Making your own vanilla extract -- how cool is that?!

Vanilla extract to be

A friend gave me homemade vanilla extract this Christmas. I thought that was just the coolest gift. I'd never really thought about how extract was made, much less realized that you could make it as a unique simple gift. Loved, loved, loved it. So of course, I had to set out to make some for others. I did a bit of research and it turns out my friend bought her supplies from a high quality vanilla bean supplier: Beanilla.com.

Taking a look at their website, I found not only an array of different origins of vanilla beans, but also organic beans. There were certified organic beans from Mexico and beans grown organically, according to the site, but not certified from India. In addition, they had the beans that you've heard of before -- bourbon and madagascar vanilla -- as well as a handful of others. Reviewers cited their large plump beans, and I decided it was worth a shot. They also sell a variety of other vanilla products, as well as the jars you need for extract.

There are a number of very informative posts on making vanilla extract on the Internet, and I'm certainly not an expert. One of the best I read is found here.  The important thing is that vanilla can age over years, like wine, with a little bit of care. During the initial extract, you are shaking the bottle regularly. Once it's extracted enough to start using it --about 4-5 weeks -- then you just top off the vodka (or rum) each time you use it.  About 6 months in, it is recommended that you remove the beans and strain the seeds. You re-bottle the extract and let it age, or use it. A totally wonderful "reuse" product, you can then take the beans, dry them, and store them with sugar to create vanilla sugar. How's that for fully using a product??

Making the extract was pretty straight forward. We cut open the beans, used a knife to scrape out the seeds. Filled the bottles with vodka, and capped them.

That's a pairing knife but these are big SOFT beans

you can barely see the hundreds of little seeds in there

Add vodka

A few days later we used one of our remaining beans to make Jamie Olver's Proper English Custard. My first attempt at that, having made Bird's Eye custard quite a lot in my younger days. This was a lot more technically complicated, but O-M-G... unbelievably delicious. Definitely the best custard I've ever eaten... or so I recall. :)

The Real Winter Squash: Blue Hubbard

Blue Hubbard Squash in pieces

 Our first Winter CSA pick up included potatoes, radishes, collards, carrots, fennel, bok choy, leeks, cilantro, and what I had been waiting nearly a year for... a Blue Hubbard squash. I forgot to photograph it whole, so here it is on the left, split in two and another slice taken from the top. These amazingly ugly squashes are unbelievably tasty. Last year I used them for pie and equally delicious soup. In Germany in the winter we would have lots of kerbis (meaning gourd) soups and other dishes through the Fall. Kerbis oil and seeds are used as condiments. The one thing you'll never see is kerbis pie. Funny. They just don't eat the same type of desserts as we do.

Roast until soft in oven

What they are missing !


You cook Blue Hubbard like Butternut or other winter squashes. Cut them in chunks, scrape out the seeds, and roast the pieces in the oven at 350F for 45 minutes or so. They'll be totally soft and you scrape the skin off to mash the remains. 

Puree and add ingredients

 Once you have something like this, it can be pureed with spices, cream, and eggs for pie. Or changed into some other savory dish.


Did you know that most commercial pumpkin for pumpkin pie - the kind you buy in a can - is butternut squash? It's interesting to me that you'll find quite a lot of people who say they don't like squash, or particularly butternut squash, but will eat it as pie.  Of course, the sugar and cream probably influences that.

wonderful Blue Hubbard Squash pie

 But Butternut squash soup tastes nothing quite like Blue Hubbard. I'm hoping for at least one more squash this season.

Which isn't to say that Butternut isn't great for soups. I have two wonderful recipes for it. One combines the squash with ginger for a smooth soup that balances those wonderful flavors. The other keeps chunks of squash in with pork, creating a chunky Fall stew for a tasty pairing.


One Blue Hubbard is enough for two deep dish pies and several small ramekins. Looks good, eh?

Dried squash seeds

My great find this year is dried seeds. Of course, I'm constantly looking for ways to use my new dehydrator. I dried apples and raw almonds in the last few weeks. The almonds are soaked overnight and then dried for 24 hours. This keeps them a bloated, crispy feel that's hard to describe and absolutely addictive.


I figured the seeds might well work the same. I soaked them for about 6 hours, dried for about 12 hours. I sprinkled on some cinnamon at the start, too. The result were puffy seeds with a paper-like outer coating that was similar to rice paper in consistency.

The kernel is a green yummy morsel

The outer white part is fibrous and a bit chewy, but the seed on the inside has a wonderful delicate taste of pumpkin.

In Germany I would buy raw kerbis seeds for my yogurt. These were dark green seeds, and I could never quite make out really where they came from. I've never seen a green squash seed. But taste testing our new dried seeds, my son and I realized there was a separate kernel inside the white coating which was giving the fabulous flavor. Sure enough, with some effort you can pull off the white coating to reveal a green seed. It's a bit difficult, and you can see my finger nail marks on the green seed here, but hey, you get the idea. I do wonder how they strip off the outer coating commercially now. Hmm....

Organic Local Apples

A new source for Organic Apples

Farmer, farmer put away your DDT now, 
I'll take spots on my apples, 
Leave me the birds and the bees... 
Pleeeaaassseeee..

