Curried Beef Wontons

I seem to gather recipes wherever I go, I have been doing this since I was in high school and we won't even talk about how long ago that was.  I have three cloth bound journal style books full of recipes dating back to the early '80s, my first recipe journal, dating back to the late '70s, was a spiral bound notebook.   This particular recipe comes from an acquaintance, whose name I sadly have forgotten over the years.  He brought these wontons to a gathering, and since I love curry he gladly shared his recipe, now I will share it with you.  

According to Food.com, "curry powder is a blend of up to 20 different herbs and spices, including the commonly used: cardamom, chiles, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, fennel, fenugreek, mace, nutmeg, pepper, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, saffron, tamarind and tumeric (which gives curry its characteristic golden color)."  They also go on to say that "curry quickly loses its pungency. It will keep for 2 months in an airtight container."  I have had mine for a little longer than that and it is still pungent, but considering this advice it is probably best to buy curry in small amounts, unless you use it regularly.  Penzeys Spices says "Tandoori, Maharajah and Sweet Curry are rich and flavorful without being hot.  Hot Curry and Vindaloo are hot and spicy.  Garam Masala, Rogan Josh, Saté and Balti are somewhere in between.  Just starting out?  Try Sweet Curry, Rogan Josh, Tandoori, Balti or Sate Seasoning."  I used a Sweet Curry for this recipe. 

I don't make these as often as pork wontons, which we like even better, but these are very good and it is fun to take both kinds to a gathering to share. I have made these at the same time as the pork wontons, using the same frying oil, just be sure to make the curry wontons last as some of the curry may flavor the oil.

To shape the wontons, place about one tablespoon full in the center of the wonton skin and using water or egg white to moisten all the edges, fold into a triangle, then bring two of the points together as shown above.  These are good alone or served with a Sweet and Sour Sauce.  I have not tried it yet, but I am thinking that a teaspoon of dried chili peppers added to the sweet and sour sauce would add a complimentary spice to these wontons.

Curried Beef Wontons

1/2 pound cooked and shredded beef (I use a slow-cooked roast)

1 teaspoon dry sherry

1 teaspoon cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1/8 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons sweet curry powder

2 teaspoons sesame seed oil

2 green onions, minced

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 to 2/3 package of wonton skins

Peanut oil for frying

Mix and marinate for 1/2 hour.  Place one tablespoon of mixture into the center of a wonton skin, moisten the edges of the skin with water or egg white, fold into a triangle and then bring two of the points together and moisten to attach.  Deep fry in hot peanut oil over medium-high heat.  Drain, and enjoy with Sweet and Sour Sauce.

Sense of Home Recipes / Appetizers

Pork Wontons

I rarely deep fry anything, however, I have made these wontons many times and every time I make them I can't believe how good they are.  There is something about the pork, onion, sherry and soy sauce insides mixed with the deep-fried goodness on the outside that just gets me, and then when you dip them into a sweet and sour sauce - oh my!  My complaint with wontons at restaurants is they never put enough filling inside, sometimes it seems there is scarcely a teaspoon in there.  The exception is cream cheese wontons, those are usually filled full of yumminess.  I also have a Curried Beef Wonton recipe I want to share with you, but I digress.

I received this recipe on a notecard at my bridal shower many years ago and it quickly became a favorite.  I have made them for an "Appetizer and Dessert" party I hosted and a full Chinese dinner for my family that included the dramatic cellophane noodles dropped into hot oil (kids and adults think this is cool), but mostly I have just made them on their own so we could eat as many as we like before I put the remainder in the freezer for another day.

When you are ready to assemble and fry the wontons be sure to have everything ready to go, they will fry up quick in the hot oil and you will be non-stop busy folding triangles and pulling out golden brown wontons to drain on a rack.  I use water to seal my wonton skins, just dip a finger in the water, wipe it along the edges of the filled wonton skin and fold and seal tight.  Water works just fine for me, but many people use egg whites, your choice.  The wontons often have such a good seal on them they puff up with air and when I turn them with a pair of tongs I have to hold them on that side for a bit or they will just flip back over on me.

Pork Wontons

1 pound ground pork, cooked
3 green onions, chopped
4 water chestnuts, chopped
a pinch of sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon sherry
4 mushrooms, chopped
a pinch of fresh pepper

1 package wonton skins
Peanut oil for frying

Mix the first nine ingredients together.  Cover the wonton skins with a damp towel when working with them so they do not dry out.  Assemble the wontons by placing a scant tablespoon of the mixture in the center of a wonton skin.  Seal the wonton skin edges with water or egg white, fold them into a triangle shape and then pull two of the points together and seal with water or egg white.  Deep fry in peanut oil over medium high heat until golden brown.  Serve with sweet and sour sauce.  These may be frozen and reheated in a 300 degree F. oven until hot, being careful not to brown them more. 


