Kitchen Firsts & Lasts

So much changes in the kitchen this time of year. Out winter stockpile dwindles just as we transplant the new seedlings. We simultaneously welcome fresh ingredients and say goodbye to all those hearty cold-weather recipes. Firsts and lasts abound.

~first corn, last jars of freezer jam and pesto~

~First green smoothie, last frozen blueberries, picked in July~

~first store-bought garlic, last batch of lentil soup~

I am keeping my fingers crossed that this is the year I planted enough garlic to get us though until the next harvest. That this is the year we pick not ten, but twenty pounds of blueberries. That this is the year I jar up double the amounts of jams and tomatoes. That this is the year we rely more on our own food production than ever before. 

What comfort foods are you saying goodbye to for the summer? What things are you welcoming back into your warm-weather kitchen?

Italian Ice For All

I think we can officially can this summer the Summer of Italian Ice. We're obsessed, but the frequent trips to the store to get our hands on some Richie's Italian Ice is getting pricey and junky. So we figured out how to make our own, and haven't stopped making it yet.

Watermelon: cut up half of a watermelon and put into blender with 2 tbsp of sugar. Blend until fruit is liquid and sugar is dissolved. Add one tray of ice cubes and blend.

Blueberry: Combine 3 cups of berries and 2 tbsp of sugar. Blend until fruit is liquid and sugar is dissolved. Add one tray of ice cubes and blend.

Peach: Combine the meat of 6-8 peaches and 2 tbsp of honey (the honey compliments the peaches nicely). Blend until fruit is liquid. Add one tray of ice cubes and blend.

Coffee: Make coffee to your liking. Be sure to sweeten while the coffee is still warm. The finished product would be delish with a bit of whipped cream.

For all Italian Ice flavors, pour mixture into shallow tray and put in freezer. Every half hour or so scrape the surface with a fork. Do this until the entire mixture is frozen and snowy.

I forgot about the coffee in the freezer, so it got no fork scrapings. You can see it is much more crystallized than the others.

We have raspberry and lemon on the list for this week. What flavors can you think of? We'd love some new flavor suggestions!

20 Must-Eat Summer Recipes

Aimee, of Artsyville, recently wrote about the weekly creative prompt called weekword. This week's word is FLAVOR, so I thought now is the perfect time for me to jump in.

The flavors of summer can't be beat and, luckily, many of them can be prepared with little or no stove usage.

Celebrate the Season:
Pesto (FuoriBorgo)
A Campfire Breakfast (Simple Bites)
Strawberry Jam (Mandy Gerth)
No Need For a Stove salads ( Indie Fixx)

Veggies:
The Perfect Summer Salad (The Baker's Daughter)
Chinese Cabbage, Fennel, and Daylily Salad (So Wabi Sabi)
Green Bean and Cherry Tomato Salad (Smitten Kitchen)

On The Grill:
Spicy Mango-Pineapple Hot Dogs (Coconut & Lime)
Grilled Pizza There's nothing like it! (Serious Eats)
Strawberry Salsa & Burgers (Everybody Likes Sandwiches)

Refreshing Sips:
Raspberry Rosemary Cooler (Maya Made)
Strawberry Lemon Mint Daiquiris (A Foothill Home Companion)
Green Smoothie Cocktails (Shivaya Naturals)
The Porch Swing (Smitten Kitchen)

Sweets and Treats:
Variety of Tarts (Angry Chicken)
Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Balls (Joy the Baker)
50 Homemade Popsicle Recipes Includes great popsicle-making tips (Growing a Green Family)
Ice Cream Sandwich Pops (Living Locurto)

Misc Summer Eats:
Giant Black Bean Salad (101 Cookbooks via Soulemama)
Lots of Noodles Each of these recipes can be eaten cold—perfect! (Which Name?)


Oh! And I can't write a food post without mentioning my new fav cook e-book:
Healthy Snacks To Go. Highly recommended!

Use It or lose It: French Toast Casserole

If you're like me, you have bread in your freezer. I save it all—those big crusty loaf ends, shamefully old hot dog and hamburger buns, sub rolls, and dinner rolls. Until recently, I only used that leftover bread for croutons or bread crumbs.

But oh, I have a new trick up my sleeve now: French Toast Casserole. It's recipe number three of the Use It or Lose It series.

Start with whatever bread you have. Stale or aged-in-the-freezer pieces are perfect for this recipe. Tear it up into small pieces and cover the bottom of your baking dish with it.

In a In a large bowl, whisk together 7-8 eggs, 1 cup of milk, 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a dash of salt and pepper. Pour over the bread pieces and distribute evenly in the pan.

Next sprinkle 1 cup of grated cheese (whatever you have will do) over the top. If you're up for it, cook some bacon or crumbled sausage and sprinkle that over the top too. Bake in a preheated 350° oven for about 40 minutes until the eggs are set. Let cool for a few before serving.

