Kids Dish

How can it be August already? The summer is flying by and all I have to show for it are two cups of frozen shredded zucchini. Half a CSA share does not provide enough food for us to preserve for the winter, but with the new baby it’s a good thing we didn’t go for a full share since most of it would have ended up in the compost bin anyway. I’m a bit behind since we were out of the city most of last week, so here’s a photo of the share from two weeks ago:

3 medium eggplants, 3 red onions, a big bunch of carrots, a bunch of swiss chard, a pint of mixed tomatoes, a big bag of green beans and cheddar cheese and yogurt from the buying club.

Last week’s unphotographed share included a quart of Yukon Gold potatoes, close to a pound of green beans, a 1/2 pint of mixed grape and cherry tomatoes, a 1.5 lb bag of red potatoes, 2 summer squash and 3 pattypan squash, 3 huge green peppers and a quart each of raspberry and peach yogurt.

This week’s share had 1.5 pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes, about a pound of green beans, a quart of mixed tomatoes, half a dozen yellow squash, a pint of jalapeño peppers, and 5 yellow onions.

This summer I find that the half share is enough for us and I haven’t had to supplement with any additional vegetables from the market. Unfortunately the buying club through the CSA hasn’t offered any fruit at all this season, so I’ve had to buy fruit each week. If I don’t make it to the farmer’s market up the street on Fridays I get stuck buying it at the supermarket so it’s not local and frankly not that great.

Watermelon is the perfect summer snack. It’s sweet, it’s juicy and since it’s mostly water it’s an excellent thirst quencher on a hot summer day. Watermelon is also packed with some of the most important antioxidants in nature. It is an excellent source of vitamin C and a very good source of vitamin A, notably through its concentration of beta-carotene. Pink watermelon is also a source of the potent carotenoid antioxidant, lycopene which is also advertised as being present in ketchup, so it must be good.

Watermelon has been on sale lately at the supermarket, and though I do my best to stick to local, seasonal fruits I haven’t seen any watermelon yet and I haven’t been able to resist the allure. Sadly, my inability to resist has led to the purchase of some mediocre watermelon. It’s not bad, but it’s not good enough so we eat it plain, but not with enthusiasm. I needed to do something with half of a largish watermelon. I’d used half for watermelon salsa which was also sadly mediocre and couldn’t figure out what recipe wouldn’t be hindered by not so great watermelon. Then I found it: Watermelonade.

This recipe requires some prep but once the prep is done you’ll have enough on had for a large pitcher and then some. This is a delicious pink drink that kids will love. Add gin for the parents and have a nice cocktail hour.

7 cups cubed, seeded watermelon (about half of a medium sized watermelon)
1 cup lemon juice
1 cup simple syrup*
3 tablespoons grenadine
3 cups ice
1 cup gin (optional, but recommended for those of age)

Combine ingredients and blend until slushy. Serve with lemon wedges and sprigs of mint.

Alternately, puree the watermelon in a food processor and strain over a fine mesh sieve. Combine watermelon juice with other ingredients and serve over ice.

*Simple syrup is usually one part sugar to one part water. For this recipe I used two parts water (2 cups) to one part sugar(one cup) so it wouldn’t be overly sweet. There was plenty leftover for more watermelonade. To make it combine in a pot over medium heat. Stir sugar and water until sugar dissolves and boil for 2 minutes.
refrigerate for a few hours or overnight before using.

I like the idea of bananas because they are portable, filling and healthy, thus they make a great snack on the go. They are also cheap, and while I prefer to buy local produce in the season, we’re not quite at the height of fruit season yet and while the berries are plentiful, the cherries require pitting now that Sam has gone ahead and eaten several pits, resulting in a rather uncomfortable night. There’s not much else around yet so supermarket fruits it is. Of course Sam has decided against bananas again.

He ate half of one last week but the rest of the bunch has been sitting in the fruit basket getting riper and riper. I thought about making some smoothies, but of course I never got around to it. I moved the almost completely brown bananas to the fridge and figured I’d make muffins or banana bread. But I was uninspired by the thought of banana quick bread and remembered a recipe I’d seen online for Elvis cake- a peanut butter banana cake with chocolate chips.

