Ode to a Salad

The best salad I’ve ever had was at the River Cottage Canteen in Axminster in southern England.  It was so ridiculously simple, but gorgeous and well composed at the same time. It was a green salad with a variety of different leaves and petals with very thin slices of lamb on the plate around the edge of the salad.  If I remember correctly (this was several years ago now!) it had homemade croutons, sunflower seeds, and a creamy mustardy vinaigrette.

What made this salad so incredible and memorable?

1 – it had leaves, flowers, and greens that I had never eaten before in a salad: pea shoots, nasturtium flowers, pansies, baby beet leaves, and a variety of other greens and lettuces; they were all picked from the garden that morning probably so they were incredibly fresh

2 – the homemade croutons were unbelievably good; they added awesome savory flavor, wonderfully crunchy texture, and totally elevated the salad to another level

3 – the vinaigrette was simple yet delicious, and it didn’t upstage any of the delicate flavors of the greens, flowers, or sunflower seeds

4 – the lamb was probably leftover from dinner the night before where I’m sure they served roast lamb… and yet it was perfectly suited for the salad, sliced so thin almost like a leaf itself

The final thing that made this salad outlandishly good was that it was so stinkin’ simple!  No chef skills are required to compose such a salad at home.  I sat there thinking to myself while eating the salad that if all salads were that delicious I would have no problem eating them for a meal multiple times a week.

I haven’t stopped thinking about that salad.  So now, years later, I am setting out to make that salad this spring.  I’m going to grow the things that I want to go in the salad, make the dressing and croutons, cook lamb one night and use the leftovers the next day.  I think I will call it the Great Salad Project.  I invite you to join me in planting, picking, plucking, and dressing this elusive salad.

Has anyone else ever eaten a salad that you will never forget?

-Rebecca

Introducing my new ETSY store!

Hey everybody!  Just dropping in here to announce a new little project I’ve been working on (and dreaming about) for a while now.

I’ve just opened up an ETSY shop called “Coming Up Cozies.”  Yay!  I’m selling hand knitted mug cozies, and right now I’m specifically knitting cozies that fit wide-mouth mason jars.  They go perfectly with a great new product that I love called cuppow that turns a wide-mouth mason jar into a travel mug.

Go check out my shop and tell me what you think.

Coming Up Cozies

-Rebecca

 

What’s one thing that is good for you, for the environment, and for your local economy?

(our favorite new winter vegetable – Fennel!)

LOCAL FOOD!

I want to cheerlead for seasonal, local, and sustainable food for a moment.  I mean, it’s kinda my thing.  The happiness, community, seasonal rhythms and feasting that come with eating locally has enriched my life more than I ever thought possible.  I’m more grateful about the lives around me and for the wonderful things that sustain and nourish me.  I am more aware of the wonders of each season.  Seriously, if you’re looking for something in your life that brings a wonderful richness and meaning 3 times a day (every time you eat!) then think about local food.  I chose to start eating local food for so many reasons in the beginning: for the environment, for the local culture and economy, for workers rights in places like California and Florida where a lot of our produce comes from, for animal welfare practices, to avoid putting pesticides in my body.  However, the most surprising outcome of my local food experience has been the emotional, social, and communal benefits I have received from my lifestyle and food.

It’s so sad to me that food can become about calculations so quickly: calorie count, portion size, points, carbs, dollars and cents.  You and I put food in our bodies three times a day, and for many people it is an agonizing experience of diet, restraint, or of overwhelming choice.  I firmly believe that in this day and age meals should be full of wonderment and celebration of the bounty of our local place.  Before you think I’m naive and that I don’t understand real life, think for a second about all of the times you eat.  I mean seriously, how many meals have you had in your life, give or take a few?  As of today I am 8,991 days old, and I therefore have eaten somewhere close to 27,000 meals.  Holy cow!  And some of those meals contained atoms that are still in my body!  How amazing is that!  Your body and mine are amazing machines, and we get out of them what we put in them, three times a day.  And I’ve decided that I want my meals to do more than just give me the nutrients and energy necessary to function, I want my meals to bring me joy, happiness, fullness (in more ways than one).

I understand that there are many barriers to eating local, sustainable, organic, ethical food, and I would like to discuss some of them here on the blog, at least in terms of my experience.

So if you have any barrier to choosing local food you would like for me to hit on, post it in the comments.  I know of some of the barriers I experienced, but I want to see if others have similar reservations.  So if local food is something you’ve ever thought not possible for you, go ahead, post a comment about it.

