Tag: <span>pasta</span>

Tag: pasta

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2012 – Week 21

 , , , ,

DSC_9638

Just something simple for this week.  I’ve had an overload of tomatoes and STILL zucchini from the garden, so I figured I’d go with it.  The sauce is the 4th batch from the tomatoes we grew, and the zucchini, I can’t even count how many pounds I’ve eaten this year, not to mention the pounds of zucchini that I’ve given to friends and neighbors!  The pasta is home made, using the same recipe I always use – 1 cup flour to 1/4th cup liquid (water in this case).  With this post, I’m finally caught up on my backlog of posts and we’re nearing the end of our local summer.  There are still a few good weeks left – all the fall squashes are coming out, but it’s slowing down a bit.  I’m not sure if my zucchini plant is aware of this though.

Pasta with Roasted Zucchini:
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma
Tomato Sauce – Tomatoes from our Garden
Onion – Jack’s Farm
Zucchini – Our Garden
Non local – salt, olive oil, pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2011 – Week 18

 , , , ,

DSC_2651

This one was pretty simple. We were getting ready for vacation and I had little time to get something together, so I went with what I’d already stashed in the freezer. The pasta was made a while back and frozen, the sausage was frozen as well, and the peppers and tomatoes came from the garden. Pretty simple, but it counts as local, and even super local considering the maybe 100ft walk from the house to the garden.

Pasta with Peppers and Tomatoes:
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma
Peppers – My Garden
Tomatoes – My Garden
Chicken Sausage – Mountain View Poultry
Non Local – Olive Oil

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2011 – Week 7

 , , , , , , ,

DSC_0328

Okay, I know I say this every week, but, I REALLY made a good one here.  It’s no secret that I love garlic scapes, the spirally green vegetation that grows above the garlic bulb.  In order to get a proper garlic harvest, the green shoots need to be cut back to allow the garlic bulb to grow and harden.  Those shoots, or scapes, are gently garlicky, and can be cooked up much like scallions.  After a little googling last week to find other uses for garlic scapes, I came to a brilliant conclusion.  Garlic scapes could be steamed and blenderized and then used to make pasta (why no, I haven’t been on a pasta kick either), and then topped with a garlic scape pesto.  That’s exactly what I did.  I steamed the garlic scapes for about 10 minutes.  Then, using a stick blender, added in a little of the water from the steam pot, and blended until I got a thick slurry of garlic scapes.  Made and rolled the pasta using about 1/4th cup of the garlic scape slurry instead of water and allowed that to rest while I cooked up zucchini, diced scapes (yes, ALL THE SCAPES!), spring onions, and some crimini mushrooms along with pork sausage.  The remaining garlic scape slurry was given a boost of smoked sea salt and a little olive oil to make the pesto sauce.  Boiled the pasta, threw some sauce on top, added the sausage and vegetables to the plate, and there was dinner!  A little chunk of cheese on the side of the plate finished off dinner – which, I’ve just finished off dinner as I’ve been sitting here typing this up for you, it was THAT GOOD.

Garlic Scape Pasta with Sausage and Vegetables:
Garlic Scapes – Jack’s Farm & North Star Orchards
Crimini Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma
Zucchini – North Star Orchards
Spring Onions – Jack’s Farm
Pork Sausage – Countrytime Farm
Smoked Sea Salt – Pureblend Teas
Fat Cat Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Non Local – Olive Oil

One Local Summer

One Local Summer – Week 21

 , , , , , , , , ,

DSC_4341

The husband has returned home and planted himself in the kitchen. I can’t say I mind, when the result is an amazing crock pot meal. He took a Bison chuck roast out of the freezer and threw in all manner of vegetables and fruit that I had from the farmer’s markets and came up with something AMAZING. The bison was SO tender after cooking for five hours and the way the flavors blended together was really a work of art. I think I’m still in a food coma over this one!  It was all served over some home made noodles using Whole Wheat Pastry flour and Buckwheat flour from the Mill at Anselma.

