The Last of the Dark Days

March 31st marked the end of the 2012 Dark Days Challenge. March was a tricky month for local eating, due to travel plans, work demands, and the onion box running low in the pantry. This weekend, I grabbed the very last yellow onion to throw together a quick lunch - my final Dark Days meal.

Pasta from the freezer, canned tomatoes and tomato puree and a yellow onion from the pantry, and a chunk of butter out of the fridge - that's all you need for a hot and simple pasta-with-red-sauce lunch.

Tomato Sauce with Butter and Onion
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen's version of Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking"

Dump a quart of canned tomatoes and a pint of thick tomato puree in a pot.
Drop in one half of a halved onion and a few tablespoons (3-5) of butter.
Heat up the sauce to a boil and then let simmer for 20-30 minutes.
Break up some of the tomatoes into more appealing chunks.
Spoon over just-cooked, still-warm pasta.

It's so good that we ate every bite before it crossed our minds to take a photo. Then, we were too eager to get back outside to do yard work to take a photo of our empty bowls. Spring is a good time - full of new energy and enthusiasm for any bit of green or glimpse of spring migrants.

Here's to the end of Dark Days, and to the start of the gardening season!

The Fabaceae Family: Cosmopolitan Beans

This post is all about beans... hopefully, it will be more interesting or useful than a hill of beans.
The Fabaceae is the bean family, which includes, among many others, the pea, the green bean, the lentil, the soybean, the fava bean, the black bean, the chickpea, and the peanut.

Snow peas in a tangle of vines

The bean family is considered "cosmopolitan"because these plants are found throughout the world. The bean family is extremely important to many food cultures, providing a wonderful source of vegetable protein that is portable, storable and flexible. By flexible, I mean that there is a wide variety of ways that beans can be prepared - beans can be eaten raw, dried and then cooked, smushed into hummus or peanut butter, ground into flour, fermented into tofu, tempeh, soy sauce and miso, and even concocted into red-bean ice cream.

Personally, I prefer fresh green beans to dried beans, and so I am devoting a good amount of space in the garden for both bush beans and pole beans (Rattlesnake and Kentucky Wonder). However, if I don't quite get to all the Rattlesnake beans in time, I've read that these taste something like pinto beans when dried and cooked. I'm also planning to grow a lot of snowpeas, as these flat green pods are a favorite in our household - and they freeze really well. Depending on space constraints and my ambition, maybe I will plant green shelling peas, as you really can't have pasta primavera or chicken pot pie without peas. This year will be the first year for trying to grow soybeans for edamame-eating purposes; I've ordered the Beer Friend variety from Fedco. (How could you not love a soybean that is a friend of beer?)

Hard to believe my garden will look like this in 3 short months.

For Dark Days Week 14, our challenge within a challenge is to cook a vegetarian meal. While the easy way out would have been to make this egg and cheese breakfast sandwich, I worked with my husband to make a green bean noodle casserole with mushroom sauce. I need to work on my egg noodle-making - the first time was not the charm.

Local ingredients - eggs, wild mushrooms, onions, shallots, butter and milk.
Flour from King Arthur Flour (local company, but grains grown in the Midwest)
Frozen green beans from Trader Joe's - I thought I had some garden beans left from last summer, but I couldn't find them in the chest freezer.

On Weekends, Cat Naps and Puff Pancakes

It's Week 12 of the Dark Days Challenge and Leap Day 2012 is rapidly approaching. Wow - January and February have simply flown by!

As it's now closer to Easter than Christmas, I don't think I'll be getting around to sending out my winter holiday cards this year. When the weeks are just packed of pressing work, deadlines, and night meetings, the weekends seem all the more precious and the mere glimmer of a thought about a moment of down-time beckons seductively.

The mighty hunter cuddle-kitty

One antidote to this whole ultra-busy time is, of course, to take a cue from the cat. Magalloway knows the value in a well-timed nap (by well-timed, I mean, just about any time of day for any amount of time). He also recognizes that it is important to do the things you want to do when you feel like doing them - for example, when he wants to catch a grasshopper in the garden, he will focus on it so intently it makes you think that time is standing still.

Leisure time = arranging apple slices in a pie pan

This past weekend, we decided to do our best feline impressions - taking a nap on Saturday afternoon and making a large, elaborate brunch on Sunday. It was wonderful to just sit at the kitchen table without feeling a rush to move onto to the next task at hand - yeah, I can dig that.

And what could be better for a leisurely brunch than apple puff pancake? This is one recipe that you can't rush - it is leavened by beaten eggs and only rises to its full golden-brown height in the last minutes of baking. It's beautiful, sweet, simple and satisfying.

