Tag: <span>ravioli</span>

Tag: ravioli

One Local Summer

One Local Summer – Week 6

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I finally made it out to the Anselma Mill Farmer’s market this past week to get flour and a few other things.   I don’t think all the flour is grown locally, but it’s definitely ground at the mill using the centuries old equipment. It’s really pretty awesome to think that this mill has been around for so long and is still useful today.    Here’s a link with more information about the flour, if you’re interested.  I also met the woman who runs Pure Blend Tea and came home with the Fruit Boost tea which made one heck of a batch of iced tea.  Anyway, onto the ingredients in the meal, starting in the back.

Salad:
Lettuce – Charlestown Farm.  Nice and crispy!
Cucumber – Smith’s Produce.  I was so psyched to see cucumbers already, I had to bring some home.
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm.  It actually made a really great dressing for a simple salad.

Ravioli:
For the ravioi pasta, I used a basic recipe I had found ages ago on the web and have modified a bit. It’s one cup flour (here, there’s 3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour and 1/4 cup buckwheat flour), one egg, one teaspoon olive oil, and water to make consistency. I roll it out using the good old KitchenAid pasta roller set which makes the process SO much easier.  To form the individual ravioli, I found a form that pasta sheets are laid over, filled, then sealed with a rolling pin.  First batch using this was a little off, but the second batch came out perfectly.
Hot Bison Sausage – Backyard Bison.  Just the right amount of spice!
Cheese – Birchrun Hills.  Used the Equinox cheese inside the ravioli with the sausage.
Flour – Anselma Mill.  Used Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
Buckwheat Flour – Anselma Mill.  They said this was a new one for them and I heard that adding buckwheat flour into the pasta dough mixture made it different, and it did, in a very good way.
Egg – Mountain View Organics.
Sauce – Homemade.  We found a few bags in the freezer left over from our 2008 amazing tomato year.
Spinach – Charlestown Farm.  Put a bunch of leaves in the steamer for just a minute.
Non-Local – Spices, Salt, Pepper, Olive Oil.

As a bonus this week, there was also Jam!  Two types.

Jammed Yellow Cherry Jam
A friend and I went to Walnut Springs Farm to pick cherries.  I LOVE yellow cherries and when the folks running the booth let me know there were two types available to pick, my eyes must have lit up like I had won the lottery.  I immediately knew that they were destined for a batch of jam, and sure enough, three pounds turned into 5 jars of sunny yellow jam.  I sort of want to go pick some more, add in a few blueberries, and see if I can make green slime jam because that sounds like fun.
DSC_2101 Black Forest Preserves
I did actually pick some red cherries too.  Three pounds of those (I came home with about 10 lbs, but did a lot of taste testing while we were there too) became Black Forest Preserves.  It’s a recipe out of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving and involves cherries and cocoa powder.  I have to admit that the chocolate doesn’t really come out in the recipe – the jam just tastes RICH – but it’s destined to be a part of thumbprint cookies when cookie baking season kicks into full gear.
One Local Summer

OLS: Week 7

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One Local Summer rolls into week seven.   This week it’s back to being all me and I went all out.   Let’s start in the front with the zucchini, from my very own garden.   Next around, clockwise, is a zucchini bread muffin.   Finally we have a DELICIOUS bison with pesto and sharp goat cheese ravioli.

Zucchini – Yep, zucchini.   Non-local salt, pepper, and olive oil.   This one was perfectly ripe and gosh I could’ve eaten the whole zucchini at once.
Zucchini Bread Muffin  – I’ve been getting a LOT of zucchini from the garden and decided to give this recipe a try.   This was tricky since I was trying to keep as local as possible and the result isn’t quite perfect, but considering the amount of zucchini I’ll have this summer, there’s plenty of time to get it right.   I used my own garden zucchini, wheat pastry flour from the Mill at Anselma (stone ground there too from PA wheat), honey from Baues Busy Bees,  eggs from Mountain View Organics, and goat’s milk yogurt from Shellbark Hollow Farm.   Non-local ingredients include salt, baking soda, baking powder, canola oil, and vanilla extract.   If you’re keeping tally, yes I left out the spices, walnuts, and apple sauce.   It still tastes delicious and I love what the honey adds to the recipe, but I think I need to add more flour or less wet ingredients since it didn’t rise as much as I had expected and is a little dense.   Still, incredibly good, and worth a repeat.
Ravioli – WOW.   Wow.   Wow.   This was the most labor intensive part of the meal, but it was 100% worth it.   I dug out the pasta roller for the Kitchen Aid mixer and went to town.   Used the same wheat pastry flour as above for the pasta along with some non-local salt (and tap water, of course).   The filling is ground bison from Backyard Bison, with basil and oregano from my back deck planters, some of the frozen pesto sauce from Week 1, and Sharp II goat cheese from Shellbark Hollow Farm.   Non-local salt, pepper, and olive oil were also used.   The sauce is from the same batch of tomato sauce I made last year with the tomatoes from our garden (there were lots, and lots, and lots of tomatoes, in case I haven’t mentioned that before).   I haven’t ever made ravioli, so it was a learning experience for sure, but now that I know what I’m doing, I expect next time, this will go MUCH faster and be much easier.   I’m not quite sure if it tasted so good because it really was that good or that the amount of effort I put into doing something new mentally enhanced the flavor.  

Really though, I’m quite proud of myself for pulling this whole meal off and not giving up in the middle, leaving the kitchen a complete disaster and my stomach empty.   Through doing this whole challenge, I’ve been finding myself spending less time inside grocery stores and more time outside at farmers’ markets – I might go once every other week to the grocery store for things I can’t get at the market, essentials, etc.   It’s neat, and I hope to continue this as long as possible, maybe even freeze some meals to pull out in the dead of winter when I need a  dose of *real* food.