More autumn color? Here.
More beagle Bert? Here.
More haybarn? Here.
© FarmgirlFare.com, best seat in the house.
Tuesday, October 18
Monday, October 17
Sunday, October 16
Sunday Dose of Cute: Bringing in the Sheep
Last spring my hunky farmguy Joe and I decided we would start spending part of each Sunday working the sheep. We've been really good about sticking to our schedule, and in all these months we've only blown off a couple of weeks.
Since sharing a farm with dozens of critters (current count: 78) means we live in a constant state of surprise, uncertainty, and the total inability to do almost anything at a designated time, keeping to this new routine has been nothing short of miraculous, especially since working the sheep is not something we really look forward to doing.
Since sharing a farm with dozens of critters (current count: 78) means we live in a constant state of surprise, uncertainty, and the total inability to do almost anything at a designated time, keeping to this new routine has been nothing short of miraculous, especially since working the sheep is not something we really look forward to doing.
More photos and story below. . .
Friday, October 14
Recipe: Easy and Healthy Roasted Eggplant with (or without) Red Onion and Sweet Red Peppers
How to roast eggplant? Just dice it up, toss with a little olive oil, and pop it in the oven. This healthy way to cook eggplant is so simple, yet so flavorful.
When it comes to food I often tend to go overboard. I serve dinner salads that guests assume are meant to feed the entire table. I bake enormous cookies. I currently have 14 jars of organic peanut butter in my pantry.
More than once I've been declared the "highest grocery receipt of the month" at Trader Joe's, although in my defense the store is 200 miles away and I only get to shop there a couple of times a year. The checkers say things like, "Wow, you must really like cheese," and "Just how many cats do you have?" When they raise an eyebrow at the twelve pounds of organic carrots, I mention our seven donkeys.
So it wasn't surprising that when I moved from a tiny urban lot in Northern California to a sprawling Missouri farm back in 1994, my organic kitchen garden grew from around 60 square feet to about 10,000. I planted something like 174 different kinds of herbs, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, almost all of them started from seed. The gardening magazine editor who asked me to send him a complete planting list called my efforts "ambitious."
I've scaled back since then.
I'd never grown—or even cooked—eggplant before moving to Missouri, but the 20 plants in my first year's garden (what was I thinking?) rewarded me with a bumper crop. I ended up turning the majority of my harvest into caponata during a several month long canning rampage, but when I called the 800 canning hotline number for processing directions, I was sternly informed that I couldn't put up jars of caponata.
"Oh, yes I can!" I said, hanging up and taking my chances. (I lived.)
It would have been easier on everyone if I'd just roasted all that eggplant, which is what I did with the 15 beautiful dark purple ones I recently bought from our Amish neighbors.
Recipe below. . .
Thursday, October 13
Wednesday, October 12
Wordless Wednesday Dose of Cute
More Wordless Wednesday? Here.
More Little Dee Dee? Here.
More sheep? Baaaa!
© FarmgirlFare.com, where my hunky farmguy Joe likes to point out—usually while he's unsuccessfully trying to flip her over onto her butt so we can trim her hooves—that there's nothing little about Little Dee Dee anymore. But that's her name and I'm sticking to it.
Monday, October 10
Monday Dose of Cute: Moving Day (One of Many)
Moving across the farmyard, rather than across town or across the country, is both good and bad.
Good: There isn't that one big exhausting moving day.
Bad: There isn't that one big exhausting moving day.
We actually started moving into our new home, which has been under construction for 8½ years, last year (we've been paying as we go and doing a lot of the work ourselves). The washing machine and a couple of new chest freezers went over, we started filling up the big walk-in pantry, we carted over various boxes and plastic tubs of stuff.
We began sleeping in the new house (which Joe says we need to just start calling 'the house') in August, the night before our new fancy air conditioning system broke for the third extremely exasperating time. Cross your fingers it's finally fixed (now that we don't need air conditioning).
More below. . .
Sunday, October 9
Saturday, October 8
Saturday Quick Dose of Cute: Under Cover
Farm cats find all the best spots to hang out.
Want to see more of Kit Kat Kate? She's tucked over here.
More firewood photos? They're stacked back here.
© FarmgirlFare.com, black and white and cute all over—and almost time to head out into the woods to start cutting and stacking this year's heat.
Friday, October 7
Thursday, October 6
Recipe: Healthy 100% Whole Grain Carrot, Raisin, and Zucchini Bran Muffins with No Cereal
Can you freeze shredded or grated zucchini? Yes! And there's nothing to it. One of my most popular posts this time of year is How To Freeze Zucchini and Summer Squash (and My One Claim to Fame).
