Good times and good food

Kate and Tom invited us over for dinner tonight—we had pasta carbonara, salad, and fruit crisp. I'm in a bit of a food cloud right now so I'm having difficulties crafting thoughts into words; all I can say is that it was absolutely amazing and I am pretty pissed that I forgot my camera. One thing Kate said that rang true was that good food is easy when you have good ingredients (or something like that). Thanks guys.

Mighty Meat Loaf

I used to make this meat loaf for my roommates in college. I don't know how the recipe came into being—I think I just used all the sensible ingredients available at the time. The outcome was good enough that I've been duplicating it since and my old roommates' wives tell me they can't make their own without hearing about mine.

The following recipe makes four two-pound loaves.

• Ground Beef - 3 pounds
• Sweet Sausage (not in casing) - 1 pound
• Ground Lamb (the original had deer) - 1 pound
• White Onion Diced - 3 medium
• Celery Diced - 3 stalks (pick some leafy ones)
  
• Garlic Rough Chopped - 1 bulb
  
• Bread - 3 slices
• Eggs - 3
• Soy Sauce - whatever you're in the mood for
• Ketchup - a good healthy squirt (must be Heinz)
  
• Salt
• Pepper

Simply add all the ingredients in a big bowl and mix the hell out of it. Cook it how you wish.

Your Favorite Roasting Pans

Over Thanksgiving we filled our freezer chest with local meat and now we're in the market for some roasting pans to try a few new recipes. Our approach to buying things for the kitchen, is do it right the first time and never do it again. So far we've started a very small collection of Le Creuset, All Clad, and Wüsthof, and they're great. What we're looking for now are roasting pans, both big and small, that can also be put over a gas range. For the hunt, we have a restaurant supply store nearby and there is also the internet. However, we do need your help with some suggestions. Personally I've never owned a roasting pan that wasn't cheap metal, or glass. I'm not quite sure what it is that I'm looking for and in my search for a quality piece, I'm afraid that I may over do it. So, if you all have any suggestions of brands or providers, please let us know. Many thanks.

New Cookbook

We like to open gifts in small spurts around here. You know, it's what we wished we could do as kids, but we weren't allowed. Well, we play by our own rules now.

When I was an undergrad I used to watch the hell out of cooking shows and one of my favorites was Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef. I really dig his approach to food. He has been cooking close to the home since long before it was the cool thing to do. His style in the kitchen is challenging for the everyday home cook, but it is far from unapproachable.

To my great joy, Meg bought me Jamie's Cook Your Way to the Good Life. The book is his account of the relationship between his kitchen and his garden. He broke the book into seasons and shares a few recipes that have ingredients that come from that season. The recipes seem simple and the results look anything but ordinary.

Building Ingredients

Turnips are a great ingredient for broths. We planted this little batch with one thing in mind, soup for the winter. We're still waiting on a few more ingredients before the soup making begins; so our plan, while we wait, is to cube, blanch, and freeze these suckers until the time is right for cooking.

Raw Deal

We're lucky to live in a state that is really pretty lenient about raw milk sales—Robbyn at The Back Forty has tons of info on some of the ridiculous regulations that other states have. Anyway, we occasionally pick up raw milk at our awesome local food co-op, Kimberton's, which has pretty much everything in the way of local, organic, and sustainable food. A couple days ago I stopped in and learned that they've got milk from a new dairy that uses nice, re-usable glass bottles. I paid a $2 bottle deposit and picked up a jug—much nicer than the little plastic bottles we used to get.

If you've never had raw milk, I highly recommend giving it a try. It's delicious, and you can search raw milk producers by state at the Weston A. Price Foundation's Real Milk page, on eatwild.com, or on www.localharvest.org.

Beef and Vegetable Broth

After all was said and done we managed to fill four and a half one-quart yogurt containers. We gave it a taste and agreed that it is in desperate need of salt. I didn't add more than a smidge and may add more when we actually use it for soup. My old man over salted everything and I vowed not to make the same mistake.

