{"id":5023,"date":"2013-11-13T17:46:16","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T22:46:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/?p=5023"},"modified":"2013-12-06T17:03:25","modified_gmt":"2013-12-06T22:03:25","slug":"cranking-it-out-of-the-kitchen-on-a-snow-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/2013\/11\/cranking-it-out-of-the-kitchen-on-a-snow-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Cranking it Out of the Kitchen On a Snow Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Nothing like pushing your culinary limits. It\u2019s easy for me to get lazy with cooking\u2014doing the same things I\u2019ve always done, especially if I can do them blindfolded when I\u2019m in a tired or harried state. But God and circumstances and magazine editors are constantly presenting me with nifty challenges that keep me from getting too complacent. That\u2019s a good thing. Lately I\u2019ve been pushing on a couple fronts.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yesterday it snowed here. A flurry or two wouldn\u2019t be such a crazy thing in November, but the fact that two inches stuck to the ground, and was still hanging around here this morning, is a little strange. I took some photos of snowy nasturtiums to post on my Facebook page; they seemed so pretty in an incongruous kind of way.<\/p>\n

I like snow days, because they force me to stay inside and do my house-y, kitchen-y (and okay, computer-y) stuff. In the case of yesterday, it was a very good thing, as I was right on top of my deadline to develop six recipes for Vegetarian Times<\/em><\/a>. I mentioned this assignment a few weeks ago<\/a>, but I bring it up again, because the topic definitely fell squarely into the culinary challenge (culinarily challenging?) department. My charge was to develop recipes featuring (or at least including) the often discarded parts of veggies, including carrot tops, broccoli leaves, radish greens, celery leaves, chard stems, and beet greens. As it happens, I\u2019ve developed recipes with chard stems and beet greens in the past, but around here, most of the rest of these goodies go straight to the chickens. When a farmstand customer offers to remove her carrot tops and leave them for the hens, I am only too happy. The more green stuff the chickens eat, the better their eggs.<\/p>\n

But now that I\u2019ve made carrot top pesto (really delicious), stir-fried broccoli leaves (the new kale?), and lemon-ginger-ized radish greens, I\u2019m all excited. Those broccoli leaves, I\u2019m telling you, are delicious. I did have a brief setback, though, which got me thinking about food waste: Many of these veggies are not available in the grocery store in their \u201cnatural\u201d state. In other words, the greens are removed. (On the Island, the extras are likely composted or donated to pig farmers, but I hate to think about how much of this stuff goes into landfill in some circumstances, just because the leaves are wilted.) Broccoli is especially denuded these days. You can hardly get it with the stalk still attached (and the stalk is delicious, too), much less with anything more than a few leaves on it. (Farm stands, farmers\u2019 markets, and any natural grocery offering local produce will be a different story.) And if you\u2019ve ever seen broccoli growing in a field, you know that it\u2019s kind of all about the leaves.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Yesterday I went down to Morning Glory Farm<\/a> and they ever so kindly sent someone out from the farm store to the (snowy) field across the street to cut two large broccoli heads\u2014with stalk and lots \u2018o leaves\u2014for me to play with. They were so beautiful that I didn\u2019t want to cut them up. In the end I only used a small amount of the leaves in my recipe (which I then tried to photograph in the snow\u2014here\u2019s an outtake!!), but I saved a whole bag of leaves from just one head to put in soups and stir-fries over the next week.<\/p>\n

However, I\u2019m not sure we\u2019ll be having a soup or a stir-fry any time soon. In Part Two of my current culinary challenge, I am trying to make my way through at least one piece of pork from the freezer every week. (For those who don\u2019t know, we raised two pigs this summer, which we unfortunately named. So now when we have pork chops for dinner, the question always comes up: Is this a Dozer chop or a Wilbur chop? Yikes.)<\/p>\n

This week I\u2019ve gone overboard. I made meatloaf with ground pork first, then finally got a huge pork butt (that\u2019s actually shoulder meat) defrosted enough to cut it into pieces and concoct a chili-ish stew in the slow-cooker. Wouldn\u2019t you know it, though, I\u2019m not too crazy about how it came out\u2014my spice mix wasn\u2019t quite right. But we are eating it anyway\u2014last night in burritos, and tonight in, who knows?<\/p>\n

But the really good news is that I had enough sense to reserve some of the pork butt meat and pork fat to make breakfast sausage\u2014and it turned out absolutely delicious. This is probably our best effort so far with the pork. Not that making our first-ever homemade bacon from the belly wasn\u2019t very cool and fun (did that a few weeks ago), but it came out a bit salty, so there\u2019s room for improvement there. But today I used Bruce Aidell\u2019s Brown Sugar and Sage Breakfast Pattie recipe from his Complete Book of Pork<\/em><\/a>, and it was perfect. I made the mistake earlier in the fall of trying to make sausage from already ground pork, but the grind and the ratio of fat to meat is all wrong for sausage. You have to start with some pork meat (preferably butt) and some (actually a little more than some) pork fat. You don\u2019t need a grinder though; I chilled the meat and fat and chopped in the food processor as instructed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Roy was pretty excited about the sausage, too. In fact, we\u2019re both kind of surprised and delighted by how much of our own food we\u2019re eating. Roy said to me last night that next year is canning and preserving year. Okey dokey, Roy. Now, all we need is the cow for milk, and we\u2019ll never have to go to the grocery store again. (The cow and a whole lot more time.)<\/p>\n

In the meantime, I\u2019m reading more and more about the benefits of fermented food, so I may have to try making kimchi. But I think next up is something I can wrap my head around a little more easily\u2014roasted pumpkin pie. The only problem is that the only ripe Sugar Pie pumpkins we have left are the ones from Libby\u2019s garden. I\u2019ll have to ask her if she\u2019ll loan me one. Should be okay\u2014Libby likes a good experiment in the kitchen!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nothing like pushing your culinary limits. It\u2019s easy for me to get lazy with cooking\u2014doing the same things I\u2019ve always done, especially if I can do them blindfolded when I\u2019m in a tired or harried state. But God and circumstances and magazine editors are constantly presenting me with nifty challenges that keep me from getting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[115,14],"tags":[50,153],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5023"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5023"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5083,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5023\/revisions\/5083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}