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Friday Turkey Soup

December 5, 2008

What do you do with that turkey carcass after the big feast? If you’re like me, you wrap it in a clean garbage bag and freeze it until you’re inspired to make Friday Turkey Soup.

This is what I did with my turkey carcass a few days ago.

I love having a 12-qt stockpot for times like these, when you need to fit a turkey carcas into a pot and cover it with water. Actually, I had my hubby break it in two pieces, but it would have fit intact, had I wanted it to. Really.

I added a peeled and quartered onion, a bag of baby carrots, a bay leaf, about 1/2 tsp. of peppercorns, sea salt, and a handful of parsley and thyme dug out from underneath the snow. I brought it to a boil and then simmered it for about 5 hours, until the stock was thicker and rich smelling, and the scraps of meat were falling off the bones.

At this point, I removed the big pieces to a bowl and strained the stock about 6 times into progressively finer strainers so that it was pretty clear, and then separated it into 3 smaller pots to cool and let the fat rise. Using a spoon, I strained off the fat and discarded it. Now I had stock.

I filled 3 ziptop freezer bags with 6 cups each of stock and lay them flat to freeze. This is a great freezing method for liquids because not only can you stack the bags easily in the freezer to save space, but the thin sheets thaw more quickly than solid blocks. I’ve already used one of them in my cabbage soup this week — recipe to come soon.

Then I put all of the turkey meat that came off the carcass back into the pot along with the carrots and onions, and ladled this “soup base” into 6-cup plastic food storage containers to freeze for later in the winter. Some cold and harried night, I’ll be able to toss this soup base into a pot to thaw, bring to a boil, and add noddles, corn, or cooked rice to make it more of a satisfying quick and easy meal. I could add a can of diced tomatoes, cut potatoes, and green chiles to make a turkey stew… The possibilities are endless.

I also froze a couple single-serving containers for a nourishing meal for the next cold or flu sufferer.

I’ve been looking into replacing all of my plastic container storage with Pyrex Storage and trying to figure out how

I’m going to store all the items I’ll need — I like to freeze a lot of soups when I’m in the mood to cook, so that we can still eat well even on the nights when I’m not in the mood to cook. Food storage containers rotate through my kitchen and freezer constantly.

Sigh. I’ve gotten so used to the conveniences offered by plastic that I’m feeling resistant to changing even though I know the dangers of using plastic food storage containers. I wish the plastic manufacturers were concerned enough to make their products so that they didn’t leak BPAs into the foods.

Stopping Stridor with Steam

December 2, 2008

Not much more frightening then when your 4-year old shows up at your bedside in the middle of the night painfully wheezing for air with a barky cough. Stridor, or difficult, raspy breathing can be a sign of croup, or it may just be an individual occurrence due to breathing dry air. Luckily, you can avoid a trip to the emergency room with a few simple actions.

The problem with stridor and croup is that they gets worse when the child panics, but not being able to breathe is so scary that panic comes with the territory. The cure has to be two-pronged: warm the airway and calm the panic.

I scooped my daughter up and flew into the bathroom where I ran the shower as hot as it would go and let the tub fill. I sat on the edge of the tub with her in my lap and closed the curtain around us to create a steam tent. The warm, humid air relaxed her throat and opened her airway. The lulling sound of the shower calmed her panic and allowed her to settle down and nestle into me. We stayed in the steam about 10 minutes, until the moist air relaxed her throat and she started to snooze.

Just the day before my son had asked me to turn on his humidifier for the winter and I had responded that as soon as I clean it out I’d turn it on. Of course, that hadn’t happened in time to prevent this episode.

As it happened, I had to replace the humidifier in my daughter’s room anyway as the old one was leaking. I really liked the one we had because it allows you to set the steam temp to cold or warm, and uses uv light to purify the water. I felt lucky to have found this Slant Fin GF-211D 2.4 Gallon Germ-Free Warm-Mist Humidifier for less than half what I had paid for the first one 4 years ago

If the steam bath doesn’t work to stop the stridor, the next option is to bundle up and go outside to breathe the cool air. This can help stop the attack, too.

Do Diabetics Need to Limit Carbs?

November 25, 2008

Reader question: As a type 2 diabetic I look for healthy recipes, & the immune boosting food sounded like a great thing. But when reading the carbs @110 per serving — OMG we are only allowed 60 carbs per meal. This is not at all doable.

I’m sad to learn that you must be operating on outdated dietary information if you limit yourself to so few carbs. Where is your body getting the fuel to run? The American Diabetes Association recommends a “whole foods” diet, not one in which you count carbs.

Limiting carbs is helpful when you’re eating processed foods which lack nutrition anyway. In the natural health world, we’ve seen diabetic patients be able to wean off of insulin by following a “Perfect Whole Foods” diet, as described in the book Recapture Your Health by Dr. Walt Stoll and Jan DeCourtney.