Sense of Home Recipes / Appetizers

Sweet and Sour Sauce

Sweet and Sour Sauce

1/4 cup brown sugar (packed)

2 tablespoons cornstarch

3/4 cup pineapple juice

1/4 cup water

1/4 cup vinegar

2 tablespoons ketchup

In a 2 quart saucepan, mix sugar and cornstarch.  Add pineapple juice, water, vinegar and ketchup to the sugar and cornstarch, mix well.  Cook stirring constantly, until mixture thickens and boils.  Serve warm with pork or curried beef wontons.

Sunday Stills

House For Rent

Oatmeal Fruit Cookies

Here at Sense of Home we love cookies and this recipe is particularly good, think oatmeal raisin cookie meets chewy granola bar.  These cookies are as healthy as any purchased granola bar, likely healthier, so they make a good midday snack.  Keeping home baked goodies on hand is important to me, it prevents us from buying junk food at the store or from the vending machine at work.   

Any dried fruit or nut would work in these cookies, I dehydrated several kinds of fruits this summer and am thinking of putting dried cherries rather than the raisins in the next batch.  I like the addition of coconut, but if you don't, leave it out.  Sunflower or pumpkin seeds would also be good in place of the nuts.  Just keep the nut and fruit measurements the same.

I make cookies small so that I can eat two, it is a psychological thing, one cookie doesn't seem like enough.  Remember though, they are still full of sugar so small doses are best.  I always put my cookies in the freezer and we take them from there, it keeps them soft and fresh.  My husband puts a couple in his lunch in the morning and they thaw well before he is ready to eat them.

Oatmeal Fruit Cookies
Makes about 3 dozen

1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup honey
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 cups rolled oats
1 cup raisins
1 cup dates, pitted and chopped
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup shredded coconut

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.  Cream butter with brown sugar and honey in a large mixing bowl until light and fluffy.  Beat in eggs and vanilla.  Sift flour, soda and salt into egg mixture and stir well.  Add remaining ingredients and blend thoroughly. 

Drop walnut-size balls onto baking sheet and bake for approximately 12 minutes.  Cool on rack and store in airtight container.  If not using within a few days, freeze to keep them fresh.


Sense of Home recipes

A Few Good Books

My reading has led me to some very good books lately and I wanted to share them with you.  First a book that is easy to locate, Prairie in Her Heart: Pioneer Women of North Dakota.  This book discusses women's role in homesteading on the prairie, there was much to learn and they had to be self-sufficient.  Many first or second hand accounts are recorded and the stories are amazing.  They were brave, determined, adventurous, and resourceful.  Some of the stories are quite funny, seems a sense of humor was necessary.  I love this portion of a story of a young homesteader, "Her first attempt with bread was such a failure she tearfully threw out the dough, and then later found baby chicks stuck in it.  Being a determined person she became an excellent housekeeper and cook."

Another book that I really enjoyed was The Sod-House Frontier 1854 - 1890.  I could only find this one used copy on Amazon, it looks like it was reprinted since the date on the book for sale says 1979 and my copy was printed in 1943.  Here is the same title, I believe, but the prices are higher.  I picked up my book from a library discard sale table, whenever I travel I stop at used book stores and comb the shelves for books like this that are out of print.  Anyway the book is full of interesting bits.  Many of the pioneers had little money and lived on what they could grow or what cost the least.  Page 270 says pioneer food suffered from sameness and corn was the staple article of their diet.  "one dollar's worth of corn would furnish the same amount of nutriment as two dollars and fifty cents' worth of wheat or four dollars' worth of potatoes."  The children carried cornbread and molasses to school for sandwiches.   In the winter the cows would dry up so they ate cornmeal mush with salt alone or with meat scraps.  Some said after those years they could never eat cornbread again.  One coffee substitute "consisted of cornmeal and molasses fried together until they were powdered.  This semi-burned mixture, when boiled, produced a makeshift coffee."  You see I focused in on the food right away, the book also mentioned how they preserved summer fruits and vegetables by drying, pickling, or making jellies.  Canning was not a common practice in a frontier sod house and, of course, there was no freezer until winter set in.  Meat was eaten fresh killed or dried until winter, then they could store cuts in barrels outside.  The book also covers homesteading, vigilante days, battling nature, finance and more.  Not too much on gardening or crops for household use, that just seemed to be a part of everyday life, with not many details written down.