Wishing you healthy community and joyous eating,

-Rebecca

Southern Sunday Biscuits

For years I have tried to find a biscuit that I would be proud to serve at our table. I have tried every reasonable biscuit recipe I could find, but they always turned out like something that would embarrass a Southern cook.  I mean, I feel like good biscuits should be in my genes.  Well, I’m delighted to announce that after countless trials, this recipe has won me over.

Adapted from The Homesick Texan

I love a simple recipe, only 6 ingredients… makes it easy to memorize.  First, mix the dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar.

Keep the butter in the fridge until you are ready to use it.  Then, quickly without handling it too much, cut into cubes.

Cut the butter into the the flour mixture.  My preferred method is with the whisk on my stand mixer, but you could use a pastry knife as well.  I prefer not to use my hands because I like the butter to stay cold.

Mix until you have nice pea-sized crumbs.

Then, stir in the buttermilk.  Before doing this, I switch the whisk for the dough hook on my mixer.  If mixing by hand, a good strong wooden spoon should do.  [I'm just lazy and use my mixer any chance I get.]  Mix until all the flour is incorporated into the dough.

Turn the dough out onto a well floured surface.

Sprinkle with flour and roll so that the entire surface of the dough has a nice light sprinkling of dough and isn’t sticky to the touch.

Now here comes the fun part!  Whack the dough with your rolling pin a few times, turn the dough, whack a bit more, and fold the dough in half.  Then continue whacking, turning, and folding.  In all, you want to have folded it about 4 times or so when all is said and done.  The goal is to get some good dough, flour, and air layers going on in there (along with the now flattened pea sized bits of butter in the dough).  

Whacking the folded layers.

Roll out the dough to about 1/3 of an inch thick.

Flour a WIDE-Mouth mason jar, then cut out 8 biscuits from the dough.

Place in a warmed, well-seasoned 12 inch cast-iron skillet.

Bake until nice and golden brown.

Eat, with apple butter preferably.

Recipe - makes 8 biscuits

2 cups plain flour

1 Tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

8 Tablespoons (1 stick / 4 ounces) unsalted butter, chilled

3/4 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 450°, stick your cast-iron skillet in the oven to heat up as well.  In one bowl, mix dry ingredients.  Cut chilled butter into cubes and cut into flour mixture until pea-sized crumbs form.  Slowly stir in the buttermilk until flour mix is completely incorporated into the dough.

Take the cast-iron out of the oven at this point (you don’t want it to get scorching hot).  Pour dough onto floured surface, knead quickly, then form into a ball.  Whack with rolling pin, fold in half, and repeat a few times.  Roll dough out to 1/3 inch thick and cut with a wide mouth mason jar into 8 biscuits.  Place in the cast-iron and cook in the oven for 12 minutes, or until golden brown on the top.

Happy cooking, and delicious eating,

-Rebecca

Look what I found!

Took a wander through the garden/backyard this evening to check everything out; things have been popping up around here since we’ve been having unseasonably mild nice rainy weather. It certainly has felt like spring, and the plants must think so too.  Look what I found popping up next to our fence.

It’s a hollyhock! I planted them from seed last summer, but it was so hot and dry here none of them came up or did much of anything.  And then I found this guy, one little leaf, right next to a pretty healthy looking hollyhock plant.  What promise a seed may hold!  Although I won’t count my hollyhocks before they bloom, who knows when crazy cold winter air might swoop down here and freeze it, and everything else that thinks it’s spring, to a crisp.

Monday Menu

(one of our winter staple dishes – carrot salad)

This weeks begins my weekly Monday Menu posts where I post our menu for the week with some explanation why we chose each meal, where we got the recipes, etc.  I explained why we love meal planning so much here, and I gave you an overview of our regular routines the are incorporated into our weekly meal plans here.

Sunday

• breakfast – Fried egg, bacon [Iain's homemade from our very own pig!], and sourdough toast
• lunch – smoothie
• dinner – roast chicken, green peas, roasted carrots

Monday

• breakfast – homemade blueberry blue cornmeal muffins [with blueberries picked in Toccoa with my momma on a hot summer morning, the blue cornmeal with the blueberries makes for a fun and colorful wholesome breakfast] and half a grapefruit [yay for citrus season!]
• lunch – Green lentil and curried browned butter soup with crusty sourdough bread [from 101 Cookbooks, also in the cookbook Super Natural Everyday]
• dinner – garden salad tossed with leftover roasted chicken from Sunday’s dinner, sliced pear [just had it sitting in the fruit bowl, most any fresh or dried fruit would do], toasted walnuts, feta, and homemade vinaigrette

Tuesday

• breakfast – blueberry blue corn meal muffins again, with more citrus fruit
• lunch – Green lentil and curried brown butter soup again
• dinner – white beans and cabbage [the cabbage is from the farm where we get our raw milk, Iain picked it up on Friday when he made the milk run; the recipe is from the cookbook Super Natural Everyday]

Wednesday [we're tired, halfway through the week at this point - leftovers are our friend!]

