We started our garden about a month late – our moving date was not well timed with the Farmer’s Almanac this year. So now, we are harvesting veggies that everyone else in our area harvested 4-6 weeks ago. In some ways it makes us feel really behind in our gardening, but in another way it is actually good – having a second harvest! The first time around we bought these goodies from the farmer’s market – second time around from our garden!

Less than two weeks ago we got our biggest harvest yet – 5 beets, 10 carrots, fresh herbs and lots of beautiful edible flowers – nasturtium and borage.

FLOWER POWER!

Nasturtium flowers and leaves are edible and have a wonderful peppery flavor. Even the seeds can be pickled – they apparently taste like capers. The flowers are high in vitamin C, and have been used to treat colds. It can also be used topically for bacterial and fungal infections because of its mustard-oil content.

Borage flowers are perhaps one of the only truly found in nature blue foods, beyond blueberries. They have a very sweet taste. The flowers are also rich in minerals, most notably potassium. Medicinally the leaves are often used as support to the adrenal glands and for inflammation. Probably the most well-known use for borage is borage oil. Borage oil is very high in gamma-linolenic acid, GLA. GLA is an essential fatty acid, omega-6 oil. Borage oil supplements are most beneficial for arthritis and chronic dry skin, such as eczema.

We really planted both of these flowers in accordance with companion planting – plants that keep bugs and disease, as well as other garden pests away from the plants you are growing for food. So these plants have a dual purpose. Plus they are very pretty as an edible garnish. My stepdaughter Gwen had never had an edible flower until we served this salad for dinner recently. At first she didn’t want to try them, but after some coaxing, she did, and she really liked them!

I love roasting beets for salads, and pairing them with goat cheese. There is something so good , and not to mention aesthetically beautiful about the combination of goat cheese and beets. So I decided to roast the whole lot, and arrange them on top of fresh greens from the garden, also. As we have been harvesting plenty of those for months now.

This is a perfect dinner salad on a hot summer night, when your family is looking for something light. This would also be a wonderful first course to a summer harvest dinner. It is colorful, delicious and healthy on so many levels!

INGREDIENTS:

5 small beets, cut in half
10 baby carrots
2 TBS fresh rosemary
1 TBS fresh thyme
salt & pepper
olive oil
1 tsp dijon mustard
1 tsp maple syrup
5 cups fresh greens – arugala, red leaf and green leaf lettuces, nasturtium leaves
olive oil to toss the greens in
salt & pepper to season greens
¼ cup goat cheese, crumbled
nasturtium flowers, as garnish
borage flowers, as garnish

METHOD:

Stir the veggies with olive oil, salt and pepper and herbs until well coated. Roast in a preheated 400 F oven for about 45 minutes, turning once halfway through.

In the same bowl, add mustard and maple, dump the roasted veggies in and stir to coat. Then toss the greens with olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Crumble the goat cheese on top, arrange the roasted veggies and the edible flowers. Serves 4 as a main dish.

We are still without internet, here at the homestead, so my absence in the blogosphere continues…but I have been amassing so many great recipes since we got here, I just have to keep sharing, as I can. I am just so inspired to shop for food and cook here!

This is a local, or at least regional salad with products coming from Northern New England (or grown by me – in the case of the lemons). This salad features the beautiful and delicious bounty of spring and is packed full of nutrients and major brain food.

I am excited to be featuring some delicious products from several awesome local producers here in beautiful Northern Vermont. This just goes to show how easy and pleasurable it is to eat locally, when you are in a community that really supports local agriculture and food producers. Especially when these products are readily available and easy accessible to the community.

That really is the crux of the local food movement– even though our growing season is much shorter here, there is always an abundance of local products available. Having local products available year round is an important goal of this community, and because it is a community effort, you really can find local products year round. This includes produce, meats and dairy in addition to local coffee roasters, bread bakers, beer and wine makers, peanut butter producers, as well as salsas, sauces and condiments. Not to mention the maple syrup and raw honey! The produce variety may not be as extensive as if you were going to the regular grocery store, but that is part of the joy and challenge of seasonal eating. Plus, learning simple techniques like canning and preserving can really prolong the bounty of a shorter growing season, adding color, flavor and nutrients to the winter months. So if you plan ahead, you can actually eat quite well during harsher months. Thinking that weather is the key factor in the availability of local foods in a community, is a terrible misnomer. I found it much harder to find true local staple products in Florida, which is one of the reasons we left. I lived there for over 3 years. I have lived here less than 2 weeks.

This focus on local and sustainable food is just one of the many major reasons we have decided to make this part of the world our permanent home. We really are so lucky to have found a community that shares our strong core values, which is important on so many levels. Living in a place where your ideals are supported and just a “normal” part of life is a welcomed relief. People are adaptable and can make do anywhere, finding hidden treasures, but being able to live according to your values with ease is a true blessing. I am looking forward to sharing many other finds with you over the coming months and years.

Local Products

* Bar Harbor Mackerel, Bar Harbor, Maine -all natural, wild caught, naturally hardwood smoked Atlantic mackerel. Sustainably harvested from the clear cold waters of the Gulf of Maine. I consider Maine as well as the rest of Northern New England and the Quebec province of Canada (25 miles as the crow flies) to be local to us. This mackerel as well as wild herring fillets are available from a local market, Apple Tree.