Apple puff pancake fresh from the oven

Local ingredients -
Empire apples - Cardigan Mtn. Orchards
Eggs and maple syrup - the backyard
Milk - McNamara Dairy
Flour - Farmer Ground, Finger Lakes of NY
Butter - Cabot Creamery


Non-local ingredients - 
Brown sugar
Cinnamon and allspice

No Sap, but a Red Sauce (Dark Days 12)

Adam made his decision this weekend - no maple sugaring this year.
I'm a little disappointed, but at the same time, this has been a year without winter.
It doesn't feel right to celebrate the spring thaw when the winter hasn't frozen your soul stiff.

There are practical reasons as well to skipping the sugaring season; among the practical issues are that the sap barrel can't be kept cold with a blanket of snow and that we've already missed the early part of the run, which produces the lightest and prettiest syrup.

Instead of boiling sap, I tried my hand at boiling down tomato puree with some sugar, vinegar and spices to make a quick tomato ketchup. I adapted a summer grilling recipe to a "late winter/early spring/I don't know what season it is, but the chickens are happy to be outside" recipe boiled down on the wood stove. I'm calling this the heart of redness sauce, because the color turns out to be an impossibly deep red - primal and intoxicating like Joseph Conrad's novel.

Into the heart of redness - so tasty

The Heart of Redness Sauce - a winter riff on "Hot Tomato" Jam from James McNair

1 pint tomato puree (or unseasoned tomato sauce)
1/3 cup sugar
4 tablespoons minced ginger
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
2 dashes of Sriracha hot sauce (a.k.a. Rooster Sauce)

Mix up all the ingredients in a medium or large skillet. Stick this on the top of the woodstove, or on medium-high heat on your stovetop. Let it boil down 20-40 minutes, stirring occasionally, until you get a thick sauce that mounds up on your spoon. (Keep an eye on this, because it really depends on how thick your tomato puree or sauce is.) Take it off the heat and let it cool down to a manageable temperature for eating.

"a.k.a scrumptious"

This sauce is SO GOOD! We spread a thick layer on top of lamb burgers seasoned with black pepper, red wine, garlic and sesame oil. Adam gave the burgers and sauce a solid nine out of ten - a.k.a. scrumptious. That's pretty high praise, so I think you should try this at your house, too.

For Sunday dinner, we had lamb burgers with the heart of redness sauce, baked sweet potato fries and Empire apples. The Dark Days Challenge is starting to get a little more ingrained in my cooking. We pulled out some ground lamb from the freezer and I searched for a lamb burger recipe that would not require an additional trip to the grocery store.

Citing my local sources -
Ground lamb - Yankee Farmer's Market
Garlic and sweet potatoes - Spring Ledge Farm
Tomato puree - my garden and Musterfield Farm
Empire apples - Cardigan Mountain Orchard

The Family Solanaceae: Garden Plan 2012 and Dark Days Meal (#11)

I sat down one night last week and started sketching out my garden plans for the spring.

But first, I needed to sketch out what I grew in my garden last year. In order to promote fertile soil and reduce crop disease and pests, it's a good idea to rotate your garden vegetables so that you're not growing nitrogen-hungry tomatoes in the same soil each year. 

I found it helpful to draw 2011 on the left-hand page and 2012 on the right-hand page of my garden notebook. The beds are scaled in my mind, but not on the page... this is more of a schematic than a rigorous planting regimen. This is also a work in progress - note that I am using pencil, not ink here.

Click to open a larger picture in a new window.

I counted over 40 seed packets in my little storage box saved from previous seasons, and having ordered 20 new packets this year, I realized that sharing my planting plans might "get into the weeds" pretty fast. I figured it would make sense to report out on my garden planning on a botanical family basis. So, to start off, let's meet the Solanaceae family...

The Solanaceae is a New World family (i.e. native to the Americas, not Eurasia) of tobacco, potatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, deadly nightshades, belladonna, mandrake (not the shrieking variety of Harry Potter fame), petunias, groundcherries, and many other plants. (For a full listing, visit the USDA Plants database.)

I have a few types of hot and sweet-hot peppers (cayenne, cherry bell, and orange pimiento) that I'm hoping to start as seedlings next month. I have not had much success getting sweet bell peppers to fully ripen, so I think I'll stick to the farmer's market for acquiring a stockpile of those.

For tomatoes, I have ordered Cherokee Purple, a big, meaty heirloom that looks positively wild and unkempt but tastes fresh, sweet and juicy. I also have seeds from previous years of several varieties of cherry and paste tomatoes. I have found that smaller tomatoes ripen faster and more uniformly in our garden microclimate. My neighbor, who lives two houses over, grows outstanding Brandywine tomatoes, but I have the hardest time getting my full-size tomatoes to ripen.

