Dinners

Well, since we're in Maine, lobster's obligatory.

Pasta another night. An adaptation Spaghetti Alla Carbonara from 365 Ways to Cook Pasta by Marie Simmons. Since I didn't have bacon, I used tuna, added peas and used the eggs from the farm down the road. It came out pretty well...

22 October 2011

A date! Tim and I went on one for the first time in quite a while. Our meal? Sushi! 'Nuff said.

Applesauce!

The girls and I went to a homeschooling event at a local orchard where we and one other family were the only ones there. We had a blast, got a tractor ride to some choice and older Macintosh apple trees as well as feeding sheep grain pellets, eating fresh apple donuts and drinking fresh apple cider. Along with the free bags into which we could stuff eight apples, we went home with a large bag of apples we filled with apples and paid for. My intention: make applesauce. And, if I have any apples left over, make a pie or can them.

For the applesauce, I used the recipe from the Rodale publication Preserving Summer's Bounty.

The first batch I made filled only one jar with some left over for dessert, so I decided to just peel apples until I reached the bottom of the bag and count how many batches of 13 (what was specified in the recipe) I had left. Since I had four, I quadrupled the recipe.

Because I didn't have a food mill, I peeled the apples with Tim's help, cored them and cut them up into sections then threw them into the pot with the rest of the ingredients. What a wonderful recipe! The ingredients were lemon juice, honey, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg to taste. No sugar at all.

Thank goodness, the seals took! Now I have eight jars of lovely applesauce with enough left over for desert with ten apples ready for whatever.

28 October 2011

When struggling to add something new to the HTML, I realized that the followers I had I managed to delete.

What a way to treat one's friends!

I must devote some hours today to updating this blog... So many apples and cabbages and turnips and so little time...

17 October 2011

(Backtracking a bit...)

It felt like a crock pot day...

I got a whole chicken from the freezer and set about defrosting it  as every recipe I looked at specified removing the gibblets from the bird before cooking it. As the bird in question was frozen solid, this was a many-hour proposition defrosting-wise.

While the bird was defosting, I set about finding the perfect whole-chicken crock pot recipe. I settled on this one: The Best Whole Chicken in a Crock Pot recipe on the 100 Days of Real Foods site.

The result was quite delicious. I made broth using the crock pot method recommended on the site, so it was win-win. Yum...

18 October 2011

Since the remaining eggplant needed to be used tout de suite, I searched for a simple recipe using eggplants for dinner.

I found one in The Art of Casserole Cookery by William L Kaufman (published in 1969). The recipe was Eggplant Tuna Parmigana. Since I didn't have the Parmesan or mozzarella or tomato paste called for in the recipe, I used grated cheddar, my Fromage Blanc and tomato sauce I had made from this year's tomatoes.

It came out very well...   

Bread

Over the time of this blog, I've been working on my bread baking.

Here's a loaf from April:

And here is another baked more recently:

15 October 2011

Since I had two eggplants waiting to be a part of something, I decided to use them for dinner.

After pouring through several recipes and squaring them with what I had in the cupboards, I settled on Eggplant Curry from the Moosewood Cookbook by Molly Katzen. It was very good, though I think I cooked the eggplant a little too long so they had a slightly mushy texture. They were flavorful, however. I'd do this recipe again...

I still have one eggplant left. Must seek another way to use it...

Bread Pudding

Since there were several ends of loaves left on the cutting board, I cut them up into cubes to make bread pudding.

The next step was to add milk, which I had to scale up as I had more bread than the cup and a half called for.

The rest of the recipe, a classic from Marjorie Standish's Cooking Down East, calls for 3 tablespoons of shortening (I used Kate's butter), 1/2 cup brown sugar, three eggs, and 1/2 cup granulated sugar (I used brown sugar).

I forgot to take pictures of those steps, but here is a picture of the finished product, already sampled:

It's delicious. A perfect way to put the bread ends to good use.