I love that song. The original. The remakes. Of course, we're not using DDT anymore, but there are plenty of other "proven safe" but make you (or me) nervous chemicals being sprayed on our agriculture still. Living in the mid-Atlantic, the problem I've found is that if you want local, as I generally prefer, you're going to have a tough time finding organic fruits. Sure, plenty of people have an apple or pear tree, or two, growing in their backyard. They don't touch it and it produces fine, if not beautiful, organic fruit. There is an organic blueberry farm not too farm from here (in Olney, Md), but blueberries are among the easiest fruit to grow organically. Tree fruit is tough.

So, I was delighted when a friend mentioned a source for organic apples out of Pennsylvania: Oyler's Organic Farms.  And I was thrilled when I saw the prices. Where the organic blueberry prices are several times those at the average pick-your-own farm (but chemical free), the organic apples were just plain normal grocery store prices. They sell #1 and #2 apples, by the 1/2 and full bushel. These aren't pick-your-own. You place and order, then drive to pick them up.

Since I had no idea what to expect, I went with a full bushel of #1 Ida Reds in a box. I figured the extra costs for #1 apples and also for the box, over a bag, might be worth it. The apples were $42 for 42 lbs! That's unbeatable in my book. Friends told me that they still used the #2 apples as eating apples, but that you'd have to cut pieces out here and there. I am processing a lot of my apples into sauce or freezing them for winter desserts, so you'd think I wouldn't mind cutting. I probably don't, but not cutting is even easier. And it would tell me what to expect.

My box of #1 Ida Reds

I was thrilled with these apples. They were indeed spots. All of them had some scab looking thing, but not a single one had an issue under the surface. Not one. I peeled and sliced about 30 apples (with the ever-helpful Pampered Chef tool) and found absolutely no problems. Another large bunch were sauced whole, but cored, and again, no issues.  The last big bunch went to making Fresh Apple salsa that I mentioned in my last post, for freezing. And, a handful went to the fridge.

All the apples had some blemishes like this

And all the apples looked great inside - like this !

There's still some time left for apple picking in the season. There's no doubt this is the best way for me to go. I'm looking forward to some York apples, which are supposedly much more sour, in the next few weeks. Yum yum.

A Variety of Thoughts for Fall

Hot pepper and lemon basil jellies

Well, this Summer turned out to be quite a trip, and unfortunately, the first thing to go by the wayside was writing and food sourcing. I have no idea whether my posts were missed, but here I am again, and hopefully will get back to being a bit more regular. Sadly, we've passed the height of fresh food from local sources, so we'll see how it goes. Since so much time has passed, instead of a cohesive topic, I have a bunch of early Fall subjects to touch upon today. Hopefully some of it will be helpful.

If you find yourself thinking about the long winter ahead without fresh local food, a winter CSA might be for you. My local buying group is going in together again with subscriptions at Everblossom Farm, outside of Gettysburg, PA. With pick ups only every other week and a group of families to share the driving, you can have a wide range of produce throughout the five months you would normally trek to the grocery store and get straight from Mexico or elsewhere. If you're in Southern Carroll County, you might even be able to join our group. Check out my earlier posts on Everblossom and our CSA experience last year.

My only worry about the CSA this year is that the weather here in the mid-Atlantic has been beyond dreadful this year. Today is our second day of clear blue sky in literally many weeks. The rainfall for August and September was ridiculously high and washed out a lot of farmer's Fall plantings.  Many farmers were left with poor growth and failed seedlings.  Tom of Nev-R-Dun farm in Westminster even failed to show a few weeks at the farmer's market this last month, as his plants had been hit so hard.

My own adventures didn't fair well either. I wrote earlier about my big project to create a fenced garden. It was a raised bed filled with about 7 yards of compost from D.R. Snell Nursery in Mt. Airy. Unfortunately, their compost, though extremely expensive ($27/yard+delivery), was really not good. It had not fully composted, had huge chunks of cloth, wood, and rocks in it. But most importantly, it's nutrient levels were way off. It is supposed to be manure and leaf litter, but it was very low in nitrogen, and it all but killed off my tomatoes. Everything except cucumbers were a complete failure this year.  I can only hope that next year the ground will be fully composted and ready for seeds.

The other thing we do about this year is plan for our winter meat orders. Chickens are a big one. You can't get pastured chickens locally from about November until around April. So, my group always puts in big orders to freeze through the winter. Unfortunately, this Summer was a kicker for local chicken farmers. Predation took hundreds of birds. Our usual sources, Sattva Place, Akeys Farm, and Jehovah Jirah can not fulfill our usual big order (~20 birds). So, that's incredibly disappointing. If you know another good source in the area, please add it to the comments section. We also buy our turkeys about this time of year, but Copper Penny Farm also suffered huge losses due to heat and predators this Summer. It's unclear whether they will be offering any birds for Thanksgiving. Bummer, man.

My usual source for beef, Ruth Ann's Garden Style Beef, is doing their winter orders earlier this year.  Her pick up will be in November this year, and orders are due very soon. Other farmers may have later order times, but I haven't seen any specifics.