Despite my success growing potatoes last year, I'm going to pass on growing them in 2012. They take up a lot of space, and there are excellent and inexpensive sources of potatoes at several local farms. I'm also going to skip growing eggplants - I don't love them enough to allocate them space in the garden this year, plus I can buy them for a good price at both the farm stand and farmer's market in the summer.

Leftover soup for lunch!

Speaking of getting good prices at the farm stand, when the tomatoes start coming in July and August, they don't tend to stop until the frost hits. August/September is a great time of year to ask your farmer about special bulk prices on canning tomatoes. You will thank your farmer at the time of your purchase, and then again in February when you crack open a jar of tomatoes (or pull a container out of the freezer) to make tomato soup.

For my Dark Days meal this week, I tried a new recipe for Cream of Tomato Soup. Despite its origins with a very reputable source (America's Test Kitchen), I found it to be overly complicated for a simple soup and the results were just so-so. Fortunately, there are more tomatoes in the pantry, so I will have the opportunity to try again.

Dark Days 10: Red Fruit Cobbler

I've been watching the crabapples hang on the tree in the backyard all winter.

Crabapples are supposed to have wildlife value, but I'm guessing that these are so tart that they are a food of absolutely last resort.

Fortunately, I've been able to make a fruit-based dessert in advance of Valentine's Day that is much more appealing than crabapples - this week's Dark Days entry is for a red fruit cobbler made with strawberries, sour cherries and pears.

Sour cherries, dried pears and sliced strawberries

It's true that the pears in my photo are not red, but if you soak dried pears with a jar of canned cherries and a jar of canned strawberries, the pears soak up the red sugar syrup.

Cobbler is one of our favorite desserts, so I was pretty happy to realize that it can be a locally-sourced menu option. For cobbler, you need 6-8 cups of fruit mixed with a bit of sugar, flour and spices placed in the bottom of a baking dish. Then you mix up a moist buttermilk biscuit dough - flour, butter, baking powder, baking soda, buttermilk, sugar and salt - and drop that on top of the fruit. Bake for about 30 minutes until the fruit is bubbling and the biscuit is golden.

The fruit turns into a thick, chunky sauce.

Because I was using canned fruit preserved in a sugar syrup, I just added flour and a little nutmeg - no extra sugar needed here. Cobbler is also wonderful with peaches and blueberries.

Sources cited:
Sour cherries - Parlee Farms, Tyngsboro, MA
Pears - Poverty Lane Orchards, Lebanon, NH
Strawberries - Edgewater Farms, Plainfield, NH
Flour - Finger Lakes Region, NY
Butter - Cabot Creamery, VT
Milk - MacNamara Dairy, Plainfield, NH
Baking soda, baking powder, spices, sugar, salt, vinegar (to make "buttermilk") - the grocery store

Dark Days 9: Potato Leek Soup

February is fast-approaching, which means I've been thinking about onions.

Onions can be transplanted as soon as the ground can be worked in the spring, and you need about 4-6 weeks to grow onions from seed to transplanting size. This whole seed-starting thing is all about working backwards - you start at the date that you want to put your plants in the garden and subtract the appropriate number of weeks to find your seed-starting date.

In my case, I want to start my onions in mid-February, so that I can be prepared for planting out onions on April Fools' Day or shortly thereafter. I have a few raised garden beds that warm up and dry out well before the ground does, so I have been able to get peas and some cold-hardy transplants out in early April. 

Here's a great show-and-tell article from MOFGA about starting and planting onions. I had very little success growing onions last year, so I hope this year goes a little bit better.

It's good to have things to look forward to, especially when we've had more freezing rain than snow this winter. In the meantime, as I wait to pull out the grow lights and seed-starting mix, I've been cleaning the house and working on using up my stockpile of food from last season. 

I tried making soup again, as my last Dark Days soup was a dismal failure - and turned out a hearty and simple potato-leek soup. This soup is not much to look at; its resemblance to wall plaster is striking and somewhat unappetizing. But fortunately, it tastes really good!

The chickens prefer that we eat vegetable-based soups.

I used Deborah Madison's recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, but this soup is so easy, I'm not sure you need a recipe, other than to get the proportions of leek to potato correct. I love easy.

Potato leek soup takes 7 ingredients - in order of addition to the pot, you will need butter, leeks, potatoes, salt, water, milk and pepper. If you do not have leeks, you can use scallions.

Locally-sourced ingredients:

Butter - Cabot Creamery

Leeks - Spring Ledge Farm

Potatoes - my garden

Milk - McNamara Dairy (purchased at Spring Ledge Farm)

Dark Days 8: Spinach Goat Cheese Flatbread and a Giveaway!

