Tag: <span>cooking</span>

Cupcakes and Pickles

I honestly never meant for this to be a food blog.  But I seemed to have (re)discovered the fun of cooking and baking over the summer, in part because of the One Local Summer challenge.  I was the microwave queen – I regularly told people that I didn’t cook, I microwaved, and I got married so that I would have someone to cook for me (the husband, he really likes our kitchen).  Well I guess I can’t say that anymore, now can I?  There are two food related things I’d like to share with you today.  Maybe a knitting post later this week   🙂

DSC_3975_edit This is a sweet little creation, the Double Vanilla Cupcake.  Delightful!  There’s something so fresh and sweet about a good vanilla bean ice cream that I really enjoy and that translated 100% into this recipe.  I whipped these up last night for a friend’s birthday and they were a big hit.  We stuck them in the fridge to firm up the icing (it was REALLY hot today) and they came out just perfect, so much so that a chocoholic even rated them a 99 out of 100 (with chocolate being the unbeatable 100).  Not bad, if I do say so myself.  The real vanilla beans are what make these so delicious and I can’t imagine making them without the beans.  Oh and we had a little extra icing, so I need to find some graham crackers to make some icing sandwiches since that’s what mom did when we were kids and had some leftover icing from a birthday cake.  OM NOM NOM.

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Lemon Cucumber Pickles!  That is, Lemon Cucumber, not lemon flavored cucumbers.  I promised a post about these, and here it is. I decided to go all out and got myself a pressure canner and the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, commonly referred to as the ‘bible’ of canning and preserving. These pickles are the basic dill pickle recipe with the added garlic and were rather simple to make. Slice home-grown cucumbers, let soak overnight with salt and ice, boil pickling spice and vinegar, process filled jars in boiling water! It’s really that easy. The hardest part is waiting about four weeks for them to mature and marinate in the jars. They’re sitting on my kitchen counter, taunting me with their cheerful yellow rinds and mustard seeds, telling me how delicious they will be if I could just wait another two or three weeks. I’m not sure I have that much will power.

OLS: Week 9

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One Local Summer is already at Week 9.   Nine whole weeks of making one meal with local ingredients per week.   I can’t believe I’ve made it this far!   So, this week I went for simple, since I was doing a whole week of zucchini recipes.   The simple though paid off with an incredible taste, and something I really hadn’t thought of doing – making pancakes from scratch.   Easier than I ever would’ve thought!   One egg,  one cup of flour, about 1.5 cups of yogurt, and the non local ingredients (2 tsp sugar, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp baking soda, a touch of salt).   Whisk together, throw in some blackberries, and VOILA!   Fluffy, delicious pancakes.   Optionally, add some chocolate chips for a just-one-more dessert pancake.   The eggs came from Mt. View Organics at the Phoenixville Farmer’s Market, the flour from the Mill at Anselma, the yogurt from Shellbark Hollow Farm, and the blackberries were hand-picked from a patch of blackberry bushes overflowing with ripe berries at Willow Creek.   The whole thing was topped off with maple syrup from Miller’s Maple.   The best thing about this is that the whole house smelled like fresh pancakes for the rest of the day!

Zucchini Week: Day 4

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We move into day four of Zucchini Week with a heavily modified version of our recipe. My mandoline didn’t have a plate that would slice wide but thin slices of zucchini for proper pappardelle noodles (think wide fettuccine), so i went with the square-spaghetti-sized slicer instead. This gave me these awesome zucchini spaghetti noodles and I was just in total awe. Why hadn’t I thought of this before! Ingenius. Michael Chiarello uses a whole bunch of spices and ingredients that I just didn’t have and was not going to go out and buy just for this recipe, so I improvised. A LOT. Sweet smoked Spanish paprika? Grey Salt?! Yeah. I had regular old paprika and  table salt, and those worked out just fine. Instead of arugula, I happened to have some red leaf lettuce in the fridge and went with that. The feta is a goat’s milk feta that I’ve been layering on sandwiches all week. I still had two heirloom tomatoes from last week’s farmer’s market run and used those in place of the cherry tomatoes, sliced thin. I didn’t have olives, so they didn’t make it into this dish. Overall though, I think this worked out well and the idea of the recipe is still there. The warm tomatoes and zucchini noodles over lettuce made for a really great, refreshing and light lunch. Zucchini Pappardelle Salad – Recipe on FoodNetwork.com
Ingredients Used:
*Zucchini – my garden
*Lettuce – Kimberton Whole Foods locally grown
*Tomatoes – North Star Orchard
*Feta – Amazing Acres

