Summer's prosperity

I delight in eating my way through the rainbow, especially when 80% of it comes from within a 20 minutes drive from my house.  This view is what sustains me through the long winters.

Daily Photo::27

Dinner!

peace

Daily Photo::15

Tonight I am cooking up some yummy poached pears and prunes to puree up for Kai.  One of my favorite cooking blogs, Smitten Kitchen, has inspired me to spice up (pun intended) my view on baby food.  The vanilla and cinnamon smell so good, I want a spoonful!  Plus after 2 weeks of having a constipated baby, prunes become a very important part of a daily diet.  :-)  Spinach or squash next?

peace

Tis the season...

peace

This week in the garden

The beans and peas are plentiful and often.  Abigail and I love eating them fresh from the garden.  I made the trellis for the peas from hemp and birch branches.  I love the sloping angles of it, reminds me of a house roof.  But for next year, I will need to remember to make it taller.  Who knew the peas were going to grow almost five feet high?  (Well, not me obviously!).  Since I didn't have enough pea seeds for the length of both sides of the trellis, I planted lettuce which will be ready for its first cut this week.  With all the hot weather we have had, the shade of the peas has been really helpful.  In Matt's weeding earnest he pulled up the spinach and pepper plants, so I have a few bare spots to plant some more beans.  In his defense, the kids and I started the pepper plants from seed in April and they were probably never going to produce peppers before fall so I am glad for the room.  And the spinach will do better in the cool fall anyway.  Tonight for dinner we had beans and peas from the garden, locally grown tomatoes and garlic, and basil from our herb garden.

With all this crazy hot weather this summer (loving it, not complaining.  I wait through 4 1/2 months of solid snow for this!), the blueberry bushes have all ripend at the same time and overwhelmed us!  We bribed enticed 4 of our students that work for the summer to come help us pick the bushes clean with a reward of blueberry pie.  There were 5-6 of us working for about 3 1/2 hours to get it all done.  In the end we picked about 12 quarts with lots more in people's bellies.  We had a great dinner with every single person contributing to cooking the meal in some way and 2 pies with ice cream for dessert.  I have never had so many people cooking in my house at the same time.  It was a wonderful experience.  There is just something so unifying about preparing food with people.  It was about the best way I could think of to spend a Sunday afternoon.

peace

We're jammin', we're jammin', jammin'

(Bob Marley fans will get the title reference - I hope!)

8:45 pm Tuesday night, after putting the kids to be a little late (it was swimming lessons night), I walked out to the kitchen, rolled up my sleeves and took a deep breath.  There were 20 lbs of strawberries in my refrigerator waiting to be jammed.  The kids had helped me prep the jars that afternoon (aka loading the dishwasher) and I had washed all the rings and lids.  I prefer to make freezer jam.  I love the fresh fruit taste, it is less work and I can use the lids year after year since the jars don't need to seal like in canning.
Matt came into my madness around 10 pm after paying some bills and was planning to go to bed.  Oh, the plans we make and how they come undone!  When he saw my progress (snail-like), he took pity on me and joined the effort.  The strawberry season was early this year due to a hot spell in May.  Therefore the time in June which is usually mid-season was the end this year.  We got to the farm on the very last day of picking, this past Sunday.  The wife said we were "ambitious" when I mentioned that we wanted to pick 20 lbs.  It was hot as, well you know, the kids got cranky, had to go the bathroom (a lot!) and went to the van after about 30 minutes.  So Matt and I were left on our own to search and wade through rows of mushy, end-of-the-season strawberries to find the edible ones and fill our containers!
 You know, it takes a long time to fill a quart container when the almost all the berries are small, a looong time.  But after 2 hours and a bad sunburn, we had picked our 20 lbs exactly (the farmer wife was very impressed, I am sure).  So, back to the kitchen - there I was an hour and 15 minutes into jamming washing, stemming, mashing, stirring, pectin-ing, and filling by myself and I only had 3 pints full.  I told you it was snail-like.  Picking tiny, end-of-the-season berries takes a long time remember?  Well, stemming, cutting off the mushy parts of tiny end-of-the-season berries takes even longer.  Really.  Which is when my handsome prince on his white stallion appeared and stemmed to my rescue!  (Accurate description, honey?)  After a few foul ups (not adding enough sweetener or pectin - it was late, my brain was done), Matt singing silly (sometimes obscene) songs and me asking him to quit it, and laughing up a storm listening to the hilarious comedy portion of this pod cast (First Contact) I had listened to before Matt came to my rescue, the jammin' was all done by 1am.  Whew!
Strawberries we love you but next year, we are picking early!

peace

Foodie thoughts...

