Environment, Food, Climate Change, and Religion
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Preheat oven to 375o
Mix together almond butter, sugar, eggs, extract, peanut oil and salt. Stir in nibs and both flours.
Drop by rounded teaspoon 2 inches apart on parchment paper or greased cookie sheet. Bake 14 minutes. Let cool five minutes before removing to wire rack.
Cream Biscuit
I got tired of the overly sticky and unworkable biscuit scratch recipes. These two flours work well together, although regular whole wheat flour will suffice. This recipe takes away a third of the usual amount of cream and adds cold butter for a more substantial dough.
Preheat oven to 425oF
Prepare baking sheet with parchment paper
In food processor, process all the dry ingredients to mix. Cut butter in pieces and process in dry mixture, two or three pulses. Turn on machine and pour cream through spout. Process until dough forms.
Toss dough onto clean surface dusted with flour. Work dough, adding sprinklings of flour until no longer sticky. Either wrap in plastic and let sit in refrigerator until needed, or proceed to cutting biscuit shape.
Roll dough flat until ¾ to 1 inch thick. Use biscuit cutter to make round shape. Place on baking sheet.
Bake for approximately 15 minutes or until golden brown appears on top. Serve immediately.
Notes
Finnicky Dough begins quite sticky coming out of food processor. Dust your hands with flour unless you like bits of dough between your fingers.
Place tray in middle of oven. If placed on bottom rack, the biscuit will burn on the bottom before browning on top.
Using ultra-pasteurized cream will produce flattened, uneven biscuits with undercooked dough in the middle. Autoimmune diets can only use pasteurized cream.
Example:
Notes
Only a generation ago, Brisket and its adjacent cut, Flank Steak, were the poor family’s gourmet cut. Nowadays, one might consider taking out a small loan to purchase a full brisket. Still, the gourmands are not wrong, brisket cooked long and slow is a worthwhile experience.
Southern Brisket
5 ½ hours (mostly unattended)
FYI: Whole Brisket is 8-9 lbs. and a Half Brisket is 4-5 lbs.
Post cooking seasoning
Preheat oven to 300oF
Pour off sauce into glass bowl or measuring cup. Let fat rise to top and either pour off or ladle off. If you desire a thicker sauce, heat 2 TBS fat and then add 2 TBS flour to saucepan. When paste forms, slowly add sauce to thicken, stirring constantly. Taste and adjust seasoning again.
The recipe is a pesto style filling for mushrooms that invokes spice and Mexican ingredients. If you want to substitute a hotter pepper, the ingredients promote the heat rather than temper it. (Learned the hard way.)
Preheat oven to 350o.
2 jalapeños
4 garlic cloves
2 scallions
2 tomatillos, peeled of paper
¼ cup chopped cilantro leaves
1/3 cup shredded cheddar cheese or queso fresco
½ cup pepitas (pumpkin seeds)
4 TBS oil, divided
¼ – ½ lb. chicken sausage (optional)
4 mushrooms, chopped
8 large button mushroom caps or 2 portobellos
Wash vegetables, removing stems and roots. Heat cast iron skillet on HIGH and add 2 TBS oil. Toast jalapenos, garlic, scallions, and tomatillos until seared on all sides. Remove from heat and let cool for a few minutes.
In food processor, add cooked vegetables and process. Add pepitas and cilantro, process. Slowly add remaining oil in a slow drizzle with machine running. Scrape down sides. Add cheese and chopped mushrooms, process. If adding sausage, process last.
Remove stems from large mushrooms and wipe grit off caps with a damp paper towel. Wipe caps again with oil. On a baking sheet, either oil the bottom or use parchment paper. Fill the caps with mixture and place on baking pan.
Bake 30-40 minutes. Tops will be browned.
Refrigerates well for leftovers.
“Someone” purchased almond butter as a possible replacement for peanut butter on sandwiches – not a successful idea. However, cookies were a hands-down winner and the container haunting the back of my pantry shelf now has a welcomed spot among the baking ingredients.
Ingredients:
In a mixer, combine almond butter, sugar, eggs, peanut oil, vanilla, and almond extract. In a separate bowl, mix both flours and salt. With the mixer running, slowly add the flours to the mixer until completely combined. Batter will be loose.
At this point you may preheat the oven to 375oF. Let the mixture rest in the bowl, either on the counter or in the refrigerator for at least 10 minutes, 20 minutes is better.
Use parchment paper or a silicon sheet on top of the baking tray. Scoop out oversized tablespoons of dough onto the baking tray. Bake 15 minutes. The edges of the cookies should be brown. Remove from oven and let rest in tray for two minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. The inside of the cookie will be wetter, with a marzipan-like consistency.
