Loquat Jelly

I made some loguat jelly last weekend. Down here we call them Japanese plums. The tree is a tropical and when we get mild winters like the last one we usually get a crop. Husband likes the jelly and it wasn't difficult to make. Am packing the camper for a trip to Florida this weekend with my son and his family. Haven't used the camper in a while so I need to get in there and do some cleaning. Not my favorite thing to do, so I am procrastinating and writing my blog.

Homemade Bread

I read about starting a sourdough mother for homemade bread on a blog called MaryJanes Farm here. I made my mother 2 weeks ago and named her Vera after my grandmother. The first week I made the bread it didn't rise much, probably too new. This week I tried again...I'll let my video show you how it turned out.


As you can see, I don't know what I am doing!. At least I have a sense of humor and gave yall a good laugh. I'll try again next week.

Supper at Ma-T's

Last weekend Emily kept Kelly & Karen's children so they could have a weekend date. Emily & the kids came over for supper Saturday night and we had red beans and rice and fried chicken. They had to eat in the family room because the dining room table is full of stuff from Dan's mom's house. I think they enjoyed eating at a table by themselves. They got very talkative and giggly as you can see. In a few years they will probably hate me for putting this on the web.

Emily was keeping Steve's & Amanda's girls this weekend and they came over for supper Saturday night. We had meatballs in brown gravy. They all like rice and gravy and ate well.

They love to play dress up with all the costumes I get at garage sales. Here is a video of them all playing together. Excuse the messy house, Dan's mom's stuff hasn't found a home yet. The laundry also needs to be done...but fun things first!

!

Smokin Hot Crockpot

This week my crockpot is smokin! Sunday evening I came home from visiting my friend Jan in Birmingham for the weekend. Because I hadn't cooked over the weekend, I realized I didn't have anything for my lunch the next day at work. I was going to have to go out into the unbearable heat and find something to eat. Oh, woe was me! Didn't have anything planned for supper Monday night either. Monday morning I put some red beans in the crockpot, sauteed some onions and ham pieces and threw them in too. They cooked all day. On the way home from work, I went to Winn Dixie and bought a whole chicken and some ground meat. The beans turned out great and I had some left over for lunch today. This morning I put the whole chicken in the crockpot and tonight I am going to debone it and make chicken salad for sandwiches the rest of the week. The chicken cost about $5.00 so Dan and Danny and I are having lunch all week on five bucks! Sure beats eating out everyday. Not sure what else I'll use my trusty ole crockpot for next, but I am sure I will be using it more these days.

Crawfish Bisque

My daughter and sister and I got together to make some Crawfish Bisque. It can be very time consuming, especially stuffing the cleaned crawfish heads. I have done it once before and peeled the crawfish tails and cleaned the heads myself. It was a 2 day project. This time we saved time by purchasing the tails already peeled and the heads already cleaned. It still took us all day to make the bisque. It didn’t help that one of my burners on my stove was inoperable. I am going to show some of the steps in pictures and include the recipe that we generally followed. The recipe is found in a local cookbook titled “Delicious Hertiage” by Nippy Carville.
Crawfish Bisque
Cajun cooks should know
· A 40 –pound sack of live crawfish yields 12 to 15 cups peeled tails.
· Two cups of peeled tails equal 1 pound
· From one 40-pound sack, there will also be 1 or more cups of fat, needed for the best flavor of this dish.
For and easier variation of this dish:
It’s possible to make a tasty bisque using peeled tails and cleaned heads. These are readily available at seafood markets throughout South Louisiana.
Preparation of Crawfish
1. Wash crawfish several times by rinsing with the hose. To purge, fill a large tub or pot with water, add 1 ½ boxes salt and crawfish.
2. Let crawfish sit in salty water for 15 to 20 minutes. Remove, drain and rinse.
3. In large seafood boiling pot filled with water, scaled crawfish. Do not boil. Remove from pot and drain.
4. Separate sections, reserving the heads to be used for stuffing, the claws for making stock, and the tails for stuffing and gravy.
5. Discard all parts inside the head, while carefully extracting the fat (yellow-mustard substance) into a separate bowl.
6. The tail is the edible part of the crawfish. Peel and devein by pulling out the dark string down the center of the back. Marinate the tails with a seasoning mix like Tony Chachere's and 1 bunch of chopped green onions.