It's apple picking time ! I've been asked by a number of different people about preserving apples recently, specifically about freezing apples. Yes, apples freeze extremely well. I do a few things with them. I'll slice about 6 apples, toss them in sugar (for preservative), and freeze them in a ziploc, removing as much air as I can. This is exactly what you need for an apple pie. You can use the apples frozen, and some people even freeze the apple with the bag sitting in a pie tin so they have the exact shape they need. You can also just dice the apples, skin on or off and freeze them like that. That's great for apple toppings and crumbles. I also make a lot of sauce, but my absolute favorite these days is apple ginger salsa, which freezes fabulously.

I think I got this recipe from allrecipes.com last year, but am not sure... in any case, they have one listed there... they call it Fresh Apple Salsa Recipe. Make a bunch. Freeze it in pint or half pint jars. It goes fast.  I like it best with yellow corn tortillas.

Ingredients

• 2 tart apples, cored and cubed
• 4 tablespoons lime juice
• 1 fresh jalapeno pepper, seeded and sliced
• 1 fresh Anaheim chile, seeded and sliced
• 1/2 medium onion, finely chopped
• 2 tablespoons coarsely chopped fresh cilantro
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, lightly toasted
• 2 tablespoons fresh ginger, peeled and thinly sliced
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. In a large bowl, stir together apples and lime juice. Stir in jalapeno and Anaheim chile slices. Stir in onion, cilantro, walnuts, ginger, and salt. Mix thoroughly.

 

The other thing to do right now is deal with herbs you have in the deck or garden. Most of them can be cut and dried inside - hung in the basement is perfect. Oregano is a perennial. Just cut a bunch of it's stems off, dry them, and ta-da! you have oregano for the winter. Mint is the same. I also usually dig up a bit of mint, pot it, and bring it inside for the winter.  If you have lemon verbena for it's fabulous herbal tea or otherwise, you can actually bring that plant in for the winter. It is a tender perennial, so if you don't, you'll have to buy another next year. Instead, dig it up, shake off all the outside soil. Cut off almost all of the growth - and dry that in your basement for winter tea ! -- so that it doesn't stress out. Re-pot and keep in a sunny location. It will completely regrow during the winter and you can use it fresh. 

I also grew lemon basil this year and didn't use it. So, last week I was contemplating what to do.Turns out, it makes awesome jelly. With about 2-3 cups of lemon basil, you can create a lemon tea, add sugar and pectin. I doubt you need to use a hot bath canning process, but I did. The result is a lemon drop flavored jelly - delicious ! As is always the case with jams/jellies, getting it to set how you want can be tricky. The batch I made this past week set, but is a bit runny. It sorta has a honey texture. In any case, lemon basil jelly on cream cheese and crackers.... yum yum.  I'm certain that lemon verbena would produce a similar tasting jelly.

jellies with cream cheese on crackers - scrumptious!

 While you're  in the mood of topping cream cheese and crackers, might as well make some hot pepper jelly. If you've never had it before and you like hot-sweet combos, you are seriously missing out. This super easy jelly is made with apple cider vinegar, chopped hot peppers, and sugar. A lot of recipes also add sweet red peppers. Last year I made bulgarian carrot pepper jelly -- at it set perfectly. This year it set a bit runny, so you never quite know. There are any number of recipes out there for hot pepper jelly. It's so easy and so acidic (so there's no real risk of getting sick later), I always recommend it for beginner canners. 

 Well, I guess that's enough for now. 

Foraging: It's Wineberry Season

Wineberries

This is the first week here of wineberry season -- often referred to locally as wild raspberries. They are indeed a species of raspberry and they grow wild here, even rampant, but they are not native to North America. These berries litter the woods around our property and, if you can tolerate the thorns, reward the picker with a nice tart fresh flavor. In parts of the country they are considered invasive, though I'm not sure if that is true here in Maryland. Originally they were cultivated to use as a hybrid for raspberries, but they got loose. The great thing about them is that they grow in reasonably heavy shade, an attribute not found in many berries. We follow the edge of our yard or trails through the woods to grab whatever we can. Of course, the "best" berries taunt you from canes that are just out of reach. Despite better wisdom, my son and I are always drawn further and further into the brambles reaching for that cluster of perfect berries, inevitably caught by the many thorns and left scratched and battered.

This morning we took a friend out picking and, determined to overcome the thorny branches, we set an early morning meeting time and dressed in long sleeves and long pants. Naturally, we've hit a very humid spell and so we set off around 8am in already oppressive weather. The berries are close to their height now, and the picking is easy. The extra clothes were worth the heat, as we got caught many times, but our arms and legs returned unscathed.

Pick only dark red and plump berries - like the one far right bottom

The best berries are always just out of reach

and between you and the berries are these thorns!

wild blackeberries

Where there are wineberries, there are wild blackberries. Their season is just starting and so you'll only find a few dark black juicy berries on each cane this week. And they'll undoubtedly be very sour. I'm not a big fan of these berries, and I'm particularly not fond of their thorns, which, though fewer in number than those on a wineberry cane, are longer and far more vicious.  But they look tasty.  So when they are there, we pick a few of them too. These are not wild black raspberries, which are, well, raspberries and quite delicious. They are also much rarer to find in my woods; I tend to find them each year more by random than planning.

Nasty blackberry thorns !!

