Tag: <span>bison</span>

One Local Summer – Week 22

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The husband decided that we ought to use up some ground bison and make his own special on-the-fly version of Italian Wedding Soup. This was a collaborative effort, and what we came up with is absolutely incredible. It’s far from traditional, but it was incredibly delicious and definitely something that will be made again. We had made chicken wings the night prior (boil wings, then throw on grill to crisp) so we had the chicken stock on hand already. Other than that, the recipe is below, feel free to print, use, and enjoy!

Italian Wedding Soup:
Bison – Backyard Bison
Red Onions – Maysie’s Farm
Garlic – Maysie’s Farm
Egg – Mt View Organics
Bread – LeBoon’s Homemade
Cilantro, Sage, Basil – My Garden
Carrots – Maysie’s Farm
Potatoes – Smith’s Produce
Chicken Broth – Boiled down from Mt View Organics wings (Tuesday Night’s dinner!)
Non-Local – Salt


Italian Wedding Soup Print Print

Ingredients – Meatballs Ingredients – Soup
1 lb ground bison 10 cups Chicken Broth (from 2lbs chicken, boiled)
2 cloves garlic, minced 2 Small Red Onions, Diced
1 egg 2 Carrots, sliced
1 slice Italian Bread, crumbled 8 Small Potatoes, cubed
Cilantro, Sage, Basil to taste 1 tsp Salt
12 large leaves of Spinach, chopped

Instructions:
  • Preheat oven to 350F.  Break egg into bowl, add bison, garlic, crumbled bread, and spices, mix together well with hands.
  • Roll into 1″ round meatballs, place on greased cookie tray and bake in oven for 20 minutes.
  • Heat broth on medium-high in large stock pot.
  • add onions, carrots, potatoes, and salt and simmer while meatballs are cooking.
  • Add meatballs to pot and simmer for 15 minutes.
  • Add spinach and simmer until wilted.
  • Top with your favorite grated cheese and enjoy!
  • Makes approximately 14 1-cup servings
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    One Local Summer – Week 21

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    The husband has returned home and planted himself in the kitchen. I can’t say I mind, when the result is an amazing crock pot meal. He took a Bison chuck roast out of the freezer and threw in all manner of vegetables and fruit that I had from the farmer’s markets and came up with something AMAZING. The bison was SO tender after cooking for five hours and the way the flavors blended together was really a work of art. I think I’m still in a food coma over this one!  It was all served over some home made noodles using Whole Wheat Pastry flour and Buckwheat flour from the Mill at Anselma.

    Crock Pot Bison Roast:
    Bison Chuck Roast – Backyard Bison
    Onion – North Star Orchard
    Purple Potatoes – Unknown Vendor at Anselma
    Apples – North Star Orchard
    Noodles – Egg from Mt View Organics, Flour from the Mill at Anselma, Buckwheat flour from the Mill at Anselma
    Peppers – My Garden
    Wine – Paradocx
    Beer – Homebrew Imperial Blonde
    Sage – My Garden
    Cilantro – My Garden
    Basil – My Garden
    Non-Local – Spices

    One Local Summer – Week 20

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    Pumpkin, again. Yeah when I get on a kick, I get on a kick, but at least here there are plenty of other ingredients involved. The recipe took a lot of searching – I wanted to use both bison and this little Long Island Cheese Pumpkin I brought home last week. Finally, I came across a recipe for Potato Topped Beef and Pumpkin Casserole which ended up being the perfect recipe to use for my new little casserole dish. Naturally, there were a few modifications. I didn’t have any carrots, so I used turnips instead. Left out the beef stock cube, and used three types of potatoes. The pumpkin makes for a great base, but the sweet pumpkiny flavor is mostly lost in the recipe – I suppose this works out okay, since the flavors all run together well, but I was expecting more smack-you-in-the-face pumpkin. Still, it’s delicious, and VERY much edible.

    Oh and if you’re curious, the dish comes from Karin Lorenc on etsy.

