The Perfect Thanksgiving Menu

This is not the Thanksgiving I grew up with; this is the Thanksgiving which has slowly evolved in my adulthood. Growing up we had many Thanksgivings at my grandmother's house.  She really liked cooking and would work all day preparing the dishes.  It's strange though, I don't really remember what all she prepared.  There must have been turkey, mashed potatos, gravy, and stuffing, but all I remember is munching on dishes of tiny sweet pickles and pimento stuffed olives while we waited for the main event. That and I remember her pies; there was always one pumpkin and one sweet potato.

As an adult, Thanksgiving has become my favorite holiday, eclipsing Easter and Christmas.  I became the Thanksgiving matriarch in my family in my mid twenties and started forming the core of our Thanksgiving  tradition, and my sisters have added their own contributions over the years. I love cooking with my sisters all day and then glutting myself on the resulting feast.  Since I moved out West, I have missed our cooking marathons terribly.  This post is for them, so that we have all our Thanksgiving treasures documented in one place finally.

Over the years items have been added and subtracted. Some years, I've had to pick and choose among these favorites because there was not enough time or wo-man power to make them all, and I'm sure it will continue to change as all traditions inevitably do, but right now this is my perfect Thanksgiving Menu. 

Appetizers:

Deviled Eggs

Raspberry Brie Tarts

Roasted Chestnuts

Sweet Pickles

Olives

Drinks: 

Egg Nog

Kid's Wine

Asti Spumante

Main Courses:

Tofurkey or Other Vegetarian Holiday Roast

Corn Casserole

Stuffing

Mashed Potatos

Chickpea Gravy

Sweet Potato Casserole

Roasted Butternut Squash w/ Cranberry Amaretto Topping

Tante Balin's Kürbis Pasta

Tante Britter's Green Bean Casserole

Cranberry Sauce

Cranberry Tartlets

Dinner Rolls

Desserts:

Sweet Potato Pie

Pumpkin Pie

Instapot Review - Thank You Canada

Among Rat's accessories is an Indian pressure cooker. I loathe it. Among it's many offenses it doesn't even whistle, so I have no idea when food is actually done; this has resulted in such sad recipes as Bisi Beli Burnt. It hisses and spits at me and likes to ooze foamy goo onto the stove top burners.  And I'm always afraid it's going to blow up in my face. If Rat did not love using it so much, I would throw it out. 

So when our new Instapot electric pressure cooker arrived, I set it up to cook some, rice all the while keeping my distances and eyeing it suspiciously. But it had none of the behavioral issues of the Indian pressure cooker. It was silent excep when it made a pleasant little chime to let me know the rice was done. Since I could set a timer, I didn't have to wonder when the rice was done or worry about it burning. And Instapot didn't squirt out messy goo from its valve.

The Instapot is a nifty gadget from Canada.  It is one machine with many functions: it is a rice cooker, a pressure cooker, a slow cooker, a yogurt maker, and less impressively a sautér, steamer, and warmer. As a bonus the cooking pot is not made with poisonous non-stick coating, it is stainless steel. I have been lusting after the Instapot for three years now. They are a bit pricey and I could never justify the cost while we still had a working rice cooker, but our Proctor Silex Rice Cooker passed away a few weeks ago, after serving us well for three solid years, so it was time to buy a new kitchen toy, and it is awesome!

I never ate rice too often before I met the Rat.  In fact, I used to make *shudders* boil-in-the-bag Minute rice. I know, I know, all I can say in my defense is no one taught me how to cook. However, since meeting the Rat my Indian food - and therefore rice - consumption has increased to the point where a rice cooker is a necessary kitchen appliance.  I have gone through several of them, each leaving behind a plastic rice paddle and soup spoon as their grave markers. My favorites have been ones like the Proctor Silex, where the rice bowl and lid are removeable and dishwasher safe. Why you would make a rice cooker without a removable lid or rice bowl is beyond my comprehension, but there are many out there.

Rat brought home one such abomination when one of our rice cookers died. I loathed the thing. The lid was permanently hinged on and someone (I'm not saying it was the Rat, I'm just saying it wasn't me) would always close it up with rice still in there and the next time I went to make rice (usually a couple days later) I be greeted by a pink putrid blob when I opened the rice cooker lid.