Now that the snow has finally arrived, I am in no rush to get back into the garden. Before it snowed, I felt like I should be doing some sort of yardwork, even though the ground has been frozen solid for weeks. Now, I am blissfully relieved of my obligations to do yardwork or compost-turning until spring comes.

Instead, I have turned my gardening attentions indoors - I am forcing some paperwhites and a red amaryllis to bloom indoors, and I'm trying to nurture the houseplants with a little more care than usual. Also, I've been doing my garden planning for the spring (click here to enter a giveaway for a seed catalog).

In the meantime, I can't live on the beauty of flowers and houseplants alone, so I spent a good amount of the weekend cooking. I am really fortunate to have Spring Ledge Farm's greenhouses so close to my house. They are open Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings through the winter, and their spinach is fresh, crisp and oh-so-very-green. For dinner last night, I made two small flatbread pizzas with garlic-infused olive oil as the base, and spinach, red onion and goat cheese on the top. That's a bit of grated Parmesan that you see in the photo - I'm trying to use up a last little bit of this cheese that has been "aging" in the fridge for months.

That's some creamy chevre.

Garlic-infused olive oil sounds really fancy, right? It's not hard at all and takes about 1 minute to assemble. 

Garlic-Infused Olive Oil -

Take a clove of garlic, smash it flat with the flat side of a knife, chop it finely and put it in a small cup or dish with some olive oil. When you're ready to assemble the pizza five minutes later, dump the olive oil with garlic chunks onto the dough and spread it around the whole pizza all the way to the edge. Also great with crusty bread or breadsticks.

Sources cited:

Pizza dough - Bread flour from Champlain Organics, honey from Cutting Farm, sugar, olive oil, salt, yeast from the grocery store

Red onion - Kearsarge Gore Farm

Goat Cheese - Vermont Cheese Company

Spinach - Spring Ledge Farm

Garlic - from Vanessa's garden

Parmesan cheese - originally from Wisconsin, it's been in the fridge so long, it might now be considered a local product.

Olive oil - Italy (definitely not local... but oh so tasty)

Dark Days 7: Lessons Learned from Winter Squash

This week, I bring you two tales of good intentions and not-so-good outcomes.

Kitty happy meal?

I.
I bought a pile of butternut squash and pie pumpkins from Musterfield Farm in September and put it in dry storage in our garage. I put it on a wooden tray up on a high shelf stacked on top of a bucket, which meant it was difficult to see and difficult to pull down.

Last week, I went through the hassle of pulling the tray off the shelf. Guess what I found - one completely putrefied and moldy squash and one icky pumpkin. Straight to the compost for those. I also found a squash with one small soft spot, so the chickens got a special squash treat.

The rest of the winter squash are still fine, but they do not last forever, so I guess we will be eating squash more often in the next few months.

Moral of the story - Check on your root-cellared vegetables frequently.

II.
This week, the Dark Days Challenge organizers have posed a special challenge - the one-pot meal. I had roasted a butternut squash and a small pie pumpkin earlier, and had the puree hanging out in the fridge. Butternut squash soup with garlic and ginger was calling my name.

I didn't quite manage to answer that call. I used onion, garlic, carrot and dried celery as the base of the soup, and got the proportion of dried celery to fresh veggies wrong. Even though I used all local ingredients (except for the ginger), this week's challenge was a failure. The bottom line is that I have a golden-colored soup that tastes like celery instead of squash.

This is a disappointment, my first Dark Days failure. I have still been eating the soup for lunch at work, with chunks of bread thrown in to mop up my sadness.

Moral of the story - 1 teaspoon dried herbs equals 1 tablespoon fresh. Forgetting this rule equals a waste of time.

P.S. The photo above shows Magalloway scoping out the day-old chicks in their transport box. He decided that they were much too loud to eat, so we have the happy outcome of keeping chickens and a pet cat who is interested but afraid of them.

Dark Days 6: Tzaitziki Eggs

Gardens help us cultivate the idea of "Waste not, Want not" -

We can save seeds from one year to the next.
We can use mulch to save water and hours of weeding effort.
We can convert leaves, spent vines and other yard waste into compost.
We can give the unwanted caterpillars, slugs and kitchen scraps to the chickens.
We can collect used egg cartons and put new eggs in them to store, sell or share.

One of these things is not like the others.

I'm trying to bring that frugal ethic indoors this winter - specifically, to address the issue of food waste.

Like pinatas, New Year's resolutions are only made to be broken. So, this is more of an exercise than a resolution - just a thing to start doing and keep doing. In the summer, I typically end up cramming vegetables in every available cubic inch, so in winter, I certainly appreciate a clean and organized fridge.

I'm a pretty horrible housekeeper, so I can't give you much guidance on how to clean and organize your fridge, or create a weekly menu plan and matching shopping list. One thing that I do know --- if you do not eat your leftovers, the storage containers will start multiplying... rapidly...

