Tag Archives: foodie

Inspired By

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The Ellicott City Farmers Market.

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Just a simple salad. Baugher’s strawberries. Breezy Willow arugula. Shepherd’s Manor Ewe Cream Cheese. What you can do after a quick walk up Main St. on a Saturday morning.

What would you pay for a salad of this freshness at a restaurant? Not the small amount necessary to make this one.

We bought a quart of strawberries (OK, two quarts). They were $5 a quart if you bought two. The cheese.

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$7.50 at the market. Sheep’s milk cheese. To. die. for.

Arugula. $2 for 1/4 pound. We bought half a pound because I love it.

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Breezy Willow’s organic veggies are awesome, to say the least.

We added a simple cream dressing. This was Newman’s creamy Caesar.

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You could make at least six salads with what we bought. $16.50 total in cost. We are greatly enjoying the bounty from the market.

As for dinner that night.

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I grilled those Lancaster Farm Fresh wings and served them with that rhubarb sauce.

And the wine. From the Wine Bin.

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How great to have wine right next to the market. The better to complete your meal choices.

I could get used to finding Saturday dinners at this market.

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#hocofood

Hanging Out at the Swap Box

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Or, how I’m spending my Thursday afternoons.

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The swap box is where you exchange an unwanted item from your produce delivery in Community Supported Agriculture. I expected that there would be weeks where Lancaster Farm Fresh (in my half share) and Friends and Farms (in my individual basket) would overlap.

I pick up my Friends and Farms basket first. We know in advance what we are getting.

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This week, the vegetables included spinach, red onion, red potatoes, cucumbers, asparagus, lettuce, rhubarb and collard greens.

Heading over to Columbia to get my LFFC box, I knew I was at least going to have some similar items. Our advance email told us the half share would be getting this.

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Half shares get four to seven items. This week there were five. Kale, green leaf lettuce, chives, red scallions and collard greens. I swapped the chives. That would be an obvious swap for me since this is what I have in the community garden.

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I think I could supply the 44 members of the Columbia pickup with their needs for chives, and then some. I usually swap herbs because I grow them.

I really wanted to find some lovely little Hakurei turnips. The full shares got them. But, no joy. I settled for another green leaf lettuce.

Besides the veggie share, I started my monthly cheese share this week. Every four weeks. Three varieties.

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The chevre. Raw milk cheddar. Sheep’s milk soft cheese.

After seeing the incredible cheeses last year in other people’s boxes, I sprung for cheese this year. I don’t regret it at all.

I also get three pounds of free range chicken every week. This week: one pound of boneless skinless chicken breast, and two pounds of chicken wings. I wrote about the wings yesterday.

Changing topics here, and returning to Friends and Farms. The protein this week. Cod and hanger steak.

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Just enough cod to make fish and chips one night. And, hanger steak. Hard to find as there is only one per cow. I never knew that before I started getting more unusual cuts of meat from Friends and Farms.

Bread and eggs this week in my individual rotation. And, as usual a few add ons.

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Butter, and plain yogurt. The butter, to make chive butter to freeze in cubes to use next winter. The yogurt. To make tzatziki with one of those cucumbers, and some dill from my garden.

All in all, a good start to the summer season, for eating regionally and seasonally. And it is still cool enough to do something with those collard greens. I seem to have an excess of them this week. There could be worse things in life. An excess of collard greens just means bring out the bacon.

#hocofood

Rhubarb on My Chicken Wings

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A marriage of one item from both of this week’s baskets. Rhubarb from Friends and Farms. Chicken wings from Lancaster Farm Fresh.

Tomorrow, after I recover from all the wonderful food, wine and beer at Wine in the Garden, I will talk more about the other items we got this week. But now, let’s just talk savory rhubarb.

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Last summer I made RhubarBQ sauce. This is the last jar of it.

There will be more of it made with the rhubarb we got today. I think I have enough to do half the recipe that’s on the link above.

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We also got two pounds of chicken wings.

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The chicken is an add on item in our Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative CSA delivery.

