Yummeh.

CSA veg!!! Turnips! Aren't they pretty? And you can eat the greens, too. I feel like this may become a slow cooker soup with the cranberry beans...
Beautiful carrots...
Some heirloom tomatoes and zebra stripe tomatoes. We also got dill, cilantro, peppers, eggplant, garlic, shallots (whoops, forgot to take pics of those, they were huge!), lettuce, white potatoes, and radishes.

Yesterday was our work day at the farm! It was so nice to be out there and the weather couldn't have been more perfect. Boy, fall is just beginning, the fields were golden, a few trees are turning, the growing season is slowing down... oh, summer, how I miss you!! But it's all good. This weekend should be perfect.
We got to see the horses in action at the farm, how cool is that?!? Zephyr and Queen were all harnessed up when we got there, and they turned the potato rows so that we could find the potatoes. It was very cool to see them working and they were very intelligent, well-trained creatures. So sorry I did not get a picture. Really, though, it's the first time I've seen horses in action like that, and I was so impressed (city kid!).
Probably the last of the squash I cooked up for supper last night.
Gallo Pinto, round two! Using up more of the cilantro!
The bulghur and cabbage casserole I made for our CSA workday potluck.

Bulgur and Cabbage Casserole

1 small head of cabbage, finely chopped
2 C water
1/2 C bulgur, reconstitued in 1 C boiling water
1/4 C olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 T paprika
1 t caraway seeds
1 t salt
1/2 t pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Finely chop cabbage in food processor using the disk with the holes in it.
Saute onion, add spices and seasonings, bulgur and cabbage. Mix well. Add water. Pour into oven safe casserole and bake 30m, covered, 10m uncovered.

A nice side.

And finally, Garbanzo Bean Paprikash with Dumplings. This was yummeh! I sort of mixed two recipes together, Paprikash with Dumplings, Tofu Paprikash and a dumpling recipe from another recipe.

Garbanzo Paprikash with Dumplings

2 T oil
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
2 T paprika
2 T sugar
1/4 C nutritional yeast
1/4 C ketchup
1 t salt
1 can garbanzos, undrained

dumplings;

2 C flour
2 t baking powder
1 t salt
4 T Earth Balance (1/2 stick)
1/4 - 1/2 C soymilk/water
1 1/2 t celery seed powder

For the garbanzos and sauce,
saute onions and garlic, add all ingredients up to garbanzos, mix well, add garbanzos, mix well, bring to a boil and lower heat and simmer.

For the dumplings

Bring a large pot of water to boil.
Sift the dry ingredients, mix well. Cut in the Earth Balance until mixture resembles meal, slowly add soymilk, should make a fairly dry dough. Roll out into a snake and cut into smaller pieces (I like big dumplings, so I get about 16). Pour into boiling water and cover, lower heat and cook at a low boil for 10m. Remove with slotted spoon, add to garbanzos and sauce and gently mix. Serve right away.

notes;
I may try experimenting with adding more baking powder.
The celery seed powder was a good addition (even if it did turn the dumplings green!).
The sauce is richer with the ketchup and nutritional yeast.

All of a sudden my book ("The Doomsday Book") got super exciting. Everything happened at once. I could barely put it down last night. Woo! Death! Disease! Near Escapes! Can't wait to see how it turns out...

Jam, man!

What We Had For Dinner Last Night;

Roasted Eggplant and Lentil Soup based off of this recipe...

1 large eggplant, quartered lengthwise
3 T olive oil
1/2 C French lentils
1/2 C moong dal
14 large sage leaves
2 C water
1/2 t onion powder
1/4 t garlic powder

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place eggplant on a rimmed baking sheet and drizzle with 1 T olive oil. Season with salt. Bake 30m or until very tender.

Meanwhile, in a med saucepan, cover the lentils with 2" water, salt with 1/2 t salt and add 2 sage leaves. Bring to boil, lower heat and simmer 20m. Blend in blender with 1 C water and pour into soup pot.

Remove eggplant from oven, scrape flesh into blender and blend with 1 C water. Add to lentils in pot. Season with garlic and onion powder, salt and pepper. Stir in 1 T olive oil.

Fry the sage leaves in 1 T olive oil on high, 30s per side. Garnish soup with fried sage.

This was pretty good, if you haven't fried sage before, you really should, it's quite good!


The above is what I hovered over seemingly all day as I tried to make Sumac Elderberry Jam. I did persevere and We Have Jam!! More pics later. I think it's very good, I suppose I would. The idea is that the tartness of the sumac is supposed to heighten the flavor of the elderberries and I think they are a good combination.

