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We have made it through yet another year on the ‘farm’, which sounds better than ‘small scale agriculture experiment’.  We have a cellar full of food for the winter and are looking for to the meat store opening, which to the rest of the world is known as hunting season.  No doubt the coming weeks will outline some of the projects we have undertaken this summer and ones we are looking forward but for now, a list:

  • Our chickens survived another year and continue to lay
  • We have a FULL cellar – and our garlic is fantastic
  • We planted 6 new fruit trees this spring as well as blueberries, black raspberries and strawberries (both June and Everbearing)
  • We got watermelons – first time we have managed to ripen them
  • We grew ARTICHOKES and harvested them
  • We have been working on the house and after many long hours have restored our original pine floors in both the living room and bed room downstairs
  • We installed our first permanent raised beds for the fruit listed above as well as herbs for culinary and medicinal use

Aside from all of that I am sure I will think of more – check back in the coming weeks for some more in depth follow ups.

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So to compliment my brown sugar and rosemary ribs I whipped up some garlic and rosemary mashed red skin potatoes tonight.  And compliment they did, they were good, good enough to be made again.  Aside from being good they were easy, really easy.

Rosemary and Garlic Mashed Potatoes with Ribs

These were easy and just took a little time to allow the potatoes to marinate, which provided some excellent flavor.

Ingredients
6 to 10 red skin potatoes
1/4 c olive oil
2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp onion powder
2 tsp fresh rosemary finely chopped
1/4 tsp ground white pepper
margarine

Instructions
First I washed and quartered the potatoes, then placed them in a medium bowl.  If you wanted to you could peel them before you quartered them.  At this point in a small bowl I combined the rest of the ingredients and mixed well.  Then I poured the mixture over the taters and stirred them tell they were well coated.  Then I let them set for a couple hours, stirring them through the olive oil mixture every 30 minutes or so.  Then it was into the oven at 375°F for 45 minutes until they we were tender.  Then I pulled them out and mashed them and whipped with some margarine until they were how I wanted.

They were amazing with a subtle taste of garlic and rosemary on nicely roasted mash potatoes.

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The chicken saga continues, and tonight we cracked open the P90X cookbook and scaled back a recipe for the two of us.  We have also started on a new portion control saga to only eat as much as our fist (chewed of course), with more vegetables and less meat.  We ended up with a relatively easy chicken recipe that was tasty.

Lemon-Garlic Chicken Breast with Coucous

Ingredients
2 chicken breasts
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp molasses
2 cloves of garlic chopped
1 tsp worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper

Instructions
Combine lemon juice, molasses, garlic and Worcestershire sauce in a bowl and mix well.  Spray a baking dish with non-stick cooking spray and put chicken in it.  Pour marinade over chicken, cover and refrigerate, turning occasionally for 1 hour.  Pre-heat oven to 425°F and bake for 45 minute or until done, basting occasionally.

It was pretty tasty, at least the skin was and it had enough flavor to permeate every bite of the chicken.  It was a little dry, but I slacked in my basting and will do that more frequently next time.

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In the spirit of the Digital Chef, “cookin’ with what you got”, I cooked up a cupboard cleaner meal.  Actually it was more of a fridge cleaner, but none-the-less we got rid of some almost empty stuff.  It was also a beautiful day so I cooked all this mess on the grill over cherry wood, no charcoal just straight cherry wood, had an awesome flavor in the chicken, the taters were sealed in foil.

Potatoes and BBQ Chicken Breast

All in all it tasted good, it hit the spot and cherry wood usually make any meat a little better and chicken breast on the grill is no exception.

The chicken was place in its foil boat atop a bed of onions, a mashed clove of garlic and sprinkled with BBQ 3000.  It was then smothered in BBQ sauce, we had a little bit of three different kinds in the fridge and I used all of them.  Three more bottles out of the way.

The potatoes were canned potatoes (which I had never even seen before, let alone ate) and they were placed in a foil boat with a couple tablespoons of margarine, some chopped onion, some mashed garlic, some parsley, some steak sauce and a little cheese.

Both dishes were pretty dang good and even better for not having planned at all, a last might grill meal for the win.

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