I made it last night and it’s fantastic, but the icing was overly sweet. Here’s the recipe slightly modified- I plan on making it again.

Elvis Cake
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cups white sugar
1/2 cup butter or shortening
1 cup milk
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 eggs
2-3 mashed bananas
1/2 tsp banana extract
2/3 cup mini chocolate chips, more for sprinkling on the finished cake

Mix together the flour, baking powder and salt and set aside. In a large bowl, cream sugar and shortening until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Add flour mixture alternately with milk, beating just to combine. Stir in vanilla, mashed bananas, and banana extract. Stir in chocolate chips. Pour batter evenly between two greased and floured 9 inch round cake pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Let cool completely.

Frosting
2 sticks of butter, room temperature
1 cup of smooth peanut butter.
2 cups of powdered sugar
Up to 2 Tbs milk

In an electric mixer cream together the butter and peanut butter until smooth and fully incorporated. Add the powdered sugar a cup at a time and use milk to adjust the consistency to your liking. Using natural peanut butter will result in a frosting that’s not quite as sweet but it may be a little grainy.

We went berry picking last week at Linvilla Orchard, a local pick your own that has a wide variety of fruit available throughout the year. Last week was the end of strawberry season, the height of raspberry season, and we missed blueberries, which were closed for ripening after the first of the season were picked out.

This was Sam’s third trip to the orchard- fourth if you count a trip when I was pregnant. Last summer we picked blackberries, tomatoes, and peaches. In the fall we went with a group of friends and skipped the apple picking but we went for a hayride, drank apple cider and walked through the pumpkin patch. Sam remembered the place and kept insisting that he was picking strawberries in the pumpkin patch.

We got there later than we’d hoped and ate lunch at a picnic table before taking the hayride out to the strawberry patch. It was hot and humid and Sam hadn’t had a nap. Ben was strapped to my chest in a wrap with built in SPF. The rest of us were slathered in sunscreen and sweaty. Sam didn’t know where to find the strawberries so I picked up the leaves and showed him how to find them. We got to work with our separate boxes. Sam preferred to “pick� strawberries from mama and dada’s boxes, transfer them to his box, and eat them immediately. He was soon covered in strawberry juice.

Three quarts (and about a thousand strawberries consumed later) we took the hayride back to the raspberry bushes, adjacent to the parking lot. Sam was still in good spirits but he was tired. The raspberry picking appealed to him because the raspberries were at a good height where he could pick them without bending or searching. He ate a ton and ran up and down the rows before asking to go home. We got about two quarts of raspberries before paying and heading home.

It’s been a week and we’ve consumed all five quarts of fruit. I planned on freezing some of it, but I never got around to it and it was so good we just kept eating it. I’ve been eating granola with yogurt and berries every morning for breakfast and eating berries every time I open the fridge.

A few ideas for berry storage:
Berries should be washed before storing. Rinse them in 3 cups of water mixed with 1 cup of vinegar then run under fresh water from the tap. Drain in a colander. Line a salad spinner with several layers of paper towels and spin the berries until dry.

Store the berries loosely covered at the front of the refrigerator. They are cold sensitive and will last longer.

To freeze, put the berries on a baking sheet in rows so they’re not touching. Freeze, then transfer berries to freezer bags for storage.

It occurred to me last year that I may be the only person on earth who has never eaten anything with rhubarb in it. At least not that I know of. I never remedied the situation last year, but on our last trip to the farmer’s market, when I saw both rhubarb and strawberries fresh from Lancaster County for sale I couldn’t resist buying them both.

