Good Food Down on the Farm

Pasty ready to eat - YUM! We LOVE pasties! These handy meat/veggie pies are based on the traditional food Cornish miners took into the mines, a handy way to have a portable meal that was adopted by our own Yoopers, many of whom were miners from Great Britain and brought this idea with them. Darrell had cooked down some meaty beef bones with veggies to make beef stock to can. He cleaned the meat off the variety of bones when the stock was ready to put into jars. There was a nice little bowlful of very tender, juicy meat. We also had a small pack of cooked pork jowl meat in the freezer from a previous project, so I thawed that out and blended the beef and pork. I added a variety of seasonings, as both the beef and pork were somewhat bland on their own.   Pork and beef from salvaged meats. I pan-roasted some cubed rutabaga, carrot pieces, potatoes and onions to really bring out the flavor in those veggies . . . drizzled in a little oil and sprinkled with some Herbs de ...

Even in the winter here on Coach Stop Farm, we are processing foods gathered in the summer and fall. This past weekend was time to sort through the stored Butternut Squash and process them, as a few had gotten soft. I was pleased when I cut them open to find that they had, indeed, ripened more after storage. I had had to pick them before a frost back in early October, even though most of them had green veins on them, indicating they weren't quite ripe. And, a couple I had cut into earlier had definitely not been the deep, rich orange that I like to see inside. I decided to experiment with freezing one, cut into cubes. It yielded 4 quart-size freezer bags of chunks of squash that can be roasted or put into soups, or whatever. We shall see how they seem being used after being frozen like this. For all the rest, they were steamed in a large roasting pan in the oven, giving me this nice bowl of cooked squash. I need to decide if I'm going to freeze this or can it, so th...