The Market This Week

Fun stuff we got at the Charlottesville Market today: (aside from all our usual yummy veggies and meats from various farmers):

-Garlic from Roundabout. We were so happy to see Meagan from Roundabout back at the market, since they’d been absent for the beginning of the season. There is nothing, and I meant nothing, like Roundabout Garlic. It’ll ruin you for any other garlic. We got 2 lbs. We’ll be getting much, much more for storage over the next year. You should do the same. They also have wonderful heirloom tomatoes, tomatillos (which we also got), and more. Stop by, and tell Meagan hello!

-Sgt. Pepper’s Berry Balsamic Band marmalade from Mass a’Peel. This stuff is fabulous, as are all the varieties we tried today.  It’ll go with a lot of things: chicken, cheese (which we’re pairing it with later this week–more on that below), bread and butter, and probably a few other things I’m neglecting to mention. But what we’re really excited about pairing it with are the scones Thadd’s just decided to bake. Yum.

-Matcha latte and matcha cookies from Blue Forest Bakery.  This is a wonderful, local bakery specializing in Japanese breads like anpan. Recently, they added the wonderful cookies, and the latte was really refreshing.

-Caramont “The Old Green Mountain Round” goat cheese. If you’ve not had it, you should try it. It’s amazing. Actually, all their cheeses are beautifully crafted.

-Night Sky Farm’s 4-pack of chevre. This is another great farmstead dairy & cheese maker. We love their peppered chevre. We love everything else, too, but the peppered chevre has a special place in my stomach…er, heart.

The produce was great this week. Tomatoes are coming in, as is corn, squash (patty pan, yellow, zucchini, etc.), greens, potatoes, herbs like basil and dill. All told, it was a great day at the market.

How Do You Know Shawn’s Happy?

Easy: I’m cooking or otherwise puttering in the kitchen!  I’ve been dehydrating cantaloupe, freezing bananas and melon (this is a great way to save seasonal produce for smoothies!), preparing to ferment sour pickles, and I forget what else. Fortunately, I did remember to take pictures of some of the putterings to remind me:

Above: Hummus. If you’ve never made it, you should. It’s easy, inexpensive, tasty, and healthy. It takes few ingredients (chickpeas, garlic, tahini, EVOO, and lemon juice) to start, then you can add anything you want to flavor it, from paprika to sundried tomatoes. It’s the perfect dip for all those summer veggies, or a great spread for sandwiches. Below: I don’t have a glass pitcher that won’t crack if I dump boiling water into it, so I make a strong quart of  tea, then dilute it into a larger pitcher for iced tea. We’re from the North, so we don’t quite get the whole “Sweet tea” thing. We drink it with little or no sugar and some lemon.

Above: Okay, let’s face it. There’s almost no way to make certain things look good on film, no matter how good they taste in real life: pot roast, curry, and this dish–Thai Peanut Sauce with Shrimp–are great examples. Drab photo aside, it was delicious. A bit spicy, a lot depth (umami!) from fish and soy sauces, with a bright bite from sarachi and lime.  I served it over noodles, and sided it with a cucumber-tomato salad. Thadd made himself sick on it, which is always an indicator that it was a great dinner.  Below: summer is a time for salads. We toss all kinds of stuff into our salads, including the mango and pecans you see below. They complimented the fresh, local goat cheese and spinach perfectly. A good salad needs little in the way of dressing, so I just drizzled some EVOO and balsamic over it, and sprinkled it with a bit of sea salt.

Below: Two recipes that have been featured here. First, the Mojo Pork Loin from my last post. Second, the three-potato salad that was my most popular recipe at the Growing Power seminar at Lynchburg Grows in March. These dishes work well together, and make a great barbecue menu!

This week, more puttering! I hope to get up some photos of the pickling process, as well as some of the dehydrating I am currently doing. Are you puttering?

Grilled Mojo Pork Loin Recipe

You can buy mojo-marinaded pork loin, but it’s expensive. The ingredients to make the marinade are probably things many of you already have in your kitchen, and making it yourself means you get to skip all the junk that’s usually in store-bought marinades.

Mojo Marinade

-Garlic, minced. I used about 5 cloves

-Juice from 3 oranges  (or about 1/2 c. from a jug, if you’ve got it)

-1 medium white or yellow onion, chopped

- Juice from 5-7 limes, pluse zest from 1. Or, 1/2 c. from concentrate and zest from 1 lime.

