Bird's Nest Eggs...

My Mum taught me how to make Bird's Nest Eggs when I was little girl....here's how they're done!

It starts with buttered bread and lovely eggs....take a glass
and cut the center out  of each piece of buttered bread.

Now, fry up those buttered centers until they are golden.

Next, fry the toast  on both sides and drop the egg in
the center. We like to leave ours a little runny...with
plenty of pepper.

The finished Bird's Nest Egg, with a side of Granny Smith

Fred has his eye on my plate, while....

Jasper has his eye on Michael's plate. 

An interlude with Jasper...

"That was unnecessary, Mom."

Sweet Potato Pie



Start with a crust...




Next, some cooked sweet potatoes, some crystallized ginger,
sugar, cinnamon, cloves, powdered ginger, and sweetened
condensed milk, eggs....




Puree it all....




Fill your crust and decorate with pastry-shaped schnauzers and
burros that are supposed to look like shepherd-collies. Egg wash and sugar
on all....




Oh, and don't forget to make tiny tasting pies...I mean, who
can wait?




Out of the oven...uh, did the schnauzers grow?




Eh, voila! All done.



Let's Talk Green Tomato Pie and Artful Nozzle Topping Noises

First, what's spinning in our kitchen now? Why, Nightmares on Wax, A Word of Science
     When I was little, my Grandma used to make green tomato pie with the tomatoes that developed just before the fall frost. I often thought this was a Pennsylvania Dutch receipe, a testament to the region's culinary frugality (I remember my Mum punctuating a conversation about receipes involving pig's feet and pig's ears with the explanatory statement, "People used to use everything but the squeal"). However, I have found that green tomato pie is popular in other areas, too. When I've made it myself before, it's been runny and the green-ness of the tomatoes becomes a little...mmm...how shall I say it...*making a rude lip-smacking noise and wrinkling my nose* overpowering? Perhaps, yucky? Sure, we'll go with yucky.
     My Mum also makes green tomato pie, and hers is more like apple pie and definitely really tasty. I decided to try my hand at the receipe again last night before Michael got home from work. See, I have a metric ton of green tomatoes in the fridge, and I've already made six quarts of green tomato sauce. And sometimes pie is the only acceptable thing a person can have for dinner. In On the Road, Jack Kerouac proclaimed pie to be the most nutritious thing he could get for the few cents he had left in his pocket when he was traveling. Of course, his pie involved ice cream, but that's besides the point. We, folks, had Redi-whip. To celebrate that winning Redi-whip spirit, I'd gladly make the topping-coming-out-of-the-nozzle-noise for you, but I don't have sound effects here on blogger, and that's sad.
Anyway, by 4 p.m. yesterday, I had a few things going on in the kitchen at the same time. In early spring, when we got the new stove, Michael judiciously suggested I get a double oven. A very wise suggestion indeed. At the time I thought, eh, I'm good. *waving hand in the air* I don't need a second oven just yet. Well, clearly, I was a fool. You'll see. I had our poor oven stuffed and working hard for three hours. It has since put in a grievance with its shop steward, but that's me so....*shrugging* ya know...

Coring and slicing green tomatoes for the pie filling.

Here, I'm rolling out the dough for the bottom crust. There will be a top
crust, too. I mean, isn't that why we eat pie, for the crust? Maybe that's just me.

It don't look purty here, but it'll taste good.

And ladies and gentlemen, we are in the pie, ready for a lid!

Lid on! And vented.

Here, the lid gets a lovely brushing of egg wash (I know, I was rather
generous with that brushing) and a dusting of granulated sugar.

Green tomato pie out of the oven and cooling.

Look at what this woman is pushing through the system at 375-degrees.
This went on for hours! Sweet potato fries, banana bread in little pie pans.

Did I mention I was also making a beans and greens soup? I was.
The beans are a Christmas Lima we grew. The meat is pork. The greens are
last week's salad (but still good). The broth is Herbox chicken boullion cubes.
Then there's sage, rosemary, salt, and pepper.  

