I Dare You To Eat It

Today was the day I decided to make TWENTY times Erica’s copycat recipe for Cafe Rio style black beans. Starting early, even a whole month ahead of time, is the only way I’ll be able to pull off feeding the 50 friends and family invited to Rosie’s Thursday night farewell party. I’ve tried a few versions of these wildly popular recipes and http//favfamilyrecipes.blogspot.com is my favorite. So if you need to make a boat load of beans, you might give this a try.

First, I have to introduce you to my new BFF. I believe it absolutley was Divine Intervention when about a month ago a total stranger GAVE ME this perfectly new pressure cooker. Time to confront my fears and phobias about blowing up the house and killing everyone on the block in some freak cooking accident. I carved out some time, sat myself down, and read the instruction booklet cover to cover. Here’s what I learned. A. This sucker gets really hot. B. Don’t open it when it’s really hot.

My plan was to cook 4 batches of 4 cups of dried beans at a time. This made 40 cups of freshly cooked black beans before I added all the special sauce ingredients.

I measured out the first four cups and carefully rinsed them. Then I sorted them for any duds or debris. I doubt the restaurant is this careful, but…

Then I added the washed beans, 2 quarts of water, and 1/4 cup of oil to the pressure cooker. You could also add 1 tablespoon of salt to cook with your beans. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. Everyone has a different opinion on this detail. I think I prefer cooking the beans with salt in the water but that’s jus me. It’s not a big deal either way.

Lock on the lid and let it rip. (Er, set on high heat at 15 PSI.) When the pot came up to pressure, I turned the heat down to medium and let them cook for 15 minutes. As soon as the timer went off, I turned off the heat and let the pot cool for 30 minutes.

Now, I’ve always understood that dried beans will triple in quantity when cooked but after careful measuring, my original 4 cups of dry only made just barely 10 cups of cooked. Just sayin’. Then I drained all the cooking liquid and set the beans aside while I repeated this process three more times.

Here’s what I used to this point:

Storage Ingredients

16 cups dried black beans, cooked 4 cups at a time, in a 8 quart pressure cooker

1 cup oil, added 1/4 cup in each batch to limit the amount of foaming while the beans cook.

4 tablespoons salt, added 1 tablespoon per batch, totally optional

The secret sauce was made, as I said before, mostly following Erica’s recipe, but twenty times her amounts. I did cut way back on the amount of tomato juice because because I don’t need my black beans to be so soupy. If they need to be thinned before serving, I can always add the additional 6 cups of juice later.

Sauce Fresh Ingredients

50 cloves of garlic, minced

2 1/2 cups cilantro, chopped

Sauce Storage Ingredients

3 or 4 large cans of tomato juice (46 oz. each)

1/2 cup oil

1/2 cup ground cumin

1/2 cup salt

Heat tomato juice in a GIANT pot. Remember, I only used three cans instead of four. Any variety will do.

Peel and mince garlic cloves. I like to throw on a pair of rubber gloves when I’m dealing with this much garlic.

The fifty cloves measured about 2/3 to 3/4 a cup before being minced,

and about a half a cup after I ground them up in my little handy chopper.

I don’t know why this seemed so important to document and explain. I’ll move on now. Heat the oil and carefully saute garlic for only 10 to 20 seconds.

Two wimpy bunches of fresh cilantro chopped and measured out to be the 2 1/2 cups I needed. That meant I didn’t have to break into my stash of frozen!

Combine all four batches of cooked and drained beans with the sauce ingredients. Heat and serve OR chill and freeze for later use.

Mine are cooling in two huge glass bowls in the fridge and tomorrow I’ll divide them up to freeze until the night before the big party. I’ve probably made this look more difficult than it was. Black beans for 50 did take about 3 and a half hours to prepare, but that’s 3 and a half hours that I don’t have to spend come the end of June. It’s a great feeling.

And no one will ever miss the 3 cups we stole for lunch!