- 1/2 tsp. cumin

-3 tbs. fresh oregano, chopped (or about 1 tsp. dried)

- 1/2 tsp. lemon pepper (or, 1/2 tsp. ground pepper and zest of 2 lemons)

- 1/2 tsp.  freshly ground black pepper (use this in addition to above seasoning)

- 1 tsp. ground sea or kosher salt

- 1 c. oil. EVOO or canola.

-Hot sauce, chili sauce, or adobo sauce, to taste (if desired).

Toss everything in a blender and puree.That’s it!

This is great on chicken, fish, and especially pork. We did a loin on the grill, and it was spectacular.

Food Photos!

I’d like to think you come here for my wit and food politics, but we all know you’re here for the food. Since I’ve been a bit light on food porn these last weeks, I’m going to throw a bunch at you today to catch up!

Above: You all know we eat from local sources as much as possible, and I just found a new source for amazing chicken: Davis Creek Farms. Their 100% pastured, free-range, better-than-organic chickens are slaughtered on the farm by the family, and they’re delicious. The bird above came trussed just as you see it–ready for roasting. His prices, which was about $3.40/lb for whole birds, are totally worth it for the flavor and the good farming practices. The carcass will, of course, go into stock later this week.  Below: These freshly-dug potatoes and carrots were roasted with Herbs de Provence for a wonderful side dish. Fresh potatoes have a richness that store-bought just can’t match, because store-bought potatoes are stored in warehouses just above freezing. These temperatures change the starches in the potatoes, rendering them less creamy and muting the flavor. The baby carrots tasted like carrots, not like sugar. Yum! The leftovers will be mixed with beets and beet greens in a homemade chicken stock base for a wonderful soup. The carrot tops will be used in pesto (thanks to the farm for this idea!).

Below: Falafel is hard to come by in this area, and we’ve been craving it. I finally had time to whip up a batch a few days ago:

Below: Summer brings cold fare to the table, in part because I tend to lose my appetite in the heat. For lunches, I’ve really gotten into savory smoothies, which are essentially gazpacho every day! They’re healthy, full of vitamins and fiber, and fill me up while cooling me down. I side them with some protein (usually an egg, cheese, and/or nuts), and it’s a light, filling lunch that is also full of what I need to keep up my active lifestyle.

Now that market season is here and our CSA has started, we’re looking forward to a lot of produce and a lot of new recipes. We’ll also be doing, as usual, a lot of preservation via canning, freezing, and drying. All this means lots of new pics, so if you’re just here for the food porn, you’ve got something to look forward to. If you’re here for the politics, don’t worry, that’s coming, too!

Canning and Freezing

I realized that I didn’t have any photos of what I actually *do* when I preserve foods, so I am going to make a more concious effort to set up the tripod and get some shots of what actually goes on in Chef Shawn’s Kitchen. This means you’re all going to see me at my worst, since I don’t shower, do my hair, and put on makeup before I work in the kitchne. In fact, I am often a mess, especially when canning: my nastiest clothes, oldest aprons. my hair thrown haphazardly up into whatever I think will keep it out of my food and my face. This is what cooking looks like to me, the nitty gritty. It’s what I do, it’s what I love, it’s what I think everyone who possibly can do should be doing  (yes, I am opinionated and passionate, which is why most of my readers are here).

Above: filling sterilized jars with hot peach sauce. I lost my funnel, which I am hoping to find when we move (or before, actually, which would be better). Below:  Lowering the jars into the hotbath.

Below: the final product: peach sauce we can enjoy this winter. This is just the first batch (I am canning another batch tonight, in fact). I love home-canned peach sauce in the middle of winter, it’s a decadent treat that warms you through and through.

I’ll be posting more about preservation soon, including freezing basil, pickling beans and cucumbers, and a bunch of other stuff. I’ll even include some recipes! And, speaking of recipes, there isn’t one for peach sauce. You just pit the peaches, slice them into quarters, and toss them in a pot over some heat until they get mushy (yes, skins and all). WARNING: Peach pits are poisonous when cooked and eaten. Please make sure to pit your peaches! I use a stick blender to whip it all into a sauce, and voila! No sugar needed.

Preserving Summer

The harvest season is in full swing, and it’s the perfect time to think ahead to the long months we’ll have without this bounty.

