Sweet Local Farm

We had seen an episode of Jamie Oliver where he makes fresh pasta in literally 45 seconds. After Karen’s mom gave us a pasta machine she had gotten at the thrift store, we had to try it ourselves. This is a quick easy recipe that will take you no time at all.

Ingredients:

• Flour
• Eggs
• Salt

Ratio: 1 egg for every 3/4 to 1 cup of flour, pinch of salt. Our hen’s eggs are huge, so we generally need more flour than I’ve recommended here.

Throw the ingredients into the food processor. Start off with 3/4 cup flour per egg. Pulse until the mixture is a bunch of sticky crumbles. Keep throwing in more flour until you achieve this. Pulse away!

The mixture should look something like this:

Roll it through the pasta machine at the widest setting.

After each ‘roll through’, fold the pasta sheet in half onto itself and throw some flour on either side. Keep rolling through. I’d suggest doing this 5-6 times to give it a nice silky consistency.

Next…keep firing that pasta sheet through the machine, decreasing the opening between the rollers each time. The sheet should have great elasticity, allowing it to get very thin without tearing. Fold the sheet into a roll and slice it up into your pasta pieces.

Boil for about a minute…this cooks quickly.

Enjoy with your favorite cooked veggies or homemade sauce! Do you have any pasta suggestions we should try?

…make apple cider!

There are three very big, very old apple trees on our farm. At their peak, they must have well over a thousand apples on them. Unfortunately, the majority of them fall off during the spring drop and as the summer progresses. This year, we have been quite diligent about picking up the good ones soon after they fall. If you get them in time, they are juicy and sweet.

We have been dehydrating apple slices as well as making cider. We are freezing the majority of the cider to have for the Fall months. On special nights, we put a little spiced rum in the cider for that extra bite!

How do you like them apples?
(sorry…had to say that)

This past week we harvested our first eggplants.

We have over 20 plants, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting our first fruit. Now that they’re beginning to ripen, I anticipate a healthy amount of eggplants for the remainder of the season. One of my favorite recipes to make is breaded eggplant. We decided to make an abundance so that we could freeze some for future use. Little did we know that 5 eggplants would actually translate into 5 trays of food. Well, at least we’ll have this yummy treat for many meals to come.

Below is the recipe that we used. Enjoy!

Ingredients:
- Eggplants
- Bread
- Italian spices
- Eggs
- Olive oil

Directions:
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
- Slice the eggplant into 1/2 inch thick pieces. This can be done either horizontally or vertically depending on your preference.
- Put the bread, spices and a little olive oil into the food processor. Blend until it resembles bread crumbs. Put onto a large plate.
- Beat the eggs and put onto a large plate.
- Spray a baking sheet with olive oil.
- Dip each side of the eggplant into the egg, then press down onto the bread crumb mixture. It helps to push the breadcrumbs onto the eggplant.
- Place onto the baking sheet and put into oven.

These will take approximately 40 minutes in the oven or until golden brown.

We served them over pasta with our homemade marinara sauce and a side of sauteed kale.

Do you have any eggplant recipes to share?

Happy Harvest Monday! I’m up to my ears in tomatoes, yellow squash, and cucumbers. Here is what I picked this morning:

The apples are all windfall apples from an old tree that was here. They are not the prettiest, but they taste very crisp and sweet, with a bit of tartness. I’ve been peeling and drying them in the dehydrator. They make a great snack.

I also wanted to share with you some harvests from other days this past week:

Luke picked 25 jalapenos which he went on to pickle with carrot and onion.

This is one day’s worth of tomatoes from this past weekend. Luke separated them into varieties for this shot.

Green beans and yellow beans.

I made some cucumber relish, although I still have baskets full of cucumbers to be dealt with.

An exceptionally large daily harvest from last week:

My kitchen looks like a farmers market. We have baskets full of food on every surface and the fridge and cabinets are full of pickles, relish, jams, and gourds. It is a little overwhelming, but then I remind myself that this is the reason we work so hard in the garden all year. Today’s to do list involves making a huge batch of tomato sauce.