18 years of serving in the Young Women’s organization, twice as ward president, helping all four of my older girls achieve their goals, and I never HAD TIME to complete my own Personal Progress. D*U*M*B, D*U*M*B, DUMB DUMB DUMB! (Card family cheer)

But I’m working on it now, with my 13 year old, and it’s a great experience. My 10 hour project for Knowledge has been to learn how to pressure can meat.  

!!!

Last Saturday I bought about 30 pounds of boneless pork spare ribs, from Costco. (Side note: DO NOT GO TO COSTCO THE SATURDAY BEFORE MOTHER’S DAY. EVER.)

My plan is to have all the lovely bottles of precooked pork ready and waiting on the shelf when it’s time to serve my version of Cafe Rio sweet pork to the masses.

I also bought seven roasted chickens because they seemed to be even cheaper than than the fresh whole chickens, and needed much less cooking.

(So many things to do with canned chicken.)

The next step was to boil the pork. This took about an hour and a half because there was a ton meat.

I also decided to speed boil the roasted chickens. A dip in the bubbly made the meat fall off the bones, plus I needed the chicken broth. My dear friend, Linda taught me that it’s a super good idea to purchase a fresh pair of rubber gloves so that I could handle all this meat while it was still steaming hot. Linda also suggested that the meat be prepared ahead of time so that it could chill in the fridge, at least overnight, making it much easier to skim off the extra fat from the broth.

On Monday I went to Linda’s house for the actual processing. She’s such a great mentor and always a riot. After quickly reheating the meat and broth we added 1 teaspoon of salt to each jar and packed the meat into the bottles. Linda was amazed, even shocked, at how well I could pack in the food. Years of practise.

Then we slid a…skinny…spatula thing down the sides of each bottle setting free hidden air bubbles, topped it off with hot broth, added the lids, screwed on the rims, and loaded the pressure canner. Each batch of 7 quarts took about 90 minutes to process.

So now I finally know how to do what I’ve always considered to be an awesome trick! And believe me, I’m going to feel pretty dang tricky about 6 weeks from now when I’m hosting 50 friends and family for dinner prior to Rosie leaving on her mission to Arizona. It’s GREAT to know that all that shredded pork (oh my) for the Cafe Rio salads is ready to go and only needs to be heated with salsa and brown sugar added. I love having it preserved in bottles because the meat is not taking up all the space in my freezer. It means I still have room to store the 35 cups of black beans, and piles of cilantro rice, and whatever else I need to buy.

Work is work. But for me, and my crazy schedule, it just works better to do as much as I can ahead of time. Hey, can anyone direct me to some great instructions on pressure canning dried beans? With pictures? Please?

 Thanks friends!

Some days, lots of days actually, I wonder what to post. I wonder what would possibly be helpful to someone else. Today is not one of those days.

If you want to print the pattern please click on each of the images below to view them full size, and then print the page.

Big thanks to my awesome SIL, Michael, and his wonderful computer brain, you no longer need to write in your requests for the chemo caps pattern. I’ve already sent it out all over the United States, and Canada, and this post will make it even that much more accessible. Detailed sewing pictures can be found on the original post here and shots of the finished products can be found here.

Fresh Ingredients

1 egg

3/4 cup milk

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

1 lb. hamburger

1/2 cup chopped onion

Storage Ingredients

1/2 cup quick oats (I used my regular oats and ground them up for 2 seconds with the onion in my food processor)

1 teaspoon salt

Topping:

2/3 cup ketchup

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1 1/2 teaspoon prepared mustard (I used Dijon)

In a bowl, beat the eggs and milk. Stir in cheese, oats, onion and salt. Add beef and mix well. Shape into 6 mini loaves; place in grease 9 x 13 pan. Combine ketchup, brown sugar and mustard; spoon over loaves. Bake, uncovered, at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. (Note from Kathy: My boys eat two mini loaves each so I double this recipe to serve 6 people. Serve with mashed potatoes and mixed veggies. What makes this so good is the sauce to meat ratio.)

I hesitate showing the pictures of what happened.

