Allyson

Chicken and dumplings are a staple in my house. They’re something in between a soup and a stew, and I usually get silly and call it Stoup. They’re incredibly easy to make, though it takes a bit of effort until you’ve learned the method. It’s filling, delicious, and you’ll get requests.

Ingredients for the stoup:

• 6 to 8 oz of uncooked chicken per person
• enough water to cover the chicken
• salt, pepper, oregano, thyme, and rubbed sage to taste
• 1 medium carrot, diced small
• 1 small onion, diced small
• 1 large rib of celery, diced small
• a teaspoon or so of butter, margarine, or olive oil
• white wine to deglaze the pan

Ingredients for the dumplings:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1.5 teaspoons salt
• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg

The chicken for this recipe can be done in two different ways. First, you can use bone-in chicken pieces and make it like “pulled chicken,” meaning you cook it, then remove it from the water and shred it up until it’s the size of bits you like. Second, you can use boneless, skinless chicken breast or thighs, in which case you’re going to cube your chicken into bite size pieces. Regardless of which method you choose to use, you should sprinkle the chicken with salt and pepper, then brown it in a cast iron pan (separate from the one you’ll be making the broth in). Make sure to brown all sides, but remember it doesn’t need to be cooked through. The full cooking happens in the water.

While you’re browning your chicken in batches, add enough water to a pot that it will cover your chicken when it’s added. It’s okay if you don’t get quite enough in the pot; you can add more after. You just want to get enough in there that you can start heating it up to a boil. As you finish browning chicken parts, put them into the water. Make sure there’s enough water to cover all the chicken completely, but not much more, and then lower it from a boil to a simmer. Add in your spices, about a teaspoon of each for now. You can add more later if needed.

As your chicken is simmering, dice up your carrot, onion, and celery. Add a bit of fat to the pan you cooked the chicken in, and saute your vegetables until the onions are soft and beginning to clarify. Add a tablespoon or so of a dry white wine to the pan, and stir and scrape well with a wooden spoon. All of the stuff you scrape off the bottom of the pan is “fond” and it’s what makes your stoup delicious. Add the veggies and fond to your chicken and broth.

Make your dumplings. Add the four and salt into a medium bowl. In a separate bowl or measuring cup, whisk together your milk and egg. Add the liquid to the flour, and mix until it forms a dough. This should be a soft and relatively smooth dough, with very elastic qualities. It may be a bit sticky or tacky, but it shouldn’t stick to the counter when you’re kneading.

Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface until it’s smooth and elastic. Keeping the counter lightly floured at each stage, you should then roll out your dough so it’s as thick as you like your dumplings to be. If you like your dumplings to be fat and fluffy, you’ll want to roll them out to about a half inch thick. If you want them more like noodles (my preference), roll them to under a quarter inch, basically as smooth and thin as you can manage without the dough sticking to the counter. Cut your dumplings into strips, squares, diamonds, or really any shape you like. you can use a dough cutter, or a knife, or even a rolling pizza cutter. Use a bread scraper to lift the noodles off the counter, dust them well with more flour, and let them rest and dry a bit while the rest of the food is readied.

When your chicken is thoroughly cooked (about an hour, or longer if you like), pull any boned parts out of the broth. Shred, if you like, and return the chicken to the broth. Bring the broth to a low but steady boil, and begin adding the dumplings to it a little at a time. I usually add about a handful of dumplings, then stir and let them begin to cook. This keeps them from sticking to one another. The flour on the outside of the dumplings will help thicken the gravy in your stoup, too. Cook the dumplings until they’re tender. This can take anywhere from five minutes to 20 minutes, depending on how thick they were rolled and how dry they were when you started. They should be solid throughout, with no doughy interior. Thin ones will taste like fresh noodles (which is essentially what they are).

If you find that your gravy isn’t thick enough, add a little water or cold broth to a tablespoon of cornstarch, stir until well combined, and then add a bit at a time to the simmering stoup. Repeat until you reach the consistency you prefer. Add in any spices you like, and if you want a fancier look, top each bowl with a sprinkle of fresh minced parsley.

