August 18, 2009
· Filed under Main Dish, Summer · Tagged basil, pasta, pesto, sausage, tomatoes
Posted by Lisa
Pesto Sausage Pasta
This pasta was so delicious and rich. The pesto just explodes in your mouth!
Pesto Sausage Pasta
printable recipe
- 1 torpedo (or other red onion), sliced thinly
- 5 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 pound sausage, balled or torn into bite-sized chunks
- 2 medium tomatoes, chopped
- 1 batch pesto
- 1 pound dry spaghetti, cooked
- freshly grated Parmesan
When the pasta water is close to boiling start to prepare the sauce. Heat a tablespoon of oil in a large pan on medium high heat and add onions and garlic. Cook for a few minutes then add sausage. Cook sausage and onions until sausage is done and mixture starts to caramelize. Stir very frequently to prevent burning. Add tomatoes. Cook until pasta is ready. Drain pasta and add to pan with sausage, onion and tomatoes. Add pesto and toss until thoroughly combined. Serve sprinkled with grated Parmesan.
July 3, 2009
· Filed under Main Dish, Summer · Tagged basil, broad beans, fava beans, pasta, tomatoes
Posted by Lisa
Broad Bean, Tomato and Basil Pasta Salad
I threw together this salad for a very warm evening with visiting family using a few things I had on hand and a couple of things I picked up at the farmers market. Broad beans, aka fava beans, are a late spring/early summer treat. They are typically harvested when they are fairly mature and then you have to shell the beans and then remove their inner skin after blanching the shelled beans. Growing Wild Farm (owned by our very own contributor Sheila), has been selling young favas at market. They are so young that they don’t need to have their skins removed, which makes preparation quite a bit faster. I also picked up some early tomatoes from a stand that I don’t typically purchase produce from, but they had tomatoes and I felt that tomatoes would really complement the favas and the basil that I also purchased. We had some grilled pork chops and thick yellow onion slices leftover from my birthday dinner the night before, so I threw those in, too. The salad tasted like summer and it was hearty, but not too heavy for such a hot night.
Broad Bean, Tomato and Basil Pasta Salad
- 1 lb of dry pasta, cooked and rinsed with cold water
- 2-4 cups of chopped, fresh tomatoes
- 1/2 cup chopped basil
- 8-10 ounces cooked pork chops, steaks, chicken or ham, chopped (optional)
- 1 onion, thickly slice and grilled or caramelized
- 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
- 3 tablespoons lemon juice
- 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
- freshly ground pepper, to taste
- sea salt, to taste
Combine the pasta, tomatoes, basil, meat, onion, and Parmesan in a large bowl. Mix the lemon juice, olive oil, pepper and salt in a small bowl until combined and pour over pasta mixture. Stir to thoroughly combine. Taste and adjust seasonings as necessary. Serve cold or at room temperature.
April 29, 2009
· Filed under This and That · Tagged bacon, beans, collards, eggs, greens, kale, leeks, menu, pasta, pesto, rapini, salad, spinach, swiss chard
Posted by Sheila
Ok, things have been cooking pretty slowly for me and this blog. As my about info relates, we are not usually meal planners so can’t share a weekly meal plan. However things are heating up now that we are back to harvesting for the CSA. Now we begin to just harvest for ourselves on the same day, and either suggest recipes for that week that we have tried, or often find new ones that we then try that week. This will make it easier for me to serve up tasty blog posts to complement Lisa’s hard work here! The second ingredient that has been missing for me here has been taking decent pictures of the food we make. I have come to have a great appreciation for the well taken pictures on food blogs. Like Lisa mentioned to me, it is hard when everyone is ready to eat and you are trying to get a picture in, and then add in a dash of poor lighting in the kitchen and it just becomes a fiasco. So I have decided, photo or not, words can go a long way (pictures do help) with wetting your appetites! Here’s some of what we ate from our fields last week.
- Goat and Barley Soup with Leek Tops (cut leek tops into 1 inch pieces and used as their own veggie–these were soft and delicious by the time the soup was finished!)