Broth
Make a broth using 2 gallons of water and the crawfish claws of about 5 lbs of crawfish.
Add:
3 medium onions, cut into large pieces
Seasoning mix, like Tony Charare
2 bell peppers, quartered
Roots and peelings from onions, celery and garlic well scrubbed
6 ribs celery, cut into large pieces
2 gallons water
1 head garlic, cut in half

Stems from 1 bunch parsley

Allow the onions, peppers, celery, garlic, parsley stems, roots and seasoning to come to a boil. Boil about 45 minutes and add crawfish claws. Simmer about 1 hour. Strain and store in refrigerator of freezer. Yield about 1 ½ gallons.
Roux (pronounced rue)
With 2 cups of oil and 2 cups of flour, make a roux as follows.
1. In a heavy Dutch oven, heat oil over low heat.
2. Stir in flour and continue cooking over low heat.
3. Cook roux slowly, about 45 minutes, stirring only occasionally. This cooking time is a good opportunity to prepare the crawfish heads.
4. When roux reaches a golden brown uniform color, remove from heat immediately and set aside.

Stuffing Mixture
10 cups (or less) chopped crawfish tails
2 bunches green onions, chopped
2 medium onions, finely chopped
1 bunch parsley, chopped
1 – (8 oz) can bread crumbs
1 head garlic
6 eggs, beaten
Tony’s seasoning, salt and pepper to taste,

1. Combine above ingredients. Mix thoroughly.
2. Rinse heads well and pat dry with paper towels. Stuff heads and lightly tap open end in flour. Brush lightly with oil
3. Bake heads at 350 degrees for about 20 – 30 minutes till the stuffing begins to dry out.
Gravy
2 sticks butter
Broth
4 large onions, chopped
Crawfish fat
2 bell peppers, chopped
Tony’s seasoning, salt & peper to taste
4 ribs celery, chopped
3 cups tails
Roux
1 bunch parsley, finely chopped
1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste


1. Sauté, the onions, bell peppers, celery and garlic in butter until soft. Stir these sautéed
2. vegetables into roux.
3. Add tomato paste, broth and fat. Season well to taste.
4. Cook over medium heat for at least 1 hour. Add stuffed heads about 30 minutes before gravy is complete.
5. Add the marinated tails and green onions 20 minutes before serving. When ready to serve, add the parsley. Ladle bisque and stuffed heads over fluffy rice. Yield: 150 -175 stuffed heads or approximately 24 servings.
We freeze the broth in meal size batches and freeze the heads separately. When we serve we are rather stingy with our heads so we ration out 4 per person.

Meyer Lemon Blueberry Scones

It's almost blueberry time again around here and I still have some frozen in our freezer. I need to try to use them up because they are only good for a year frozen. Friday morning I made some delicious lemon blueberry scones.

I don't recall where I got the recipe but it isn't very difficult.

Meyer Lemon-Berry Scones
Total preparation time: 10 mins Serves: 8
Ingredients:
3 1/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter
1 cup Juice from one Meyer Lemon and enough Milk to fill
1 cup Fresh or frozen Blueberries
1 teaspoon Grated Lemon Peel
1 Lightly beaten Egg
1 Egg White
3/4 cup Granulated Sugar
2 tablespoons Granulated Sugar
Steps:
1. Heat oven to 400 degrees
2. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in large bowl. Add butter and mix with pastry blender or fork until mixture looks like coarse crumbs. Gently stir lemon juice-milk mixture into dough, along with blueberries, lemon peel and egg until just mixed.

3. With floured hands divide mix into six to eight rounded circles and place on baking sheet 2" apart. Brush with egg white and sprinkle with sugar.

4. Bake at 400 degrees for about 18 minutes or until golden brown. Cool and serve warm or at room temperature.

These are very good, not too sweet and just right for me to bring to the office for breakfast. I am going to freeze them individually and bring one a day.

Lovely Weekend

It was my kind of weekend. Some things needing to be done, but enough time to do some unplanned things too. We had my grandchildren ( my daughter's 3) spend some time with us. We visited some of my other grandchildren ( my son's 3 children) in Mandeville. Two of the girls were playing softball (coach's pitch) in their 1st game. My son, Kelly, is the coach. It was at a really nice park with covered stands. We had a bar-b-que at Kelly's after and then headed home. I had to be at choir practice at 4, and barely made it in time. Dan got the kids dressed for church and met me there. Later in the evening, we lit a bonfire intending to have smores, but the fire was waaaay to hot, so the kids ate the smores with unmelted marshmallows. They seemed to enjoy them almost as much as the real thing.

