Wahsega Valley Farm

Cauliflower "rice" and zucchini "pasta"

Here are a couple of fun things to make if you've stopped eating grains or just want a chance of pace.

Since I've given up grains, that rules out rice and pasta - and yeah, even the gluten-free kind. I didn't eat much of either anyway, so it wasn't a big sacrifice for me to give them up. But there are always times when I'd like to put a nice curry dish on top of some rice or have tomato sauce over spaghetti. The paleo people have come up with of a bunch of cool alternatives for the foods we used to eat and cauliflower rice and zucchini pasta are two of them.

Here is a picture of the cauliflower rice before I cook it:

To turn cauliflower into "rice", you just cut it up and toss it into a food processor and let it go until the pieces are about the size of rice. You don't want mush, so don't be overzealous. Then, I usually just stir fry it with some onions, garlic and mushrooms, and add a little Bragg's Liquid Aminos for extra flavor. I can eat it plain (it's good!) or use it as I would rice. It's nice with stir-fries or any recipe that has a sauce. It's versatile, just like rice is - and is quick to make. 

Then, there is zucchini pasta:

I like it a lot. Mike said he would have liked the spaghetti better the other night if I hadn't told him it was made with zucchini noodles. But he's never been a big fan of spaghetti anyway, so... mox nix. For me, it's guilt-free eating and doesn't bloat me up and spike my blood sugar levels like grain-based pasta. And, depending on how much you cook it, the noodles can be firm and crispy or soft and noodle-y. You can cook them in the microwave, in the oven, steam 'em or on the stove top.

To turn summer squash into noodles, you can use a mandolin - which I would have used if mine wasn't packed up with 95% of our belongings that wouldn't fit into this tiny cabin - or you could use a julienne peeler like I did. Mine is Kuhn Riko brand, but there are several out there. You just peel the length of the zucchini, stopping when you hit the seeds. (I feed the zucchini scraps to my chickens after I put them in the food processor to make them bite-sized.) You end up with what you see in the bowl above; they hadn't been cooked yet.

So, there you have it - two foods to help those who are trying to kick grains or for those who just want to try something different. 

Today's eggs

Here are the eggs I brought in today from my chicken girlfriends. They're in my special egg basket that I've had a long time - way before I ever had chickens or thought I'd ever have the opportunity to have chickens. It's thick so is kinda padded, making it perfect for egg gathering. There are 13 in the basket and we get that many every day! We give some away, eat some and scramble them up for the chickens who loooove them. 

With all the eggshells I have I've started drying them and then grinding them up for calcium for my garden and even the chickens. And sometimes if I'm lazy I just toss them into the compost pile. 

I love my chickens like pets, but it's sure nice that they "give back" and kind of pay their own way.

Turnip soup recipe

Sarah's Turnip by Nigel Fletcher

This is a follow-up post for the one where I was looking for a good turnip recipe after having been given about five pounds of turnips from one of Mike's customers.

I lucked out on the first turnip recipe I tried! I've never really liked or disliked turnips because I've never had fresh turnips in anything that I can remember. But I knew I disliked rutabaga a lot from the canned stuff I was forced to eat as a child. Uck. Pah-tooey. I kinda threw turnips into the same category.

I was recently going through a lot of my cooking magazines - tearing out the recipes that held promise and tossing the rest. In this small cabin, there is no room for collecting piles of magazines. In the third magazine I went through, my January 2009 issue of Vegetarian Times, I discovered a bunch of cream-free "cream" soups. The two that caught my eye the most were the Curried Cauliflower and Sherried Kabocha with Spiced Pepitas, but on the next page, what did I see? Cream of Turnip Soup... Eureka. How how easy was it? Very.

And, how good was it? I liked it a lot, though I did make a few changes. ! I was actually surprised, with the simplicity of ingredients, but there you have it. And, here is the recipe for anyone looking for a turnip recipe that doesn't taste like dirty socks. :) At least it didn't to me.

Cream of Turnip Soup

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 pounds fresh baby turnips, peeled and diced
1 small onion
2 bay leaves
1/4 cup soy creamer (optional)
1/4 cup celery leaves, sliced into fine strips

Heat oil in large saucepan over medium heat. Add turnips and onion, and cook 15 minutes or until vegetables are translucent, stirring occasionally. Add bay leaves and three cups of water, and season with salt and pepper, if desired. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium-low. Cover, and cook 25 to 30 minutes, or until turnips are very tender.

