Venison Pie

As has been mentioned all week, I had a plan to make a venison pie.  I was following this recipe, which I altered just a little bit.  First of all, the juniper was OUT.  (You can find out why here, in case you were wondering.)  I didn't have Scottish ale, but I had my foraged hops homebrew, which is an ale.  I used foraged Dotted-stalk Suillus mushrooms.  And I made my own pastry instead of using puff pastry.

Ah, the pastry.  I had been trying to find an occasion to make a savory pie, so I could experiment with using the rendered duck fat to make a savory crust.  Now was my chance!  Since it melts at such a low temperature, I mixed it with butter:  2/3 butter to 1/3 duck.  Even then, it was the most fragile thing I've worked with, even with putting it in the freezer frequently to keep it cold.  It broke every time I tried to put it in the dish, which was probably too deep anyway.  I finally had to press the crust into the dish.  The top crust went better.  From a taste and texture perspective it was really, really good, but just not worth that much hassle.

The filling before adding the beer

I did, however, use the scraps to make a cheese tart, having figured correctly that the 9 year old wouldn't enjoy the meat pie as much as the rest of us.  It was obviously a hit as the kids almost came to blows trying to divvy it up.

The pie was served with baked carnival squash topped with truffle butter and a stir fry of tat soi and komatsuna greens.

Farm Share Dinner Tonight!

Today's farm share, the first one my sister-in-law and I have needed to split, consisted of: 2 heads of lettuce, 1 large bowl of tat soi, 1 head of garlic, 4 basil plants, 12 carrots, 6 really small zucchini/summer squash, 2 cucumbers, 30 fava bean pods, 1 pint each of snow peas and shell peas, 5 stems of cosmos, and herbs. I didn't pick up the herbs. So here's what I'm doing with my half:

I marinated the fava beans using this recipe and will likely eat them tomorrow. Except that instead of shallots and chives, I used garlic scapes.

Tonight's dinner is chicken nuggets, biscuits, and salad (red lettuce, cuke, shell peas, radishes from my garden, maybe some goat cheese) with an "only Mom will eat" stir fry of the squashes with garlic scapes, some carrots, and the tat soi. Right now the kids are munching on carrots and cucumber slices.

I combined the snow peas with the leftover half-pint from 2 weeks ago and will find something to do with them in the next few days.

While I was dropping of the share at my brother's house, we went outside to check out their wild blackberry and concord grape vines. The blackberries are just forming, nowhere near ripe yet, but there have to be about a thousand on the big bush. I have never seen so many in one place! And the grapes should be enough to make them some grape jelly (we haven't even made a dent in last year's batch, so I won't make more for us). This is so exciting! More gleaning! More canning!

Tat Soi

Tonight's meal was entirely centered around using the tat soi - what I read about it implied that it didn't last long, so I should use it first. I decided to cook it with the pattipan squashes. First I cut up the garlic scapes and fried them in olive oil for about a minute and then added the cut up squash. This was sprinkled with a lot of maple pepper, my favorite seasoning for squash. At the last minute I added the tat soi and stirred it until it was soft and wilted.This was served with lamb, garnished with the pineapple mint jam, and grilled pineapple. It all was delicious! Followed by the salad course: red leaf lettuce, salad greens, goat cheese, mulberries, more garlic scapes (raw this time), and radish, with a maple balsamic vinaigrette dressing. I don't think I've eaten this much salad since I moved out of my parents' house. But I've been enjoying playing around with the different greens, adding a variety of fruits and cheese in almost every one. (Mango, cilantro, and goat cheese make a great combo, by the way.) Just one month of this farm share has really expanded our menu - and we've been known to eat almost anything.