Serve your chicken and dumplings over a pile of mashed potatoes, rice, or on their own in a bowl with a spoon.

Hey all, I’ve been considering a variety of topics for the next few weeks. With spring rapidly coming, I could talk about gardening, and explain how to start seeds indoors, and all the stuff that goes along with making a functioning garden that will provide actual food. I could write about raising chickens (and/or other livestock, though I have less experience with non-chicken livestock) and what that takes. I could go into how one makes staples, like bread, cheese, butter, and the like. I could talk about mending and making clothing, blankets, and such.

What do you all want to hear about? My gut says go with gardening, but I also want to write what is of interest and useful to y’all.

The past couple of weeks have been an absolute whirlwind. So much so that I really don’t have anything specific to write about. Part of the problem I’m having is that when I write the night before (like I am now), it might be out of date by morning. That’s what happened last Wednesday. I don’t like it when that happens.

Let’s see. First, I’ve been very happy to see what’s going on with DOGE. I have long held the opinion that “smaller government is better government” and DOGE seems to be doing just that. I’m confused as all get out over people weeping about “the poor federal workers who got canned” when those “poor” federal workers got 8 months of salary to play on. Most of them will have jobs by the end of the month, and that 8 months of salary is theirs to keep for holiday or Christmas or whatever. There’s nothing poor about them. I never got 8 months (or even 8 days) of salary when getting fired.

NH had a bill, HB 283, put forward. If you’d like to look at it yourself, you can find it (and lots of commentary from pundits) here. Basically, as I read it, it says that NH schools will (if the bill passes) no longer require world languages, arts and music, engineering and tech, computer science, and personal financial literacy in order to graduate. The number of credits remains the same. What I read, when I looked at the bill, was that NH wanted to focus on having students who could read, write, and do ‘rythmatic, first and foremost, and so those were made most important and required. I see that schools that are struggling to put out kids who can do those very basic things can now focus on just those basic things. What the bill does NOT say is that those other subjects are being removed from the school.

However, the NEA and other Dem groups are basically telling their folks that the Republicans want to take all those subjects out of schools. They have ads on Facebook and other places. I keep going onto them and asking people, have you actually read the bill? Most of them very obviously have not, and are simply taking their talking points and moving on. The pearl clutching is horrifying.

I am less irritated by those who did read the bill and have constructive commentary to make about it. It’s been suggested by a friend that less requirements means people will not bother taking courses on art and engineering and such. I find that unlikely. Every high school kid I know (and I know lots of them, because my own kids are just barely out of high school) takes subjects that are not required. They take art, or “language arts in comic books” (a surprisingly robust and very good English course, I might add), or whatever other equivalent to “underwater basket weaving” there is. Art and music aren’t leaving the schools, anymore than the football team is. There’s a ton of opposition to the bill, so I am guessing it won’t pass, but I don’t see it as the major threat that the Left obviously does.

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I made this last week. It was rich, delicious, filling, and just the right thing after a long day of moving snow.

Ingredients:

• 3 lbs beef, cut into 1” cubes
• salt
• black pepper
• 1 tbsp oil
• 1 pkg bacon, cut into small pieces
• 2 large carrots, peeled, sliced on bias into large chunks
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 2 cups dry red wine
• 2 cups beef broth
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1/2 lb pearl onions
• 8 oz mushrooms, quartered
• cornstarch mixed with cold beef broth, for thickening

Preheat oven to 350°. Season beef with salt and pepper.

In an oven proof pot, heat a little oil over medium heat. Add the bacon and cook until it’s crispy, stirring occasionally. This will take about six minutes. Pull the bacon out of the pot with a slotted spoon and put it on a paper towel lined plate to drain.

Increase the heat to medium high, and then add in the beef chunks in a single layer. Don’t crowd the pot, as the beef needs to be able to move around freely. Do it in batches, removing properly seared beef and adding it to the pile of bacon.