Whole wheat banana chocolate chip bread in little individual
pie pans because the chocolate chips always stick.

And the green tomato pie with brown sugar. I was happy with my pie this time.

A Day Making Jam

It's the last of the "putting up" activities here. I probably shouldn't say 'last' because we still have so many habaneros and so many garlic bulbs (some of which Michael re-planted in the garden for next year), and so many green tomatoes that I can foresee that we'll have more receipes to potentially tackle (perhaps even tomorrow!). Today's activities are documented just below. Pictorial time!

Here is the beginning of garlic-Hungarian wax pepper jam.

...and here Michael is filling jars with garlic-Hungarian wax pepper jam to
go into the canner.

After that, we began roasting garlic for roasted garlic jam. Yes, roasted garlic jam!
We've found the savory receipe segment of the Ball Canning Book. So much excitement!
Here, the garlic is covered in 1 tsp. olive oil and 1 tsp. balsamic vinegar.

The roasted garlic, here wrapped in aluminum foil, made the kitchen smell amazing.

At 10 a.m., when we got up, we started soaking dried apricots in white vinegar.
Why? We're making habanero gold preserves.
The apricots needed to soak for 4 hours. Now, they've plumped up.

The garlic-Hungarian wax pepper jam is out of the canner.

Now, Michael is stirring the beginnings of the habanero gold.
It contains: 1 /2 cup dried apricots, 3/4 white vinegar, 1/4 red onions (our own!),
1/4 cup habaneros (our own!), 1/4 cup Hungarian hot red peppers (ours, too),
and 3 cups sugar.

Remember the roasted garlic above? Here it is in white wine (there's some
in Savannah at this point, too...heh! It's Saturday, kids.), golden balsamic vinegar,
water, crushed peppercorns, and 3 cups sugar.

The roasted garlic pepper jam 'broth' pureed with our immersion blender and
mixed with cracked black peppercorns...before we added the pectin.

Here is the gorgeous habanero gold.

Michael is putting lids on the roasted garlic jam here. They're about to take
a hot bath in the boilign water canner.

And the full collective of today's activities appear above.

All this productivity made us hungry. Last night, at Riesbeck's in Steubenville,
we found that they make chocolate Redi-whip. So, here, we've got crackers,
peanut butter, banana, and chocolate Redi-whip

Moment with nature: the fall colors continue to spread across the hill.



Another moment with nature: more of fall colors in "the holler".



Swiss Chard and Green Tomatoes

At the end of August, before our vacation, Michael planted Rainbow Swiss Chard. Chard is popular in Mediterranean cooking and reputed to have high nutritional value. Still, it's a thick-leafed business, so I either need to cook it or.....my favorite: make it into pesto. Eh voila!


Rainbow Swiss Chard, preparing for a bath...
actually, this, ladies and gentleman, is bath 1 of 3.



....and into the collander for a nice drip-dry.

So, how do I make swiss chard pesto? I'm glad you asked. First, be sure to have a schnauzer nearby to get behind legs and between feet. This makes the process particularly exciting, notably when you're moving between cutting board and food processor. Be prepared to reprimand the young lad frequently and point to the kitchen door repeatedly, to little avail. Next, fill your food processor with olive oil (one glug), a fist full of almonds (right now they're the most reasonably priced nut available at Costco, two shakes of parmesean (from the pour-out side not the shake side), two cloves of garlic (peeled, crushed, and finely chopped), a squirt of lemon juice (for good luck...no, actually to keep the greenery from browning so dramatically), and  a teaspoon of salt. When all that is in the processor, add chopped swiss chard (chopped so that it actually processes, rather than only partially processing and leaving large shredded leaf pieces along the processing bowl sides...such sights cause Savannah to make a frowny face).  After you've done all that (I had so much chard, I did the above method three times), you have pesto to freeze the willies out of, like this:

And in it's final form: pesto!  It's in the freezer for a long winter's
nap. Well, I'll probably wake some of it up in a week or so.