This is a pandemic recipe, for those working from home. Cooking time is 5-1/2 hours.
The prime rib was served in the better neighborhoods and the short ribs were on the menu in the modest neighborhoods of my youth. Short ribs were a working man’s affordable beef choice before modern restaurant fare discovered the qualities of this cut, ruining the easy affordability for everyone. The ribs were typically used in a beef stew where the bone marrow added flavor to the developing broth. Stew was difficult to cook correctly because the meat tends to be tough and chewy, and stovetop burners were unforgiving. However, stew was a one pot meal that could feed a family meat, potatoes, and vegetables. The standard fare was tough meat, limp vegetables, and pasty potatoes.
My family is done with the stew recipe.
This is an updated recipe for braised short ribs on offering to the modest homes of the world who can still afford beef occasionally. The recipe only works in a cast iron pot with a cast iron lid because we are braising. The limp vegetables and pasty potatoes are cooked separately, and you are on your own for those recipes.
3-5 lb. short ribs
1 large onion sliced
2 tomatillos, cut into several pieces
1 tomato, cut into large pieces
2 cups broth (vegetable or beef)
2 cups salted water (your call how much salt)
1 cup flour
Salt and pepper
¼ cup oil (grapeseed or olive oil)
This recipe is for a cast iron pot with lid.
Preheat oven to 300F.
Place the pot on a burner and pre-heat on medium high. Add oil in small increments as the flour absorbs the oil. Be careful not to scorch the meat. Save the leftover flour for end.
Wash and dry the short ribs. Season the flour with salt and pepper before coating the dry ribs. Add ribs to hot oil in batches. Let ribs rest on a plate while working on the next batches. When complete, add more oil to pot with heat turned down to medium. Add onions and sauté until soft, about 3 or 4 minutes. Add tomatillos and tomatoes, stirring them to coat. Add broth and stir. Add water and stir again.
Return ribs to pot, bone side down. Lid the pot and place in oven. Cook for 5 hours.
Return pot to burner. Plate the short ribs on a large platter. Using oven mitts, pour off the fat into cup.
To thicken the broth into a gravy, take three teaspoons of the reserved flour and put in a bowl. Add three or four tablespoons of the piping hot fat from the cup. Stir into a paste. Add the paste to the pot (it is still cooking hot), stirring until it is incorporated. Correct salt and pepper seasoning. Pour the gravy over the ribs and serve.
Dipping sauces are a huge stumbling block for people who have adverse reactions to MSG. Nearly every worthy sauce for dumplings has a strong MSG component. Asian sauces in particular, view MSG as a necessary ingredient, and Western industrial food companies have followed suit. Complimenting dumplings is a struggle.
This sauce is a not an imitation of Vietnamese Peanut sauce; rather, it is an homage. Several of the flavors have been lifted from Vietnamese cooking, but the sauce stands on its own. Some of the ingredients are European and one, Saba, is from medieval Italian cooking.
Faux Peanut Sauce
2TBS fresh ginger
1 clove garlic
1 lime, juice only
1 TBS saba (medieval Italian grape-based sweetener and thickening agent)
3 TBS peanut butter
½-1 tsp hot pepper sauce
½ tsp white wine vinegar
3TBS white wine
1 cup vegetable broth at room temperature
1 TBS rice flour
Chopped peanuts (optional)
In food processor combine all the ingredients but the broth and flour. Process. Transfer the puree to a pot set on medium high burner. Suspend the flour in a small bowl of the broth, then add to puree. Add the rest of the broth, stir until sauce is reduced to preferred consistency. Garnish with nuts before serving.
Of all the possible sauces, hot sauce is the poor people’s choice. First, hot sauce is cheap to make at home because there are only three base ingredients: salt, vinegar, and hot peppers. Peppers are easy to grow and are found on every inhabited continent. Second, hot sauce is an outdoor worker’s friend, promoting healthy sweat glands and thirst that are necessary to thrive in hot climates. Finally, hot sauce has a unique method of covering a variety of issues with poor quality food, transforming distasteful flavors, spicing up bland ones, and (sorry to say) making old and rotting foods palatable.
No matter how gourmet or expensive marketing managers make their hot sauce products, this is one sauce easily executed at home that will taste superior. Hot sauce will stay a long time without industrial additives. Even if a batch goes bad, a new, long-lasting batch can be whipped up in an hour.
20 hot peppers (jalapeno, serrano, thai bird, etc.), about 1 pound, less for the more potent peppers.