• breakfast – muffins again, citrus fruit
• lunch – lentil soup again [at this point I am almost tired of it, good thing it's finished today!]
• dinner – white beans and cabbage

Thursday

• breakfast – cranberry-orange-almond homemade granola [with a few tiny dark chocolate covered cocoa nibs, shh, don't tell my mom I'm eating chocolate at breakfast!]
• lunch – garden salad [a remix from Monday night, so a little roast chicken, some sort of toasted nut, some sort of cheese, some dried or fresh fruit, something pickle-y, dressing]
• dinner – sausage ball carbonara [homemade sausage from our own pig, yum!; recipe from Jamie's Italy, an incredibly simple and quick, yet delicious dish, it's seriously so quick, one of my faves]

Friday

• breakfast – granola again
• lunch – leftover Sausage ball carbonara from the night before
• dinner – fennel risotto [another recipe from Jamie's Italy, it's a great cookbook!]

Saturday

• breakfast – homemade waffles in our awesome on the stove waffle iron [it's small, easy to clean, easy to store]
• lunch – catch up; not as in the condiment, but as in usually at this point in the week we have leftovers to eat, or have eaten with friends at some point during the week and are a meal behind on our plan]
• dinner – borlotti bean mole with roasted winter squash [we're just now realizing that we haven't really begun eating on our big winter squash crop from the garden that we've got in our 'cellar'; recipe from 101 Cookbooks]

If you’re a blogger and are going to try out weekly menus, post ‘um with us and link up in the comments!  If you’re interested in any recipes or help with weekly meal planning, you can let me know that in the comments too!

Happy planning and delicious eating,

-Rebecca

Introducing Monday Menus

(Iain’s homemade bacon hanging in front of our spice racks)

Every Monday I am going to post our menu for the week with some explanation why we chose each meal, where we got the recipes, etc.  I’m going to give you a little overview of our regular routines the are incorporated into our weekly meal plans.

BREAKFASTS – Often I’ll make biscuits or muffins for breakfast Sunday morning and I’ll make enough to last a few mornings into the week.  Generally, Iain will have made a batch of homemade granola in the cupboard, and he’ll make more whenever we run out.  I try and always have homemade yogurt in the fridge for granola at breakfast, and for smoothies.  If we ever find ourselves without muffins, biscuits, or granola, we almost always have toast and homemade jam or peanut butter and honey, or fresh eggs (from our henny hen hens).  We also have homemade sausage and bacon in the freezer always (from our own piggy pig pig).

LUNCHES – We often make some sort of soup or salad on Sunday for lunches for the week.  These are usually easy to make, healthy, and rarely include meat.  There are so many different types of cold salad out there, something like pasta salad, chicken salad, lentil salad, quinoa salad, coucous salad… the possibilities are endless and therefore lunches never get boring.

SMOOTHIES – We do smoothies a lot, as they’re a really healthy, nutritious, and delicious breakfast or snack.  We have them a lot on Sundays, when have a relatively late big breakfast and just have a smoothie sometime in the afternoon.  We make our smoothies almost always with the same basic recipe: frozen fruit we’ve frozen when it’s in season (peaches, blueberries, strawberries) and fairtrade bananas bought from The Daily Grocery – since we’re just going to freeze them we buy the ones that are about to go off, they’re cheaper! - homemade french vanilla greek yogurt (I’ll tell you more about that soon), a splash of OJ, and a drizzle of local honey

PANTRY – A well stocked pantry is how we survive from week to week (We’ll talk about what we keep in our pantry soon).  The pantry is so important and will make or break your weekly meals.

BREAD – When I’m too lazy to bake myself, we buy bread from the Granary in Watkinsville… it’s  AWESOME bread for reals y’all, I am so grateful to have such good bread available locally.

VINAIGRETTE – I know it sounds weird, but we always have homemade vinaigrette lying around, and we use it all the time.  It’s so versatile and quick and easy to make.  I shake the following up in a mason jar: extra-virgin olive oil, whatever vinegar I have lying around – I usually make my own herbed vinegars – a quick drizzle of honey, sometimes some homemade mustard goes into the mix, a splash of water, and some sea salt and cracked black pepper.  It goes on everything from sandwiches, green salads, pasta salads, braised greens, bread and cheese, etc.  It’s so nice to always have around, and homemade vinaigrette really elevates otherwise ordinary and plain dishes to delicious gourmet meals.

Do you have a weekly routine or some repeating players in your weekly meals?

-Rebecca