Sweet Potato Burrito Bowls with Lime Chipotle Dressing

One of our favorite meals has always been beans and rice, and last year I started making a more complicated version with lots of delicious toppings like sauteed peppers and onions, shredded chicken in green sauce, roasted corn, cheese, salsa, and sour cream.   I was looking for variations that would work for Zoe's mostly vegetarian and tightly budgeted house, and came across a lot of recipes that included sweet potatoes.  This is the version I came up with after looking at several.  I think it turned out great!

Sweet Potato Burrito Bowls with Lime Chipotle Dressing

For about 4 servings:

Ingredients:

2 cups cooked black beans*
2 cups cooked brown rice
1 onion, thinly sliced lengthwise
1 red, yellow or orange bell pepper, in strips
4 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cut in cubes.
2 Tbs. olive oil
1 sliced avocado (opt)
1/4 c. chopped fresh cilantro (opt)

for the dressing:
2 Tbs. sour cream
2 Tbs. mayonnaise
2 Tbs. lime juice
1/4 tsp. paprika (smoked if you have it)
1/4 tsp. chili powder
1/4 tsp. ground chipotle powder (or some finely chopped canned chipotle)
1/8 tsp. cumin
salt and black pepper

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.  If you have one (or two), preheat a pizza stone or roasting pan. Drizzle the bell pepper and onion with about 1 Tbs. olive oil, sprinkle on a few pinches of salt and toss to coat.  Spread out on pizza stone or roasting pan or large cookie sheet and bake, stirring occasionally, for about 20 minutes or until they've developed some spots of brown roasted color.

Peppers and onions as they start roasting

Peppers and onions after they're roasted 

Roasted Sweet Potatoes

Toss the sweet potatoes in another Tbs. of olive oil and sprinkle with salt, and roast those the same way as the peppers and onions.










Mix together the dressing ingredients.

Chipotle Lime Dressing

To serve, put a scoop of rice, beans, and each of the kinds of veggies in a bowl, top with the optional avocado and cilantro, and drizzle with the dressing.

Cooked black beans

*For black beans, I cooked these in my instant pot.  3 cups of black beans, 9 cups of water, 1 Tbs. salt, 2 Tbs. dried minced onions, 2 cloves garlic, 2 dried chiles (I used Oaxacan pasilla, but the chiles are optional and you can use whatever type you prefer) and 2 dried avocado leaves (totally optional).  Pressed "beans" and did a quick release when they were done cooking.  This time I had presoaked them a few hours before cooking, and forgot to reduce the 30 minute automatic cooking time, so they're a little softer than I might prefer.

Whole Wheat Lentil Burrito Filling

I don't make this recipe often because it's easier just to use beans, but when I make it we all like it a lot and I wonder why I don't make it more.  Very healthy, cheap, easy, and delicious.  And it uses 2 things I always have on hand in my food storage: wheat and lentils.

Whole Wheat Lentil Burrito Filling

from Laurel's Kitchen

1 1/2 cup cooked whole wheat berries (see other post about cooking whole wheat berries)
1 cup dry lentils
1 quart tomatoes (or 28 oz. can) plus their water, diced
2 cloves crushed garlic
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. dried parsley
1/2 tsp. cumin
2 tsp. chili powder
1 cup water as needed

Mix all together and cook until lentils are tender, about 1 1/2 hours.   Use as a filling in flour tortillas.  You can top it with cheddar or jack cheese, olives, salsa, sour cream, lettuce, shredded cabbage, etc.

Food Storage Introduction & a recipe for Whole Wheat Bread Mix

I freely admit to spending too much time thinking about food.  When you combine that with my fascination with end-of-the-world scenarios, it shouldn't surprise anyone that I have food storage. Though realistically, I imagine that long-term food storage will be more likely to benefit us in the case of food shortages or loss of employment.

I want our food storage to allow us to eat quality foods, foods that are healthy, economical, and delicious.  Cooking with food storage generally doesn't lend itself to food that fits both those criteria and that of being fast.  If you have long term storage ingredients that are fast, they tend to taste gross, cost more, and be filled with all kinds of preservative chemicals that I don't want to eat.  So I have made a transition in the kinds of foods I'm willing to store.  I no longer purchase things like MREs, dehydrated meals or dehydrated meats or TVP.   I've greatly reduced the amounts of things like powdered milk and eggs.  I prefer to stick to the basics, the things that I know will be good for us, like dried beans and whole grains.  I like that rotating my food storage gives me another incentive to cook from scratch and use real ingredients.