- Salad Mix of baby lettuces, crisp baby Russian kale, blood red beet leaves, borage flowers, perpetual spinach, and wild sorrel tossed with nettle pesto, italian-style homemade vinaigrette, and coarsly chopped Oregon hazelnuts
- Braised Rack of Goat with Sauteed Rapini
- Pizza Night: Nettle Pesto w/ sheep’s Feta AND Carmelized Leeks and Rapini, w/ Parmesan and Olive Oil
- Coconut Red Beans and Rice w/ baby perpetual spinach leaf salad with oil, vinegar, feta
- Falafel and Chard Cakes (ours somewhere between these and these )
- Rice Noodles with with sautéed Kale, locally fished Tuna, and Buttery Leeks
Things we plan to try this week:
And lots of different salads:
- Baby Perpetual Spinach with warm dressing of some sort (maybe we will splurge for some bacon…our piggies had none) and poached egg.
- Baby Perpetual Spinach w/ balsamic vinegar/olive oil, walnuts, and Oregonzola (Rogue Creamery blue cheeses-yum!!)
- Ceasar-inspired Lettuce Salad with our Rogue D’Hiver lettuce (a Romaine type)
- And maybe this Butter Lettuce and Pumpkin Seed Salad with our Winter Density lettuce (a butter/romaine style)
Otherwise it might be more of our old stand-bys: kale and eggs in the morning, greens smoothies, collards and rice and buttery leeks and white beans, more slow cooked goat (it is the only meat in our freezer right now), and probably another rapini pizza on pizza night! Who knows, maybe this week a great picture will come out of a great meal and it will grace this table here!
March 21, 2009
· Filed under Main Dish, Spring, Winter · Tagged bacon, dried tomatoes, feta, garlic, greens, mushrooms, pasta, preserved foods, rapini
Posted by Lisa
Mediterranean Spaghetti with Spring Vegetables
Our family doesn’t eat as much pasta as we used to, but pasta is a quick go-to dish that is the perfect vehicle for odds and ends from the refrigerator. My daughters kept asking me the name of this dish, so pressed to name it I came up with Mediterranean Spaghetti with Spring Vegetables, which they declared too long of a name. I couldn’t come up with anything else. It is Mediterranean in flavor with feta, balsamic vinegar, copious amounts of garlic and herbed tomatoes that I dried last fall, but it also had green onions and rapini which are green and spring-y. The dish was fairly quick and complimented by all (except my youngest who is developing an aversion to many green vegetables). The richness of the pasta was offset by a turnip salad.
Beautiful Fresh Vegetables and Home Dried Tomatoes
Mediterranean Spaghetti with Spring Vegetables
- 1/2 lb bacon, chopped
- 8 cloves of garlic, minced
- 1/4 – 1/2 cup dried tomatoes, sliced or chopped into smaller pieces
- 3/4 lb sliced mushrooms
- 1 bunch of rapini (or other greens) chopped
- 2 green onions, sliced
- 2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme (so easy to grow yourself)
- 2 tablespoons chopped parsley
- 3/4 cup crumbled feta
- 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
- 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
- freshly ground pepper
- 1 lb spaghetti
Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil to cook your spaghetti.
You will want to have all your ingredients ready at this point, because the pasta comes together fairly quickly. As your water heats, start cooking the bacon in a large pan. After several minutes, add the garlic and dried tomatoes to the bacon. When the bacon is nearly brown, add the mushrooms to the pan.
This part takes a little coordination. You will want to add your rapini or other greens, green onions and thyme to the bacon and mushroom mixture when your pasta is about halfway cooked, because the greens require very little cooking and you don’t want them over done. When pasta is al dente, drain in a colander and add the pasta to the bacon and mushroom mixture in the large pan. Also add all of the remaining ingredients to the pan. Mix well with tongs to even distribute everything. If the pasta seems a little dry, add a drizzle of olive oil and/or a small amount of chicken or vegetable stock. Serve immediately.
