Rescuing Culinary Mishaps, Or, When Life Gives You Mush…
This last week what I had in my hand was basically a mess, and this is the story of how I tried to fix the mess.
First of all, I bought some little pie pumpkins that I did not remember to use in time for Thanksgiving. And then when I did remember to use them, one of them had a huge black spot on it, and the other had a tiny black spot on it (oh, no! Not the dreaded black spot!). So I needed to rescue the salvageable part of the pumpkins that I had on my hands, and soon.
I found this recipe:
Beef and Pumpkin Soup
Combine in crockpot:
1 1/2 pounds beef stew meat (I browned it first)
1 10 ounce package of frozen corn (I used Edamame)
1 1/2 cups 1/2 inch pieces peeled and seeded pumpkin (or butternut squash)
1 1/2 cups water (I didn't use this)
8 ounce can tomato sauce
3/4 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped green sweet pepper (I was fresh out)
1 clove garlic, minced
1/ teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
Nutmeg to taste
Cover and cook on low-heat for 10-12 hours or on high for 5-6 hours.
Add 2 ounces dried whole wheat macaroni, drain, and add to soup. Ladle into bowls, sprinkle with parsley (I didn't)
It came from this cookbook.
I didn't have corn on hand, but I did have frozen edamame in my hand, and they are sweet and tasty and add protein instead of sugar, so I used those. It was looking very, very pretty in my crockpot. I wish I had taken a picture of it then. Each separate piece was distinct in shape and color, and the orange of the pumpkin, reds of the tomatoes, green edamame, and dark brown of the roasted meat combined to make a feast for the eye as well as the tummy. I admired it for a moment, and the decided I needed something to serve it with or on.
I remembered that I had this recipe from the night before, still on hand:
It comes from this cookbook.
Nasi Kuning (Yellow Rice cooked in Coconut Milk)
I did not exactly follow the recipe because it called for cooking the rice in a heavy pot on the stove top. I cook my rice in a rice cooker. So I mixed up:
short-grained brown rice
coconut milk
turmeric
lemon grass
lemon juice
salt
and enough water to make my two cans of coconut milk stretch out to the right amount of liquid.
Now, it turned out very flavorful and 'authentic' tasting. We love dishes like this, and this cookbook is an outstanding source for authentic Asian home-cooking using ingredients that you can usually find even in our local grocery stores (where one of three grocery stores carries tofu, and not very much of that, and not at all reasonably priced).
So, the rice was good (everything in this cookbook is good). But it was just a wee bit crunchy because my coconut milk did not have enough liquid to quite cook the rice to the nice chewy texture we like. It was only the merest bit of crunch, not even quite a crunch, but slightly more than merely firm. I thought that would be very tasty in the stew, and then I had a brain storm. The stew wasn't very watery and it still had a couple hours cooking time to go, so I mashed up a can of stewed tomatoes (all out of tomato paste, and we are using what we have on hand)
I put the rice on top of the stew, poured the extra tomato sauce on that and let it continue to heat up through our afternoon church service.
And when it had heated in my crockpot for that extra two or three hours, what I had in my crockpot was a lovely turmeric yellow pot of mush with flecks of green from the soy beans. The flavor was terrific, but the texture was... mush. Baby food. Totally unappealing: 
Now the animal in that stew is from a grass fed animal that lived a blameless and excellent life on a grassy meadow not terribly far from here, but it wasn't my cow and it wasn't my meadow so it cost me only slightly less than meat at the grocery store, if that meat from the grocery store is premium lobster and the grocery store is an upscale yuppy establishment with marble floors, fountains, and a gourmet olive bar.
So I could not just throw the mush away. The Cherub doesn't care what she eats as long as it's not soup, and it didn't have anything she was allergic to, but even the Cherub cannot take care of five gallons or so of mush.
So I browsed through a cookbook or two and by putting together two or three ideas, I came up with these:
Mush croquettes.
I pulled the pieces of stew meat out and cut them up into small pieces (pinhead sized slivers, my husband says) using my hand-dandy kitchen shears. Then I mixed in a couple of eggs and some panko, Japanese style bread crumbs. Do you want to guess why I used panko? Because that's, oddly enough, what I had in my hands. I had purchased it to make tempura with, but I hadn't gotten around to the tempura yet.
