milk makes cheese

Remember all that milk we had? Here's where more of that homemade ricotta ended up.
This time, it's polenta (bought from a local farmer) with tomato braised chard and white beans with homemade ricotta.
More milk went to homemade yogurt. Troy and I were up early one morning, before Jasper woke up and both prepping something in the kitchen. As I looked over what he had going, I realized we were both working on the same thing-- homemade yogurt.
So we've been having said yogurt with local blueberries and raspberries from our garden for breakfast. I wish the blueberries were from our garden as well but we can't seem to produce them...

salad days

Ok, I admit it. It was so hot, we ate take-out three days in a row. But before the lethargy hit, we made and ate a delicious steak salad. We sat outside and enjoyed the tiniest breeze until we just couldn't take the mosquitoes anymore.

Grilled hanger steak salad with garden lettuces, grilled corn, garden sugar snap peas, basil and mint.

not looking a gift horse in the mouth

So, we're getting WIC (coupons for free food for women, infants and children). For a family of three, we're getting 5 and a half gallons of milk a month. That's insane! Do people really consume that much milk? I wish that we could up the amount of veggies we get (only $10 worth) and forgo some of the milk (and frozen juice and 6 cans of tuna a month too!), but I'm not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Instead, I decided it was finally time to learn to make cheese.

So, here's my first attempt. I made ricotta and we had:

homemade pizza with tomato sauce (from last year's garden tomatoes), zucchini and crookneck squash, corn, spring onions, basil and fresh homemade ricotta.

We also had a lovely salad with garden lettuces, garden sugar snaps, spring carrots and cucumber.

back to eating

After a year long break from documenting our every tasty morsel, we're back to gardening, cooking and enjoying the fruits of our labor.

First up is a beautiful roast chicken with crispy roasted potatoes and arugula salad. The cherries in the salad come from our lapin cherry tree, planted in honor of chauncey the bunny (rip after 13 long years of life).

And here's the reason for the long break, and our new favorite past time:

summer tomatoes

I guess it's the crazy windstorm we had last night, but I'm thinking about our summer bounty. We had so much basil. I made a bunch of pesto and froze it.

And here are some of our tomatoes. So many tomatoes. I made batch after batch of tomato sauce and froze it.

After the 3rd or 4th batch, I burnt out. But we still have a ton of tomoto sauce in the freezer. For soups, sauces, salsa... and little summer after winter's wind storms.

Here's what the tomatoes look like now. Still so much fruit on there, rotting away. We got a little crazy planting tomato plants. Next year, only 3 or 4 plants!

my first roast chicken

I made roast chicken about a month ago or so. Turns out that while herzog isn't into me eating meat, he loves chicken. I find this interesting because I never liked chicken much before I was pregnant.
Anyway, I decided it was time to figure out the secrets to good roast chicken. The answer, of course, was butter.
We had some rice with wild mushrooms and spinach with raisins and almonds alongside.

Eating in Hawaii

i was going to say that this was the first good food we had in Hawaii. but in fact, we stopped at the farmers market in Kona on our way to the hotel. there, we picked up mango, papaya, bananas and avocado-- all local. so in fact, the first good food we had was at breakfast with fruit and local granola.
but this was the first good food we had out somewhere, at cerviche dave's. and it was absolutely delicious.
dave makes 4 cerviches daily (or multiple times a day) with whatever the very freshest and best fish is that's caught that day. this day, it was marlin, delicious marlin. we went another day and it was ono which was good too but not as good.
dave recommends that your first time there, you get the variety plate with a taste of all the cerviches. one has thai flavors: coconut milk and lemongrass. another (we're going counter-clockwise around the plate) has shrimp and pecans (troy did not eat this one, wanting to live to see another day), the next: lilikoi (passionfruit) and macadamia nuts. the last one has mexican flavors: a bit of spice, black beans and corn. our favorite was the lilikoi, a flavor i've become completely addicted to and am going through withdrawal now being stateside.

after the variety plate, we had a tostada, topped with cerviche and avocado and it was eaten before i could get a picture of it.
dave gave us some of his choppino next which was good but not as good as the cerviche. the bread comes with it is made my his girlfriend and is super yummy.