Women of the Northern Plains is another interesting account of homesteading women, whether they came alone or with a husband and children.  This account though has more details and facts, not just personal accounts.  So the feel of the book is more scholarly, perhaps.  I have not quite finished reading this one yet so this is just my impression so far.  One of the accounts I enjoyed went like this "As Christianson was breaking sod one day, a group of young Indian men followed him, turning the heavy chunks back to their original position, grass side up, covering the exposed soil.  Christianson stopped, offered the men some tobacco, and asked why they were undoing his work.  They pointed to the broken sod and said, 'Wrong side up! Wrong side up!'  For Indians, the land's value lay in its grass, which supplied food for deer, elk, bison, and horses as well as prairie turnips, wild fruits, and other plants for people to harvest.  European and Yankee settlers, however, believed the land's greatest potential could be released only by breaking it open with a plow and planting in it the seeds of domesticated grasses."

Pioneer Girl: Growing Up On the Prairie is the true account of Grace McCance's family homesteading in Nebraska in 1885.  Written by her daughter, it follows Grace's experiences as a homesteading child as she remembers it.  It is written for children ages 9 - 12.

I recently picked up Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning and though I haven't tried any of the preserving recipes, there are several I want to try next summer when the garden is producing again.  The back of the book says "here is a book that goes back to the future celebrating traditional but little know French techniques for storing and preserving edibles in ways that maximize flavor and nutrition."

I also really enjoyed Land in Her Own Name, this link is a book review I wrote of that book nearly a year ago.

I have a few more books I will be reading over the winter and as I do I may write a book review of some of them.  It has been fascinating reading about the lives of the early settlers.  Your library may have these books available locally or through Interlibrary loan.

Have you read any early settler books that I should read?  I am always looking for another good book.


Sense of Home / Homemade Living / Book Reviews

Potato and Corn Gratin

On Sunday, when deciding what to make that would provide another meal during the week, I was paging through a bound notebook of recipes I collected in the 1980s (crikey, that sounds like a long time ago).  I came across this gratin and having a goodly supply of potatoes in the "root cellar" I decided this was just the thing to make.

Naturally being from North Dakota I also decided the Dakota Red was the potato of choice for this recipe.  A food processor makes quick work of slicing plus I could never get each slice the same width, which helps when it comes to cooking time. 

The corn I used is some I had taken off the cob and froze back in September, I wrote about the method I use here.  After making the recipe we decided that this would also be good with crispy bacon added.  So when we ate leftovers Monday evening I cooked up some bacon and mixed it in.  Yes, bacon is a good addition to this dish, the amount is your choice, I think a little spreads the favor throughout, but a little or a lot, it would be good either way.  As you can see I did not have the green onion or chives, but that would have given the dish a nice color contrast.

Potato and Corn Gratin

4 to 6 servings

2 pounds potatoes, peeled and sliced into thin rounds

Salt and ground white pepper, to taste

1 cup of frozen corn

5 tablespoons of butter cut into small pieces

2 cups buttermilk

2 tablespoons minced fresh chives or green onions for garnish

optional:

add bacon pieces that have been fried crisp

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.  Generously butter a 9 x 12-inch gratin or other baking dish.  Arrange half of the potato slices in a single layer in the bottom of the dish, overlapping slightly.  Season with salt and pepper.  Sprinkle with 1/2 cup corn, sprinkle 1/2 of the bacon if using, and dot with 2 1/2 tablespoons of butter.  Repeat layering.  Pour buttermilk over.  Bake until milk is absorbed and potatoes start to brown, about 1 to 1 1/4 hours.  Sprinkle with minced chives or green onion and serve.

Sense of Home recipes

Linked to Tuesday Twister and Real Food Wednesday

   

Snug for Winter

It looks like winter is here to stay this time.  The snow came down sideways, 4 inches of it, and with a forecast for high temperatures to be in the teens this week, it won't be going away anytime soon.  We have prepared for this inevitability so we are snug for the winter.

I've got the cold air stop at the bottom of the door we do not use in winter.  Our meat freezer and our vegetable, fruit, and miscellaneous freezer are full, the pantry is stocked with foods I have dehydrated, purchased or canned.

We close the drapes as soon as we get home in the evening and open them before leaving for work in the morning.  It is surprising how much cold air is behind the drapes and during the day if the sun is shining it warms the house.  At night we turn the thermostat down even more and leave our heavy quilt on the bed, we are snug under layers of warmth.

We keep the temperature low at our house so I have a supply of cotton and wool socks to keep my feet warm.  We don't wear shoes in the house, it keeps the house cleaner and does not wear out the carpet as fast, however, this fall I was feeling the need for some extra warmth on my feet so when I found the above slipper shoes on clearance, I snagged them.  They are toasty warm.  I have been wearing these in the mornings before work when I where tights and a skirt, they are so warm and comfortable one morning I got in the car, looked down, and saw I still had them on.....back to the house.  