First Jar

We have an informal rule that we can't break into our canned and frozen stash from the garden until the first snow. Last year we had to wait until late January or some other ridiculous date, but this year our unexpected November snowfall meant that we got to dig in early. So, yesterday we busted into a jar of our tomato sauce, cooked it up with some garlic (ours) and onions (not ours), and put it on pasta with fresh ricotta from our awesome local Italian market. It was delicious, and the food coma lasted late into this morning.

As an aside, I blame the blurry photo on the fact that nearly all of the lights in our kitchen decided to burn out simultaneously.

Frozen Veggies

We don't have a pressure cooker for low Ph canning and we have a sweet ass freezer begging to get filled. We have begun to blanch and freeze some of our veggies to keep us going during the Winter months. The last two batches have been five pounds of green beans and about five pounds of corn.


There's nothing fancy about our prep process. We blanch the veggies in boiling water (with a little bit of salt) for a few minutes, drain them, and then put them in an ice bath to stop them from cooking.

After they've cooled, we drain them again ( we actually let them sit in the strainer for a few minutes to let any excess water drip off) and spread them out evenly on cookie trays.

This is where the genius happens.



We put the trays in our freezer above the refrigerator to stiffen a bit before we store them in a bag or plastic container. To keep the trays separated, we used wine corks as stilts between each layer. I'm telling you it works like a charm. If you want to try it, but don't have enough corks, throw a party.

Tomato Sauce

The tomatoes we juiced on Saturday became canned sauce on Sunday. The recipe we used, again came from Putting Food By. It really couldn't be easier.

What we did is took the five quarts of juice (from fifteen pounds of mixed tomatoes),

put it in a pot,

and gave it a gentle boil...

for an hour.

The reason for the cooking time is to cook off the excess water from the fruit. When using paste tomatoes there isn't much loss in volume, but since we were using slicing and paste tomatoes the loss was much more. Actually, after a hour our five quarts cooked down to five and a half pints. However, cooking it down is important, so we just kind of hung out...

and had some beers.

One quick note: Since we are doing a boil-water method (as opposed to pressure cooking), we left the sauce straight as not to muck with the ph levels. Adding any kind of vegetable will lower the ph and run the risk of bacteria having a field day in your food. To be on the safe side we added a tablespoon of lemon juice to each pint, which guarantees it will be okay.

When the juice becomes sauce, the rest is pretty simple. Hot pack the sauce into scalded jars, wipe the rims, set the lids...

and put the jars back into the boiling water for half an hour. Oh yeah, we took Robin's advice about adding a little vinegar in the water to eliminate mineral dust. It works kick ass. Thanks Robin.

After half an hour we pulled the jars, let them cool...

and dated them.

Sticky Rice

We don't share many recipes on the ol' blog, so I thought I'd post about one of our favorite standby meals: Sticky Rice. It's sort of a bastardized cross between fried rice and stir fry and we like to think it's Asian cuisine. At any rate, it's delicious and we eat it at least once a week. Sticky Rice makes great leftovers and is extra good for breakfast with a fried egg on top. To cook it:

• Make a bunch of rice. We have a rice cooker, so this is quick and easy.
• Chop up garlic and onions and heat them with some peanut and sesame oil in a heavy pan.
  
• Add whatever vegetables you have on hand. Since we're at the height of harvest season we had all kinds of stuff in it tonight. During the winter, it features lots of cabbage, carrots, and frozen corn.
  
• Cook up the vegetables however you like them and then throw in the rice.
  
• Stir it all up, and add some soy sauce.
  
• Beat an egg or two, depending on how much food you made, and pour it all over. Let it cook on the hot food for a bit, and then stir everything around and let it all cook for a couple more minutes.
  
• Eat it. Add a little more soy sauce on top if you like, or, if you're Kelly, add a bottle and a half of hot sauce.
  

Produce Department

Finally, we are at the point where we can go grocery shopping in the garden for dinner every day. We are getting lots of food, and soon we'll need to start canning and freezing to keep up with it all.