Please visit Daphne’s Dandelions for other gardener’s harvests.

I found some cute templates for home canning that I wanted to share with you.

Bitter Betty Industries designed these charming labels for fruit preserves and veggies. They are the perfect size to cut out and place under the ring of your canning jar without breaking the sealed lid. Visit her site for a high quality downloadable file.

For equally charming labels, visit A Sonoma Garden for a downloadable file.

Homegrown.org offers a variety of gorgeously designed canning label templates as well as templates to create your own seed packets. These labels would make great gift tags for homemade candles and soaps.

Here is what I picked this morning:

crookneck squash, marketmore cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, two strawberries, one egg, and a bunch of tomatoes

See what other gardeners are harvesting over at Daphne’s Dandelions.

Every year I look forward to making a batch of heirloom tomato catsup. I was first inspired to do so by an episode of Jamie Oliver’s show Jamie at Home. He uses zesty ingredients like ginger, fennel, and chilies, along with colorful heirloom tomatoes. Here is his recipe.

I subbed a few things. I used fresh jalapenos from our garden instead of the chilies, and extra fennel since I didn’t have any celery. I also used all fresh tomatoes, even though you can use canned. It still ended up tasting fresh and herbal.

Slice up all your veggies. You can do rough chunks of everything because it all goes in the food processor.

Throw everything into a bog pot- stems and all. It will be strained later.

It cooks down a bit.

Run it through the food processor.

A food mill is exceptionally handy for straining the mixture.

After you strain the catsup, you put it in a clean pot, add sugar and vinegar, and let it reduce. It needs to simmer for a few hours in order for it to be thick and rich like traditional catsup. Then can it up and process in a hot water bath.

Before:

When we bought our house a year ago, there was an old freezer in the mudroom. We never turned it on or used it because old appliances like that are energy gluttons. We recently bought a new Energy Star chest freezer for our basement and had the old one hauled away. It opened up a lot of space in the mudroom so we decided to put in some shelves and make a pantry for all of our home canned goods and supplies.

The empty space:

Luke bringing in the rustic barn wood shelves:

The finished pantry:

We added hooks for hanging onions, garlic, and mesh bags of nuts.

It is so nice to have a place to store all this overstock for the winter. I’ll make a curtain to keep the pantry cool and dark.

I’ve been busy in the kitchen. In the past few days I’ve made dill pickles, heirloom tomato salsa, summer squash relish, and rosemary rhubarb preserves. I also dehydrated tomatoes and yellow squash, and made apple sauce.

I used this recipe for the dill pickles. It is a simple, easy recipe and the pickles come out tangy and crisp.

The secret is to soak the cucumbers in ice water for at least 2 hours before pickling.

I used dill flowers and sprigs in each jar.

It is helpful to have a huge pot to sterilize the jars in.

Pack the jars full of cucumber slices, dill, garlic and pour in the boiling brine.

After the jars are packed, process them in a hot water bath for 15 minutes if you would like to store them for a while. If you plan to eat them quickly you can skip this step and keep them in the fridge. I hot water bathed about half of the jars and put the rest in the fridge.

I also made some salsa. It came out so good! I had made some fresh salsa the other night for dinner and decided it would be good canned as well. I picked all the fixings from the garden- tomatoes, cilantro, jalapenos.

I shredded some garlic and onion with the rest of the ingredients in the food processor.

I added a half cup of rice vinegar, salt and pepper and boiled it for about 10 minutes. I drained some of the excess liquid and then processed it in jars just like I did with the pickles.

The garden keeps delivering. This is what I picked this morning:

It seems early for winter squash but then again everything is early this year.

Ripe tomatoes and yellow beans:

I picked the rest of the rhubarb and some rosemary so I can make that jam I talked about a few weeks ago.

The cucumbers are prolific this year. I think I’ll make some relish with these.

I love how colorful all the veggies are!