1 large clove garlic
½ medium onion, sliced thin
2 medium tomatillos diced
1 bell pepper diced
2 TBS vegetable oil
1 tsp salt
2 cups water
1 cup cider vinegar or white vinegar
*Either ventilate the room or wear a mask. The capsaicin fumes will burn the tissue in your throat and nose. Do not use cast iron for this recipe.*
Peel as appropriate and dice all the vegetables. Heat the oil in a large pan on medium high. Add the vegetables and ¾ tbs of the salt. Sauté for 5 minutes. Add the water and continue to cook, stirring occasionally. After 20 minutes or so, the peppers should be very soft and most of the water evaporated.
Remove from heat and allow the mixture to cool down to room temperature. In a food processor, puree the mixture until smooth. Add the vinegar and the rest of the salt. Mix, taste, and add more salt, as necessary.
Two Ways
Spread – jar as is, in a mason jar. Let the mixture rest for two weeks in the refrigerator before use. Spread as a paste or add to mayonnaise, mustard, and dipping sauces.
Sauce – strain the mixture through a fine mesh sieve. Toss the solids. Place the liquid in a mason jar, letting the mixture rest for two weeks in the refrigerator before use.
Peanuts
During this anniversary of the assassination, a condemnatory critique has come to the fore in our cultural conversations. This well-documented argument concludes that the image of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. presented today is a sanitized version of the real life and times of the reverend, especially his last years, after the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. The legislation was present but the racism, the poverty, and the disparities in opportunity were still deeply embedded in the United States. He was fighting as hard as ever, with every growing headwind against his movement and his goals.
“They pay us peanuts,” many Americans on poverty wages say. The cliché is old, even dated now. Few realize that this statement is rooted in American slavery. Peanuts are intimately bound to the black slaves of the United States, including the commercial success of tan, highly nutritious kernels.
Peanuts reached the United States by a circuitous route. The peanut we know today is a hybrid of two plants that originated in South America, at least 3500 years ago. The record is scant, but kernels have been found with mummies on South American continent.
The European explorers discovered peanuts in the 1500’s and brought them back to Europe. From Europe, the peanut was distributed to Africa and to Asia. The peanut became a staple crop in parts of Africa.
In the 1700’s, the peanut makes its debut in North America as another commodity accompanying the slave trade. As slaves were loaded on ships, so were peanuts. North American farmers did not know how to grow or tend the peanut crops though, although they were interested in investing in them. They relied on their African slaves, who were already familiar with the peanut, to manage the crops. At this time, the peanut crops were considered appropriate for feeding livestock and slaves. Peanuts were slave food.
Peanuts rose in stature with the Civil War for military reasons. As the Union soldiers make their way through the South, they encountered peanuts as a snack and as a staple, appreciating the taste and the health benefits. Enjoying their new nut, the soldiers brought peanuts back to the northern states, incorporating them in their diet. Decades later, P.T. Barnum adds roasted peanuts to his circus show to boost his profit margin.
Peanut butter emerged more than once during the 1800’s. but gained a stronger hold in the American diet late in the century. A St. Louis doctor concocted a peanut spread recipe for his elderly patients who no longer had enough teeth to chew meat. He recognized that the nut was a good source of protein, which could be gummed.
Peanut butter produced by the large conglomerates today is a sweeten gooey concoction of what the slaves ate and the good doctor invented. Peanut butter was pureed roasted peanuts with nothing added. Today, we pay extra for the pure product while the adulterated one is less expensive.
One commentator called the presentation of Dr. King in today’s history books and holidays “cotton candy.” I have used the same term for years to describe many peanut butters on the grocery shelves, which is the origin of this essay. Food and images of a civil rights leader and minister are not the same phenomena and should not be equated with the same gravity. Nonetheless, the same sanitizing of the slave origins and the following historical chapters of purging the repercussions of that slavery do run in parallel.
Many of the best tasting dishes today began in poverty. The peanut, however, does not come from poverty alone, but from American slavery as well. Enjoy your peanuts; these nuts carry much history with them.
PEANUT BUTTER COOKIES (gluten free)
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
Ingredients:
½ cup sifted coconut flour
¼ cup rice flour
1 cup natural peanut butter
1½ cups sugar
3 eggs
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup peanuts, coarsely chopped (optional)
¼ cup peanut oil
½ teaspoon vanilla
Directions:
1. Mix together peanut butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, peanut oil and salt. Stir in peanuts and coconut and rice flours.
2. Drop by the spoonful 2 inches apart on greased cookie sheet. Bake for about 14 minutes.
3. Cool slightly and remove from cookie sheet to racks.
Glenn Jacob 