I beat two more eggs into a froth ("and let that be a lesson to you," I told them). I put out another small bowl of panko and put some peanut oil into a skillet to deep fry them. I used two big spoons and shaped the mush mixture into pieces about the size of two walnuts. I flattened them a bit and dropped them into the bowl of beaten (and now cowering gently) eggs. Then I used two forks to gently turn the mush patty in the eggs, lifted it up and dredged it with panko, and then set it down on a glass cutting board to wait its turn. When I had four of these done, I used two spoons to gently slide them into the oil. While they fried I started on the next batch.
This was by way of an experiment in between houseguests (one set left at 1:00 the next houseguest arrived at 3:00). The first attempt was still mushier than I like, so I added eggs and panko to the bright yellowish orange mush. That made for a better textured product.
I did not finish my frying before company came, but had the kitchen in a bit of a mess for the 3:00 company. Fortunately, she was coming to see the Equuschick, the HG, and the Equuschick's horses (not, I suspect, in that order), so she did not care what my kitchen looked like. I finished them while she was out riding. The HG and the Equuschick pronounced them good. The Boy says they're okay. Jenny looked doubtful enough that I didn't ask her to try them. She hadn't even liked the flavor of the mush, unlike the rest of us (when Jenny says a food has 'flavor,' she's not being complimentary). The Cherub is allergic to the additions of wheat and eggs, and the FYG was in a corner reading so I don't have her vote yet.
The HM, sadly, is out of town.
I think these will freeze nicely, wrapped individually in saran wrap. Then the Equuschick and the HG will have them available for ready made convenience foods on those days they are in a hurry and haven't time to prepare better lunches to take to work or school. They should reheat nicely in the microwave and even better in the oven.
These are good, but not quite good enough to go to the trouble of duplicating them again on purpose- plus, I am not sure I could. But they are more than good enough to eat, and no budget was harmed in the preparation of these croquettes (or this blog post).
Now some people would look at the time it takes to make something like croquettes and suggest that time is money and I should have thrown out the mush and done something else with my time. I will shock a few readers and suggest that there are times and situations where that approach might be best. If I took time away from my fifty dollar an hour job to make croquettes, that might have been unproductive. But I don't have such a job. My time really isn't money, because I wouldn't have been using the deep frying time to do something else wildly remunerative.
If all the ingredients came from a free source, then I might have broken even in the cost/effort/benefit ration. I am also not at all sure that it's the proper frugal spirit to toss something just because it was 'free.' Jesus gathered the fragments of the loaves and the fish, and those cost him no money at all.
If I had to pay a sitter money to keep my small children out of the kitchen while I deep-fried, that would have been silly. I have never paid somebody to watch my children while I cooked. At any rate, they are all old enough now (except the Cherub) that they are helpers rather than hindrances. I think we should also count the learning experience on the plus side. I demonstrated an attitude and skill I want my children to have. I also gained a blog topic for this week.=)
When life gives you lemons, you make lemon-ade. And when life gives you mush, make croquettes!
P.S. For some Christmas related ideas for making new things from old, visit this post at The Common Room!
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2 Responses to “Rescuing Culinary Mishaps, Or, When Life Gives You Mush…”
December 7th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Another great recipe to use pumpkin in is the Butternut Squash soup in the Joy of Cooking. Just substitute the butternut squash for pumpkin. It won’t taste just like it would if you used butternut squash, since butternut has a kind of rich, nutty flavor, but it still turns out pretty good. This recipe looks about right:
http://yumsugar.com/751378
It also might take a bit more preparation than busy people are willing to spend, but I recommend it anyway because the result is almost decadent. You can substitute the leek for onion for a more inexpensive alternative. It’s definitely dinner-guest material.
October 25th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Every time I make a pumpkin lantern, or roast meat with pumpkin, I also roast the pumpkin seeds. They are great source of goodness (heaps of zink) and they taste nice too. All these seeds need is just a simple quick wash and on any old pizza tray they get done to golden color pretty fast.
Roasted Pumpkin seeds also make an outstanding vinaigrette. Crush them in a food processor or mortar and pestle and combine them with vinegar, oil, honey, dijon mustard, shallots, and either mint or tarragon. I’d recommend using a lighter vinegar such as sherry, banyuls, or champagne as something like balsamic would be too overpowering. This would probably taste really good with Haggi’s Pumpkin and Fennel salad.
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