Above: Peach sauce, made with local scratch-and-dent peaches. We rarely sweeten any of our sauces, and this sauce in particular didn’t need it. The flavor is fresh and rich–we’ll enjoy this treat in the colder months ahead. Below: Sour pickles. Yep, that’s mold you see, and it’s supposed to be there.  These have been pickling for about a week, with about 3 more to go. The mold is skimmed every few days.

Since we have a garden this year, we’re planning a lot of preserving. A partial list:

-Pesto (this freezes beautifully)

-Tomatoes, diced and sauced (canned)

-Melon (dehydrated)

-Mushrooms (frozen & dehydrated)

-Green & pole beans (frozen)

-Apples (sliced and sauced)

-Peaches (sauced, chunked for pie & cobbler filling)

-Blackberries (Frozen)

-Pickles (dill, sour, bread & butter)

And probably some things I am forgetting. Home-preserved products taste so much better than store bought, and are usually better for you because you can pick the produce fresh and at peak ripeness. You can also control the type and am0unt of additives and spices, which is wonderful for people who are watching their sodium, who have problems with things like MSG or certain spices, who are diabetic and need to watch their sugars, or who are trying to stay away from too many additives. It’s also cheaper than buying out of season produce, and easier on the environment.

We’ve Finished the Nursery

This year, UC & I are co-gardening with our friends Dave and MJ. They have a large yard, and we all want a garden. With 4 of us providing labor (and compost…oh, the compost) and splitting costs, we can have a much more productive garden than if we tried to do it individually (or, in this case, as two separate couples). To that end, last night was the official kickoff of the growing season with what UC dubbed the “How Hippie Are We?!” party, which consisted of dinner, wine, and newspapper seedling pots.

Dave is a wonderful Landscape designer, and the most plant-savvy of us all; so, he did the seed research and ordering. He also came up with the idea for this fabulous little pots as an essentially free alternative to expensive peat pots. Not only are they cheap and easy, they’re also completely compostable. When we’re ready to plant the seedlings, we can just  stick the pot and all in the ground.

The seed pots came home with us today, and are now sitting in the makeshift nursery we set up in our dining area, which gets fantastic light.

They’re actually covered with a piece of plastic leftover from covering our windows this past year,  sort of their own little nursery/green house, which will help hold in moisture and heat during sprouting. There’s 6 kinds of heirloom tomatoes, red bell peppers, and two or three hot peppers in these early starter pots (including an African variety called “Fish peppers” and a variety that grows black peppers on black foliage). The rest of the garden is direct sow, which is for the best as we’re out of room for our darling little pots.

The gardening should really help reduce grocery bills for this year and through the winter since we’ll be putting much of it up via canning, drying, lacto-fermenting, and freezing. It’s getting done as organically and sustainably as possible, too.

Next weekend:  the boys get together and do some yard work while the girls are all busy out of town so the garden areas are ready for plants(yes, I do realize it’s a bad idea to leave them unsupervised, but we’ll put the fire department on alert). And so the rabbits can’t lie in wait to eat all the fruits of our labors. Stay tuned for an update on how that goes. There will likely be pictures, and I can’t imagine they won’t contain some kind of explosions and fire.

Weekly Frugal

This week is a bit odd in terms of frugal groceries. The market was rained out on Satuday, so we went to Miller’s Farm Market, a “stationary” market. The variety isn’t, of course, as good; but, we do love their products.

We spent $65 there on grociers, including organic whole milk and yogurts. We also picked up some fresh shitakes! The grocery store bill was $37.15. So, we’re under budget.

This week’s menus are also a bit odd because we are incredibly busy. Here goes:

Dinners

-Tonight. Roasted turkey, served with acorn squash, mashed potatoes, and edamame. This is an unuasual dinner for us in that it has starch in it, but we needed to use up some potatoes before they went bad. They’re local and have stored great, but it’s been warm and muggy (and we don’t have the cold storage set up in the apartment yet). To save heating the place up, and to be just generally better on energy, the roast is being done in the spare room in the roaster. The acorn squash will get cut into quarters and tossed in about an hour before the bird is done. UC will make the potatoes, and the edamame will be boiled & seasoned with smoked salt and butter. I realize it’s not a very inventive meal, but it’s tasty and will provide serious leftovers. After dinner, the meat will be stripped, and the carcass set to simmer, along with some sweated onion and spices, on our Kitchen Day this week.

