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What to do with a half-drunk bottle of Champagne?

Lindsay — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 21:46:38 +0000

Happy New Year!

For us, New Year’s Eve is an excuse to host a dinner party, so we invited our closest friends over and had a low key evening. We started with homemade French bread (recipe to come) with local butter and quick-pickled radishes. Then we had braised pork belly with turnips and an arugula-parsley salad. For dessert, Erik fried Twinkies. Yeah, we had fried Twinkies after such a homemade old-school meal. They were fantastic. He promises to post the recipe soon.

The pork came from this great, relatively new butcher in our town. He sources from small, local farmers and is really knowledgeable about his art. He tries hard to sell the whole animal, even the parts that aren’t so popular, so the shop is full of cookbooks and he’ll suggest ways to prepare, for example, trotters (pig feet). When there wasn’t enough pork belly in the case, he shouldered half a pig and filled our order right there and then. Take a look!

Anyway…after dinner, we rang in the new year with Champagne from Westport Rivers in southern Massachusetts. Since none of us are huge Champagne fans, we awoke this morning to at least half a bottle of warm, kind of flat Champagne sitting on the kitchen counter. As you know, I have trouble wasting food, so I found two recipes for using the last bits of Champagne in the bottle.

The first, Champagne vinegar, isn’t much of a recipe. For every cup of leftover Champagne, add one tablespoon of homemade apple cider vinegar or a store-bought apple cider vinegar with the “mother” (Bragg is a good brand). Pour the mixture back into the bottle and cover the top with a thin towel or cheesecloth, secured by a rubber band or piece of string. Let it ferment in a dark, cool place for a month or so. It’s ready when you like the taste.

The second, Champagne sorbet, is from the Flour cookbook, which I LOVE for special occasion baking. It has a nice Champagne taste, but it’s not overwhelming. We might make it next year for a fancy-schmancy New Year’s Eve dessert – we certainly can’t get less fancy than fried Twinkies.

Champagne Sorbet

Makes a generous 2 cups

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Notes
2/3 cup	White sugar
1 cup	Water
1 cup	Champagne	Substitute another sparkling beverage, e.g. Prosecco or sparkling cider	Westport Rivers
3 TBsp	Lemon juice	Fresh, if you have it (1 large lemon)
Pinch	Kosher salt

Directions

Combine the sugar and water in a small pot and heat to boiling over medium-high heat.

Boil, stirring occasionally, until the sugar dissolves. When you think it’s fully dissolved, turn off the heat and wait a minute until the water is still. Check the bottom of the pan for undissolved sugar. If you spot some, bring it back to a boil for another couple of minutes and then check again.

Let the syrup cool in the pot. Transfer it to a small bowl and refrigerate for two to three hours.

After the syrup has chilled, add the Champagne, lemon juice, and salt.

Pour the mixture into your ice cream maker and freeze according to the maker’s directions. For ours, this was 45 minutes.

If you want a firmer sorbet, pack into a freezer-safe container (we used a pint jar) and freeze overnight.

Why Buy? DIY! How to Make “Hot Pockets”

Lindsay — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 13:27:40 +0000

Many of our friends have had babies in the last couple of years. We’re really lucky to have this amazing group of kids to play with and moms and dads to admire. They’ve given me quite a bit of food-related knowledge. For example, if it falls on the floor, it is either totally contaminated (first kid) or fine after you shake off the dog hair (second kid).

I’ve also learned that one of the best things you can give parents of a newborn is food that can be eaten with one hand. Since we really like these “haute” pockets (shmancy, huh?), we figured they’d be an awesome food gift for our friends who just had their second daughter…especially since their first child is only a year old. Heroes!!

This recipe does take a little bit of time, but it makes six good-sized pockets, enough for almost a week of lunches. They’re sturdy enough to toss in your purse (maybe wrapped in one of these cute food cozies) and taste just as good at room temperature as they do warm. I haven’t tried it, but I’m sure you could freeze and reheat them like the real thing (2 minutes in the microwave or 25 minutes in a 350 degree oven).

In my quest to convert you to the DIY version, I tried to look up comparable nutrition information. I gave up. They’re all so meaty and cheesy that it’s not a fair contest. You could fill this dough with whatever you want, though, so if you have a favorite flavor, give it a try!

