E is for Eats

The combination of late nights at work and heading out of town to celebrate my Grandma's 80th birthday (that's her in the grainy picture above) wreaked havoc on our meal plan. We ended up making just two of the 4  planned meals , so no check in this week. Because we were in upstate NY this weekend, we missed our farmer's market. Thankfully, New York State Dept of Agriculture has a website that lists all of the farmer's markets. We stopped by the market in Rhinebeck and it was a good little market. They had a wider variety of vegetables than our local market has had recently, so finally we won't be eating cabbage salad every night! Craig also picked up some ground venison, but I think he's keeping that in the freezer until he has a chance to make chili. Without further ado, here's what we have planned this week: Meal 1 - Sweet and spicy turnips, spinach salad, orzo with butter Meal 2 - Curried rice noodles with veggies, black radish salad Meal 3...

The rutabaga before the soup A few weeks ago , I picked up a rutabaga at the farmer's market for the first time. I was kind of at a loss as to what to do with it. So, as usual when faced with a new vegetable, I turned to soup. I poked around on line and through my cookbooks for ideas and inspiration. This recipe from The Inn at Little Washington was actually mentioned in two of my books and on many of the sites I visited. It looked delicious, but all that butter! 2 cups of heavy cream! It was a bit too heavy for a weeknight dinner. And I didn't have the sweet potatoes and squash on hand. I used the recipe as a guide, but made a few tweaks out of necessity. Rutabaga and Apple Soup adapted from Patrick O'Connell's Apple Rutabaga Soup serves 4 to 6 2 Tbl Butter 1 rutabaga, peeled and chopped 1 onion, diced 4-5 carrots, peeled and chopped 1 Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored and chopped 4-5 cups of stock, chicken or veggie 1/2 cup of Milk (I used 2%) 1/4 cu...

what a difference a week makes! This is the time of year that it's a serious challenge to eat locally. Even though last week's snow has melted, the sun was shining and the temperature was in the 50's yesterday, it is still winter. Which means slim pickings at the market. And with the damage caused by Hurricane Irene last fall, there are even less offerings than usual. There is one vendor at our local market that has a greenhouse, so they sell greens - they have lettuces, arugula, kale and more. But they are so expensive! The greens are $5 for 1/4 pound. I'll treat us for one meal a week, but it's too much to buy all our veggies from them. I also try to spread my dollars around and make sure that I buy something from each of the vendors. It seems even more important this year, seeing that every single farmer at our market suffered damage from the hurricane. So that means a lot of cabbage, onions and potatoes. To be honest, I'm having a hard time coming up wi...

It's that time again - let's see how we did with our meal plan last week . Meal 1 - Christmas lima beans with caramelized onions and bacon, spinach salad I had been curious about heirloom beans and was poking around on the interwebs when I found the Rancho Gordo site . They have an almost rabid following and I decided to give one of their samplers a try. These are expensive  beans, so I was hoping they would knock my socks off. Either beans are beans or I have a terribly unsophisticated palette, because I truly didn't notice much of a difference between these and other dried beans (now these beans and canned beans, no contest. The Rancho Gordo beans kick canned beans in the .... well, can). It is important to me to support small farms and it's VERY important to keep heirloom varieties around (we don't want another potato famine now, do we?), so I'll probably keep heirloom beans in the pantry along side the conventional dried beans. I would like to find a pro...

My last post about making yogurt provided a basic guide for making yogurt at home. Well, I have really refined the process over the past few months and I thought an update was in order. Also, I have found a simple way to strain yogurt to make thick, creamy Greek-style yogurt. So, here is my revised yogurt making method: 1. Take 6 oz container of plain yogurt with live active cultures out of the fridge. Let it sit on the counter until it's about room temperature. 2. Pour 42 oz of milk into a saucepan. Heat the milk until it's warm to the touch, but not hot. DO NOT bring it to a boil. This differs from my previous post. I found that bringing the yogurt up to 180 degrees and them letting it cool, only consumed a lot of time and sometimes caused the yogurt to have a gritty texture. It did not help thicken it as I had read. 3. While the milk is warming, put the room temperature yogurt into a bowl and gently smooth it out with a spoon or rubber spatula. You want...

the first real snow of the season! It snowed yesterday! Honest to goodness snow! It was so pretty ....... and so f'n cold. But there isn't enough snow that can keep me away from our Saturday Farmer's Market. I figure if the farmers can come down to Brooklyn and stand in the freezing cold for 8 hours, the least I can do is waddle over in my heavy winter coat and buy what they are selling. Unfortunately, they aren't selling much. I was able to get some spinach, but yet again we have cabbage, kale and onions on the menu this week. And I'm back to a meat heavy menu. I was too hungry last week to try to go vegetarian again. Here's what we have planned: Meal 1 - Christmas lima beans with caramelized onions and bacon, spinach salad Meal 2 - Kale, potato and sausage soup, shredded carrots with tahini dressing Meal 3 - Italian turkey sausage and onions over polenta, spicy coleslaw Meal 4 - Red lentil bake, cabbage and corn salsa salad We have some fun pos...