Good Food Down on the Farm

For our retail pork offering, we had some sausage processed as "andouille", which is used a lot in spicy southern cooking, especially Cajun/Creole. We wanted to try some of it ourselves, so went searching for recipes calling for andouille sausage. This recipe comes from this link for Southern Food  and made a great "chilly, rainy night" supper for us. This is a delicious creamy mushroom soup with a little cheese and chunks of andouille sausage. Feel free to use another variety of smoked sausage in this recipe. Ingredients:       1 tablespoons vegetable oil       12 to 16 ounces andouille sausage, halved lengthwise then thinly sliced       16 ounces sliced mushrooms       4 tablespoons butter       4 green onions, thinly sliced       1 clove garlic, mashed and finely minced     ...

Last night I pickled 6 pints of asparagus spears - the season is coming to an end and I wanted to get some done before, suddenly, there's not enough to work with. We've been using a recipe we found online at AllRecipes.com, but have made some alterations to suit ourselves. First, and probably most importantly, there does not seem to be enough vinegar called for - it asks for 1 2/3 cups to put up two pints. I tripled the recipe for 6 pints and ran short of pickling liquid, so I made a note to increase the vinegar for 2 pints to 2 full cups. Second, we found another reference to putting a clove of garlic into each jar, which works out great. And finally, the 2/3 cup of sugar made our first batch (two or three years ago) a little too sweet, so I have a notation on the recipe to use 1/3 cup per 2 pints. You can be the judge of how sweet you want it. The red pepper flakes make it fairly spicy, so you can judge your own usage - on a scale of 1 "mild" to 10 "ho...

Ordinarily I’m writing about dishes we make with the meat we raise here on the farm, or garden veggies we raise, or some combo thereof . . . this is a little different tack, as it involves fish, which we don’t raise OR catch. Our neighbor, who is an avid fisherman and hunter, gifted us with a large bag of frozen coho salmon. I thawed out this monster portion of fish with trepidation – we love fish, particularly salmon, but this was about 3 pounds or so of fish – could have fed six people! We had a meal using two of the smaller filets that came out of the thawed pile, but there were two enormous chunks – probably 1 ½ - 2# of filets that I had cooked and then wondered what to do with. I have never before made chowder, but I like it, so I looked up a bunch of recipes for fish chowder, making mental notes about things that sounded good to me. Here (approximately) is what I put together, which turned out to be a quite-savory fish chowder. Darrell whipped up a batch of his co...

After our Thanksgiving gathering (turkey, Darrell's fabulous stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, butternut squash  and creamed corn from the garden, fresh cranberry/orange relish, homemade applesauce, the Fall Harvest Salad , and the ubiquitous Crescent Rolls without which my step-daughter could not survive Thanksgiving dinner), I pulled all the meat off the carcass and put the bones in a big pot to simmer for several hours, creating a wonderful broth. I spent a chunk of Saturday afternoon cooking carrots in some of that broth, cutting up turkey into bite-sized pieces, adding corn (from the summer garden) and peas, and then blending the broth, left-over potatoes and stuffing into a thick and wonderful gravy to create the pot pie filling (see our recipe for Turkey Pot Pie for all the instructions here ). Sunday afternoon, Darrell made pastry crusts and we assembled pies, ready for the freezer. Yum! Easy-peasy winter meal that can bake in the oven while we're out doing ch...

I created this for a Thanksgiving 2012 get-together, wanting to focus on hearty fall garden veggies. It was a big hit at the table! One small Butternut squash, cut into cubes (or half of a medium squash) 20 Brussels Sprouts, cleaned and cut in half One small beet, cut in halves or quarters 3-4 slices of bacon, fried crisp, drained and cooled, broken into small pieces One smallish head Romaine lettuce, split into quarters and chopped chunky 3-4 smaller leaves of kale, washed and torn into bite-sized pieces 2 green onions, sliced thin 1/2 cup walnuts or pecans ½ cup dried cranberries ¼ cup Grated Parmesan cheese Brown sugar Honey Salt Vegetable or olive oil Balsamic or Red Wine vinegar Coarse black pepper Toss Butternut Squash cubes in a little oil in a bowl to coat them and spread on a baking sheet. Roast at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes (depending on the size of your chunks) or until nearly done. Return to bowl and add about...

So I've been working on digging the potatoes out of the garden before it freezes - finding a couple of dry days in a row so they can lay in the sun and dry and harden off has been a real challenge. At least we're getting some moisture back in the ground after the drought this summer, but all the rain is wreaking havoc with finishing up in the garden - no idea if it will dry out enough to till down all the new weeds that have sprung up with the rain, or if they'll just have a big head start next spring! Anyway, found this odd potato which looks like the maw of some undersea creature, ready to gobble up any small thing that comes its way. Don't know what it was eating underground - maybe grubs and such.

Last year, I was bemused by the strange looking seed pods that formed on our radishes after they had gotten overgrown and flowered. I posted a photo of them then, and had mentioned them to someone recently who said the pods, when they're fresh and green, are good to eat! Raw in salads or such, or sautéed lightly was what I was told. So this past Monday, right before going traveling for 3 days, I was doing some last-minute gleaning in the garden and looked at the radishes. There are still lots of the pretty little white flowers, but many of the flower stems had beautiful green pods. I picked one and ate it - not unlike a sugar pea in its pod! And a very subtle taste of radishes as an after-note. So I harvested a bunch of them, put some in a salad for dinner that night - nice little crunchy addition! The rest are in the vegetable crisper - don't know how long they'll keep and be usable, but it was fun to try another idea to get even more yield out of the garden!