Sumac Elderberry Jam

2 C sumac extract*
2 C elderberry juice**
4 C sugar
1 package Pomona's Universal Pectin

Boil up your sugar, sumac and elderberry. Add your pectin as per instructions on the package. Boil until it thickens and pour into jam jars. Boom! You've got jam!

*place 4-5 heads sumac in tea towel, tied up, cover with water and soak overnight
**pick 2 C worth of elderberries, cover with water and boil. Mash through strainer and reserve juice. Add water if needed to make 2 C juice.

I think if I do this next year, I'll use regular pectin and I'll not soak as many sumac heads as I did (I soaked an entire pot full and so now I've got sumac extract in the fridge). I also will perhaps leave the elderberry skins and seeds in to see if there's enough pectin in them to set without adding pectin. Must google this.

Purple Viking potatoes


melon! so refreshing!
shell beans- I'm using these in soup today, excited to see what it will be like...
fresh sage! used in soup above
tatsoi- bigger this time!

CSA veg!

Aubergines! Purple fruit is incredibly cool. In my next post you will see what I did with them... well, at least the big'un.
Red potatoes! I never know what to do with potatoes. Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew!


Look at these!!!!!!!!!!! I am so excited, after becoming enraptured of paprikash and so forth, I am really excited about these this year (I think we just ate them out of hand last year). What to do, what to do? They are paprika peppers! I sure hope we can get some of these red and then maybe I will try and dry them or something...Here is some lovely chard. Gotta use this before it gets all floppy.

Here is some parsley! I can make parsley pesto again! Or maybe I should try something else?
Here is our pickle pack, which is a good idea, but I have to go pick up some jars, that should be easy enough, right? I've never canned before, but I DO have a wire cooling rack and a giant pot. Some weekend in September? I think next week we'll get another one so maybe sometime that week I should be a-picklin'.
Here are some dragon beans. They are dragon lingerie (woo!) dragon tongue beans. No idea what to do with these, already I was stumped with the yellow and green ones... froze those. Maybe I should pickle these, huh? What do you think, on my pickling extravaganza weekend (or weekday) in September?
Fennel. I am the only one who will eat this. Too bad, suckas!
And of course we had so much more!! More tomatoes! Walla walla onions! Lettuce mix with tomatoes! Zucchini and summer squash! I love our CSA.

Po-Ta-Toes!

Aren't they beautiful? We enjoyed them Thursday night as we feasted on leftovers before we left for Grandma and Grandpa's. These were courtesy of our CSA! I truly love a beautiful bouquet of flowers and have rearranged them again, now that we are home.

We had lots of fun and E. got to try out her new bike with training wheels- she did very well.
We even got to go to some beautiful waterfalls. We went to Twelve Foot and Eight Foot Falls. Really quite astoundingly beautiful!
Here is some lovely purple basil that I whirred up with some olive oil right away and put into small containers to freeze for the winter. We shall feast on pesto come winter!
We also got some lovely red onions...
A bunch of tomatoes (which I plan to blanch, remove the skins, dice and freeze).
Next is a lonely green pepper that I took a picture of before I found his brethren... but my pictures of them turned out blurry...
Some yellow and green (aka zucchini) squash
Some potatoes......and supper last night- pesto! With some splendid spring greens salad and cucumber and green peppers. We also got garlic, cucumber and wax beans!

Read "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham. Thought it was good, really resonated with parts of it, liked the little connecting details between the different stories, makes me want to read Woolf. Have started "Where Angels Fear to Tread" by E.M. Forster and am enjoying it.

Tried to fix the wavyness of the edging on the blanket, but no go. So, slapping on a garter border, ho! Tried it with just one repeat and it seems fine, will have to block the s@!# out of it, though.

This post brought to you by the letter C

I have been lax in posting these pics of our latest CSA bounty! We got a lot, I haven't pictured the veg we have gotten before, just the new stuff, but we also got squash and my long awaited for zucchini (lost that pic, too lazy to repost, you can use your imagination), some cherry tomatoes that got eaten on the way home (just like candy!), more onions (hooray!) and lettuce (more romaine pesto here we come!). Here we have some new potatoes, which I made into a potato salad (no recipe as it was kind of weird).
And the first tomato, which E. and I and the baby shared for lunch one day!

Then the green beans which were so sweet and good, I froze a bunch and we'll be so happy to eat these come winter.
And finally, parsley and dill. I did use the parsley for supper last night and will hope to use up the rest this weekend.
Oh, and can't forget the cukes, I put one in the potato salad in lieu of celery, and then just ate the others straight up, skin and all 'cause I'm crazy like that.
Here is our meal last night. I had hoped to make some sort of pocket with that mixture, but then I forgot we were out of flour. So I made chickpea pizza and had it with that! Hooray! D. liked the chickpea flour pizza, and I was glad, because I like them too! They have lots of protein in them.
There is a can of lentils (cheater!) and some paprika and some frozen and then thawed tofu crumbled in and some sauteed onion and garlic and chopped up parsley and some other herbs from our herb garden courtesy of Ironwood Farm and some veg broth powder. Kind of a mish mash, but it served the purpose and was good.

