Finally I harvested something!

Yummy...first mixed green salad of the summer from my OWN garden.  I'm pretty pumped to actually be eating something from my garden, especially since my last post was so woe is me.

Combine this with a shredded chicken breast, feta cheese, snap peas, roasted golden beets from Robinette Farms and a little olive oil/balsamic vinegar and I had one tasty meal tonight!  I love summertime meals!

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Pizza and beer

Now doesn't that sound like an excellent meal?  I am a pizza fanatic, specifically the thin crust of a New York style pizza.  My absolute favorite pizza is from Zios in Omaha.  I may have been eating there once a week the last few months of my pregnancy...:)  I've tried duplicating my favorite pizza at home and have gotten close a couple times.  I've made a few pizzas on the grill last year.  Close, but no cigar.  I always struggled with is the sauce.  I didn't want a thick pasty sauce.  I wanted something more of a fresh tomato sauce, but not too fresh because I had problems getting the crust done when it was too watery.

Enter Annie's Eats Thin Crust Pizza.  I think I died and went to heaven after I made this.  (Please check out the rest of her website, because she has excellent recipes.)  I found it!  The perfect combination of thin chewy crust and a nice tomato sauce.  I would have taken pictures of it, but Jon and I ate both pizzas I made too fast.  Please please try this recipe.  The sauce is hands down my favorite homemade pizza sauce and it made a lot of sauce, so I have some frozen.

And doesn't a great pizza need a great beer?  Enter Schilling Bridge.  Schilling Bridge Winery is located in Pawnee City, Nebraska.  I haven't tried the wine yet, but Jon bought some of the 70 Schilling Bridge ale and it is my new favorite beer.  I could probably have one a night if I wasn't breastfeeding.  As it is now, I can hardly even drink half of it, but mmmmmmmmm is it good!

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What I've been up to lately...

Our lives have been filled with a little bit of dirt and a LOT of mud now...here's a sneak peak.

That's fun stuff right there, but I will let Jon talk about what's happening.

This is what I've been up to lately...trying to clear out our freezers!  When we brought home all of our processed roosters, our freezer space became a premium. 

So, I've been making some homemade tomato soup with some tomatoes that I froze last year.

This is the lazy way to preserve tomatoes when a person gets sick of canning.  I much prefer hot pack canned tomatoes, especially to use in chili and soup.  But there is something to be said for the ease of coring tomatoes and popping them in the freezer.  These might have been a wee bit freezer burnt, but I managed.  And the great thing about freezing them like this, is the skins slide right off when you let them thaw in water.  Super simple!

I've also been making lots of breakfast wraps.  We are overflowing with eggs right now and I can't keep on top of them.  These duck eggs had been sitting in our fridge for awhile, so it was time for them to go!

I just love the color of duck eggs.  And they taste exactly the same as chicken eggs.  I can't tell a difference at all.  The only way I can tell the difference between a chicken and a duck egg is how hard the shell is when I break it and the viscosity of the duck eggs.  When you break a duck egg, the egg whites string along forever, which is I bet why they are so good for baking.

Can you tell if these are chicken or duck eggs? 

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Homemade biscuits and gravy

Oh, how homemade gravy used to be the bane of my existence!  I could never make homemade gravy to save my life.  And for some reason I was determined not to use any cornstarch...to me that felt like cheating.  I wanted to be able to make gravy from flour and from scratch no less.

Well, I figured it out!  All it took was a Thanksgiving edition of Real Simple and Pioneer Woman Cooks.  Which if you haven't heard of Pioneer Woman, you must not be on the Internet very much!  Since last year's Thanksgiving, I have successfully made turkey gravy, chicken gravy and now homemade biscuits and gravy.  Oh boy...was it good...

Hot and steamy...perfect on a cold fall day.

And the best part was that I used our sausage from our boar that we butchered.  Let me tell you something...I am not a fan of sausage.  I've never really enjoyed the taste unless it was smothered with gravy and on biscuits.  But this stuff was delicious.  I don't know if it was the pork, which was voted on the Slow Food Ark of Taste, or the way our local processor spiced it, but man it was good! 
And for being a fatty or lard type of pig, there was hardly any fat on this sausage.  I had to add some butter to the roux, because there wasn't enough fat.  I"m actually excited to try more of this sausage since it was so darn good!

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Banana bread with chocolate chips...yum!

