recipe

Fried Green Tomatoes…Italian Style

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We have a LOT of green tomatoes this year.  A lot.  So, last night I gave fried green tomatoes a shot.  But instead of serving them up Southern-style, I decided to do a play on eggplant Parmesan. Instead of eggplant, I used some of those green tomatoes covering my countertop.

Italian-Style Fried Green Tomatoes

-Slice 8-10 green tomatoes and set aside.

-Scramble 3 eggs in a small shallow bowl and set aside.

-In a large shallow bowl, mix together 1/2 cup all purpose flour, 1/2 cup corn flour, 1 tablespoon dried basil, 1 tablespoon dried oregano, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon ground pepper, 1 tablespoon garlic powder, 1 teaspoon onion powder.  Set aside.

-Pour about 1/2 inch of oil in the bottom of a frying pan (I used an organic, non-GMO canola oil.).  Heat the pan until very hot.

-Dip each tomato slice in the egg, then the dry mixture and then place in the hot oil.  Allow to cook until brown, flip and cook the other side until brown.  Remove the fried slices from the hot oil and allow to rest on a paper towel for a few seconds before plating.

I served my fried green tomatoes on a bed of pasta, topped with my homemade tomato sauce and freshly grated Parmesan cheese.  Enjoy!

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Forget About It

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It seems as if it has been a very long time since I posted a recipe in this space, so here goes nothing.  As I’ve said a lot over the past few months, finding my grandfather’s recipe box has been a fun adventure filled with cooking experiments and taste tastes.

This particular card has been one I have played around with quite a bit over the past few weeks. And this weekend, after a lot of testing and even more tasting, I think I’ve come up with a great pumpkin bread recipe that allows you to forget about adding in all of that refined sugar and unhealthy oil.  Enjoy!

Pumpkin Bread

1 1/2 cups honey

1 cup coconut oil (melted)

4 eggs

2/3 cup water

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon nutmeg

15 ounces pumpkin puree

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees.  In a large bowl, beat the honey and melted coconut oil with an electric mixer.  Next add the eggs and beat until smooth.  Then add the water and beat mixture again.  Set aside.

In another large bowl, mix both flours, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg.  Add the dry mixture to the wet mixture slowly, beating with an electric mixer.  Finally, beat in the pumpkin puree.  (I add dark chocolate chips at this point sometimes too 🙂 )  Pour into two greased loaf pans.  Bake for 55-65 minutes.

Apple Sauce

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A sure fire sign that fall is upon us is when we start to find apples popping up here and there at the farmers’ markets.  Last week, we found our very favorite farming family at market with their tables loaded down with the most beautiful apples.  There were Cortlands, Jonathans, Honey Crisps, and Crimson Crisps.  Each more delicious than the next.

With all of this goodness to choose from, the girls and I decided it was high time to start making apple sauce.  So yesterday, with much fanfare and hullabaloo, we began our apple-sauce-making soiree.

The girls did all the work, while I took pictures and drunk in the sounds of 2Cellos on the IPad.  They used our very favorite apple peeler/corere/slicer to do the majority of labor, and then took turns adding some yummy local honey and spicy cinnamon to the mix.  We make our apple sauce in our slow cooker, so we just set it and forget it 🙂

A few hours later, once the aroma of the sweet and tangy apples, floral honey and spiced cinnamon fill the air, we have the perfect apple sauce for our family’s liking.  Fall is here.

Our Weekend

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This past weekend we opted to stay close to home because many of us in our little household of four were getting over the lovely beginning-of-the-school-year sniffles. It always seems so odd to me to have a cold in the middle of a ninety degree heat wave, yet that was our particular situation this weekend.  So with lemon tea and honey in hand, we set to having a fun-filled weekend none the less.

The first pumpkins of the season made an appearance at Friday’s market, so we had to buy just a couple.  The girls worked hard all of Saturday morning, digging out the seeds and preparing for some roasted goodness.

While the girls worked hard on the pumpkins, I got busy making my homemade granola. We were able to purchase some delicious home-grown oats from Hazard Free Farms, which helped to make the granola extra yummy.

