Tag: <span>peaches</span>

Tag: peaches

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2016 – Week 13

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It may not be the world’s most exciting meal, but it’s classic Chez Sheetar comfort food – meat and potatoes.  It was a quick and easy meal to make in the oven in one pan, and I get to show off the peach jam I made!  Our single little peach tree yielded quite the harvest this year, so I was able to do two batches of jam, a run of canned peaches, and even froze two bags of skinned and pitted peaches for pies over the winter.  Of course, the squirrels got a fair share of the peaches too, but it’s no big deal since there were SO many.  Anyway, the meal is kielbasa with potatoes plus a small salad and some cheese and jam.  The cheese is Birchrun Hills’ Red Cat that was washed in Tired Hands beer and it was OH SO DELICIOUS with the jam.  It actually made for a nice little dessert!

Ingredients:
Kielbasa –  M&M Creek Valley Farm
Potatoes –  Jack’s Farm
Cheese –  Birchrun Hills
Lettuce –  North Star Orchard
Tomatoes – Our Garden
Peach Jam – Our Honey, our Peach tree
Non Local – Salt, Olive Oil, pectin (for jam), Salad Dressing

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2016 – Week 12

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Yep, still playing catch-up.  It should be week 15 as I’m posting this, so I’m still behind.  Life just keeps getting away from me and the first thing to go when things get to be too much is cooking.  But hey, I’m still here making the effort, and I have to wonder if I’d even bother cooking at all if it weren’t for this challenge!  So, this meal was a ham steak with grilled onions and eggplant and a cucumber and tomato salad on the side.  Everything was cooked on the grill, so it was great to not have to heat up the house on a day that was already too hot to begin with!  I may have ever so slightly overcooked the ham steak, but it was still delicious since it was given a little rub down with our own honey before it was introduced to the grill.  I need to remind myself that I don’t have to be fancy, and it’s okay to slap meat and veggies on the grill and thats  good enough (and better than a microwaved boxed dinner).

Ingredients:
Ham Steak – M&M Creek Valley Farm
Tomato –  Kimberton CSA
Eggplant – Kimberton CSA
Cucumber –  Jack’s Farm
Blue Cheese –  Birchrun Hills
Peach – Our Tree
Honey – Our beehives
Non Local – Olive Oil

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 18a

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Yep, still playing catch-up on posts, but I’m almost caught up.  This is the last meal husband made before heading out to work.  It’s basically veal parmigiana with squash, a salad, and a bowl of peaches and raspberries.  The veal was breaded with flour and a little cornmeal, double dipped in buttermilk, and fried up in a cast iron skillet with lard.  The sauce we had made from local tomatoes in a large batch and had plenty left around for this dinner.  We added sliced squash to the sauce to cook up as a side to the veal, and finished off the whole thing with a glass of Pinot Noir.  A pretty substantial meal for a One Local Summer dinner, and every bit of it delicious.

Ingredients:
Veal –  Birchrun Hills
Blue Cheese Dressing –  Birchrun Hills
Cheese –  Birchrun Hills, Equinox
Tomatoes – Clover Hill Farm
Buttermilk Maplehofe Dairy
Lettuce –  Charlestown Farm
Raspberries – Our Garden
Peaches – Our Tree and  North Star Orchard
Wine – Sandcastle Winery
Squash –  Jack’s Farm
Flour  Mill at Anslema, Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
Cornmeal –  Mill at Anslema
Lard –  M&M Creek Valley Farm
Non Local – Salt, pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 17b

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Biscuits and gravy – true comfort food.  This is quickly becoming an occasional favorite of the husbands (and, let’s be honest, he’s not alone), and as I’m sitting here writing this up, I’m realizing just how much One Local Summer has encouraged us to cook more from scratch instead of eat out of boxes.  Eight years ago, I’m not sure we would have considered this worth the bother, but now?  ABSOFREAKINGLUTELY.  The biscuit dough is SUPER easy to make, and as of this round of One Local Summer, we’ve embraced that which is lard.  Lard!  Even the word has a negative connotation, and is used as an insult.  It isn’t a replacement for olive oil which is a far healthier fat, but when put up against butter, it’s got less saturated fat and more monounsaturated fat (the good kind of fat).  Of course, you want the stuff that’s un-hydrogenated, and I believe the tub we got from the farmer’s market is just plain rendered pork fat.  I honestly can’t tell a difference in the taste either.  To make things a little more healthy, we added a bowl of fresh berries and peaches, and of course that mug of cold brewed coffee.  A side note about the raspberries – the little invader raspberry bush that pushed under the neighbor’s fence into our yard has been producing about a cup of berries a day.  We’re happy to have this new addition to our garden and enjoy fresh berries almost every evening now!

Ingredients:
Buttermilk – Maplehofe Dairy
Sausage –  M&M Creek Valley Farm
Lard –  M&M Creek Valley Farm
Flour –  Mill at Anslema, Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
Raspberries – Our Garden
Peaches –  North Star Orchard
Non Local – Salt, Pepper, coffee, baking powder

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 11b

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Another catch-up post, and I’m a week behind on posts!  Getting caught up (again) though – it’s crazy how summer can just fly by like this.  Husband is away and I decided to try out a few new things.  I know he’s not a big fan of fennel or farro (really, wheat berries in this case), so I decided to go crazy and combine the two!  I found this recipe (Roasted Fennel  & Farro Salad) and went for it.  The wheat berries came from North Star Orchard and we’ve had them hanging around in the freezer for a while.  They do take a while to cook, but the results are absolutely worth it.  Combined with the fennel and peppers, it made for a dish that was great warm or cold.  The simple cucumber and tomato salad was a recurring theme for the rest of the week too.  Drizzled with a little balsamic vinegar, it made for a great afternoon snack, and there’s just something about fresh tomatoes and cucumbers.  The cucumber is an Armenian cucumber and something I’ve never had before.  It has a soft fuzz on the outside that I scrubbed off with a vegetable scrubber brush, and I found it a little more crisp and less acidic than a regular cucumber.

