DDC, Week Four: Game Hen and Vegetables

Cooking for myself this week-- no siblings, no housemates (although I hope they will help with the leftovers!).

One of my co-workers alerted me to a place to get local poultry (yay!), so I decided to see what I could find in stores. While I couldn't find chicken (my original plan), I did find cornish game hens at New Leaf. Because I was cooking for myself, I only had to pick up one-- a good thing, considering that Christmas shopping left me if not broke, then at least depleted in funds. I am incredibly pleased with the way this turned out, though, so I will likely cook it again later in the year.

Game hen: Farm to Family
Butter: Strauss
Parsley: SC Downtown farmer's market (given to me by a friend; I don't know exactly where it came from)
Potatoes, golden beets, chiogga beets, parsnips, carrots: New Leaf (all local farms, but I didn't write down specifically which ones)
Turnips: Happy Boy Farms
Olive oil: Bariani
Salt: Eatwell Farms
Pepper: exception

DDC, Week Three: Shepherd's Pie

Memo to self: don't cook when you're exhausted.

This one took way longer than it should have-- both to prep/cook, and to decide on. My younger brother (and housemate) works at New Leaf, which is where I picked up most of the ingredients for this. I wandered around the store one night for about half an hour, trying to figure out what I wanted to make. At the meat department, my choices were fairly limited: the beef was from Humboldt, but everything else was out of state. Humboldt isn't exactly within my 150-mile radius, but it is, at least, in the same half of the state as I am. I'd been wanting to make shepherd's pie for a while, so I decided to go for that-- I picked up potatoes, carrots, parsnips (thank you, New Leaf, for labeling the origins of your produce!) and cheddar cheese, then went home to cook. Overall, it went fine, but I wish I'd had a bit more time to think and plan this one.

...for one thing, if I'd planned, I would have remembered that I actually had some local ground beef in my freezer. So this ended up an imperfect meal, but a tasty one.

Intentions

It seems that the more I cook, the less I blog. In the past few weeks, I've made a lot of food-- cheese twice, Italian sausage, lemon-ginger-honey jelly and persimmon butter, caramels. Unfortunately, I have been without camera and without a lot of time for most of the cooking that I've done, and a lot of it has been done on deadline. When I made caramels, for example, I made the second batch about half an hour before the friend who was picking them up from me arrived.

I have made one more of the Dark Days meals-- shepherd's pie!-- and have plans for my next (game hen and vegetables, om nom nom), but I still need to post about them. Soon, soon, soon.

DDC Week Two: Spaghetti

Week two!


Nothing too adventurous, yet-- both this week's spaghetti and last week's beef stew are things that I cook regularly, just shifted a bit more locally.

This time around, my exceptions were pepper and parmesan cheese, neither of which I could source locally-- I really, really love parmesan cheese. Other than that:

Pasta: Spaghetti from the Santa Cruz Pasta Factory (note: I'm not sure where they get their flour, but their website says that they source ingredients locally whenever they can)

Sauce: My own, made this summer with tomatoes from Happy Boy Farms and my dad's garden. Two new rules for next summer: I am not allowed to talk myself out of buying flats of tomatoes, and I am not allowed to open my canned sauce until after tomatoes are no longer available at the farmer's markets. Because these were my last jars of home-made organic sauces, and it's only December. Technically, I still have a jar of yellow tomato sauce, but I feel like I should save that for something really special. We'll see.

Meat: ground beef from this place in Cayucas-- I don't remember the name, but will look it up next time I use some. Woo!

Salt: Farmhouse Culture

Olive Oil: Bariani, from Sacramento

Pepper: exception

Parmesan: excepetion

Although this is not the most daring, new, and exciting of meals, my housemates seemed to really enjoy it, at least based on the amount of leftovers!

Dinner didn't happen until quite late tonight, because my friend Laurel and I spent most of the day out shopping. I managed to only buy one thing for myself: a new ice cream maker! My old ice cream maker has been surviving, zombie-like, for the last six months or so-- one of my housemates tried to wash it out, and ended up draining about half of the freezing fluid. So while it could almost freeze everything, it fell just short, leading to oddly-textured ice creams and syrupy sorbets. NO LONGER! I have a new ice-cream maker, and it is shiny and red.

DDC, Week One: Beef Stew

I think that I've been planning to make this version of this stew for longer than I've been signed up for the Dark Days Challenge.

It's essentially the same as the stew posted here, only made with locally-sourced ingredients. My main exception, overall, is pepper-- I've managed to find local salt and olive oil, so I'm pretty set other than that, and a few things (like parmesan cheese) that just aren't produced anywhere around here, as far as I know.

Doing this on the central coast of California almost feels like cheating-- we can get a lot of fresh fruits and veggies year-round at the farmer's market, and there are a few stores that continually stock local produce. On the other hand, it is a bit more of a challenge than I had expected, as there are some things I thought would be available that I really can't find (like peas!).

