Winter Kitchen, Part Four

We eat a lot of Mexican styles at our place. We never used to, but cutting down our meat intake meant incorporating more beans into our lives. We bought a tortilla press because we make a lot of tortillas and various Indian breads from scratch. We've discovered the kids prefer tortillas made of half corn masa and half wheat flour. My favourite vegetarian chili recipe is the Red Bean and Quinoa chili from Feeding the Whole Family.

So, I usually cook our beans (kidney, borlotti, haricot, etc) in my slow cooker then freeze them to use later. But I could not resist the kitschy orange labels of these tins of refried beans, chipotle and jalapeño peppers. A bit of brightness in our Winter Kitchen.

Bread

After a busy weekend rushing around with visiting family I felt the need to get into the kitchen and make some food from scratch to centre myself again. I'd been meaning to try Jim Lahey's No Knead Bread recipe that did the rounds of some craft blogs I follow.

I cannot tell you how easy and how delicious it was. There was much ooohing and ahhhing over the taste and crispy crust. I will definitely be making this again.

I also started fermenting some dough to make a wholegrain loaf from my Feeding the Whole Family book. We'll see how that turns out at lunch today. I've also started an orange millet raisin bread following the same principles, for tomorrow.

There is nothing like whole, slow food to replenish the soul and body!