Once all the beef is seared, remove all but a tablespoon or two of the bacon fat in the pot. Lower the heat to medium, and stir in the carrot and onion. Cook until the onions are wilted and the carrots begin to soften, which should take about five minutes. Stir in the garlic and tomato paste, and cook until fragrant. Add a splash of red wine to the pot and deglaze it, making sure to scrape any “stuff” off the bottom of the pot and incorporate it into the onion mixture.

Add in the beef and bacon, the rest of the wine, broth to cover the meat and veggies entirely, spices, onions, and mushrooms. Stir gently to incorporate, and then cover the pot with a tight fitting lid. Put the pot in the oven and cook until the beef is fork tender and the sauce is slightly thickened. This will take about an hour and a half to two hours.

Remove the pot from the oven, and set it on top of the stove. On a medium high heat, bring the liquid to a low boil. Slowly pour in a tablespoon or so of cornstarch mixed in with some beef broth, and stir the stew well. Continue to add a tablespoon or so of the cornstarch slurry until you reach the desired thickness.

Serve your Beef Bourguignon over mashed potatoes, and with a side of your favorite vegetable.

Notes:

I tend to buy larger cans of tomato paste. When I open a new can, I measure out two tablespoon “plops” onto parchment paper, and put it in the freezer. Once it’s frozen, I stick the plops into a baggie, which I can then pull from whenever I need tomato paste. If you’re using frozen tomato paste, let it simmer until it dissolves into the onion mixture before moving onto the next step.

You can thicken the liquid with a roux if you prefer, but the silkiness of a sauce made with cornstarch is hard to beat. Because cornstarch is entirely starch, you need half or less of the amount you’d need of flour, in order to get the same level of thickness. A roux of flour will tend to make a thick gravy that is dark and heavy, while a roux (or “slurry”) of cornstarch will be lighter both in color and texture. There are places for both, but I prefer the cornstarch in this recipe.

If your family are not big mushroom or onion fans, you can cook those separately in a pan and add them as a topping in each bowl, instead of cooking them in the stew. Again, this is a matter of preference.

I know we’re out of season, but this seemed to be a good topic. Butchering applies to all animals, and whether you’re taking something small or large, there’s a level of skill to getting it done. The video is self explanatory, and it’s pretty good. I learned things watching it, and I hope you do, too.

I wanted to talk about butchering in general, though, for those who may not want to sit through an hour long video (though I do recommend doing so when you have time, it’s VERY good). In my very strong opinion, the hardest part about harvesting an animal is killing it. Once the animal is dead, it doesn’t really matter what you do to the body. It’s not going to complain or suffer in any way. So if you can shoot or otherwise dispatch the animal, know that the butchering can go as slow as needed and no one’s going to judge you for your cuts.

The purpose of butchering is to get the meat off the animal and into usable pieces. When you’re talking about large game like deer, elk, moose, bear, and the like, you will be dealing with parts rather than a whole animal. Like in the video, your butchering will consist of taking pieces off the larger carcass, and then preparing them for freezing or otherwise preserving them for long-term storage. Smaller animals like chickens, ducks, geese, possum, squirrel, etc. are small enough to allow you to work with the whole animal, and so the process is slightly different. You can prepare the entire carcass for freezing or preserving, which can be easier (but occasionally is more tedious).

The first order of business with any animal is to remove the guts, the viscera. Generally speaking, this involves opening the stomach cavity from the anus to the ribs, and then carefully pulling everything out. In larger animals this is pretty easy except for the first cuts. I always worry I’m going to puncture something when I’m cutting around the anus, and you don’t want that because you don’t want fecal matter in what’s going to be your food. Basically, you have one long connected tube (or more correctly, set of tubes) that go from mouth to ass, and you need to remove it all. There are internal organs that can be eaten, like the heart, liver, and kidneys. Technically, brain is also edible, as well as other stuff, but the other areas are very much filters for all sorts of things. Liver and kidneys, while filters, aren’t likely to pass anything on to you (especially after both freezing and cooking), but I always avoid the brain, lungs, and other stuff. The sole exception to this is that you can use the large intestines of some animals to make sausage casing (generally you would use pig, but technically any large animal intestine will do), but it requires a lot of cleaning to make it safe. Hides on larger animals can be removed first or last, depending on how you’re storing it during processing.