The Instapot performs the main job that I bought it for exemplary. It makes awesome rice. So far I have tried basmati and jasmine. The rice comes out tasting and looking like the rice you get at restaurants. With all our other rice cookers (or using the stove top method) our homemade rice has always been a bit mushier than restaurant rice. Also we always end up with a layer of dried out rice stuck to the bottom of the pot. With the Instantpot, as long as I put a light coating of butter or oil on the bottom, the rice does not stick to the bottom of the pot. It is so nice not to end up wasting a quarter cup of rice every time I make it.

As a pressure cooker, I have been quite happy. Although it doesn't always reduce recipe time, it allows for passive cooking: no need to keep stirring every few minutes, no worries about something burning, nothing boiling over onto the stove top and making a mess. I infact, prefer to use the Instapot over our crappy apartment electric stovetop for most cooking tasks.

Besides rice, I have made cheesy grits, fennel egg curry, steel cut oats, and the easiest to peel hard boiled eggs. Seriously, pressure cooking your eggs is the way to go; it creates a pocket between the egg white and the shell while cooking, so when you go to peel them the shell practically falls right off ( no more ugly pock-marked eggs). Recently, I tried the yogurt making function with some regular thermophilic yogurt, and it set quite nicely in eight hours.

I am loving the many benefits of cooking with the Instapot, especially now that the temperatures are in the 80s and 90s, it keeps the kitchen nice and cool. Basically, it's like a slow cooker on crack. I can dump things in and not worry about them burning, and best of all I don't have to wait 6 to 8 hours for the food to be done.

Dirty Laundry - How to Wash Cloth Diapers

One of the biggest concerns of people when considering cloth diapering is how to clean them. If you don't have to consider cleaning them they are just as easy as using disposables. Since many of us were diapered using disposables, we haven't had the generational wisdom passed down to us on how to launder diapers, and are pretty clueless.

The good news is if you are exclusively breastfeeding you don't have to worry about doing anything with the poo. You just throw the soiled diaper in your wet bag and wash it because breast fed poo is water soluble.

The bad news is once you start on solids or if you are formula feeding you need to shake off the poo into the toilet before watching. Using flush-able diaper liners or a diaper sprayer can be helpful with this. I have heard of some people having a designated "poop spatula", but this method is not for me.

Since college I knew that I wanted to cloth diaper. But it remained a nebulous idea, until I became pregnant; then I realized if I was actually going to cloth diaper I was going to have to do some research and educate myself on it. I spent a lot of time researching cloth diapers, and consider myself an expert on the topic now, not just because of research, but because now one year into raising a cloth diapered baby, I have experimented a lot and learned what works and what doesn't.

One option you can keep in mind is having a diaper service, they will pick up your soiled diapers and drop off cleaned diapers. Personally, I could never get on the used diaper bandwagon - it just grosses me out putting something on my daughter that other babies have pooed and peed in.

If you can't afford or don't want to use a diaper service there are certain steps you can add to your washining routine to sanitize your diapers. Though I had read up on other peoples diaper washing routines and had decided that cold water rinse, hot water wash, cold water rinse, dry in the dryer was the way to go, I noticed after we started solids that the diapers would stink when I was drying them in the dryer, a nasty fishy smell. Some sites said that if this is happening then it is probably a problem with the detergent, either you are using too much and the detergent is not being fully rinsed out or you are using to little and it is not enough detergent to fully clean the diapers. At the time I was using Rockin Green Classic Rock (yes I had done a water hardness strip test to select the appropriate formula for my water). In desperation, I  switched detergents to Charlies.  This improved the situation a little, but the diapers were still smelling.

So if you are suffering with stinky diapers, here are a few things which have worked for me:

Vinegar
Use vinegar in the final rinse (warning you want to remove any PUL covers or AIO diapers with PUL). You could also use bleach, but it is hard on fabric and will decrease the lifespan of your diapers.

Sun
Sun your diapers. The ultraviolet light from the sun kills germs. Also diapers take a really long time to dry in the dryer; you could cut down on your electricity bill by sunning them. I like to do this every few washes to sanitize mine.  The sun also helps remove some of the poo stains; it is especially effective with EBF poo.

