holiday sweets

Every year I have great intentions of baking and cooking holiday sweets as gifts, but until this year it has never happened. This year I did get a little carried away, but the sweets were well-received and resulted in family members hiding their stashes so they wouldn't have to share with everyone else! That, of course, (despite not exactly promoting the Christmas spirit) made me very happy.

I've mentioned before that I have never gone wrong with Orangette's recipes. I made my favorite granola, and these cookies, which I learned about here. I ate an entire batch of those cookies in about a week, and then had to make another batch for gifts. They have to be one of my favorite cookies ever.

Then I went a little crazy with candied citrus peel. This was on my list of things to make last year, but Levi's birth was on time and therefore citrus peel making never happened. I used this recipe, and did 2 grapefruits, 3 oranges, and 4 lemons. I boiled them all together and they still maintained their individual flavors. Also, I cut the grapefruit peels a little thicker before I started freaking out that I was leaving too much pith (and therefore cut the lemon and orange much thinner), and I actually ended up liking the texture of the grapefruit the best.

Making candied citrus peel is not a quick undertaking. Although it wasn't especially labor intensive, it was time intensive, but the results are incredible. I dipped half in bittersweet chocolate and left half plain. I did not have any suitable packaging and couldn't bear to package my citrus peel in zip-loc bags (!), so I sewed little pouches out of parchment paper. They ended up looking great, but one caveat is that the citrus peel will dessicate if it is not in an air-tight container, so I stored these little gift bags in zip-locs and instructed their recipients to do the same!

After almost 8 hours of citrus peel making, and with Levi down for a nap, I looked at Adam and said "do you think I would be crazy if I made homemade marshmallows right now?" Homemade marshmallows have been on my list of things to make since the December 2003 Martha Stewart Living came out, and then this post really inspired me. I used the instructions from the link on the Angry Chicken post and they turned out perfectly.

I dipped some in dark chocolate and sprinkled them with crushed walnuts for giving. Next year I want to make snowflake-shaped marshmallows and give them as gifts with homemade hot cocoa mix.

spring food

The wild leeks are pretty much done for the year. They are starting to look trampled and some have little flower spikes. Last spring I didn't get to enjoy them a whole lot as my morning sickness wouldn't really allow it. But this year we put them in nearly any recipe that called for leeks, onions, or garlic. We made wild leek pizza, wild leek pasta, and best of all potato and wild leek soup. The soup was so delicious that I made it twice, using this simple recipe, but using two bunches of wild leeks (whole leeks, greens and all) instead of the regular leeks.

Also on our spring menu is mass quantities of rhubarb. I am sad to say that I have never lived in any place long enough to justify planting rhubarb, but our wonderful neighbors have kindly kept us stocked with all the rhubarb we want. Every spring, I look forward to this recipe, and I end up making it dozens of times until I am thoroughly sick of it. Last May I still had frozen strawberries that I picked the year before, but this year I don't...so I have been omitting the strawberries and using 3 cups of rhubarb instead of 2.

Unfortunately this year we have not been lucky enough to go foraging for copious amounts of my favorite spring food, but today Adam found these two gigantic morels underneath our back porch. How morels ended up under our porch, I have no idea...but we will be sure to enjoy them sauteed in butter tonight.

why did it have to end?

I wasn't going to write about this book - many others have...I've seen it mentioned on several blogs that I regularly read - but I want to. I can't stop thinking about it and I want to talk about it. First of all, this is the first book I have read for pleasure in probably over a year. My dissertation took its toll, followed by a pregnancy during which my brain was fried - and I haven't been able to concentrate long enough to really get into a book for a long time. Also, this book made me really want to cook...something that has definitely fallen by the wayside since I had Levi.

I think Molly's blog, Orangette, was the first blog I ever read. When I discovered the wonderful world of blogging, I was writing my dissertation but my brain would think about nothing but food, so the first blogs I read were food-related. I have made a handful of her recipes and I have to say that every single one has been wonderful. Most I made numerous times. Fall and winter of 2007 we lived on her carrot salad - I probably made it a dozen or more times until we ate so much of it that neither Adam or I thought we ever wanted to see it again (I might finally have gotten over that).

Anyway, I love her book. I started it last week and was reading only a chapter or two every night while pumping breast milk before going to bed. I was savoring it slowly and was actually looking forward to my (previously dreaded) nighttime pumping sessions. Well, then I got obsessed and started reading it while nursing too. And I just now finished it...during Levi's nap. I actually regret the obsessive reading glut, because I was enjoying taking it slow and mulling over one or two recipes at a time. Also, I read it so fast that I have only had the chance to make one recipe so far - Buckwheat Pancakes, which I made on Sunday morning with blueberries, and which were exceptional. It would have been fun to take my time and cook my way through the book.