The problem was what to make. The strawberries were so perfectly ripe and sweet we ate one of the two quarts in the car on the ride home. I am not a pie person and strawberry rhubarb pie is the most popular dessert using the two ingredients. But once again, Smitten Kitchen came to the rescue with this fantastic crumble. It’s easy to make and it used ingredients I had in the kitchen except for the Demerara sugar which I substituted with dark brown sugar. Serve it with ice cream.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Crumble
For the topping:
1 1/3 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons Demerara sugar (or turbinado sugar, or Sugar in the Raw)
Zest of one lemon
1/4 pound (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
For the filling:
1 ½ cups rhubarb, chopped into 1-inch pieces
1 quart strawberries plus a few extras, hulled, quartered
Juice of one lemon
½ cup sugar
½ cup flour
Pinch of salt

1. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Prepare topping: In a mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, sugars and lemon zest and add the melted butter. Mix until small and large clumps form. Refrigerate until needed.
2. Prepare filling: Toss rhubarb, strawberries, lemon juice, sugar, flour and pinch of salt in a 9-inch deep-dish pie plate.
3. Remove topping from refrigerator and cover fruit thickly and evenly with topping. Place pie plate on a baking sheet, and bake until crumble topping is golden brown in places and fruit is bubbling beneath, about 40 to 50 minutes.

Hazelnuts are high in protein and good-for-you unsaturated fat. Many brands of packaged mixed nuts contain lightly salted hazelnuts (also called filberts) in addition to the typical cashew, almond, walnut, peanut mix. They’re great for snacking on plain or salted, and they’re also now making hazelnut butter which is just like peanut butter only, well, made with hazelnuts. Hazelnut coffee is the only flavored coffee l like (though please don’t give coffee to your kids!) and hazelnut liquors like Frangelico are delicious poured over ice cream or just over ice (again, please don’t give booze to your kids!) Combined with chocolate, hazelnuts are divine.

Nutella, a chocolate hazelnut spread, is the easiest way to get your chocolate- hazelnut fix and you can even serve it for breakfast. I love hazelnut crepes, but sticking to my quick and easy theme I’ll just link to a recipe for the crepes (which require more effort for breakfast than I generally like to commit to) and give you a recipe for a close second in deliciousness. Grilled Banana and Nutella sandwiches. If you have a panini press, sandwich press, or George Foreman Grill I recommend using that for the ease of clean up and minimal effort, but if you don’t have specialty equipment any frying pan will do.

Grilled Nutella and Banana Sandwiches
makes 2

1 ripe banana sliced and mashed
4 slices whole wheat bread
1/3 cup Nutella
4 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon confectioners (powdered) sugar (optional)

Place the bread slices on a flat surface and spread each slice with some Nutella. Spread the mashed banana over 2 of the slices and combine to make 2 sandwiches. Butter both sides of the sandwich.

Heat the grill or frying pan to medium-high. Place the sandwiches on the grill and cook until golden brown on both sides (cooking times vary, but it usually takes 3-5 minutes on my preheated panini press). If using a frying pan flip the sandwiches after the bottom is browned and cook the other side until brown and crisp. Remove from the grill and sprinkle with the confectioners’ sugar. Eat immediately.

Btw, I didn’t forget about the lasagna recipe! I’ll post it tomorrow.

Do you live near a farm where you can pick your own produce? Bob, Sam and I took a field trip to Linvilla Orchards this morning. This was my first trip to Linvilla in a couple of years. The last time we went was on a weekend in the height of fall apple season and there must have been 10,000 people there. I was pregnant and though I had fun I wasn’t too keen on returning. Today was absolutely lovely. Just an hour after opening in the middle of the week, it’s not crowded at all.

Blackberry picking was excellent. It didn’t take Sam too long to catch on and he was picking the ripest berries he could reach in no time. Blueberries were pretty picked over so we moved on, but not before Sam ate as many as Bob picked for him. Peaches weren’t quite ripe so we didn’t spend too much time there. The tomatoes were fantastic. Bob and Sam picked cherry tomatoes and I went for the Romas.

We ended up picking a pound and a half of blackberries, enough blueberries for a small snack, about 10 pounds of tomatoes and two pounds of peaches. Sam ran out of steam and needed a nap after stuffing his face with all the berries he could, so we held off on checking out the apples and grapes. We stopped at the market there to use the bathroom and bought a spinach and cheese bread for lunch before heading home.