* Pete’s Greens – Four Season Organic Vegetable Farm, Craftsbury, Vermont – Salad mix featuring: red rib dandelion, endive, fennel tops, wrinkled cress, red leaf amaranth, tatsoi, ruby red chard, bright lights chard, arugula, upland cress, spinach, orach and purslane. These were some of the most delicious and aesthetically beautiful greens I have had. We first had them at the Bee’s Knees an amazing local restaurant. I asked the server where they got their mixed greens, and then we were able to procure some from another local market, The Green Top Market.

* Elmore Mountain Bread Elmore, Vermont– Wood fired micro bakery. They use a long fermentation process in their bread making. Each loaf takes a total of 16 hours. Sometimes it is hard to resist bread like this, and so I was indulging on it when we first got here and I wasn’t having any ill effects from it. Now I know why…just another blessing, considering many of the restaurants in the area, as well as local groceries, and markets sell Elmore Mountain Bread. Being able to eat a sandwich or burger at a restaurant is a true luxury for me. Thank you, Elmore Mountain Bread!

* Farmer Sue’s  Peperoncini Peppers Bakersfield, VT – Do you know how hard it is to find peperoncini peppers without corn syrup? I love these little pickled peppers, and now I have an alternative to making my own . Farmer Sue makes all kinds of delicious pickled vegetables and sells at the year round Lamoille Valley Artisan Farmers Market .

RECIPE:

Smoked Mackerel Salad

INGREDIENTS:

6-8 oz. smoked mackerel fillets
juice of ½ lemon
salt&pepper to taste
hefty sprinkle of herbs de provence
1 TBS fresh chives, chopped
1 TBS mayonnaise
2 peperoncini peppers chopped
drizzle of olive oil
2 cups salad greens

METHOD:

Mix all ingredients together in a bowl, reserving a little lemon juice for the greens. Dress your greens with olive oil and lemon juice and toss. Place a mound of the mackerel salad on top. Serve with slices of sourdough baguette.

Be sure to share the mackerel juice with any feline or canine friends you might have at home. They will love you!

Serves 2

A few years ago when I was still teaching at the cooking school, we had a summer camp program for kids. It was really fun teaching a room full of young people the joy of cooking and food. Inspiring them to eat with their taste buds, and not worry about whether they thought they liked something or not based on principle, but to expand their horizons. Little foodies in the making. As part of this teaching we tried creating dishes with unique flavor profiles, that packed a wallop, a real flavor sensation!

One of the dishes we made up covered all the basics – super sweet, salty and savory. We stuffed dried dates with parmesan cheese, wrapped them in bacon and broiled them until the bacon was nice and crispy. We called them bugs – because that is kind of what they look like if you are a kid. For me, I easily looked past their outward appearance, this was one of the most amazing flavor combinations! One of those bites that you really can’t wrap your head around, until you have tried it! For me, it was love at first bite.

It has been a while since I last had these, but recently I got a craving for them. We had just picked up some dried dates from the health food store and I had some turkey bacon in the fridge that needed using up – and of course we always have Cabot Seriously Sharp Cheddar in the fridge (what kind of displaced Vermonters would we be without it?), so a plan started coming together in my head. We also had some nice peppery arugula in the fridge, straight from the farmers market and I thought that would marry nicely with the sweet and savory date bites. Topping everything off with some thick, black balsamic glaze, and it really was heaven on a plate. The stuffed dates are great on a salad, but certainly can be served alone as an hors d’oeuvre . They are so quick to put together, but the taste is totally amazing. Sure to impress anyone. Go ahead and make some – you know you wanna try them!

As I have discussed a few posts ago, summertime is all about simple, laid back fare, getting together with friends and family and just relaxing. We live very close to the beach now. We could walk there, but sometimes it is fun to take the car so we can bring our big cooler, a blanket and other goodies for a beach picnic.

While Rachel and Gwen were here, we went with our friends Lela and Bubba to have a beach picnic. Everyone met at our house, we made sandwiches with whatever was in the fridge and both Lela and I brought something to share. She made a delicious pasta salad with asparagus and red peppers and I made what I called a “New World” veggie salad – it contained 2 ears of corn on the cob, a roasted sweet potato, black beans, tomatoes, red bell pepper and zucchini. I tossed all the veggies in a light mustard vinaigrette and sprinkled with lime salt, cilantro and a pinch of chili pepper.

I also baked a batch of gluten free blueberry muffins for dessert. I used a gf muffin mix I found at the health food store. I topped the muffins with some cream cheese icing I had in the fridge leftover from when I made Lela and Bubba’s wedding cake!

We all had a great time enjoying the food and keeping away the sea gulls who really were hell bent on joining our party! They were some serious party crashers! But we didn’t let them stop of from enjoying surf, sand and each other’s company!