Greens-Stuffed Haute Pockets

Serves 6

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it (SWM = Somerville Winter Market)
1 1/2 tsp	Active dry yeast
10 ounces	All-purpose flour	You’ll need some extra for the counter.	Wild Hive Farm
1/2 tsp	Kosher salt
1/2 tsp	Sugar
2 large	Eggs	1 for the dough, 1 for the filling	Red Fire Farm CSA
3 TBsp	Olive oil	You’ll need a little extra for the bowl the dough will rise in.
About 2 pounds	Mixed dark leafy greens	About 4 bunches, but don’t worry too much about it	Organic (not local, because the timing didn’t work out)
4 cloves	Garlic	Chopped finely	Red Fire Farm CSA
1 tsp	Ground cumin
1 tsp	Ground coriander
Big pinch	Kosher salt
4 or 5 grinds	Freshly ground black pepper

Directions

To make the dough, add the yeast to 1/2 cup of room temperature water. This will dissolve the yeast so that it’s ready to work.

Whisk together the flour, 1/2 teaspoon of kosher salt, and sugar. This is sort of a lazy girl’s version of sifting.

Whisk together one egg and the olive oil. Add this and the dissolved yeast to the dry ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon until it forms a shaggy (i.e. dry) dough.

Dust a clean counter with flour and dump out the dough. Knead the dough for a couple of minutes until becomes nice and smooth. It shouldn’t be sticky, so knead in a little more flour if it is.

Pour a drop of olive oil into a clean bowl. Form the dough into a ball, put it in the bowl, and roll it around in the oil. Cover the bowl with a towel and let the dough rise for an hour or until it has approximately doubled.

While the dough is rising, get a big pot of water boiling. While it’s heating up, prepare your greens by removing the stems/ribs.

Once the water is boiling, blanch the greens. To do this, add a couple of big handfuls of greens to the water and cook for 3 minutes (only 1 minute for spinach). Don’t crowd the pot too much. While the greens are cooking, fill a big bowl with ice water. Once the time is up, shock the greens (stop them from cooking) by transferring them from the pot to the ice water. Use tongs or a spider to let most of the hot water drain off first. Once the greens are cool, drain them well.

Once all the greens are blanched, shocked, and drained, squeeze the pile with your hands to remove most of the water. Then, roll up the greens to a dishtowel that you don’t really care about and wring out some more water. Avoid white towels, because they’ll turn green. The idea is to get rid of as much water as you can so that the pockets aren’t soggy.

After you’ve squeezed and squeezed, you’ll have a loaf of compacted greens. Chop this up into about 1/2 to 1 inch pieces. Set aside until the dough has risen.

Once the dough has risen, put the ball on a lightly floured counter and cut it into six equal pieces. Form each piece into a ball and let them rest on the counter for 15 minutes. This will relax the dough so that it doesn’t spring back when you roll it out.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

While the dough is resting, beat the second egg and add almost all of it to the greens. Save about 2 tablespoons. Add the garlic, cumin, coriander, salt, and pepper to the greens and mix well. I like to use a fork, because it helps to break up the clumpy greens. Plus, I just used it to beat the egg, so it’s already dirty.

After 15 minutes, roll one of the dough balls into a circle approximately 7 inches across (that’s about the size of my hand). If you keep your counter floured and rotate the dough after each roll, you’ll keep it from sticking and get a better circle.

Lightly pack the greens mixture into a 1/2-cup measuring cup and turn them out onto the bottom half of your dough circle. You might need to use a slightly larger or smaller cup, depending on the volume of your greens. Using the reserved egg mixture, brush a little onto the bottom edge of the circle. You could use your finger if you don’t have a brush. Stretch the top of the circle over the greens to meet the bottom edge. Fold and crimp the edges together. The egg will help glue the pocket shut.

Transfer the pocket to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or lightly dusted with cornmeal and repeat with the other five dough balls. Three pockets will fit on each sheet pan. Brush the pockets with the remaining egg for a nice, shiny finish.

Bake for 25 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through for even browning.

Cooking for One: Inappropriately Large Salad

Lindsay — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 18:52:25 +0000

Here’s another attempt at avoiding delivery while Erik is out of town – a salad that is nearly the same size as my laptop. I’m a hungry girl, so normal salads don’t really do it for me. I need a thoughtfully composed bowl of tasty things or I don’t feel satisfied. Instead of giving a recipe, I’ll give you my little guiding principles for making a GIGANTIC, super-filling salad.

