Meatballs Primavera

Want a fast, cheap, healthy spring meal?  My new invention, Meatballs Primavera, is your solution.

I buy lots of very inexpensive, grass-fed hamburger meat from a local butcher shop here in TN:  if you buy ten pounds, it's $2 a pound.  Can't beat that!  Probably couldn't even raise it myself for that.  But a girl gets tired of hamburgers all the time.  Meatballs, however, are another story.  They are infinitely variable in terms of what you put in the meatballs themselves, and what you put around them.  I do it slightly differently every day, but this spring I've developed this recipe called Meatballs Primavera.

Here's what you need:

Butter or olive oil
Hamburger or ground meat
Herbs
Onion, sliced
green vegetables (in this case I used broccoli and collards from the garden)
Heavy cream
Lemon juice
Nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste

Chop the herbs and mix them with the hamburger and season with a little salt and pepper.

Heat the butter in a large skillet or deep pot.  When the butter gets hot, brown the meatballs on both sides.  (My meatballs are kind of like small hamburgers, a bit flat rather than perfectly round.)

Push the meatballs to one side of the skillet and add the onion slices.  Turn down the heat.  Brown the onions slowly another four to eight minutes.  If you think the meatballs are getting too cooked, you can remove them with a slotted spoon and set aside for a while, but I usually just leave them.

Add the greens and broccoli.  Add a small amount of water--maybe 1/4 cup or less-- and put a lid on the skillet.  Steam the greens and everything together for about 8 minutes.

Remove the lid and add cream to taste.  Turn up the heat and simmer to reduce the liquid, for about two minutes.  Don't overcook the greens; they should remain bright green.

Season with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and nutmeg.

home cured bacon

I love bacon, and I read a post on Michael Ruhlman's site about how to cure your own bacon at home, so I decided to try it.  I bought a pork belly at Garrett's butcher shop in Algood, TN.  It weighed about 3.5 lbs.  I followed Ruhlman's directions, which involved making a cure of salt, honey, black pepper, bay leaves, thyme, and garlic.  You rub this cure all over the pork belly and put it in a big plastic ziploc bag, and store it in the refrigerator for a week.

The pork belly shrinks some during the week, because the salt is drawing some of the moisture out of it.   When you get it out at the end of the seven days, it's smaller.  You rinse the cure off, and then you bake the pork belly at a low temperature in the oven until it reaches 150 degrees internally, which took about two hours in my oven.

At this point I removed the skin on the underside of the pork belly.  I froze some of it, for seasoning soups later, and Molly the Border Collie ate some of it.  It is very tough, like shoe leather, but she just swallowed it whole.

I sliced up some of it immediately and fried it, but it was hard to slice when it was warm right out of the oven.  A day or two later, after it had chilled in the refrigerator, it was much easier to slice.

This bacon is very lean, compared to the bacon we buy at stores.  I think the reason is that many pigs these days are bred to be lean rather than fatty.  I learned from the ever-useful Oxford Companion to Food that in the 19th century, when bacon was the main meat for working class and rural people of the British Isles, there were many breeds of bacon pigs.  Now most bacon pigs descend from Yorkshire Large Whites and Danish Landrace pigs.  ( Some of my ancestors were from Yorkshire; maybe that's why I like bacon so much!)

Snow on Brangus Lane

This winter there has been a lot of snow on Brangus Lane.  When I got here on December 12, four inches fell during the night!  Since then, there have been lighter snowfalls from time to time.  On Wednesday huge, beautiful, silver-dollar-sized flakes fell for an hour or so.  The snow helps to insulate the greens under the row covers from the cold.  Here you can see the garden with two beds with Agribon spun-bonded row covers laid over greens:

Star Wars cookies

I got these cool Star Wars cookie cutters from my sister Marian for Christmas.  They represent Boba Fett and a generic Storm Trooper.  To make them, I used the 1-2-3 cookie dough recipe from a cookbook called Ratio.  You weigh out one part sugar, two parts butter, and three parts flour, mixing the butter and sugar together first. This makes a very basic shortbread cookie, which I varied a bit by adding some vanilla flavoring and an egg yolk.  Then I rolled it out and cut out the cookies.  Boba Fett looks more like a domed adobe house than like a bounty hunter, but maybe that's just me.

