Brush with Greatness

I’m famous!! Or rather, my pie is famous!  It was published in a fabulous new cookbook by Maine food writer Sandy Oliver.  I just learned last night my pie was included in this book when I read about it on Leslie Land’s wonderful blog.

Sandy got the recipe when I shared it with her for her column in the Bangor Daily News in 2010.

Of course, I shared it here on Henbogle first, the day I invented it, basing it on a recipe from Epicurious, and with support from my best bud and fellow pie maker Holly.

And now, it is famous!  As it should be.  You’ll have to buy the book to see it.

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Salad dazed

I picked more lettuce this morning, and washed all of it and prepared it with my salad spinner, then packed it in my largest plastic container.  There’s probably 3 lbs of lettuce and spinach all ready to be thrown in a bowl and eaten.  I line the bowl with a clean (kitchen use only) cotton men’s hankie, which absorbs the moisture from the washed leaves so they stay crisp, not slimy.  I love my convenience foods!

Dan and I are eating a lot of salads these days.  I read with interest Daphne’s post about garlic scape salad dressing, and thought I need to shake things up and try some new salad dressings.  So tell me, what are your favorite salad dressings? What do you like to put in your salads?

One of my favorites is Lemon Parmesan Dressing, especially with an arugula salad.  Wow.  I drool all winter thinking about it.  I have several dressings listed in my recipe blog, Yankee Pantry, which can be accessed through the categories drop down menu.  Please share your favorites with me!

 

EDIT 6/7/2011

I awoke this morning thinking about another terrific summer salad which mixes savory and sweet, fruit and greens, with Maple-Lime dressing and blue cheese.  My friend Nikki taught me this recipe years ago, and I think it will be on the menu for tonight.

Harvest Monday

Luscious leeks are allowing me to post to Daphne’s Harvest Monday series this week.  My leeks have held up pretty well over the winter, and are downright delicious.  The look pretty awful in this photo, but they clean up pretty good, as you can see below. I sliced them up and added them to some delicious sweet Italian sausage from the pork we purchased from our friend Nina, and added some of my home canned vegetable soup base, and some cannellini beans for a delicious pot of soup, yum.

And finally, thanks to the inspiration from a comment left in my earlier birthday nod to my beloved state, Maine Blueberry Cake using some of those blueberries I froze this past summer.  Give this delicious cake a try, but remember, you have to use Maine Wild Blueberries or it just won’t work.  YUM!

Melt-In-Your-Mouth Maine Blueberry Cake from Marjorie Standish’s classic Cooking Down East, with one change– Kate’s Homemade Butter rather than Crisco.

• 2 eggs, separated
• 1 c sugar
• 1/4 t salt
• 1/2 c butter
• 1 t vanilla
• 1 1/2 c flour
• 1 t baking powder
• 1/3 c milk
• 1 1/2 c Maine wild blueberries*

Beat eggs white until stiff.  Add about 1/4 c of the sugar to keep them stiff.

Cream butter, add salt and vanilla to this.  Add remaining sugar gradually.  Add unbeaten eggs yolks and beat until light and creamy.  Dust the blueberries with about 1 T of the flour.  Stir together dry ingredients together and add alternately with the milk.  Fold in the beaten whites, then gently fold in the blueberries.

Turn into a greased 8″x8″ pan.  Sprinkle the top of the batter lightly with granulated sugar.  Bake at 350°F for 50-60 minutes.

*Fresh is best, but frozen will work.  Add them as frozen berries however, and prepare for a slightly longer cooking time.  In theory, this cake serves eight.  Huh.

Shrimp Chowder

For Dani at Critter Farm, who requested it, I’ve posted my shrimp chowder recipe at Yankee Pantry, my recipe blog.

My new favorite cold remedy

A steaming hot mug of ginger tea with lime and honey.

To make, chop up a couple of tablespoons of fresh ginger (I keep mine in the freezer, peeled and cut into chunks), steep in hot water for about 10-ish minutes, add a big squirt of lime, and honey to taste.  MMMMMMMM.

400 feet (round trip) to yum

Thanks to Sue, who recently chose to award me a Yum-Yum award, I was inspired to create a truly local meal tonight featuring ingredients from the garden: a Cheddar and Garden Vegetable Omelet. After a tough day working on the hoop house (more on that tomorrow), I wandered 200 feet or so to the garden to see what was available to go with eggs (see why in photo, right). I found our first Costato Romanesca zucchini of the season, a beautiful onion, and some gorgeous chard.

Back at the house, I cleaned and chopped the chard, removing the stems and midribs to cook separately, and diced the oinion and zucchini. I started with the onion and chard stems, cooking them in my large skillet, then added the zucchini, then the chard leaves. After adding the leaves, I stirred well and added lots of freshly ground black pepper and a sprinkle of sea salt, then covered the pan until the chard was tender. I removed the vegetables from the pan, wiped it out with a paper towel, returned it to the heat and added a big knob of butter.

When the butter was melted I swirled it around the pan, added some Henbogle eggs beaten well with a 1/2-ish teaspoon of sea salt. One the eggs were nearly done, I added the veggie mix and topped with some shredded Cabot Seriously Sharp cheddar cheese.