Guideline 1: Commit. Get a big bowl. Much bigger than you think you’ll need. Better to look silly and keep your salad together, than use a small bowl piled precariously high. The second part of committing is to use your hands to toss everything together. Maybe I’m not very coordinated, but I’ve never had good luck with salad tossing utensils. I either toss more on the floor than in the bowl or don’t adequately mix everything. My (clean) hands work great though!

Guideline 2: Only use things you like. I don’t like celery, so you won’t see it in any of my salads. I prefer dark leafy greens (kale, spinach, etc.) to lighter ones (romaine or iceberg). I also like some sweetness from fruit and a mixture of crisp and soft things. I don’t like a huge bowl of crunchy veggies, because I get bored of chewing them. You get the picture. It also helps to have some prepped stuff in the refrigerator. If you like beets on your salad, as I do, roast a few right away, so that they’re ready for a quick salad later in the week.

Guideline 3: Know a few good dressing recipes. I love the standard oil and vinegar, but it doesn’t always make the cut. We have found that raw food cookbooks and websites (like Choosing Raw) have great recipes for interesting dressings that can turn a pile of produce into a meal.

Guideline 4: Mega salads aren’t diet food! It’s a meal, so treat it like one and pay attention to what you’re putting in it. Like any meal, it should be substantial enough to keep you full, but not overloaded with calorie-rich ingredients. The salad I made today had a riff on this avocado-mustard dressing with a small avocado (about 200 calories) and a tablespoon of olive oil (120 calories). I also added about a tablespoon of toasted pine nuts (50 calories or so). As a meal, this is fine for me. It’s filling and delicious, but not a reason to reward myself with ice cream this afternoon. Even though it’s definitely ice cream weather…

Check out our salad posts for some ideas. As the weather warms up, it’s nice to have an arsenal of dinner ideas that don’t require the oven or stove.

How to Set Up a KitchenAid Food Mill Attachment

Lindsay — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:31:17 +0000

When I started canning, I didn’t have a whole lot of fancy tools. You honestly don’t need that much, but there are a few extras that really make life easier. One of those is a food mill. This is basically a crank that forces food through a screen. In doing so, it removes seeds, stems, peels, and tough fibers and produces a smooth and uniform sauce. I use it for fruit butters, applesauce, and tomato juice.

You can buy a manual version, but if you have a KitchenAid stand mixer, I’d recommend the attachment. It’s super quick and leaves your hands free to do other things. You have to buy two attachments, though, which kind of irks me. The food grinder just grinds, so you need to add the mill component to strain out the bits. Once you have the two boxes, putting them together is like playing with Legos.

How to Make Clementine Marmalade

Lindsay — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 22:15:53 +0000

Happy New Year!! I hope you all had a wonderful 2011. Ours was very exciting – we traveled to some interesting places (here and here), got engaged, and moved to Somerville, MA. Whew! 2012 promises to be a fun one as well. We wish you all happiness, health, and delicious food!!

After last night’s festivities, you might want to top your burnt toast with this marmalade full of vitamin C and fructose and just a tiny bit of whiskey. Once you slice up all the clementines, it comes together pretty quickly. If you don’t process it, you can have it ready in about an hour. It’s got a nice bittersweet flavor that would work well with rich food, if you get sick of toast – a glaze for salmon or maybe in a grilled cheese sandwich.

Hair of the Dog Marmalade

Makes 6 4-ounce jars

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it
1/2 tsp	Whole allspice berries
1 stick	Cinnamon	Broken into a couple of pieces
6	Clementines
1 small	Apple	Grated	Apex Orchards
2 cups	Carrot	Grated	Red Fire Farm
3/4 cup	Water
1 3/4 cup	Sugar
5 TBsp	Bottled lemon juice
2 TBsp	Whiskey	Optional	Tuthilltown Spirits

Directions

Prepare your canning tools, if you’re processing this. (Steps 3, 4, and 6)

Since we won’t be removing the peels, wash the clementines really well. They might be coated in wax, so give them a good scrub. Slice the clementines as thinly as you can, discarding the first and last slices and any seeds. I have a cutting board with a little moat, which is really helpful for catching the juice. If you’re using a regular cutting board, consider pouring the juice into your pot occasionally, so that you don’t lose any of it.