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The trade wars going on are making me chuckle. First, we have Mexico. Trump imposed a tariff on them, slated to begin at 12:01am Tue. Feb. 4rd. By 10am Monday, Trump had fielded a call from Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, and the tariffs were put on hold for a month. Why a month, you ask? Because Sheinbaum promised to “…reinforce the northern border with 10,000 members of the National Guard immediately, to stop drug trafficking from Mexico to the United States, in particular fentanyl.” (AP)

Canada… now they’re doubling down. Or rather, I should say that outgoing Prime Minister Trudeau is doubling down. He’s put a 25% tariff on certain items coming from the US to Canada (the list is here: Canada.ca). Having zipped through the list, it looks like chicken and other poultry, cheese and other dairy products, wine and other alcohol, cigarettes, and then a list of various smaller products like suits and jackets, carpets, etc. The biggest one for me is the chicken. We in America have been experiencing a rising in chicken prices because we have less chickens due to many of them being slaughtered due to avian flu (I’m on the fence over it, but having talked to egg and meat producers myself, it’s not that big a deal and isn’t the main reason costs went up). If we’re not exporting chickens and eggs, that means we get to eat them. That should lead to our prices going DOWN. Seems like a win to me.

Canada placing tariffs on our goods going north means that our folks will find people willing to pay better prices down here, in America. That means we keep American produce in America. That seems like a huge win to me. Bring it on.

Funny (to me) quote: “And don’t forget bar cabinet staples, like tequila and Canadian whisky. According to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a trade group, the U.S. imported $4.6 billion worth of tequila and $108 million worth of mescal from Mexico, as well as $537 million worth of Canadian spirits – including $202.5 million worth of whisky.” (AP) Goodness gracious, what ever will we do if we can’t buy Mexican tequila and Canadian whiskey? Oh, right, we make those here. Never mind then. LOL!

And then we have Panama. I don’t understand all the minutia with the trade agreements between Panama and China, but I know that we used to own the canal. We built the damn thing. I can’t find news on it, but I heard through the grapevine that Panama has already caved on their Chinese partners, and modified things to allow better and more preferential treatment to American ships using the canal, thereby halting (at least temporarily) Trump’s tariffs.

The bottom line is, everyone’s now watching Canada. They’re the only ones who didn’t immediately give in. I’m pretty sure that Canada is going to hurt more from this than America is. While Canada is a little bit larger, it has less population by far (336 million in America versus Canada’s 41 million). They simply don’t have what it takes to win this trade war. Eventually, they’ll give in.

And while I’m pretty sure that Trump’s comments about making Canada the 51st state were jokes, there would be benefits to both countries in merging. It also might allow for some spacing out of people, maybe “redistricting” in a way? Regardless, it’s a fascinating idea.

At this time of year, with the blisteringly cold nights, a pot of hearty potato soup is just the thing to warm you. I love this plain, where I get to enjoy the simple flavors of the potato itself. I also love it “blinged out” with cheese and onions and other delicious additives. It’s super easy to make, too!

Ingredients:

• two tbsp margarine, butter or olive oil
• one potato per person, plus one extra, diced, skins on or off to taste
• one to two onions, chopped roughly
• one tbsp minced garlic per person
• enough chicken or vegetable stock to cover the potatoes completely
• milk or cream, to taste
• finely chopped fresh parsley (optional)
• crumbled fresh bacon (optional)
• shredded cheese of your choice (optional)

In a soup pot, heat your butter or oil and add the onions. Cook for a few minutes, until the onions are clear and limp. Add the garlic and stir well, cooking for another minute. If you are using fresh parsley, add half of it now and give the onions a good stir, then add the potatoes and the broth, just to cover them. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until potatoes are tender and starting to fall apart.