So, how do you use wineberries? Quickly! Wineberries do not last very long at all, and you'll want to do something with them within 24 hours. You'll notice they have a stickiness to them and the flavor is more tart than the cultivated red raspberry. They are great fresh, on cereal for example. I made jam with an early batch this week, which came out ok, but not great. Mixed with the sugar necessary for jam, the wineberry seems to lose its distinct fresh flavor. Today's pick will be macerated (sprinkle with sugar and let sit until the juices are drawn out). Then we'll turn lady finger type cookies (quickly!) in the resulting juice and layer the cookies, crushed berries, and cream cheese into a fast tiramisu-like dessert. Yum, Yum!

Today's harvest - random blackberries included

Traditional tiramisu uses marscapone cheese, which is rather expensive, and requires significantly more work to whip egg whites and fold in the rest of the ingredients. It's fabulous and we make it for special occasions, but for a quick "just us" dessert, we go with the faster, cheaper recipe. Well, it's not so much a recipe because it's modified heavily depending on what we have around. But it is faster and cheaper. The Germans, at least in the South, use whipped cream and something like cream cheese to create these big thick lighter versions of tiramisu. They are just absolutely fabulous. Ours is something in between. If we have whipping cream, we whip that and fold it into cream cheese with a bit of sugar. If we don't, we hand whip the cream cheese to make it a bit lighter, but still dense like the traditional dessert. The main lesson we learned from the Italians was to quickly toss the cookies in the coffee or juice that you are using. The cookie will seem dry, but as it sits in the fridge, it will absorb that liquid and have a lovely cake texture when it is eaten. That soggy gooky tiramisu you often find in restaurants is due to soaking the cookies in liquid, rather than tossing them quickly.  Making the dessert with fruit allows you to eat the great berries that are available all Summer, and you can make this with just about any fruit that will macerate well. 

Toss your berries in sugar and let them sit to extract the juice

These are the cookies we use

 

 

Macerated berries

 

 

Toss quickly in juice and layer with cheese....

then more cheese and fruit

Layer until you're out of ingredients - rest in fridge 30-60 min

This entry is part of "Feed me tweet me follow me home" blog hop at A Moderate Life !

Real Food in the Ill-Equipped Kitchen

Mom's kitchen

I am in Seattle for three weeks helping my mother in her recovery from open heart surgery. We got her home from the hospital Monday afternoon, and I knew the main thing she needed was uninterrupted sleep and good food. Eating at this point was/is still exercise, so things that are chewy, like meats, were out the question. Even pasta was too much work and then she wouldn't eat enough to get any calories. So, soup it was. My cookbooks are all at home, of course, but I figured that if I googled a recipe with a book title someone, somewhere would have posted it online. Sure enough. Yesterday I went seeking this wonderful squash soup made simply with squash, apples, onions, and a hearty amount of ginger from Simply in Season. I found it on The Local Cook, a blog I already read.

My mother lives alone in a vibrant city. She loves good high quality food, Real Food we might say, but being alone and in a tiny place, her own cooking is simple and she often eats out. In Seattle, eating out doesn't mean Applebees, though I'm sure they exist here. She eats very well at family owned businesses normally, but now she's not able to do that for some time. Preparing to come out here, I figured I could make her a lot of great food, store stuff for when I'm gone and she still can't do much by herself. I knew her kitchen was tiny, but I had no idea how limited her basic kitchen tools were. In all the times I've visited her over eight years or so, I'm not sure we've cooked in the kitchen.

I'm used to a fairly large kitchen. Her entire home is less than 800 sq feet, so the kitchen is more like a NYC galley kitchen. I remember in graduate school visiting someone in the city and finding that their kitchen was this remarkable sliding door, fold-out contraption that was literally in the entry hall. In my mom's home, the entire workspace is this two feet long piece of counter next to the sink. 

In any case, I set about preparing the squash soup yesterday. A large butternut, two large onions, ginger, and two apples. You also need chicken broth, which I had made in her one large pot a few nights before. I discovered she has no large bowls. No mixing bowls, nothing, at least that I could find. And just the one gallon pot. So I set about this elaborate maneuver of straining the broth using a colander that had too many holes over a variety of small bowls. At least half the broth made it to the floor, I think, but eventually I had a pot for the soup and enough broth to make it.

Then the fun really started. There are a multitude of very small, very cheap (meaning high-likelihood of cutting yourself) knives, but not much else. No chef's knife. She has her father's carving knife and bread knife. he died in 1952. A paring knife, and a short-bladed serrated knife. At first I found no peeler, later I found a peeler that was too dull to peel. This recipe requires peeling and cubing the squash. Joys. And I thought chopping the onion and apple were going to be hard. they were. Having hacked all the skin off the squash with a paring knife, I was left perplexed about how to cut this huge thing. The only option was the bread knife. Hey, it worked, and, surprisingly, it actually worked well.

These were the knives I had to work with

An hour later, we had supper and, in spite of all the limitations, it still tasted great. I topped it with a big dollop of chevre cheese to add creaminess and extra calories for her. Fabulous. Having said that, I think I'm likely to buy a chef's knife during my stay.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday and Simple Lives Thursday - two great sources for other blogs on related topics.