I’m currently debating whether to freeze or can the tomatoes. I don’t have canning equipment, but it seems like it would be a worthwhile purchase, especially since my chest freezer is permanently out of commission. I’ll probably end up freezing most of the eggplants and green beans in my garden so it would be nice to can the Roma tomatoes to make room.

I have a confession to make. I don’t particularly care for raw tomatoes. I love them roasted, grilled, and in sauces and salsas, but a slice of tomato, on its own or in a sandwich doesn’t appeal to me at all. I almost always pick the raw tomatoes out of everything I eat. I guess I’m just not a tomato person. But these Sungold Cherry tomatoes?

They’re the sweetest tomatoes I’ve ever eaten and it seems like it would be a waste to eat them any other way. With tomatoes like these I might become a tomato person after all.

eat local, pick your own, orchards, fruit, canning or freezing tomatoes,

I don’t mess around. To feed my family on our two week vacation I packed four coolers and several bags worth of food. Here’s the list in its entirety. Local foods are in italics, local foods that were obtained through my CSA are in bold as well as italics. All of the meat was humanely raised and pastured from Meadow Run Farm.

Fruit
2 quarts of Peaches
Cantaloupe
Pint of apricots
quart of cherries
Quart of blueberries
Two bananas
12 limes

Vegetables
Beets
Bunch of kale
3 zucchini
4 green peppers
bunch walla walla onions
half pint of sun gold cherry tomatoes
garlic
quart of green beans
quart of wax beans
pint of new potatoes
bunch of swiss chard
bunch of carrots
one shallot
6 ears of corn

Fresh herbs from my garden
Rosemary
Basil
Tarragon
Parsley (not from my garden)
thyme

Meat
2 lbs hamburger
2 filet mignon
4 new york strip steaks
1 whole chicken
lb bacon
short ribs
spare ribs
4 smoked sausage links

dairy
cheddar
Jack
Raw milk Colby dill
Raw millk herbed jack
Herbed goat cheese
Parmesan
Amish butter- both salted and unsalted
half and half from pastured cows

Miscellaneous
Tofurkey Italian sausage
Morningstar grillers (veggie burgers)
whole wheat pasta (2 bags)
whole grain brown rice
whole wheat hamburger buns
whole wheat hot dog buns
peanut butter Puffins
blueberry cereal bars (from Trader Joes)
salt and pepper kettle chips
lightly salted chips
peanut butter
2 jars bruschetta (from Trader Joes)
newman os
2lbs coffee
sugar
olive oil
peanut oil
seasoned salt
garlic salt
red pepper flakes
pepper grinder
kosher salt
pizza seasoning
spicy seasoning
nutmeg
balsamic vinegar
ketchup
mustard

And I forgot the Cheddar Bunnies. I was forced to buy Goldfish.

If you think the food list is nuts you should have seen all four pages of the packing list. Here’s a picture of our loaded car and trailer.

vacation, packing, CSA, eat local, in season produce, humanely raised meat,

One of the best parts of late summer is the abundance of sweet, ripe melons. Sure you can usually get cantaloupe, honeydew and watermelon all year long at the supermarket, but that stuff is like soggy cardboard compared to the huge variety of melons available come summertime.

No matter what kind of melon you choose, they’re a perfect summer snack. They taste best chilled, either right from the fridge or right from the picnic cooler. You can use them in fruit salads, salsas, cold soups and sorbets. The shells make pretty serving dishes- watermelon shells are a gorgeous vessel for fruit salads. And kids love melon. I’ve never met a kid who didn’t like to spit a watermelon seed (all the more reason to avoid the seedless varieties!) Melon balls are fun and easy for kids to make (and for some reason the phrase melon ball always makes me giggle.)

You can buy melons precut in the supermarket, but you’re much better off buying them whole at the farmer’s market. When picking a watermelon, look for a melon that’s mostly blemish free, symmetrical, and evenly colored with a dull, not shiny, exterior. If it’s hollow when you thump it, it should be ripe. All other melons are easy to pick at the farmer’s market- if they smell delicious, 9 times out of ten they’ll taste delicious. But at the supermarket, when they’ve most likely been refrigerated for a while before they get there, they won’t be so easy to smell. In that case, when you’re choosing honeydew, cantaloupe, casaba, cranshaw, canary or any other variety, look for melons that are slightly fragrant and are heavy for their size. You’ll need to pick up a lot of melons to get the hang of judging ripeness by weight, so if you see someone handling every melon in the pile it’s not as strange as it looks.