Remove the pot from the heat. Using a potato masher, mash the potatoes until they are the consistency you like. Some people prefer a lumpy soup, with large chunks of potatoes (that would be me). Others like a smooth, pureed soup (my children), and this can be achieved by pouring the soup into a food processor or blender and giving it a bit of a whir. Alternatively, you can use an immersion blender easily enough for something in between.

Once the soup is the right consistency, return it to a medium high heat and bring it to a low boil. Add your cream or milk if you want, and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer until it’s as thick as you like it. As a quick fix, if you find your soup isn’t thick enough, you can always add dehydrated potato flakes until it’s the right thickness. Add the remaining fresh parsley right before removing it from the heat, and stir to distribute evenly. Serve the soup in large bowls garnished with a sprig of parsley, and a sprinkle each of bacon and cheese.

Notes:

If you’re in a real hurry, or you’re exhausted and just want potato soup, use instant potato flakes in your favorite flavor. Add enough liquid to make it soupy, then add your onions, parsley, and toppings. This isn’t as good as making it yourself, but it’s nice in a pinch or when you’re camping and don’t want to be bothered with whole potatoes.

You can add all sorts of things to potato soup. A loaded baked potato soup would have bacon, onions, sauteed mushrooms, and cheese. You could do broccoli and cheese as a topper for something that pretends to be healthier. Add a dollop of sour cream and paprika to the top for a creamier finish. Use your imagination!

Chris asked me to write this. He wanted me to write it because we got into a long, drawn out and rather loud discussion last night over it. It was emotional, on my part at least. I got very frustrated because I couldn’t seem to voice what I wanted to, and Chris was offering me solutions and excuses for Trump. That wasn’t what I wanted. Also, this hits me differently, I think, as someone new to “right of the left.”

So let’s start at the beginning.

I listened to Trump’s press conference about the DC crash. I started watching with a certain amount of nervousness, because I know Trump often says things during stuff like this. I was expecting a few gaffes, but I kind of got thrown sideways (emotionally) over some of what he said. For those who want the full transcript, it’s here. I’ll be quoting from it below.

I was trying to not cringe over the commentary about how much better his (Trump’s) policies were than Biden or Obama’s. Frankly, when I’m tuning in to find out what’s going on with a crash, I do not want to hear finger pointing. Do that after, when we have facts in hand. But it’s Trump, and I put it off to grandstanding, which is normal for him no matter how much it irritates me. Then he said this:

“But we’ll restore faith in American air travel. I’ll have more to say about that. I do want to point out that various articles that appeared prior to my entering office, and here’s one. The FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities. That is amazing. And then it says, FAA says, people with severe disabilities are most underrepresented segment of the workforce and they want them in and they want them. They can be air traffic controllers. I don’t think so.”

I know people who do piloting and ATC. While I know that there’s been a push to get women and people with different skin color into ATC, I didn’t think they’d lowered their standards. I did 15 minutes of investigation, and according to what I read, their method of finding people had changed, but their requirements for hiring had not. As a side note, apparently I didn’t look back far enough, as there’s a Fox article about changes done in 2015. I didn’t look that far back last night. Regardless, I translate the above statement from Trump to say, “People in wheelchairs and who are mentally defective can be air traffic controllers.” That statement is not true. Looking back on it now, it’s one of Trump’s “aggrandizement” statements, making his claim sound bigger than it is. I believe Chris would consider it to be a gaffe or misspeak, as opposed to a lie. I called it a lie last night. I was wrong about it being a lie, but I don’t think I’m wrong that it’s a bad statement.

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When people ask me how much food I have prepped, I always say just about 18 months. It’s an odd number to many, and I often get asked why. The answer is, if the apocalypse begins right in the middle of summer and it’s too late to start planting, that’s the “worst case scenario.” From there to a finished crop is just about 18 months, give or take a few weeks. So 18 months is the longest I can expect to be with no food.