Remove from heat, and remove bay leaves. Add soy creamer, if using. Use blender or food processsor to puree ingredients until smooth. Season with salt and pepper, if desired, and stir in celery leaves just before serving.

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The changes I made:

I didn't have any celery leaves on my celery, so just added celery to the turnip and onion mix and cooked with them. 

I added 1/4 cup of dry, white wine while cooking the turnips, onions and celery.

I used a large onion instead of small one.

I used veggie broth instead of water.

I added two large heads of garlic.

It tasted better the second day. And, when I ate it, I sprinkled a little cheese into it. And the next day when Mike came home, he was toting a bag of Frito Corn Chips - not an item on my normal eating list by any means, but I crunched some on top of the soup for texture and it was even better. I'm not a proponent of junk food as any of my regular readers know, but hey - it was a fun change of pace. Next time I think I'll try the crunch of something better... like pumpkin seeds.

Crochet projects - part 2

I'm trying to stay caught up with my blogging, but with a healing chicken (update soon), posting lots of silver jewelry on ebay and just taking care of the cabin, etc., it's been difficult. I'm behind once again!

And it's a dark and dreary day. I can't wait to see the sun again!

Here are pictures of the rest of my holiday crochet projects. The first group shows Sarah (who should be a model) wearing the hat, arm warmers and scarf I made for her:

It's gotten so warm here lately that it might be next year before she has the need to wear them though! The next arm warmers I make will be with much finer yarn and I'm thinking about making some socks soon too. The latest Interweave Crochet Magazine explains how to make them so well that it doesn't look too intimidating. And I still want to make myself some leg warmers. If it was colder, I think I'd be doing just that, but with our warm weather, my brain is on my veggie garden instead.

Here are a some boring ol' hat and scarves that I made for myself:

I want to make a lacy shawl and some kitchen curtains, but haven't had the time to sit down long enough to get either going. I started the curtains last winter, but the pattern didn't float my boat. So I'm going to start over. No point spending hours on something that doesn't make your eyes happy, right?

Oh, here is a picture of the apple and pear & ginger butters I made for gifts this year; I forgot to post pictures of them:

The apple butter is woooonderful. It cooked in a crockpot for about 18 hours or so. The pear butter was good too and didn't take nearly as long to make, but the apple just hit the spot. Yum.

That's it for now!

Really easy yeast bread

Here is a super easy bread to make if one is apt to eat gluten bread. I'm not much of a bread eater at all - gluten or gluten-free, though I usually stick to gluten-free when I partake. But when I saw this recipe on 101cookbooks, it was so simple I just had to give it a try. Plus, I've had good luck with most everything I've tried from Heidi's site; I love her recipes. Talk about easy! You don't have to knead it at all! Just mix, let rise for 30 minutes and cook. And it's really good... and pretty:

Mike eats bread a lot more than I do, and loved it, so I'll probably make it often for him. I'd like to mess around with the ingredients a bit to see if I can replace white flour. The only change I made from Heidi's recipe was I added 3/4 teaspoon salt instead of the 1 1/2 recommended and used organic whole wheat pastry flour instead of regular whole wheat flour because that's what I had. And I used a smaller bread pan because I wanted my bread taller. It sure tasted good with apricot preserves on it:

If I make any substantial changes that make it better (in my humble opinion, of course), I'll post changes later. I already have some ideas of changes and additions. But as is, I highly recommend it for a treat; it's very good - and so easy!

*****

For those interested, the green stuff behind the bread is my lemongrass plant being processed. I cut the stalks into sections and froze them, keeping a small part of the plant to winter over inside and then I'll plant it back in the garden next spring. It smelled amazing as I was cutting it up. Here's the plant straight from the garden - rootball and all - a much smaller version than the one I grew the year before:

Garam masala

I finally got around to making some more garam masala, one of my most favorite food enhancing mixes. Garam masala is similar to curry in that one can mix different ingredients to create different types and flavors; there are many versions of each. I've never bought a pre-made container of either because I like mixing my own - knowing what's in it and all. I'd made a batch 31 years ago when I received The complete Asian Cookbook by Germaine Solomon and used it for what seemed like forever. The book says it will last for about six months, but I think I used my original batch for many years since it seemed to retain its flavor. But it finally gave out a few years back and I decided to put together a new batch yesterday. Here are the spices I used... this was after pan roasting them until they were fragrant.

