Busy Hands Homestead

I don't consider myself to be an experienced gardener.   Every year is new and every year new lessons are learned.  This year cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and Jerusalem artichokes were new additions to my garden.   The cabbage needed more sun.  The broccoli provided us with a nice dense head of green followed with crisp little side shoots for the rest of the growing season.  The Brussels sprouts resulted in cheers when I served them to my kids.  And the Jerusalem artichokes - well they did great, but dominated the sad row of tomatoes I planted next to them.  While the sturdy stalks of the sunflowers reached preposterous heights, the tomatoes barely survived.   I know now to not plant anything close to these vigorous plants.  Rather than having the abundant harvest of tomatoes I had hoped for, beautiful fall bouquets brightened up our living space.  After a few light freezes, a serious cold snap was p...

Dinner is in the oven.  (By oven I mean the toaster oven I have had set up on the porch all summer to avoid heating up the kitchen when baking smaller items.)   We are having a zucchini dip that tastes similar to spinach artichoke dip and was a raving success with the whole family a few days ago.  So I am making it again.  The kids are at the park with Adam.  I am supposed to be working on this:  I am trying to finish this small quilt for Ivory's first day of school tomorrow. Between our morning WIC appointment and our dentist appointments this afternoon, I have been stitching the details onto the little girl walking a path of hearts to her home. My baby is going to school and I want her to know that my heart will be with her, wherever she may be. The little girl on the quilt is almost done. All she needs are eyes. Then the batting needs to be cut, the layers pinned and quilted and binding stitched all around the edges. Crazy, I ...

"There is a big seed in this one." Sylvan is beaming at me, shoving the fourth plum into his mouth in under five minutes. "Slow down. You are going to get a belly ache." We went on a walk through the neighborhood and passed a tree tucked into an alley that had dropped the most perfectly ripe, pink and purple plums.  We picked them up and brought them home. They are our latest edible find. A few days ago we picked spearmint up the Rattlesnake in the Bugbee Nature Area.    It is dried down and ready to be tea on cold winter nights.    These beautiful and delicious shaggy parasols popped up in our neighbors yard (currently empty and we did ask the landlord's permission) and I used them in our frittata yesterday.  The remainder of the mushrooms are opening up and we will pick and grill them soon. (These mushrooms are what a portabello mushroom you can buy at the grocery store attains to be.  They are meaty and dense and juicy.) Fo...

After heating up the oven to 450 degrees it was too hot to eat in the house.  We took our plates and moved outside to the picnic table and ate our slices of pizza in the cool shade our maple tree. I made my favorite pizza: roasted beet, feta, caramelized onion and walnuts. I made a second pizza: feta, pizza cheese, beet greens and morels. Between the two pizzas I used a beet and all the beet greens off of the bunch I bought from the farmer's market Saturday morning.  Reluctantly, I let Adam pack the remaining slices for his work day lunch.  I know that I will be making pasta with radish green pesto for the kids and I...  but that pizza was so, so good. I always enjoy pizza night. I like to think that it involves washing less dishes...  probably not true...  after making the dough, caramelizing onions and mixing up the sauces the dishes pile up just the same.  But it feels different. I like sliding the pizza onto the baking stone in the oven. I ...

I bend down, look into the fridge. I close it and step out the back door. I scan the garden beds - back to the fridge. It is June and I am in love with this time of the year. The meal planning gets looser...  instead of having solid shopping lists and a specific plans for each and every item purchased, I step into the garden and ask: "What are we having for dinner?" The truth is, that even though it is June, there are not many things to harvest. There are radishes (and their greens. delicious!), spinach, sprigs of dill, almost ripe strawberries and a mounding rhubarb plant.  All other plants are still tiny - promising more later in the summer. I snip Spinach leaves. They mound up in my basket. I snip a few sprigs of dill. We are having Pacific Rockfish for dinner and these garden additions will be perfect. I look down at my pan and realize that this is the first of  this year's dinners that has a substantial garden contribution.  Sure, I have been usi...

A few weeks ago I sat in the noisy gym at the Y (during family fun time) listening to a voice mail from one of my WIC counselors asking me to call her back regarding the online session I had just completed.  At my last visit I had been offered the choice between a follow up in office visit or an online session on wichealth.org after which I would just email the office. I took the online choice and all I could think was: SHIT!... because there is nothing like an online, blank, anonymous appearing box to solicit my honest and uncensored opinion on a subject, especially a subject related to food.  And that opinion had NOT been kind.  In my mind the person reading my criticism was not received by the sweet lady I look forward to chatting with every few months but rather the creator of the lack luster content I had found when I clicked through the segments of my Meatless Meals Section I had chosen to complete. When I finally did speak to her, I...

Sunday Cooking Marathon: aka Adam starts his Field Season Rainy day walk through the neighborhood. Look Ma: NO FEET!!!! Today I washed, chopped, cooked and transformed: 5 lbs of Carrots 1 bunch of Kale 1 head of Cabbage 3 Onions 6 potatoes 1 lb of Sprouts 1 lb of Tofu 1 lb frozen Spinach 1 lb frozen Green Beans 3 Cucumbers 2 cups Walnuts 2 cups Raisins  1 lb Shrimp 1 lb Ground Beef 1 lb Italian Sausage 1/2 bunch of Cilantro 1/2 bunch of Parsley  into:  Eggrolls Enchiladas Spinach Soup Tofu Cucumber Salad Moroccan Carrot Slaw  Moroccan Chicken Salad with Green Beans and tonight's dinner: Spicy Shrimp with Cucumber Salad, Cilantro and Flat Bread These dishes, along with a few more ingredients and some other odds and ends, are all of the lunches and dinners that Adam is taking with him on his first BIG planting project of the season.  There is enough for him, for us and a few lun...

