Bread can make you a hero. It comes together easily and fast, if you do not count time waiting for it to proof. Yet, it can make new friends and impress enemies. With four basic ingredients: flour, water, yeast and a touch of salt, you get a classic, good, bread dough. Bake it with the windows open, fill the neighborhood with the mouth-watering goodness of fresh bread aroma and even the most unfriendly neighbors will turn out.
When it comes to getting things done, few tricks work as well as a good shopping list. If you go to the supermarket with no list, if you wander the aisles trying to decide what to get, shopping takes forever, and when you get home, you’ve forgotten the important stuff, like beer.
So simple, so comforting, French Toast makes a frosty morning a better place to be. Not all French Toasts come together wham-bam. There are the more complex French Toasts, some soaked in sugared milk overnight then baked until they form a bread and caramel treat. A tasty dish, this, but today, praise of simply dipped and fried French Toast feels due. Click here to read the rest of this article
Buying locally grown goods makes good sense, and usually good cents. When you buy locally, you help your neighbors, small farmers who are being crowded out by mega-companies; you get fresher food and often better varieties of produce than you can find in the supermarkets. The small farmers who grow produce for road-side stands and farmers’ markets often grow varieties that differ from those grown by big, super farms. The mega farms grow things that provide quantity, in contrast to taste, and that transport easily. Small, local farmers can grow varieties that ripen in the field and bring better flavor to your table. Many consider this biodiversity important to the perpetuation of our agriculture. When you buy from a local grower, you invest in goodness today and promise for tomorrow. Click here to read the rest of this article
Some ingredients lend themselves to sweet, some to savory and some to both. I’m here to tell you, boys and girls, pumpkin lends itself to both. The Blonde cooked Savory Pumpkin Quiche from our homegrown and hand processed pumpkin. It not only swirled delight around my mouth and nose, but the next day, when I unpacked the leftovers at work, every woman in the lunch room had to stop by to see what smelled so good. Click here to read the rest of this article
Like many people, I went without a food mill for years. Now I wonder why. Oh, we always had a blender and used it often but it is relegated to smoothies and mayonnaise now. Click here to read the rest of this article
The food processor has been around for a long time, was used intensely at first. Now, it comes in useful once in awhile. Once we began to make pasta sauces, thick soups and jams and jellies; now that we put up most of the vegetables we eat through the Winter, the food mill is used more than both blender and food processor combined.
Last summer, we bought half a cow from the Amish. It’s great meat, no weird stuff, no extra hormones or steroids. All this is sitting in the freezer. Or, some of it is. It seems that last time someone got something out, a package of beef fell out, and stopped the door from closing. All the meat on the door thawed out. Thankfully, what was in the freezer proper stayed frozen.
Still this left us with about twenty pounds of stewing beef that we had to cook right away. So, as we were making our various stews and freezing them, it occurred to me that people don’t do this as often any more.
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The last five pumpkins of the season sit outside our window, orange against brilliant yellow leaves that fell from the sweet maple onto the deck. We grow our own pumpkins, but if we did not, this is the time I’d go pumpkin shopping. The Halloween thing is over and pumpkins are on sale. No one is looking to carve jack o’ lanterns and most folks do not realize they can find food inside the pumpkin; lot’s of food. Click here to read the rest of this article
I have really been trying to eat healthier lately. And to face facts, fish is healthy. It’s got omega-3, lots of protein, and low on your bad fats. The only problem is… I hate fish. I had a bad experience at a red lobster when I was very little. It involved some escargot my father forced me to try, and the results were, let say, explosively bad. That sort of soured me on seafood in general. Which was a real tragedy, considering I ended up spending several of my formative years living on Prince Edward Island, literally surrounded by fish.
Recently, I figured it was time to try my hand at fish again. But I wanted to find something that didn’t have that nasty “fishy†taste, or at least, not much. Which is why I chose salmon. It is a pretty mild fish, as far as taste goes, and it’s one I’m fairly used too. I mean, who hasn’t had a salmon sandwich, really?
So, I did a little looking, and found a little dish called Salmon Wellington. It’s basically salmon rolled in pastry like a jellyroll. It fit all my criteria, a healthy fish dish, that wasn’t too fishy. Also, it turns out that it is absolutely gorgeous when it’s done. Serve this at a dinner party, and you’ll have friends for life. Or at least moochers who want more of “that fish thing.â€
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If you picture the canned soup you buy down the soup aisle and are thinking to yourself, “I don’t need to spend my time making something so very banal.â€, you may want to reconsider. This homemade tomato soup shares only one thing with the salty canned version: both are mostly red. Click here to read the rest of this article