Crock Pot Bison Roast:
Bison Chuck Roast – Backyard Bison
Onion – North Star Orchard
Purple Potatoes – Unknown Vendor at Anselma
Apples – North Star Orchard
Noodles – Egg from Mt View Organics, Flour from the Mill at Anselma, Buckwheat flour from the Mill at Anselma
Peppers – My Garden
Wine – Paradocx
Beer – Homebrew Imperial Blonde
Sage – My Garden
Cilantro – My Garden
Basil – My Garden
Non-Local – Spices

One Local Summer

One Local Summer – Week 2

 , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

DSC_1526

And we’re onto Week 2. So far, there’s not a lot of produce to pick from at the market given that our growing season REALLY gets moving at the end of May into early June. Oley Valley Mushrooms always comes through with fantastic mushrooms – these Crimini ‘shrooms were seriously the best mushrooms I have ever eaten. There may have been one or two that didn’t make it into the pan.  The recipe we used was the Beef Stroganoff recipe from SimplyRecipes.com with a couple of local substitutions made.  We used bison in place of beef, goat’s milk yogurt instead of sour cream, and since we couldn’t find onions at the market just yet, we ended up replacing those with a few leeks and it worked out just fine.  So, let’s start in the back with the bread and run around, clockwise.

Bread:
Bread – Saint Peter’s Bakery.  This was their rustic white bread, which was sweet and super soft.

Beef Stroganoff:
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms.  Crimini mushrooms with this incredible earthy flavor.
Bison – Backyard Bison.  We used a sirloin that we happened to have in the freezer from a few markets ago.
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm.  The yogurt is tangy and actually made a perfect substitute for sour cream.
Leeks – Hoagland Farm.  It’s a little bit of an odd substitution for shallots, but it worked out well.
Noodles – Mill at Anselma.  The base for the noodles was whole wheat pastry flour from the mill made with wheat grown in Pennsylvania.  This is one find that I’m SUPER proud of and just love that it’s a local ingredient.  I also used an egg from Mountain View Organics and a touch of olive oil.  Then the pasta roller/cutter and KitchenAid mixer did the rest of the work.  These noodles really came out fantastic, arguably my best attempt at pasta yet.
Non-local – Olive oil, spices.

Honey Rhubarb Muffin:
Okay, maybe this wasn’t 100% local, but we’ll call it a bonus localish item on the plate.  The recipe came from here and I tried to keep it as local as possible, but with bakery items, it’s just not possible to use pastry flour and get just the right consistency.  A blend of flours (all-purpose and pastry) seems to work out best, and I figure it’s better to stick with that than force the locality issue and get something that’s more like hardtack than a muffin.  We left out the chopped nuts.
Flour – Mill at Anselma.  Split 50/50 with generic all-purpose flour.
Rhubarb – Hoagland Farm.  I remember not liking rhubarb as a kid, but now?  I cannot get enough.  There is chopped rhubarb in the muffin as well as a sort of honey rhubarb reduction jelly sort of spread on top.
Egg – Mountain View Organics.
Sour Cream –  Shellbark Hollow Farm.  Substituted goat’s milk yogurt here again, and it worked fine.
Honey – Baues Busy Bees.
Non-local – Sugar, Canola Oil, Salt, Baking Soda, Vanilla

Wine:
Penns Woods Chambourcin Reserve (2006).  It’s a local winery that we hadn’t had the chance to try before and decided to go for it since they were at the farmer’s market running tastings.  We were not disappointed.

This might just be the best one local summer meal we’ve ever made.  I’m pretty sure it will be going into regular dinner rotation in the future!  Now I want to hear about some other recipe sites that you enjoy using for dinner ideas.  I’m slowly picking through Elise’s Simply Recipes site and am just plain running out of meal ideas.  So, please share your favorites!