Add the clementine slices, juice, grated apple and carrot, and water to a wide saucepan. Put the cinnamon sticks and allspice berries into a tea ball or tie them up in a square of cheesecloth and add them to the pot. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Once the mixture is boiling, stir in the sugar and lemon juice. Once the sugar has dissolved, raise the heat to high and boil hard for about 15 minutes or until the liquid has thickened considerably. I know this is a vague description, but it’s done when there’s only a little puddle of liquid at the bottom of the pan.

Remove and discard the spices and stir in the whiskey.

If you’re canning this, fill your jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace, and process for 10 minutes. (Steps 7+)

Dark Days Challenge Week 4: How to Cut Up a Whole Chicken

Lindsay — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:33:21 +0000

Our Dark Days meal for the week was something that we have already posted, so we decided to post a strategy instead. Eating locally sometimes means having limited options and learning how to deal with what you can get. In our case, we can’t find (or afford when we find it!) user-friendly, pre-wrapped packages of local chicken breasts. So, we buy a whole chicken and do some work ourselves.

Yep, it’s kind of gross. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that you’re eating an animal, not just “meat”. I sort of feel like this is the respectful way to eat chicken. Is that overly crunchy and “we are the world”? Probably. But it’s also waaaay cheaper and not all that bad. To combat the ick factor, keep a pair of tongs and a towel nearby. When I feel the willies coming on, I just clean my hands on the towel, grab the tongs, take a deep breath, and remind myself that if I’m going to eat it, I should be able to touch it. A few minutes with the tongs and I’m back to my bare hands.

This is probably not the “official” way to cut up a chicken, but it works for me. The model for our photo shoot was a delicious 3-and-a-half pound chicken from Stillman’s. She had a little cosmetic issue with the skin on her breasts, so imagine that it was intact. Sorry for the blurry photos…the day went something like this…

Erik: Hold still so I can take the photo.
Lindsay: I’M HOLDING A CHICKEN SPINE. IT’S GOOD ENOUGH!!

Directions

Get all your tools ready. Once your hands are chicken-y, you won’t want to dig around. You’ll need:
- Cutting board
- Sharp knife
- Kitchen scissors
- Plate to hold the finished pieces
- Zip-top bag or something similar to hold the pieces that will go in the freezer for stock later
- Tongs
- Towel for drying your hands when things get icky or slippery
Take a look inside the bird. Is there a little bag? These are the giblets – the organs. Some people cook them up; some people toss ‘em. Your choice, but take them out of the cavity either way.

Put your chicken, breast side down, on the cutting board. Use the scissors to cut down one side of the spine and then the other to remove it. You might have to use two hands. I save the spine for chicken stock, so it goes in my zip-top bag.

If there’s anything floating around inside, get rid of it. My chicken had a couple of things that I assume were organs. That called for tongs and a deep breath. I got through it, though, and so will you.

Flip the chicken over. Legs are up first. This is mostly about dislocating the joint, rather than cutting through the bone. Lift up the chicken by a leg to see how it moves. This will help you figure out where the joint is. Cut through the skin and meat on all sides of the joint until you can see it. Bend the leg back and forth to try to pop it. Sometimes I’m lucky and it comes apart easily. If that doesn’t work, stick the tip of your knife in the joint and push down to break it. Repeat with the other leg.

If you want, you can also separate the drumstick from the thigh. Follow the same steps as for separating the leg from the body – find the joint, cut through the skin and meat, and pop/cut the joint.

Now for the wings. I usually stick these in my stock bag along with the spine, but you can certainly cook them if you’d like. Again, just use the same steps as for the leg to remove both wings.

Once the wings are off, you’ll have a very familiar piece of chicken staring at you. The breasts. With the neck-end facing you, stick the tip of your knife in the bone at the top-middle of the breasts. Push the blade of the knife down to the cutting board to split the bone in half. One half of the breast should come away pretty easily at this point. You’ll have to use your fingers to separate the meat from the center bone, leaving you with ribs and meat. You can leave the second breast as is or remove the wedge-shaped breastbone by working the meat away from it with your fingers and a knife. There are probably nicer ways to split the breasts, but this works for me.

There. Done. Not so bad, right? Cook however you’d like.

Is this the best kale salad ever?

Lindsay — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:03:58 +0000

It’s a bold statement. I’m not shy about it. It could be the best salad salad ever. I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, to decide for yourself.