Shhh, don't tell anyone but the kids are in their room right now playing so nicely that I can even post.  Let's not bring it to their attention, though, or they may have to resume their normal behavior to save face.  I guess this abnormal interaction may be the result of a house full of grumpy, sickies suddenly feeling better on this Monday morning with a week full of no school ahead.  Bliss...for the moment.

So, just in case anyone is interested, I have found an amazing new ingredient that I now need to buy stock in...

smoked paprika!

I use this wonderful flavoring in everything.  Not hot like hungarian paprika or bland like regular paprika but really wonderful smokey flavor.  Awesome on pork, chicken, great in curries, and takes scrambled eggs to a whole new level. 

Unless you are a vegetarian or vegan, you know how bacon makes everything taste amazing?  And I mean everything.  For example, my kids love quiche with asparagus in it, why?  Because I add bacon.  They love wilted spinach salad.  Yep, bacon again.  Now I am not saying that my husband kids only eat vegetables with bacon on it.  They are actually pretty good about eating vegetables.  They just eat so much more of them if they have bacon on them.  My point?  Smoked paprika has a similar effect without all the fat and clogged artery consequences.  Now, you can't really substitute one for the other.  Smoked paprika in broccoli salad instead of bacon?  Don't that would do the trick but it does add such a nice smokey flavor that I think you will find all kinds of reasons to use it.

Tonight, in fact, I am using it in a recipe I found on allrecpies.com for slow cooked sweet n sour pork. 

Kids love it, Matt loves it, I love it and it goes in the crock pot!  Hard for me to find all those things in one dish.  In case you want to try it, here are my modifications:

 I use smoked paprika instead of regular (obviously!). 
No green peppers.  I think they would be a great addition but they do not like me.
2 Tbls of cider vinegar - 1/4 cup is just a little too much
No sugar at all.  The pineapples are really sweet enough on their own.

If you try the recipe or smoked paprika in anything, let me know.  I would love to have more reasons to use it.  :-)

peace

Face-to-face

Friends of ours share a beautiful farm with thier parents and will eventually take it over themselves one day.  They have recently acquired around25 chickens and started selling the eggs by word of mouth.  I just love the various sizes that come in one carton, the bright yellow/orange of the yolks, the way the whites just zoom out of the shell...so fresh! 
For the past several weeks our friends have been delivering their eggs to interested people in our church.  I have just loved watching these exchanges: people bringing back their cartons from the previous weeks to be reused, trading their hard earned dollars for farm fresh, hand gathered, lovingly raised free range eggs, seeing all the eggs cartons carefully labeled by name and date in the church frig.  I love when agriculture & community take on this interconnected relationship: farmer and eater exchanging goods in person, talking about the chickens, how the weather is affecting production, what future plans of the farm are, and chatting about life, community, work, etc.  Person to person, instead of farm to truck to store to consumer to table.  It is amazing how much more valuable an investment becomes when it has a face & a name, when it is your neighbor.  This is how all of us do more than merely eke out an existence or make ends meet, this is how we live a life: face-to-face.

peace

Harvest season

I am loving this season of harvest. Living most of my life in the suburbs, I never really lived my eating life in tune with the seasons. Whatever I wanted to eat was always available in the grocery store. Over the last 7 years, I have realized the importance (and health!) of trying to live in the rhythm with, not in opposition to, nature's cycles of seasons, day and night, etc. This became especially clear to me on a 6 week backpacking course Matt and I participated in in college. You sleep when its dark and wake when its light. You eat because you are hungry and rest because your body demands it. It seems like such a simple concept but in our modern life filled with conveniences and 24-hour drive thrus it can be a profound worldview.

Anyway, this year God's rhythms are calling me to harvest. Living in a rural area where they are many farms is giving lots of opportunities and reminders to harvest now and store away for later. I love the idea of taking fruit and vegetables when they are locally in season, fresh, at the peak of ripening and freezing or canning them to enjoy in the winter. There is nothing better than eating fresh tasting sweet (and I mean summer sweet not freeze-section sweet) corn. Especially on the mountain where we have the potential to get snowed in several times in the winter.

Today I froze 3 dozen ears of corn. Not nearly enough, need about 5 dozen more. And 7 quarts of summer squash, I will probably do about 7 more. All locally grown and oh so tasty. Matt's parents (the canning and freezing gurus in my life), the kids and I will pick blueberries on Thursday to freeze as well. We do have 4 blueberry bushes in our backyard but since they need some pruning, fertilizing, and TLC, they are only producing enough for our snacking pleasure. But I am LOVING having blueberries right in our back yard. I am dedicated (Matt's says obsessed but I think that is a bit extreme :-) to picking them every day to win the battle over the birds and the bears. (We actually did have a mama bear and 3 cubs in our yard a few weeks ago! It was amazing. I will post some pics some time!)

Anyway, I praise God for this season of harvest that will provide and sustain us in a slower (and colder!) time.