Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I'm writing this because my son needs this particular version of Gumbo Z'Herbes as I actually do it. It was based off a recipe in Epicurious that then went to Chow that then went to Chowhound, that then... anyway... I don't know the exact origins anymore, and I've changed it substantially from them.  Ingredients 3  lb  greens (two bags of Costco Super Greens is great for this) 2/3  c  vegetable oil 2/3  c  all-purpose flour 1   yellow onion chopped 1  bunch  scallion chopped 1   green pepper chopped 4   celery ribs chopped 2  cloves  garlic minced 2  t  kosher salt 2  T  Cajun seasoning (preferably Lucille's) 2 cups vegetable broth or chicken broth if you're not going vegan or water 2  whole  cloves 2  whole  bay leaves 3 whole allspice 1  T fresh herb (I never have marjoram, so it's been cilantro usually or parsley)  Gumbo Z'herbes Directions Have a big bowl of i...

Everything you need, it all gets called out below, too, but if you're like my son, you like a list of everything so you know you have it all. Crust 3/4 cup whole wheat flour 1 3/4 cup AP flour 1 tsp salt 2 Tbsl sugar 6 Tablespoons coconut oil 1 Stick (8 Tablespoons or four ounces) of butter 4-8 Tablespoons ice water Filling 3 Pounds baking apples if you like the peels on 4 if not, mixed types 1 Tablespoon lemon juice 1/2 cup white sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg 2 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/8 teaspoon allspice if you have it, cloves might work too 1 Tablespoon arrowroot starch if you have it, or just plain AP flour works, too 2 Tablespoons butter something for a glaze, I use buttermilk, milk, half and half, cream, leftoever egg whites from Jet doing cream puffs... You'll need a tablespoon or less Someone asked me for the recipe, so I figured I'd write it up here, so that I can share it as needed.  In a food processor: 3/4 cup whole wheat flour 1 3...

Strawberry Hill makes povitica for the Kansas City Ukranian and Croatian and Eastern European people in the Midwest. They do an amazing job of it and were highly recommended by John's father's cousins. So we bought an apple cinnamon one and an English walnut one to see what they were really like. We ate the apple cinnamon one, first, and that's what I started my experiments to reproduce. I started with Joy Food Sunshine's Homemade Povitica Bread Recipe , but it was far too light and airy and bread-like for me. It's a very nice loaf of sweet bread with a very light swirl of nuts for flavor and scent. It's a nice thing, but entirely unlike the Strawberry Hill loaf, which was super dense and the swirl of flavors dominated the almost chewy wrapper around the filling. It also had very little cinnamon, something I really missed as the Strawberry Hill apple povitica had a wealth of cinnamon richness. Also in talking to the Arkansas cousins, living in the American Sout...

I've been branching out a bit with my sourdough.  One particular branch had to do with my sore tooth. I couldn't quite handle the usual crust when I was recovering from my crown replacement. In part because I was still using a good deal of rice flour to keep the dough from sticking to the cloth I was using in the loaf pan for the overnight chill/ferment cycle. Rice flour makes for a much harder crust than I like, though it also allows for really pretty patterns because it comes out white.  The loaf to the left is one that had a LOT of rice flour being used to keep the cloth mostly non-stick, and I did it only once because the texture was so hard for me to chew. I read that one could use a 50:50 mix of rice flour and regular flour and that would mitigate the texture problem, but I ended up using the mix for just rubbing directly on the cloth AND using Farmer John's very coarsely ground whole wheat flour directly on the dough to keep it from sticking to the counter and that w...

There are two different everyday dumplings that we always used to make at home. One is the potsticker (gwo tiea) and the other is the boiled dumpling (jow tzs) (literally foot). They have a variety of innards and different wrapper dough to deal with their cooking environments. Dough Ingrediants Potsticker Dough 400 grams all purpose flour 210 grams boiling water 2 grams salt Boiled Dumpling Dough  400 grams all purpose flour 210 grams cold water 2 grams salt Dough Preparation - Is the same for both Put the flour and salt in a medium bowl, and, using a fork or chopsticks, gradually add the water. Pour out the pieces of dough and extra flour onto a clean counter and knead together. Place in a covered bowl and let rest for 20 minutes. Then take it out and knead it again until it's smooth and pliable, about 3-5 minutes, and then put in the covered bowl again to rest at least 20 minutes, but it can hold for a few hours. Filling 1 pound meat/protein. Usually ground pork, but ground turke...

The A/V job was well worth doing. The memorial was very heartfelt and John did the work while I helped him with cameras and the sound. There was a huge gathering, too, of family, friends, and the community around the family. The support was palpable. It was good to do.  And, for the first time in two years, John and I went to a neighborhood party in the afternoon/evening. They were a vegetarian/vegan household, but we knew they ate eggs. So I made a pecan pie. Of course, it started with the pecans. When we were going through Texas, John and I stopped at two different pecan "stores". One was far more interested in selling any tourist anything they might happen to want from Texas. The second, just off the side of the highway in Chillicothe, TX, was actually trying to sell pecans. There were signs all through town saying, "We buy pecans." So I guess there are a lot of pecan trees in the area, but these were from the Valley Pecan orchard, or so they say and all the nuts...