Last night's dinner was a surprising success.  I did not expect to watch the kids spoon the soup into their mouths - without a single complaint.  I even received complements.  That is rare out of the mouths of my children when dealing with anything spinach that I thought I would share the recipe.  (Sorry, no picture...) Spinach Soup  4 slices bacon fry bacon, remove from pan and set aside 1/2 large yellow onion, chopped saute onion and then add 1 teaspoon salt  6 medium potatoes, chopped  3 boullion cubes 3 cups water 2 Tablespoons butter simmer until the potatoes are soft take half of the soup, blend it, and return it back to the pot 3 Tablespoons flour 3 cups water  whisk the flour into the water and add to the soup, then bring to a boil 3 ounces cream cheese 2 cups chopped, frozen spinach dash of nutmeg and pepper stir in cream cheese and spinach, add nutmeg and ginger when the cream ...

Every few weeks I sit down with cooking books spread across the table and leaf through the pages.  I have been planning our dinners approximately three weeks into the future.  I starting this project in November.  "Why?", you might ask.  Well to be completely honest it is because we have food stamps.  In spite of careful shopping I still managed to run low on food stamps by end of the month and it was an unnecessary worry in my life.  We manage to eat varied  mostly organic, fresh, made from scratch meals every single day sitting around the same dinner table (unless Adam is working out of town) sharing our day with family and sometimes friends as well. There are a few patterns that  have developed over the course of this experiment that I try to utilize to make the process simpler: soup and fresh baked bread once a week 2 or 3 vegetarian meals per week seafood once a week a salad centered meal once a week  pizza night ...

When I think about the day in 2003 on which I met my husband, I think guacamole. There are many moments in our lives that I remember by the meals we shared. The last meal he cooked for me before I drove to New York for my summer internship in 2006 was Veal Marsala.  The meal that was waiting, sitting on the table, when I returned was a Spaghetti Squash picked up at the Farmer's market that morning. Even rockiest days of our marriage (so far), I will always fondly remember with side by side concocted candied orange peals and chocolate fudge.  The morning after Ivory was born, we pulled apart monkey bread while we stared across the tiny hospital room at that sleeping bundle.  The day after we came home from the hospital with we walked all over Stillwater, Oklahoma in 90 degree weather.  When we walked out of the door that morning we were full of new parent adrenaline and the fact that I had had virtually no sleep the night before seemed to matter litt...

Over our Sunday morning cups of coffee Adam and I penciled a list for the day.  Our list had a few chores around the house, but was mostly comprised of delicious food things to make and bake.  The weather is cool and wet and it is planting season again.  This means our Sundays are full of food preparations and our week days are spent apart.   I ran off to the grocery store to pick up a few things while Adam tackled the first food item: Caramel Rolls.  While Adam picked up things around the yard, I rolled up  my sleeves and crumbled together butter and flour to make pie crusts.  I picked the meat off of the bones of last night's roasted chicken , baked butternut squash, boiled sweet potatoes, sauteed mushrooms and broccoli, wilted kale, crumbled up bacon to make my version of the Big Sky Pie that I found in the Missoula Magazine (Page 10) last winter.     Adam started the Braided Swish Cheese Loaves ...

September is flying past.   I am trying to soak up the last few days of summer and the first of fall.  This involves pulling things out of the garden, into my kitchen and preserving food in jars.  I pulled the largest of my second and third planting of beets, (they were so small, sigh, in spite of the watering), scrubbed them, boiled them and pickled them.  I am trying out a few new canning recipes and using a few of my old standbys.    Really, this process should not have taken more than a few hours, but some how it took me all day.  By nighttime four ruby red pint jars stood on my kitchen table. This new recipe only contains half a cup of honey..  although, I will admit, that I am going to make a second batch of pickled beets using my old sugar laden recipe because I don't think the kids will be chowing these down with quite as much enthusiasm.  I picked arm fulls of my blue curly leaf kale.  Running back and fort...

I spent the evening sitting at the ceramics studio, teasing the clay into what will hopefully become a tall, free standing sculpture.  When I arrived home the dinner dishes were still stacked by the sink, the house mostly picked up and I found Adam, Ivory and Sylvan all cuddled up in the same bed.  I resisted the urge to wash the dishes and decided instead to put together this post that has been haunting me ever since I baked my Beet and Onion Tart a few days ago.   There is something so indescribably gratifying about being able to pull a plant from the ground, carry it to the kitchen table and share it with family and friends.  Being able to make an entire meal from ingredients almost entirely from the garden is even better.   I pulled yellow and red onions from the ground and beets with nice lush greens, and as most times when I walk back into the house with my harvest, my cookbooks lacked an option that utilized these plants in their e...

This recipe utilized the ENTIRE beet plant: the leaves as well as the roots!  3 medium sized beets with greens 2 tablespoons coconut oil peppered goat cheese salted and roasted sunflower seeds salt pepper Roast the beets ahead of time ( directions here ) and let cool.  Peel the beets and cut into cubes. Wash and chop greens.  Heat the coconut oil until hot and drop the greens into the pan.  Cook, stirring occasionally, until the leaves are dark, dark green in color and a little crispy. Remove from heat.  Layer the greens, the cubed beets, crumbled goat cheese, and sunflower seeds.   Add salt and pepper to taste.   There are no exact quantities.  Just add all the ingredients in the proportions that look and taste good to you.  Enjoy.