Strawberry and Chocolate Morning

The strawberries in syrup I made a couple of years ago looked not so appetizing as soon as I made them. No wonder they never got eaten. I won't be making them again. But, I still had 1.5 pints left so, today, I boiled them with a little cornstarch and made a syrup. We had whole wheat waffles with strawberries in syrup with chocolate sauce. What a way to start the day!

Something New

Today it was my turn to pick up the farm share. We haven't finished last week's share, mind you, so that means we have EVEN MORE food to work through. I kept the lettuce, arugula, tat soi, carrots, garlic, potatoes, peppers, and onions. My sister-in-law got arugula, tat soi, 3 cherry tomatoes, 3 husk cherries, basil, garlic, carrots, potatoes, peppers and onions. We gave the flowers to my mom and dad. Leftover from last week: hot peppers, arugula, carrots, red potatoes, onions. I am really not sure what to do with all the arugula. I've made salads, tossed it with pasta, what else is there? (Suggestions welcome.)

On a whim, I decided to make potato chips. I found instructions here, and got to work slicing them with my mandolin. (Note to self: the plastic food guard is there for a reason. Use it. Your thumb will thank you.) We added vinegar to the soaking water as we were told that would make them more crispy.My 8 year old wanted to help, so together we dried them:Then I fried them:And look how good they look!
The 5 year old decreed they were yummy and couldn't stop eating them until they were all gone. I consider that a success. Plus this salad with goat cheese on top, and the entire meal was farm-share/home-grown/farmer's-market in origin. That's an achievement for us, certainly!

Going Too Far? Nah!

Gleefully I crowed to my sister about picking 2 quarts of wild blackberries in our brother's backyard yesterday. She said, "You realize you're crazy, right? I've never seen anyone get so excited about foraging."

I just can't help myself! Even if I did have to arm myself with gardening gloves, hiking boots, and long pants just so I wouldn't get so many scratches. I mean, I was IN those bushes. I did, at one point, get stuck under a very large and spiky cane and required my sister-in-law's assistance to get out. At which point, I'm quite sure, SHE decided I was crazy, too.

Today's batch is wild blackberry. I even ran 1 quart of the berries through a sieve to get out some of the seeds. It smells heavenly. I decided not to add the sage; I'd been debating this all week, but finally "simple" won. Using the basic recipe in the Certo package, I ended up with 8.5 cups of jam. I'll keep 4 cups and the other 4.5 will go back to my brother and sister-in-law.

And then we'll keep an eye on those Concord grapes....

Lovely Lemon Curd

This is a test. This is a beta-test of the NEW inventory management system, thanks to my wonderful husband.

Now I can:

1. make the item
2. blog about it
3. add it to the inventory app
4. print QR labels
5. affix to the jars
6. manage inventory using the QR reader on my iPhone

Today's demonstration batch is 5 jars of Meyer Lemon Curd. A double batch (2 jars are 4 ounces each, the other 3 are 8 ounces each), made in the largest pot (thanks, note-to-self!).

Divine Figgy Goodness

Once again, I find that Whole Foods is my enabler. Yesterday I discovered Black Mission Figs, on sale(!), and bought 3 8-ounce packages. I still have a little fig jam left but I was thinking about preserves. After my overnight shift, a nap, and some dinner, I found this recipe for preserves, which seemed easiest. It is very easy. I halved the recipe, and I hope I didn't cook them too long, because the preserves are really thick. I did use the kitchen shears at the end to chop up the figs in the preserve as they were too large, in my opinion. But the preserves are so yummy, and thick, and figgy. They taste like candy.

Also at Whole Foods yesterday: Meyer lemons. I bought 6.

While the figs were simmering I made another batch of Dilled Carrots. When my sister-in-law and I went to the farm on Thursday we decided that I should take the whole bowl of carrots this week and make them all into dilled carrots, and then give her half the jars. Works for me! Again, it's such an easy recipe I don't mind. I ran out of the fresh dill so I did use dried dill in one of the jars. I'm not worried, though. It should be fine. I got 4.5 pints out of that batch and will keep just 2 pints.

My Heart is No Longer Broken

While our blueberry picking spot is not yet up to previous levels, we were at least able to get enough blueberries overall to make 10 cups of jam and save 3 cups of berries in the freezer for pancakes. In the blazing heat this morning we went out and picked 4 pints of tiny little berries. My watched stopped; it's very disorienting to keep looking at your wrist and see the same time. Oh, well. Today we searched high...
and low. We came face to face with a deer. Who was rather displeased to see us. She snorted at us a couple of times and bounded off. We ate blackberries and even found 4 raspberries. We saw a chipmunk. A bright chartreuse grasshopper. And a big praying mantis.

(No bugs were harmed in the making of this jam.)

Sausages!

Finally! I've been looking forward to this for a month - our highly anticipated sausage lesson! I brought my husband since we were warned ahead of time that this was really a two person job, if at all possible. So now we both know how to make sausages. We had a really fun time, and Michelle, our instructor, is a great hostess and teacher.

She even had the cooking show flair going - she had precut a bowl of meat and spiced it and put it in the fridge, so that when were done cutting up the meat and spicing it, we wouldn't have to wait. She put one bowl in the fridge and, voila, produced a well chilled bowl of seasoned pork ready to be ground.

It's a fairly simple process as long as you have the space, the grinder, and the casings. We learned how to prepare the casings (not as bad as I had anticipated), grind up the meat:
bind the meat with the spices and cream (we made bratwurst, which calls for egg and cream):and then stuff the casing. There were more technical difficulties at this step; we had casings split on us (not the end of the world) and there is a distinct lack of uniformity to the length of the links. Not bad for a first try, though!
We made a total of 42 sausages, with an additional 3 small patties since we ran out of casings. They were chilled for a day then I froze them in units of 4 to 9 sausages each, depending on their sizes. Tonight we had our very own grilled sausages, with homemade pickles, homemade ketchup, and marinated farm share fava beans. How satisfying is that?