a colander and dipped them briefly in boiling water. I then spread them out on the mesh trays of my dehydrated set it to 125 and let them dry overnight. Don't toss out that big bowl of soaking water, your plants will love it!

To use the hash browns I soaked them in warm water along with dried onion, dried bell pepper, dried garlic for about 10 or 15 minutes. Drain well (save the soaking water!) and fry until all the veggies are tender. I poured a little of the soak water into the pan and covered it to help speed up the process. Salt and pepper according to taste. The soak water has the flavor the of the potatoes and other veggies in it. I usually save that water and use it as my liquid in the crock pot if I am slow cooking something for dinner that night. If not I toss it in the compost or in the chicken bucket.

Bread Day

Once a week I make lots of bread. I started out making it just for our family and I would take an extra loaf to a friend now and then. Soon I had friends showing up on my doorstep on bread day asking if maybe I had an extra loaf to spare. Soon I had a small following of bread junkies that show up with money in hand hoping to snatch up any extra loaves I have. I enjoy baking and I like that people like my bread and a little extra money for the fun jar is kinda nice too!

I make a whole wheat bread and often add goodies to it depending on my mood. I have started trying to make a good sour sourdough and while I have the sour part down but my dough always turns into a big blob when I bake it. Tasty but not pretty!

I bought my bread pans from The Urban Homemaker. I love these pans.

Easy Potato Chowder

I love coming up with easy, cheap, hearty meals for my family. Lately I have been able to buy 20lbs of potatoes for about $5. They are usually $5.49 for a 5lb bag at my local grocery store but the small health food store has had them on special. I have been experimenting with potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

I started with about 6 slices of bacon chopped and cooked in my dutch oven. I used one potato per person (6 potatoes). Peeled and chopped an tossed in with the sizzling bacon. I also chopped half a large onion and minced some garlic. Saute all of it until the potatoes start to brown and the onion starts to soften.

I like to add a boost of nutrition whenever I can. I have baggies of steamed, pureed and frozen fruits and veggies so that I can easily add it to any meal. In this recipe I added pureed sweet potato and some dehydrated celery. I also used on jar of chicken broth. I added all of that to the potatoes and onions and then covered and turned the heat to low and let it simmer until the potatoes were cooked.

After the potatoes were cooked through I slowly stirred in 2 cups of milk. The milk I used was mixed from powdered milk but fresh or canned milk works just as well.

After the milk has been added and heated you can mash it a little to get a thicker soup. We like a creamy soup with some potato chunks. At this point you can season it to taste. Salt, pepper, Mrs. Dash and whatever else sounds tasty.









After the soup is done serve it with a crusty piece of bread and sprinkle the soup with Parmesan or any good cheese. Our total cost for this soup which served 6 hungry people (two of them teenage boys!) cost less than $2 for the entire pot!

Mango Jalapeno Jelly!

I had a request for a mango jalapeno jelly and this is what I came up with. It is very pretty. A light amber color with festive confetti like bits of red and green peppers. It has a bit more heat than some of my other jalapeno blends. I am not sure why. Different batches of peppers seem to have different amounts of spice. This is a bit thicker than my regular jalapeno jelly. I think the mangoes definitely add more body to the jelly. It is really more like a jam. I really like the slightly tropical taste the mangoes add. It would be wonderful brushed on grilled shrimp or salmon. I plan to use it on pork loin this week.
I will be making this one again!