It’s Thanksgiving! For most Americans, this is a day to eat lots of turkey with all the fixin’s. When everyone’s stuffed to bursting, there will still be meat on the fowl’s bones. Some of the meat will go into another holiday favorite—turkey sandwiches. But even with much of the meat going into sandwiches, there will likely be plenty remaining. Every year, cooks wonder what to do with the excess, and it’s not just meat that overflows the refrigerator. There are those potatoes and pies, carrots and creamed onions, and so on. So to help tired cooks who are looking for ways to use up all that leftover food, but who are sick of long hours slaving in the kitchen, here’s a suggestion…

 
Quick Pot Pie  It can’t get much simpler than this and still be mostly homemade. I used chicken left over from a store-bought roasted chicken for this pot pie, but you can use turkey meat just as well. The recipe is versatile, and you can use whatever vegetables you have on hand. The reason this pot pie is so simple is that it relies on condensed canned cream soups and on biscuit dough from a tube. I used Pillsbury Jumbo buttermilk biscuits. Substitute the biscuits of your choice, and if you have leftover gravy, that can stand in for the condensed soup. How much does this recipe make? Enough for four to six servings, depending on what you’ll serve alongside. Use up some of that stuffing and cranberry sauce as side dishes.

Here’s the ingredient list for the pot pie I made for this demonstration (it’s a rough job…):

• • 1-2 cups cooked turkey (or chicken)
• • 2 cups mixed vegetables, either frozen or leftover
• • 1 medium onion, chopped
• • 1 cup fresh button or other mushrooms
• • olive oil
• • 1 tablespoon dried whole thyme
• • 1 small can condensed cream-of-chicken soup
• • 1 small can condensed cream of potato soup
• • 1 cup packed fresh spinach leaves
• • ground black pepper
• • 1 pound tube Pillsbury Jumbo biscuits

Substitute cooked or fresh chopped greens (kale, chard, chickory, mustard greens) for the spinach if you prefer. And if you’re using the mixed frozen vegetables, as I did, just pull them right from the freezer. No need to thaw. You can use whatever vegetables you like, but they should be chopped and not creamed or juicy. Substitute the creamed condensed soups of your choice. I used low-sodium soups. The goal here is to make life simple, not harder, so mix-and-match to suit your tastes and what you have on hand.

Ready to begin? Great! Preheat the oven to 350-degrees Fahrenheit. Shred and chop the cooked meat into bite-sized bits and put them into a large mixing bowl. Stir the frozen or chopped cooked vegetables in with the meat. You can either mix in the raw chopped onions and mushrooms, or cook them first. I prefer to cook them—you’ll see why in a minute.

 
Heat a film of olive oil in a medium saucepan, and cook the onions and mushrooms over medium heat until they’re softened. Now add the thyme and pour in the condensed soups—straight from the can, no mixing with water or milk! The soups form your thickened sauce base. Heat the mixture until it’s bubbling, then stir in the spinach. Cook a little longer, until the spinach begins to wilt. Turn off the heat and stir in the meat-vegetable mix. Now pour the whole mixture into a 9″ square baking dish.

 
Time to address the biscuits. These take very little time to bake, which is why I prefer to pre-heat the “filling” for this pot pie. If I hadn’t, the biscuits would cooked before the filling was bubbling hot. Open the tube of biscuits and peel off four of them. Place these over the filling, and then put the remaining four biscuits on a small baking sheet (no need to grease the sheet).

 
Put the pot pie in the oven to bake, but hold off on the biscuits. After 15 minutes in the oven, the pot pie biscuits will be golden. Now place the other biscuits in the oven as well. Continue to bake both for 10-15 minutes. Be careful not to burn the pot pie biscuits. When the biscuits on the sheet are golden brown and the pot pie biscuits are as well, remove them all from the oven.

 
The biscuits which baked atop the filling will have a dumpling-like consistency underneath, while the sheet-baked biscuits will be firmer. Serve some of the filling with each biscuit, giving the firmer ones to those who prefer them that way.

 
This technique can be used for leftover roast beef, too. Use beef gravy or condensed cream of potato and cream of mushroom soups for sauce. It’s not as good as a pot pie made with homemade dough, but it’s delicious fast food that saves hassle and time for busy cooks. Enjoy!

