Thyme for a January warm-up

I love having fresh herbs. I have fresh rosemary that I can take from my bush outside any time I like (though it's covered with 8 inches of snow right now). I needed thyme for a recipe and actually had to buy thyme as I used all the stuff in my garden up. So I found myself with a large package of fresh thyme that needed to be used or dried. Usually I'm too lazy to dry my fresh herbs so I've been putting thyme in everything.

We have decided that winter, because the oven needs to be on for so long, is the very best time to make a long, slow roast. We had a Roseda top round in the freezer so I decided I wanted to make an herb-crusted roast. There are two options when making a top round rare roast beef. You can use the fancy method where you put it in a very hot oven for 20 minutes and then turn the oven off, or you can keep the kitchen nice and toasty for 2-3 hours at 300 degrees, just like Mom did when I was growing up. I went for option B.

First I coated the roast in a mixture of rosemary, thyme, 3 cloves of garlic, sea salt and pepper, ground up in the food processor with about 2 tbsp olive oil. I smeared this all over the roast, put it in the baking pan and popped it in the oven. DONE!

I'm on a fruits and vegetables kick. Understand, I don't necessairly admit to enjoying eating these things (meat and potatoes girl from Wisconsin you know ;-) but I bought the zucchini so I had to figure out what to do with it. My sweetie said roasted, I interpreted that to be gratin and found a lovely zucchini-basil gratin suggested in my Herbfarm cookbook. Since it's January, and my basil plants are definitely not out there in my herb garden, I change the gratin to a Zucchini-Thyme gratin, followed the recipe and popped it in next to the roast.




Now that the kitchen was all toasty warm, we decided to use some of the homemade bow-tie pasta that we had made over Christmas to go with it. We've been experimenting with homemade pastas for the last month. Lasagna, tagliatelle, raviolis, and now bows. We made so many bow-ties that we dried some. I decided to use them but found that I only had about 3oz, so we mixed them with egg noodles. I went for peas (more vegetables) as I had some fresh snow peas and a package of frozen peas so I decided to use those. I cut up a shallott and fried it up in some bacon grease and butter (yes I keep a thing of bacon grease in my fridge) and then added some thyme and a little bit of dried mint from last year's stash. Added the peas and snow peas cut up into 3/4 inch slices and then put in the cooked pasta. Drizzle with olive oil and voila!

As you can see, the plate turned out very tasty. The gratin with the parmesan on top was delciously salty, the meat tender and the pasta refreshing (yes even with three fats).




In order to complete the dinner we needed dessert. Luckily, I had frozen chocolate buttercream left over from the buche de noel this Christmas, and I had frozen a sugar tart crust so I took those out, baked up a couple of tart shells, smeared on the chocolate buttercream, some Door County Cherry preserves that I had brought home from WI last summer and sprinkled it with toasted almonds. YUM!

Redesign for Motivation

So it's been just about six months since I posted here. Between traveling, my road bike accident, getting the house done, school, and life in general I have become a lackluster blogger.

To get back into the spirit of things, here are a few photos from my last few months. We went to France and Spain in August. My first time in Spain and it was absolutely delightful.

Marquis de Riscal Vineyards and Baserri Maitea Restaurant.

I had my accident in September, I refuse to post a picture of my woeful bike that is beyond repair.

We did go to Vermont and California in October though. Each lovely and completely different:

Elephant seals at Ano Nuevo:

Hiking the redwoods.

Look for more posts soon....

Peas in a Pan

We went to the market last weekend for fresh peas. Now understand, that in Baltimore, fresh peas only last for 3-4 weekend markets and you have to get there EARLY in order to get your stash. We walked out of the house at 7am and our neighbor Ben says "where are you guys off too so early?" We informed him that we were on our way to get peas. He assured us he and his wife would be right behind us.


We hurried off, bought our asparagus for cookbook club on Monday, then turned to look for the pea/bean guy. He'd moved! We didn't see him but we did see a long line snaking from one of the stalls. I sidled up to someone in the line and asked what he was in line for and he said PEAS!!! I jumped in line (20 or so people in front of me now) and soon Ben showed up 2 people behind me. We assured him that we would get the end of the peas as it was now 7:25 and the pea cooler was looking mighty empty. Three people in front of us the lovely pea lady dumped another cooler full of peas into the cooler, SAFE!!!!

We proceeded home with our 2lbs of peas.



My sweetie got a beautiful new pan for a present (thanks Renee) and we decided we would make the peas and onions in that pan. I got some small pearl onions. We cut one end off and boiled them for one minute, put them in ice water and POP they slid right out of their skins.

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I caramelized them in some olive oil and then added the peas, a knob of butter and a splash of white wine and cooked that for about 5-7 minutes. Look at those brilliant green peas.





I added some shrimp and cooked them for about 2 minutes, turning often. Look at that beautiful pan!!!







The peas and shrimp were absolutely delicious.

Who says you need to live in Door County or Washington State....

We picked cherries last night. YUM! These look a bit battered from the scoot to work but they are Tasty!!! More blogposts to come soon.

