harvest

Spring Soup

/ makingofahome / 3 Comments

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have a bit of a crush on Jamie Oliver.  In fact, this year our Thanksgiving meal featured all dishes we gathered from various Jamie Oliver cookbooks.  I am just in love with his fresh approach to food, and that is why I find myself constantly reaching for one of his recipes time and time again when it comes to feeding my family.

My all time favorite cookbook of his is Jamie at Home:  Cook Your Way to the Good Life.  The cookbook is broken down by season, and also explains how he grows the many vegetables highlighted in the recipes.

Yesterday, when I looked out my kitchen window and saw all of those asparagus sprouts reaching out from beneath the soil, I knew it was time for my favorite spring soup.  The recipe below is an adaptation of a recipe from Jamie at Home by Jamie Oliver.

1 1/2 lbs. asparagus (chopped)

2 white or yellow onions (chopped)

2 leeks (chopped)

2 celery stalks (chopped)

3-4 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 lb fresh spinach

3 quarts stock (You can use any stock of your choice here, depending on your preference.  The soup I made last night featured pork stock.)

salt and pepper to taste

Put the olive oil in a large stock pot and heat over medium to high heat.  Then add your onions, leeks, and celery.  Cook until the veggies are tender, but not browning.  Add the chopped asparagus and spinach.  Stir a bit more until the asparagus is warmed and the spinach begins to wilt.  Then add your stock, cover the pot and turn down the heat.  Let the mixture simmer for about 10-15 minutes.  Take the lid off and run an immersion blender through the soup.  Salt and pepper to taste.

I normally then poach some fresh eggs and add those to the soup once it has been dished up.

Enjoy!

 

Breakfast for Dinner

/ makingofahome / 1 Comment

Yesterday I decided to have an impromptu rummage sale, so by the time the sale ended and the left over items were boxed up, it was dinner time and I had nothing in my arsenal ready to go.  It was actually my oldest daughter who said, “I know Mom, we should have breakfast for dinner!  It is fast, and my favorite!”

Well by golly that was a fabulous idea!  So breakfast it was:  pancakes, scrambled eggs and fruit salad.  I have come to adore my pancake recipe, and I wanted to share it with you today.  It takes under ten minutes from start to finish, so it is a perfect homemade dish to prepare when you are crunched for time.

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

2 tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 T oil (I use an organic canola)

1 egg

1 cup milk

Enjoy!

This Week

/ makingofahome / 3 Comments

This week I will remember…

~eating fresh asparagus from our garden…in March!

~listening to local farmers speak so passionately about being stewards of the land.

~tiny hands cutting fruits and vegetables.

~sweating, while in a sleeveless shirt, pulling weeds in my garden…again, in March!

~bird song drifting through my windows.

~raspberry green sun tea.

~eating outdoors for the majority of our meals this week.

~sharing a meal with my family at an amazing restaurant that serves delicious local food. Yum!

~searching for a great new read.

~my girls, sitting in their own petite rocking chairs, reading books for over an hour.

~exciting new changes coming about for our family.

I hope all of you had a great week!  Enjoy your weekend!

Completely

/ makingofahome / 6 Comments

Yesterday we embarked upon a new adventure in our household:  the girls made dinner!  From start to finish (with a little help from Mom with some knife skills and boiling water), they created and prepared our entire evening meal.

The three of us girls went to our local natural foods store and I told them they could pick out anything they wanted to use in their dishes for dinner.  What seemed like a very random combination of items to me, ended up turning out just great!  Yet another example of what goes on in those little minds of theirs.

On my two-year old chef’s menu was a fruit salad with watermelon, kiwi, apples and blueberries with a homemade raspberry lime dressing (recipe courtesy of her big sis).

And on my five-year old chef’s menu was a spinach salad with apples and kiwi and a homemade raspberry lime dressing.  (She created the recipe for this dressing completely on her own.  In the store she told me she needed to buy limes to use as the acid with the olive oil in her dressing.  A smart cookie this one is!)  And the main course was her all time favorite:  angel hair pasta with pasture butter sauce.

Rhubarb Goodness

/ makingofahome / 6 Comments

As the rhubarb in my garden continues to flourish (despite the fact that it is only mid-March), I was reminded that I still have a bit of rhubarb frozen in my freezer from last spring.  Last night I decided to make my all-time favorite rhubarb dish with some of last spring’s left overs.

This is an old recipe of my mom’s.  I believe it is adapted from a recipe taken from a church cookbook of some kind, and it is just the most yummy dish imaginable!

Rhubarb Squares

2 cups flour

1 cup butter (softened)

1/2 cup sugar

Blend well and press into an ungreased 9 X13 pan.  Bake at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes.

While that is baking, mix

2 eggs (beaten)

1 1/2 cups sugar

1/2 cup flour

1/2 salt

3-4 cups chopped rhubarb (depending on your love of rhubarb)

Once the crust is done baking, spoon this mixture on to the crust.  Bake for another 35 -40 minutes.

I hope you enjoy this delicious early spring treat!

