Sweet Sassy Molassy

CSA Challenge: Italian Wedding Soup

Italian wedding soup

We had leftover ground beef and pork sausage from making stuffed peppers, so we decided to make some Italian wedding soup and made some small meatballs for it. The soup was incredibly easy to make. We sauteed some garlic, onion, celery and carrots, then added chicken stock, some orzo and the meatballs and then added in some greens at the end and garnished with some asiago cheese. The greens were all leftovers from the weekly CSA: spinach, arugula and salad greens. It made for even better leftovers the next day. It was one of the best soups I have ever had, and I ate it for dinner and lunch the next day!  And I don't particularly even like soup as a meal all that much!

Onion marmalade crostini

Maybe one of the reasons the soup was so good was because of the crostini with onion marmalade that we added to it. Leah made some onion marmalade out of a few big yellow onions, balsamic vinegar, brown sugar and salt and pepper cooked slowly over low heat. We made some crostini from toasting some baguette slices, rubbing with garlic and then topping with the marmalade. This was awesome in the soup! We also used the marmalade as a spread on ham and roast beef sandwiches throughout the week.

CSA Challenge: Stuffed peppers with homemade tomato sauce

Garden tomatoes

I haven't had a lot of time for updating recently because work is so busy. However, I was thinking about making some tomato sauce this morning and remembered that I hadn't even updated about the first sauce I made a few weeks ago. One of the main reasons we grew our own roma tomatoes this summer was to have some to make really good pasta sauce on the cheap. So, after our first harvest, I decided to give it a try and see how it turned out. I cheated a bit and used a few farmer's market tomatoes in the first batch, since I only had 4 ripe tomatoes at the time, but the 2nd batch is all from our own tomatoes from the garden :)

Roasted tomatoes for sauce

First, I sliced all the tomatoes in half and laid them in a single layer in a roasting pan. I drizzled olive oil over them and sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper. Then I chopped up some onions, garlic, and oregano and flat leaf parsley and spread them all on the tomatoes as evenly as I could. Then I baked them in the oven at 450F for about 30 mins.

Roasted tomatoes for sauce

After they had cooled a bit from the oven, I peeled the skins off (we ate them later because they are yummy, but I don't like them in the sauce) and scooped out all the good stuff into a deep bowl so I could use a stick blender to make the sauce. A regular blender would work fine too, or you could just mash it up if you like a chunkier sauce. We ended up using this sauce to cook with some stuffed peppers, which turned out great!

Stuffed peppers

To make the stuffed bell peppers (which we had gotten in our CSA basket), I first made the stuffing and then cleaned and steamed the peppers to soften them, then stuffed them and baked them for about 20-30 mins til they were hot inside. Because I pre-cooked the stuffing mixture and the peppers, they took a lot less time to cook in the oven. I was inspired by this recipe, which I doctored up a bit: http://www.singforyoursupperblog.com/2009/08/20/delicious-stuffed-peppers/

For the stuffing, I pre-cooked some rice and then made a mixture of 1/2 lb of hamburger and 1/2 lb of pork sausage, which I cooked with some spices and onion and garlic and a touch of  tomato paste. Then I mixed in some rice (I think about a cup, but maybe more) and half the sauce and proceeded to stuff the peppers with the mixture. The rest of the sauce went into the bottom of a baking dish. I placed the peppers on top of the sauce, grated some cheddar cheese on top and baked it at 350F for about 20 mins. We served it over the rest of the rice and spooned some of the sauce on top, along with a nice big salad!

CSA Challenge: Pickles

Pickles

A few weeks ago, we forgot to place our CSA order and ended up getting some pickling cucumbers in our basket as part of the "Farmer's Choice" mix of veggies they give you when you don't order for yourself. I've never made pickles before, but after some research, decided it should be pretty easy to try. I wanted to make some refrigerator dills and some more traditional canned dills. I kind of used a mix of recipes I found online. It seemed there's really only 2 things that you need to worry about: soaking the cucumbers in ice cold water to keep their crunch and making sure the ratio of vinegar, water and salt stays the same no matter the size of your batch. So it was quite easy to make a small batch, even from recipes that are for large amounts. I used wide-mouth pint jars, because they will fit in the big pots I already own (the water needs to cover the top of the jars for canning).

I started by scrubbing the cucumbers and soaking them in ice water for a few hours. Then I made a brine with 6 cups water, 2 cup white vinegar and 1/2 cup kosher salt, with some mustard seeds and a few hot pepper flakes, and brought it to a boil. While that was getting going, I boiled my canning jars and lids to sterilize them and bring them up to temp.
 

Pickles

For the refrigerator dills:
I picked out some fresh dill heads and peeled some garlic and placed a few dill heads and a sliced clove of garlic in the bottom of 3 jars. I sliced about half the cucumbers into spears (the largest ones, and cut off the ends so they would fit into the jars) and stuffed them into the jars. Then I poured in the brine to about 1/2 inch from the top of the jar and put a few more dill heads on top before sealing the jars. These I turned upside down (per the recipe I had seen) to settle overnight and make sure they weren't leaking before putting them in the fridge.

Pickles

For the canned dills:
Again, I picked out some more dill heads and peeled and halved some garlic cloves, but also sliced an onion into 1/2 inch thick slices and put a slice of onion, 2 garlic cloves and some fresh dill into the bottom of the jars. I packed the jars with whole cucumbers and then poured in the brine, added some more dill on top, and then sealed the lids. I boiled the jars for 10 minutes, then removed them, let them cool a bit and checked the seals of the jars. I allowed them to cool overnight and put them in the fridge after about 3 days.

Results:
I tried the refrigerator dills after about 4 days and they were awesome! They turned out so good and they tasted like real dill pickles! I was so excited, because it just didn't seem possible that after only a couple of days that they would have any flavor, but they do! I have been snacking on them after work and they are crunchy and delicious. I am going to wait for 2 weeks to try the canned dills, and I have no doubt that they will be good, but I am curious if they will taste much different and if the extra effort of canning is even worth it, especially since I burned my hand when some of the boiling water splashed up on me when I was removing the jars.