Zucchini Week: Day 2

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Day two of zucchini week brings us to Stuffed Zucchini. As usual, I used the recipe as a guideline and substituted a few things using ingredients found locally. For the ground turkey, I used hot italian turkey sausage. Instead of Parmesan Cheese, I threw in Sharp II Chevre. Tomatoes were both from a local source and even last year’s garden in the form of sun-dried roma tomatoes. Mushrooms are also local mushrooms of the Crimini variety, bought from my favorite farmer’s market. The zucchini used here is a monster zucchini, probably a little past its prime, and a result of a neglectful gardener who didn’t want to go out picking through her garden during the heat, humidity, and thunderstorms we’ve been having lately. However, those three things have given me quite the harvest, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much. Now if only I could find a way to combine both zucchini and cucumbers into one dish! Stuffed Zucchini – Recipe on SimplyRecipes.com
Ingredients Used:
*Zucchini – my garden
*Basil – my herb garden
*Egg – Mt. View Organics
*Sausage – Mt. View Organics
*Onion – North Star Orchard
*Tomatoes – North Star Orchard
*Cheese – Shellbark Hollow Farms
*Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms

Zucchini Week: Day 1

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For day one of zucchini week, I decided to try something new and different. I just love Elise’s website for recipes and this one jumped right out at me as being something relatively easy and delicious and above all, different from the normal uses for zucchini. The Zucchini Fritters were all of those things and this is definitely going see many repeat performances! I switched out the scallions for a locally grown onion, and used goat’s milk yogurt and cheese, both from local farms. The cheese in little lumps at the back of the plate is a spicy chipotle chevre and since I like a bit of tabasco sauce with anything involving egg, this pleased my palate to no end. This may not be a whole meal, but it’s a great use for at least one of those zucchini! Zucchini Fritters – Recipe on SimplyRecipes.com
Ingredients Used:
*Zucchini – my own garden
*Egg – Mt. View Organics
*Onion – North Star Orchard
*Flour – Mill at Anselma
*Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farms
*Cheese – Amazing Acres

OLS: Week 8

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Pizza for Week Eight!   I saw the post on FarmToPhilly.com about making pizza and I just *had* to!   This has become a popular item in the house since the crust is actually done on the grill.   I usually do a big batch of them at once and then stick them in the freezer or fridge and throw toppings on later and stick them in the microwave or toaster oven to melt the cheese really quick.   It saves time, the crust comes out nice and crispy without using a pizza stone.   I’m giving credit to Bobby Flay for this one since we saw it on Food Network a while ago and I thought it was absolute genius.   Cooking in the house during the summer is just TOO hot sometimes, so taking everything outside to the grill is a great option.   The show featured this recipe, and I really just only use the flatbread part and make my own toppings.   On to the ingredients!

Crust: Whole Wheat pastry flour  from the Mill at Anselma.   Non-local Olive Oil, Salt, Yeast
Toppings: Heirloom Tomatoes and onions (hiding underneath) from the North Star Orchard, Colby Cheese from Agape Acres, and a little basil from the back deck.   Couldn’t find a local Mozzarella, and really, all cheese is delicious in my humble opinion, so Colby it was.   I didn’t even bother with sauce since the tomatoes were nice and juicy.

