Came across a travel agent in Birmingham, Michigan (Australia 2000 Travel) that offers a deluxe Food and Wine Tour to Australia.
My husband, Leonard, has family in Australia and it is always a place I have longed to visit (he has already been there). Wouldn't a Food and Wine tour be the perfect thing to combine with a trip to visit my husbands family in Australia? I think so...guess I will add this to my Christmas List!
Any of you readers ever booked an Australia travel package before? What did you see? Where did you go? More importantly, what did you eat? Anything scrumptious?
Here is a slideshow of the share produce for 2010. My thoughts on this year's share follow the slideshow.
The CSA season is over and I must admit I am not too disappointed about it.
For some reason, I found the share to be more stressful for me this year. I didn't feel in the mood every Wednesday to pick up the share, clean and store the veggies and then prep them for use during the week or to store them in the freezer for use during winter. Last year was the opposite, I felt like every Wednesday was like Christmas picking up my share.
It wasn't that I felt the quality of the share was any less than last year, because I thought it was good considering they hardly had any rain all summer. We got A LOT of peppers, I would guess it was because it was what they had to give us considering the difficulties with rain. The tomatoes we got this year were FANTASTIC!! We had fun eating the many varieties we got through the season.
I am not sure if I am going to be a member of Maple Creek or any share next year for a few reasons. One, I feel like a break. Two, I go to the farmer's market every week anyway, so I can just pick up what I really wanted there without all the stress of getting things I do not feel like cooking each week. And Thirdly, we enlarged our garden (which we lovingly refer to as Tuscany, since it is a garden on a hill) for next year and I think we will get a decent amount of produce out of it next summer. But time will tell, and I will be sure to let you know!
Week 12 Looks Good! I've already chopped the peppers for freezing, made pesto out of the lemon basil and chopped and frozen the cilantro in one of those little frozen herb cube trays from Trader Joes.
It was a nice surprise to get some apples today and the Swiss Chard looks absolutely gorgeous. I treated those watermelons like crystal because the last time we got them I split one open by accident by setting it on the counter (the sign of a truly ripe melon).
I must admit I was happy to not get any green beans. They tasted really good, but it is not my favorite vegetable and I will be happy to something else as a side for the coming week.
The zucchini is piling up and I must do something with it soon. I don't have problems thinking of things to do with all my zucchini, I have problems finding the time to do something with it. Feels like just can't find enough time the last couple of weeks.
Wow, is the only word I can use to describe this week's share! Look at all of that goodness! Melons, tomatoes, onions, squash, green beans, corn, peppers, kohlrabi (yeah!), basil and cabbages. And don't they all look gorgeous!?!
The kids are back at school, and although I love them to pieces, I was very excited to pick up the share without them because their job was to pick out our share of tomatoes and they always liked to find the smallest ones they could. It was nice to have the freedom to choose my own size tomatoes this week!
The tomatoes alone make this week's share worth the money we spent on the share. Last weekend at Whole Foods my husband saw an old heirloom tomato that he wanted to try. At $3.99/lb that one tomato cost us about $7!
I hope you are all enjoying the bounty of the season as well! Guten Appetit!
August has gone so fast. I haven't forgotten about taking my share pictures, I just haven't gotten around to posting them. Here are the pictures from the last three weeks. Week 8's picture is a little weak because I was in Traverse City and my husband picked up the share and took the picture with his Blackberry.
The more I read about grains and specifically wheat. The more I am convinced that our family should limit the consumption of them whether they are whole, sprouted, soaked, etc. While I think that we can get by pretty well on meat, veggies, fruits and dairy, I would still like to have the option of making a muffin or a pancake for the kids every so often. And I should say with the exception of the few cavities our family has, we are not suffering any ill-health affects because of our consumption of grains, so if the kids have a cupcake or some corn chips at a birthday party, I really don't care. I just feel that in the long-term minimizing our consumption of them is best for our family.
For that reason, I recently ordered some books and alternative flours to help us on our grain reduction journey.
Grain-free Flour: Coconut Flour Almond Flour (it is bleached, but I emailed the company to see how they bleach it and they remove the Almond skins by quickly steaming them.)
There are other grain-free flour options available, but I choose these two because they had cookbook accompaniments I could use to guide me as I start cooking with them. I should also say that I only bought these to use occasionally. I wonder what would happen if we all started consuming as much almond and coconut flour as we do wheat, I can imagine that too much of these flours could be bad too...but that is just a guess.