Now, let's talk green tomatoes. I harvested a metric ton of them yesterday morning. It's supposed to frost this weekend, so I thought I'd better get them now. Unfortunately, the reporter here forgot to take a picture of all
the green tomatoes in the dish drainer (we put her on bathroom cleaning detail as punishment for her negligence) and I don't have a picture of that 'metric ton' of tomatoes, but I assure you there were many. My drainer fairly floweth over. So much so that after I cut up 3/4 of them, I filled up a 6-quart slow cooker bowl, and I still had some left over....like enough to crowd the countertop. I mean, holy bananas, right? Anyway, my Mum makes a really good green tomato sauce, much like marinara, that she serves over pasta. I asked her to email me the receipe, and this is what I made in the slow cooker, with a few of my own little tweaks. What you see below is (and I apologize for my rampant inexactitude, but I eyeball most of my ingredients when I'm not baking, so a lot of these measurements are very idiosyncratic, like the pesto receipe above...like a fist full of almonds, Savannah? Can you be a little more vague? You'll see that yes, yes I can be.):
>>Green tomatoes, quartered, and about 2" beaneath the rim of the 6-quart slow cooker bowl.
>>2 red onions
>>several cloves of garlic (to taste)...I start with 4, and any additional cloves obviate the need for concern about a) vampire attacks or b) general invasion of personal space by others (great for public transportation riders who hate crowding!)
>>2 glugs of oil
>>about a tablespoon of paprika (or, my method, two quick and forceful shakes from the bulk container)
>>2 teaspoons pepper
>>2 teaspoons salt

The beginnings of green tomato sauce (with a few red tomatoes in there
because we had them handy)

After it cooked for four hours (the funny lady here forgot that turning on the knob means nothing until the appliance is plugged in and that took an hour for her to realize...you know, I was looking at it going, 'why isn't it getting hot?'), I used my immersion blender and made it into a genuine, stick-to-the-pasta sauce. When I was boxing it up to put in the freezer, I sampled extensively. For all my ingredient-measuring inexactitude, it cooked up beautifully.
Meanwhile, on the pepper front, our dehydrator produced a lovely baggy of Hungarian Hots, Wax Hots, Habaneros, which all will, in time, be contributing their concentrated fire to chocolate chip cookies. Here they are in a rather un-glamorous shot. Like a bunch of mummy finger, they are:

Egyptian Mummy-fingers...*cough*
No, actually, they're dehydrated hot peppers.

Finally, like the program Sunday Morning, I'll leave you with a nature scene. Pleasant Valley in fall:

Moment with nature: the color of autumn in the valley. It gets more vibrant
every day.

Moment with nature: the color of autumn behind the farmhouse.

My favorite time of year...

"It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn."  -- B.C. Forbes

Usually, each year, we get a nice little haul of acorn squash, which are
perfect for making pumpkin soup.

I cut them open, remove the seeds....

...bake them, and remove the orange flesh from the dark green shell.

I puree the squash in the food processor and then freeze it to use later.
See? There's the orange good stuff in the upper right hand corner of the freezer.
The purple stuff on top of it? Pureed red beets, which are perfect for
chocolate cake.

 I made Asian-style pulled pork using cranberry juice, our own hot pepper jam,
hoisin sauce, ketchup, ginger, liquid smoke, soy sauce, our own garlic and
red onions, and cornstarch. It looks like a hot mess here, but once it cooked
down, it was *so* good. We ate it over cooked sweet potato chunks.

Look at our bean haul! They're in the jars and tupperware containers
around the crockpot.

There's my handsome beekeeper, coming down from bee hill.

The boyz are restless because Dad is outside. Eventually, when I was
downstairs folding laundry, they 'nose-pried' the door open and ran out to Michael.

We got some beautiful apples from McDannell Fruit Farm in Biglerville, PA,
which we always try to stop at on the way home from visiting my folks.
What is this? An apple crostata! Click here for the receipe.

Michael's putting the garden to bed.

And I made some apple crisp for tomorrow's breakfast.

The gorgeous fall reds, oranges, and yellows continue to spread across the hill.