Hot water
If you have control over your water heater you could also increase it so that the hot water gets to 140-150 degrees (the temperature required to kill germs). Although, this route could be dangerous when you are bathing the lil one. Heating some hot water in an electrical kettle and adding it to the washing machine is another option.

In case you are interested in my diaper laundry routine here it is:

1. Do a cold water rinse to get rid of any poo or pee that was not rinsed off. 
2. Hot water wash with two tablespoons of Charlie's laundry detergent.
3. Remove the PUL diaper covers at this point (vinegar breaks down their absorbency so I just line dry them)
4. Run a final rinse adding between 1/2 to 1 cup vinegar (depending on load size) to the rinse water and let it soak at least one hour and sometimes overnight.
5. Hang outside on clothesline in the sun to dry.
6. Finish up with 10-15 minutes in the dryer to soften the diapers up.

Sometimes I skip step 5 if I am in a hurry to dry my diapers and sometimes I am lazy and skip step 6 and just deal with diapers that are a little stiff. 

Water Kefir Grains are Reproducing!

Well, it has almost been 6 weeks exactly, and now my water kefir grains have started to grow!

I started out with 3 tablespoons and now I am up to 4; a modest increase, but at least they are increasing. I am hoping to have an extra 3 to 4 tablespoons to take with me to share with family when I visit Michigan. I had read that sometimes kefir grains take 6-8 weeks before they start reproducing. Seems to be true.

I have been constantly making kefir since I received my grains. I feed them 4 tablespoons of sugar and culture them in a quart mason jar for two days, then I strain out the grains and start the process over. The strained liquid I mix with some juice or tea ( so far I have tried cherry, grapefruit, cranberry, Concord grape and hibiscus tea) and culture for another two days on the counter top and then move it to the refrigerator if I haven't drank it all by that time. I have also started adding either a teaspoon of molasses or a pinch of pink Himalayan salt for minerals.  

I notice that non-concentrate juices seem to get more fizzy. Also I have noticed some decrease in my appetite since I started drinking kefir.

Since it has been getting hotter here (90s), I am starting to move from two days of culturing to one.  This will also give me a buffer if I forget about  my grains for a day. On a couple occasions now, I have forgot and let the grains go three days in between their feedings. I was scared that I might kill them, but they seem to be doing fine.  I hope they keep on reproducing. I will be happier once I have some back up grains stored away just in case something goes wrong.

Instacart Review

I tried Instacart last night and it was great.  Delivery to my zip code in San Jose only became available in the last few weeks.  I wish they had this service available when I was pregnant.

Instacart prices are not the same as the store prices.  I would like to run a comparison myself one day - I will update this post if I ever do - but from reading others reviews it seems they charge about 22% more than the store price. Also delivery costs $3.99.  In my case I used a referral code, so I automatically got $10 off my first order and free delivery. If anyone wants to give it a try here is the referral link: http://inst.cr/t/S8AtVx. 

I figure the $10 off would defray the surcharge costs. Not to mention the fact that going to the store costs gas or bus fare.  In my case Whole Foods is 9 miles away and gas right now is around $4.00 a gallon, so going to Whole Foods is going to cost me about $2.75, and my time, 40 minutes driving there and back, plus however long I am in the store, but I say the store time is cancelled out by the time I spend ordering online and on the phone with my personal shopper. As an added benefit, I don't have to carry groceries up three flights of stairs.  Although I don't think there is anything to force you to, you are encouraged to tip your shopper. I am not quite sure what the standard tip etiquette is supposed to be in this case, but the website drop down offers a minimum choice of $2. Other choices are $5 or $10. I only ordered 15 items, so I tipped $2. You do have to order a minimum of $10 worth of groceries too; not that that's a tough thing to do. If you plan on using the service often, they have a Instacart Express, a program where all of your deliveries over $35 are free; the program costs $99 for the year, but if you use it weekly that's under $2 per order for delivery. As a side note, I didn't get any cool reusable Instacart bags like I've seen online.  My groceries were delivered in normal Whole Foods paper bags.  I would think that they would give you a bag for your first delivery. 