Included are coriander (I didn't have the seeds, unfortunately, so used ground), cumin seeds, whole peppercorns, cardamon seeds that were peeled after roasting, cinnamon sticks, whole cloves and a whole nutmeg. After roasting, I ground them up in my old coffee grinder that I now use for herbs and flax seeds, etc. 

It smells so good and I made a big pot of veggie stew and used some right away. And Mike didn't call it "underarm stew" this time around; he even said it was "good". Maybe the old garam masala was what gave it that taste he hated so!

I can can!

Yep, I canned five quarts of tomato sauce a few days ago and it wasn't difficult at all. One just has to follow a few rules and not be crazy with veering too far off from safe recipes. It was a hot water bath canning session, not one using pressure though my canner can do both. I'm not afraid of pressure canning like some since I've used a pressure cooker on and off most of my life, but this recipe didn't call for it. In fact, most of the things I want to can (actually, I'm bottling them, not canning them, but that's just semantics) don't require pressure canning. Not yet anyway.

See? Here are my very first jars of roasted tomato sauce:

Note to self: Fill bottles a little higher next time.

I'd like to make nicer labels, but these Ball bottles are so bumpy with measurement points, decoration and the word "Ball" on them that there is really no place flat and smooth to put a bigger label than the ones I used. I like the bottles a lot though, so I'll just make small labels I guess.

I aspire to be super canners like JenW - or Lori! They are my canning idols. :)

Today I am making more sauce or ketchup or salsa... not sure which yet - and will can some more! Now that the weather has cooled down, the tomatoes aren't ripening up as quickly so I'll have a bit of a reprieve until the final load on the vines turn red. I've had a lot of success with my tomatoes even with all the woes I had with worms boring into them and other creatures eating them. My tallest tomatoes - Amish Paste - are nine feet tall and still growing!

And, as the weather cools down - it's in the 50's now at night - my mind has turned to soap making and crochet, among other things. I'm not going to have a winter garden this year, but have a lot to do to prep it for next spring. But having no garden will allow me time for other things and I'm looking forward to a roaring fire and being all cozy inside. I guess I'd better start on those leg warmers that I never got around to last year - and decide what seeds to buy for next year's garden... the list is growing!

Fun with tomatoes

Yeah, it doesn't take a whole lot for me to have fun, huh? Messing around figuring out ways to preserve tomatoes is actually a good time for me. I'm sure some people would rather poke a stick in their eye, but for me... growing the tomatoes and then eating and processing them is just an enjoyable thing. 

I ordered an Oxo Food Mill and it works so well at removing the seeds from the tomatoes - and is very easy to use. It will also separate the pulp from the skin, but I didn't need it for that purpose in this process. This was my first attempt at processing tomatoes for freezing (or canning when I do bigger batches), so I just tested some of my paste tomatoes from the garden to make sure I liked the outcome - Amish Paste and Roma - both of which I love. And later I processed a bunch of the other types of tomatoes in the same way.

Instead of cutting everything up and cooking it in a pot and/or boiling the tomatoes for a few seconds to be able to remove the skins, I cut the tomatoes in half, removed the little bit of a core they had and tossed them into a big bowl.

I then splashed some olive oil on them and put them cut side down onto a jelly roll pan into a 400 degree oven - and roasted them. I also roasted some peppers from the garden and some garlic and onions at the same time to add to the finished product.

I have a convection oven and it didn't take very long for the tomatoes to get soft and the skin to wrinkle - and I was able to do other things while they were cooking. I could have let them get more charred and might do that next time.

Once they cooled, the skins just slipped right off; it was so easy...

... leaving the roasted tomatoes in all their mushy glory. I know some people don't mind skins in their sauces, so you can keep them or toss 'em. Same with the seeds.

I then dumped the tomatoes (along with all the juice that came out during the roasting because it was super tasty) into the Oxo food mill to remove the seeds. 

It was fun (and quick!) to use. Yes, I guess I am a nerd if something like this floats my boat, but it did just that. Floats my boat!

Here are the seeds and fibrous parts of the tomato that the food mill extracted... a treat the chickens loved!

Cool, huh?

And here is the end-result that I can use for the sauces I want to make; it was quite thick.

I really like this process and have roasted all different kinds of tomatoes since trying it with the paste tomatoes. I have so many tomatoes ripening in my kitchen, pantry and outside that I will be quite busy for the next few weeks. I might can some, but so far have just been freezing them. I want to use my canner though, so might do the next big batch; I've never canned before!