I am dying to make almost every recipe in there, and the only reason I might skip some of them is that a few seem quite labor intensive and Levi does not allow me that kind of cooking. Most of the recipes are accessible and unintimidating though, and I'm sure they are all delicious. I already bought a huge bunch of bananas specifically so some will over-ripen and I can make the Banana Bread with Chocolate and Crystallized Ginger. And I'm about to go make a big old shopping list so I can make a few other recipes this week. This book not only got me reading again, but also got me cooking again, and because of that I am unbelievably happy.

foraging

Saturday we went to an undisclosed forest in Vermont in search of the elusive morel mushroom. Looking for morels takes some serious concentration and patience - they are nearly invisible because they blend in so well with the leaf-littered forest floor. You have to scan the ground for odd darkish lumps that could well be morels. And they are few and far between, so there is a lot of nothing in between short bursts of excitement.

We went foraging with a friend who is a very experienced mushroom hunter, and we came home with about 3 pounds of morels between the three of us - in dollars, this is about $120 worth of morels! Adam and I took 1.5 pounds of them and planned our dinner the whole way home.

First we had to go up to the woods to get some wild leeks, a perfect partner for morels. I spent a few hours digging leeks on Thursday at Fat Rooster, and it was hard work in the deep rich soil near the farm. Luckily though, the soil in our woods is rocky and shallow, and pulling the leeks was really easy!

We decided to make homemade pasta to go with our morels, because it has been a long time since we last made pasta, and it really is superior to anything store bought. It seemed inappropriate to have our precious foraged morels and leeks with run-of-the-mill dried pasta, so we broke out the old pasta maker and made a simple egg fettuccini.

I sauteed the leeks and morels in butter and reduced some white wine into the mixture. I added heavy cream and tarragon, seasoned it all with salt and pepper, and boiled it until it was thickened. We had the morel sauce over our fresh pasta with a sprinkle of freshly grated parmesan cheese on top. It was one of those meals that left us nearly speechless, aside from the occasional moan or exclamation of how amazing it was. Happily we still had about a half-pound of morels left, so we had another wonderful morel dinner on Sunday night!

spring greens

We returned from Portland on Saturday and picked up our last winter CSA share on Sunday. It's slightly sparse on the root vegetables, because obviously by now many of them are suffering from being stored all winter. But they made up for that with a dozen eggs and a huge bag of spring greens. It's hard to tell from the photo, but that bag of greens must weigh at least two pounds...and they are delicious!

Portland went very well, Adam is done with his dissertation, we ate some incredible meals, and saw some friends. Everything is in bloom there and it is just gorgeous. Luckily though, when we got home, most of our snow had melted! We can see our driveway, yard, and back patio again, and spring is definitely in the air here too.

I finished a couple knitting projects, and will try to post them soon! But I am really a little frantic right now about finishing the last chapter of my dissertation, so posting knits might have to wait.

dried garlic

Our supply of garlic was getting completely out of control. Not only did we have the garlic from our winter CSA share, but we also had our own crop of garlic...about 50 heads that we planted during our last fall in Portland that were harvested by my brother about a month after we moved to New Hampshire. Well, now it is getting warm and inevitably some of our garlic has started to sprout a little and we had to find a way to preserve it.

Adam came up with the idea of putting it in the food dehydrator and making little dried slivers of garlic. We are storing it in the freezer to further its shelf-life. At first I wasn't quite sure what to do with dried garlic, but I was making a recipe the other day that called for garlic powder and I don't have any because I typically prefer to use fresh garlic. I figured I'd give the dried garlic a chance and Adam ground some in a mortar & pestle into the finest most wonderfully fragrant golden garlic powder I have ever seen. It probably comes as no surprise that freshly ground garlic powder is far superior to anything that has been sitting in a jar for months or years...but really, this stuff is amazing!

vermont gold

On Sunday, I helped inaugurate the 2008 maple sugaring season out at the farm. We tapped about 60 more maple trees (they had already tapped a bunch a few days prior), and then spent the whole afternoon collecting sap to bring down to the sugar shack.

Most of the trees are hooked up to tubes that all drain into huge 250 gallon collecting tanks, but a number of trees are still done with the old fashioned bucket hanging from a tree. Most of the trees with buckets are along the road, but it is really difficult to climb up the huge pile of snow on the side of the road (all the while risking the chance that you'll fall through the thin icy layer on top and end up waist-high in a snow drift!) and make your way to the buckets, empty them into your bigger bucket, then make your way back down the snow drift...without spilling too much sap!

