Mama's Oatmeal

Mama's Oatmeal is full of lots of delicious goodies and a great way to start the day.

For my second pregnancy, we chose to go to a birth center for my prenatal care and the birth. It was a great team of two midwives, an OB-GYN and birth assistants. I loved the leisurely appointments that really focused on taking care of the whole person and the whole family. If you live in the Phoenix area, I highly recommend checking out Blossom Birth Center. 

In the binder of articles and resources from Blossom, there was a great recipe for Mama's oatmeal. It became a family favorite, and I made it at least a few times each week while I was pregnant. Over time we tweaked and perfected until we landed on our current recipe. We hadn't had it for a while, and decided to make it yesterday morning as part of our cleaning out the pantry, fridge and freezer effort. What a delicious and nostalgic treat. When I started making this, our toddler wasn't eating nuts yet, and she would ask for "hini, hini, hini" for tahini. Amazing that she's now able to clearly discuss "all the delicious goodies" in her oatmeal, and to list the ingredients one-by-one including "tahini'.

*start the recipe the night before*

Mama's Oatmeal - City Share Style (2-3 servings)

1 C Steel Cut Oats

Water

1 T Raw Apple Cider Vinegar

2 C Whole Milk

Pinch of Pink Salt

Dash of Vanilla

Small handful of dried fruit (raisins, cherries, cranberries or prunes)- optional

1 T Black Strap Molasses

2 T Butter

Pecans

Tahini

Soak the oats in water with the apple cider vinegar over night. In the morning, pour the oats into a fine mesh strainer. Rinse with water. Return the oats to the pot, add the milk. Bring to a simmer and add the salt, vanilla, dried fruit, black strap molasses and butter. Continue to cook until the oats are tender - about 15 minutes. Dish up into bowls. Add a small handful of pecans and 1 teaspoon of tahini to each bowl. Top with extra whole milk until it reaches the desired consistency.

Celeriac and Potato Mash

Last week at the farmers market, we spotted some celeriac and decided to give it a try. I have read about it before, but never tasted it. We assumed that it would taste like celery, but the person at the farm stand also said that it tasted a little spicy. I looked up a bunch of recipes and we decided to prepare it as a puree. We mixed it with potatoes, butter and cream.

It took some effort to cut and peel the celeriac because it has a tough woody texture (and our knives need some serious sharpening). I cut it into small pieces and and boiled it with the potato chunks. Recipes suggested using a food mill, but we don't have one, so I resorted to the food processor. The food processor worked well. The result was a creamy, flavorful puree.  I don't think it is our new favorite, but we were pleased with results, and we would get celeriac again. I think I like the flavor diluted with potatoes.

What new ingredient have you tried for the first time recently?

Meal Plan Monday
(We only have broad brush strokes because we still have to do our major food shopping for the week.)
Monday - Hamburgers and salad
Tuesday - Soup made with chicken broth
Wednesday - Chicken with seasonal vegetables
Thursday - Spaghetti squash alla carbonara
Friday - Fish with seasonable vegetables

Celeriac and Potato mash
1 head of celeriac, pealed and diced
4 small potatoes, pealed and diced
3 T butter
1/2 C cream
salt and pepper to taste

Bring a pot of water to a boil and add the celeriac and potatoes. Cook until they are both tender (about 10-15 minutes). Place in the food processor and mix with the butter and cream. Blend until smooth. Salt and pepper to taste.


This post is part of Meal Plan Monday, My Meatless Mondays, Homemaker Mondays, Mouthwatering Monday, Just Another Meatless Monday and Midnight Maniac Meatless Mondays,.

Haddock with Herb, Lemon and Butter Sauce

Something we have noticed upon moving to the Boston area is that there is a bounty of locally caught fish. There are fish CSAs advertising at the various farmers' markets and Whole Foods has fish out of Gloucester, MA. All these fresh, local options are making us enjoy fish a little more frequently. This week we had some haddock. We both like the firm, meaty texture. In the past we have prepared it with panko bread crumbs, but now that we are avoiding grains we decided to just pan fry it and serve it with an herb, lemon and butter sauce. It was superb! The only downside was that there weren't any leftovers and I actually had to make our lunches the next morning.

We enjoyed our haddock with spinach salad and mashed butternut squash. Please notice the lovely gray plates...we thought we'd give the ugly yellow ones a night off.