Raising a Homemaker

Head chef for Blueberry Kuchen

One of my big goals in raising my son is that when he flies the nest he can run a household.  I have no idea whether others share this goal consciously in raising their children; I am not sure that I've really ever discussed it with other parents. But for me, it's a real concern and it's something that I think takes energy and progressive conscious education. It's frequently easier to do the job, whatever it is, yourself than teach a child to do it, review their work and help them improve it. When my son first started cleaning the bathroom at age seven, I think there was more work required to clean the clean bathroom; but at nine, he needs no assistance and he knows all the mechanics.

I'm guessing that a lot of people enter into adulthood and their own home without being taught, not just about how to clean a toilet bowl, but how to manage their finances or cook their meals, how to fix a leaky toilet or grow food.  I personally was really good at managing finances because a family friend had spent time teaching me how to make the most of credit cards without debt.  I was relatively weak on a lot of other aspects of running a home.  When  I was in school, it wasn't cool for the academic kids to take courses like home economics or shop - i literally think no one I knew took those courses - and so I took typing. Ironically, here I am in my forties learning to cook and having chronic muscular pain that largely prevents me from typing. Schools do a great job of preparing you to contribute to society and the economy and traditionally the family taught you all the skills needed to fly in adulthood. My husband hadn't been taught to cook, clean, or do finances growing up. That's not a disparaging comment on my in-laws; I think that boys in the 1960s and 1970s simply weren't taught these things that often. But I don't want my son to have to be dependent on someone else, which is quite different than choosing to be interdependent.

Of course, a critical area for me is food. He has been actively cooking, not just putting sprinkles on cupcakes, since he was at least six. We work on reading recipes, assembling ingredients, measurements, principles like cutting, etc. In Italy, we discovered the mezzaluna, a two handled knife shaped a large "U" that allows even the youngest children to safely chop things on the cutting board. This is the perfect way to allow them to really participate in preparing food. After all, what kid doesn't want to use the knife? But knife skills are hard, say I who has routinely stupidly cut herself. With the mezzaluna, their hands are never near the blade and they can be completely responsible, except for an initial coarse cut, for making things like bruschetta. I think the pride of being a specialist at some recipe is huge for young kids, at least, it is for my son.  He's big on bruschetta and tiramisu.

He's proud of his whipping skills

We've just begun knife skills and I dont' let him move things into and out of the oven yet. He's itching to use the oven.  I do now let him monitor things on the stove.

When we cook together, I try to act as his sous chef, so that he is largely responsible for bringing things together. Yesterday we made a blueberry kuchen, the German word for cake, from the wonderful local cookbook, Dishing Up Maryland. We've never been a big dessert family, but this year with over 100 lbs of fruit stored from the Summer, we are diving in to all things fruit. We've made crisps and cobblers, compote and fruit ice cream. It's a new adventure for both of us. Yesterday was the layered kuchen, with a somewhat thick pastry like bottom, a layer of blueberries, and a crumble topping. Perfect with ice cream.

This post is part of Simple Lives Thursday at Sustainable Eats, a blog from a family attempting a "hard core" approach to local living. 

The Winter CSA: Halfway Mark

We are about halfway through our Winter CSA with Everblossom Farm in PA. This has turned out to be a great decision for us this year. Sometimes people complain with a CSA that they don't get enough food, or that they get way too  much of one thing. In my own experience, you can only do so much with zucchini, I think. Elaine of Everblossom Farm has done a great job of ensuring we are provided with a variety of produce and herbs for each of our pick-ups, though this all has to work within the confines of winter growth and root cellar storage. We chose to take 3/4 of a share, which for our family of three seems to have worked out really well. On the weeks we get the full share, we certainly have too much, but then it evens out the next time when we receive only a half share.

I took stock this weekend of where we stood with the CSA items. We have one butternut squash left, but started the season with six, so that is good. We had two quarts of potatoes and probably three pounds or more of carrots. We also had quite a bit of garlic, but again, I had completely stocked up on garlic before the Winter. There are a few things in the freezer, like leeks, but overall, we really are just talking potatoes and carrots.

I decided the potatoes were starting to be a bit soft and we better start making a bigger dent in the carrots, given we'll probably get  more next week! So, we converted the potatoes into gnocchi and the carrots into carrot cake. I had only made gnocchi once before, in a cooking class in Italy, and I hadn't really done very well. I'm not sure why that is. My instructor clearly thought my kneading skills were poor. This time I followed Jamie Oliver's recipe. After baking the potatoes in the oven, I ran them through the food mill to remove the skins and create a fine grade. Note to self, next time just peel the potatoes. The food mill requires a lot of effort to deskin potatoes. Things were actually pretty easy from there. An egg, nutmeg, salt, and a dash of flour. A bit of kneading, rolling out sausage links, and clipping with the scissors. I tested the mix in boiling water, and it held together and tasted great. Later that evening, I melted gorgonzola cheese in butter and half-n-half for decadent sauce and tossed in baked halibut chunks.

Gnocchi in the works

My son made the carrot cake for the most part, using a recipe we found on allrecipes.com. This was another first for us, and he remarked throughout how weird this cake was. In the end, it is quite delicious, particularly with a marscapone-butter icing. I think the use of crushed pineapple and apple sauce ensures that it is moist, but it wasn't too heavy.  In one fell swoop, we used three cups of grated carrots, which helps dig into the pounds of carrots in the fridge. That and a carrot salad taken from Moosewood Cookbook put us on track for carrot consumption for the week. More and we might turn a bit orange.

