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One Local Summer 2011 – Week 4

By Sheetar 1 June 2011 1 June 2011

Some of my favorite spring vegetables are finally ready to harvest and I’m just thrilled! This meal features items from vendors at both the Phoenixville Farmer’s Market and the Mill at Anselma Market. This one was all me this week and I found a bunch of fresh vegetables to toss in a creamy, white wine sauce along with a crust of Focaccia and some chicken. The pasta is the same old recipe I use every time I make pasta (1 cup whole wheat pastry flour, one tbsp olive oil, and 4 tbsp water [or one egg if you want egg pasta], add extra water to acheive the right consistency). With the power of our Kitchen Aid Mixer and the pasta roller/cutter attachment, this is really an easy process, and nothing beats making your own pasta. Sometime this summer, I have to figure out how to make flavored pastas by using vegetable puree in place of water. For the wine, I uncorked a bottle of Riesling we brewed up at home. It’s not entirely local, but it was made in our own kitchen, so that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. The sauce didn’t quite thicken and become creamy like I had hoped, but it’s still delicious, and infused itself into the vegetables. YUM. The chicken was marinated in wine and oil and cooked on the grill to perfection. All in all, the meal was REALLY delicious and I’m happy there are leftovers.

Spring Vegetable Pasta
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma
Chicken – Mt. View Organics
Focaccia – St. Peter’s Bakery
Sun Dried Tomato Cheese Spread – Birchrun Hills
Spinach – Maysie’s Farm
Crimini Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Asparagus – Hoagland Farm
Broccoli – Smith’s Produce
Spring Garlic – Brogue Hydroponics
Non Local – Olive Oil, Riesling (homebrewed!), pepper

11 in 2011, Socks

Warm Up Sox

By Sheetar 25 May 2011 23 May 2011

It sounds naughty right? Well the pattern comes from a book called The Joy of Sox, and yes, it’s a clever play on another book about something entirely different. The pattern was originally knit starting at the toe and finishing at the cuff. Now, I can knit socks toe-up, but I loathe every second of it. I learned to knit socks from the cuff down (top-down), and it’s more familiar and comfortable for me. So, I pretty much took the stitch pattern and worked it into a top-down sock. Yeah, the cable is upside down, but it really doesn’t matter to me, and the basic idea of the sock is still preserved (or at least I think so anyway!). Really love the eye searing green from the colorway called, “Night Vision,” and the yarn was fun to knit with, making a squishy pair of socks. So sad that it’s summer and I won’t really be wearing them till the fall again, but when the cold weather comes, I’m sure they’ll be ready for my feet. This is the third finished item in my 11 in 2011 goal for knitting this year.

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2011 – Week 3

By Sheetar 23 May 2011 23 May 2011

Husband was in charge yet again of this one. We’d had a fancy blue cheese wedge salad at a restaurant and thought, hey, we could do this locally. So, a big chunk of lettuce covered in blue cheese, blue cheese dressing, and most importantly bacon, add a slice of bread, and we have a meal. The dressing came out REALLY well even though we didn’t have buttermilk and sour cream, but the yogurt is pretty tangy to begin with, so it worked out.

Wedge Salad
Lettuce – Jack’s Farm
Spring Garlic – Jack’s Farm
Bacon – Countrytime Farm
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills Farm
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow
Smoked Sea Salt – Pureblend Tea
Sesame French Bread – Sweetwater Baking
Riesling – Mount Hope Winery
Non Local – pepper, worchestershire sauce

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2011 – Week 2

By Sheetar 17 May 2011 17 May 2011

We had picked up chip steak from Backyard Bison last week, knowing full well that we were going to do Philly Cheesesteaks, Local Summer style this week. So, all we needed were mushrooms, something resembling an onion, cheese, and some bread to finish the meal. Husband took the reins on this one and had everything ready to go for lunch when I got home. Perfect! The bread was supposed to be St. Peter’s Bakery’s rustic white, but somehow we ended up with an olive loaf instead (honest mistake) which worked out alright anyway!

