We’re in the homestretch now – only a few short weeks to go before the rhubarb and asparagus are up. Things are growing like crazy in my garden and I can imagine the farmer’s markets are starting to fill with some new early spring greens.
My chives are up which is nice since I’m almost out of onions and it’s just about time to plant the last of my sprouting potatoes. The pantry still has 3 jars of spaghetti sauce, countless jars of canned peaches, chutneys, salsas, green tomato enchilada sauce, roasted red chili sauce, 2 jars of pickled or roasted peppers, 2 jars of home canned tomatoes and tons of pickles and jams but the freezer is full of dried tomatoes, fruit and berries so we are in good shape.
Next year I won’t make as much jam but I will can more plums and cherries since we liked those more than I expected we would. I don’t think I made enough applesauce this year either since we use it to make fruit leather in addition to eating. It was a good exercise and I guessed pretty well all in all. Or maybe we are just eating what is there since I don’t shop at the store but it doesn’t feel like we’ve wanted for much and the variety has been all right.
My husband was out of town last week so the kids mostly drove the menu. You’ll see it was heavy on the side of baked goods which I normally try to space out because I feel like it’s replacing junk from the store with homemade junk (minus the chemicals) but still not the nutrient dense food I try to make. It felt a little like IHOP since we ended up eating breakfast for dinner quite a bit in the absence of another adult to cook for. Next week you’ll see way more veggies as I try to eat down the garden beds to make room for transplants and spring starts.
French toast from homemade soaked 100% whole wheat bread made from Bluebird Grain hard red wheat, Lentz spelt, Golden Glen milk and backyard eggs.
Aebelskivor from Lentz spelt and backyard eggs.
Have you ever seen how these are made? In the cutest little pan. If you want you can fill the holes halfway and then add a slice of apple or jam or even something savory inside like sausage and cheese. It’s sort of the original hot pocket. I keep meaning to make little pizzas like this and put in my sons’ lunch boxes for school. How fun that would be for them to find little balls of sandwiches for lunch!
I’m trying to clear out the veggie beds for spring plantings so I harvested the last of the over wintered carrots and some nice turnips. We snacked on them all week.
Buttermilk (home clabbered from Dungeness Creamery milk) oatmeal Lentz spelt scones with home dried sour cherries and dried blueberries. I wanted to add home dried apricots from Rama but that sparked a huge debate between the boys so I scrapped the idea. Too bad because I love apricots!
Homemade cavatelli (from Bob’s semolina since I couldn’t find the Fairhaven duram wheat that Brittney had used last week.)
Cavatelli with Willipa Hills gorgonzola sauce served over my turnip greens with steak from our Cascade Range Beef cow and Edmonds Winery claret.
Ina Garten’s maple scones using Bluebird soft wheat and Golden Glen butter (1 pound of it to be exact.) But the scones are a family favorite. We are trying to clear out the old maple syrup to make way for the Stannard Farms syrup buy I organized last week. 26 gallons of it. That’s a lot of syrup!
Home pickled Loki salmon with Rockridge Orchard apple cider vinegar and a bay leaf off my tree. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to make this. I’ve been looking for local herring and there is none so I finally just substituted salmon. It was delicious and a great quick snack to have around. Pickle Man loved it.
Soaked 100% whole wheat bread using Bluebird grain red winter wheat.
Winter minestrone using my cabbage, home canned tomatoes, freezer corn, frozen chicken stock that I made a few weeks back and white beans from Full Circle Farm.
Black Pepper Plum cobbler with my neighbor Martha’s plums from the freezer and homemade snickerdoodle ice cream using Golden Glen cream, backyard eggs and lightly sweetened with maple syrup. The black pepper lent a depth to the plums that was hard to place and slightly spicy. I wished I had used more but I was treading lightly since I wasn’t sure how it would come out. It was kind of a wacky idea that I luckily pulled off!
Buttermilk biscuits, backyard egg scramble with Beecher’s cheddar and bacon from Akyla Farms.
Home canned Rama peaches, homemade granola and local yogurt! This one was a complete surprise. During an emergency trip to Met Market for kleenex we saw this and had to get it. The kids will only eat store bought yogurt and even my husband expressed his distate for my homemade yogurt. Of course if I put as much sweetener in mine as commercial yogurt makers do they might eat it but I’m choosing my battles carefully these days. I’m still buttering them up to raise turkeys in the backyard this summer…
Next week, onto more veg. Happy Dark Days!
What yummy meals! I am a huge fan of breakfast for dinner… especially when my husband has a busy work week. I actually plan breakfast for dinner at least once a week.
I’m soooo jealous of your chives! I wanted some desperately last week, so I went outside and stared longingly at the still-brown plant. If the springish weather keeps up here in NH (and the snow stays away), the chives just might be here sooner that usual! Oh happy day.
