Yes, yes, it's been a while. Life is stressful and blogging isn't my top priority right now. But here I go!
The snow has mostly melted and I'm thinking about all things spring and summer. We went to a seed-starting workshop 2 weeks ago and tiny sprouts of hungarian wax peppers, broccoli and basil are coming up. The chocolate peppers are taking their sweet time. I'm starting to collect seed starting paraphenelia in anticipation of planting boxes and our community garden plot. It's hard to believe I'll be growing my own food again!
Still have Pete's CSA. Our vegetables are dying off, and that's sort of ok with I'm pretty much over root vegetables. I still have rutabaga and celeriac in my fridge and we just got more parsnips this week. Here's what else we got:
Red Onions; Mixed Colorful Carrots; Parsnips; Mixed Greens and Shoots; Frozen Strawberries; Japanese Style Miso from Les Aliments Massawippi; Oyster -or- Shitaki Mushrooms from Amir Habib; Butterworks Farm Cornmeal; Butterworks Farm Buttermilk; Grafton Classic Cheddar Ends
I had defrosted some of my homemade marinara for dinner tonight, so I seared the oyster mushrooms, sauteed a bunch of chard, added some red-wine braised onions leftover from last night and dumped in a jar of my sauce. We had that over pasta. Nom Nom.
I've also made homemade bread the past few weeks. The first week I tried a no-knead recipe from Mother Earth News. The flavor was incredible but the bread was short. Last week I adapted a honey-wheat bread recipe from Allrecipes that tasted great. I experimented with a loaf, a round loaf in a cake pan and a free-form loaf on a pizza stone. It was a tad sweet for me, I'd cut down on the honey next time. Now I have a chef starting for a pain de campagne from a bread cookbook. It takes 4 days to make, so I guess Saturday we'll enjoy it.