Philly Cheesesteak
Bison Chip Steak – Backyard Bison
Crimini Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Experimental Cheese – Birchrun Hills Farm
Spring Garlic – Jack’s Farm
Bread – St. Peter’s Bakery
Smoked Sea Salt – Pureblend Teas
Non Local – olive oil, pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2011 – Week 1

By Sheetar 9 May 2011 9 May 2011

The market has opened for the season and it’s time to bring One Local Summer back from the dead (ack, a zombie, run!). Our local Phoenixville Farmer’s Market had its opening day this past weekend and we were there for the honey sweet festival marking the first day. While our market is still open on a limited schedule throughout the winter, it’s nice to know all of our favorite vendors will be there every week from now until the end of December. We’re always up for the challenge though and this week, I tasked the newly-returned-from-Indonesia husband with cooking the meal. Naturally, it ended up being beef-based but since there aren’t quite enough vegetables growing just yet, but that’s fine with me. The brisket was smoked for about an hour and then put in the crock pot for the rest of the afternoon. The meal was paired with a local wine that really set off the smokey flavor of the beef just perfectly. Hope you’re ready for an awesome One Local Summer!

Brisket with Mashed Potatoes:
Beef Brisket – Birchrun Hills Farm
Potatoes – Jack’s Farm
Truly Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills Farm
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow
Goat’s Milk – Shellbark Hollow
Spring Garlic – Jack’s Farm
Bread – St. Peter’s Bakery
Maple Sugar – Miller’s Maple
Wine – Due Rossi from Chaddsford Winery
Non-local – Homebrew beer (for crockpot), salt, pepper, paprika, olive oil, garlic powder

recipes

Risotto Coi Bruscandoli

By Sheetar 18 April 2011 7 February 2012

Ri-What Co Who? That’s Italian for Rice with Hop Shoots (Bruscandoli). My husband and I brew our own beer, so we started growing hops (Fuggle and Hellertau) in the back yard. Just three short years later, they’ve grown beyond their boxed-in home and have started invading the lawn. This means lots of pruning since you’re supposed to only have three vines per rhizome to ensure a good harvest. Once they start shooting up in the spring, they grow quickly – sometimes 3+ inches per day. Today, I walked out to find that there were shoots already reaching over a foot high, and it was time to thin the hop-herd. Someone in our homebrew club had mentioned that the young, tender shoots can be used in cooking much like asparagus. Google to the rumor-rescue, and it’s true! In fact, it’s a very common Italian dish (specifically around Venice), and those young hop shoots (Bruscandoli) can be found at markets throughout the spring. I managed to find authentic Italian recipes using Bruscandoli on the website for the Commune di Berra (near Venice). I printed out the recipe for Risotto coi Bruscandoli and set to translate it. What follows below is an Americanized version of the recipe with both the original measurements and the (roughly) American equivalent. It’s pretty easy to make, and don’t worry about having a whole 300 grams of hop shoots – I only had about 125g, and it was plenty! The recipe calls for a white wine, but I served mine with a delightful hoppy beer – Terrapin’s Rye Pale Ale.

Risotto coi Bruscandoli Adapted from recipe here	Print

Ingredients:
1.5 cup (300 g) Arborio Rice	4 cup (1 liter) Vegetable Broth
3 cup (300 g) Bruscandoli (Hop Shoots) use only the tender tips, break off hard ends	1/2 cup (50 g) grated parmesan cheese
1 Onion – minced	2 tbsp Olive Oil
4 tbsp (60 g) Butter (unsalted)	Salt/Pepper/Parsley to taste