I also played with another Christmas toy, which is a measuring cup attached to a digital scale.  Very handy, and very good for aficianados of Ruhlman's ratio system.

Big turnip

I planted a fall garden in August and then went to Houston in September for three months. While I was gone it got pretty cold, but a neighbor put some blankets on the garden for a few of the coldest days.  When I got back a week ago, it got very cold:  down below ten degrees.  But because there were four inches of snow and blankets over the beds, most of the vegetables survived, including this huge turnip, which weighs almost two pounds.

What do you do with a turnip this big?  I made a pot of soup along the lines of Leek and Potato soup, only it was Turnip and Onion soup.  I fried some bacon, then sauteed some onion in the fat, added the turnip and some water, and simmered till the turnip was soft. Then I pureed the soup and added some cream.  Good!

Grissini

Grissini are sort of like long skinny biscuits, although they are baked longer, so they get hard.  Maybe they are like long skinny biscotti then.  Or dog biscuits for people.  (I found out that dogs like grissini too.)

Anyway you use the same sort of ingredients you use in biscuit-making, and you make a stiff dough as for biscuits.  But then you take a piece about the size of a super ball or a marble, and you roll it out to make a long thin worm, and you bake it.  It's a lot like playing with playdough.

I found out that if you roll these worms out with two hands, gradually spreading your fingers apart as you roll, it makes them stretch to ten inches long, which is what the recipe specifies.  Well, maybe some of mine weren't quite that long.

Here's the recipe I used, from an old Gourmet:

Yield: Makes 32 breadsticks Active Time: 1 hr Total Time: 1 1/2 hr 1/2 cup rye flour 3/4 cup all-purpose flour, plus some extra for dusting the counter 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup Kalamata or other brine-cured black olives (3 oz), pitted and finely chopped 1/2 cup well-shaken buttermilk 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled to room temperature 1 large egg beaten with 1 tablespoon water to make egg wash Special equipment: parchment paper Put oven racks in upper and lower thirds of oven and preheat oven to 350°F. Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment. Whisk together flours, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt in a large bowl, then stir in olives, buttermilk, and butter until a dough forms. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead 5 or 6 times.  You might have to add more flour if the dough is too wet. Halve dough and form each half into a 12-inch log. Cut each log into 16 pieces. Roll each piece into a 10-inch-long rope and arrange 1/2 inch apart on lined baking sheets. Brush breadsticks lightly with some of egg wash. Bake, switching position of sheets halfway through baking, until golden and crisp, 25 to 30 minutes total. Cool on sheets on a rack 30 minutes.

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/printerfriendly/Black-Olive-Grissini-235790#ixzz13ChipLOC

Beware the Packsaddle Worm!

Today I got stung by a packsaddle worm. 

Here's a picture (I didn't take it; it's from a website):

It's been a while since I've had the "stingin' worm" experience.  Years ago, I used to get stung pretty frequently while looking at my corn patch.  I could never see the bug that got me.  Finally somebody told me that there were these almost invisible bugs in corn that sting very badly, called packsaddles or stinging worms. 

I forgot about them, though, because for years it didn't happen to me. Then it did, today.  I wonder why the stinging worms came back.  Maybe it's because we've had such a wet, hot year.  Today I researched the packsaddle worm online and found out that their scientific name is Acharea stimulea.  Presumably "stimulea" means "it hurts."

A PBS site about American words supplied some quotations illustrating the use of the word "packsaddle," rather like the OED does:

From 1884:   "I wonder if Harris ever saw a pack saddle. Well, its as putty as a rainbow, just like most all of the devil ' s contrivances, and when you crowd one of em on a fodderblade you ' d think that forty yaller jackets had stung you all in a bunch. "

From 1925 Dargan Highland Annals:   "You said I must git another big mess ' fore the frost struck ' em heavy, an ' that field was plum full o ' pack-saddlers. One stung me ever ' time I laid my hand on a roas ' in ' year. Hit hurts worse ' n a hornet fer a minute, an ' it ' s harder on a body ' s temper than a hornet is."

It does hurt pretty much like a hornet for a minute, but then it stops hurting; however, the little swollen bites remain.

Anyway, if you have a corn patch, don't let little kids go in there, and if you go in yourself, wear long sleeves and/or gloves.