I've been trying to stay on the ball with our harvest tally this year. I even got a ledger book to record the weight of everything, which is the kind of OCD activity I normally would really be into. However, one thing I forgot to take into account is that it's kind of annoying to meticulously record weights and quantities into a ledger when you're starving and ready to bite into a raw zucchini. So instead, the weight of everything we've picked so far this year is written on the back of an envelope on the kitchen table.

For the record, that cabbage weighed 2 pounds.

The Scrap Sack

Meg and I are preparing for soup. As we bring in the grub from the garden, we are saving the scraps from the cleaning and chopping in a one-gallon freezer bag. Our intention (oh what a safe word that is) is to eventually boil the bits down as part of a vegetable broth or stock.

I've done it before and it worked out great but, understandably, no two batches ever taste alike. Just think of it as less waste and more taste (Yep, that seals it, I'm the biggest fucking dork alive. And what's with all these parentheticals? Dag.).

Just shy of a soapbox

If you haven't already, stop by The Slow Cook and check out Ed's post on fish sustainabilty. Please don't take this as a preaching of politics, I'm in love with our differences, but I do appreciate being informed. I knew salmon and a few other species were on the "oh shit" list, but damn, there are a bunch more that need to stay off my plate. If you find what Ed has shared helpful, kick ass, if not... well, still kick ass. Cheers.

A Good Shelling

We've had snow and snap peas for a bit. Yesterday we had our first taste of some shelling peas. For some reason we have always had a hard time growing these things. Usually a warm or cold blooded pest was to blame. This year things were a bit slow to mature because our first planting got mucked with by chipmunks and I am also suspicious of a bad batch of seeds. Oh well, that's the gardening experience I suppose. Did I mention that Meg is clutch with the Alfredo sauce? Throw in some of these peas and... Hot Damn!

In about two months,

picture this

but with tomatoes.

Diversity in salads

This year's first pea flower.

Backyard Breakfast

This morning I went out back, gathered some eggs, harvested red oak leaf lettuce, picked some sage, and clipped a few leaves of chard. Fifteen minutes later they became breakfast. Other than the olive oil everything came from our garden/coop and it was delicious. This is one of the major reasons why we shop at home.

Holy Garlic Stink, Batman

Last night, we went through with our plan to turn some of our green garlic into pesto sauce. I cleaned a small handful of garlic—roughly the same amount as bunch of green onions from the grocery store—and chopped off both the roots and the grassy tips. I threw the garlic in our trusty Magic Bullet, along with some olive oil, a little salt and, to thin it out a bit, some water from our cooking pasta.

We put it in a pot to heat up and added some romano cheese. It looked very, very, green and it smelled deeeelicious.

Then we tasted it, and we fell to the ground and started to cry. It was insanely, tongue-burningly strong. It was intense.

Note to anyone making sauce out of green garlic: No need to use a ton of the stuff.

We poured about half of the sauce into a container to use some other time, and added a boatload of cheese and cream to the remainder with hopes of mellowing it out a bit. That did the trick. It tasted way good on pasta, and we'll zap up the rest of our early garlic crop and freeze it (in teeny tiny portions) so we can throw it on food throughout the sumer.

I kept getting whiffs of garlic today because my bookbag, which was in the kitchen while we were cooking, reeked of it.

What's for Dinner?

Kelly bagged us a groundhog on Easter. Ali, who is from a rural area that's appreciative of the self-sufficient, sustainable lifestyle that we strive for, suggested a few recipes that we might enjoy.

She posted about them here

Delicious! Plus, these recipes are versatile and you can make substitutions and adjustment to fit your lifestyle. Take the Venison or Moose Casserole, for example. How often are you out of venison and you just don't feel like running out to the store right before dinner? With most cookbooks, you'd need to scrap that whole recipe and make tater tot casserole or something. That's not the case here! This recipe is for Venison or Moose, so just pull that extra moose meat out of the freezer, and voila! Dinner is served! Thanks, Mrs. Clara Miller, Crescent Beach, Maine!