There’s a great restaurant near where we used to live in NYC called Northern Spy. Definitely give it a try if you’re in the area – it was one of our favorites. They make a kale salad for dinner that’s really simple, but almost perfect. For brunch, they add a poached egg and make it perfect. Yum yum yum. Erik and I have been eating a lot of kale salads with poached eggs lately. It sounds kind of strange, but give it a shot. It makes a quick, filling, and nutrious meal any time of day. Two nights ago, I was HANGRY (so hungry I was angry) and Erik soothed me with one. Before I had time to protest, BAM! it was on the table and calming me down.

Perfect Kale Salad

Makes 4 servings

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it
1 small	Squash		Red Fire Farm CSA (Honey Nut Squash)
1/4 cup	Slivered almonds
1 1/2 TBsp	Lemon juice
1 1/2 TBsp	Olive or sunflower oil
To taste	Salt and black pepper
1 bunch	Kale	Red Russian and Lacinato are great for salads.	Red Fire Farm CSA
4 to 8	Eggs		Red Fire Farm CSA
1/4 cup	Cheddar	Cut into small cubes or crumbled	Narragansett Creamery (Atwell’s Gold)

Directions

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Cut the squash in half and place, cut side down, in a small baking dish. Bake the squash until soft, about an hour, depending on the size of your squash. Remove from the oven and let cool.

Lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees.

Spread the almonds on a baking sheet (or pizza pan) and bake for about 15 minutes or until browned. Watch them carefully, because they’ll go from nicely browned to burnt very quickly. You can do all these steps a few days ahead, if you want.

Once the squash is cooled, remove the skin and chop into bite-sized, but small pieces. Reserve about 1 cup for the salad. Refrigerate the rest for a quick side dish another time.

Start a pot of water boiling to poach the eggs.

Pour the lemon juice into a large salad bowl. While whisking, add the olive oil in a thin stream to help it emulsify. Whisk in the salt and pepper.

Prep the kale, following these instructions, but slicing the ribbons only about 1/4 inch wide. As you finish the kale, toss it into the bowl with the dressing.

Toss the kale in the dressing, making sure to coat all the leaves. I usually just use my (clean) hands, because I seem to be unable to keep salad in a bowl any other way. It also gives me a chance to give the kale a little tenderizing massage.

Once the water is at a rolling boil and the kale is dressed, poach the eggs. Only make as many as you want to eat that meal. This salad keeps well in the refrigerator, so you can make a quick meal of the leftover tossed salad and a newly poached egg. We use nifty egg poachers, like these, and cook our eggs for two and a half to three minutes for a cooked, but runny, egg. You could also just crack them gently into the boiling water and then fish them out with a slotted spoon. It takes a little practice, but works.

Put a pile of kale on each plate. Top with the squash, cheddar, almonds, and a poached egg (or 2).

Dark Days Challenge Week 1: How to Make Potato Gnocchi

Erik — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:25:06 +0000

To motivate ourselves through the winter, we have joined the Dark Days Challenge, which asks that we cook one meal a week focused on SOLE ingredients (sustainable, organic, local, and ethical). Right up our alley! Each blogger gets to set their own parameters within these guidelines. We’ll be sticking to the following rules for our Dark Days recipes:

Our primary sources for ingredients will be our CSA through Red Fire Farm, the Somerville Winter Farmers Market, and our canned/dried/frozen stores from the summer.
If we need to supplement, we’ll use ingredients from within 150 miles of home or those that we get from the NYC Greenmarket system while visiting friends and family there.
Salt, dried herbs and spices, baking soda/powder, and vinegar are fair game, but we’ll try to find local sources.

I sort of feel like relying on the Greenmarket is cheating, but we’re still figuring things out here and will be spending a time in NYC for holidays, so I’m giving us a pass. On to the recipe!

This is actually two recipes, one for the gnocchi and another for the sauce. Both are variations on recipes from Lidia’s Family Table, which is a phenomenal resource.

Potato Gnocchi

Makes 4 servings

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it
1.5 lbs	Potatoes		Red Fire Farm CSA
1	Egg	Beaten	Red Fire Farm CSA
2 cups	All purpose flour		Cayuga Pure Organics (NYC Greenmarket)
0.75 TBsp	Salt

Directions

Clean the whole potatoes and place them in a large pot. Fill with enough water to cover the potatoes plus a little headroom. Place on high heat, cover, and allow to boil for about 45 minutes, or until they are tender when poked with a fork but not yet falling apart. Drain the potatoes and let them cool enough to handle.