So good served with a little maple syrup.

This is a great brunch dish, or a super simple recipe if you're feeding a large group for breakfast.

If eggs aren't your thing, there are plenty of good uses for the bread you have hanging around. I had no idea just how many recipes included old bread, and was pleasantly surprised when I googled "uses for leftover bread." Here's a whole list.

All In A Cookie

We love cookies. And batter, and books, and knowing where our food comes from. So a few years ago when I found the book All in Just One Cookie, I knew we had to have it. This hysterical book takes the reader through the process of making a batch of chocolate chip cookies. With each ingredient, it chronicles its source, and how it is made/processed. I had no idea baking soda starts as a mineral mined in Wyoming that is then mixed with hot water and carbon dioxide. The resulting chemical reaction produces baking soda crystals.

I think about local foods often, and we do our best to stick with local produce. We have also recently taken steps to buy meat from this area. But as far as baking goes, I have no idea where many of the ingredients come from. Why have I never investigated this before? A bit of research yielded local and semi-local sources for some of those ingredients. With that in mind, we set out to make our favorite oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe.

...with eggs from our back yard, and butter from Maine

flour and oats that could be purchased from the Pioneer Valley Heritage Grain CSA

The chocolate chips could be substituted with chopped chocolate from Taza Chocolate

...and the labor, willingly provided by two little gals who'd rather eat the batter raw.

That leaves the vanilla, sugar, baking soda, and salt for the non-local ingredients. Could honey be substituted for the sugar without ruining the texture? Why isn't salt produced on Cape Cod anymore? I'm dreaming of sources, hoping for more luck.

Imagine. All in just one cookie!

A Flood, an Anniversary, and a Snack

Ahoy! Here's the state of my back yard at this very moment:

Everything is a little topsy turvy right now with a pond for a yard, a wet basement, and two days of school canceled due to flooding. (Makes the mini flood of last summer seem like a walk in the park.)

Here's the good news: today is my one year blogging anniversary! I owe it all to my college roomie, Erica (the original Remembery Capsule recipient), who gently pressed me (many times) to start this blog. It was to be a marketing tool for my jewelry business, which I suppose it is, in a roundabout way. What I never could have imagined was the connections I would make, the knowledge I would glean, and the doors of opportunity that would open. So glad I finally listened to her good advice and started this...I don't know, the word blog just doesn't seem to do it justice.

Another good note: these bread sticks (recipe from Petit Appetit; Eat, Drink, and Be Merry) are the perfect companion for a jar of Nutella. Oh boy. They're made from whole wheat, so that balances out the chocolate, right?

Use It or Lose It: Anything Quesadilla

The second recipe in my Use It Or Lose It series is the Anything Quesadilla. It's filled with whatever produce you have, or need to use up before it goes bad.

I fished through my fridge and found spinach who's days are numbered, the end of a red cabbage, some wilting green onions, and a lime that was past its prime. I also added a handful of frozen corn. For the cheese, I used grated cheddar and some feta cheese crumbles, but any cheese will do.

Chop everything up and saute in a bit of olive oil until the veggies are heated through or cooked to your liking. Squeeze some lime juice over everything, add in some cayenne for a little heat, and some sea salt.

Place one corn tortilla (four tortillas are good, too) on a pan, sprinkle with cheese, add the cooked veggies and then place a second tortilla on top.

Over medium-low heat, cook until the cheese is melted and the tortilla is slightly browned and crisped. Using a spatula, flip the quesadilla over to cook the other side.

Remove from heat and cut in half or into quarters. Enjoy it plain or with your favorite toppings—sour cream and salsa are delicious with it.

This recipe is wide open. Some more possibilities include leftover meats, cooked potatoes, beans, root vegetables, or a mix of cheeses. A breakfast version of this is excellent. The combination of eggs, cheese, chopped veggies, and salsa are my favorite weekend-morning meal.

The Biga, The Better

I am from Boston, but I don't mean "biggah," I'm talking about biga, a bread starter. Cousin to the sourdough starter, the biga is the key ingredient used in Italian-style country breads like ciabatta and pagnotta. It adds flavor and gives a crisp crust and moist chewy inside that, until now, I had only enjoyed in store-bought loaves.

It's a bit of a process, this biga business, but I found a recipe for a two-week biga in The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook, that makes a large batch that you can pull from for...two weeks.

A dough made with a biga is somewhat sticky, soft, and invitingly smooth. This batch made a delicious round loaf we devoured with pasta and broccoli. Pictured below are the rolls we ate with soup. Really though? It was more like the soup that accompanied the rolls. So good.

We have been baking our own bread for years now—sandwich breads, baguettes, rolls and sweet breads, but I have never been able to match that certain something found in country breads from the bakery. Bread with a crisp, knobby crust, airy inside, and deep flavor seemed out of my reach. Not so, anymore, now that I have tapped into the Italian in me. And just as the author of the recipe I followed predicted, I will never be without it. Best part is I still have another eight days to use the biga in my fridge.


