Creamy Pasta with Ham, Peas, and Mint & Spicy Pork Belly Confit
I’ve posted two new recipes on the Sweet Stem Farm blog…check them out!
I’m also very excited to announce my first “Foodie” blog post for Fig Magazine here.
And my apologies for being so absent, dear blog world. I promise to return.
For Dinner:
Spinach Salad with Strawberries and Sunflower Seeds
Two-Seed Dressing
Fresh Organic Mint Tea (from Crawford’s Organics)
Kielbasa (from Sweet Stem Farm)
Recipe for Two-Seed Dressing
1/4 cup sugar or honey (I chose honey)
2 tablespoons sesame seeds
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 olive oil
1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon paprika
Salt & Pepper
Fresh is the best.
I have been tremendously busy lately, planning a bridal shower/bachelorette party, working on weekends, and taking on a new professional project. In between business, we manage to fit in a bit of pleasure – and the weekends are a perfect time for the happiness that good food brings.
A local farm had a huge sale on eggs, three dozen free-range eggs for $5 (at Lime Valley Mill). I bought up and have been making delicious egg salad ever since. Today I made kale chips as well – which I highly recommend if you’ve never tried. Simply drizzle de-stemmed kale leaves with olive oil, bake for 10 min. on 350 degrees, then sprinkle with salt. It’s the perfect snack.
Tonight we’re hoping to have a homemade pizza party, topped with sausage from Sweet Stem Farm. This weekend rain brings much needed moisture to the newly tilled soil in our garden, which we’ll be preparing for planting this week. More on that later!
One of the many perks of working on a farm is access to very fresh, very cheap, local raw honey. This honey is so fresh that Nick found a bee in it.
I’m not kidding.
Also, it isn’t totally obvious in the photo, but this is a very large jar of honey. I thought it would take forever to put a dent in it, but I guess when you have honey around that is this good you just start putting it in/on everything. We drink hot tea with honey everyday. On extra cold nights we make hot toddies. We eat peanut butter and honey toast for snacks. We cover our salads in this delicious balsamic vinaigrette.
I would say that I cannot believe our jar of honey is already half empty, but I’m more of a half full kind of girl.
Making whey has to be the easiest thing ever. You basically let your milk sit out for a few days. I recently bought raw milk and set it out to seperate into whey and “cream cheese”. I’m not sure about the cheese yet, it is still draining, but I don’t think whey can get that messed up. You can use whey lots of ways (wheys) but tonight I used it in my first attempt at homemade sauerkraut. The best and worst part about fermentation is that you really do nothing but wait.
Tonight: I made kale chips for the first time and canned banana peppers for the second time.
We also sat down and finally signed up for our CSA share for the winter. I’ve created a plan to make the cold months a bit more tolerable by picking up a box full of fresh, local veggies bi-weekly. Picking and buying 20 lbs. of sweet potatoes and obsessively canning also fit nicely into this plan of stocking up good foods like little squirrels before the winter.
Speaking of sweet potatoes here’s some shots from our adventure this past Saturday.
You should know that sweet potatoes are the magic veggie packing in tons of vitamins and storing long through the winter (after “curing”). You can also eat them lots of ways: sweet potato pie, sweet potato fries, baked sweet potatoes, sweet potato ice cream, sweet potato soup, sweet potato muffins…. and Bubba Gump style the list goes on.
Watermelon Ice is the most refreshing thing I’ve ever tasted on a hot summer day. I found the recipe in one of the many Martha Stewart publications I receive monthly, but off the top of my head I’d say it is as easy as this:
One watermelon cut into chunks – no seeds please
One cup sugar
The juice from half a lemon
Blend it all up, let freeze overnight, and wake up to deliciousness but beware of brain freeze!
Tonight I made my first batch of pesto ever. I am ecstatic! If you’re familiar with growing arugula, you quickly realize that it grows fast and fierce. There is so much arugula in our garden I am worried it will soon be too late to use and it will go to waste. Luckily, an email came through my inbox today that mentioned sandwiches (LOVING sandwiches, I could not ignore it) and hidden among the recipes there was a mention of arugula pesto.
I spent a few minutes picking the arugula, spent about 5 minutes chopping it all up in our blender, and just like that I have my very own blend of pesto that will surely top all of my sandwiches this week. Tonight we made salmon and slathered the pesto all over the top with a drizzle of honey. With a side of our homegrown romaine (our first of the season) and some rice with chile garlic sauce we stuffed ourselves silly.
I can’t wait to share pictures from our trip to NY! We had the best time. But a post like that deserves more detail and right now there’s a kitchen to clean.
On Sunday, we had ourselves a full day. Breakfast at a diner, afternoon bowling through the rain showers, and a big ol’ Sunday Crafternoon complete with fresh-squeezed homemade lemonade. Homemade and lemonade have a lot of the same letters…it must be meant to be!
We are recycling some yard sale kitchen chairs into magnificent colorful brunch chairs. They will be used at all times, but for some reason I decided the other night they will be titled “brunch chairs”. And so it is.
We watched the man at the local hardware store mix the paint for us – a pretty cool experience. We ordered one gallon of Hospitality – that’s the color! Then came home and sanded down chairs for what seemed like eternity. My arm started to ache, so I decided we needed lemonade. Fresh-squeezed, which was conveniently time-consuming ;-)
Stay tuned for pictures of our progress!