    Potato Topped Beef and Pumpkin Casserole:
    Bison – Backyard Bison. Sirloin
    Flour – Mill at Anselma. Bread Flour
    Onion – North Star Orchard
    Turnip – Maysie’s Farm
    Long Island Cheese Pumpkin – Smith’s Produce
    Red Wine – Paradocx. Barn Red
    Sweet Potatoes – Brogue Hydroponics
    Purple Potatoes – Unknown Vendor at Anselma
    White Potatoes – Brogue Hydroponics
    Non-local – Olive Oil, spices

    One Local Summer – Week 2

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    And we’re onto Week 2. So far, there’s not a lot of produce to pick from at the market given that our growing season REALLY gets moving at the end of May into early June. Oley Valley Mushrooms always comes through with fantastic mushrooms – these Crimini ‘shrooms were seriously the best mushrooms I have ever eaten. There may have been one or two that didn’t make it into the pan.  The recipe we used was the Beef Stroganoff recipe from SimplyRecipes.com with a couple of local substitutions made.  We used bison in place of beef, goat’s milk yogurt instead of sour cream, and since we couldn’t find onions at the market just yet, we ended up replacing those with a few leeks and it worked out just fine.  So, let’s start in the back with the bread and run around, clockwise.

    Bread:
    Bread – Saint Peter’s Bakery.  This was their rustic white bread, which was sweet and super soft.

    Beef Stroganoff:
    Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms.  Crimini mushrooms with this incredible earthy flavor.
    Bison – Backyard Bison.  We used a sirloin that we happened to have in the freezer from a few markets ago.

    Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm.  The yogurt is tangy and actually made a perfect substitute for sour cream.
    Leeks – Hoagland Farm.  It’s a little bit of an odd substitution for shallots, but it worked out well.
    Noodles – Mill at Anselma.  The base for the noodles was whole wheat pastry flour from the mill made with wheat grown in Pennsylvania.  This is one find that I’m SUPER proud of and just love that it’s a local ingredient.  I also used an egg from Mountain View Organics and a touch of olive oil.  Then the pasta roller/cutter and KitchenAid mixer did the rest of the work.  These noodles really came out fantastic, arguably my best attempt at pasta yet.
    Non-local – Olive oil, spices.

    Honey Rhubarb Muffin:
    Okay, maybe this wasn’t 100% local, but we’ll call it a bonus localish item on the plate.  The recipe came from here and I tried to keep it as local as possible, but with bakery items, it’s just not possible to use pastry flour and get just the right consistency.  A blend of flours (all-purpose and pastry) seems to work out best, and I figure it’s better to stick with that than force the locality issue and get something that’s more like hardtack than a muffin.  We left out the chopped nuts.
    Flour – Mill at Anselma.  Split 50/50 with generic all-purpose flour.
    Rhubarb – Hoagland Farm.  I remember not liking rhubarb as a kid, but now?  I cannot get enough.  There is chopped rhubarb in the muffin as well as a sort of honey rhubarb reduction jelly sort of spread on top.
    Egg – Mountain View Organics.
    Sour Cream –  Shellbark Hollow Farm.  Substituted goat’s milk yogurt here again, and it worked fine.
    Honey – Baues Busy Bees.
    Non-local – Sugar, Canola Oil, Salt, Baking Soda, Vanilla

    Wine:
    Penns Woods Chambourcin Reserve (2006).  It’s a local winery that we hadn’t had the chance to try before and decided to go for it since they were at the farmer’s market running tastings.  We were not disappointed.

    This might just be the best one local summer meal we’ve ever made.  I’m pretty sure it will be going into regular dinner rotation in the future!  Now I want to hear about some other recipe sites that you enjoy using for dinner ideas.  I’m slowly picking through Elise’s Simply Recipes site and am just plain running out of meal ideas.  So, please share your favorites!

    OLS: Week 10

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    Week ten of one local summer is cooked and consumed already. The husband is home again and decided to try something different – tacos! I was in charge of the taco shells and toppings while  he did the filling. I found a good shell recipe here which used both cornmeal and flour.   I went with whole wheat flour instead of regular old all-purpose flour and it didn’t seem to make a difference.   They were surprisingly easy to make and then form inside of a napkin holder lined with some tin foil.   It looked a little funny, but it worked out well!   The husband improvised a taco spice recipe (sadly, none of those are local, but it tasted great!) which he added to some ground bison and onions. I also found these curious little mexican gherkin cucumbers at the farmer’s market on saturday and just had to bring them home after Jack let me taste one.   They’re sweet, with a little sour and just perfectly bite sized.   It’s really amazing me, week by week, the different things we can make using local ingredients that I never even thought of doing (making taco shells from scratch?!).   This is totally spoiling my ideas of store-bought and semi-homemade that I had been used to cooking  (and mostly microwaving), but all in a good way.   I’ve recently been doing some canning and preserving and I should do a post on that too – it’s another new thing this year that I’m trying and is again, surprisingly easy – much easier than I had thought!