The Carrot Cake

While we are in the lean weeks right now for the CSA, the rest of the group feels the same way we do. This was a great idea.

The cake used a lot of carrots

Food Preservation: Adventures in Fermentation

Starting lacto-fermented Ginger Carrots*

This year I "put up" more food than ever before, canning or freezing 40 lbs of sour cherries, 40 lbs of blueberries, 60 lbs of peaches, and another 60 lbs of apples. That doesn't include cold storage of things like garlic, onions, and squash that I got in late Summer to use in the Winter. Nor does it include the tomatoes or other summer veggies that were blanched and frozen. I'm not organized enough to plan out my usage of these things, or maybe I'm not disciplined enough to follow the plan, so I'm curious to see where I stand in July with the mason jar collection.    

 So why do all this? Certainly there are any number of people who get all they can from the farmer's market during the season and then return to the local grocery store in the Winter. Nothing wrong with that. But, I like a good challenge. So when I decided to consume as much locally as I could, I took that to the extent of questioning myself regularly: could I do this more locally? do I really need to buy this at the store? Occasionally I say, yes, damn it, I want those shitaki mushrooms, but more often, I find a solution using what I can find grown within easy driving distance. And the great thing about challenges like this is the more you practice, the easier it gets. So besides canned tomatoes - we simply can not freeze enough, it seems - and the occasional mushroom, I really turn to our pantry, freezer, or oil room (cold storage wanna-be) for every meal. In truth, a large part of living this way is the challenge and the satisfaction of self-sufficiency. I'm definitely a born diy-r. Even when that means do-it-harder.

Of course, the winter CSA has made this all much easier again. When you have fresh lettuce coming in the door, you needn't be concerned about texture or flavor loss with other preservation methods. The onions we are getting from the CSA are significant enough to have kept me from buying them in the store since October, so that too is good. And, we're slowly but surely pulling out our preserved and frozen food and making our way through it. Frozen spinach and chard made a mean spanikopita last week, and our yogurt is sweetened daily with one of several fruit preserves. I am carefully walking the dance of using the CSA goods while it is still fresh and making a dent into the stored produce at the same time. This is a non-trivial exercise, I've found.

The CSA has proven for me to be just about the right size, but I do have an awful lot of carrots. We've gotten a good pound or so of carrots, maybe two, each pick up. So at one point, even though we were eating carrots fresh and in meals, we had about four pounds of carrots sitting around. Of course, they last a really long time properly wrapped in the fridge. But, what the heck, I figured, let's see if we can preserve them. Of course, one way is in things like carrot cake. :)

I decided to try my hand at lacto-fermentation. Honestly, I wasn't really sure what that was. But, I'd seen a recipe for fermented ginger carrots in the book Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. I love this book because it is full of fascinating information and lots of weird stuff. Ginger carrots sounded cool. It was certainly a type of food preservation that I'd never done, nor knew anyone who did. I guess except pickles, we had tried to make lacto-fermented pickles (not with vinegar) a few years ago. That failed miserably. I was sure this would work better. If not, I had plenty of carrots left.

Lacto-fermentation is a traditional way of preserving food by encouraging the proliferation of lactic acid producing bacteria. Lactic acid itself is a natural preservative, and food that has been preserved this way can be put in cold storage (or the fridge) for very extensive periods of time. The two big examples are sauerkraut and kimchi, both made with cabbage, and both, according to my Internet research, needing six months to really mature. In essence, with these recipes, you put your veggies in a crock and cover them with a ton of salt and liquid, preferably whey. Left at room temperature they will ferment in some number of days and then you move them to cold storage to continue maturing.

Ginger carrots are made by shredding a bunch of carrots and ginger, packing them into a small mason jar, punching them with a hammer or such to get juices to flow, adding salt and whey to cover the carrots completely, screwing on the lid and leaving them alone until they bubble. I used whey from my cheese, but you could also drain it off of plain yogurt - you really only need a little, and apparently you can just use salt for veggies. The mix started with 1 Tablespoon of salt! I tasted the initial mix and the salt was overwhelming. I had the darnedest time getting the carrots to stay under the liquid, which is supposedly important. I'd push and push, then let go and up they'd float. In then end, I used a lot more whey than originally called for, but I found no other way to keep the carrots below the liquid. I searched online and found a great blog with lots of comments about this particular recipe. I wasn't the only one who had this problem and others recommended nested mason jars, but I couldn't do that in my case. So, I crossed my fingers, put on the lid and let it sit.

My house is a bit on the cold side, so the carrots looked the same three days later. But, after four days they were bubbling. I took off the lid and it "popped". I tasted them. Salty, really salty, and sour-ish. A bit disappointed, I put them in the fridge and figured I'd feed them to someone else. :) My mother, visiting for the holidays, was my first victim only a day later. Still salty. We put them back in the fridge. A week or so later, she tried them again on a sandwich and remarked how the salt taste had diminished. By the time a friend visited right before New Year's Eve, they were quite fermenty - not a word, but an image - and not very salty. We decided we weren't sure what we thought about them. i put them back in the fridge. On the 4th, we had friends over, and we tried them again. This time, I thought they were absolutely fabulous. The salt was all gone and the fermenty-ness was more mature. Now they're gone and I need to make more.