I received all of my items, although three items had to be substituted: my mushrooms, my beer, and my potatos. I ordered at 4:28 and received my order by 5:32. I was supposed to receive my order between 5:30 and 6:30, so I was impressed (1 hour delivery was not available for me from Whole Foods, probably because it's a 20 minute drive away).  

All in all, I think this is a great service if you don't mind paying a little more for the convenience. It's especially worth it, if you are sick or are pregnant or have a baby. Assuming you are using Instacart Express, ordering an average of $50 of groceries weekly, and that the prices are indeed marked up 22%, it's costing you maybe $12 for delivery in an hour. I guess it all depends how much your time is worth.

Citypickers - Experiments in Urban Gardening

I've long been curious about Earth boxes and their less expensive cousin, such as Citypickers.

Using intensive gardening techniques, you need 200 square feet of garden per person to eat during the growing season. My entire outdoor growing space right now is 20 ft by 7 ft, which is 140 square feet. So even if I used every inch of our balcony for gardening (something which no doubt would displease Lord Rat), I still would not be able to grow enough produce for one of us.  Ah, the banes of apartment living (or condo or town home for that matter).

Well, I probably won't be growing all of our own food anytime soon, but today I started with almost 4 square feet of garden, by planting a Citypickers raised bed, the dimensions of which are 20 in by 24 in.  I like that the CityPickers is square and it's not that bad looking.

I'd like to see how much produce I can produce on our balcony without uglifying it too much, and whether it would result in any decrease in our grocery expenses.  Although, I suspect that the ROI on this may be in the form of fresher, higher quality produce and the convenience of being able to grab the ingredients for dinner off your balcony.

I'm not sure how long you would have to use one of these in order to see a reduction in your grocery bill.  There is the initial cost for the CityPickers planter, the potting mix to fill it, the lime, and the fertilizer, not to mention any seeds you may buy.

My initial set up costs were $50.98, not including tax.  You are supposed to add fertilizer and lime every time you replant the Citypickers, and I guesstimate the lime and fertilizer will last me a total of 4 plantings, so in four plantings I need to grow about $50 worth of produce. After the initial startup, each planting will cost about $4.25

CityPicker: $29.99
Potting Mix: $9.97
Lime: $4.98 (use 2 cups per planting)
Fertilizer: $5.98 (use 3 cups per planting)

Total:$50.98

I am hoping to get:

6 golden beets

10 cherry bell radishes

1 bunch of kale

3 bunches of Swiss chard

2 bunches of winter spinach

I am guestimating that that is approximately $20 of organic produce.  Although, Swiss chard, spinach, and kale are all cut and come again, so they may actually produce quite a bit of salad.  I will also have the beet greens and radish greens to eat. Assuming each planting produces $20 of produce, I will be in the green by the third planting.

I plan on posting on the gleanings from my little garden.  If nothing else, it will be fun to grow little treats that you can't find easily in stores, green zebra tomatos and sorrel - you can't put a price on that.

Crockpot Caramel

Did you know that you can just fill your crockpot with water, submerge a can of sweetened condensed milk in the water, and set the crockpot on low for 8 hours and BAM! Caramel! Or for those of you who are picky, "dulce de leche" technically, or über-technically "manjar". Whatever it is, it's yummy to dip your apples in.

I removed mine from the can and put it in a mason jar, since I read that there is a slight chance the can could burst (I do not need another incident like the cherry kefir incident earlier this week). Some recommended putting a slight puncture in the can to avoid this risk, but I was also leery that heating the can might cause extra BPA to seep into the milk. 

This project combined two of my loves, the crock pot and Mason jars, and it turned out quite nicely, especially for the minimal amount of effort required. It was a beautiful caramel color, the texture was more gelatinous than caramel, more like a pudding. I dipped some Annie's pretzel bunnies in it, and the combination of sweet and salty was delicious, I had to stop myself before I ate the whole bag. I am looking forward to enjoying the rest as a snack with apple chips this week.

I can imagine this being a nice and easy hostess gift: take a basket and fill it with apples and place a jar of homemade caramel in the center, maybe tie a little red bow around it.