Rice the potatoes. This can be done either by peeling them and using a potato ricer, or by using a food mill (which will automatically remove and separate the skins). We used the attachment to our Kitchenaid stand mixer, which is actually two attachments, both the food mill attachmentand parts from the meat grinder attachment. It’s kind of complicated to put together, but it’s a real labor and time-saver. I wish we had taken pictures of the milling process (and construction), but we had just gotten back from Thanksgiving and were cooking for company coming over, so we were in a bit of a time pinch. Next time!

Rice / mill the potatoes on a sheet pan. Using a rubber spatula, mush and spread them out over the pan. Sprinkle the salt over the layer of potato. Let it cool and dry for lat least 20 minutes (up to however long you feel like it!).

Pour the beaten egg over the potato and then layer on the flour. [At this point in our timeline I finished the unpacking and cleaning up and made it to the kitchen to help, with the camera!] Start with about 1 cup of flour.
Using the rubber spatula, fold the bottom layer of the potato over the top around the edges. Repeat (gently) a few times until it begins to resemble a loose dough. Gradually add more flour until you have a kneadable dough. If you don’t add enough flough, the gnocchi will fall apart when cooked…but they’ll still be tasty!
Using your hands, finish the kneading process by making the dough slightly more consistent. Sprinkle on more flour if necessary and knead it in. It should feel more like a dough than mashed potatoes. Shape it into a ball and cut it into quarters.
Clean and lightly flour a work surface. (Up until now you could do it all on the sheet pan.) Roll out each quarter of the dough in an 18 inch rope. Cut each rope in half to make them easier to work with.
Cut each portion into pieces between 2/3 of an inch to 1 inch. Have a floury sheet pan nearby to start collecting the shaped gnocchi.
To give the gnocchi its classic shape, hold a fork so that the tines are facing downwards and push each piece onto the fork near where the tines join. The tines will make an impression on the one side and your finger will create a slight indentation on the other side. Then, roll the gnocchi off the end of the fork to make it more cylindrical and to create the tine impressions all around. Rumor is that eventually you can do this in one motion. I’m not there yet.
Once all of the gnocchi are shaped and on the sheet pan, toss lightly in the flour to avoid sticking and cover them with a towel. They should be boiled immediately at this point or frozen. They don’t sit around well in this form. Bring a large pot of water to boil (get this started in advance if you remember).

Using a kitchen skimmer / spider or slotted spoon, drop 5 or 6 gnocchi in the boiling water at a time. This is important because the water needs to be at the boiling temperature to form the “skin” that will hold the gnocchi together. The more gnocchi pieces are added to the water at one time, the more the temperature will drop and the longer it will take to recover. Limiting the number of pieces is annoying but in the end it will be easier and you will get better results.

Leave each batch in the water for 2 – 3 minutes, until they plump up a bit a float to the surface. Fish them out with your skimmer, but be gentle with them! Cooking for too long will lead to mush, so don’t be afraid to pull them out a few at a time as they float.

Simple Tomato Sauce

Makes a lot

Amount	Ingredient	Preparation	Where we bought it
2 quarts	San Marzano / plum tomatoes	Previously canned (2 quart jars)	Cherry Lane Farms
1	Large onion	Diced (about 1.5 – 2 cups)	Red Fire Farm CSA
1	Medium celeriac	Diced (about 1.5 – 2 cups)	Enterprise Farm (Somerville Winter Farmers Market)
3 TBsp	Olive oil
2 cups	Water
2	Dried bay leaves
1	Dried chile	Crumbled (substitute 1-2 tsp red pepper flakes)	Northshire Farm chiles dried last summer
1 tsp	Kosher salt

Directions

Place the oil in a Dutch oven or large pot over medium-high heat. Once it’s heated, add the diced onion and celeriac (or you can substitute carrot, celery, etc.). Cook, stirring frequently, for 3-4 mintes. You want them to soften but not brown. [Note: we made this sauce using our own canned tomotoes. You can use store-bought canned San Marzanos, if you must.]
Add the tomatoes, salt, bay leaves, and red pepper flakes. Swish the water around the tomato jar or can to get out the last bits and dump it into the pot. Turn up the heat, cover, and bring the sauce to a boil. Check on it and stir frequently.