*****

I've been super busy and not had time to post here, but when things settle down in the garden, I'm hoping to have more time for writing. Emails too... I know I'm late again on a whole new batch of emails. The hours and days are just flying by and leaves are already starting to change a bit here. Autumn is right around the corner!

Pickle people

Are you a pickle person? Mike and I aren't. To me, most of the pickles I've eaten were either way too salty or extremely sweet. The only ones I ever liked at all were called Bread & Butter pickles, but even they are too sweet for me. But I had ten cucumbers I needed to do something with lest they go bad, so decided to make some pickles since I never had.

(I might add here that the word "pickle" is really a very silly sounding word and I keep hearing in my head Arlo Guthrie singing a ridiculous song... "I don't want a pickle, I just want to ride on my motorsickle"...).

I didn't have enough to bother with canning the pickles, so I opted for the "refrigerator" version. I now have three quart jars of Bread & Butter pickles. For what they are, they taste pretty dang good! But I will never eat that many pickles.

Conclusion: I love cucumbers, not pickles. I'll just grow enough to eat raw and fresh and give away what extra we have - like last year.

I did make some very nice marinara sauce though that I'm enjoying... even though my tomato picking experience has been rather frustrating this year. They are growing like gangbusters, but I've lost quite a few to worms and someone eating them outright. So I've had to pick them before they are fully ripe and vulnerable, like these I brought in from the garden last night.

I have tomatoes ripening on four windowsills in the kitchen and one benefit to ripening inside is visual - I love seeing them scattered about the room. Here are the ones I used in the sauce that ripened up fine in the windowsills.

Included are Mortgage Lifter, Pink Brandywine, Amish Paste, Roma and Better Boy. The mix turned out very well because the marinara sauce tasted superb! It was only enough for the meal I wanted to cook, which was good since it was a test run, but here is my first tomato sauce made from my own tomatoes - that I will definitely make again.

All those tomatoes = a one quart jar of sauce. That's because you toss the skin, seeds and any chunky greenish parts of any tomato. And a few of the tomatoes just weren't "beefy" enough... were mostly seeds and schlop (that I ate). I definitely need a good food mill though - to separate the skins and seeds from the tomato pulp. Although I know how to peel a tomato easily after dunking it in boiling water for a short time, etc., getting out the seeds was a pain in the behind and time consuming. I've done some research, but if anyone has a good suggestion for a good food mill, I'm all ears.

I ended up making a kindof eggplant parmesan (without the parmesan) with the sauce and these cute little eggplants from the garden:

And I'm getting ready to freeze a bunch of my peppers so I can have some in the winter! It's hard finding organic peppers around here and when you do they are so expensive. They are listed in the Dirty Dozen List of veggies to buy only if organic since they are otherwise laden with pesticides. So freezing is the way to go with my bounty of peppers.

My garden is hanging in there and producing - even after the onslaught. And guess what? The weather the past couple of days has been downright... dare I say... perfect. It's noon now and 77 degrees with a nice breeze outside. Simply perfect. This morning when I was in the garden, I could have used a sweater! In August! 

Chocolate oatmeal coconut cookies

 
Ready to eat!

Yesterday I had a strong hankerin' for something chocolate. I pondered my craving a bit and wanted to make another batch of JenW's gluten free/dairy free/no refined sugar brownies that I've already made twice (with my own added touches), but was out of cocoa, so I grabbed my trusty Maida Heatter's Cookies book and decided to cook a cookie that I used to make often many years ago. Only I changed it to a gluten-free version, replaced the butter with a vegan butter and virgin coconut oil and cut the sugar by 1/3 - and it tasted as good if not better than when I used to make it following the recipe exactly. Next time I will either cut the sugar to half of what is called for - because they are still very sweet if you ask me - or use a decent sugar substitute. I was lucky to even have sugar in the house since I so rarely use it. It's an organic turbinado sugar, so is less processed than the white stuff, but it still does what sugar does to the body. This recipe would also be very easy to make vegan by replacing the one egg with an egg replacer like the one made by Ener-G, or by using flax seeds. The recipe I used as a base for my version is Maida's Chocolate Oatmeal Crispies.

 
Ready to go into the oven

They were so addicting I almost made myself sick by eating too many yesterday. And Mike raved about them, though he can only have one a day.

I'm going to add my version of the recipe to my Food Recipes section sometime this weekend for anyone who'd like to give them a try. In the meantime, a cup of hot coffee accompanied by a cookie sounds like a mighty fine idea just about now...