I found a good history of the biga and instructions to make one here.

Use It or Lose It: The Series

Our One Small Change for January was to be more conscious about the food we have in the house, and waste less of it. So, for the past month we have made an extra effort to use up the produce and other perishable foods before they have a chance to rot. With a little imagination, we came up with (and found) some new recipes that include those cast away ingredients in the fridge. I'll be sharing those recipes here in a new series called Use It or Lose It.

I'm starting off the series with this recipe for Savory Tortilla Chips, in an effort to use those tortillas before they turn a fuzzy blue-green.

Start with a handful of tortillas and cut into quarters (the girls love any task that calls for the kitchen scissors).

Coat a baking pan with olive oil (or any cooking oil) and arrange the tortilla pieces in a single layer. Spray the tops of the chips with olive oil and sprinkle with chili powder, curry powder, and salt (use whatever ratios you prefer). Bake at 350° for 4-5 minutes, turn each chip over and return to the oven for another 5-6 minutes. Be sure to watch them closely after 4 minutes, as they can go from perfect to charred in a flash. The chips will be a bit soft when you first take them out but they will crisp as they cool.

The variations to this recipe are endless and, really, you could use whatever spice combo you can come up with. Plain salt and pepper would be great, or a sweet version using butter, sugar and cinnamon sounds delicious, too. Enjoy!

...and February's One Small Change is in the works, stay tuned.

Between (and sugar on top)

The week between Christmas and New Years is always a unique one. A week filled with a bit of reflection as we absorb the events of the past year, mixed with a sense of anticipation and renewal, as we await the new year. Kate, of Marmalade Moon recently wrote about these days, the "days in between," or “mellandagarna,” in her native Swedish. I love the idea of giving this week "in between" a name and celebrating it.

When you think about it, most of us do celebrate it, in our own ways. This year, we have been celebrating mostly with food (our very favorite way to commemorate occasion). Cooking and eating some old favorites and trying a few new recipes, too.

Banana bread has always been a favorite, but it was taken to another level after a friend told me what she recently ordered at a diner: banana bread toasted with butter and powdered sugar sprinkled on top (!). So we baked a loaf, using our preferred recipe, thickly sliced it, slathered it with butter and sifted the sugar onto it and, wow. The sugar dissolves into the melted butter, becoming something reminiscent of frosting (which is always good for breakfast. My mother would be proud—and I am being completely serious). This may be a fantastic new tradition for us—ringing in the new year with some good ol' sugar coated bread.

Wishing you a peaceful new year!

A thousand thanks for stopping by this little place and commenting. This blog has been a wonderful avenue of artistic expression and you, the readers, have motivated and inspired me to continue on a creative path. I look forward to sharing so much more in the new year. Best wishes for the new decade!

Mint!

Ignoring the advice of every gardening book ever written, I let the mint in my garden get out of control. And so, even in December—even after frost and snow, we are still enjoying this delicious (and plentiful) leaf straight from the garden.

A bunch of mint hanging to dry in our kitchen is a familiar sight. We have jars and jars of the dried herb stashed for the winter.

It's a good thing that the girls' favorite tea is "minty" tea.

I recalled a simple recipe for mint candy, and figured this was the perfect use for the last leaves left out back. Start with a good bunch of mint leaves, washed and dried.

Next, dip them in egg white then in granulated sugar. Let the leaves dry for about a day on parchment.

Candied mint leaves are thin, sweet, and surprisingly crispy. This delicate treat couldn't be easier to make—the hardest part is waiting for them to dry.

We found this recipe in a kids book of nature crafts but I can't, for the life of me, remember what book. If anybody out there knows, let me know and I'll give credit where it is due!

The Big Rock Candy Mountain

When I was little, I always wanted to have rock candy pops. I was so attracted to those rainbows of brightly colored, translucent crystals. And that wooden handle with the little ball at the end? Had to have it. I loved everything about rock candy—except for the taste, really. Too sweet for me.

The girls have my husband's sweet tooth, so we set out to make our own rock candy this week. Here's how we did it:

Start with 1 part water, 3 parts sugar. Bring to a boil and stir until the sugar dissolves (there may be some sugar that doesn't dissolve, you want the liquid to be just about saturated). Let the sugar water cool enough to be able to pour into glasses. At this point, you can add food coloring.

Suspend strings (roughly 6 inches long) from pencils and lay them over the tops of the glasses. We also put wooden skewers in the glasses to see which would work better.

Let it stand for a couple of days. This photo was taken after one day and you can see the crystals beginning to form on the string and skewer.

Two days later, the surface of the sugar water had completely hardened.