Instructions:
Chop the onion and Bruscandoli finely Add chopped onion and Bruscandoli to pan with olive oil and sautÃ© for about 10 minutes at medium heat Season with salt and add rice, stirring for 5 minutes Start to pour in broth, about a half cup at a time, stirring frequently, until the liquid is mostly absorbed by the rice before adding the next half cup of broth – mixture should still be wet, and not dry/sticky once the liquid is absorbed Remove from heat, add the remaining butter, cheese, pepper, and parsley to taste and stir together well Serve with your favorite hoppy beer! Serves about four

knitting, Socks, Spinning

Go With the Flow Socks

By Sheetar 16 April 2011 16 April 2011

Finally, another spun-to-finished project. I’ve been accumulating quite the stash of handspun, and I figured it was time to put some to use. The yarn is dyed by Meg at Twisted Fiber Art, and she’s really quite the magician with dye. The colorway is called, “Intrigue,” and was part of a club Meg ran for 3 months. I spun the superwash merino roving into a thin single and then chain or navajo plied the yarn so that the colors would stay together as they were dyed. I ended up with about 425 yards of fingering weight yarn that was then turned into a really squishy pair of Go With the Flow socks. The pattern knitted up quickly, and I only made a few modifications – worked a plain slip-stitch heel and didn’t turn the work inside out after the heel flap was done. I love the way they came out and refuse to take them off now that the photos are taken. Yeah, it’s almost not-sock season, but that won’t stop me from stocking up for the winter!

Foreign

EuroTrip 2011 – Rome

By Sheetar 8 April 2011 7 February 2012

Rome > Siena > Florence > Venice > Munich > Brussels > Amsterdam

The husband and I packed our enormous backpacks and headed off, thanks to a batch of frequent flyer miles, on a two week vacation to the cities listed above. I’ll put up a post per city over the next couple of weeks – in part for myself, to remember the places we went, as well as for others to enjoy. The trip was March 15-29, 2011 and here it is, April 8th, and I’m still having a hard time getting back into the groove of things at home. I was told that means we had a terrific time, and I’m inclined to agree 🙂

Roma! We landed in Rome early on March 16th after leaving the USA on the 15th. We were able to take the train from the Fiumicino airport to the main train station in Rome (Termini), find our nearby hotel (Hotel Papa Germano), and be all checked in and settled with the room by 10am. It was drizzly but about 60 degrees F, so not incredibly terrible. We grabbed our things and took the metro out to the Vatican City. After going through metal detectors and security (something new since my last visit in 2002), we were permitted to go inside St. Peter’s Basilica. First we saw the inside of the Basilica, marveled at the size of the place, the art (The Pieta!), and just took some good time taking it all in.Photo to the right is of the inside of St. Peter’s Basilica, looking up at one of the many, many domes inside.

We then decided to go and climb the cupola, “a piedi,” and save one Euro per person. If you took the elevator, it cuts out 231 stairs from the total of 551 stairs. We arrive at the top of the 231 stairs where the elevator lets out, and it’s the gallery inside the basilica. Nice view of the whole basilica from a safe, fenced in walkway that goes around the entire cupola (see photo to the right). Great, we think, that wasn’t too bad, we’re there, and that’s it, and we go back down, right? No. There are another 320 stairs that wind in the narrow space between the inner and outer skins of the cupola, taking you ALL the way to the top of the highest point in the Vatican. At one point, near the top, the walls curve in on a diagonal so that you are basically walking up those stairs leaning sideways. Doug demonstrates the beginning of the walls moving in on his 6’4″ frame in a photo here.

We make it to the top, and the view is spectacular. Spectacularly pouring rain too. Good thing we brought the rain jackets instead of heavy winter coats. Anyway, I shuffle out, get a photo of the view (photo to the right), and then wait in line to head back down all 551 of those stairs again. At the bottom, we went back inside to the Crypt which holds the tombs of 91 popes including the most recent burial, Pope John Paul II. I had the pleasure of sitting through Easter Mass in 1998 with him, in the Vatican on a high school trip to Italy. I’m not the world’s most religious person, but the dude was pretty well liked and a master of I don’t even know how many languages, so even if the religious importance of the mass flew over my head, the cultural importance of JP and the pope’s position certainly did not. When we got to the point where his tomb was, a large group of mourners (he died in 2005 by the way), clutching tissues and sobbing, had been given a sizeable area to stand and mourn as long as they wished. Doug was a little shocked, and I was too, given the amount of time that had passed. Found out after we got home, that he’s set to be beatified on May 1, 2011, so that might have been part of it too.