Man, I had a craving so bad for pumpkin bread with chocolate chips today!  I like to use fresh pumpkin so I'm holding off for a couple months.  The alternative was banana bread with chocolate chips..everything is better with choc chips, right?

Soooo yummy!

Anyone else have one of these?  If not, you should.  It's the best way to keep butter that I've found.  My friend, Liz had one at her house and I had to get one as soon as I saw it.  Just make sure to change out the water regularly.

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Cheesy zucchini....FAIL!

I've been on a quest lately to get more veggies in our diet.  I do great with fruit, I probably eat 1-2 pieces of fruit a day.  But veggies are a little harder.  Sure I can just heat up some frozen corn or green beans, but I'm looking for something more.  So, I decided to try a cheesy zucchini recipe from my fav cookbook.

This is one big zucchini! 

It looked so nice after being cut up and weighed.

Even the piggies liked the ends and the peels.  You should have heard that little babies squeal!

And what couldn't turn out right with this much cheese...right?

Looking good!

I had high hopes and they were dashed when I bit into one.  Too much garlic, the zucchini was too soft and the cheese did nothing for the zucchini.  The flavors just didn't meld together at all.  I was very disappointed and actually only ate a couple bites.  Oh well, you win some...you lose some!  Maybe I need to find a vegetarian cookbook for some good side dishes...

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Dear Internet...

I shake my fists at you!  Work!  Every time I sit down to do a blog post, the Internet decides to take a rest...very irritating I tell you.

Some random thoughts:

I've been cooking a little bit more lately, which makes both of us very happy!

First up some grilled pizza.  I've been trying to use the grill outside, so that we don't heat up the house.  Grilled pizza on a pizza stone was just the trick.  I was a little nervous about using the pizza stone on the grill, because I've heard you could crack it.  But this is a much better alternative to heating up my stove inside to 500 degrees for an hour.

I usually make my crust from scratch, but this is a ball of dough from Trader Joe's.  You just stretch it out and lay it down on to some yellow cornmeal to keep it from sticking.  See the wooden handled thing that the pizza is on?  Get one if you are going to make a lot of pizza on the stone.  This one was pretty cheap, I think it was from Bed, Bath and Beyond.

I just warmed up my grill to around 400-500 degrees.  My recipe called for 500 degrees in a stove for an hour, but that made me too nervous.  And let me warn you, it takes a little practice to actually hit the pizza on the stone without spilling everything.  One more reason to make pizza on a grill!

Can you say delicious?  I need to remember to split the dough next time.  The dough was too thick, especially in the middle so it didn't get done all the way.  Next time!

I also made up some breakfast burritos mainly for Jon.

I've never been a huge breakfast fan.  I'd rather have the same type of cereal for a year than eat eggs.  But when I started to become intolerant to milk I had to branch out a bit.  I've slowly learned to like different types of eggs.  What did me in was a bite of Jon's Waffle House egg sandwich.  Oh my...it was heaven!  There are no Waffle Houses in Nebraska, but we stopped at one in Missouri on the way back from visiting some family. 

These were actually pretty good, if I do say so...  The recipe called for Ore-Ida potato chunks, but I just cut up some potatoes, threw some olive oil on them and baked them for ten minutes.  I have this thing for frozen foods...I'm not a big fan.  I don't even like to go down the frozen food aisle, except when I can't get my craving for Digiornios rising crust cheese pizza any other way.  Can you tell I'm a pizza freak?

This burrito recipe and another one I'm going to make tonight are from the book Don't Panic Dinner's in the Freezer.  Excellent book about making freezer meals.  I like making simple recipes with few ingredients and as much homemade as possible.  This book fits the bill.  There are a couple exceptions, but I've learned to work around that.

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Yummy pancakes

My favorite pancake recipe by far is from one of my favorite cookbooks Food to Live By: The Earthbound Farm Organic Cookbook.  I happened to get this cookbook through one our recycling program, which offers rewards for how many pounds you recycle.  It's hands down one of my favorite cookbooks and I just recently got her second one. 

There are many many bookmarks in this one!  (I apologize for the poor quality of pictures, I really need to use my tripod when it's 6:30 in the morning, but I get lazy...)

My favorite eggs from Common Good Farm, the egg yolks are unbelievable!

This recipe is called Basic Whole Wheat Pancake Mix.  I was going to post the recipe, but I'm just not sure how that works with copyright laws.  Trust me, they are delicious!  They just have a really great nutty flavor that goes so well with real maple syrup.  Please, if you are going to make this recipe use real maple syrup, it's so much better than that corn syrupy maple syrup that's so cheap.