All in all, we gathered almost 600 gallons of sap, which sounds like a lot, but with a ratio of 40 gallons of sap to every one gallon of maple syrup, that is only enough for about 15 gallons of syrup! But the sugaring season has just begun, and the sap is likely to flow like crazy this week since we are expected to have daytime temperatures above freezing for the rest of the week.

signs of spring

I spent four hours today in the greenhouse at Fat Rooster Farm, planting radicchio, basil, escarole, chard, bok choy, parsley, artichokes, spinach, arugula, and cabbage. They have also already started 21,000 onion seeds! It was so wonderful to spend some time in a sunny, hot greenhouse today! It was over 100 degrees in there, which felt really really nice.

Also at the farm...more than 20 lambs have been born over the past couple weeks! They are so curious, and entertaining to watch. My favorite is this little reddish lamb below (I guess I can relate...I have red hair too).

These two (my reddish lamb and another with reddish legs) were definitely interested in me, and the camera...so it was easier to get pictures of them than the rest of the lambs running around like crazy! There was a really cute black lamb that I wanted to get a picture of...but he was uncooperative.


So, it seems like spring really is on its way! (Finally!)

march vegetables

We got our March CSA box last weekend, and I'm happy that we got 8 pounds of carrots and 8 pounds of beets! I am falling behind a little bit on the potatoes...they are gorgeous potatoes, but it is hard for us (a family of 2) to eat 10 pounds of potatoes in a month! I can hardly wait any longer for spring to come...and spring produce. Somewhere beneath the snow there are wild leeks in the woods behind my house, and morel-hunting to be done...and all those wonderful spring salad greens that are probably starting to grow in greenhouses as we speak. We have two more months of winter CSA vegetables, but I bet we will start getting some early spring produce next month...I hope! It is rainy and windy today, and just generally bleak outside. Not a very likely day for me to be thinking of spring...but I guess it is the kind of day that makes me long for spring!

sugar high

As promised, Adam made me my favorite dessert on Saturday afternoon. I love lemon bars more than anything. When we lived in Portland, Oregon, I often went out of my way on my walk home just so I could buy a lemon bar. I also think I've tried every lemon bar in the city and could probably tell you where to get the best one!

Half of the pan disappeared by the end of the day on Saturday. We slowed down a little bit after that, but I ate the last little sliver of lemon bar on Tuesday morning for breakfast. Adam said that I ate nearly the entire pan by myself, and I actually think he might be right. I looked at the recipe and realized that in the span of two and a half days I probably ate over a cup and a half of sugar and over a stick of butter. That's just disgusting. But they're sooooo good!

Here is the recipe, which we have adapted from a little recipe card we picked up at Penzey's Spices. We've tried a lot of lemon bar recipes, and this one is exceptional.

1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
2/3 c. powdered sugar
pinch of salt
1 1/2 sticks cold butter, cut into pieces
3 eggs
1 1/2 c. sugar
3 T. all-purpose flour
1/3 c. fresh lemon juice
1 t finely grated lemon peel
powdered sugar for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. In a medium bowl, mix the first three ingredients. Rub the butter into the flour mixture (or use a pastry cutter or food processor) until it is crumbly. Press into an ungreased 9x13 inch pan and bake for about 20 minutes (until very lightly golden). While the crust is baking, beat the eggs until foamy, and add the sugar, flour, lemon juice, and lemon peel. Beat until well combined. Remove the crust from the oven, increase the oven temperature to 350 degrees. Pour the filling over the crust and bake about 15 minutes. When cool, sprinkle with powdered sugar.

homemade granola

I really love the recipes on Orangette...everything I have made so far has been really excellent. I'm actually currently addicted to French-style Carrot Salad and I always add a peeled grated raw beet to the salad, which is a delicious addition. Since I discovered that salad, the carrots from our monthly winter CSA boxes are always the first things we run out of.

Yesterday, I made Orangette's Daily Granola. I decided to make it as written, because I've never made granola before and because reading the post makes you believe that it is the most perfectly wonderful granola in the world. I was skeptical because I'm not a huge fan of sesame seeds, but I added them anyway. This granola really is excellent, and addictive too...it is now all over the floor because I couldn't resist scooping up handfuls of it and shoving it into my mouth. Adam, our primary household cereal eater, also gave it a huge thumbs up. It has the perfect balance of sweeetness, and tastes slightly fruity because of the apple sauce, which I would never have thought to add to granola. I'm not a huge cereal person, but this morning I happily devoured my bowl of this granola with milk and sliced bananas.

river cottage

I got this cookbook for Christmas, and have been slowly perusing it...I just have to say that it is unlike ANY cookbook I have ever seen. Actually, the recipes part of the cookbook is the least exciting thing about the book, although I would guess that the recipes are also very good (I haven't made anything yet, but I have made a couple excellent dishes from the River Cottage website)...what is truly remarkable is that this book is almost a guide to the production of food. There are not only sections on how to buy produce and meat, but also how to grow vegetables, choose varieties for flavor, freeze vegetables, choose a breed of pig or cow to raise, dry-cure your own bacon, bottle-rear orphan lambs, kill a chicken, smoke fish, and forage for wild greens. And much more too, of course.