After spending most of the day at the Vatican, we walked a short distance to the Castel Sant’Angelo. We were pretty beat by that point, and the Castle offered us some more stairs that we begrudgingly took to the top of the castle (photo to the right is from the top). A stage and sound equipment was being set up outside but we couldn’t figure out what it was for.. something was going on, in all that rain?After that, we took the metro back to the hotel and took a short nap before dinner. Dinner in Italy doesn’t start until 7 or 8pm and forget about even finding a restaurant open before 7. It’s a later event than it is in the USA, and is always at least an hour or two long. You relax, enjoy yourself, chat, and have a full, FULL, 3-course-minimum meal. We took advice from the hotel reception staff and went across the street, still a little travel weary, to La Famiglia. They had a tourist menu for 16â‚¬ plus 4â‚¬ tip. The wait staff spoke English – I speak Italian, or at least used to be pretty good after studying it in college plus the semester abroad for four years – and the food was delicious, ESPECIALLY the orange custard Tira Misu.

March 17. We wake up and finally figure out that the stage setup from last night was for the 150th anniversary of Italian Unification. We were up early, and a little worried that everything would be shut down for the day because of the big holiday. Instead, we find out that everything is free because of the big holiday – we didn’t pay a single admission fee anywhere all day long! Not bad. So we wished Italy a Happy Birthday and set out to the Baths of Diocletian which wasn’t quite open yet. So, we go on a walk around the block and stumble into Santa Maria degli Angeli e Martiri (Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Angels and Martyrs). Camera crews are set up inside and outside the church for something (probably as part of the celebration of the unification), but the cathedral is still open, so we go in to waste some time before the baths open. Turns out, the cathedral was built using the existing walls of the ancient Roman bath. There’s also a really neat sundial built into the floor, also referred to as the Meridian line. A small hole in the wall allows a spot of sunlight that shines at solar noon to mark the date. It was pretty neat to see something like this inside a cathedral, and we took some time looking it over (photo to the right).

The Baths of Diocletian finally open, and we go inside (for free!). The courtyard outside is lined with row after row of grave stones gathered from various sites around Rome. The museum inside contained so many incredible artifacts including a large collection of items from burials in the surrounding area. It was totally visual overload, and I REALLY enjoyed spending time inside (and out of the rain). We then hop the metro out to the Coliseum – a must-see landmark in Rome. Noticing a long line at the Coliseum, we walk down the street and stop in for some pizza. The rain had stopped for a short while, but started up again just as we were finishing lunch. The wait staff moved us under the umbrellas on the outdoor dining area, and let us hang out with our wine until the downpour stopped. At the coliseum (photo to the right), entrance is free again, and we dodge in and out of passing downpours, wandering around the complex.

It looked like the rain finally gave up for the day, so we decided to hit up the Roman Forum and Palatine hill. I still get chills walking on the ancient Roman roads (Via Est Via Romana!), thinking that I’m walking on the same stones where Julius Caesar, Cicero, and other notable Romans once walked. Those four years of high school Latin really bring ancient Rome to life in a way that can’t possibly be described in words. We spent the remainder of the day exploring the forum including the Stadium of Domitian (photo to the right). Headed back to the hotel, and again upon recommendation by hotel staff, went off to a nearby restaurant, Da Vincenzo. Another fantastic meal, served by an English-speaking waiter with quite the sense of humor (he had us laughing all night). Another classic Italian dinner, complete with wine and dessert. We went back to the hotel and got ready for our morning departure to Siena.

Official Stair Counter: 551

Slideshow of photos from Rome