Once it boils, turn the heat down to medium / medium-high to maintain a bubbling simmer. Cover and cook for 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. At this point you can continue simmering and cooking down for as long as you like, up to an hour. When the sauce is as thick as you want, remove the bay leaves, blend with a hand mixer to your desired consistency, and add salt to taste

We served our gnocchi and sauce with another round of our arugula, beet, and peach salad. We quenched our thirst with some delicious cider from Eve’s Cidery and capped it off with little parfaits of home-canned cherries in wine and whipped cream. Yum! Nothing better than an impromptu Sunday dinner with good friends.

How to Pit a Cherry with a Paper Clip (Video)

Lindsay — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 21:24:34 +0000

Get ready for some MacGyver moves. If you ever find yourself without a cherry pitter and have 9 pounds of cherries to prepare for canning, just grab a paper clip and open it up to make a “hook” on each end. The first few cherries will be a little awkward, but after that you’ll get the motion down and fly through the pile. I was really surprised at how well it worked! It was also pretty satisfying to keep one more uni-tasking kitchen tool out of our apartment, although I suppose you could use a cherry pitter for olives too.

If you’re a little nutty about presentation like I am, you’ll also like that using a paper clip to pit cherries only makes one hole in the fruit, leaving it prettier for pies and cocktails. I even slipped the pit through the hole created by the stem without even tearing the cherry a couple of times. One cautionary note, though, also for people worried about appearances. My hands turned, as you can see, a really sexy shade of blue pretty quickly. They stayed that way for a few hours, but were almost clean the next morning after a fairly standard amount of hand washing. I think a regular pitter would be cleaner, but not nearly as fun.

Why Buy? DIY! Hand, Body, and Face Lotion

Lindsay — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:56:54 +0000

I had been scrutinizing labels for the last year or so, trying to find products without petrochemicals, chemicals that mess with hormones, or shady business practices. I could find one of the three, maybe two, but not all three. And they were EXPENSIVE! And tiny, so the bathroom trash was filling up with little empty bottles.

As a reaction to all that, I decided to give my sister-in-law a bunch of homemade spa-type products last Christmas. While searching for recipes, I realized that lotion is really only three ingredients. THREE! Not 20 ingredients that are nearly impossible to pronounce (octinoxate, anyone?). Just beeswax, oil (almond and sunflower are good), and water. Done. Even better, we make local lotion, since we get both sunflower oil and beeswax at the greenmarket.

This is a technique, not a recipe. I’ve put some ratios at the bottom, but the basic idea is that more beeswax will make a thicker lotion. If you want to use a pint-sized Mason jar on your blender to minimize clean up, keep the total volume at 15 ounces or less, so that there is enough room in the jar for everything to move around. We made a pump dispenser out of a Mason jar, which means this process is easy peasy for us now.

**Update: our homemade pumped only lasted a few months. We replaced it by purchasing a lid-pump for a mason jar. A few options available on Amazon are here, here, here, and if you still want to make your own, this will help.

Lotion Technique

Grate the beeswax with a microplane or other grater. The finer you grate it, the quicker it will melt.
Note, although we used the small blocks pictured, as time went on we upgraded to using a one-pound block of beeswax, which is both easier to grate and more economical. We bought ours at the greenmarket, but you can find similar ones online. Even if you make this lotion regularly, a single block will last you 1-2 years at a minimum.
Measure the oil into a Pyrex cup and add the beeswax.
Put the measuring cup into a pot and add enough water to come up to the level of the oil.
Heat the pot until the water simmers gently. Continue the simmer until the beeswax melts. Remove from heat and allow it to cool until you can touch the measuring cup.
Pour the water into a regular mouth pint jar and add the cooled oil/beeswax.
Add essential oils to the jar, if desired.
Screw on the blender pieces and blend on low until everything is emulsified (pulsing helps). It will go very quickly from separated to a creamy white lotion. You might want to open the jar and give it a stir to free up any water that might not be getting down to the blades.

Yep, that’s it.

For a rich hand cream, we use 6 ounces of oil, 3 of beeswax (6 tablespoons), and 6 of water (all volume).
For a body and face lotion that will work in a pump dispenser, we use 6 ounce of oil, 1 of beeswax (2 tablespoons), and 8 of water.

We add about 30 drops of essential oil for fragrance – lately half lavendar and half geranium.

Go forth and blend!