13 October 2011

The pasta press arrived today. I used the proceeds from a contest to buy a KitchenAid press at the recommendation of both Tamra and Teri. Boy, that thing was easy to use--though I do need to get the proper amount of flour in the dough. Nearly there, but not quite.

For the first batch, I made some squash pasta using nearly all that's left of the puréed Hubbard squash. I took the precaution of puréeing the squash with chopped garlic and onions from the garden.

It was delicious...

9 October 2011

I spent much of the day pickling, making a batch of zucchini bread and butter pickles as well as a batch of green tomato pickles. The bread and butter pickles were hot bath processed, and the seals took, thank goodness. But, unfortunately, not all of the seals of the green tomato pickles took. Some of the jars had to go in the fridge while the rest went into the cellar.

Because I had some bread ends lying about, I decided to make some bread pudding, using Marjorie Standish's recipe from her book, Cooking Downeast. I followed the recipe, but added cinnamon and ginger. Yum.

6 October 2011

We had a great frost that wiped out the tomatoes. Since there were a lot of usable green tomatoes on the vines nearest the house, I filled the garden basket nearly half way full with them. I'll turn them into pickles and relish. Some of the tomatoes were too far gone and mushy. I left those. Perhaps they'll turn into vines next year...

5 October 2011

I finished putting the basil in bags and stuck them in the freezer. Just in time--there was a partial frost...

4 October 2011

I went into the garden after dealing with the laundry on the lines, and found a lot of turnips, beets and onions ready to com inside. Spent a lot of time brushing off the vegetables, then washing and putting the greens in freezer bags. They'll be great in soups...

Must finish tackling the basil...

3 October 2011

The frost is coming, so I pulled out all the basil and brought it inside to process it. I got only as far as plucking off most of the leaves that still looked serviceable. There were quite a lot!only as far as plucking off most of the leaves that still looked serviceable. There were quite a lot!

2 October 2011

Sunday was spent much of the day working on a giant, 15 pound Hubbard squash I picked up from the local orchard (the girls and I picked up apples and cider).

I baked the squash until it was soft, then puréed it in the food processor. I used a recipe I found here http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1950,147186-236204,00.html, though I found that I had to bake the squash for an hour or a little more (lost track) thanks to it being so large.

I reserved six cups to make soup, then used a cup to make squash pasta using a recipe I can't seem to find now. Basically, the gist of it was to substitute eggs with the squash with a ratio of 1/2 cup of puréed squash to every cup of flour. Since the recipe did not include any onions or garlic, I had to add some, but I made the mistake of not puréeing the onions and garlic with the squash.

After letting the I rolled the dough with the pasta machine Teri lent me, then cooked them. Delicious! Though I do need to learn how to use that machine a little better...

Since I had a zucchini hanging about, I started two batches of pickles: one refrigerator pickles and one batch of bread and butter pickles from Andrea Chesman's Favorite Pickles and Relishes.

Miso Soup

While exploring the Hong Kong Market in Portland, Maine (http://hongkongmarketmaine.com/), I was inspired to try to make my own miso soup. With the help of the staff, we picked out some bean paste, sea weed and tofu (as well as my favorite soy sauce, some sheets of sea weed for making sushi and some sesame oil).

I found a simple miso soup recipe here: http://vegetarian.about.com/od/soupsstewsandchili/tp/misosoups.htm.

The recipe was simple and the results were delicious! I will definitely do this again. In fact, I think I would like to make my own miso from scratch...

Since I didn't have scallions, I substituted chives from the garden. Speaking of which, I should dry them before the frost snatches them away--and the basil, and the lettuce...

Drinks of Summer

What can be complete without iced tea? Perhaps ice tea with fresh mint, oregano, basil and Earl Grey tea. Delicious.

I was inspired by an article in the Sun Journal: http://www.sunjournal.com/bplus/story/1053948.

Having the choice of plain ice tea with mint as well as lemonade--that's summer.