 
Send a Comment

 
Whether you’re a canoeist or a kayaker or both, you’re bound to find plenty of uses for rope. At a minimum, every boat should be fitted with a bow line (call it a towline or painter if you prefer). Stern lines are a good idea, as well. And what’s the easiest way to attach these essential lines? With knots, of course — preferably bowlines. Once you’ve fixed a couple of lines in place on your boat, one fore and the other aft, you’ll be much better prepared to meet the challenges of traveling over water. You can line down through a tricky drop or track upstream against the sweep of the current. You’ll also find it easier to recover your boat in the event of a capsize. But rope has many more uses. If you stow gear inside your boat — and what paddler doesn’t? — you’ll want to tie it down. You’ll also need to lash float bags firmly in place anywhere they’re not constrained by decks. If you don’t, your flotation will just do what comes naturally as soon as the gunwales dip below the waterline: float free. Then your boat will be left to swim (or sink) on its own. Rope is useful off the water, too. At day’s end, you’ll need to make your boat fast to your car’s roof rack before you head home. And if you store your boat outside, you’ll want tie‑downs to keep it from blowing away the first time the wind rises above a stiff breeze.

The bottom line? Rope is valuable stuff. I learned this early, even before I started running rivers, when my mountain hikes took me off the trails and up steeper and steeper slopes. Before long, I found my life hanging — well, not by a thread, exactly, but by a rope. Of course, I didn’t actually hang from the rope very often. Thankfully. But my rope was my constant companion on rock faces and frozen waterfalls, always ready to help me out in time of need. We spent a lot of time together, my rope and I, and as our acquaintance deepened, my knowledge of knots and hitches and their uses grew apace. Beginning with Lesson Number One: On a mountain, when your fingers are numb with cold and your brain is addled by exhaustion, simple is good. And one of the simplest tools in the climber’s bag of tricks is the prusik hitch, named after its putative inventor, Austrian mountaineer Karl Prusik. The name lost its capital “P” somewhere along the line, however. It often loses the “hitch,” too. In any case, a prusik — with or without the accompanying hitch — is little more than a loop of cord that’s wrapped around a host rope (or sometimes two ropes, or even something else altogether, like a branch). Unweighted, the prusik slides more or less freely along its host. Once under tension, however, it holds fast.

I’ll show you how to tie one in just a minute. First, though, here’s what the prusik looks like:

 
In the left photo, I’ve tied a prusik hitch around a quarter‑inch laid nylon line. On the right, the hitch encompasses both the laid line and a length of braided polypropylene. Now let’s look at one of the most important ways prusiks are used in whitewater rescue… Read more…

 
Send a Comment

When I began serious study of photography in high school, color was where it was at if you wanted to sell your work to glossy magazines. The days of black-and-white photography had just become old fashioned. Yesterday’s medium. (No matter that a photographer named Ansel Adams was perfecting the zone system and publishing stunning shots in black and white.) So when I loaded film into my camera, it was color transparency film I used. Then a few years later, after graduation, I was offered a job as an assistant to the school’s art teacher, who was starting up a photo club and darkroom. She encouraged me to take up black-and-white photography, because she’d seen my pen-and-ink illustrations and felt I could translate that skill to cellulose. With her help I learned to develop my prints, and gained an appreciation for the medium.

I didn’t stick with black-and-white photography after my job concluded at the end of the school year. Ginny moved away, and my interests in nature photography lured me back to color. I had only one camera, and didn’t want to have black-and-white film loaded when that perfect shot presented itself, so I kept Kodachrome 25 or 64 in my Nikon. That was a long time and many cameras ago. The years passed, and for one reason and another I got away from photography except in my work as a field geologist, but when I adopted digital technology, my old love of artistic photography returned. With digital technology comes versatility, and I rediscovered a love of black-and-white photos. Best of all, it’s possible to shoot in color, and translate photos into monochrome later, either in the camera, or with post-processing. Now I can eat my cake and have it too.

What about you? Not convinced of the beauty and utility of black-and-white imagery? Look at the following photos and reconsider.

 
Whether the subject is something mechanical, natural, or structural, black-and-white can create a powerful image. The secrets of success for black-and-white photos are strong contrast and composition. Without contrast, the image will be bland, and strong compositions give the photo punch and help direct the eye around the picture while giving it personality. Here are a few more shots:

 
By limiting or lengthening depth of field, you can focus attention on a discrete subject or on the whole view. Tweaking curves, levels, and contrast are fundamental post-processing techniques that are needed for monochrome images as well as color. To get black-and-white photos, you can set your camera to capture only in monochrome (if your camera has the capability, that is), or you can alter color images in post-processing (my preference). One common way is to open the Saturation feature in your image editing application and then desaturate the photo. Work on a copy of the original, never on the original itself. I you’re interested in the nitty gritty, get hold of a good book such as John Beardsworth’s Advanced Digital Black & White Photography.

We live in an age of color, but don’t neglect the power of black-and-white photographs. You’ll have to learn to “see” in black and white when shooting, but it doesn’t take long to get a grip on it. Give it a try.

 
Send a Comment