A critique of Baltimore eggs

We love eggs. I like mine sunny-side up, steamed lightly, with the cover on and the edges just starting to brown. He likes his "pleated", the yolk broken and stirred once or twice (not scrambled) and quickly flipped over in a hot pan. Both of us like them cooked in a combination of olive oil and butter to give it just the right consistency. Luckily we are blessed this week with the beautiful eggs from Tam's farm in Vermont. Breakfast was delicious.

The problem with Baltimore eggs is they seem to lack je ne sais quoi compared with the farm raised eggs that we've eaten on both the Ranch in Wyoming and Tam's eggs from Vermont. We have tried eggs from three different vendors at the farmer's market in Waverly and they are all sadly lacking. Renee brought us some lovely eggs from a secret farm near Frederick, but those are not easy to get either.

I think the secret must be compost. The local farms are commercial where as, at the ranch and the farm in VT, they don't have a lot of birds thus they can feed them a very diverse diet of kitchen scraps, feed and their free range bugs. I've heard rumors of people in Baltimore starting to raise their own chickens, one is the neighbor of a friend of ours. I just have to wonder, with a yard that is 30x30, how well the birds are getting along with my friend's dog. And do they have a rooster?

At any rate, I think I'm going back to Trader Joe after this as the ones at the market are pretty much comparable for twice the price.

Chicken Corn Chowder

It was so cold and rainy last night that I decided to say no to the leftover gyros that I had made Wednesday night and make soup instead. Since I didn't want to go to the store I gave some long thought to what I had in the house and came up with the idea to make chicken corn chowder. I had some leftover butternut squash so I wanted to add that. Spinning off of an Epicurious recipe, I cut it down and used frozen chicken breast instead of the already been cooked chicken. I also pureed the squash seperately, lifting it out and blending it and then adding it back in. This made for a very creamy soup without having to add cream or more than the 2 tbsp bacon fat that I started with. I finally used the beautiful red chili pepper Chris gave me last month (yes it was still good) and pulled out some of that Singleton's store bacon.

Recipe:

3 slices bacon
1 medium onion
1 fresh chili
4 c chicken broth
2 medium potatoes 3/4 in cubes
1.5 cups butternut squash 3/4 in cubes
2 c. milk (I used 1%)
1 tsp dried thyme
1 bay leaf
salt and pepper to taste
3 c frozen corn
1 chicken breast, 1/2 frozen, very thinly sliced


Cook bacon until crisp and remove from pan, let cool and chop into bits (reserve). Leaving 2 tbsp bacon grease, saute onion and chili until onion is almost translucent, add butternut squash and potatoes and saute 2-3 minutes more. Add broth and milk, thyme and bay leaf. Cook until squash is soft. Carefully remove squash and some liquid from the soup and puree in blender. If you do not want potato chunks you can use an immersion blender and puree everything. Return squash to pan, bring to a simmer and add corn. Simmer 5 minutes. Add chicken and cook until chicken is cooked through. Taste for salt and pepper. Serve with bacon sprinkled over the top. You can also top with cilantro. Warm and comforting on a rainy, cold night.

Vermont Bacon-off

Each year we pack up enough beer (Brewers Art Resurrection) for four people for four days and head to the mountains of Vermont to stuff our faces and sit on the sofa of our friends on their little hill farm in Stowe. Below is Tadcaster the ATV pup sporting his doggles on a run to the mailbox.

We were warned this year to expect a new addition to the household, as besides the sheep, chickens, dogs and cats , we now have angora fur bunnies and a house bunny that hangs out next to the wood stove eating raisins (5, no more, no less).

The foliage was beautiful, just past peak so it was raining golden leaves. My sweetie and I took a lovely ride over Smuggler's Notch to go in search of the 2 gallons of maple syrup that we need to get us through the winter. While investigating the possibilities in Jeffersonville, we came across a sign for smoked meat at Hanley's Market. We went in to take a look and bacon looked and smelled glorious!! Asking them what they smoked it over resulted in the correct answer.... cob smoked, bingo.

Now, it must be said that most years we get our bacon from Singleton's Store in Proctorsville, VT. We have an arrangement with friends that anyone in the vicinity must pick up bacon. This is a 2.5 hour ride each way from Stowe. After the 9 hour drive, we were not in the mood for more driving, so finding a cob-smoked bacon 1/2 hour from Stowe was quite exciting and required a taste test. Our friends were definitely not opposed.

Luckily our friends had some of the Singleton's bacon in the freezer, so we popped that open, popped open the Hanley's bacon and proceeded to have a bacon-off. I cooked them up in separate pans as you can see so I didn't "sully" the taste of one with the other. They all believe that bacon should be cooked until it is dead, I, for one, believe it should be slightly undercooked. They go their way, very dark bacon. On the left, the bacon from Singleton's, on the right, bacon from Hanleys.
I wasn't up to eating bacon all by itself so I whipped up some pancakes, Tam made pumpkin muffins in her new leaf muffin pan and we sat down to our taste test.

The verdict.... Delicious! Both brands of bacon were tasty, but you could tell the Singletons had been frozen as it was slightly acidic and a bit more dry than the other. The Hanley's store bacon was crispy and smoky and altogether a VERY acceptable substitute for the Singleton's store bacon. Next year we shall stock up, as of right now, Josh just stocked us up with Singletons so we have four pounds in the freezer. Brunch anyone?