Haddock with Herb, Lemon and Butter Sauce
4 T butter
1 lb haddock (or other firm fish)
2 T olive oil
1/4 C chicken broth (or fish or vegetable broth)
1 T fresh lemon juice
1 t lemon zest
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
4 T fresh herbs, finely chopped (we used chervil, dill, parsley and tarragon)

Melt 2 T of butter in a skillet, and add the fish fillets. Cook for about 3 minutes per side (depending on the thickness of the fish). Place the cooked fish on a serving platter. In the same pan, add the chicken broth. Deglaze the pan and cook until the broth slightly reduces. Add the rest of the ingredients and turn off the heat. Let sit for a couple of minutes and then drizzle over the fish.

Enjoy!

This post is part of Miz Helen's Full Plate Thursday, Jenny Matlock's Alphabe-Thursday, Frugal Food Thursday, Simple Lives Thursday, and Friday Food Flicks.

A Versatile Mustard Sauce

We have fallen into a dinner rut since we moved to Brooklyn last October. I think there are a few factors that have contributed. Our move coincided with the time our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm share came to an end. The CSA delivery each week forced us to get creative to find new and delicious ways to eat up all of the vegetables. We also found out right before we moved that we were expecting our first child. Soon after, the fatigue and nausea of the first trimester set in and ruined most plans for dinner preparation. Finally, our commutes both got a little longer. It's amazing how getting home 30 minutes later can make such a difference. We arrive home tired and starving and it's hard to get motivated to make anything exciting for dinner. I keep telling myself that a meal plan and some slow cooker dinners will help, but I haven't been very good about following through on either front.

What to do? Well, we do have a very easy sauce that helps dress up our standard meat, vegetable and starch dinner. It's a delicious mustard sauce with only two ingredients. We tend to serve it over pork, but it would be great on chicken too.


We cooked our pork chops with some onions in a cast iron pan. Once they were done, we removed them from the pan and prepared the sauce in the same pan with the pork juices. We served it over some orzo with a side of broccoli and salad.

Mustard Sauce
2 T butter
1 T Dijon mustard
1/4 C white wine (optional - we left this out)

Melt the butter over medium low heat and stir in the mustard (and wine if using it). Whisk until combined and then serve.

This post is part of Miz Helen's Full Plate Thursday, Pennywise Platter Thursday, Alphabe-Thursday, Tip Day Thursday Carnival, Frugal Fridays, Creative Girls Blog Hop, Foodie Friday, and I'm Lovin' It.

100th Post

This is the 100th post on City Share. This mile marker comes at an appropriate time because we are approaching a time of transition. All the posts thus far have been shaped by cooking and eating our way through our CSA share, but our summer share will end in a month. We are now researching some winter vegetable and meat shares (if you have any suggestions for NYC please let me know). Another change is that I have become motivated to not just keep eating local food, but to begin to incorporate more traditional foods into our diets. I have been inspired by Jenny at Nourished Kitchen and Ann Marie at Cheeseslave and many more. On top of these changes in our diets, we are going to move to Brooklyn next month. We are very excited to have found a lovely apartment with double the space of our current place.

To help me incorporate more traditional foods, I will be participating in Kelly the Kitchen Kop's e-class on Real Food for Rookies. The class has actually already started, but we have been busy lately so I'm just getting ready to begin on my own now. I will be sure to share my new found knowledge from her class.



In celebration of the 100th post, we have a delicious dinner to share with you. We had a flavorful grass-fed steak with sauteed leeks and mushrooms, a beet salad with yogurt dressing and green salad. Ahh, it was a fabulous treat dinner. The steak was delicious, the leeks and mushrooms were so good that we just kept eating them by the forkful before they even made it to the table, and the beet salad made my husband declare that "Beets are dirt candy."


Mushrooms and Leeks

1 T butter
2 leeks, the whites cut in half lengthwise and thinly sliced
3/4 lbs mushrooms, chopped (we used shitake and oyster)
1 T sage, finely chopped
salt and pepper

Heat a cast iron pan over medium heat and add butter. Once the butter is melted, add leeks and cook until translucent. Add mushrooms and sage and cook until the mushroom are tender. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Delicious eaten straight or over chicken, beef, rice, or pretty much anything else.


Look at this beautiful selection of beets.


After they are fork tender, peel the beets with a spoon.


Combine the ingredients for a dressing.