I also tried another treasure from Grandpa Dit’s recipe box: piccalilli.  I must say, standing in the kitchen over a giant pot of boiling veggies on a ninety-seven degree day was not one of my brightest ideas, but the final result was quite tasty.

And I chopped the day away, getting food ready to put by in the freezer for the winter months.  Andrea Hazzard, from Hazzard Free Farm, gave us a great suggestion for preserving watermelon.  Pour boiling water over a bit of honey, making honey water.  After cooling down the honey water, pour it over diced watermelon until all watermelon is covered.  Then freeze it for enjoyment in the winter months.

Rajah enjoyed finding a new hiding spot.  Oh my.

And Tyler enjoyed some brewing time.  He concocted a batch of caramel creme ale.  Yummy.

I have also been hard at work in the backyard, continuing with our garden expansion.  I am so excited to bring you the finished product in tomorrow’s post.  Hooray!  See you then.

Canning Day

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Mom (standing with hands on hips, a bit overwhelmed):  What am I going to do with all of these vegetables?

Five-year-old Preservation Expert:  Mommy, there is a lot of stuff here.

Mom (hands still on hips, a bit more overwhelmed):  Yeah.  Got it.  I’m still trying to figure out what to make with all of it.

Five-year-old Preservation Expert (with a look of absolute clarity):  I know!  I think we need to have a canning day!  Like, a whole day when all we do is can and freeze stuff for winter.

And so continues a day in the life with a very young child that just gets it.  Of course.  Why wouldn’t we put some of this food by for when the bounty is less?  Sometimes it takes youth to open our eyes to what is right in front of us.  Wonderful suggestion my darling girl.

Here is a walk through our day of food preservation…

{A wonderful new idea I got from this magazine.  What a fabulous idea!}

{Salsa, salsa and more salsa}

{Got to love hot pink fingers for a day.}

{I struck gold this week!  I found my grandfather’s recipe box in the back of my parents’ pantry.  It contains all of his old canning recipes, including his bread and butter pickles, my favorite of all his canning greats.}

Once A Year

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One of my favorite times of the year has arrived, and that my friends is peach time!  I love fresh peaches so much in fact that I only eat them when they are in season, in their absolute prime, in the middle of the August heat.

We buy our peaches locally from a family fruit farm where they grow all of their own peaches in their orchard, and they are to die for.  After the market last week, we ran home and got to work on my favorite pie on earth:  Grandma Dit’s Peach Pie.

I still remember being in about forth grade and I was home sick from school because I was running a high fever.   It was late fall, the time when most schoolchildren begin to fall ill, and I found myself buried beneath the afghan on the couch, watching reruns of Saved By The Bell.  My mom asked me if there was anything she could get me to eat that would make me feel any better.  I told her the only thing that would heal what was ailing me was Grandma’s peach pie.  There were no fresh peaches available in late fall in Rockford, Illinois, so my mom did what any good mother would do.  She improvised.  She went to the grocery store and bought a pre-made peach pie.  I took one bite, spit it out and said, “This is not right.  It’s not the same.  Never mind.”

I don’t know why this story has stuck with me for so long, but I think it is because there is no replacement for real, in-season peach pie, using my grandmother’s recipe.  So here goes…

I make my own crust (recipe found here).  Then I fill it with delicious sliced peaches.

I add about 10 tiny dollops of butter on top of the peaches, and then create a mixture of 1 cup sugar, 4 tablespoons flour and 1 teaspoon cinnamon.  I scoop this mixture over the peaches and butter so the entire pie is coated.  I then add just a touch (about 1/4 cup) of water to the pie.  This creates a delicious custard-like consistency.  Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes and then reduce the heat to 325 degrees for 45 minutes.

I truly hope you enjoy this recipe that I hold so close to my heart.  Enjoy!

Everything But The Kitchen Sink

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As I mentioned yesterday, our garden is quiet the producing machine right now.  The girls and I were in the garden all day yesterday and came out with bucket upon bucket filled with onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, greens, and carrots.

