Day 2...Soup's On

Day 2...

Me and my lambkin stop for a photo op on the outskirts of the Culpeper Farmers Market.

I had a glorious time in Culpeper, Virginia with my folks.

We had a ball.

We even went to the Culpeper Farmers Market.  I used to be a vendor there a few years back so there were many familiar faces and friends.

I actually didn't want to go.  To many people. The thought of people everywhere asking "where've you been" and such rot was debilitating.

Nosy Parkers.

I'm just kidding.  I like these people.  I just forgot that most of them were extremely nice.  All except my arch-nemesis. The Fish Monger.  You know who you are. I felt your death stare. But, in the words of the late Tupac Shakur, "I ain't mad at cha."

Any who, my sister and I got super-caffeinated upon entering the market because of an amazing roasted coffee company that just so happened to serve iced coffee on a warm summer morning.  We even had Seconds, which was a bad idea for me, after we had bought all of our goodies.

Our goodies included: beets, a variety of kale I'd never seen before, five different varieties of garlic (yes, 5, and he probably had 20 to pick from) and other scrumptious stuff.

We stashed our veggies in the car and traipsed down Davis Street to a childhood favorite, Knakals Bakery.  As soon as we opened the door to the bakery I was hit by a wave of nausea.  I turned 50 shades of Green.  I thought I was going to toss my cookies and then crawl across the counter and toss their cookies.  That place that used to be, to me, the smell of heavens gates but in an instant became Dantes Inferno with Mephistopheles taking money for doughnuts across the cut glass (I know, it was really Faust and Meph).

They are so sassy in there.  Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode with the Soup Nazi.  I'm always prepared to be neglected or worse when I go into Knakals, but assaulted by the smell was a new injustice.

We 23 skadoo-ed, and legged it to my new favorite place.  A place were dreams are made every day: Clark's Hardware.

I lived in Culpeper for nearly 20 years and never set foot into Clark's Hardware until Julie took me by the metaphorical hand and shoved me in the door with the hope of cast-iron cookware within its walls.

That place is A-MAZE-ING!!!

I have set my cap on a 16-inch Lodge Dutch Oven. She will be mine. Oh, yes. She will be mine.

Clark's has it all for the avid gardener, the constant cook and something for your hobbyhorse's horse.
The place is an inspiration waiting to happen.

After I picked out my birfday, Christmas, Easter, Saint Valentin'es Day and every other major holiday, presents for the next six years, we left with a promise on our lips that we'd be back.

I was so psyched that when I went home I was bound and determined to cook Dutch oven style again.  I made two phenoms: a lentil stew and cornbread.

Lentil Stew in the campfire coals.

Lentil Stew
1 1/2 cups green lentils, dry
1 medium sweet potato, diced
1 large yellow onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 big tomato, chopped
3 cups water
1 can (14 oz.) coconut milk
2 tsp. Bangarang or seasoned salt
2 tsp. Chinese Five spice powder

It's done and ready to be dressed.

Toss all of the ingredients into your Dutch Oven and lid.

Place in a bed of ten or so hot coals.  Add at least 16 on top of the lid. Add hot coals when needed.  Let cook for an hour to an hour and a half, or until the lentils are done and the sweet potato is soft.

Slap on those high heat gloves.  Brush the coals and ash off of the top and gently open the lid a little to let of steam.

Remove lid.

Serve the stew piping hot in bowls.

When serving the hot stew you can add:
1 bunch of kale, chiffonade cut
1 or 2 jalapenos, minced
a few sprigs of basil and cilantro, minced

Also, you can substitute 3 cups of cooked lentils for the dry lentils and reduce the water to 14 oz.












Cornbread

Cornbread ready to go into the coals.

2 1/4 cup cornmeal
3 Tbsp. chia seeds, ground
3 Tbsp. sugar
3 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda

3 Tbsp. coconut oil, melted
2 3/4 cup almond/coconut milk

In a big bowl, toss together all of the dry ingredients.  Then dump those ingredients into a well oiled Dutch Oven.  Stir in the wet ingredients until well combined.

Put the lid on.

Place DO in a bed of 10 hot coals.  Cover the top with coals as well.

Cook for 30-40 minutes. Put on those high heat gloves. Give the lid the Brush-a-Roo. Remove the lid carefully.

 Cut cornbread, remove from DO and let it cool on a wire rack.

The best dag-gone dinner I've had in ages!

The most moist cornbread I've ever had.

Day 1...The Oven Broke

My oven is dead. Dead as a doornail as the expression goes.  I am a vegan cook. This would not do.

I don't know if you have ever had a mad-craving for chocolate cake with no oven to cook it in.  How are you going to survive? How are you going to have your cake and eat it too? These were questions I was facing the day my oven broke. 