What could be better for a lovely summer dinner? Grilled chicken wings served with a dip of savory tangy barbecue sauce that invites you to venture outside that strawberry rhubarb rut we fall into whenever we get rhubarb.

Believe me, this sauce is worth the time to make.

#hocofood

It Takes a Community (garden)

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I didn’t realize the social aspect of having a community garden plot. I really enjoy being able to stop and talk with fellow gardeners. Taking that break when you feel that weeding is way too hard in high temperatures.

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There are always people up there. Some of them gardening. Some fulfilling their service hours.

Last year, the community gardeners donated over 1000 pounds of vegetables to the Howard County Food Bank. About 800 square feet of garden space in the plots is dedicated to the Food Bank Garden, and other gardeners donate their excess crops.

Every Tuesday morning is Food Bank harvest. This week they harvested greens, as it is still early in the growing season. I got there a little late, as I was caught up in family things. I missed them by a few minutes.

So, I puttered around. Fed my plants. Picked potato beetles off my cucumbers and zucchini.

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Zucchini is one of those love-hate plants. Love them when they produce, and hate them when they over produce.

This year though, I have to admit, I inherited the Godzilla of chives.

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Now, I love chive blossoms but these are out of control. I also have one amazing common sage plant.

Along with, believe it or not,

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TOMATOES!

Early girl and supersweet 100s. Both have tomatoes on them.

Life is good. There are tomatoes in the future.

#hocofood

Strawberry Season

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Officially opened today at Gorman Farms. You do have to check to see when they are open. They had some hail damage.

As for us, we got strawberries Thursday from Miller Farms in our Friends and Farms basket. They are also open for those who live south of us.

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These berries made it into three different meals already.

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Strawberries with greens. Such a simple great salad. I used arugula, romaine and the pea shoots from our baskets. A very easy yogurt dressing. Scallions from my garden.

The second use.

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Berry yogurt. Besides some of the strawberries, I used a few defrosted blueberries. The plain yogurt from Pequea Valley. A little agave for sweetness. That small care package in the fridge went with my husband for his 12 hour shift in an amateur radio contest. A few hardboiled eggs, and some penne pasta I made the other day.

The last of the strawberries from Thursday? I ate them. What can I say. I love fresh berries.

Besides Gorman, there are other pick your own farms around here. Depending on where you live, you can find one not far away.

Like Larriland, or Baughers in Westminster, or Butlers Orchards in Germantown. They are all saying early June opening.

Berries are a fruit that we enjoy picking. Our freezer was stocked with berry syrup cubes, and frozen berries.

We will as usual go out to Larriland and pick at least 20 pounds. You can’t beat the price.

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#hocofood

Mangia Italiano!

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Italian feast. That’s what we can make with this week’s Friends and Farms basket.

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Within this basket is a serious baseline for “gravy” or as known here in the States, tomato sauce.

Tomatoes. An onion. Garlic. Carrots. Basil. Sweet Italian sausage. Mushrooms. Really, you can have one very interesting experimental session making your own version of an Italian staple.

But, you know you can add that Swiss chard.

As for other meals, this is my egg and bacon week.

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Eggs and bacon. There is probably not much else that just jumps up and makes us happy.

Well, maybe strawberries.

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We all got a quart of strawberries. This should do well with finishing off that yogurt I bought last week.

And, the chicken.

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This weekend. One spatchcocked grilled chicken coming up.

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I forgot! Those pea shoots. You know, I definitely love pea shoots. But, they have to be eaten soon.

Great Memorial Day basket! Time to get grilling!

#hocofood

Lunch From the Garden …

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… and a few regional farms.

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In the process of making lunch, the picture above shows some of the kale and chard from this morning’s thinning of the garden. Dressed with a simple yogurt dressing. Shake yogurt and lemon infused olive oil with some garlic powder, salt and pepper.

An apple from last week’s Friends and Farms basket, served with some of that provolone that we got, too.

Homemade peach yogurt.