I got the books a couple of weeks ago, but today the flours arrived:
I am super excited to try these alternative flours and look forward to sharing the results here. The only problem is I am heading up to beautiful Traverse City next week and won't be have the time to try them until I get back. Adios Amigos!
Tomatoes: Will eat on our salads or give to the kids for a snack during the week. I always ask them if they want it cut up like a "farmers market sample" which means I chop it up and give them toothpicks to eat it with.
Potatoes: Yum! These were good I slow roasted them in my mini-slow cooker. Had a few leftover that I will put in the kid's eggs in the morning.
Green Beans: Will use as a side veggie for dinner. This Peanut Butter Green Bean Recipe is a fun side dish that is pretty kid-friendly that I have made in the past.
Broccoli: Will use as a side veggie for dinner. I usually just steam them.
Green Peppers: Not sure what I am going to do with these, the black bean soup recipe from How to Eat Supper is AMAZING and calls for green peppers, I might chop them up and freeze them for use with the recipe over winter.
Onions: I put them in my storage bin and will use them through the week for cooking as needed. I just bought some of these vegetable keepers from reuseablebags.com that are in the mail. I can't wait to get them and hang them up in my kitchen to store my garlic, onions, and potatoes in!
Usually I reserve my favorite things posts for individual items, but today I wanted share with you some of my favorite things, from my favorite online store, reuseit.com. The store is chock full of environmentally friendly products for your use at the home, office and while out and about. They are constantly adding new items and have frequent sales, so there is always something new to buy ;-)
You can view pictures of many of the items I have purchase from reuseit.com on my flickr set for them,
Or, if you are more of a video person, watch the videos below where I talk about some of my favorite items.
Litter Free Lunch Napkins
Insulated Lunch Bag (Made in the USA)
Reusable Wrapping Paper
Reuseit.com has a HUGE selection of items like the ones I reviewed, hop on over there to check it out.
Two Types of Kale. We had some of the Kale for dinner tonight as sauted greens. It was very good. I think I will have some with my eggs at breakfast tomorrow morning.
Lots of Lettuce: We will use this for salads throughout the week.
Kohlrabi: purple and white. I sliced it into matchsticks and put it in our salad and sliced some and just ate them. It was very good. My husband really liked it because he remembers eating this as a child.
Fresh Garlic: I am going to cure these because I have a clove of last week's garlic still hanging around.
Kale: I made some Kale chips out of the Kale, but now I use coconut oil instead of Olive Oil, VERY good!
Update on last week:
A few people asked about the garlic scape pesto, well I tried this recipe from a Michigan Garlic farmer and it was so good. We had it on pasta and with the leftovers, I put it on our eggs one time and another, mixed in some olive oil and vinegar and made a vinaigrette out of it.
Today we spent thing morning at the VERY lovely Yule Love it Lavender Farm in Leonard, Michigan. It is a wonderful place to visit. We went there because my daughter loves to pick flowers and I thought it would be fun for her to go someplace where the entire purpose was to pick flowers. I also happen to love lavender. She had fun, but was probably a bit too young to pick lavender because we had to be specific about which stems we picked (they had to be flowering and we had to cut in between the first and second set of leaves), but we all still really enjoyed it because she could do other things like carry the stems we picked and put them into the basket.
After picking the lavender we sat down for some amazing lavender ice cream. We each had a bowl and it was superb! I am plan on trying to make some in the future.
Then the kids headed over to a little play area that was set up close to the pavilion that had a child-sized clothesline, a sandbox and a small tractor. They had a blast "washing" and "drying" the handkerchiefs they had there and playing in the sand.
We didn't participate, but they also offer an afternoon tea that looked really nice, but I think we will save that activity for when my children are older and can appreciate it more.
Here are some additional pictures from our trip today:
We got tomatoes, LOTS of lettuce (good thing we like salads), some garlic scapes, some onions, and some garlic.
I used a clove of the garlic in a salad dressing I made this evening for dinner, it was very good!
Thinking I will make some salsa with the tomatoes and green onions. I have some cilantro growing in my garden that will be nice in the fresh salsa. The tomato was very good. We had one in our salad this evening.
We will use the lettuce up in our daily lunch salads, and probably have some salads with dinner this week too.
I think I will try making some garlic scape pesto with the garlic scapes this week. Probably won't use it right away, but will freeze some for use later in the year.
