Random Raccoons
Picnicking Birds
Sammich Pr0n
Ham and cheese with a big pile of slaw with a tasty vinaigrette.
Seen on the Internets
Instant Pot: Beef and Barley Soup
JeffreyW makes mouths water with this photo of his Beef and Barley Soup (with bonus Foccacia recipe here)
For the stovetop version, click here.
It has been unseasonably warm here, but I still wanted soup. Checked the freezer and I had a cross-rib roast, that would do since there was not a secret stash of chuck roast tucked away. All the other ingredients were handy, so Beef and Barley soup was it.
I added a potato, diced small, just because.
Beef & Barley Vegetable Soup
- olive oil
- 1 lb chuck, cut into small cubes
- 1/2 small onion, diced
- 2 tsp crushed garlic
- 14 oz of tomatoes (fresh or canned)
- 8 cups of water (or water and vegetable broth**)
- 12 oz sliced carrots (frozen ok)
- 12 oz green beans (frozen ok)
- 3 stalks of celery, chopped
- 1/2 cup barley
- 1/4 tsp cayenne
- 1/2 tsp ground pepper
- 1/2 to 1 tsp salt (more as desired)
- 2 bay leaves (remove before serving)
large saucepan
Heat oil in the instant pot on the sauté setting. Sauté onions for 1 minute, add beef and brown on all sides, add garlic and sauté for 1 minute making sure not to burn the garlic. Add remaining ingredients. Set the pot to Soup/Stew setting and cook for 35 to 40 minutes, until barley is tender. Use natural release method.
Serve with biscuits or cornbread.
**For vegetable broth, I blend the tomatoes, and an additional 6 oz of carrots, 6 oz of green beans, 2 stalks of the celery, 1 cup water into a smooth puree, to make a hearty base for the soup. I like the hearty stock.
Yum.
It’s soup season, so here are a few more: Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese, Chicken Tortilla Soup, and Minestrone with Tiny Meatballs
Farming To Save The Planet
Here’s some information on cattle and soil regeneration.
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Climate Solutions: Soil Regeneration and Carbon Sequestration
I’m going through my resources, and as I sort, I thought I’d share. This group of links is about carbon sequestration solutions.
A friend of mine likes me to stay in the loop, so he sends me a lot of fresh info. He recently sent me this article about cattle and climate change. I’ve been very interested in what is often called holistic farming to regenerate soil and sequester carbon. Ruminants can play a vital role in this. This has some solid science behind it.
They put it into permanent pasture and managed it using regenerative multi-paddock grazing with dairy cattle. Within three or four years they recorded substantial improvements. After five years they had enormous increases in soil carbon—up to eight tons of carbon per hectare per year. In areas where you can grow crops throughout the year, like in the southern half of the States, if you make sure there’s vegetative cover of the soil, a living root in the ground year-round and you practice regenerative grazing using multiple paddocks with adequate recovery, you will get extraordinarily rapid results. In our more arid areas in Texas, we find we need about 10 years to get substantive soil functional improvement. When we went up to Canada, we worked with people who had started 20 or 30 years ago, and they had moved ahead remarkably. Over those long time periods, the soil had been measured every second or third year, and in the best cases, within four or five years, there was a noticeable increase in soil carbon and surface water infiltration. In those northern areas, after 14 years now, there is still no decrease in the upward trajectory of the soil carbon.
…They put it into permanent pasture and managed it using regenerative (click here to read more)
Picnicking Birds
Sammich Pr0n
Note how I have cunningly hidden the true scope of the bun’s disfigurement. The red sprinkle is Tony Chachere’s Creole seasoning. It’s mostly salt with red pepper and I often use it instead of salt.
My bun-fu was weak today.