Let's start with whole grains.  The cheapest option is really whole wheat, so I'm going to focus on that this month.  At the LDS Home Storage Center, you can buy bags or #10 cans of whole wheat for less than I could find anywhere else.  If you use a lot of wheat, it might make sense to buy a 25 lb. bag and use that before you use the sealed cans, because it's cheaper un-sealed.  However, since I already have a lot of wheat that I bought in the past, I prefer to cycle through the older wheat I have and replace it with the fresh cans annually.  It's supposed to maintain most of its nutritional value for 25+ years, but I've found that older wheat (especially when it hasn't been stored in a cool enough place or properly sealed) tends to make bread that is bitter and tough and won't rise properly, so I try to rotate what I have all the time and avoid storing anything longer than 10 years. If you have older wheat you're trying to use, then I'd recommend three possibilities for making it more palatable: first is to use it in small proportions with fresher wheat, second is to try sprouting it (and then bake with it - you've seen those sprouted wheat loaves in the stores) and the third is to use it in sourdough, which helps break it down for you so it's easier to digest.

I prefer to bake with hard white winter wheat, because I feel like I can use a higher percentage of whole wheat flour and still make breads that my family enjoys.  I have a wheat grinder and I just grind wheat whenever I run out.  I keep a container by my white flour and sugar and also usually grind an extra batch to throw in the freezer, since it keeps better in the freezer once it's ground.  Lately I've been making my own mixes for the things I bake and cook most regularly: pancakes, muffins, whole wheat bread that I throw in the breadmaker, etc.  I'll have to do another post about mixes.

If your family doesn't currently eat whole wheat bread, then start by gradually adding a little bit, like replacing 1/4 cup of the white with wheat in your recipes.  Keep increasing the proportion of whole wheat until you/your family wants more white, then back off a bit and get used to that amount for a few months and then try increasing again.

However, if you don't bake, then storing lots of whole wheat will be wasteful, because there aren't a lot of other good ways to use it.  Store other grains like rice, oats and pasta instead.  As for ways to use wheat other than baking, I find that boiled whole wheat is a little too tough on the jaw to eat a whole bowl for breakfast, but my parents highly recommend cooking up a mix of 1/3 brown rice, 1/3 barley, and 1/3 whole wheat.  I haven't tried it yet, because oatmeal is so much easier, but I think I would like it.  I've come across recipes that use whole wheat in weird ways, but I prefer to just use it in baking.  One exception is a recipe I have for a burrito filling that's made with lentils and whole wheat in a tomatoey sauce.  I've also occasionally thrown some into vegetarian chili because it has a chewiness that is similar to ground beef.  I recently came across recipes in Fine Cooking for grain salads that can be made with cooked wheat berries, that sound pretty good, but I haven't tried one yet.  Has anyone tried making their own graham crackers or wheat thins?  I have some recipes I've been meaning to try.

So today's #1 recipe for whole wheat is for our everyday whole wheat bread.  You can grind the flour and measure out several bags of this mix at once, slip in a piece of paper printed on one side with the ingredients and on the other with the instructions, label the bag, and store it in the cupboard (or freezer for longer periods) until you're ready to use it.  Then when we need a new loaf of bread, it only takes moments to throw a batch in the breadmaker.  Measuring out all the dry ingredients at once means that I only have to clean up the mess of measuring once for several batches of bread.  I actually got a little fancier by laminating the instructions and taping them to the outside of the bags (leave the bottom loose so you can flip it up and see the ingredients on the back).  You can even re-use the same bags for the same recipes without washing them, since they just have a bit of flour on them.  I fold them in half and clip them together with a large clip and re-use them when I'm ready.

Some notes:  you could use part white flour.  I use hard white winter wheat.  The flax is optional, but a healthful addition.  The gluten and dough enhancer help the loaf have a little more of a spongy chew, but it works without if you don't have any.  Potato flakes help the loaf last longer before it gets stale or moldy.  And I suppose you could also skip the milk powder and substitute flour for the oats.

100% Whole Wheat Bread Mix for the Breadmaker

adapted so much that this one I can call my own recipe

Measure into a quart-size zip-top baggie:

ingredients:

3 c. whole wheat flour

1/2 c. oats

1 tsp. salt

1 Tbs. ground flax seed

¼ c. dry milk

¼ c. potato flakes

2 Tbs. gluten
1 tsp. dough enhancer

100% Whole Wheat Bread Mix

Add mix to breadmaker with:

1 ¼ c. water

2-3 Tbs. oil or butter

2-3 Tbs. honey or molasses

1/2 Tbs. yeast (active dry)
Add more flour or water as needed.

Use whole grain cycle.

If you don't have a breadmaker, you can use this recipe to make bread by hand or with a mixer.  Just put the wet ingredients in a bowl, mix in most of the dry mix, and slowly knead in the remainder of the dry mix until it is all added and the dough is tight but moist.  Let it rise in a greased bowl, covered, until double, then shape and let rise in a bread pan until a good loaf shape, then bake at 350 until 180 degrees in the middle (best way to tell if bread is done!), about 40 minutes.

Eating down the fridge

I'm going to list some of what we ate this week because sometimes I think it's helpful just to get ideas of what to eat.