Onions, Carrots- Happy Boy Farms
Bacon- home-cured, pork belly from Fatted Calf
Flour- Massa Organics
Thyme- home-grown
Salt- Farmhouse Culture
Pepper- conventional
Beef, bones for broth- TLC Ranch
Celery- don’t remember, from New Leaf/farm in Hollister
Beer- Devout Stout, from the Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing Company

This one stayed in the oven for a full two hours while I was at practice with the pipe corps, and it was om nom nomfully delicious when I came back-- I had no joy finding local potatoes or barley, which are the two starches I usually use, so I ate this with my favorite bread (whole wheat millet!) from Kelly's French Bakery in Santa Cruz. The onions had almost completely disintegrated, which was fun, and the flavors really came together well. I am sad that I likely won't be able to make this exact thing again, as TLC Ranch (from which I bought the stew beef and the bones for the stock) is no more.

Note: this was actually prepared and cooked on Wednesday, December 1, but I am awful about posting on time (and my camera doesn't like to talk to my Mac, so I had to wait for a different computer to get the photos!). Yes, I am utilizing the magic of back-dating for this entry.

Cheese, Jam, Broth

I'm sorry that I haven't been updating for the last few weeks! It's been work, and Thanksgiving, and while I've done a lot of cooking, I haven't done a lot of photography or anything like that. If you follow me on Facebook, you know a lot of it-- a friend commented to me the other day that from my FB, it looks like I'd have no time to do anything other than cook and eat!

I've been experimenting a lot more with cheese, for example. Within the last two weeks, I've made two batches of chevre, mozzarella, and am currently halfway through a batch of feta (from this recipe; I'm somewhat concerned that it'll stay more creamy than crumbly). This is in part due to discovering the lovely people at Mountain Feed and Farm Supply, up in Ben Lomond, who carry all the cheesemaking supplies a girl could dream of. I was so, so happy to discover them-- the staff is both very friendly and very knowledgeable. They also carry vacuum-sealers, smokers, juicers; in other words, things that I really kinda want. Like, a lot. Also, jars! Pectin! PH testing strips for canning! I could really go on for hours.

My dad has also been doing this thing where almost every time I go down to my parents' house, he gives me a whole lot of homegrown something. So far, it's been shallots, oranges, and dried tomatoes, all from the yard/garden. The oranges are getting eaten, the dried tomatoes became pesto, and the shallots... oh, the shallots.

Let me start by saying that I haven't always loved onions. When I was growing up, my parents would always remind me of my sister, Miranda, who absolutely hated onions-- and for a long time, I was right there with her. Sometime near the end of college, I started using onions when I cooked, and from there, it's been all downhill.

On the other hand, when your dad gives you two pounds of shallots, sometimes it's hard to figure out what to do. Thankfully, I'd been considering making savory jam, so shallot jam it was! I used this recipe (I more than doubled the cooking time after I added the balsamic vinegar, btw, so that it actually had a jam-texture), and we have decided that it tastes good on just about everything. I still have a bunch of shallots left, though-- anyone want some jam? It does look a bit like the creature from the black lagoon, but it tastes sweet and savory and the same time. I am in love.

(Also: the secret to Kelley's tuna sandwiches is, indeed, pickled red onions. Woo!)

Tonight I'm making vegetable broth in preparation for the Dark Days Challenge, about which I am incredibly excited. I've managed to find local ingredients for just about everything I need to make beef stew, so that'll be the first thing I make. I'm very excited about this challenge; it'll be the first time I've participated in something like this!

Sometimes, it's the journey

That sounds really pretentious.

At least some of the time, though, it's true-- sometimes the cheese doesn't cheese, or you spend five hours making something that will be eaten in... rather less than that, or what have you.

This, for example, is my second batch of goat cheese resolutely not becoming cheese. I did everything right this time! I didn't mess with it! And yet, somehow, after two days of straining through cheesecloth in the fridge, I ended up with cheese spread, not a firmer cheese. This is totally and completely fine. It's going to be delicious (roast garlic, mmm), but it's not what I was necessarily looking for. I guess next time, it's back to the OMG, must add more rennet/citric acid/agh what can I put in this cheese. Because sometimes, the process tells you that it's okay to mess with things, that you were totally right about the curds needing to be bigger and the whey to be clearer.

And then sometimes you spend all afternoon watching something (pretty) closely, and it turns out that it is both a) gorgeous, and b) totally going to be under-appreciated. This, my friends, is my lovely tomato paste, made from the tomatoes I bought last Saturday from Happy Boy Farms. I made yellow tomato sauce this summer (see below!), and while I usually like to add a can of tomato paste to my sauces for texture, and so they're less like soup, it's entirely impossible to find yellow tomato paste. The box from HBF, though, had several pounds of yellow heirloom tomatoes. So on Sunday, with the beef broth simmering on the stove, I made yellow tomato paste, for the sauce I canned this summer.

I don't know if anyone out there has ever made their own tomato paste, but going from about eight cups of raw cut tomatoes to one half-pint of paste is something of an experience. It's a lesson in patience, in having something else to do when you're waiting and stirring and waiting and checking the heat one more time. Because eventually, you're going to have yellow tomato paste for your yellow tomato sauce, and this winter will be good. (And sometimes, there's also a jar of red tomato paste to be made, as well.)