Baconaise February 20, 2013

Your own highly flavorful homemade mayonnaise. Yum. This is really easy to do if you are already making bacon that day since you don’t have to melt the bacon. No rancid canola oil or estrogenic soybean oil just yummy goodness.

1 cup oil (bacon fat (liquid but not hot) + enough olive oil to make 1 cup)
2 whole eggs
pinch salt
2 tbs apple cider vinegar (like Bragg’s)
1 tsp mustard

Place eggs, mustard and vinegar in food processor. Run the food processor and place the cooled oil in the food pusher (assuming that your food processor pusher is like mine and has two tiny little holes in the bottom that perfectly drizzle liquid- if you don’t have this just drizzle oil very very slowly down the feed tube). Let run until all the oil is gone and then your done!

[Be warned this is a raw egg recipe if you are worried about that you can modify by putting the egg, vinegar and an extra tbs of water in a sauce pan and put over very low heat. Stir constantly until you see the first 2 bubbles and then STOP! Push this through a fine mesh strainer to make sure there are not scrambled eggs chunks and then place in the food processor and continue with the recipe above at that point.]

you can get Bragg’s apple cider vinegar here and I will get a small commission

How-To “Hard Bake” Eggs…no fail hard boiled eggs February 19, 2013

It’s so easy to hard boil eggs perfectly using the oven! Ugh no more accidental runny egg yolks.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place eggs into a muffin tin. Bake for 30 mins. Wait to cool before touching. Easy! Perfect eggs every time.

image courtesy of Carlos Porto at freedigitalphotos.net

How to make- Beef Bone Broth/ Marrow/ and Tallow February 17, 2013

I finally got my beef bones from the local butcher (I mean literally they raise the cows and then butcher them for sale locally) for the first time and they look awesome. $5 for a much bigger box than I expected. I can fill my large crock pot 4xs with this many bones, it has alot of fat on them which I can render down into tallow, AND I can save the hard bones to give to dog friends. I did not expect to get this much for so little it’s just like my coconut experiment. It’s crazy how much we spend for processed things when if we just spent a little time we can get so much more for much less money and it’s healthier.

So next time I’m going to cut off most of the fat so that I don’t have garlic flavored tallow to try and use cosmetically but beef broth is pretty easy to make.

Place bones on a rimmed sheet pan with a halved peel onion, 1 carrot, whole garlic bulb into a 350 degree oven and bake for 30 mins. Turn bones over to brown other side and cook for 30 more minutes. Pry out marrow and set aside to eat. Place bones, 2 tbs apple cider vinegar and vegetables into crock pot and cover with filtered water. Place on low for 2 days. Skim off any fat and save as tallow to cook with. Filter bone broth and store. I plan to reduce my bone broth and freeze into portion size so that it takes up less room.

For tallow cut up the fat into small pieces. Place in a pot and cook on low until everything melts and impurities separate. Remove impurities and store tallow (it will look golden when liquid but will cool to a nice white color).

Use tallow for high temperature cooking. Apparently it’s delightful mixed with olive oil and butter for cooking flavor. Make soap. Or rub it on your skin 🙂

How to make: Coconut Water/Milk/Flour/Butter?/ Decorative Bowl/Cat February 12, 2013

I bought 2 coconuts priced $1.58 ea. Out of each coconut I was able to get the equivalent amount of coconut water to an 11oz bpa free tetra pack coconut water box which costs me $1.29 a box….So I was able to get coconut milk and flour out of the same box essential for free…yay! It does require time and effort but the more I do it the less time and effort it takes as I get more proficient at being a coconut monkey 🙂

To “make” coconut water:

*Find the softest eye of the coconut
*Use a steak knife and bore a hole
*Shake coconut water out into a container to drink later
(I think there must be almost a vacuum with only boring out one of the eyes but the other two are really hard so I just *shake shake shake* and the water does comes out. There is probably a better way 🙂 )

To get the meat out:

*Preheat over 350 degrees
*Whack coconut on hard surface (I used my concrete step outside my house and hoped the neighbors weren’t watching) where the opened eye is until it cracks
*Bake at least 10 minutes
*Pry out coconut meat with a butter knife (try to not shoot yourself in the eye or hit the ceiling with chunks of coconut)
*Use a vegetable peeler and remove the brown skin on the meat
(for larger pieces I needed to bake it longer…make sure it doesn’t brown- next time I will whack the coconut more on the concrete to get smaller pieces)

Make a bowl:

*Save large pieces of husk for decoration. 🙂 Done!

Make coconut milk:

*Soak coconut in filtered water for several hours in blender
*Blend until coconut meat is completely pureed
*strain “milk” from puree

Make coconut flour:

*Preheat oven to 200 degrees
*Place coconut puree (which looks more like teeny tiney chunks) onto a cookie sheet and leave in oven for several hours until dry
*Pulse in food processor into fine flour

Make coconut butter……

*uh I tried making coconut butter with my Ninja and then my Kitchenaid food processor and it didn’t really work

Something I learned….my kitty loves coconut meat…I might have to change her name to Coconut Whiskers

see me on the Food Renegade carnival