Shawnee couple score touchdown with all-natural edamame dips
03.02.10
In the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, the Hass Avocado Board is predicting football fans will consume 80 million pounds of guacamole on game day, almost double the amount snarfed down last year.</p><p>But surely Team Avocado has caught wind of a rival dip poised to tackle the nation’s ever-growing mound of chips?</p><p>Over the past year, Dean and Anne Panovich of Shawnee have drafted their own team of family and friends to help boil, blend and package batches of Soy-Zen-Zay, a zippy line of dips made from edamame, a nutritious, bright-green Asian soybean with a nutty, buttery flavor.</p><p>The dips — low in sodium, free of preservatives, gluten and dairy and made with non-genetically modified beans — sell for $4.99 at 15 Whole Foods markets in Kansas City, Denver and Boulder, Colo. Locally, the dips also are available in Cosentino Markets, select Hy-Vee stores, Nature’s Pantry, Green Acres and the Community Mercantile in Lawrence.</p><p>On a cold, gray January morning, Anne pours a batch of frozen, shelled green soybeans imported from China into pots of boiling water. As the water returns to a boil, clouds of steam cause condensation to form on the kitchen windows of a ranch home remodeled to serve as a certified production facility. When cooked to al dente, the beans are drained and pureed using two immersion blenders suspended from a makeshift PVC-pipe contraption Dean devised to replace a hand blender and ice cream scoops. After several minutes of whirring, he dips a plastic spoon into the steaming mixture and offers up a taste from his first batch of edamame-cucumber dip.</p><p>“See how it still has ridges? Did you feel the jagged edges?” Dean says moments after rolling the puree around on his tongue. “We’re big on texture. It should be the texture and consistency of cream cheese, not creamy like mayo. We’re getting closer. If we go too far, it kind of tastes like mayo. Some people say, ‘I’m sick of hummus’ — I think because it has that flat feel on the tongue.” </p><p>After blending the puree to the proper consistency, Dean pours it into a stainless-steel funnel the size of an old-fashioned megaphone and flips a red lever. Warm dip flows out a stainless-steel spigot into a plastic tub with the team logo. He slaps it with his palm to activate the seal.</p><p>Touchdown?</p><p>“Anybody can create something good in the kitchen, but once you tub it and try to get a 10-week shelf life, everything changes,” Dean says. </p><p><strong><span class="subhead">The dream team</span></strong></p><p>Anne grew up on an Iowa soybean farm, yet she was the one who introduced her father to edamame.</p><p>Although the Midwest is a leader in soybean production, the bulk of American-grown beans are a variety typically fed to cattle. A Japanese variety known as edamame (pronounced ed-ah-Mah-meh) are handpicked and squeezed from fuzzy pods that grow on stalks. The Japanese most often eat edamame out of hand as a snack.</p><p>Only 5 percent of soybeans grown in the U.S. are processed into supermarket food products, but the number of soy-based snacks continues to grow, according to Linda Funk, executive director of the Soyfoods Council, which is based in Iowa.</p><p>Funk is eager to convert Midwestern farmers to the joy of soy but notes that “fresh soybeans are like green beans. Once you pick, you have to blanche and flash freeze or use right away, so finding processing plants is the sticky wicket.”</p><p>Five years ago, when Anne, a former high school math teacher, began to research recipes, she had trouble finding one for an edamame dip. She developed recipes and flavors using frozen soybeans and tested them out on family and friends. Eventually, she worked with Kansas State University food scientists to work out production, food safety and packaging requirements.
Source: Kansas City Star
Cheesy and cheap: Make white lasagna
20.01.10
Make meat mixture:
Heat the oven to 375°F. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook until soft and translucent, 3 to 4 minutes. Stir in the garlic, salt, and pepper and cook until the garlic is fragrant, about 1 minute longer Add the beef and pork and cook 2 to 4 minutes until the meat is browned. Pour off the extra fat from the pan.
For lasagna:
Stir together the milk and Parmesan sauce and evenly spread 1/2 cup over the bottom of a 13 x 9-inch pan. Lay 3 lasagna noodles in the pan lengthwise.
Stir together the Cheddar and Monterey Jack cheeses in a medium bowl with the egg.
Pour 3/4 cup of the sauce over the noodles and top with 2 cups of the cheese-and-egg mixture. Pour 3/4 cup of the sauce evenly over the cheese, and follow with 3 more noodles, the meat mixture, 3/4 cup of the sauce, 3 more noodles, the remaining 1 cup of the cheese mixture, and the remaining 3/4 cup of sauce. Sprinkle evenly with the Parmesan.
Source: msnbc.com
When cooked to al dente, the beans are drained and pureed using two immersion blenders suspended from a improvisation PVC-raise one's voice doodah Dean devised to and more »