Enjoying "All the Names", I asked my husband last night, is Portugal near Italy? Because I think this author reminds me of Italo Calvino. He's lighthearted and funny.

No knitting, won't be any, we're going up to our land Thursday so I am in the midst of preparing for the trip, getting stuff organized and planning the menu- today I hope to actually get to preparing some of said food. After a trip to the park for the kids, of course. And watering a friend's plants who are on vacation. Hopefully I'll have some good camping recipes for you come Monday. This trip will be brought to you by coconut milk.

Peel This!

So here we have our csa veggies! We got some old favorites, such as arugula, snap peas and lettuce, and so many good new things... I was particularly excited about the basil!!!


Scallions... going to use this in a salad with the Napa cabbage from last week...
Green beans! Gonna saute these up and have them tonight (well, at least some, we got a big bag full!).

Beets! These are dangerous in a household with children!! Maybe D. and I will have to have them after the kids are down... romantic beets! I will cut them into heart shapes... or maybe not -grin-.

Zukes!! I anticipated soooo many zukes I sort of stocked up on zucchini recipes and so I'm kinda bummed it was a hard year for them! These were so good last night just sauteed in oil with a little pepper and garlic salt! Oh, and I added oregano and some ?thyme?- I'm having problems keeping my herbs straight. Yummm.
Popcorn! Our CSA is so cool! They secretly kept some of the popcorn they grew last year and suprised us with this! We will always remember the first time we made this and D., shall we say, exfoliated his hands right well! If you don't have super callused hands, use gloves to rub the kernels off!!

Garlic! That we pulled on Saturday!! Fresh garlic is fun! Whenever I am peeling garlic, I always imagine Isa saying that you can really tell a lot about a person by how they peel garlic... (I think it was in one of their shows, but I didn't have the patience to look through all the videos!). Well, begone selfconsciousness! Fresh garlic is a breeze to peel compared to dried.


Baby fennel! Salad? I'm not sure. I love it's licoricey taste.
And finally, last night's meal. Said zuchinni and rice with cashew sauce. The sauce is basically Dragonfly's Bulk Dry Uncheeze Mix scaled down and made fresh.

Cashew Sauce

1 C raw unsalted cashews (16)
1/3 C nutritional yeast
1 clove garlic, cut into chunks
1/2 t onion powder
1 T cornstarch
1/2 t salt
1 C water

Process all ingredients except water.
Scrape into pot, add water slowly and heat until thick.
It was really good.

Liking the Stirling book.
Started knitting a baby sweater!! Yay, me!

Corn and Bean Salad and csa veg

Chinese cabbage- don't know what to do with this yet, our csa gave us a recipe for refrigerator kim chee!! That would be fun!
And we got beautiful flowers!!
Here is some dill I'm pretty excited about! Tofu dill sandwiches, anyone? Maybe those pickles you can make in the sun?
Sweet onions- very cool... I was recently reading through some old recipes from my grandmother and there was this recipe for poached onions where you boil them? and I was thinking that might be fun to try? but probably not with yummy csa onions...
Snow peas! We got snap peas, too! Soooo great for snacking on, just straight. Nom.
These are thumbelina carrots. We'll see what happens with these, if we don't just eat them raw.
We also got scapes (the last of the season) and lettuce. I was hoping for zucchini, but I guess that will come... bug problems.
Our friends B. and S. are here from Milwaukee and so we had a grill out last night- nothing too fancy I am afraid, but the salad was good! There are a million iterations of this on the internet, but I thought this version was quite yummy!

Corn and Black Bean Salad

2 cans black beans, rinsed and drained
1 can corn, drained
1/2 red onion, minced
1/4 jicama, diced small
1 avacado, diced
1 bunch cilantro, chopped fine approx. 1/2 C
2 T oil
1/2 lime's worth of juice
1 T cumin
1 t salt
1/4 t chili powder

Prep all ingredients and mix together. Tada!
If you're going to refrigerate it for a while, add the onions just before serving (onions get slimy if you leave them in). Oh, and the salt, too.

I thought the lime really made this salad- I've tried it before with balsamic (1 T), but the lime juice was just so much better! Really. And the jicama added a fun crunch. And the chili powder you could up or whatever, but we are mild midwesterners.

No reading yesterday.

Trying to find the perfect yarn for my new design! Having fun looking on Ravelry...