This is a dish I made a while back, that I have yet to blog about. It is so very simple, but the taste was just so bright and summery, I thought this would be the perfect time to share it – in the height of summer. These are my favorite kinds of salads – “leftovers salads”, where you pull a bunch of stuff out of the pantry and out of the garden, and make a simple masterpiece. I do a lot of these “leftovers salads” and they are always the best because they are always so unique.

I had half a box of orzo pasta that I cooked up and then cooled. I drizzled it with some sun dried tomato dipping olive oil that I received via FromTheFarm.com from Sierra Olive Oil Company. Then I chopped some heirloom tomatoes and garden tomatoes and some fresh mozzarella.

I stirred that in with fresh chopped herbs from our garden: basil, oregano, scallions and lemon balm. A little salt and pepper for the top, and a final drizzle of organic Meyer lemon vinegar.

I brought this to a potluck dinner and there was nary a piece of orzo left! Now that I am writing about it, I am craving it again!

I made this salad with leftover shredded carrots I had from making the Carrot Wedding Cake. I over bought on carrots because I wanted to make sure to have enough for the cake…so I had leftovers of course. Which IS ALWAYS a fun challenge for me. That is the beauty of cooking with leftovers – endless inspiration and ideas because you never have the same combination of ingredients – exactly. Which makes me think outside the box and just have fun experimenting!!!

I don’t normally buy pre-shredded carrots, so this was a new ingredient for sure . In reality, I can’t take credit for this recipe though, as I found it on the shredded carrot package. I did tweak it a bit, but the inspiration came straight from the label. Sometimes those on the package recipes are actually great! I served this with grilled organic chicken cutlets that had a Jamaican Jerk spice blend rub. For those of us counting calories/fat/protein ratios and the like, I do have nutritional information at the bottom of the recipe!

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So of course after receiving all those wonderful products from FromTheFarm.com I was inspired to start experimenting with them right away.

Santa Sweet Grape and Ugly Ripe Heirloom Tomatoes

Santa Sweet, the name of the company is also the name of the seed variety of this original grape tomato. The company owns the particular seed variety along with the Ugly Ripe heirloom variety seeds. Therefore they are the first company to bring the grape tomato to the United States. Any other company who sells “grape tomatoes” and are not Santa Sweet- their seeds are a cousin of the original. These grape tomatoes are super sweet and very pop-able. Children love their shape and taste. The Ugly Ripe tomatoes are reminiscent of a delicious tomato fresh from my grandfather’s backyard garden. They may be ribbed and bumpy, but their flavor is delicious and full of pure tomato flavor. Perfect to eat like an apple, or chopped in salads.

I live with a “tomato connoisseur” who just fell in love with both of these varieties of tomatoes. So much so, that all we really did with them was make wonderfully simple salads dressed with balsamic vinegar and and extra virgin olive oil.

My favorite salad was these dressed tomatoes over a bed of spicy organic arugala, mixed with a nice ripe avocado and some smoked cheddar cheese. It was like summer in a bowl. We ate these kinds of salads for 3 days straight!

FromTheFarm.com offers a Tomato Variety Pack that includes 6 Ugly Ripe tomatoes and 2 pints of Santa Sweet Grape tomatoes!

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Sierra Olive Oils and Spice Packets

So everyone has been asking to see how I roast a chicken in my tagine. I love my tagine and I try to come up with as many uses for it as possible. I am a huge fan of roasted chickens, and I usually roast one or two a month and I always make soup from the carcass. So when I got my tagine as a present, I did an experiment and roasted a chicken in it. As with anything you put in a tagine, the chicken came out super tender and falling off the bone – with no basting or liquid necessary. You literally throw it in the tagine, and throw the tagine in a 350 F oven and cook for about 1 1/2 hours. That is it!

This time, I decided to rub my delicious organic roaster with Sundried Tomato and Basil Olive Oil from Sierra Olive Oils. The company had also sent me a variety of spice packets used for dips (which are not available yet, but will soon be), but I thought it would be fun to try one as a rub for the chicken, so I chose the garlic variety.

I had some leftover fresh fennel that I stuffed the bird with. It came out perfectly delicious. Served with peas, it was a delicious and homey dinner, and almost too easy to make!

On a recent trip to the Farmers Market we stopped at one of our favorite organic produce stands. They were selling some nice pea shoots and the biggest, fattest, firmest portabella mushrooms I had the pleasure of seeing. I really wasn’t in the market for mushrooms on this occasion, but forgive me, it was like that moment in The Fellowship of the Rings when the hobbitses find the mushrooms and get so excited they trip over themselves and start rolling down the hill yelling Mushrooooooms!
Luckily for me there were no hills involved…

I brought them home and knew we had to eat them right away. I didn’t want to lose any of those fabulous fresh flavors or the perfect meaty texture. So I decided to really celebrate my veggie finds: mushrooms, pea shoots, arugala and eggplant. I broiled the portabellas and eggplant (remember I have no grill and can’t get one) and paired them with chevre and roasted garlic and topped with really good balsamic vinegar. This was a wonderful main course salad, perfect for all that summer weather we have been experiencing. Served with a nice crisp glass of white wine and life is good.

I served the salad with caramelized onion pumpernickel dinner rolls – a recipe which I adapted from the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book that has revolutionized my life.

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