That assumes, of course, that I know how to make a garden grow. Now, I do know, and I’ve practiced. At one point, we had a small farm with an acre of kitchen garden that friends and I tended. I raised chickens and we hunted, and we traded with locals for things we didn’t grow or hunt. It was a lovely way to live and I miss it terribly. Sadness aside, I spent four years or so learning how to grow a garden of sustainable size. I’ve done the practice, though I need to continue to practice.

If you’ve never grown anything other than a few flowers, you need to begin learning how to grow crops now. This is not something you can “learn as you go” during an emergency. You need to know how to do all this stuff before an emergency. Do you know what to grow? Do you know how to grow it? Do you know how to harvest it? Do you know how to preserve its seeds, or otherwise get a crop the following year without getting seeds from a store? You must have the answers to all these questions and more before the SHTF.

The first and most important question to ask yourself is what kind of food you can grow, and what kind you want to grow. You should focus on learning how to grow the things that are in the middle of that Venn diagram. I usually suggest people start with garlic, green beans, herbs, and some sort of squash. All four are easy to grow, and require only a bit of attention to keep the weeds and predators out. I can tell you that my family can eat 100 feet of green beans each year. That’s a LOT. Most people plant about half that, if they’re planning on growing all their beans rather than purchasing. What that does NOT include is seed for next year, and that’s an important thing to remember.

I find that the best information for beginner gardeners comes from the Victory Garden networks out there (like these: Plant a Victory Garden and Vintage Victory Garden booklet). Victory Gardens were grown during WWII as a patriotic method of keeping commercially grown food for “the boys across the water.” Today, they’re an act of rebellion, because growing food makes you less dependent upon The Man. The idea of a Victory Garden is to provide enough supplemental food for your family that you don’t rely as heavily upon the government and commercial farmers to feed you. I suspect that this is a very good practice for all conservatives to begin as we move into a time of frugality and less government spending.

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I think this is my favorite JD moment so far. Margaret Brennan apparently wanted to play journalist and attempted to take down VP Vance in a sit-down conversation. She brought up immigration, which should be a hard-hitting topic right now. Unfortunately for her, she’s not nearly as good at this game as Vance is, and the bottom line is she’s arguing for keeping violent criminals in the country. Not a good look for her.

From the interview:

Vance: ‘We absolutely cannot unleash thousands of unvetted people into our country…’

Brennen: ‘These people are vetted. These people are vetted. Uh…’

Vance: ‘Just like the guy who planned a terrorist attack in Oklahoma a few months ago? He was allegedly properly vetted, and many people in media and the Democratic Party said that he was properly vetted. Clearly he wasn’t. I don’t wan’t my children to share a neighborhood with people who are not properly vetted, and because I don’t want it for my kids, I’m not going to force any other American citizens’ kids to do that either.’

Brennen: ‘No, and that was a very particular case, it wasn’t clear whether he was radicalized when he got here, um, or, when he was living h-“

Vance: ‘I don’t really care, Margaret, I don’t want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me.’

And that’s a wrap. Brennen tried and failed to make Vance look foolish. Her point was to make him stutter, to call on his faith as a Catholic and shame him, and he had absolutely NONE of it. Instead, he brazenly told her that he was ashamed by the American Council of Bishops, which was an impressive thing to say, in my opinion.

Another question being asked on social media is, what do you tell your kids if one of their friends is swept up by ICE while they’re in school? I’ve heard several good answers, mostly snarky, but my favorite was honest and polite, and went something like this:

“Honey, I’m sorry your friend was taken away. If they are here legally, it will take a day or two for the paperwork to sort out, and your friend will be right back to school. ICE agents can be scary, but they’re very gentle with children, and they won’t hurt your friend. But if your friend’s parents are here illegally, then I’m afraid you might not see that friend again. I know that’s hard, and it isn’t your friend’s fault, but there are consequences to actions. Just like you have consequences to your actions when you do something bad, your friend’s parents might have done something bad. They aren’t being punished like you, but they do have to go back to their home country. That’s the consequence of their actions.” (from Not the Bee)

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