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To share, we used one cup of plain yogurt. One defrosted peach, from my stash in the freezer (courtesy of Larriland picking last August). A 1/2 tsp squirt of agave. That’s all. I control the sweetness when I start with plain yogurt.

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This yogurt is available at Friends and Farms. At Breezy Willow Farm store. And at England Acres in Mt. Airy. Best yogurt we have ever found. No web site, as they are an Amish farm.

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As for the rest of this bag of peaches. Destined to become peach pops. Simple to make. Blend the peaches with yogurt. To fill my popsicle molds I need about 32 ounces in the blender. If I get a little too much, the rest goes in a small plastic jar and becomes frozen yogurt. I am using whatever I have to give it the amount of sweetness I want. Currently I have agave, but I also use honey or maple syrup.

On a related note, I harvested a few more white onions today.

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Including one very large one, that was too crowded in the middle of the rows.

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And found the beginning of an onion scape on the largest one. Now, I need to head back up there and pinch off scapes to let the onions put more energy into the onions and not the shoots.

Back on the home front, though, my garlic out in the back yard hasn’t begun to produce scapes yet. They are getting really large finally, so I hope to get at least one dozen large heads of garlic in a few months.

So far, a good start to the harvest of spring vegetables. Now, if only the strawberry picking season would begin. Gorman Farm projects that they will open Saturday the 24th of May. Larriland is still posting “late” May. We are almost out of the last of the frozen berries, and can’t wait to get out in the fields and bring in this year’s berries. The freezer is getting empty now.

#hocofood

The First Harvests

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It’s always exciting when we switch from planting to harvesting. This year I am keeping a record of what we get, from the multiple sites where I have vegetables and herbs growing.

My favorite microsite is my foraged asparagus.

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At the top of our driveway, where the asparagus is growing wild. Today, I got one new spear, added to the six already picked. Last year I think I counted 42 spears. Let’s see what this year produces. And, yes, that is crape myrtle, with the asparagus firmly entrenched under it.

Up at the community garden, it was time to thin the greens.

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By the way, three inches of rain will penetrate the heavy row cover. The weeds are coming in, so I weeded and thinned today.

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I have mostly kale and chard up there, but did add some recently sprouted arugula. Today’s take. Two ounces. They will grace an omelet this weekend.

Notice the chive flowers. I inherited massive amounts of chives, and a few varieties of sage in our plot. I took the best flowers to use in that omelet, and admired the bicolor sage that recovered after the winter.

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This sage is tiny but my common sage bush is doing well also. I love sage when I make pork dishes, and in tomato sauce with sausage.

Today I was also fighting the pests. On the cucumbers and the eggplant. Potato beetles on the eggplant and cucumber beetles chewing off my young cucumber shoots. Garden Safe to the rescue, we hope. I am on a 7 day schedule with this OMRI approved insecticide. These pests already killed off four cucumber plants, and made a mess of the leaves of the rest.

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If you look behind the plant stick, you will see one of the potato beetles. Soon to meet his maker, like his brethren I squashed that were noshing my pink eggplant leaves. I think I do need to cover the eggplants. And, those are weeds you see. I am trying to keep up with them, but this blasted rain just makes everything grow so fast.

I came home with this.

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Some greens. A few blossoms. The one two foot long asparagus from the driveway.

Tomorrow, I may head out to the garden in the yard and harvest spring garlic. At least three of the eighteen plants in the back yard aren’t that big, and they won’t mature enough before the heat of summer. They will flavor a few meals this week.

Not bad for mid May. I can’t wait for tomato season, but this is a good beginning.

#hocofood

Trying to garden organically is tough, but I will prevail (I hope).

A Tale of Two Providers

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Both of them awesome. The source now of most of what we eat. Well, with the exception of my garden, which will provide all kinds of goodness in the next four months.

Today, our Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative CSA started up. For a 25 week summer season and a seven week fall extension. We dropped down to a half share because we still do Friends and Farms, and yes, we have a garden.