To use up a bunch of odds and ends, I cobbled together a nice little dinner. I call this very successful experiment in leftovers... Tzaitziki Eggs!

Tzaitziki Eggs
Butter for the pan
A handful of minced onion
A few eggs
A sprinkle or two of feta cheese (I love feta with eggs - it's great.)
Tzaitziki sauce
-- Melt the butter, cook up the onion and add the eggs and cheese. Scramble this all together.
-- Scrape out onto a plate and top with tzaitziki sauce.
-- Finish with a few grinds of pepper. Taste this before you add salt, as feta can be quite salty.

Amazingly, I had minced onion, 4 eggs separated and chilling in little Pyrex dishes, leftover feta, and leftover tzaitziki. This required no cracking of eggs, no knife or cutting board - just a cast iron pan and a few grinds of pepper.

This is one of those dishes that you shouldn't knock until you try it - I am definitely going to make this again. This is definitely the lowliest of the low in terms of cuisine, but I believe you could transform this idea into a tasty Greek-style frittata for a classy Sunday brunch.

In case you do not have Tzaitziki Sauce lounging on the second shelf of your refrigerator, you can make this really fast. I call this recipe the Winter Version because true tzaitziki contains cucumbers - but  it's going to be six months before I see a local cucumber.

Tzaitziki Sauce (Winter Version)
1 cup of Greek yogurt (or regular yogurt drained in cheesecloth)
1 large clove of finely minced garlic
1 heaping tablespoon dried parsley
1 heaping tablespoon dried dill
-- Combine all ingredients; adjust seasonings to taste. Let sit for a few hours or a few days in the fridge to develop flavor.

Sources cited:
Butter and Greek yogurt - Cabot Creamery, VT
Onion and garlic - Spring Ledge Farm, New London, NH
Eggs, parsley and dill - my gardens and henhouse
Feta cheese - the grocery store (so probably the cheese is from Wisconsin)

In terms of local-sourcing this time around, I did pretty well - every thing was local except the feta. I have not found a reasonably-priced locally-produced feta cheese in the food stores that I frequent. Sounds like I need to research this more to track down some feta.

Dark Days #5: Hard Cider

Oh, what a difference a year makes!

This time last year, you would have found me perusing my Fedco seed catalog with a big mug of tea, as shown below.

Ahh, the zen of garden planning.

2012 has brought some changes - this is my seed-purchase planning spread this year.

No zen this year, more like ordered chaos.

You may notice that my collection of garden books and catalogs has rapidly expanded. And I've swapped the tea for hard cider.

No, garden planning is not so stressful that I'm driven to drink! Today is Thursday and that means it's Growler Day at Farnum Hill Ciders in Lebanon, where locals can stock up on the offerings of the day at a discount.

While hard cider was the original American adult beverage of choice, it is not well-known today. What I've been enjoying this winter's evening is nothing like Woodchuck or Hornsby's; Farnum Hill tastes much more like a dry white wine. I'll let owner Steve Wood tell you about it himself - here's a clip from the PBS production "The Botany of Desire" where Steve was interviewed. (The feature-length documentary is based on Michael Pollan's book of the same name, written before he started on his lengthy, multi-book quest to find the answer to life's most persistent question, "What's for dinner?")

Garden planning brings out the eternal optimist in all of us, but each year, the motivation changes a little. Discovery of new or different varieties, hard lessons learned from the year prior, and surprising successes all play a role in the general feeling of "anything is possible" for the upcoming year's garden.

For 2012, I've got three primary motivators for my garden planning:

1) I'm feeling ambitious to really work on season-extension this year, so I can be working in the garden from March through December. 2012 will be the year of the cold frame.

2) Julie introduced me to some new tasty vegetables that she grew in her education garden at the Sylvia Center at Katchkie Farm in 2011, and that I really want to grow this year. Julie's enthusiasm for growing and eating vegetables is positively contagious. Specifically, I want to try out salad turnips and braising greens (choy, mustard greens, broccoli raab, etc.) and garnish kale.

3) My aunt and mother-in-law gave me gifts of garden books for my birthday, full of tips, recommendations and layouts. I've relied on the good words of Mel Bartholomew and Eliot Coleman for garden planning help in the past, but I'm really enjoying The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch and The Kitchen Gardeners' Handbook by Jennifer Bartley this year. I will review these books in more detail this winter.

I'll also share my planting list and seed order with you all shortly. Readers, are there any new varieties you're planning to try out this year?

***
As this is a Dark Days challenge post, I should mention that I did eat more for dinner than just hard cider. The hard cider is an excellent local beverage pairing with my meal this week, but unfortunately, I fell a little short on the local choices for the food part of the meal.