I've now been doing transcripts at Longmont's 911 for 9 years. It's changed a lot from burning CD's for all the attorneys to a completely digital process, and going from tracking all the phone and radio traffic for an incident to nothing but the initial phone call. It's also gone from doing maybe half a dozen to doing sometimes upwards of fifty a week. I was very glad that there were only twenty something this week, so I wasn't much more than an hour. Having a lot of practice helps.  It was odd, though, going to the bulk store for dried soy beans and the library and not really needing a mask. A few people were still going about with them, but with the positivity numbers so low and the county and state mandates gone, I think most folks were feeling that it was okay to be without. And I realized, especially during the latter part of the road trip, that I rarely actually get within six feet of anyone for any amount of time, much less ten minutes on most errands. So...

We got home in less than two days, and last night, when I went to bed, I knew I was going to be in trouble. For the last several months, I've been waking up at night, when I was here in Colorado, with a panic response. I felt like I couldn't get enough air. I would take a lung capacity test, and it would come out normal; but I felt, emotionally, like I couldn't breathe . It was awful. My allergy doctor, Dr. Li of Flat Iron Allergy, has been urging me to take my Advair twice a day when it used to be that one inhalation a day was enough for me. So, reluctantly, I decided to take his advice. I probably should have done it sooner, as that very night, I stopped having the panic attacks. He's also the doctor who told me to get off Montelukast, which used to be an asthma drug that Dr. Murthy put me on, but the side effects of Montelukast were anxiety, vivid bad dreams, and some patients became suicidal. There were also side effects of ADHD, sleeplessness, and loss of mental cl...

This post is in response to someone that really wanted the recipe for my Mexican Beef Stew, which is actually a recreation of a stew that I had in Gallup, New Mexico, at a Mexican restaurant that was a family-owned little place that made its own nearly everything, including fluffy flour tortillas and a fairly standard Mexican restaurant menu but for a single item. It was lovingly placed in the MIDDLE of the second page, and had the mother's name attached to the stew. I'd never had Mexican beef stew before and ordered it, anticipating chilies or other things, but instead got this delightful brothy beef stew. There was obviously tomato in the broth, but no chilies that I could detect, no corn, no beans, just huge chunks of super tender beef, carrots, celery, potatoes, and the long, long, long simmered ghosts of onion chunks. Mexican Beef Stew from Vergie's Restaurant and Lounge Here's a picture of the original, just so you have a good idea of what I was talking about. ...

I used an old bread pan instead of a banneton, and shaped the bread before putting it let the dough in the pan in a tea towel rubbed with rice flour overnight in the fridge instead of just in a bowl in the fridge. The dough was just under the lip of the pan when I put it in, and I wrapped the whole thing with a produce bag that I closed with a twist tie. When the oven and Dutch oven were hot (at 500) in the morning, I got the dough out, and it had risen over the lip of the pan. I dumped it out onto a piece of parchment paper a little more roughly than I wanted; but it got there, and tried to brush off some of the loose rice flour, but didn't get even most of it. The dough just barely fit onto the lid of my Dutch oven, and I got the pot over it handily. And then I forgot to turn the temperature down to 450. I let it bake at 500 for 25 minutes and then uncovered the most glorious oven spring I've ever had. I turned it down, then, to 450 and let it go 20 minutes, and it came out a...

Ingredients Leaven 50 grams whole wheat flour 50 grams bread flour 100 grams water 20 grams starter Dough 375 grams warm (90-110 degrees Fahrenheit) water 165 grams Leaven 375 grams bread flour 125 grams whole wheat flour (finer ground, commercial/generic whole wheat) 10 grams salt Technique Mix all the leaven ingredients together. I use a quart sized translucent plastic container from take-out soup because I like to see the level of the dough inside. I put a thin rubber band around the girth of it at the starting level, and place it in a warm spot and let it grow until it doubles in height. It can take anywhere from three to eight hours, so sometimes I use a dehydrator set to 80-90 degrees Fahrenheit to speed the process.  When it's doubled, I take 165 grams of the leaven and mix it into the warm water for the dough (it SHOULD float if you let the leaven rise long enough). I put the rest back into the refrigerator for next time. I actually work it into the water, "dissolving...

We've been doing a lot of experimental cooking during the pandemic, much as everyone else has been. Some notable highlights have been the TikTok Baked Feta pasta dish (with our garden basil, some added whole garlic, and sundried tomatoes because why not riff?), the Lion's Mane crab cakes which surprised us by how GOOD they were, and the usual meanderings about sourdough, which are too numerous to actually link, though I ended up basing my experiments off of The Woks of Life's dad's recipe , as he went at it like an engineer. All good things, but Jet recently asked me for my bao recipe, AND he asked for all the changes I made to it for our food. Jet knows me way too well.  So I'm gonna write it up as I would make it. The only reference I have is the Wei-Chuan's cookbook "Chinese Snacks" and it's entirely for the dough, not the filling, and I've modified it heavily for baking at 5000 feet. Dough Ingredients and Instructions 6 c flour AP or brea...

Lately, I've been feeling like I've been run over by a truck, but got away with it. Bruised, battered, aching all over, but I'm alive, and I'm whole and I can keep going. It's not physically difficult for me to live and do the things that life needs of me, but so difficult mentally and emotionally. The Capitol Riot occurred on January 6th. That reminded me, in a huge, emotional way, of the fact that my family was wiped out by the Cultural Revolution. Armed insurgents destroyed local governments and moved, eventually, on the capitol of China and destroyed the old way of life. On the way there, they killed, detained, or executed most of the countries intellectuals and artists, including half of my mother's family, and all of my father's who didn't move to Taiwan. I had a very emotional few days, and wrote a big thing on Facebook about that and had hundreds of people respond, forward, and eventually one took exception to my equating Trump and his Proud Boys...