Oh, everything looks fabulous. Pickled salmon! So good. And of course, you know how I feel about that cobbler.
Hey, darling Annette, looks like you are feeling much better! So glad!
I’ve been making æbleskiver with white flour. Would you share your batter recipe?
I see you have another reader from New England!
Hi, Simply Good Flood Blog, I’m in NH, too.
Becky, that is a great idea. My husband said his mom would do that frequently when they were harried.
SGFB we are very lucky here in Seattle to have such mild winters but then summer is about 4 weeks long as a trade off.
Julia – I can’t wait to hear what you think about the plum and black pepper combo. It was really interesting!
Auburn, I am doing much better, just dealing with bruised ribs from months of hacking. Any pancake recipe would work but I haven’t tried my coconut pancakes yet, that is the next experiment. I have used this one: http://www.karenblixen.com/aebleskiver.html subbing spelt for white flour and it came out fine. I’m thinking that an overnight soak for the flour would give you lighter, fluffier ones though. I soak the flour in buttermilk overnight then in the am mix the eggs & oil or melted butter in one bowl and the sugar, salt & powder in another bowl. I combine the soaked flour with the eggs and oil well then sprinkle the dry ingredients over the top and gently fold until stirred. The buttermilk starts reacting to the leavener right away so you need to be ready, otherwise if you wait too long the party is over before it hits the pan. You’ve got about 10 minutes with my buttermilk culture, although maybe a storebought culture would not react as well.
I’ve read conflicting results about growing potatoes in burlap bags, so before I waste my resources including time & energy I’d like to know what ideas you’ve gathered that produce good harvest. Would you share your potato gardening plan? I’m in SE King County at 500′ in a small clearing of forest, so the chilly area I have should grow good potatoes. Already have them sprouted in the house & waiting…
Hi Corrine,
I grew them in bags last year and plan to do it again since it worked so well. I’ll be posting on it probably next week since I’m waiting for some potato starts first.
Here’s what I learned: some potatoes are early and some are late. There is no point hilling the early potatoes since they will only set one layer of fruit. With late potatoes you can hill them and each hill will produce a layer of potatoes so if you are growing early varieties you don’t need to use burlap bags or if you do just do a shallow layer and roll the bag down. The burlap bags still make great living, compostable pots to grow in regardless of whether you use the full heighth of the bag or not. I found it really easy to harvest the potatoes that way since you could just dump the whole thing into a wheel barrel and go through the dirt for potatoes. There was no chopping into them inadvertently with a shovel as if I had been digging them up an then I just transported the wheel barrel of dirt to the compost pile or added it to a bed that I wasn’t planning on growing any other nightshade family members in for the next several years. Some crops I am very careful to rotate and others not so much. Potatoes, eggplant and tomatoes I am very careful not to use that same dirt for 3 years because of the blight that can get in the dirt and come back to haunt you next year.
My chives and rhubarb are up. The blueberries buds are popping. How did you do the carrots? Grow them in the fall and leave them in the ground until now? I didn’t know you could do that. I’m on my last jar of strawberry/rhubarb jam. Still have a couple jars of blackberry jam. My greenhouse is full of fun stuff waiting for the sun to come out. I didn’t can tomatos last year. Gave them to everyone we knew and ate them every day. But, I’m already planning on growing a few extra and canning salsa and relish.
You say you have a bay tree. I’ve been thinking about looking into that but thought it might not tolerate a hard winter. But if you can do it in Seattle, I can do it in Vancouver, WA. Need to add that to the list.
Hi LeAnn, I planted the carrots late July and just left them in the beds. I did have a few rows rot in the cold snap in early Dec but most of them were ok. The longer they stay in the ground the more flavor they lose though so they aren’t spring carrots to be sure. It’s more like an outdoor root cellar. Strawberry rhubarb jam sounds great, I need to make some of that this year!
I planted the bay tree last spring and it’s doing great despite that snap in Dec. My mil has one in Shelton and I want to say it did die after a few years but if you know there is something big coming you can always cover it with burlap or a towel for those nights. I bet it will work just fine for you.
Yum! I need to go through my pantry and figure out what I’m going to can this year. I need a LOT more jars if I plan on keeping us in tomatoes through the winter. My kids eat homemade yogurt so we eat a lot. I still have some jam, but strawberries are still three months out for us and I’ll be out of peach jam before they’re ripe again.
Angela, the jar thing takes some planning and quite a bit of up front capital. After that though it’s a matter of saving 1 or two of each variety of tomato for seeds. How cool is that? We are about out of peach jam as well. I’m definitely shuffling some things around this summer.
I am so impressed by the amount of dishes you made using homegrown ingredients!
Come share your post on our Grow Your Own roundup this month. Full details at
http://chezannies.blogspot.com/2010/03/announcing-grow-your-own-40.html