Good Food Down on the Farm

Friends were coming for lunch yesterday. When we first made the plan (it's March in Michigan), I thought "a yummy chicken soup from one of our chickens, along with some homemade French bread, will be just the ticket!" Then, watching the forecast on Monday, I realize the temp will be in the 80s on Wednesday (this was a record-setter for our area!), and that hot soup and warm bread was probably not the way to go. So I re-visited the menu. Fortunately, my mom collects recipes for me out of the paper, and on Sunday I had gotten the March Dash  insert. It had a Mediterranean Chicken Salad  recipe than sounded interesting. Of course, being me, I had to alter it some - partly because there are a couple of ingredients that I just don't care for (tarragon and olives) and partly because I didn't have exactly what the recipe asked for, so I substituted. Served on large leaves pulled off a head of Romaine lettuce, this was a wonderfully tasty, cool lunch on a hot day, wit...

Spent a bunch of time yesterday making applesauce out of the last of the cold-storage apples. They were in better shape than I had hoped, and I only lost a couple to serious issues. So, 24 pint jars of sauce added to what I had canned back in January - YUM! This was a blend of Spys, Galas, and Courtlands.

I am not a huge fan of casseroles. However, after Thanksgiving, we just didn't have the bandwidth to make our usual batch of turkey pot pies (see our Recipes page for this), so I made a pot of turkey soup, but also went looking for some sort of casserole recipes. I found a couple I liked, and kind of married them together, with my own twist. This works well with turkey (my original effort) and I've also now made it a couple if times with cooked leftovers from baking one of our chickens.  I'll give credit where credit is due: the bulk of this recipe comes from The Kitchen Witch Blog , and then I borrowed some ideas from a Rachel Ray recipe, also. Parmesan Chicken Noodle Corn Casserole 4 cups diced cooked chicken or turkey 4 cups dried noodles (bow tie works well!) 15 oz. corn, frozen or canned 1 can cream style corn 2 cups carrots (fresh or frozen – if frozen, thaw, if fresh, cook ‘til tender) Sauce : 3 T butter, melted 1 medium onion, diced (ap...

No, not making them together, although, an afterthought, the sausage hash would make a great filling for half an Acorn squash. Then the other half Acorn could be devoted to brown sugar/applesauce filling!. We love corned beef hash with eggs. As you may have read on a recent post, we put up 110# of sausage from one of our hogs. One of the seasonings we used was for Chorizo sausage. Darrell commented, "I bet that would be good in hash". I agreed. So yesterday I cooked up a bunch of our redskin potatoes that are stored for the winter, and a pound of Chorizo, sautéd with some onion. Mixed the two together and stored the hash overnight.  This morning, in a skillet, I made Chorizo hash and eggs for breakfast. Pretty yummy! Then later, I brought up some pork chops to thaw for supper, and grabbed a butternut squash from storage, thinking I'd go ahead and get that roasted up and ready to go. When I cut the squash in half, the color was soooo gorgeous, I just had ...

Well, two full days of Thanksgiving celebrations are over and clean-up is pretty well done. We had family Thanksgiving 3 times - once at my mother-in-law's new digs in a retirement home where we could use a family dining room with full kitchen and dining table. Several of us brought food and we ate very well - turkey, wild rice/sausage stuffing, mashed potatoes w/kale (from our garden), butternut   squash (also from our garden) with a brown sugar, toasted walnut topping, cranberry chutney, corn pudding, pecan pie, pumpkin roll, apple-walnut-caramel cake. Then in the evening, went to my mom's  where her caregivers made turkey breast, mashed potatoes, the ubiquitous green bean casserole, and we brought a mincemeat pie and the pumpkin roll. Then Friday, our house was jumping, with daughter and her family, two grandmas, and two friends from out of town who spent the weekend - fresh turkey from the people who process  our chickens, sage and sausage (from our pigs) stuffing, mo...

Oh, my, I cannot believe it has been 3 months since I made time to update this blog! I've been posting items on our Facebook page and ignoring the blog, unfortunately. In the last week, I've made a major effort to get as much in from the garden as possible. Today, I dug the rest of the potatoes, picked kale and steamed it for the freezer, and canned beets. My back is telling me I spent too much time on my feet today! from this to this - love beets redskin potatoes love this beautiful kale - yummy, too! As I was going to pick the kale, I noticed (again) the seed pods on the French Breakfast Radishes that bolted - I never turned them under, so the radishes got huge and gnarly, and the plants grew these amazing seed pods!  Radish seed pods French Breakfast Radishes gone gnarly! Equally amazing to me was finding a secondary head of cabbage on one of the old stalks. It's actually nice and firm, so I cut it off and have it in the crisper.  ...

It almost seems anti-climatic, because you spend so much time preparing the garden, planting, weeding, nurturing those tiny plants, that when suddenly there're many things to harvest, it's almost a shock! We got our garden in very late this year . . . seems odd, but we're actually getting sugar peas in July (and probably now, into August!), because they get morning sun and then are shaded from the very hot afternoon sun by the corn. A serendipitous pairing of neighbors in the garden, I think! Of course, the pumpkins and the squash on the other side of them are trying to overrun them, so it's a race to see how many peas we will get before the pumpkins win . . . beets are just starting, and have been harvesting kale, which makes a fabulous salad (wrote about that before), and, wilted in a little bacon fat is a wonderful green addition to an omelet. Potatoes are close to becoming usable - probably could get some, but I want to make sure the hills are fairly mature before I...