Adam cooked black duck and Canada goose breasts with shallot and sweet cherry, and I prepared a side of homemade pasta, rosemary-infused olive oil and Parmesan cheese. The duck and goose were local (well, they are migratory, but were shot flying over Great Bay in New Hampshire), and the pasta and rosemary-infused olive oil were homemade, but the shallots, cherries and cheese were all from far away lands. Not a great week for Dark Days eating... but a very good week for Dark Days drinking.

Dark Days #4 - Holiday Edition - Pickled Peaches

Happy Holidays!

Charlie Brown trees look better in the dark.

We are celebrating two overlapping holidays this year - the eight days of Chanukah and the twelve days of Christmas! Even for households that only celebrate Christmas, I'd strongly recommend celebrating all twelve days.

Multi-day holidays are wonderful for a number of reasons, but the reason most pertinent to this blog is that it allows for enjoying all your favorite holiday foods for many days, not just the one-time Christmas dinner. This is an excellent reason to work on clearing out your pantry and freezer of summer vegetables, canned tomatoes and that single pint jar of pickled peaches that you were saving for a special occasion.

Because I'm still a local-eating amateur, I didn't try to make Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas morning brunch and Christmas Day dinner all with completely local ingredients. Yes, I admit that this is a missed opportunity for a true challenge in local eating... but I'm okay with that - there's always next year. However, I did end up using a lot of local ingredients over the past few days, including that jar of pickled peaches.

When my mom was a teenager, she had really gotten into canning during the summertime and reminisces about the very small peaches that her family friend, Alice, had growing on a tree in her yard - they were perfect for pickling whole. However, I had never seen peaches small enough to fit into a canning jar; the ones coming from the orchard were all far too large. Not that I didn't believe my mom's story, but I never believed that I would find apricot-sized peaches unless I grew them on my own trees.

Imagine my happiness this summer when I found some very small peaches (selling for a dollar a pound!) at a local orchard and knew that they were destined for a sweet and vinegary brine. Even though I felt compelled to eat most of them fresh, I did manage to make a jar of whole pickled peaches.

For Christmas brunch, we had scrambled eggs, bison sausage in a balsamic-rosemary-maple reduction, pickled peaches and regular canned peaches, and my mom's Christmas danish in the shape of a candy cane. The pickled peaches, to my delight, didn't taste like vinegar as some pickles do - just spicy and a little bit sweet. Overall, it was a pretty good locally-sourced meal, minus the traditional must-have Christmas danish. (Full disclosure - the balsamic vinegar was from Italy and the rosemary from the high and dry lands near Telluride, CO. Thanks to Julie for farming out there and thanks to Angie for sharing the good herb!)

To make your own spiced pickled peaches, you should try the recipe in The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving. There is also a recipe in the Ball Blue Book, which I have not tried.

Source citations:
Eggs - six happy hens in the backyard
Milk - McNamara Dairy
Feta cheese (in some but not all of the scrambled eggs) - from Wisconsin
Bison sausage - Yankee Farmers Market in Warner
Balsamic vinegar - Italy
Rosemary - Colorado
Maple syrup - sugar maple trees in the backyard
Peaches - home-canned, from Carter Hill and Gould Hill Orchards
Christmas danish - from my mom

Dark Days - Spinach and Pasta

Spinach is a Holy Grail vegetable for me. I plant it several times a year (spring and fall) in a specially prepared bed, water it thoroughly, and generally try to pamper the baby spinach into succulent green leaves. But it never seems to get beyond the baby spinach stage without some sort of problem - bolting, turning yellow, freezing solid, wilting in a 90-degree day in early June, being eaten by a chipmunk. However, I can go to my local farmers' market and find the most soft and delicate full-sized spinach leaves from several different growers. Hope springs eternal - and maybe next year, I'll find the secret to growing spinach.

This week, I came oh-so-close to the Holy Grail of the Dark Days Challenge - the 100% locally-sourced meal. But true local cooking continues to elude me - utilizing local seasonings is really tricky for me.

Looks like a dog's breakfast - tastes much better

Spinach and Pasta in Cream Sauce
- another fast weeknight dinner -

Part One - The Pasta
Boil water for cooking fresh pasta.
Get started on Part Two while you wait for the water to come to a boil.
(If you're using dried pasta, you will need to adjust the timing so that the pasta and the sauce are both ready at the same time.)
Cook the fresh pasta for 3 minutes, drain and add to the saucepan.