Simple Solution

/ makingofahome / Leave a comment

In keeping with the theme I seem to have started this week, I wanted to pass along an extremely easy recipe that my family uses at least once a week.  I try to make my family’s bread from scratch, but as we all know, making yeast breads can sometimes be very time consuming. On those nights when time is scarce, I always reach for this recipe.

Mix together 2 cups self-rising flour and 1 cup local stone ground wheat flour.  (I also add in 1 scoop of Garden of Life’s Super Seed.  This, of course, could be left out.)

Then add 12 ounces of your favorite beer.  (Maybe you were so inspired by Monday’s post on home brewing that you have some homemade brew on hand to add!) Mix in the beer and then pour the batter into a loaf pan.

I like to sprinkle a bit of brown sugar on the top at this point.  But you could definitely leave that part out.

Bake at 350 degrees for 45-50 minutes.

Enjoy!

Breakfast From Scratch

/ makingofahome / 1 Comment

Apparently I am on a DIY food kick this week!  After writing about our home brewing yesterday, I started to think about the other foods we make from scratch and soon thoughts of our delicious, and incredibly easy to make, granola popped into my mind.

I have been in a constant battle recently for something easy to serve my girls in the mornings when we are a bit rushed.  Of course I would love to make my little ones bacon and eggs or pancakes each morning before school, but we all know that some mornings do not play out the way we wish they could. We all know those mornings…When we wake up late, it seems to take years to get the kids even dressed, let alone to get them to use the bathroom and brush their teeth, and then we have exactly five minutes to eat breakfast before we have to leave for school.  Enter…Homemade granola.

I make my granola in giant batches and store it in an airtight container and it lasts up to several weeks. It is much, much cheaper than buying organic granola in the store, and the best part is that I know every single ingredient in my granola!  There are no long, four-syllable words that only someone with a PhD can decipher.  Just 5 yummy ingredients:

2 lbs organic rolled oats

1 lb raw slivered almonds

12 oz unsulphured, unsweetened coconut

1 lb local honey

cinnamon to taste

And here is the incredibly easy part:  You dump all of the ingredients, except the honey, in a giant bowl.  Mix it.

Put the honey in a small saucepan over low heat and warm just enough to make the honey a bit runny.

Then pour the honey into the dry ingredients.  Mix again.

Bake in batches in a shallow baking dish at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes.  (I stir the granola in the baking dish about every 10 minutes to assure it bakes evenly.)

And that’s it!  I store my granola in the bin pictured above and it lasts a long time.  Let me tell you, I can get A LOT of quick breakfasts out of one of these batches.  It is truly a breakfast time saver!

“I want to make my own thing!”

/ makingofahome / 2 Comments

These are the words that ring throughout our home at least three times a week.  My girls just love to cook and/or bake “their own thing” and yesterday was quite the large step for my oldest daughter.

In the past, she had been content to mix random ingredients together, put it in our counter top convection oven (with Mommy’s help of course), and eat her creations.  Now with that said, she has done quite a bit of experimenting with various flavors and has come up with some delicious combinations, but the creations were random none the less.  But yesterday she said to me, “Mommy, I want to make my own thing, and I want it to be an actual recipe.”

So I decided, why not throw caution to the wind and let her completely take over the kitchen.  With a little bit of my help reading the measurements, she made cut out sugar cookies completely on her own!

Now the crowning moment of this adventure was when it came to the topping for these cookies.  My little five-year old gazed up at me and said, “Mommy I think I am going to sprinkle a little sugar, cinnamon and rosemary  from our garden on top of the cookies.  That way we don’t have to use food coloring or sprinkles with the yucky chemicals.”  (Oh she had just made her mama’s day with that one!) And an fyi…the cinnamon and rosemary combination is one of those flavor combos she came up with during her previous food experiments.  And let me tell you, it is really delicious!

Once she was done with her sprinkles, she sat back, looked approving at her creations and said, “Perfect.  It’s just like Jamie Oliver’s pumpkin muffins when he sprinkles lavender flowers on top for sprinkles!”  (My how this little one impressed me yesterday!)

Pumpkin Scones

/ makingofahome / 1 Comment

As promised yesterday, here is the recipe for the pumpkin scones I made on “Seed Starting Day.”

Mix together the following ingredients in a large bowl:

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

2 tablespoons sugar

4 tablespoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Using a pastry cutter, add 1/3 cup cold butter cut into small pieces.  Make a well in the center of the mixture and set aside.

Next mix the following ingredients in a medium bowl:

2 eggs

½ cup heavy cream

¾ cup pumpkin puree (In the fall my husband halves pie pumpkins and scrapes out all of the seeds.  He then roasts the pumpkin halves on the grill until soft.  I then scoop out the meat of the pumpkin, run it through the food processor, and freeze it for later use in recipes.  This is what I used for this recipe.)

Add egg mixture to dry mixture all at once.  Then stir with a fork until just moistened.

Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and flatten into a circle.  Then cut the dough into wedges.  Separate the wedges as much as possible.

Brush the  wedges with a bit of additional pumpkin puree and sprinkle with additional cinnamon and sugar.

Bake at 400 degrees for 12-14 minutes.  Serve warm.  Enjoy!