March 20, 2009
· Filed under Main Dish, Spring, This and That, Winter · Tagged arugula, gluten-free, greens, kale, leeks, pasta, pork, rapini, roasting, turnips
Posted by Sheila
St. Patrick’s Day came and went with Irish Pork Chops braised with stout and leeks, served with roasted cabbage, turnips, and more leeks (leeks, leeks, leeks…our winter staple which we are still enjoying even as we size up the Walla Wallas as they work their way towards spring harvests). We also had this gluten-free Irish soda bread, ours made with sweet sorghum rather than teff flour. Our gluten free baking is usually reserved for just such special occasions, and the littlies in the house revel in the treat–we had the leftover bread as French toast the following morning, it was as if they had woken up in heaven. Dessert was rice flour shamrock shortbread drizzled with mint chocolate and for the adults, Irish Cream Coffee with the whiskey but not the Creme de Menthe, just another drizzle of the mint chocolate on the top of the whipped cream.
With the passing of this holiday that we love and feel a bit akin to having our own fair share of Irish blood between the two of us and vested in our kids, we invoke a celebratory mood that we keep with us to mark the coming of Spring (and our son’s birthday) just a few days later. As we make the move from winter to spring, we also begin to shift from winter to spring eating. The changes have already begun on our table with a handful of lovely baby lettuce salads for a few dinner parties and to round out some weeknight meals for the first time since early December! We have also begun harvesting our kale, adding it either lightly sauteed or just tossed and rubbed in oil and vinegar with just about every meal we can because it is beyond delicious harvested now, after the winter’s cold has sweetened it more than you can imagine when you try to recall summer’s more biting kale and even when compared to the fall’s first frosted leaves.
The mustards and Asian greens have begun to flower, sending up tender rapinisthat we eat out of hand for snacks or saute just a moment to toss with pasta or to top a simple olive oil/aged cheese pizza (we are using Willamete Valley Cheese Co.’s Borenkaas, a raw cow milk aged gouda), this replacing our regular winter pizza of arugula and sun dried tomatoes or sauce tomatoes from the freezer. The arugula, too, now budding, no longer the base of our simple, winter side salads.
We are only three years into our lives on this farm, two years into eating really seasonally, and just one year into growing vegetables through the winter. Still, more than ever, we mark the circle around the sun in vegetables. The trees, leaves or not, flowers here or gone, birds, bees, rain or sun…these things we feel and keep time by with great enthusiasm, even more so since we began to farm; but as we see the dishes on our table wax and wane the varying season’s bounty, we feel even more deeply connected to this cycle. And so we march forth towards the equinox with bellies full of winter and ready to be filled with spring.
February 3, 2009
· Filed under Autumn, Main Dish, Winter · Tagged pasta, preserved foods, sausage, tomatoes
Posted by Lisa
Pantry Pasta Bake
When you are eating locally, preserving food can be a great way to have out-of-season items in your meals and to help bridge the gap between bountiful harvest seasons.
Having a pantry of preserved food can also present the challenge of actually using the preserved food. Maybe you never use the dried zucchini because you’re not quite sure how or you just forget it’s there.
I threw together this pasta bake using items that were in my pantry: dried zucchini, dried tomatoes and tomato sauce and also fresh produce that I had on hand: garlic, onions, mushrooms and carrots.
It’s pretty easy really. Sauté sausage (hopefully procured from a local, humane meat farmer or you can leave it out if you are vegetarian or don’t have any handy), onions and garlic, add mushrooms after a few minutes, and then about 3/4 cup of red wine several minutes after that. Toss in a grated carrot, chopped dried zucchinis and dried tomatoes, and a pint of tomato sauce. Then simmer until the vegetables are tender. Mix with a pound of cooked pasta. Pour half of the pasta mixture into a 9″ x 13″ baking dish and then sprinkle some cheese (I used mozzarella), top with remaining pasta mixture and more cheese and finish up with a sprinkle of freshly grated Parmesan. Bake until bubbly at 375 to 425.
This is so easily adaptable to what you have on hand. It would be great with some dried bell pepper, too!