The pizza made for a quick and easy meal.   I actually botched a batch of the pasta dough from last week by using a bad recipe that had me adding way too much water.   I decided to throw in some more flour and gave up after a certain point, added yeast, and let it sit to see if it would work for pizza dough.   Happily, it worked out just fine.   After the flatbread was grilled up, I turned the heat down low and set the flatbread with toppings off the direct heat, closed the lid, and came back in about 15 minutes.   The cheese had melted nicely and it looked perfect.

I have so many ideas for using local ingredients in meals, I feel like there won’t be enough weeks for all of them!

OLS: Week 3

I’m a little late on this one, but we spent all of week 3 in Scotland.   So, I think that’s okay, right?

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For the record, this was a lunch meal and I tend to go heavier on the green things and lighter on the meat for lunches, hence the big blob of green on the plate and little bitty blob of chicken.   In the back is red lettuce from Kimberton Whole Foods, marked as grown locally, unknown farm.   On top of the salad are little turnip chips – dehydrated turnip slices from turnips found at the Phoenixville Farmer’s Market during Week 1.   In the very front is that delicious back-porch dill and goat’s milk yogurt from Week 2 (frozen while we were away, and then thawed to enjoy again).   The chicken roulade is made with chicken  again from Eberly Poultry – pounded out thin.   Inside the chicken is dill and basil from the deck, bacon from Country Time Farm, sundried tomatoes from last year’s garden, and ‘Dillicious’ cheese from Clover Creek Cheese Cellar.

Not Local: Olive oil for cooking the roulade and the salad dressing.

This meal gave me a whole lot of leftovers since I used the whole pound of chicken for the roulade and will likely keep me well fed for the week.   I still have the leftovers from last week’s meal in the freezer too!   I think I’ll make a trip to the Anselma Market on Wednesday to find ingredients for Week four.   If anyone knows of a source of local flour, I’d love to hear about it!   I might be up to try my hand at home made pasta for something different.

OLS: Week 2

Week 2 of One Local Summer is cooked and consumed already.

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I did say dill last week right? I should’ve said yogurt would be the theme of this week’s meal.   Let’s go over what’s on that plate.   In the front, Sugar Snap Peas picked up at Kimberton Whole Foods (KWF) in Kimberton, PA.   They were labelled as being grown locally, but didn’t mention which farm.   The skewered chicken, also found at KWF is from Eberly Poultry  and was marinated in olive oil and lemon juice before being tossed on the grill.   The sauce over the chicken is a sort of cucumberless tzatziki sauce using goat’s milk yogurt from Shellbark Hollow Farm and dill from the deck planter.   In the back is wilted turnip greens from the Phoenixville Farmer’s Market with a few sun-dried tomatoes from last year’s garden (roasted and then frozen, thawed, dehydrated).   Dessert is the same goat’s milk yogurt with some fresh Lancaster County farm-stand strawberries blended in.

Non-local ingredients: Olive Oil, lemon juice, spices (marinade for the chicken)

Now let’s go over why I LOVE LOVE LOVE this meal.   First, my obsession with dill – it’s limitless.   I pretty much believe that dill belongs in everything and I love the Oregon Herb bread that the Great Harvest Bread Company makes because the herb pretty much means dill.   Sadly, I don’t think cucumbers are in season around here yet, but even without the cucumber, that tzatziki sauce was delicious.   MMMmm dill.   And the chicken with the marinade worked out perfectly – so soft and juicy and DELICIOUS.   But, my new find of the week and a new favorite is that goat’s milk yogurt from Shellbark Hollow Farm.   There’s something about the goat’s milk that gives the yogurt a little extra zip or zing or pizzazz.   You should go and check  out the website for Shellbark Hollow and watching the “awwwww” inspiring videos on the goat of the month page.   I have a feeling that the goat’s milk products will be making a regular appearance in my diet now that I’ve found out how incredible they taste.   And now, as I sit here and digest that wonderful meal, I’m already making plans for the leftovers.. Frozen Goat’s Milk Strawberry Yogurt anyone?