I'm really proud to have learned to preserve things in a new way. I'm even happier that they finally turned out well. You can ferment and preserve a lot of things this way, including lemons, ginger, and, of course, cabbage. Different cultures ferment all kinds of different things, taking advantage of the naturally occurring bacteria that is found everywhere. From what I've read, it really is an art, though, as you are learning to control this process. I've got a lot of carrots still, so I'm going to try those again and then we'll see where we go from there.

Here's the recipe to try yourself.She says, ginger carrots go well with rich foods and spicy meats. They, like most lacto-fermented foods, are meant as condiments.

Ginger Carrots by Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions.

4 cups grated carrots, tightly packed
1 Tbsp freshly grated ginger
1 Tbsp sea salt
4 Tbsp whey (or use 1 additional Tbsp salt)

In a bowl, mix all ingredients and pound with a wooden pounder or meat hammer to release juices. Place in a quart size, wide mouth mason jar and press down firmly. Continue pressing/hammering, until the juices completely cover the carrots. The top of the carrots should be at least 1 inch below the top of the jar. cover tightly and leave at room temperature for 3 days. then transfer to cold storage. (they will be bubbling)

To hear what others beside I found when they tried this recipe, check out the thread on the Nourishing Cook blog, here.

* I don't have a carrot image right now, and I ate all the ginger carrots! So, I've borrowed this carrot photo temporarily from the blog The Gluten-Free Spouse, which does look cool itself for those who can't tolerate gluten.

Local Holiday Feast

A beautiful bright sunny, but cold, Christmas Eve here in Maryland. It called for a walk at the State Park.

This Christmas our meal will be the most local we've ever had for a holiday, I think. It's pretty easy to get more local "than average" by buying your turkey from a Maryland farm. We've been doing that for a few years, all with great results. But it does get more challenging when you move the sides, it seems. Our CSA has provided us with local Fall vegetables for the first time, so suddenly mashed potatoes and other sides just "are" local. But cranberry sauce, that's a tricky one. I've decided to stew some of the sour cherries that we picked and froze this Summer. So, we'll have our turkey from Copper Penny Farm, mashed potatoes and squash from Everblossom Farm, maybe sweet potatoes stored from the Farmer's market, sour cherry sauce. For dessert, the plan is to make a pumpkin roulade (like a pumpkin jelly roll with creamy ginger filling). The recipe, from the Barefoot Contessa, calls for marscapone, which I could have made, but I found myself somewhat lazy this last week, so the cheese comes from France, I think. We have started to get our dairy products from South Mountain Creamery through their delivery service, so the whipped cream necessary for all good things is from Maryland. (We've only been using them for about a month, but our really happy with their products. Their butter is excellent European style, and they deliver a wide range of items beyond their dairy products, including outstanding goat cheese from Maryland Firefly farms.)

And the egg whites from the last of our farm eggs have made peppermint meringues! Not the most perfect shape, I'm afraid, but the taste is fabulous.

Merry Christmas !

Winter CSA Pick Up 3

We received the third installment of our winter CSA on the 18th of December; this week it was a full share for me. Ever since the pie I'd made at Thanksgiving, I'd had visions of Blue Hubbard Squash dancing in my head. I'd been hoping one would find its way into my goodie bag this week. Sadly, no. There was winter squash, but not pumpkin-type squash: butternut. The full share got three butternut squash this time, which over a two week period is normally fine. But, as I had had hoarding issues during the early Fall months at the Farmer's Market, one thing I am plum full of is butternut squash. I've been working it, but as of Saturday, I had six. Luckily, I've been scrounging the recipe books for butternut recipes and it's quite amazing how much variety there is. I guess I mentioned that in a previous post, that I'd located soup recipes where butternut squash acted as a medium for sundried tomatoes or such. It really works quite well. Last night, though, I simply roasted a few of the squash and smashed them with fresh ginger and a little orange juice; a tasty simple side.

So, in the next few weeks, I have to work on potatoes, as we got two quarts of those, and I still have a little from, yes, the market. That shouldn't be too hard. I've already finished the two nice big heads of lettuce we got this week, using up more green peppers and a few of the carrots. We got a ton of carrots this pick up, but they last forever and are fabulous for stock, so no worries.

I also hoarded garlic over the summer and early Fall. I love garlic and cook most days with it. The garlic you get from the grocery store seems to turn rubbery and sprout within a few days of entering the front door. Isn't that funny how that is? It looks fine there, but then takes a nose dive in the comfort of your home. Like those herb plants??! They are all nice and perky, and you think, oh, much better to have the plant for $2.49 than to have just a small package for $2.29, but within a day of getting home, the bright and cheery plant is brown and failing. It's a conspiracy, I'm sure. So the garlic conspiracy led me to hoard enough garlic for the winter months from local farmers. I'm storing them in brown paper bags in the basement so they stay dry and a cooler. But now I'm also getting a few beautiful heads of garlic from the CSA each time, making it close to a steady-state equation. Lots of garlic. Maybe I'll have to find a garlic chicken recipe or something like that.