Also on the plate are peaches with blue cheese, another summer favorite, and beet chips which didn’t come out all that well.  My slices weren’t uniform, so they were too crisp on one half and just barely baked on the other.  That didn’t stop me from eating the whole beet though, and I really like how they taste when roasted.  One final piece of the plate was another new recipe I tried called  gougères – it’s a fancy french savory puff pastry made mostly with flour, butter, eggs, and cheese.  The recipe was part of the Birchrun Hills Kickstarter campaign rewards and I was really psyched to try something new.  It was easier than I thought and I sort of felt like a super hero having produced results that tasty and perfect on the first try!

Altogether a delightful dinner and really rather filling!

Ingredients:
Peaches – North Star Orchard
Cheese – Birchrun Hills, Blue and Equinox
Beets – Jack’s Farm
Wheat Berries – North Star Orchard
Fennel – Jack’s Farm
Eggs –  Canter Hill Farm
Peppers – Clover Hill Farm
Cucumber – Full Circle CSA
Tomatoes – Full Circle CSA
Butter – Handmade by Abby
Honey – Baues’ Busy Bees
Flour – Mill at Anslema, Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
Non Local – Balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 11a

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This is the last week of catch-up posts, I swear.  Well, at least for now.  I can’t make promises about future weeks, but I’ll try to get them posted on the actual week that they’re made this time!  I’m back by myself for this week, and went a little crazy with the vegetables.  A neighbor had let his zucchini plants go a little wild and had a few baseball bats sitting on the vines.  I graciously offered to take one off his hands so he didn’t have to ding-dong-ditch zucchini all over the neighborhood.  It’s hard to tell underneath all the other vegetables, but I spiral sliced the zucchini with my new slicer and made zucchini pasta!  I cooked that quickly in a big pan with some olive oil, salt, and pepper, just enough so it still had a little crunch to it, but was warmed thoroughly.  In another pan, I had onions, fennel, and tomatoes cooking together  to put on top of the zucchini pasta.  The sausage was pan seared, carrots steamed, and potatoes roasted.  Then the peaches!  Oh it’s peach season and these are particularly perfect, eat-over-the-kitchen-sink-because-they-drip-everywhere, juicy and delicious peaches.  I smothered them in blue cheese and baked them in the oven and they always make a perfect sweet and savory dessert.  The plate is incredibly full this week, but it’s 90% vegetables, so I don’t feel bad about it, not one bit.

Ingredients:
Zucchini – Neighbor’s Garden
Potatoes – Jack’s Farm
Carrots – Clover Hill Farm
Tomatoes – Clover Hill Farm
Fennel – Jack’s Farm
Onions – Clover Hill Farm
Peaches – North Star Orchard
Cheese – Birchrun Hills, Blue and Equinox
Sausage – Canter Hill Farm, South African Borewors
Non Local – Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 15

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And now we’re surpassing the goal of 14 with ease!  I think this is the best attempt at cooking Bison Ribs the husband has ever had.  They’re a little tricky being much lower in fat and need to be cooked low and slow.  The ribs were back ribs and were put in the smoker with apple wood, cooked for about 4 hours resulting in DELICIOUS ribs.  On the side we have those popular corn fritters, a grilled peach with melted blue cheese, and a bowl in the back with tomatoes from the garden, a sprig of basil, and some local cheese.  The wine is a homemade mead made partially with cherries I picked in Maryland and was a great match to the rest of dinner.

Ingredients:
Bison Ribs – Backyard Bison
Corn – Brogue Hydroponics
Peaches – North Star Orchard
Flour – Mill at Anselma
Peppers – Neighbor’s garden (we share!)
Blue Cheese and Equinox Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Tomatoes – Our Garden
Basil – Our Garden
Non Local – Wine, spices, olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 Meal 7

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Okay, so this one was OUT OF THE BALLPARK good.  I know I say that often when I talk about One Local Summer meals, but seriously.  I’m not sure there is too much that will top this.  We finally found a local source for butter and husband immediately remembered that the only thing holding us back from making these pretzel rolls was the butter.  BINGO!  Thus, dinner was Pretzel roll burgers with watermelon, grilled peaches with blue cheese, and a wonderfully delicious salad.  Even though there are some non-local ingredients in the rolls (baking soda, yeast, oil), they’re still really minimal in comparison to the whole of the meal, and we were even able to substitute the required sugar with honey.  Our rolls came out a little flatter than the recipe’s photos, and I had a feeling we should’ve used more flour (the dough seemed a little too squishy), but for a first time, they’re still 100% edible and delicious.  I was really glad we had leftovers of this meal so I could enjoy it a few more days, and we even have four more rolls tucked away in the freezer.  Definitely expect to see more pretzel rolls in our One Local Future!

Ingredients:
Flour – Mill at Anselma
Watermelon – Hoagland Farm
Peaches – Hoagland Farm
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Egg – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Veal & Pork Patty – Countrytime Farm
Lettuce – North Star Orchard
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Tomatoes –  Brogue Hydroponics
Cheese – Lambsquarters from Valley Milkhouse
Butter – Spring Creek Farms
Honey – Baues Busy Bees
Non Local – Baking soda, yeast, oil, salt, pepper, dressing.