The story is…that about a week ago I prepared this lovely family dinner BEFORE leaving for another presentation. Adult daughter “A” was left in charge of taking the pans out of the oven.  We’ll call her Gidget. That’s the name I use for daughters when I’m really mad.

Right as I was pulling into the parking lot for my presentation, Gidget phoned to say that the meat was still a little pink on the inside. I told her to leave it in a little longer and then I turned off my phone and went inside. Imagine my surprise when I phoned almost 2 hours later, on my way home, and learned that she was just then taking the dinner out of the oven. WHAAAAAAAT?

(I blame most of this disaster on their good dad, Mike, because he’s such a nut about ordering every single hamburger WELL DONE in order to avoid sure death.) By the time I got home I was starving and so disappointed. Gidget kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and I kept saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Kids just don’t get the pain of a failed meal.

(gutting the deer…)

(elephant graveyard)

But it wasn’t really a failure. After carving off all the burned bottoms, we sat down to enjoy a very late supper. Maybe it was just the fatigue talking but Lizzie, our 13 year old, told me she thought the mini meat loaves were “really good”, and gobbled down almost two. She doesn’t even like meatloaf.

And Kathy was right about the sauce. Nothing fancy about catsup, brown sugar and mustard, but the sauce makes all the difference…

and burns on like no other.

Dearest Cozette gave me this amazing white bread recipe from the New York Times, November 8th 2006 and adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery author of My Bread. Crazy crusty on the outside and light as a feather on the inside, this bread is a total kick to make.

Storage Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting

1/4 teaspoon instant yeast

1 1/4 teaspoons salt

1 1/3 cups cool water (55 to 65 degrees)

Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 1/3 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky.

Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal.

Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours.

When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 475 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lide and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned.

Cool on a rack.

I can’t wait to show this trick to my daughters! Who knew you could make restaurant quality bread without any oil? The only, and I mean the ONLY hard part, was remembering to start the bread almost a day ahead of time. The schedule that worked for me was to mix together the flour, yeast, salt, and water at 7:00 p.m. The next day, (18 hours later) at 1:00 p.m. I added a bit of flour, rolled it into a ball, and let it rise for another 2 hours. At 3:00 I put into into the hot pan and preheated oven. One hour later we had a beautiful freshly baked hubcap ready to serve with some homemade ham and bean soup.

I can’t even remember the last time I had something baked (other than my trusty Seven Minute Whole Wheat Bread) actually turn out. The directions scared me at first but honestly this recipe was silly-simple to prepare and took maybe a total of 10 minutes of actual work. I just LOVE big results with little effort. Bad that way.

Bada-bing  Bada-boom! (That’s all the Italian I know.)

This chicken was GOOD and it only took about 5 minutes to prepare. Exactly why I loooooove cooking with food storage!

Start with these: 4 frozen, boneless skinless, chicken breasts

Toss them into a slow cooker, drizzle on about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and sprinkle with 1 envelope of Italian dressing mix.

(1 minute)

Then add one can of cream of mushroom soup, cover, and cook on low for about four hours.

(2 minutes)

Right before serving, stir 1 cup of powdered milk into the cooking juices…

(three minutes)

and top with fresh basil leaves!

(four/five minutes!!!)

(Note to self: Next time I’m going to remember to add a few slices of tomato to the garnish, maybe broiled.)

(Or or or! It might be fun to spoon on just a little bit of hot, from the jar, marinara. You can never have too much sauce! Words to live by.)

K. Quick question.

Does anyone else think that the fresh chopped basil leaves…look like a frog?

(I may need to be tested.)

They’re not. Try to block that image. Probably ruined it for you.

Sometimes I get very lucky when I’m experimenting/drive-by-cooking. THIS, ladies and gentlemen, may be our newest favorite food storage recipe! I couldn’t believe how great-totally creamy-don’t you dare eat it-put that fork down this instant! the sauce tasted AND IT WAS MADE FROM JUNK YOU CAN STORE IN THE CUPBOARD, FOR YEARS!