If you’re looking to expand your melon repertoire, here’s a quick, easy recipe for melon salsa. It’s delicious with tortilla chips, or as a topping for fish or chicken.

Melon Salsa

1/4 cup fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons (packed) golden brown sugar
3 cups chopped seeded watermelon
1 cup chopped seeded honeydew melon or cantaloupe
1 medium cucumber, peeled, seeded, chopped
1/2 cup chopped red onion
1/4 cup chopped fresh mint
2 tablespoons minced seeded jalapeño chilies

Whisk lime juice and sugar in large bowl until sugar dissolves. Add watermelon and all remaining ingredients; toss gently. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

melon, melon salsa recipe, no cook recipe

Foods labeled “pasteurized” in the grocery store may have actually been irradiated thanks to the FDA changing the rules.

How Much of Your Food is Being Nuked Before it Hits the Shelf?
By Brita Belli, E Magazine. Posted July 5, 2007.

India alone grows 1,000 varieties of mangoes in such delectable variations as the sweet, orange-skinned Alphonso, the Bombay Green and the Bangalora. Here in the U.S., we rarely see more than one lonely variety at the local supermarket, but that’s all about to change. Soon consumers will be able to sample the sweet and tart nectars of many more imported fruits and vegetables from Thailand, India and Mexico piled high in the produce section. But there’s a catch: this fruit will arrive irradiated.

Shoppers may not be the wiser. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules in place since 1986 have required the radura — a symbol for irradiation that resembles a flower in a broken circle — on placards in front of produce displays or on packaged food like ground beef, along with the statement: “treated with radiation” or “treated by irradiation.”

But last April, the FDA proposed a revision to those rules. Food which had undergone irradiation, but not “material change,” would no longer have to bear the radura logo and companies could replace the word “irradiation” with the more consumer-friendly “pasteurized” or something else innocuous. Public comment on the current proposed change closes in early July.

Read the rest of the article at alternet.

How does this make you feel?

irradiated foods, FDA, eat local

A quart of sour cherries showed up in my fruit share yesterday and I was a little bummed about it at first. When it comes to fresh, seasonal fruit, sour is not my taste sensation of choice. But life gave me cherries, so cherry crisp it is. What better way to get your kids to eat sour fruit than to bake it with a sweet, crumbly topping and serve it with whipped or ice cream? And it is mostly fruit.

Cherry Crisp
1 quart sour cherries, stemmed and pitted*
1/4 cup of flour
1/4 cup of honey

1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup old-fashioned oats
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter cut into small pieces
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Preheat oven to 375
Combine cherries with honey and flour in a bowl and transfer to a glass pie pan.

Mix all other ingredients in a bowl until the mixture is the consistency of coarse crumbs. (If you have a food processor you can also pulse the ingredients together gently- you want lumps) Press this mixture on top of the cherries. Bake in the preheated oven about 45-50 minutes until the topping is golden brown. You can serve it plain, but whipped cream or ice cream makes it even better. My CSA newsletter also suggests topping with frozen maple yogurt- mix a couple of tablespoons maple syrup into plain yogurt and freeze while you make the crisp bakes.

This recipe also works with just about any fresh, seasonal fruit. Right now at my local pick-your-own they’re picking blueberries, raspberries, white and yellow peaches and apricots.

*In June when I got my first share of sweet cherries I wanted to pit them so Sam could eat them without me having to painstakingly pit each one by hand, or by mouth, if you want to know I really got the pits out. I read that you can pit cherries using a drinking straw. It didn’t work and I was too cheap to buy a cherry pitter. But with the smaller, softer, sour cherries a straw worked perfectly. Just push the straw through the stem end of the cherry and the pit pops right out.

eat local, cherry crisp, sour cherries, recipe