-Tuesday. Leftovers for UC. I’m out for the evening.

-Wednesday. Spicy apricot-marinated chicken, roasted with peaches, green peppers, and onions. I froze the chicken in a red-pepper and apricot marinade (meal-sized portions) several weeks ago when apricots were in. I’ll bake it on a bed of fresh, local, heirloom-varity apricots, green peppers, and onions and serve over rice.

-Thursday. Heirlom tomato gazpacho & veggie quiche. Served with homemade ciabatta, with olive oil and balsamic vinegar for dipping. We bought a good amount of tomatoes especially for this soup, which I am patterning after a soup we had at Revolutionary Soup a few weeks ago (hi MJ & Dave!).  I think I’ve got the recipe I want, and if it goes well I’ll post it here. And, I might make up a huge batch to freeze! The quiche will be with the farm fresh eggs, leftover veggies, and some cheese in one of UC’s whole wheat crusts. Thank goodness one of us can bake!

-Friday. Turkey Pot Pie. You had to know this was coming. We’ll use part of the leftover meat to make the pot pie, along with some fun veggies: edamame, roasted corn, onion, cauliflower, edamame. The rest of the meat will be frozen for future use in soup with the stock.

Breakfasts:

-Wheat berry and pearl barley porridge. I made this last night in crock pot, and woke up to a lovely, homey smell this morning. 2 cups each wheat berry and pearl barey, 4 cups apple juice, 4 cups water. Cook on low. You can add dried fruit, as well, but UC prefers his added in the morning with milk, molasses or honey, and butter.

-Oatmeal wheat pancakes with scrambled eggs. UC made this new pancake recipe for Sunday’s breakfast, and we have two left. The eggs and a cup of yogurt should round it out nicely.

-Eggs and toast. Farm fresh eggs and homemade toast. Breakfast of champions.

Snacks:

Peaches, fruit-and-yogurt parfaits, granola, chips & salsa, pretzels, cheese, smoothies.

The actual money spent on food we’ll eat this week was closer to $70, with the rest going for stock up items. The turkey and chicken were both already in the freezer, and we had everything but the apple juice for the porridge.

How’re you eating well and staying frugal this week?

More Stock

(still using the webcam because I’m still shy a camera. Ergh.)

The bag was full, so it was time for stock again. This stock is pretty heavy on the tomato, because I used the drained water from the sauce UC made from linguisas a few days earlier. With all the fresh summer veggies, the stock came out rich, thick, and almost a soup on it’s own. It’s unsalted, so the drained leftovers will go to a friend who composts (oh, that I could compost). Nothing wasted, and that’s what I call frugal!

Later this week, I’ll be doing chicken, turkey, and beef stock. The beef bones are from Panhill’s Gate farm, and it’ll be my first stock with their product. I can’t wait!

The Market News

The camera is still broken, but I did figure out how to get my webcam to take stills. Forgive the really crappy quality.

Yes, all that is ours. And, that’s not all of it. Included above: grape tomatoes from AntiSEEDant, squash and some peppers from the Nelke Farm, plums and peaches from a local orchard, honey from a local apiary (I am totally forgetting the name at the moment, sorry). Below: heirloom melons from Roundabout Farms.

These are from the Nelke’s also. Amazing for saucing, they’re called “Linguisa,” and contain very little water but a whole lot of flavor. We got 20 pounds, and are in the middle of saucing them now. Mrs. Nelke also gave us her wonderful saucing secret!

These “scratch-and-dent” red peppers are also from Roundabout, seen here roasted and ready for peeling. They’ve got bright, rich, sweet flavors that compliment almost anything, but especially cheese!

And, last but not least, and not at all from the market:

Chicken mushrooms. With Chanetrelle season over, these are our current favorites. They grown in easily-harvetsable abundance on dead tree stumps, making themselves very easy to find with their bright orange and yellow flesh. Cut up and cooked (we saute’ them), they taste a lot like slightly sweet chicken, and have a very similar flavor. These are just a few from today, I am hoping to collect more in the next few weeks.

In other news, I plan on going to Richmond on the 11th to take part in the VICFA effort to stop NAIS for goats and sheep. If you’ll be there, let me know and maybe we can meet up!

There is more regarding the restaurant, the prepared meals, etc.; but, being so busy makes it difficult to keep up with it here. Check back soon for more updates!