Jenn from Fat Rooster Farm has the flu, so I'm not heading out there to work today...which is unfortunate because I am out of perfect Fat Rooster eggs. Actually, I bought a half-dozen of local though mass-produced eggs last week in case I ran out of FR eggs before Thursday came along, and this morning I ate the last of the FR eggs and one of the mass-produced eggs. I just have to say that when I cracked the eggs into the bowl to scramble them, the difference was shocking. The FR egg had a large orange yolk and a firm white, and the mass-produced egg had a tiny pale yellow yolk and a runny white...I guess I'll have to head out to FR this weekend or Monday to get my fix. And we'll use those mass-produced eggs for some lemon squares that Adam promised to make me this weekend.

We got about 5 inches of snow overnight, and it looks like good snow too...not the wet snow we got yesterday. This means that I will probably head out cross-country skiing for the first time in weeks. I'm really happy about that!

february csa share

This morning we picked up our February box of CSA vegetables from Luna Bleu Farm. It's our fourth month of organic winter vegetables, and we will get monthly boxes of produce through May. I am really happy that the cabbage is slowing down (only two red cabbages this month)...the napa cabbage was getting a little out of control...I think we still have a head of it in the refrigerator from our December box, not to mention most of what we got in January! The sprouts were a nice touch this month...we got both alfalfa sprouts and mung bean sprouts. I imagine that as the weather continues to get nicer we'll get more little treats like that...in fact, we might start some spinach and greens in the greenhouse at Fat Rooster next Thursday, so local greens are on their way.

These were our boxes from previous months. January...

December...

and November...

It has been amazing to get all this wonderful local produce every month, and I would definitely do a winter CSA with Luna Bleu again. Aside from the napa cabbage, we have managed to keep up with eating our monthly vegetables...although I could use some suggestions for what to do with rutabaga!

whole grain pancakes

Yesterday we had Mark Bittman's whole grain pancakes for breakfast, and they were really great! I love anything with separated eggs, and the beaten egg whites in this recipe really made the pancakes fluffy and light despite that they were all whole wheat and buckwheat flour, which would usually make for a dense pancake. I was really excited about the buckwheat too, since it is so high in fiber and iron. I used ground coriander and cinnamon according to the recipe, and they were very good with a slightly exotic flavor...next time I might eliminate the coriander and use some vanilla extract for a more traditional pancake flavor. I also like the idea of adding some ground flaxseed to the mix. The recipe, as written, makes a LOT of pancakes...I was surprised because Adam and I are so serious about food that usually a recipe that is written to serve 4 serves the two of us quite nicely. I made 15 good-sized pancakes from this recipe and about half of those are now in the freezer. I'm not sure how they'll freeze, but it is worth a try!

Update: To satisfy my morning maple syrup craving, I just had some of the frozen buckwheat pancakes and they were great!! I thawed them in the microwave and then put them in the toaster oven...nothing frozen is as good as it is when it was fresh, but it is definitely worth freezing the leftovers of these pancakes!

embossed leaves socks

I didn't intend for this to turn into an all-knitting blog, but I have another finished knitting project to post! The pattern is "Embossed leaves socks" designed by Mona Schmidt from the Winter 2005 Interweave Knits. Embarrassingly, I started these in 2005 when this magazine came out! I got about half of one sock knit and then they sat around for 2 years until I picked them up again. They are done in Koigu Premium Merino, as the pattern calls for. The leaf motif was easily memorized so knitting went quickly, and I'm happy with the results!

Also...yesterday there was a new post in The Ladybug Letters, a wonderful and eloquent collection of stories pertaining to farming and food. Their site is also great because of the hundreds of recipes for every vegetable imaginable!

a good egg

On Thursday mornings I work at Fat Rooster Farm in exchange for almost all the meat and eggs that we consume. Today I cleaned garlic and washed and packaged eggs that will be sold at the next winter farmer's market. Cleaning garlic is a dusty unpleasant chore, but I could wash and package eggs all day. I get to be creative when I put them in the cartons, and I have fun making all sorts of beautiful color arrangements: rows of brown alternating with rows of white, all brown with a single green egg, and my favorite of the day...a gradation of color starting with the darkest brown, then medium brown, then light brown, then ivory, then white. In the cartons I take home with me I usually just put an assortment of eggs: speckled, green, white, many shades of brown...and they are so beautiful, they make me smile nearly every morning when I open the carton!