We added the beets and some chopped up carrot tops (parsley would also work) to the dressing, and mixed to combine.

Beet Salad with Yogurt Dressing

5 beets, scrubbed
1 t dry dill
tops of 2 carrots, chopped
1/4 small onion, finely chopped
1 clove of garlic, minced
1/4 C yogurt
salt and pepper

Bring a small pot of water to a boil, and add the beets. Cook until a fork can easily pierce the beets. Remove from the water and let cool. Use a spoon to remove the skin (we sliced ours in half first for the photo). Chop into bite sized pieces. In a bowl, combine dill, carrot tops, onion, garlic and yogurt. Add the beets and stir to coat the beets with dressing. Chill for 30 minutes to let the flavors combine. Salt and pepper to taste.

Thanks to all of you for reading. I appreciate your feedback and comments.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, Works-for-Me-Wednesday, Simple Lives Thursday, Ultimate Recipe Swap, Pennywise Platter Thursday, and Tasty Traditions.

Liver and Onions with Collard Greens and Corn

I hope everyone had a nice Labor Day. We used our day off to explore a couple of neighborhoods in Queens. We continue to expand our horizons and consider new places to live. A couple of neighborhoods were really promising, but we haven't found an actual apartment we like yet.


Labor Day is often associated with cook-outs, grilled meat and all those great summer foods. We don't have a grill, so we had something more akin to a Sunday dinner (on Monday). We had liver and onions, collard greens and corn. I read about a technique in Mark Bittman's column a while back that recreates the taste of grilled corn without a grill. What you do is heat up a cast iron skillet, melt some butter, and pan fry the corn. It looked beautiful, but unfortunately tasted mushy and flavorless. I think our CSA farmers gave us cow corn! Oops! We each took a couple of bites, but couldn't finish it.

The rest of the meal was a huge success. We always like liver and onions. This time around it was bison liver. Here is my recipe. For the collard greens, I basically followed ChezSuzanne's recipe off of Food 52. My husband exclaimed, "These are the best collard greens that I have ever tasted!" and a few bites later "These are amazing." They are definitely worth a try. It includes garlic chips, bacon, and a butter and apple cider vinegar sauce- need I say more?


Here is a close up of the garlic chips and bacon bits awaiting their fate (That's a small plate).

This post is part of Two for Tuesdays at A Moderate Life, Tasty Tuesday at Balancing Beauty and Bedlam, and Tempt my Tummy Tuesday at Blessed with Grace.

Making a Plan

We had a busy day walking around Brooklyn. We are considering moving to have some more space, so we were checking to see how we felt in a couple of different neighborhoods. There are lots of nice places, but we are weighing living space, distance to the subways, outdoor spaces, and things to do close by. It is hard because there are so many choices. It feels that we need to keep looking and looking so that we won't miss that one good deal right around the corner. A decision will need to be made in three weeks, which is good. Sometimes it is good to have deadline.

I thought we should get more organized this week and plan out our meals. We are going out of town for a wedding on Friday and Saturday, so this plan will only take us through Thursday. I want to eat up our farm share veggies and our farmers' market finds:

Monday - Stuffed Peppers with some grass-fed ground beef, corn, carrots, garlic, mushrooms and fresh tomato sauce.

Tuesday - Liver and Onions with Collard Greens and Corn on the Cob.

Wednesday - Salmon and a Mediterranean Salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, avocado, chickpeas, sorrel, garlic and feta (inspired by a dish at Miriam Restaurant in Park Slope)

Thursday - Lentil and Beet Salad with goat cheese and beet greens


Last night, we had steak with leeks and mushrooms over some yellow beans (or should they be called wax beans?). It wasn't the most photogenic meal, but it was delicious. The steak was a tough cut, so we cooked it pretty rare.


Steak with Leeks and Mushrooms
1/2 lb steak, thinly sliced
1 head of garlic, minced
2 T soy sauce
Juice of half a lemon
oil
1/2 lb of Oyster mushrooms, chopped
2 leeks, whites finely sliced
2 T butter

Mix the steak, garlic, soy sauce, and lemon juice and let marinate for a few minutes. Heat a skillet and coat it with oil. Add the steak mixture and quickly toss it in the pan for a minute and turn off the heat. Cook mushrooms, leeks in the butter until brown (about 10 minutes). Combine and enjoy!

This post is part of Monday Mania and The Healthy Home Economist.