While my recipes are based on whole foods and can be used when following a perfect whole foods diet, some contain items which are fine for normal eaters (like white rice) but stray a bit from the absolutism needed for a diabetic eating regime (substitute for brown rice). My cookbook, Glorious One-Pot Meals: A Revolutionary New Quick and Healthy Approach to Dutch-Oven Cooking, is not directed at diabetics per se; they are just one of the groups of chronic disease sufferers — not mention regular people — that can benefit from eating a whole foods-based diet.

Genetically modified foods damage fertility

November 20, 2008

A new study shows that genetically modified foods damage fertility.

“This work will do huge damage to the GM industry worldwide, since it shows that a crop — Monsanto’s maize line NK603 x MON810 — which has been approved as safe by EFSA, and given consent for use in food and feed by the EC, is in fact dangerous to health. It demonstrates that the approvals process is at best inadequate and at worst corrupt.”

-Dr. Brian John of GM Free Cymru speaking about a new study out of Austria confirming previous study results that indicate GM corn damages the reproductive system of laboratory rats.

Let’s hope that this study will affect the credibility, legality, and profitabilty of the genetically-modified food industry.

Did you catch the recent article about Monsanto’s evil doings in Vanity Fair magazine? News of their nefarious practices is finally reaching mainstream America and opening our eyes to the truth behind GM food.

I loved the part in Michael Pollen’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, where he finishes up an in-depth exploration of the history and cultivation of the potato by hesitantly eating a genetically-modified specimen in an Idaho potato farmer’s kitchen.

Whole Chicken in a Glorious One-Pot Meal

November 19, 2008

Here’s a cooking question I’ve received several times:

“Can I put a whole fryer chicken in a Glorious One-Pot Meal?”

My response has always been that I had no idea, never having tried it.

Until now, that is.

The other day I decided to test it out for myself and see if it would work. I had a 3-lb fryer thawed in the fridge and knew it had to be used one way or the other. I may have had thoughts of roasting it when I pulled it out of the freezer several days before, but I didn’t feel like roasting that day. (This is why I have trouble remembering to thaw things: by the time the item is thawed, I’m over wanting it!)

Even though I received the patent in 2005 for inventing the Glorious One-Pot Meal infusion cooking technique, I am constantly experimenting and tweaking the method. This was a good day, I thought, to test out the GOPM method on a whole bird. Since I’ve never made a Glorious One-Pot Meal that was completely inedible, I didn’t have a back-up dinner plan in case it didn’t work. Luckily, I didn’t need one.

I preheated my oven to 450F and pulled out my 5.5-quart oval enamel-coated cast iron Dutch oven. The Organic Coconut Oil beckoned to me in the pantry. I’ve been playing around with this health-giving stuff and enjoying the subtle coconut-flavoring it imparts in GOPMs and when sauteeing. About 3 Tbsps. coated the interior and lid of the pot quite liberally.

Then, I rinsed the chicken, especially the cavity, and put it in the pot. I sprinkled it with sea salt and my favorite Lodo Red Adobo red chile spice mix. Then I tossed around it an onion cut in wedges, strips of acorn squash (seeded but still in the skin), halved mushrooms, handfulls of baby spinach leaves, and the contents of a bag of frozen corn kernels.

Finally, I sent my husband out to collect sage, rosemary, and oregano from the garden to set on top in kind of a pile, so they’d be easier to remove before serving. I covered the pot, put it in the oven, and waited for the aroma of a fully-cooked meal to seek me out.

About 1 hour and 20 minutes later, it smelled delicious. The meat thermometer read over 190F in the breast and thigh of the bird, indicating it was perfectly cooked and safe to eat.

And eat it we did. The chicken meat was unbelievably tender and moist. We discarded the skin, as it came out fairly rubbery. I had to use a slotted spoon to retrieve stray corn kernels from the bottom of the pot where they were luxuriating in a liquid bath of chicken fat. I considered hanging onto the fat to use for something in the future (chopped liver?), but my helpful hubby cleaned the pot before I could get to it.

The kids scarfed it down, too, which was gratifying, and tonight I’ll use the leftover chicken to make chicken enchiladas. I declare the experiment an unqualified success!

While you won’t find this recipe in my new cookbook, you will find other new techniques that have not been published before, loads of new recipes, and even new grains to add to your repetoire. It’s coming out January 6th, but pre-order it now on Amazon for more than 30% off!

Friday Turkey Soup

Stopping Stridor with Steam

Do Diabetics Need to Limit Carbs?

Genetically modified foods damage fertility

Whole Chicken in a Glorious One-Pot Meal

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