So, here's the haul list for the 3rd pickup:

Leeks - one very large bunch

Onions - two quarts

Garlic - two heads

Potatoes - two quarts

Carrots - a big ole bag

Winter squash - three butternut

Lettuce - two large heads

Kale - one very large bunch

Fresh herbs - sage and thyme

I have the least experience with kale. Last time, I waited too long and it had wilted quite a bit, so I didn't have much to use. I just threw it into a pasta sausage thing. I'll have to find something more creative this time, and before it dries up. Maybe potato and kale soup, but I was going to make corn chowder with corn from the summer and the potatoes.

Winter CSA installment 1 - the aftermath

Well, I started this draft shortly after we got the first install of our winter CSA with the intent of telling what I did with our produce for that two week period. Now I lost the thread, and I'm halfway through the second batch of produce from the CSA. We'll pretend as if it was all planned. 


The way I've got this CSA arranged, I get a full share every other pick-up and a half share on the alternate pick-ups. So, the first load was quite a lot of food. It certainly makes you plan in advance to either consume it, "put it up" for later, or make expensive compost. While I'm quite the fan of composting, I'm not a fan of expensive compost. I hate things to go to waste, so I either wanted to eat it or freeze it before the food went bad. For the most part, I met that goal. 


Unfortunately, as I think I mentioned before, I had already been hoarding from the Fall farmer's market. This left me with a lot of butternut squash, sweet potatoes, and potatoes. On the flip side, it's caused me to experiment with butternut squash recipes, in particular, in a way I've never done before. I can now make some mean, and fiercely different tasting, squash soups. My favourites so far are a butternut-sundried tomato soup, in which the squash is a medium for sundried tomatoes, and a butternut-apple-ginger, in which the squash is a medium for ginger. Both are outstanding. 


So, here's the weirder things I used stuff for.. well, at least, weird to me because it was a first. i have little experience with beets. Like almost none. Mark Bittman suggests making a Swiss Roesti from them -- essentially a giant hashbrown of beets and parmesan. This was truly excellent, though burned in parts. Where it calls for a nonstick pan, I think they really mean that. But I don't have one, so it wasn't elegant, but it tasted great. I chalked the charred parts up to learning, and since they were the same colour as the beets, you couldn't pick them out (until you bit in). The other beet recipe was for beet greens and bacon, and it came from the farm. I just got fresh bacon from my 1/2 hog I ordered from Copper Penny Farm, so I had the perfect combo. I had no idea how well those flavours go together. I thought the beet greens would be a bit bitter, like chard or another green, but it wasn't. 


The celeriac was a trip. I mashed them as the farm suggested. It was like mild mashed celery, which is great if you like celery and weird if you don't. Luckily, I liked it and so did my son. My husband probably preferred it over the beets, which he wouldn't fein to try. 


I never really thought brussel sprouts were anything to write home about, and when I saw that there were aphids in the stalks, I almost went the compost route. It looked like a lot of work for not a lot of gain to me. But I decided that I'd cook the sprouts that i could relatively easily debug, and compost the rest. In the end, I think I cooked about 3/4 of the sprouts, but they were really small when I peeled off the buggy parts. I roasted them and used them in a pastas primavera. The flavour was sweet and subtle; I don't recall that being the case with any other sprouts I've eaten, so I'm not sure if it was because they were fresher, smaller, or a different variety. 


Now, the blue hubbard squash.. that's some good stuff... I cooked mine into two things: pie and soup. Both were  fabulous. The pie was rich and sweet, the soup very similar to German kerbis (pumpkin) soup. The only recipe I found for this squash was the pie on allrecipes.com, but it was great. 


I'm trying my hand for the first time at lactose-fermenting with the carrots. I'm using a recipe for ginger carrots from Nourishing Traditions that combines shredded carrots, ginger, salt and whey. The mixture ferments at room temperature for several days and you end up with a sour, nutritious gingery carrot side - at least, that is the theory. 


I think the only thing so far to overwhelm me is the green peppers. I've received something like 10 of them, and I'm just not a fan. so, I blanched and froze most of them. I'm sure they'll come in handy somewhere, someday. 


The first install was: (the second was very similar)
potatoes - 2 qts.
sweet potatoes - 3 large, 5 small
onions - 1 qt - these are easy to use up
leeks - 1 bunch - I froze some, put some in soup
celery - 1 bunch - froze for stock making
parsley - one large bunch - still have some of this
sage - 1 bunch - dried some, used some in various recipes
parsnips - 3 large (these store a long time and are awesome) - I ended up freezing several of these, roasting others
carrots - 1 medium bunch (ditto as parsnips) 
squash - 2 acorn, 1 butternut, 1 large blue hubbard - used these all 
garlic - 2 heads
brussel sprouts - 2 stems, about 4 cups - pasta primavera with leeks and fromage blanc
celeriac - several,  about 3 cups - smashed celeriac and potatoes - interesting
chard - 1 large bunch (probably am going to blanch and freeze this soon)  - blanched two bunches now
beets, red - 1 large bunch with greens (will blanch and freeze the greens; roast and freeze the beets)
green peppers - 5 small