After three days, we removed the strings and skewers. We picked the crystals off the strings, and let all the candy harden for a day on wax paper. The skewers came out looking like those pops I remember, though they were quite a bit skinnier. They also had more crystals on them when we first took them out, but little mouths made short work of that candy before I could snap a picture.

The homemade rock candy looks as pretty as I had hoped it would, but it didn't make much. We used 1 cup of water and 3 cups of sugar. It you want to make a small bowl of rock candy, I would suggest at least doubling that. You can also experiment with leaving the strings/skewers in the glasses for longer or shorter periods of time.

Enjoy! Then go brush your/your kids' teeth...

Lots of Time = Lots of Projects

Whew. The loooong weekend left us with lots of time to occupy. We cooked and ate and created and read and now it's time to jump back into the swing of things. The jewelry biz is picking up for the holiday season and those bookmarks have proven to be quite popular (picture me crawling out of my cave-like basement workshop, protecting my eyes from the brightness of daylight, after making many, many bookmarks).

The last of the autumn-themed projects—delicious and simple sugar cookies.

..And the first of the Christmas crafts, beeswax ornaments (these smell so good!)

A couple of lanterns made from old jam jars. Just water down some glue and paint it over torn pieces of tissue paper to stick it right onto the glass. We tied string around the tops and took a few lantern walks around the neighborhood. Now that it gets dark around 4pm, we can do that before dinner. (We even played night hide-and-seek in the back yard, using the lanterns to light our way. Fun!)

Pomanders, which I forgot all about, but should have been started about a month ago. We figured we'd give it a shot and see what comes of them in a few short weeks.

I rejoice in the fact that Black Friday is done and over with, and we don't have to hear that term—or all the hype for another 11 months. Now, if we could only avoid all the other holiday advertising madness....

Happy Holiday Season!

Red Cabbage Wonders

Irresistible. Each and every time I cut into a red cabbage, I am amazed at the graphic beauty of it. I cannot get over that bright plum (cabbage?) purple, swirled into mazes that fold over each other in beautiful randomness.

And every time I cut into one I think to myself, "Someday, I'm going to give this cabbage the props it deserves." I dream of painting, drawing, knitting or interpreting in silver this boldly contrasting composition. I'm working up to that, but this weekend we did do a little experimenting with the color.

I boiled the cabbage for about a half hour, allowing all the pigment to leach out and boil down to a slightly thicker liquid. The result was this inky, deep purple dye.

We soaked some cotton string and fabric scraps in the dye and they dried this gorgeous amethyst color. The girls have big plans for me to knit stuffed animal hats with this string, and make clothes for their soft friends with the fabric. We shall see...

Of course, we ate the remainder of that cabbage. There is an excellent recipe for Red Cabbage with Lemon and Black Pepper, in A Homemade Life, by Molly Wizenberg (Of Orangette fame). If you haven't picked this book up yet, I highly recommend it. Our favorites from that book also include Tomato Soup with Two Fennels, and Custard-Filled Corn Bread. yum-y!

The Missing Ingredient

Why must molting chickens take an egg-laying vacation? For over a year now, we have thoroughly enjoyed getting our eggs from our own backyard. I can't tell you the pleasure we take in starting a recipe with a walk to the chicken coop to collect a few eggs—the freshness, taste, and color can't be beat. But we have seen a steady decrease in eggs over the past few weeks and between the four hens we are down to one a day, at best. This is not nearly enough for a family that makes their own bread. We have adjusted by skipping the baked treats, the breakfast sandwiches, and the quiches. Just the thought of purchasing eggs pained me. I relish in the running joke the girls and I have at the grocery store, "Oh we forgot the eggs!" (I pretend to turn the shopping cart around to head for the dairy aisle). The girls giggle and shout "No Meems, we don't buy eggs anymore!"

Well as you may have suspected, I finally broke down and bought some. Not happy about this. And happy about this, at the same time.

A half-dozen eggs, paired with the 2 we had in our fridge soon yielded those mouth-watering cookies for an after-school snack, a quiche for dinner, and some Pilgrim Pumpkin Cake for dessert.

A big thank you to all the chickens out there who are not molting!

Our daughter brought this recipe home from school a few years back and it has become one of our favorites.
Pilgrim Pumpkin Cake with Brown Butter Frosting
2 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup oil
1 cup pumpkin puree
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Frosting ingredients:
1/3 cup butter
1 3/4 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons hot water

Cake:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease and flour a 9" square pan. Beat together eggs, sugars, oil, and pumpkin. In a separate bowl, mix dry ingredients together. Add this to the egg mixture and combine well. Pour batter into pan and bake for 35 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool and spread frosting.
Brown Butter Frosting:
Melt butter over low heat until brown. In a large bowl, beat together powdered sugar and vanilla, add the butter and stir well. Gradually add hot water, beating until frosting is smooth enough to spread.