Part Two - The Spinach and Cream Sauce
Meanwhile, chop two cloves of garlic and 1/4 of an onion and saute in butter in a heavy saucepan.
Add a big bag of spinach and saute this until the spinach wilts - I had to add the spinach in two parts because it wouldn't fit.
Scrape the vegetables out into the serving dish.
Add two tablespoons of butter to the saucepan and melt over low heat.
Add two tablespoons of flour and cook about 3 minutes, scraping the bottom of the pan constantly.
Slowly pour in one cup of milk and stir until the sauce thickens up slightly.
Add the vegetables back into the pan, turn off the heat, and stir to combine thoroughly with the sauce.
Season with chili-garlic sauce, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
(If the sauce is ready before the pasta, put a cover on the pan to keep the heat in.)

Sources cited:
Fresh pasta - Vermont Fresh Pasta
Garlic, onion, spinach - Spring Ledge Farm
Butter - my neighbor's pantry (yes, we ran out of butter - too much cookie-baking)
Flour - Farmer Ground Flour (Trumansburg, NY)
Milk - McNamara Dairy
Chili-garlic sauce, lemon juice, salt and pepper - the grocery store (non-local ingredients)

A Dark Days Brunch - Home Fries with Eggs and Greens

I grew potatoes for the first time this year. They may be my new favorite crop - they are so easy to grow and need very little maintenance during the height of the summer, when everything else in the garden needs constant attention. Plus, they store well for a long time.

1) You dig a trench in your garden and toss in a seed potato every foot or so.
2) You cover it with some soil, leaving 2 inches of the trench exposed.
3) Once the potato plant starts growing, you fill in the trench completely.
4) Ignore your potato plants for several months.
5) Once the above-ground part of the potato plant dies back, dig up the below-ground part.

UNH Cooperative Extension has a great two-page factsheet on growing potatoes - in case my lazy, laissez faire method doesn't suit your fancy. It also covers a bit of information on some of the diseases that can affect potatoes.

The best part about potatoes is that you don't know what you're doing to dig up. We unearthed potatoes in every size from marbles to baseballs (if baseballs were potato-shaped instead of round). The smaller potatoes are excellent for boiling up quickly for eating hot or making potato salad. The larger potatoes are great for roasting and for making a brunch favorite - Home Fries!

For the Dark Days Challenge this week, I knew that I would have only one chance to cook. We were tearing out the kitchen Sunday afternoon, so I took advantage of Sunday morning to cook a final breakfast. I wanted it to be a substantial meal so that we wouldn't have to cook again for a while!

Breakfast of kitchen demolition champions

I made special home fries with leftover bacon grease, onions, sliced bell peppers from the freezer, reconstituted dried tomatoes, potatoes and cheddar cheese. Then I fried up some eggs from our hens. And feeling like maybe I should eat some more vegetables, I sauteed a few wilty salad mix greens, just enough to soften them. A little salt and pepper over the whole thing, and some ketchup on the side - yum.

Three key tricks to making home fries -
1) Scrub the potatoes thoroughly. Keep the skins on.
2) Microwave your taters first for 2-3 minutes, piercing them with a fork before you nuke them. You want them cooked about halfway through before they hit the frying pan. (If you are anti-microwave, you can boil them for 3-5 minutes.) Thank you to Brynne for this breakthrough piece of advice.
3) Use a cast iron pan or another pan where you can really scrape the bottom of the pan without worrying about ruining the finish. You want the potatoes to develop a crusty exterior and this may result in some sticking - nothing a wooden spoon and some elbow grease won't fix.

I did pretty well on the local-eating challenge for this meal, although I found out that I had fallen prey to my own assumptions. I had assumed that Olivia's Organics salad mix (a Chelsea, MA company) would be sourcing their greens from Massachusetts; a search on the Internet proved otherwise, identifying that Olivia's sources from many farms all over the country, including California. Also, we tried some of our homemade ketchup and it tasted a little off, so we used store-bought organic ketchup instead.

Sources cited:
Bacon grease - leftover from bacon from North Country Smokehouse
Onions, peppers, tomatoes - Musterfield Farm
Potatoes - Buzz's garden (our neighbor lets us plant in his garden)
Cheddar cheese - Cabot Creamery
Salad mix - Olivia's Organics (most likely not local - darn)
Eggs - the backyard hens
Ketchup - the grocery store

Dark Days Week One - Cabbage and Sweet Potato Slaw

I had no idea until this year that you could grow sweet potatoes in New England. Sweet potatoes are a tropical root vegetable - not a cold-hardy friend of kale and red potatoes and other favored New England crops.

Like potatoes, sweet potatoes are not true roots like carrots or parsnips, but are tubers, underground stems that store starch. Unlike carrots and parsnips that are grown from seed, potatoes and sweet potatoes are grown from sprouted pieces of tuber. The "eyes" are clusters of buds, which will grow new leafy stems. Despite the similarity in common name, these two tubers are not closely related - sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family (Convolvulaceae) and potatoes are in the nightshade family (Solanaceae). They are both "New World" plants, native to the Western Hemisphere.