MAMA MIA, MAMA MIA, YES YOU CAN!!!

So the rice was of course from my long-term supply. The powdered milk was from my not-quite-as-long-but-10-years-is-pretty-long-supply. The olive oil, Italian dressing mix, and can of soup were from my three-month supply, even though we all know that those three ingredients will store longer than three months. And finally, the fresh basil, butternut squash, and broccoli were from my fresh or immediate supply…in my garden…theoretically. (Crossies count.)

I could weep! Can you imagine a whole platter of those steaming little…nuggies…lovingly layered with broiled tomatoes, or a delicate red sauce, and lots of fresh basil? (carefully placed so as to NOT look like amphibians) I swear I’m going to serve this for the next 100 family parties, wedding showers, meals for neighbors, Sunday dinners, and Relief Society “additional meetings.” It was awesome! Do you know how big this is??? This almost never happens to me! Oh how I wish there were some grapes that I could stomp!

She’s been called to serve an 18 month mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in Mesa Arizona! We couldn’t be happier! In only a few months we’ll have two of our daughters out serving missions. NEVER SAY NEVER.

And in that spirit, NSN, I’m going to share today’s letter from her sister serving in Kansas. (Nobody tell Hailey I did this.)

It’s an honest testimony of the beauty and blessings of missionary service.

I could go on…but you get the point. You’re called where you’re needed…and if you were to go anywhere else, you wouldn’t be happy, cause you wouldn’t be needed! (sort of)…but you get the point. (”When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy”- C.S. Lewis)

The real name of this simple, yet yummy, recipe is Potato-Topped Beef Bowls, and it comes from Better Homes and Gardens via my dear friend, Kris. Besides changing the name, I’ve added powdered milk to the instant potatoes. We like them creamy, and I’m determined to not waste our powdered milk…this time around.

Fresh Ingredients

1 lb. ground beef

2 cups of grated cheese

2 tablespoons butter

Storage Ingredients

1 16 oz. package frozen mixed vegetables

salt and pepper

2 cups boiling water

2 cups instant potato flakes

1/2 cup powdered milk

In a large skillet, brown ground beef over med-high heat, drain off fat. Stir in frozen vegetables. Cook stirring occasionally until heated through. Salt and pepper to taste. Stir in 1 cup of grated cheese. Meanwhile, heat 2 cups water until boiling. Add butter, powdered milk, and potato flakes. Stir until smooth and season with salt and pepper. Divide the meat mixture among 4 bowls and top with a scoop of potatoes and then sprinkle each bowl with the remaining cheese. (Kris prefers to leave the meat mixture in the skillet, cover with a layer of potatoes, and sprinkle the top with cheese. “It’s one of Brandon’s favorites!”)

Why didn’t I know about this recipe 15 years ago? This is the type of meal I could have served to the kiddies once a week. It’s fast, healthy, inexpensive, and tastes great. My husband and I totally enjoyed our servings with some of our homemade chili sauce on the side.

Meat and potatoes. 

Order up!

With endless thanks to the hundreds of women and girls that helped with this service project, the Stake Relief Society President and I delivered 200 chemo caps and about 150 skinny scarves to the Huntsman Cancer Institute.

And yes, they do want more of these so please email me your full name and address if you would like to be mailed a copy of the beanie pattern with sewing instructions. I’m sure there are hospitals in your area that would appreciate being able to offer their cancer patients a hip alternative to the traditional turban.

We also completed about 150 original skinny scarves to tie around the caps.

If you need a fun Achievement Day activity, or YW’s Personal Progress goal, or Additional Meeting in Relief Society, I highly suggest making these. They’re a great way to teach the most basic sewing skills and celebrate creativity. Eye candy for sure. Here’s just a sample to wet your whistle.

Each one was a work of art, made with loving hearts and hands. We believe that love has the power to heal.

Happy Easter dear sisters!

If you want to use the pattern, please visit the pattern post.