Photos to make you salivate
Homemade CSA spaghetti sauce with a side of steamed veggies (also from the CSA).
The first round of canning: purple and traditional kraut, kim chee, and salsa made by natural fermentation. I used the Nourishing Traditions cookbook for all of these. We like the purple kraut best. This is the only kraut I will eat. I can't stand the stuff in a can or bag at the store.
Spinach lasagna (used up the CSA loose spinach in this one)
Two cheese grilled cheese on some homemade bread (with the obligatory tomato soup).
Italian pickled garlic and green tomato antipasto. It was inspired by a trip to a local Italian restaurant with a salad bar that had this mixture on it. Matt was hooked, so I figured out how to make it since we had CSA garlic filling our crisper for months and a bunch of tomatoes green on the vine on our little late-fruiting plants.
Second round of canning. This time, only purple kraut, and I cured this batch on the ledge in our basement instead of the counter for only three days and then into the fridge.
Venison Fajitas. We butchered the deer ourselves.
Tomatoes and a jalapeno pepper picked on the second day of December. We had the plants in a greenhouse while we moved and then in the shed with a space heater due to a very late fruiting.
Giant meatloaf (combined ground venison and leftover pork from our wedding), apple tart (apples from a local orchard courtesy of grandma), sweet potatoes with butter and brown sugar and homemade gravy.
My first attempt at a 2 crust pie. The crust made with the lard rendered from the hog from our wedding and the apples from that same local orchard mentioned above.
Another crop of late veggies, this one on December 8.
Into December, we still had a bunch of squash from our CSA (still have a couple actually). Matt fried them up in a pan with some sunflower oil (also from the CSA), butter, garlic and onion.
We learned this one from America's Test Kitchen (on PBS). A diner style omelet. I'll have to spell out how to get this light a fluffy breakfast for everyone sometime. It was huge and amazing, we split it and were still stuffed.
Buckwheat pancakes with pure maple syrup (got the syrup from Matt's uncle who "made" it)
The last of the tomatoes and some more jalapenos. These ones picked 6 days before Christmas! We still have the pepper plants (and our chard) in the basement. Matt picked some more peppers today to use in his homemade venison jerky marinade.Pork Tacos
M. and I had one portion of shredded roast pork left from our wedding in the freezer and when I suggested tacos last night, he suggested using the pork. Add some onions, jalapenos, one spicy pepper which we don't know the name(a brown we one thought was sweet, but was obviously not), water and some spicy taco seasoning and let it simmer for an hour or so and we had a luscious pork feast which tasted a little like "carnitas" from Chipotle.
We put the meat in a crunchy taco shell with freshly shredded romaine lettuce, a chopped heirloom tomato, cheddar cheese, and a dollop of sour cream. I also made some spicy rice. Just regular rice with a good glop of salsa, some habenero sauce and Mexican blend corn (corn with peppers) all mixed up. Topped the whole shebang off with a glass of Sangria. Delicious.
Sometimes I wish we either followed a recipe or wrote down more detailed measurements of what we put into our cooking so we could replicate it at another time. This is one of those moments. This was so good I'd eat it every week if we could.
Ingredients in this meal which came from our CSA share:
-jalapeno pepper
-spicy brown pepper of unknown lineage
-red onion
-heirloom tomato
Ingredients in this meal which came from our roof-top garden:
-jalapeno pepper