Apparently, it takes some trickery to make the sweet potato plants believe that they are living in a warm climate with a long growing season, rather than in Zone 5A... it's a matter of starting the sprouts indoors early until it heats up enough outdoors to plant them in the ground. The enormous sweet potato shown here was grown at Spring Ledge Farm a few miles down the road. A new crop for the list for next year - sweet potatoes!

On Tuesday, Adam and I cooked up one of our 20-minute go-to weeknight dinners. This dish doesn't really have a name - it's a skillet saute of cabbage, apple and bacon and whatever else you happen to have on hand, such as a gigantic sweet potato.

Still life with dinner and (some of the) ingredients

We were doing great with the local-eating challenge of Dark Days - (what's Dark Days, you ask?)
Bacon, slivered cabbage and sweet potato, sliced apples and caramelized onions fried in a cast-iron pan and sauced up with maple syrup boiled down from our sugar maple trees this March...
But then, Adam added some mustard, salt and wine to balance the flavors - not local ingredients.

I think this is pretty good for a first attempt, and actually, I was sort of impressed that we didn't need to use any oil or spices to make a really tasty dish. Of course, we could have used New Hampshire wine or hard cider and maybe next year, I could grow mustard, let it mature, harvest the seeds and make my own mustard using vinegar that I made myself. (That would be truly ambitious.)

Here's rough instructions on how to make this dish - I wouldn't call this a true recipe because it's a thrown-together dish with whatever you happen to have. It would be good with any number of sliced-up winter vegetables.

Cabbage and Sweet Potato Slaw

Fry up 1/2 pound of bacon; once crispy, remove from the pan.
Add 2 cups of thinly sliced or slivered sweet potato to the pan and brown.
Add 2 cups of thinly sliced or slivered cabbage and a thinly sliced apple; cook 2-3 minutes.
Add 1/4 cup of caramelized onions and a few tablespoons of maple syrup and grainy mustard.
Cook another minute, add a splash or two of wine and a sprinkle of salt.
Turn off the heat, add the bacon back to the pan, and toss so that the bacon gets coated with a bit of the mustard-maple sauce.

This is one of those dishes that doesn't look great, but tastes awesome.

Source citations:
Bacon - North Country Smokehouse
Cabbage and sweet potato - Spring Ledge Farm
Apple (a Calville Blanc d'Hiver) - Poverty Lane Orchards
Onion - Musterfield Farm
Butter (for caramelizing the onion) - Cabot Creamery
Maple syrup - the backyard
Organic mustard - no idea - it's made by Westbrae, which is part of Hain Celestial Group
Cheap white wine - somewhere in California
Salt - I do not know, but here's a map of all of Morton's facilities.

Dark Days - A Local Harvest Challenge

I'm trying some new things this winter.

1) I planted basil, arugula, lettuce and spinach indoors to see if I can grow my own micro-mix. The idea is to harvest the sprouts once they put out their first set of true leaves - and use it as a flavorful garnish for soups/salads. We will see how it goes...

2) I'm trying to keep some very sad-looking rosemary alive. It's so depressing I didn't even want to take a photo.

3) And, because winter is a slow time in the garden, I've signed myself up for the 5th Annual Dark Days Challenge, which is about cooking and digging into where our food comes from. I can dig that. Even when the ground is frozen.

hosted by the great folks at Not Dabbling in Normal

Basically, the Dark Days Challenge is to cook a meal once a week with local ingredients and then to write a blog post about it. It's called Dark Days because it's held during the winter (end of November to end of March), when most of us can't run out to the garden, pick some greens and call it done. It's called Challenge because we are surprisingly reliant on non-local foods - to my great sadness, olive and citrus trees do not grow in New England.

This is the fifth year in a row that this challenge has been posed - but it's my first year and I really have no idea what I'm getting myself into.

Local is defined as within 150 miles, generally speaking. Everyone gets to set their own goal, which is nice.

The rules of the game allow participants to list out a few exceptions up front, to make this fun and achievable, rather than insurmountable and depressing. Here's a list of my exceptions and explanations of why I am making exception for these - 

1) Spices and Citrus - Definitely not local and definitely delicious. Also good for the immune system.

2) Salt, vinegar and yeast - These all fall into the category of "I could make this myself" but my other life commitments may trump making my own sea salt or trying out wild yeast fermentation.

3) Flour - I just bought 50 pounds of organic flour from two locally-owned flour mills in New York. I feel that it would be excessive to buy more flour just for this challenge.

To make things more interesting and to maintain the theme of this blog, I have two more rules:
1) At least one ingredient each week must have come from my garden, yard or nearby woods.

2) My blog posts must in some way be related to gardening - this is a gardening blog after all.