Hopefully someday I'll actually have a surplus of zucchini (and be able to give up my one claim to fame), but in the meantime, Farmgirl Fare readers offer advice for using frozen shredded zucchini in this thread on the Farmgirl Fare Facebook page. If you have any tips to share, please join in the conversation! And if you make these muffins with frozen zucchini, I'd love to hear about it.
These moist and healthy muffins are sweetened with honey and/or molasses and are made without bran cereal.
A lot of my favorite foods taste great but don't photograph all that well, like Kohlrabi Purée, or this Slow Roasted Dutch Oven Lamb with Tomatoes, Onions, Rosemary, and Red Wine. And bran muffins.
So forget the photos and just go mix yourself up a batch of this new version of my super popular 100% Whole Grain Bran Muffins. They're flavorful and moist, packed with healthy vegetables and fiber goodness (but you don't have to tell anybody that part), freeze beautifully, are made without bran cereal and processed sugar, and taste really good.
With all that going for you, who needs to look good in pictures?
One of the best things about having a food and farm blog is hearing from readers all over the world who not only love to cook but are also interested in knowing where their food comes from. Karen Perry Stillerman is one Farmgirl Fare fan who goes a step beyond just caring.
She's a senior analyst (and new blogger!) for the Food & Environment program of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington D.C., the leading science-based nonprofit organization working for a cleaner environment and a safer world. What began as a collaboration between students and faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 is now an alliance of more than 250,000 citizens and scientists.
The goals of the UCS Food & Environment program are "to promote sustainable agriculture practices like organic and pasture-based systems while eliminating harmful 'factory farming' methods and strengthening government oversight of genetically engineered food."
Sounds like good work to me. Check out their most recent report, Market Forces: Creating Jobs through Public Investment in Local and Regional Food Systems. Yes!
One summer Karen wrote to say that she had become so addicted to my blueberry bran muffin recipe that she went and picked 15 pounds of blueberries at a U-Pick farm in Maryland and froze them so she could keep herself in muffins all winter. (Find U-Pick farms in your area at PickYourOwn.org, which includes international listings.)
A few months later she told me about her new apple blueberry version and said, "I'm starting to think that I can put just about anything in those muffins, and they'll turn out to be delicious!" This adaptation of her carrot, raisin, and zucchini variation helps to prove the point.
Recipe below. . .
Wednesday, October 5
Tuesday, October 4
Monday, October 3
Monday Dose of Cute: No Dumb Clucks Here
"I'm surprised Cheeky and Mr. Fancy Pants can even still walk," my hunky farmguy Joe said one evening as we were finishing up chores and tucking in the chickens for the night.
"Why?"
"Because they spent the whole afternoon following me around while I mowed the grass, feasting on all the bugs I scared up. They've been eating non-stop for hours."
"That's pretty cute—and smart."
"Oh, those two know where the good stuff is alright."
A few days later I was able to see them in action myself—and couldn't stop laughing at the whole scene.
Lots more photos below. . .
Friday, September 30
Friday Dose of Cute: Got Any Weekend Plans?
Or will you just be hanging out?
© FarmgirlFare.com, where I'm seeing a batch of easy chocolate biscotti and maybe some buttery little cranberry scones in our future, with mugs of steaming tea and big cups of coffee with lots of steamed milk—and plenty of donkey treats of course.
Thursday, September 29
Recipe: Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread Made with Fresh Tomatoes and Basil & a Few of My Favorite Bread Books
Fresh tomatoes & basil in freshly baked bread—a winning combo (recipe here)
This interesting yet easy sourdough bread recipe says hello! to hearty bread baking season while waving goodbye to two iconic flavors of summer. Chopped fresh tomatoes take the place of most of the water, and the whole wheat flour adds flavor and depth.
If you have a sourdough starter living in your fridge, this is a fun way to use it. I created my starter years ago using the simple directions in one of my favorite bread books, Bread Alone: Bold Fresh Loaves from Your Own Hands, written by my bread baking hero, Daniel Leader.
Daniel's second book, Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers is wonderful, too—and includes several authentic European sourdough starter recipes. Part travelogue, part bread making class, and part gastronomic history lesson, it's the culmination of dozens of trips to Europe over the past two decades in search of bakers who are still using time-honored methods and ingredients to create loaves unique to their towns and cities.
Bread Alone is also the title of one of my favorite novels, a bestseller written by my friend Judi Hendricks and so named because she loves Daniel Leader's book as much as I do. I just finished reading Judi's Bread Alone for the fifth or sixth time, and now I'm rereading the sequel, The Baker's Apprentice. (Meet Judi and her adorable dog Blue in the short video, 'A Writer's Life'.)