Dan has been working on closing in the chicken yard with a top made of wire. We have lost all of our older chickens, for the last 3 years to hawks. I have 27 new babies now and don't want to lose any more. It is almost finished.

This morning after everyone feasted on Dan's eggs, grits and bacon, Caecilia and I made brownies. I used the Ghirardelli brand and they were delicious.

After washing and hanging out clothes on the line, I did a little genealogy online. I am really getting into that lately.We had a late dinner - early supper of roasted chicken mashed potatoes and carrots from our garden.
I gotta go get the clothes off the line now.
Lovely weekend....

Finished Product

Here is the final video...I wish you could smell it. It tasted delicious...one of the best ones. I rate it an 8.5 out of 10. The smoke flavor from the fire is really nice.

The rice was just right and the seasoning was pretty good. I didn't like the fact that skin and bones were in the rice .

How to Cook a Jambalaya Pts 5 & 6

After the chicken is good and brown, add the vegetables and cook it all together until the vegetables are wilted.

Continue cooking the meat and veggies until the chicken is tender and cooked through.

The next step is critical. You have to determine how much liquid is already in the pot and then add the correct amount of water to total 2 times the cups of rice you will be adding. In other words you will need 2 parts liquid to 1 part rice.

How to Cook a Jambalaya - parts 3 & 4

Steps 1 and 2 are below. This is the third step. After the sausage is brown and juicy, remove it from the pot and brown the chicken. Boneless skinless chicken thighs are the best, so no bones or skin are mixed in with the rice. We couldn't find them this time so we used chicken quarters. Add about 2 or 3 tablespoons of salt and sprinkle with pepper.

After all the chicken is in the pot and browning nicely, add some hot sauce. We like the taste of Louisiana hot sauce. The fire is good an hot at this point, coming around the sides of the pot to heat it thoroughly.

Continue turning and browning the chicken until most of the fat and juices are rendered.

How to Cook a Jambalaya Pts. 1 & 2

My husband and son were contestants in the Jambalaya Festival held in Gonzales last May. They have been cooking whenever they can to practice their technique. They recently cooked for our family to celebrate my grandson Donavan's 8th birthday. I will offer an 10 part tutorial on how to cook an authentic Louisiana jambalaya on a fire outdoors. Here is the 1st part.



Part 2
The next part is browning the sausage. We used Manda's portk sausage. It has a nice flavor.

Meyer Lemons

Our 4 year old Meyer Lemon tree was dripping with lemons this year. We have been harvesting them since late November. We just picked the last of them a few days ago and I have been searching for recipes to use them all. Last year we squeezed all the juice and froze it in ice trays to use during the year. We still have some juice left. I guess I don't use lemon juice as much as I should.


I found a great recipe for Lemon Bread with Lemon Curd. There are only 4 ingredients for the curd and it can make it in the microwave! "really easy" Here is the link to the page http://www.breadmachinemagic.com/bmme12.html
I haven't figured out to put a link in with just a word like "click here"



My granddaughter Catherine and I zested and juiced many lemons yesterday and made this delicious bread and curd. She didn't care much for the curd, but I thought it was scrumptious.


My husband likes the bread, but he hasn't tried the curd. We made enough curd to freeze about 5 mason jars full. The curd would be good for other things also. I thought about sealing the jars in a hot water bath, since I don't have a canner, but everything I read about canning curd indicated that I should use bottled lemon juice because of the standardized acid content. Because I didn't want to take a chance I decided to freeze it.

Caring for a cast iron pot

My husband and son enjoy cooking in cast iron pots. This morning they made a jambalaya for a friend's wedding. They cooked it in a big old cast iron Jamabalya pot. Since they started cooking very early this morning I couldn't make a video on how to cook a jambalaya because I was still sleeping :) It turned out very tasty.
After all the food was gone, I did get a video on how to clean and store a cast iron pot. Here is my little video.

I would probably use a cloth instead of the wadded paper my husband used.
After you coat with oil then take the pot off the heat, let cool and store.

New Year Dinner

I got a new video camera toy and am trying it out today. I have attempted to make a video on how to cut a cabbage. I couldn't turn the recorder off easily so there is some confusion at the end. Here it is.