Tater scale

Things have been busy.
Things have been good.
I'm doing a lot of teaching
And a lot less with food.

What kind of poem is that?

I got this from a student family this week.  We cooked it on Monday and have been eating it ever since.

This picture has not been manipulated in any way (I did make it black and white, because the color version was a little too vibrant), I am holding the biggest sweet potato I've ever seen right beside my head. 

It's a dirty job

Hi everyone!! We're back! Nate and I were out of town for two weeks.
Week 1 we spent working at Way of Life Christian Camp. It was a huge success and we had a great time! We spent the week working at camp with the people we usually work with (people Nate grew up going to camp with), but this year we were at a new facility. It was a great week, and it is a huge honor for my name to be lumped with the others on the Leadership team. Seriously wonderful people with whom I am honored to work.
I know its all about the kids when we go to camp, so I feel like I'm cheating by having as amazing a time as I always do. I was really blessed with new, old, and renewed friendships, and a lot of time talking about Jesus and loving on kids. I can't say enough good about it. But I'm guessing you can hear enough about it, so I'll move on. Unfortunately not really any pictures to share because I was too busy!
Week 2 we spent at the beach in South Jersey with my family. Talk about more blessings. I'll get misty if I get into the details of how great the last two weeks were. Suffice it to say, I'll share some family pics when I find my camera cord.

We got another installment of produce from my in-laws. I appreciate them so much (I appreciate them even when they don't load us up with goodies), and I'm in awe of their gardening skills. They had a ton of stuff. Some of it we tried to grow with moderate success (beets), less success (tomatoes, green beans, carrots), and maybe more success (basil, peppers, we'll have to see). I'll get into the status of our garden and maybe do a postmortem on it sometime. But its not dead yet, so I'll put that on hold.

The in-laws gave me tons of fresh beets, so I pickled them, hence the dirty job. Here are the pictures



They are hanging out in the fridge right now.

I used this recipe from my MIL, which I think is from BHG.

1/3 C vinegar
1/4 C sugar
1/4 C water
1/2 t cinnamon
1/4 t salt
1/4 t ground cloves
Bring to a boil, add cooked and peeled beets, reduce and simmer for 5 minutes, cool, let the magic happen, enjoy.

I doubled, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled (I'm not sure) it. But I left the ratio of vinegar to water in tact, which I understand is the important part, and I'm not canning them, I'll eat on them over the next couple weeks (let's be honest, few days is more likely).

My next post is sure to be about something really exciting, sexy, and intriguing in an effort to convince you that I am not, in fact, a senior citizen.

Fruit

We found a berry patch very close to us. It was a really nice morning on Saturday and its blue- and blackberry season, so we took advantage. It is a beautiful property where they grow flowers and berries to sell. Heaven? Maybe, but we were in and out pretty easily. Heaven on Wye Mountain, at least.
I'm sure there was more than I realized, but I saw blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, sunflowers, zinnias, and black-eyed susans. And huge white hollyhocks covering the electric meter! And on top of all that, their personal garden was beautiful!
First we started at the blueberries.Blueberries are so easy to pick. You just kinda shake the branch and gently pull and before you know it:They are so good, and big!

Then we headed over to the blackberries:

These were easier to pick than the last blackberries I picked.


We froze these:

But I have been using these:
For fruit pops! They are so good!



And for smoothies!
And for muffins that I forgot to take pictures of!


For you cat-lovers, this is what kitty does when it is so hot:
Looks all dejected and like he collapsed in front of the a/c unit.

The house cookie

We found it people. If you come here and I make you cookies, these will be it. If you live near here and spend time in the hospital and I bring you cookies, it'll be these. If you ask me the quickest way for me to make a million dollars, I'll tell you I would sell these cookies. Not kidding. They are outrageously delicious. They are good enough to justify the sheer extravagance of two blog posts in one day. Our niece would say they are "a delicious surprise!" or "a taste explosion in my mouth!" She would be right.
I made chocolate chip cookies the other night because we had all the ingredients, and why not? I made them according to the Joy cookbook, which usually treats me so well, but they flattened right out, they were kind of papery and crispy on the ends. They tasted good, but I could never take them anywhere. They would be a shame to our family.
It has been bothering me all week, so I decided to give it another try, but not before googling "why are my chocolate chip cookies flat?" I didn't follow any of the advice there. Instead I went to the Cook's Illustrated site (remember the amazing magazine my awesome inlaws got us?) and found this recipe.
Perfect indeed.
You brown the butter then mix in the sugar and egg. So you sort of make caramel sauce, then mix it in with the flour and chocolate chips. The dough has a candy-ish texture to it.
I have to admit. This is considerably more labor intensive than any other chocolate cookie I've made, but to me it was worth it. If you have a babe on your hip and kiddos tearing up your house, this may not be the one for you. Unless one of those kids is the next Julia Child or something (in which case, why are you ever in the kitchen?).

I peeked in the oven and said to Nate, "I can't believe I made a cookie that looks like that!"
He took a bite and said, "Wow. This is the house cookie."
Stop what you're doing and make them.

Ok, I'm off to find new ways to wage war against ants. I'm still going to win.

Kidding around for the weekend

For those of you who have been somewhat disturbed by my move into the domestic realm, this post might be difficult for you.

If you are even more disturbed by the fact that I am a rural housewife at the moment, then you should definitely just skip this post altogether.

Nate came home on Friday with this:
It is about 3/4 of a gallon of goat's milk.
A former volunteer of Nate's keeps goats now and they had a batch of milk ready. So we bought some. We made goat cheese with it yesterday evening. They make goat cheese all the time at the ranch so Nate was somewhat familiar process, at least familiar enough with it to know that we could handle it. It was pretty simple.
I took some process pics.