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The reason why we love this CSA. The diversity. Have you ever heard of Egyptian walking onions? Well, until today, neither had we.

Our half share included:
Green Kale
One pound of spring mix
Arugula (which was in the full share, but I swapped for it)
French breakfast radishes
Red scallions
Asparagus

The full shares got the purple asparagus. They had ten items in their share. They got microgreens in theirs.

I also signed up for the chicken share. Three pounds a week of free range, antibiotic and hormone free chicken. This week:

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Two chicken breasts and two legs.

Add to that bounty, the individual share from Friends and Farms. Between the two, we won’t be drowning in items and the portions are perfect for a couple.

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The complete deliverable.

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The sandwich steaks and provolone. Just what we need to make cheese steak sandwiches. The shrimp. Ten ounces in our individual basket. The small basket got twice that amount. Ten shrimp. Ten ounces. These are prime shrimp. There will be shrimp and grits, I think, to use up the last of the grits.

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The add on I picked up this week. Plain yogurt. I have plans for the yogurt. The special. Leftover ewe cream cheese for a sale price. I could spread this cheese on cardboard and love it. It is particularly good on specialty breads. I am also thinking of crackers with cheese and the last of my homemade pineapple habanero jelly.

The rest of the items in that picture above. Spinach, green onions, beets, hydroponic tomatoes, butter lettuce, bread and a couple of apples.

I really don’t need to touch a market or grocery store with this kind of variety coming to our home weekly.

Tonight’s dinner celebrated those sources. I was home alone as my better half is out for the evening.

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I covered a plate in spring mix. Sliced one of those hydroponic tomatoes, and added some basil from my garden. Shredded the end of the chicken from the last roaster (December delivery LFFC). Shaved a bit of Roots parmesan. And a scallion in the salad. I drizzled Newman’s Caesar dressing over it all. I was too lazy to make dressing with the yogurt today, but it will be made this weekend.

A glass of white wine, and what could be simpler for a meal?

Thanks to the regional deliverables of great ingredients, I had one of my fresh tasty meals.

#hocofood

Event Overload Again

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The third weekend in May. Absolutely one of the most overbooked event weekends around here.

Wine in the Woods. Both days, Saturday and Sunday.

The Preakness. Saturday is the race in Baltimore, and the Balloon Festival at Turf Valley the 15th-17th if the weather permits it.

The Columbia Triathlon is Sunday morning. Our love/hate relationship with this event depends on whether we need to get anywhere by car that morning. We live right off the bike race route.

The EC Tasting Gallery Pop Up at Bistro Blanc is Sunday night.

There is a Family Open House at Belmont Saturday morning 10-12, with guided hikes and other goodies. The Howard County Conservancy is providing environmental educational programs at the Belmont site.

We are volunteering for Big Cork at Wine in the Woods.

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Been fans of their wines since they opened the winery. Love the chardonnay, and really am looking forward to the release of their first red wines this fall. And, their new building out in Rohrersville.

As for that pop up dinner, we will be there. I can’t wait to see what the EC chefs and Chef Johnny at Bistro Blanc create in a culinary culture tour.

If I can drag myself out of bed Saturday morning to see the mass ascension at Oh-Dark=Thirty up at Turf Valley, I will be doing that too.

Belmont does interfere with Wine in the Woods. Darn. Van Wensil is leading two guided hikes which should be wonderful to do.

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Sunday morning finds us cheering on the leaders in the triathlon as they pass the Royal Farms at the circle where Dayton and Glenelg meet. We like heading up there for coffee and bagels and to watch the world class athletes as they head out, and then back, from their loop out to Triadelphia.

And, can’t forget to sit out and watch the Preakness while sipping a Black Eyed Susan. Last year they changed the recipe for the cocktail. Sounds really interesting, if you have St. Germain around the house.

What are you doing this weekend? Are you guilty of event overload, too? I’ll need a week to recover from all this entertainment.

Oh, and the azaleas at Brighton Dam are still blooming. If the rain the next two days doesn’t mess them up.

#hocoblogs