Thankfully, I am just about the most willful woman that I have ever met.  Ingenuity should be my middle name.

I built an edible garden. This is just my front lawn.  I did it with a shovel, rake, hoe, pea gravel, riverbed/farmland rocks (we call them Love Rocks because my husband would bring a few to me when he came home from the fields or an adventure), mulch, wood, and a wheel barrow (and when the wheel barrow broke I used buckets and my sons' Radio Flyer wagon). That's it. I'm 32 and 5' 2". Mother of three boys ages 7, 5 and 7-weeks. I am woman, hear me roar and what-not. I Will Survive like the great Gloria Gaynor.

the front gardens with my campfire ring of rocks in the center

I have never taken a cooking or gardening class. I was a personal trainer and aerobics instructor before I broke ground. Being vegan, I eat mainly fruits, vegetables and I flavor nearly everything with fresh herbs. Personal training tanked. I had to garden or do without. I chose to garden.

Fast-forward three years and I have another son, a ginormous garden, no microwave and a broken oven.

Oh, and a craving.


I grabbed my husband's Dutch-oven, built a fire in my homemade pit and went to it. And you know what...it worked. I had chocolate cake for dinner. Then grilled some corn. Then made a lentil stew befit for royalty. It was at that moment that I knew I may never cook a meal in-doors again. I was having too much fun playing with fire, cooking and surviving (enjoying) my quasi-crisis.

In order to bake a cake I needed to do the following:

Build a fire.  Wait till I had a lot of coals when the wood burned down.

Prepare the Dutch-oven. Lawd knows what my husband, Ernest Hemingway incarnate, cooked in it last. Wiped it out thoroughly and oiled it with coconut oil. 

Fished out his High-Heat gloves.

Located a hand-brush to  wipe off the ash and coals at the end of the process.

Threw together the ingredients to my favorite vegan chocolate cake in a 9-inch cake pan.

Chocolate Cake:
1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup Hershey's Cocoa Powder
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt

1 cup warm water
1/3 cup coconut oil
1 tsp. vinegar

Grab your 9-inch cake pan and mix the dry ingredients together in the pan. 
Grab a liquid measuring or Mason jar and stir together the wet ingredients.  Pour the wet into the dry and mix up.

Place the pan in your Dutch-oven (DO). Pop the lid on.

Place oven in a bed of coals. 

There are a few cardinal rules, as the idiom goes, for DO cooking/baking.  Figure out the diameter of the oven.  Most actually have it stamped on the top.  You need 2 big coals for every inch of the diameter of your DO to bring it to 300 degrees.  So my husband, Chris, has a 10-inch DO. I need 20 coals to make my DO 300 degrees.  8 underneath. 12 on top. 

For every additional 25 degrees add another coal at the bottom and the top.  I want a 350 degree oven to bake my cake so I need to add 2 coals underneath the DO and 2 more on top.  Simple-enough.

I ended up with about 10 big coals underneath and 14 coals on top of the lid to bring the heat up to 350 for my chocolate cake to bake.

This is the fun part.  In order to see if you have a good source of heat, hold your hand about a foot over the coals and see if it is hot.  If you think it's not hot enough, toss on a few more red hot coals with a shovel. 

When you smell your chocolate cake at about 35-40 minutes into the bake time it may be done.  Use your hand broom and sweep all of the coals and ash back into the fire. Using gloves, carefully remove the lid a little to let off steam.  Check the cake for doneness.  I see if it springs back with a touch of a finger on the middle.  If it is goey, it needs more baking time.  So lid, toss some hot coals on top and give it tenish minutes until it smells delish.

Give it the brush-a-roo.  Carefully remove the lid and remove from the DO from the coal bed.  Carefully remove the cake pan and let cool.  Slice and serve.

I was so gratified by the turn-out of the chocolate cake that I ran around the house and grabbed Chris' grill top from his homemade stone-grill thingy where he does all of his out-door cooking. Ran the grill-top up the slope and tossed it over my coals, shucked some corn, slathered on Earth Balance Butter, pulled some thyme, rosemary, parsley and other herbs from the garden and sprinkled them on buttered corn and slapped those corn-puppies on the grill-top and rotated them till they were nice and sizzly.

Then, I sliced up some of green-tomatoes and popped them on the grill and cooked them until they were pea-green and soft.  Tossed a piece of grilled corn, the grilled green-tomatoes with fresh torn basil, and wedge of chocolate cake onto a plate and served it to all of our family with teeth. We all have a lovely set of teeth except my little lambkin, baby boy.

And Dinner was served.  I survived Day 1 without an oven and I added a new cooking skill to my repertoire.  I will never be the same again.