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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 |
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Tag: zucchini
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 |
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OLS: Week 7
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.