I was hot tonight, ladies and gentleman, as I managed to remove a fairly large and very stuffed omelet from my stainless steel pan in one piece. They say the mark of a true chef is the preparation of an omelet ;-) Dan was nearly speechless, all he managed was “wow.” It was delicious, the cheddar cheese and the chard really complement one another.

Anyway, thanks very much to Sue for the award! Between the award and all the compliments on [the parts of it I’m allowing you to see] my garden, my head is threatening to outgrow the monarda!

I’m supposed to pass the award along to 5 others, but I don’t read many food blogs (which is why it has taken me so long to respond to this award!) Instead, I’m going to ask readers to share a recipe using treats from their gardens either in the comments or linking to your blogs. And I encourage you all to check out Coffee & Cornbread –Sue posts some fabulous recipes, like this one for Montreal Seasoning which deserves an award of its own! I’ll be looking forward to some delicious reading.

Ice cream heaven

Saturday morning, Dan, Holly and I went tag-saling. I LOVE tag sales. Our culture is so wasteful, it just sickens me what we throw out on a regular basis. Purchasing at tag sales is a great way to re-use items destined for the landfill if unsold, and it makes great economic sense, too. We find the most amazing items at tag sales, and Saturday was no exception.

I have been ogling the Cuisinart Ice Cream maker ever since I gave one to VISTA Carla as a wedding gift several years ago. Then Holly got one, also as a wedding gift, and has been talking about the fabulous frozen treats she makes regularly. My finger has been poised over the click button on Amazon for many months, but I hesitated.

We have an ice cream maker, and it works fine. It is even electric. BUT it uses rock salt, yuk. I love making ice cream, but the rock salt is a huge pain.

And then, Saturday morning, at a tag sale, I spied it, a Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker. I grabbed the box, and called Holly over and asked if it was missing any parts. She said no. Box firmly tucked under my arm, I asked the price. “Oh, $2,” the woman said. Dumbfounded, I handed over a couple of singles and headed for the car before someone noticed I was stealing.

The ice cream maker uses a liquid filled freezer bowl which is placed in the freezer until solidly frozen. The ice cream mixture is placed within and the bowl turns around a stationary paddle. Upon arriving home Saturday morning, I immediately washed the bowl and stuck it in the freezer, readying it it for ice cream making on Sunday.

It works great! We made two batches of ice cream, sweet cherry chocolate chip, and banana, using the recipes in Bruce Weinstein’s The Ultimate Ice Cream Book as a starting point. Both were good, but I did not care for the frozen chocolate chips, and really, the banana ice cream was so amazing it completely overshadowed the cherry. We invited our crowd of friends for sundaes and had a feast. I can see the ice cream maker is going to get a lot of use –strawberry season looms on the horizon.

Blackberry cordial

Unlike 2006, when we picked over 25 lbs. of blackberries, 2007 was not a great year for blackberries. With the few berries we harvested, I experimented with making blackberry cordial.

I steeped about 4 1/2 cups of blackberries in 1 fifth of Smirnoff red label 80 proof vodka with a long strip of organic lemon peel for 4 months, turning the bottle regularly. At 4 months, I strained the berries out of the vodka, (squeezing the berries gently) and discarded, then added 1 cup of sugar syrup (1c sugar:1/2 c water) and let it sit some more. I tasted, and added another 1/4 c of sugar syrup in February; we recently tried it and wow, is it good. Potent, but delicious. It is especially good when mixed with a little sparkling wine a la Kir Royales and I can imagine it will be fantastic when used in dessert recipes.

I strained it through a mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth, and there is some sediment. In future I will do a final straining with paper towels and see if that removes most of the sediment.

This one experiment I’ll be repeating, and plans to add raspberries and black currants to the garden are fermenting.

Yankee Pantry my recipe blog debuts

To make it easier to find and retrieve my recipes, I started a new blog simply for recipes, Yankee Pantry. I’ve imported the recipes I posted here at Henbogle, and will try in the future to post the recipes directly on Yankee Pantry, linking from Henbogle if that is appropriate. Enjoy!

Good Maine Cooking

Mainers are a thrifty lot, savers extraordinaire and experts at reinventing uses for old equipment. The infamous toilet lawn planter springs to mind, although equally thrifty would be the reuse of old cast iron-porcelain bathtubs as livestock waterers. My former landlord in Greenville, Lonnie Rowe, used an old delivery van as a chicken coop, and made wildlife watching perches out of old tractor seats set on pipes in the ground.

This thriftiness transfers into the food category, too. Chicken and turkey carcasses become stock, meat scraps go in the freezer to become soup. Of course, poultry owners have a ready source of birds to productively dispose of every scrap of food. And should you trap a big old coon or a give terminal lead poisoning to a pesky groundhog, well, there’s good eating if you know how to prepare it properly.

For my birthday earlier this month, Dan found a great old-time recipe book for me, All Maine Recipes, published by the Courier Gazette of Rockland in the late 1960s. It is chock-full of good Maine recipes, many for game such as venison or pheasant, with some modern ones, too, with many variations of the Jello salad —shudder. (I even found a recipe from my long-ago landlady Irene Yerxa of Bridgewater, Maine, and Dan saw a recipe from a woman he knew in Waldoboro, Athlene Damon. Maine is a small town spread over a big state.)

And there are several recipes for preparing garden-chomping rabbit, raccoon and woodchuck.

It is good to know I have a resource handy for preparing varmint should the opportunity arise. You just never know.