We started with the milk:

You need an instant read thermometer:

We heated the milk over medium heat to 180 degrees, stirring the whole time:

for those of you not in the biz, this is called pasteurization :)

After it heats to the prescribed temperature, we take it off the heat, and add the juice of two lemons:

After stirring it for 90 seconds, we added some salt, dissolved it, and let it sit for a few minutes:

We layered four sheets of cheese cloth in a colander over a bowl and ladled the curds and whey into the colander.

Kitty, do you want the leftover whey?
Not interested? Ok, moving on.

We put it in the fridge over night and it looked like this.
I scooped it out of the cheese cloth this afternoon and put it into a bowl.
We got 2 cups of cheese out of the deal. I don't know if this is a normal yield for the amount of milk we had, but it seems like plenty of goat cheese.
(I can't remember exactly which method we used for this, but we looked at these websites. Here, here, here, and here.)
People say to let it age for a bit, just a day or two. When we go to use it I think we will mix in some more seasonings and herbs.
I'll let you know how we eat this, but I'm thinking on salads with beets for me, and something else for Nate (he doesn't like beets, sad for him not for me).

Some things I learned:
Miss Muffet must have had quite a stomach, I've seen curds and whey now, and blech.
Cheesecloth catches more than you think it will.
I thought the kitty would like the whey, I was wrong.

Squashed

If you are like us, you also have a ridiculous amount of winter squash to use up. Just kidding, I don't know why or who else would be in this situation, I was just trying to relate to my readers. We milked what we could out of all those potatoes, but after making one last batch of potato soup last week, we decided to pitch them.
The squash is still good and raring to go.
This Christmas, Nate got two awesome gifts that we will both be enjoying. His parents got him a subscription to Cooks Illustrated, which comes out bi-monthly. We haven't received a new one yet, but the one his parents gave him was full of good ideas.
Like last year, my parents got him Bon Appetit magazine and they had two recipes with butternut squash that we were excited about. We tried one of them yesterday.
[With half of one squash I made butternut lasagna on Thursday. It was amazing and really great, but I didn't take any pics of it. (If you want to try it, it is a combination of this one and this one.)]
Last night I made Butternut Squash Quesadilla from BA.

These meals brought to you by the color orange.
I kicked the kitty off right after I took this picture, promise.

I learned this cooking method from my mother in law: quarter the squash (or only half, it depends on how big it is), then steam it in a steam basket. I think I let it steam for about 30-45 minutes. Then just scoop it out of the skin, quick (hands on time) and easy.
I like this method especially if you are going to puree it for soup or the lasagna. You can also peel it with a vegetable peeler and cube the squash for roasting, but I don't think that my peeler is sturdy enough for that, and I didn't want my fingers to be orange till next week. (The BA recipe called for packaged squash, psht.)

The quesadilla:
toast some tortillas using your broiler

saute an onion, add the squash, set aside

in the same pan saute black beans in hot oil; add chopped garlic and salsa; mash with a potato masher; add more salsa; add chili powder

spread the beans on one tortilla, squash on another, monterrey jack cheese on another, and leave one blank

put them in the broiler till the cheese melts

stack them like so: beans (add some cilantro), cheese, squash, blank.
I popped them back in after the were assembled to heat up, so I think that next time maybe I will skip the broiling that you do before you stack it.


It looked like this:


It is very good, fun flavors, and huge. I made two, we have leftovers.

If you want the real recipe I'll be glad to give it to you. It was in a section for quick and fresh dinners, more of which we'll be trying.

Stay tuned: blanket on commission from Aunt Mary is underway. It's really coming along. I haven't done a whole lot with it since last weekend, but I really knocked a lot of it out while Nate and I had that nasty cold last week. I was waiting to share pics until I show it to her, unless she doesn't mind seeing it on here along with my 6 other readers. Do you?

Mixed bag of winter goodness

This is only the beginning of the loot we will have received from my in-laws before winter is over. Nate's parents did a huge garden this summer. All the potatoes in that bin are those that we brought back with us after Thanksgiving. We have used about a quarter of them. My parents picked up those butternuts for us in Amish country, so they aren't home-grown from someone I know. The onions were a give from above, and by above I mean Harps. Harps is one of my favorite grocery stores ever, and we have a brand-spanking new one in the "city" that is close enough for us to go to with some regularity. Hallelujah!

But I digress. More Ohio goodies. The winter squash in this bag are also from the in-laws. It is a mix of butternut, dumpling, pumpkin, and "other things I don't know" squash. I'm really excited to have all these veggies that will keep for a while, and its great to know that most of them came from my family.



Stay tuned for a post-Christmas entry featuring more canned and frozen things than I will know what to do with. From both of our parents. I think it will be fun to see how long we can survive without going to the grocery store.

These are the veggies. Carrots are from the store. I think that little squash is a dumpling squash. I would like a new peeler that will be useful on squash, suggestions?

My red fiesta turns burgundy when its in the oven, does anyone else's? The oven needs cleaned too, oh well.

I scraped the squash out and stirred it in with the rest.
We had this with grilled chicken kielbasa hoagies.

That's not a vegetable...

I also put together spiced hot cocoa mix to give as little Christmas/hostess gifts. I used cocoa, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ground cloves. All that stirred in steamed milk. It was super good and pretty easy.
The presentation left a little to be desired, but I did these at the last minute and didn't get a chance to go into the "city" so I found these things at DG just down the road. I think the little containers are kinda cute.