Even the cat was not so sure he wanted to go outside.  He is a housecat, but he loves to zip outside when we open the door, not this time, the sight of snow and the cold temperture stopped him in his tracks.

Sunday Stills

The Heart of the Home

The days are full, besides a full day of work some days include running errands, stopping to visit with my grandmother and taking care of her needs.  The weather has turned cold and gray, it is dusk or even dark by the time I leave work.  I arrive home, walk into the house, grab an apron and begin to relax.  I simply look forward to warming the house with the evening meal, the day begins to slow, and my thoughts turn from board meetings to chopping onions and garlic and stirring a pot of chili.

Here at Sense of Home the kitchen is the heart of our home, conversations take place around the table or while washing dishes by hand.  Music or the evening news plays while chopping, sauteing, mixing and baking.  The cat winds himself around my feet and nearly trips me while I move from the sink to the stove.  The heart of the home is where the action is, where we want to be. 

This kitchen has seen countless meals cooked, messes made, dishes washed, conversations of future plans, cooking successes and even failures. This is where it all happens. It is a short walk out the kitchen door to the garden for vegetables in the summer and a quick dash out to the compost in the winter. Here at Sense of Home the heart of the home is where it all happens, where I want to be.

Sense of Home / A Homemade Life

Harvest Muffins

Soft, moist, spicy, these muffins have autumn written all over them.  We have had a beautiful autumn, lots of sunshine and mild temperatures.  There is a change in the air though, last night when I left work I had to scrap ice off the windshield.  A couple days ago, before autumn left completely, I decided to make these Harvest Muffins.

Harvest muffin recipes are a dime a dozen, however, applesauce, carrots, hazelnuts, cinnamon, ginger, raisins are the  ingrediants I wanted in my harvest muffins.   Note the very large carrot in the above photo, my coworker's mother gave me a bag of very large carrots she dug from her garden in October.  Despite their size these carrots are sweet and juicy, nothing woody about these tasty orange roots.

The muffins are a little peaked, the sign of over mixing, but not too bad.  Yes, I use paper liners.  I have never had good success getting the muffins to come out in one piece without them.  These muffins could be made with all whole wheat flour.  I make them with half whole wheat, half all-purpose flour because my husband prefers a lighter muffin and marriage is about compromise. 

 

Harvest Muffins

Makes approximately 24 medium-sized muffins

1/2 cup butter, softened

2 large eggs

1 1/4 cup plain yogurt

1/2 cup chunky applesauce

1 1/4 cup honey

1 cup shredded carrots

1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 teaspoon ginger

1 cup raisins

1 cup hazelnuts, toasted, skinned and chopped

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Mix butter, eggs, yogurt, applesauce, honey and carrots together.  Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and ginger and stir into moist ingredients until just combined.  Add raisins and hazelnuts and stir briefly to distribute.

Spoon batter into prepared muffin tins and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Sense of Home recipes

Linked to Real Food Wednesday.

Health Benefits of Pomegranates

Originally from the middle east or asia the pomegranate grows wild from Iran to Northern India.  With the rise in popularity the pomegranate now grows as a cultivated fruit in India, Africa, southern Europe and the United States.  The fruit grows on a large shrub or small tree, in the northern hemisphere the fruit comes into season September through January, in the southern hemisphere March through May.

The pomegranate is an impressive source of nutrition.  Consider these nutritional facts from the Pomegranate Council.

• High in vitamin C
• High in potassium
• Good source of fiber
• Low in calories
• High in polyphenols, a potent form of antioxidants which are credited with helping in the prevention of cancer and heart disease.

To get the most nutrition from the pomegranate, eat the seeds while they are at their freshest and juiciest.  It is beneficial to eat the entire seed, not just suck the juice, most of the fiber comes from the seed.  

How to Eat a Pomegranate

• Cut off the crown.
• Cut the pomegranate into sections.
• Place the sections in a bowl of water.
• Roll out the arils (juice sacs) with your fingers, compost the rind.
• Strain out the water.
• Eat the arils whole, seeds and all.

When buying pomegranates look for fruit with skin that is thin and intact.  Store fruit at room temperature, out of direct sunlight, for several days or refrigerate for longer storage. 

Besides enjoying a cool glass of pomegranate juice, throw a few seeds on a green salad or try out some of the recipes at pomegranates.org.  Just remember the juice can stain, so be careful when preparing the fruit.

Sense of Home Healthy Living

Linked to Simple Lives Thursday.