My husband grew up in Malta and introduced me to a whole new world of tuna sandwiches when we first started dating. His tuna sandwich didn't have a lick of mayonnaise anywhere in sight, instead it had Olive Oil in it, and when he first told me about it I'll admit my response was "that's gross." But that was a long time ago, and now I couldn't imagine a tuna sandwich made any other way.
I have been avoiding tuna fish for the past six years because of the mercury. But then I read this article about how the selenium in fish protects us from the mercury, and decided it was time to introduce tuna back into our lives. So tonight we had tuna sandwiches...on white bread, a real treat! My son looked at his sandwich and said "wow, I like the color of this bread." :-)
So here is how you do it, nothing too fancy and I think next time I would add a little more basil and mint. I was a little out of practice after not making them for so long.
1.) Get out some olive oil, fresh basil, fresh mint, capers, and onions (pickled onions are REALLY good in this if you happen to have some on hand)
2. Chop up everything and mix it up with your tuna. Add some salt & pepper too.
3. Put some tomato paste, olive oil, and pepper on each slice of your bread.
4. Put the tuna on top of the bread.
5. Complete the sandwich for one amazing sandwich. In case you were wondering, the lettuce isn't bad, it is a variety of Romaine called "freckles" that we got in our share this week.
Yeah! My kids have been out of school for a couple of weeks now, but it hasn't really felt like summer until today, when I picked up my first Maple Creek Farm share.
Lots of lettuce for our lunchtime salads, some Kale that I will probably make some Kale chips out of, purple onions, Garlic scapes that I will use to make the white bean dip from the New York Times, and some radishes, which of all the things we get in our share is the hardest for me to use, because they really aren't my favorite....but we'll eat them just the same :-)
So happy that my share has started and so has summer.
One thing I have been trying to get better at doing is double prepping my meals. There are so many things I like to do in summer that do not involve being in the kitchen cooking. So I try to double every freezable recipe that I make so I cut my cooking time for the month in half. For example, this week I doubled and froze everything I made so that the week of June 20th, I won't have to cook at all, I just have to pull things out of the freezer and heat them up.
Today I made and froze my meatballs. These will actually serve us for about 4 meals. Here is how I make them with the ingredients shown below.
1. Mix the eggs, sprinkle parsley, salt and pepper over the top.
2. Put in 1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder.
3. Put in 1 cup of breadcrumbs in the mixture. I make my breadcrumbs by saving the ends from my Food for Life Sprouted bread in a freezer bag for a couple months, then once I have enough, I chop them up in the food processor and put them back in the freezer for use when I need them.
4. Mix that up well.
5. Add your meat into the mixture and bring it all together with your hands.
6. Line a baking sheet with foil, parchment paper or plastic wrap and shape your meat mixture into balls. I like to use a melon baller, but your hands work just as well. Note: I have never tried it, but I think if you really wanted to prep a lot of meat, this mixture would probably work well for burgers. You could double the recipe and pre-shape and then freeze some burgers to have on hand as well.
7. Cover with plastic wrap and put in the freezer.
8. Once they are frozen, take them off the tray and put the meatball in a bag.
What are your favorite dishes to use meatballs in? I usually use mine for pasta or Italian Wedding Soup.
Yeah! June is here, and that means Strawberry Picking. Today my mom and I went Strawberry picking at Rowe's Produce Farm in Ypsilanti , Michigan (we also picked some sugar snap peas that were amazingly good). Thought I would share some pictures of the day with you, followed by a few pictures that show how I freeze them for use through the rest of the year.
Here is how I Prep the Strawberries for the Freezing.
Wash the strawberries
Hulled the by hand (didn't even need the OXO strawberry huller because they were easy to just twist off).
Placed them on a dishtowel that was on top of a cookie sheet, put another dishtowel on top of the strawberries.
Place the cookie sheet in the freezer
Once they are frozen, put the strawberries in a plastic bag for use during the year.
We had a great time. When I was helping my daughter into bed tonight I said "I had fun with you today my little strawberry picker." She replied, "Mama, I am not a strawberry picker, I am a strawberry eater." :-)
My name is Julie Magro. This blog is a dairy of what I'm trying in the kitchen. I am on a food journey. My journey started many years ago. You see, I have always had bad feelings about processed foods. Something just didn't seem right about them. But, that doesn't mean I didn't eat them. Until recently, when the ethics and health benefits of how our food is grown and/or raised became a passion.
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The basil smelled wonderful and smelled up the whole porch at our pickup site! I already made some yummy pesto out of it.
Everything else looks absolutely fabulously fresh (how's that for too many adjectives) and I can't wait to cook with it this week!