    There were a few non-local ingredients in this week’s meal which included salt, canola oil, and the taco spices.   Here are the local ingredients:
    Ground Bison – Backyard Bison
    Onions – North Star Orchard
    Tomatoes – Our Backyard Garden
    Peppers – Cressley’s Greenhouse
    Mexican Gherkins – Jack’s Farm
    Fat Cat Cheese – Birchrun Hills Farm
    Lettuce – Willow Creek
    Corn Meal – Mill at Anselma
    Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma

    OLS: Week 7

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    One Local Summer rolls into week seven.   This week it’s back to being all me and I went all out.   Let’s start in the front with the zucchini, from my very own garden.   Next around, clockwise, is a zucchini bread muffin.   Finally we have a DELICIOUS bison with pesto and sharp goat cheese ravioli.

    Zucchini – Yep, zucchini.   Non-local salt, pepper, and olive oil.   This one was perfectly ripe and gosh I could’ve eaten the whole zucchini at once.
    Zucchini Bread Muffin  – I’ve been getting a LOT of zucchini from the garden and decided to give this recipe a try.   This was tricky since I was trying to keep as local as possible and the result isn’t quite perfect, but considering the amount of zucchini I’ll have this summer, there’s plenty of time to get it right.   I used my own garden zucchini, wheat pastry flour from the Mill at Anselma (stone ground there too from PA wheat), honey from Baues Busy Bees,  eggs from Mountain View Organics, and goat’s milk yogurt from Shellbark Hollow Farm.   Non-local ingredients include salt, baking soda, baking powder, canola oil, and vanilla extract.   If you’re keeping tally, yes I left out the spices, walnuts, and apple sauce.   It still tastes delicious and I love what the honey adds to the recipe, but I think I need to add more flour or less wet ingredients since it didn’t rise as much as I had expected and is a little dense.   Still, incredibly good, and worth a repeat.
    Ravioli – WOW.   Wow.   Wow.   This was the most labor intensive part of the meal, but it was 100% worth it.   I dug out the pasta roller for the Kitchen Aid mixer and went to town.   Used the same wheat pastry flour as above for the pasta along with some non-local salt (and tap water, of course).   The filling is ground bison from Backyard Bison, with basil and oregano from my back deck planters, some of the frozen pesto sauce from Week 1, and Sharp II goat cheese from Shellbark Hollow Farm.   Non-local salt, pepper, and olive oil were also used.   The sauce is from the same batch of tomato sauce I made last year with the tomatoes from our garden (there were lots, and lots, and lots of tomatoes, in case I haven’t mentioned that before).   I haven’t ever made ravioli, so it was a learning experience for sure, but now that I know what I’m doing, I expect next time, this will go MUCH faster and be much easier.   I’m not quite sure if it tasted so good because it really was that good or that the amount of effort I put into doing something new mentally enhanced the flavor.  

    Really though, I’m quite proud of myself for pulling this whole meal off and not giving up in the middle, leaving the kitchen a complete disaster and my stomach empty.   Through doing this whole challenge, I’ve been finding myself spending less time inside grocery stores and more time outside at farmers’ markets – I might go once every other week to the grocery store for things I can’t get at the market, essentials, etc.   It’s neat, and I hope to continue this as long as possible, maybe even freeze some meals to pull out in the dead of winter when I need a  dose of *real* food.

    OLS: Week 6

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    Week six of One Local Summer and it’s almost the mid-point of the thirteen week challenge. The husband decided to take the lead on this week’s meal with no objection from me.   In the back is a pile of mashed turnips and carrots with maple sugar added for flavor.   Clockwise, next is a Bison Meatloaf using ground bison, tomatoes, garlic scapes, swiss cheese, an egg, and last year’s frozen tomato sauce.   Finally, sugar snap peas finish the plate.   In the wine glass is a Strawberry wine.   It was a great meal, and even better, I didn’t have to cook it!

    Rundown of ingredients:
    Turnips: Willow Creek Orchards
    Carrots: Willow Creek Orchards
    Maple Sugar: Miller’s Maple
    Bison: Backyard Bison
    Garlic Scapes: Willow Creek Orchards
    Tomatoes: Lancaster County (via Willow Creek)
    Tomato Sauce: My garden, last year
    Egg: Pleasant View Farms (via Willow Creek)
    Swiss Cheese: Hendricks (via Willow Creek)
    Snap Peas: Willow Creek Orchards
    Wine: Mount Hope Vineyards