This time of garden abundance reminded me of my favorite summertime dish to make:  gazpacho.  (Gazpacho is a tomato-based soup traditionally served cold.)  You can literally throw in anything and everything you have fresh in your garden, give it a whirl in your food processor and you have a healthy, flavorful dish.  It’s a great way to ensure you are getting all of your veggies in, and it tastes wonderful too.  In our house we like to serve the gazpacho in glasses and drink it like a smoothie, but you could serve it in bowls and eat it with a spoon if you prefer it that way.

In the particular batch I made yesterday, I used:  tomatoes, green and purple sweet peppers, banana peppers, garlic, red onion and cilantro.  I then add salt, pepper and Sriracha (our kitchen could not survive without this stuff) to taste.

A Summer Snack

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We have found ourselves surrounded by fresh veggies.  They lay on every flat surface of our kitchen and sunroom right now and I have been trying to find clever ways to eat this plethora of veg in the freshest way possible.

The biggest issue I seem to run into with my little ones is they need to have the vegetables prepared and ready to go if they are going to eat them.  So, this week I decided whip up a really quick and simple tzatziki dip with cucumbers from our garden.  I then slice up a bunch “dippable” vegetables (carrots, sweet peppers, small tomatoes) and store them in a sealed container.  Now any time a member of the family gets that urge to snack, there is a nice healthy snack waiting for them in the fridge.

{A little work from a friendly fairy always helps a bit too 🙂 }

For my tzatziki, I mix together:  Greek yogurt, cucumbers (seeds removed and diced), fresh or dried oregano, onion powder, fresh lemon juice, salt and pepper.  I just taste along the way and adjust my amounts accordingly.

Tomato Time

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Sorry for stepping away for a day, but my garden work kept me detained a bit longer than I thought when I was writing on Monday morning.  The tomatoes are in full swing  and I seemed to have gotten lost amongst the vines for a very long time before resurfacing and realizing that most of my day had passed me by.

This is the first year that we have not planted any slicing tomatoes.  We planted only small cherry-type tomatoes (Juliets and Mexican Midgets) for the girls to snack on, and paste tomatoes (Viva Italias, Speckled Romans and Amish Pastes) to use for tomato sauces and salsas.  What I didn’t realize about these types of plants is how many more fruits they produce compared to slicing tomatoes.  Oh my.  On Monday afternoon while I was picking, I found 4-6 ripe tomatoes, 6-8 I’m-almost-ready tomatoes, and about 20 addition green tomatoes just waiting to get ripe.  That is also not factoring in that each plant still has about 20-30 blossoms.  Apparently the tomatoes have done just fine with all of this heat.

So what to do with all of these lovely tomatoes?  Tomato sauce it is!  I love, love, love making tomato sauce.  I have no idea why I cherish this activity so very much, maybe its my Italian roots, but I look forward to this activity come late July each and every year.

Yesterday I woke up early to begin this favorite task of mine.  I went out to the herb garden, enjoyed the cool damp air from the rain the night before, and spent some time in meditation just picking oregano and basil.  It was a great start to my morning.  Then with coffee at the ready, and ingredients laid out, I went to work.  And what lovely work it was, in the quite of the morning before anyone else awoke to begin their day.  Ah.

My Tomato Sauce

I kind of fly by the seat of my pants with this recipe as (much like with my pesto). I first put a good amount of olive oil in the bottom of a stock pot.  I then add garlic and onion (chopped) and I cook that down until the onions become translucent, but not brown.

I then add my chopped tomatoes and my fresh oregano and basil.  I add a bit of salt and pepper at this point, cover the pot and let it cook over medium heat for about 15 minutes.  I then remove the lid and allow to cook for another hour or so.

At this point, I run a hand blender through the sauce (I don’t strain my seeds.  I know all the Nanas out there may turn their nose at this 🙂 )  Add more salt and pepper to taste.  Then I bring the sauce down to a simmer and leave it for several hours.  I stir it every once in a while to keep the bottom from sticking.  At the very end I add a bit of butter to cut the acidy taste.

I freeze my sauce as opposed to canning it because I find it hard to stick to an exact recipe, which is so very important to do if you are canning.  I normally freeze my sauce in wide-mouth glass quart jars filled about 2 inches from the top of the jar (to allow for expansion during freezing.)