Warning: these books all make you want to bake bread!
Not up for starting sourdough just yet? My simple homemade pizza dough recipe is a great place to start with yeast, and my Farmhouse White is an easy sandwich bread recipe that's pefect for beginners.
You might also enjoy my Ten Tips on How To Bake Better Artisan Breads at Home, which includes several other bread books I really like. And you'll find more of my favorite bread recipes in the Farmgirl Fare Recipe Index.
Do have any favorite novels that feature bread or baking?
© FarmgirlFare.com, where freshly baked bread never goes out of season—and I'd better get back to baking tonight's loaves.
Wednesday, September 28
Recipe: Middle Eastern Vegetable Salad (Fattoush) with Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Chickpeas, Feta, Fresh Basil, Parsley, and Mint
Even if you forget the traditional toasted pita bread, this simple and flavorful tomato salad still tastes great.
Autumn is in the air, and green tomato season has begun. My two most popular posts right now are Got Green Tomatoes? Try My Super Simple, No Sugar, Salsa-Like, Green Tomato Relish Recipe and How To Ripen Green Tomatoes Indoors the Really Easy Way. Gardeners are getting desperate.
We had a crisp 38 degrees on the farm Monday morning, but I'm not giving up on more vine-ripened tomatoes just yet. My six late-planted Roma tomato plants started flowering during the extended heat wave that lasted half the summer, so it was too hot for them to set fruit. The blossoms all simply dropped off, but now the sprawling vines are loaded with fat green tomatoes.
It's back up in the 80s, and our Missouri Octobers are often mild, so I'm hopeful that at least some of the green tomatoes will soak up the sun and turn red.
I need to make more of this salad.
I need to make more of this salad.
I finally stopped making the Greek Style Panzanella with Kalamata Homemade Croutons I've practically lived on this summer, but only because my three enormous volunteer cherry tomato plants quit producing.
Now I'm hooked on another tomato salad recipe from Barefoot Contessa How Easy Is That? Fabulous Recipes & Easy Tips. I'm really loving this cookbook.
Recipe below. . .
Sunday, September 25
Sunday Dose of Cute: Take a Wild Guess
Who stayed up all night guarding the sheep against coyotes and monsters. . .
Lots more photos below. . .
Saturday, September 24
Friday, September 23
Tuesday, September 20
Recipe: Easy Rosemary Focaccia (Italian Flatbread) with White Wine and Pecorino Romano or Parmesan
Are you new to bread baking? This scrumptious focaccia is a great place to start, and so is my easy pizza dough recipe. My popular Farmhouse White is a basic white sandwich bread that's perfect for beginners. You might also find my Ten Tips on How To Bake Better Artisan Breads at Home helpful.
Homemade focaccia goes with almost everything—or just enjoy it alone.
Focaccia is a delicious, easy to make, versatile Italian flatbread that for some reason I had never made—or eaten!—until just a few years ago. I tried my friend Stephen's rosemary focaccia recipe while working on an article about bread and fell in love at first bite.
Basically a cross between a thick pizza crust and bread, focaccia makes fun burgers or sandwiches but is also nice eaten on its own or alongside a meal.
There are countless focaccia flavors and toppings, from the basic olive oil and sprinkling of salt variety to complicated tomato, onion, potato, herb, vegetable, and cheese topped versions that turn it into more of a thick crust pizza.
Recipe below. . .
Monday, September 19
Sunday, September 18
Friday, September 16
Friday Night Dose of Cute: Listen Up!
Have a great weekend.
Anything interesting on the menu this weekend? I'm hoping to play around with a couple of muffin recipes tomorrow (when I'm not in the kitchen garden sowing seeds for fall greens), and right now there's a big batch of homemade chicken stock cooling on the counter and a giant homemade pizza topped with sliced homegrown tomatoes just about ready to come out of the oven.
There's a hint of autumn in the air, and all I want to do is cook and bake. And eat.
© FarmgirlFare.com, where I'm so used to those big, beautiful (and soft!) donkey ears that whenever I see a horse I think their ears look too small.
Thursday, September 15
Thursday Dose of Cute: Little Sun Worshipper
© FarmgirlFare.com, where as soon as there's a hint of autumn in the air, the cats, who have avoided the sun all summer, now seek out the warmest spots on the farm. This morning we had 42 degrees. I thought it was blissful. My 16-year-old, 3½ pound Molly Doodlebug (aka The Doodle Monster) thought it was freezing.
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