🥧🌲👀🥧 @mcmoots@kith.kitchen

The muffins are the clear winner here, everything else has detectable (but tolerable) off flavors from the milk.

Recipe (ignore the topping, they don't need it): https://livingthegourmet.com/2012/03/brown-sugar-crumb-topping-blueberry-muffins.html

Baked goods complete.

Today's batch cooking goals:
- Kippered herring onigiri
- Wakame salad (with cucumber which should arrive in tonight's grocery delivery)
- Sour milk jam thumbprint cookies
- Sour milk blueberry muffins
- Sour milk soda bread

We opened the milk jugs in the wrong order so the second one is bad again 😕 I'd make cheese out of it but we never actually used the last batch of going-bad cheese I made, so.

Partner convinced me to end Groceries Lent at the end of February, rather than waiting until the stretch goal of Pi Day. He has a harder time with improv cooking than I do, and we really are extremely out of vegetables.

Groceries Lent relies on me spending a good chunk of weekend time meal-planning and cooking ahead, especially near the end. And the soil was 46F in the garden today, which means it's time to stop cooking so much, and start gardening! 🌱

Cracked open my last jar of lilac syrup from 2 years ago. The flavor hasn't improved with age; it's fainter than I remember and has more of a vegetal note to it.

It's still a pretty nice lemonade though.

which cow part is best in pho?

(meal ideas cont'd)

- Curry with dehydrated zucchini and mushrooms again. It was fine. Make enough for leftovers this time.
- Miso soup with seaweeds for lunch
- Eat the cronches (and sprouts!) with sandwiches at lunch
- Pizza with artichokes + zucchini
- Sardine onigiri to use up some nori (and sardines)

So, meal ideas, and I would love to hear more:

- Wakame salad. With that one remaining elk steak + mushrooms?
- Ramen, with can of quail eggs + veg, seaweed, and dried zucchini
- Dried zucchini rehydrated in spaghetti sauce w/ artichokes. Maybe on top of millet as a side for elk osso buco.
- I want to do keema matar, which is not quite enough veggies to feel like a real meal. So just put some okra cronches on the plate with it?

(inventory continued)

- Partial bag of cronchy dried okra snack
- Partial bag of cronchy veggie chips
- 2 cans of tomatoes
- Dried nettles, which I think of as tea but they are also technically food
- I guess I could forage some alder catkins?

Snow was a big setback for dandelion greens but those will probably still appear at the beginning of March.

We have:

- 1.5 cans of artichoke hearts
- Frozen peas
- Dried zucchini
- Dried mushrooms (various)
- Dried seaweed (wakame + nori)
- Kale & collards in the garden, maybe a meal's worth - they've been pretty hard hit by the slugs
- Calendula greens of unknown quality, a lot of Asteraceae get nasty when old?
- All the alfalfa and radish seeds I can sprout
- Enough chickweed, bittercress, and salad burnet to garnish anything we want

- Onions (an exempt pantry staple)

Trying to figure out how to handle vegetables for the rest of Groceries Lent, as that's the first thing that's starting to feel scarce. This exercise is meant to be about creativity and thrift, not total deprivation, so we'll buy more when we really run out. But I want to make sure we are *really* running out, and that we buy more in a more thoughtful way than our usual "hey this is on sale maybe it can be a pizza topping".

Knotweed cake update: Rosewater was a good addition but 1tsp was too much.

Muffin update: they didn't rise very well, and the blueberries are more blue than purple. Was my sour milk not sour enough to react with all that baking soda?

I have narrowed down tomorrow's sour milk baking extravaganza plan to one batch of muffins (https://www.food.com/recipe/oatmeal-blueberry-muffins-88366) and one of two cakes:

Rhubarb cake, but using Japanese knotweed instead of rhubarb. https://www.bestrecipes.com.au/recipes/rhubarb-cake-recipe/3vbxdu24

Chocolate cake, but using roasted dandelion root instead of cocoa. https://nancy-c.com/2018/02/23/chocolate-sour-milk-cake/

Which cake should I make?

anyway the reason I believe it was a fridge problem is that the milk, which was scheduled to go bad today anyway, was Significantly Bad. Definitely worse than typical for expiration-day milk.

So I made my mother's banana bread recipe, which calls for sour milk, using some bananas I found buried in the back of the freezer. But that didn't use up enough milk. Muffins tomorrow I guess?

When we defrosted the freezer yesterday we threw a bunch of ice packs in the fridge to keep stuff cool, but it doesn't seem to have been enough. I don't really have enough experience to know if maybe elk (farmed elk!) is just gamey like that sometimes but uhhhh I defrosted it in a surge of optimism on Wednesday and that was probably too long ago.

Made meatballs anyway last night, ate in curry, did not get sick 🤷. Eating the rest tonight on spaghetti.

Snow day pantry dessert! I had some mango puree squeeze packs in the stash of emergency covid supplies I bought last March, and I added some sugar to half a can of evaporated milk in an inferior but basically adequate sweetened condensed milk effort. Plus, of course, the fresh snow.

It's not quite entirely unlike bingsoo.

Made a double batch of these breakfast cookies on Wednesday that I was hoping would last most of next week. They're about 2/3 of the way gone already.

They're not especially great, but they're tasty enough and healthy enough and convenient enough, and I have a lot of applesauce.

https://happyhealthymama.com/healthy-apple-spiced-breakfast-or-snack-cookies.html