Day 10

This is a fruit bowl I set up on the dining room table. Mostly stuff from the Saturday market. The bananas are Johnny's of course!

For dinner last night we had our first winter squash of the season. It was perfect: cloudy, dark, damp..... Humboldt County weather for sure. It's funny though, when it gets foggy and cloudy here on the coast it's generally hot inland. Sure enough, it was 100 degrees in Willow Creek today. I don't think we topped 65 here!

I filled baked Delicata squash with the rest of the cranberry beans from Thursday's dinner, topped it all with melted Fontina cheese, and baked it for about 20 minutes. That and a big green salad was plenty of food. For dressing, I cut up a few tomatoes and added them to the remains of the salsa from Thursday night. I've discovered that a fresh super-juicy tomato and salt is really the best salad dressing available. Way better than that roasted pepper thing I attempted last week! Simple is good.

Here's a picture of the finished product. It was quite good. I was struck by the fact that the squash, the beans, and the tomato are all indigenous American plants.....

Before bed I put the yogurt in the fridge. It turned out great this time! Smooth, with the perfect amount of tang. The sour cream was not yet congealed, so I left it overnight in the oven. I turned it on for about 30 seconds right before bed to make it a little warm. We turned the apple butter off and left in on the stove overnight.

Breakfast this morning was yogurt with raspberries and honey. I payed almost $5.00 for the raspberries at the market, and I don't think it was worth it. They tasted fine, but there's so many wild blackberries right now that it just seems silly to spend that much money on any kind of berry.

For lunch I heated up the last of the veggie pockets from Saturday night and fried two eggs. I tried one of the duck eggs - it had a huge yolk, but tasted good. I sneaked a peek at the sour cream and lo and behold - it had turned into sour cream! Really creamy and delicious sour cream!! How exciting!!

Check out this bunch of basil! It's the biggest I've ever seen - and I bought it for only $2.00 at the market this Saturday! The farmer definitely undercharged!

For dinner I made a sauce with about half the basil, butter, and sour cream. I was trying for a pesto substitute, but it just didn't work in the blender, so instead I heated the mixture up on the stove. I was really afraid I'd ruined it, but it worked! I added the rest of the salsa from last Thursday to make a really buttery basil tomato sauce.

We had the sauce over baked cod and boiled potatoes and carrots. A farmer friend of mine gave me a really big bag (about a pound I think) of pea-shoots, and about a half a pound of watercress, so we added a little to the salad mix for a really good spicy salad. I'm going to have to think of more ways to eat watercress and pea shoots!

After dinner Johnny got out the food processor to finish the apple butter. Here's some pictures of what it looked like before and after processing:


And here it is all done in jars:
Johnny added cinnamon and sugar to his. Mine is the dark one in the middle, with only apples and a little honey.

We don't sterilize the jars. Johnny eats apple butter and cashew butter sandwiches every morning for breakfast, so we put them in the fridge and he uses them up before they go bad.

That's all there is to report today. It looks like I'm going to get my sheaves of wheat on Saturday. The farmer will drive them up to a farmer's market in Fortuna, and I'll go down and pick them up. I''m so excited! I also got a Motzerella cheese making kit in the mail today. You're supposed to be able to make Motzerella in a half hour! So stay tuned for more exciting adventures in food!