My tip would be to add 2 cups of milk.  It calls for 1-1.5 cups of milk and I always end up using more to get the consistency that I like.  I've never tried them with the apples and nuts which she recommends, but I can only imagine how good that would taste.

Pancakes aren't a normal everyday occurrence around her during the middle of the week.  I was up at five this morning, since I was falling asleep reading last night at nine.  So, I had lots of time before work!  And no cooking is complete with out my favorite apron:

Thanks Andrea!  And yes I wear bright obnoxious scrubs to work...what can I say, I'm a pediatric nurse!

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The price of convenience and why I hate grocery stores

I was having a conversation with a friend at work a couple weeks ago and she complimented me on how hard I try to buy organic and/or local food.  Which was kind of interesting, considering I still buy these kinds of food.

They are my weakness....

You've got some Velveeta shells and cheese that go great with some fish sticks...that's comfort food for me.  There's some yummy pudding and jello.  Have you ever heard of someone who craves jello?  When I worked in the hospital I was always hungry for jello, since I could always smell it.

I could have taken a picture of some oreos....but I already ate them.

Missing from this picture would be a bag of McDonalds, some Amigos and maybe a little Sonic cheeseburger.

You see, as hard as I try to buy local/organic food, sometimes I fall completely off the wagon.  And when I fall, I fall hard.  Most of the time I do a really good job of making a meal plan and sticking with the list.  And then there are times when I'm busier that I just buy willy nilly and end up with a bunch of the above pictured food.  And it doesn't make me happy....  How am I supposed to put my money where my mouth is and support local/organic food when I keep buying this crap?  That's something I struggle with every time I grocery shop. 

Why do I hate grocery stores?  Because they're fake!  All that illusion of choice when the food comes from 4-5 major companies.  Maybe I'm just too used to shopping at Open Harvest but I think the lights in a grocery store are also blinding.  And the advertising...don't even get me started on all the false advertising.  And since when does America need a whole aisle dedicated just for cookies, cakes and chips?  Last time I checked America is only getting fatter.

Sometime else I struggle with is when I'm craving McDonalds.  Talk about disgusting food...CAFO hamburger with its GM sides of french fries and a small Coke...blech.  And yet I still continue to crave it!  I should give myself  a little credit, because there are some very smart researchers who make this food as addicting as possible.  I don't know anyone else who plays mind games with themselves while eating fast food.  Take yesterday for instance, the whole time I was eating a free meal of Chipotle I was thinking about confinement hogs and why they are serving pico de gallo in the winter.  Sometimes I wish I was completely ignorant to anything food related and did what everyone else does...and just freaking ate the Chipotle burrito already!

If there's one thing I've learned over the years is that I am NOT perfect.  As much as I would like there not to be crappy food choices, there always will be.  And sometimes I'm going to fall for them.  I just have to keep myself focused on my goal of producing local/organic food so that everyone else can have better food choices.  And food rant officially over...

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Runzas

If you've ever been to the Midwest or lived in the Midwest, you might be pretty familiar with a runza.  It's typically a ground beef, cabbage and dough concoction.  There is also a  chain of restaurants in Nebraska and surrounding states called Runza.  If you are ever at a Runza restaurant get the onion rings, they are the best!

Anyways, back to making runzas.  I made the cabbage/meat mixture the night before because things were not going well for me.  And by not going well, here's what happened. 

Almost ran out of flour, thankfully realized that I had some downstairs...

Went to get some sugar and completely out!  Thanks heavens for good neighbors. 

Sugar is in the mixing bowl and on to add some yeast....and out of yeast. 

So, I threw in the towel and just made the meat mixture and the dough the next day.

Can I just take a minute to talk about how much I love dough? 

I

love

dough...

The end.



Stretch out the dough into a rectangle and put a heaping pile of the meat mixture on top.




Pinch the middle part together and then bring the sides up to meet the middle. 



Try not to drop any cabbage/meat mixture on the floor, because this dude will snap it up in a hurry.  You can just see the pleading on his face... 



And done!



Enjoy some runzas!  This version is slightly different from the restaurant version.  I keep wanting to add a little cream of chicken soup or something to make it a little less dry and I keep forgetting.  Maybe next time!  These are also really great to make with swiss cheese and mushrooms.

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