I read about this idea of "eating down the fridge" somewhere last year, and though I'd never thought to call it that, it was something I'd tried to do occasionally. The idea is that you don't shop for a week or however long it takes to eat what's in your fridge. Now, I've already confessed that I'm obsessed with food. A part of that obsession is some food hoarding tendencies. So if I combine what I have in the fridge with what I have in the pantry and the freezer, we could theoretically do this for a long time. My current goal is to try to eat most of what we have in the freezers, at least to the point where I'm more aware of what's in them. I've tried keeping lists, but never seem to manage keeping them updated.

This coincides with another current goal of mine, which is to strictly stick to the current iteration of our budget. I'm really good at making budgets, and not so good at following them. Luckily we sometimes have little injections of extra cash in the form of painting (and now pottery) sales that cover the overspending.

Here's our menu from last week:
Sun: Golden Cheddar Cheese soup, Irish soda bread. I should post the recipe for that soup - it was really good (potatoes, carrots, onions, butternut, pureed with boullion, buttermilk and cheese). I prefer biscuits to the soda bread.

Mon: shrimp and scallop linguini, green salad with nectarines, almonds, cranberries, orange segments and goat cheese, pear tart from Whole Foods (Valentine's Day was an exception)

Tues: burritos. Refried beans and corn from the freezer. Whole wheat tortillas, cheese, cabbage, salsa were in the fridge. Tomatoes and avocado purchased for this purpose.

Wed: leftover seafood pasta

Thurs: shredded pork tacos (shredded pork barbacoa from the freezer)

Fri: Ate out with a Living Social Coupon at Tana Ethiopian. It was good, but for the money, I'd rather have Udipi or Green Mango. If you do go there, we all agreed the spicy lentils were the best dish we had. Then we went to see the animated shorts at Regent Square theater (I had a couple of free passes from PCA)

Sat: lunch: Use-it-up/make-it-up pasta (I had some leftover cooked linguini in the fridge that I mixed with sauteed onions, carrots, and celery and other assorted odds and ends in the refrigerator: black olives, calamata olives, a bit of goat cheese, chopped sun-dried tomatoes. Dinner: vegetarian chili from the freezer and homemade cornbread (used powdered buttermilk, since I didn't have fresh)

Sun: Southwest style hamburgers (ground beef and buns from the freezer, topped with chipotle mayo, canned green chiles, avocado, tomato, lettuce and cheddar), oven fries and sweet potato fries, and roasted turnips (I got them from the farmer and have been postponing using them, but they weren't bad this way).

On the possible list for next week:
*pozole (freezer)
*mediterranean lentil salad
*black beans and rice with a little appetizer of shrimp and avocado ceviche to use some of the *shrimp in the freezer from Valentine's day)
*fresh green pea soup with homemade bread
*shrimp pad thai
*leftovers
*chinese stir-fry if there are enough vegetables left in the crisper, with dumplings (freezer) from TJ's
*maybe cheesy hashbrowns with ham (freezer)
*breakfast for dinner
*frittata with the leftover potatoes from the oven fries

I'll just need to buy some cilantro, but I think I have everything else. I will need more bananas and milk for breakfasts. Creepy, huh? And I think I can do a 3rd week, too. TMI?

Kettle Corn

One of the foods I never had before coming to Pittsburgh is Kettle Corn. They sell it at fairs and farmer's markets, cooking it in giant steel vats over a jet of burning fuel that reminds me of raku firing. It's salty and sweet, but not as sweet as caramel corn. They just throw the sugar, salt and popcorn into the hot oil all at the same time and stir like mad with a wooden paddle until the popping slows, then they tip the hinged vat into a bowl to cool and ring the bell to let you know it's ready to buy. It's quite a drama, especially if you've got little kids in tow. It also seems very expensive, especially given that the ingredients are so cheap. I didn't see how I could ever make it at home - you can't stir a stovetop sized pan of popcorn without it popping out all over the stove, and shaking it wouldn't be enough to keep the sugar from burning to the bottom.

To the rescue: my new kitchen toy, a stovetop popcorn popper (never used) that I picked up yesterday at the neighborhood yard sale for $1.50. I saw someone using one of these at girls camp this summer, and I was impressed at how much easier it was to get the results of stovetop popcorn without the hassle of shaking a pan over a hot flame. You turn the crank, and a little blade stirs the bottom of the pan, keeping the popcorn moving. We made a batch of plain popcorn last night for movie night, and it took less than 5 minutes, possibly even including the time it took to wash the pan. It's so much better than microwave popcorn.

As a side note, I also made myself some "popcorn salt" by running some salt in an old electric coffee grinder that I use for various kitchen tasks (like grinding spices). The finer salt sticks to the popcorn better and less of it goes farther.

Tonight, we tried the more ambitious kettle corn. It worked wonderfully, and was just as good as the stuff at the farmer's market. I keep popcorn in my food storage, because it lasts forever, and so I always have the ingredients on hand, and it probably costs about a quarter for 4 quarts of kettle corn. The funnest part is that it feels so old-fashioned, like pulling taffy or something, and just the thing for a family game night, but it's so easy. Next time you come over, ask for some popcorn or kettle corn, and I'll be happy to make some for you.