Dark Days Week 15: Huevos Rancheros!

For some reason I got all het up to make some sour cream this week. I followed this recipe, because I didn’t realize Mother Earth News had one too. But they are pretty much the same.

So once I had this sour cream, I froze 3/4 of it but we still needed to [...]

Dark Days week 14: Pork! Yay!

Our locally-raised pig was slaughtered a couple of weeks ago and was finally butchered and ready to pick up last Saturday. Yay! We put everything into the freezer but kept a package of 2 pork chops out for dinner that night, and grilled them up with my favorite not-very-local marinade — red wine vinegar, [...]

Dark Days Week 13: International local eating

Local food friends Anne & Ryan hosted a potluck for the Olympics opening ceremony this week, and the assignment was to bring an international dish (because it’s the Olympics, you know). I have an affinity with Belgium, having spent a year there on exchange in high school, so I violated the rules of going [...]

Dark Days Week 12: Is it a cop-out?

Or maybe this is the point of the challenge: we’re tired, we’re hungry, there are a bunch of leeks and cabbages in the fridge but we don’t have energy to think up what to cook, much less to actually cook it. So we end up making sausage and sauerkraut again, replicating that meal exactly [...]

Belated Dark Days Week 9: Doing the best we can

Oh no, I just found this post that I wrote last Tuesday (so, still late for week 9) and thought I published, but apparently didn’t! It was late already so I guess a week and two days late isn’t any different from just two days late.

We were out of town this weekend, [...]

Dark Days Week 10 (?): Comfort Food (part 2)

Still no pictures, as my small camera is full and I am still too scared of the new big fancy camera.

We have been talking for years about making meat loaf, which Garth remembers fondly from his childhood. But his mom used the recipe from the back of the Quaker Oats box, and [...]

Sitting this week out

I missed a Dark Days meal this week — not because we weren’t eating delicious local food, just that there was no one big meal, and we were out of town for the weekend. We’re out this weekend too (and the next, ack) but I may write up a generic soup (“Piles part 2″) [...]

Dark Days week 7: Leftovers

The fridge was full and I was overwhelmed with options … How to divide up one serving of fried chicken, one serving of pot roast, four leftover egg whites, and 2+ servings of potato parsnip gratin? I was just starting to try to figure out how to decide who gets the pot roast sandwich [...]

Dark Days week 6: Solstice

I was home not-quite-sick-but-not-great on Monday, the solstice, so we built a big fire in the fireplace and did our Solstice stockings at noon instead of after work as planned. And we cooked all day, which is what really makes it a holiday, I think.

Our pretty Blue Slate hen turkey met an [...]

Dark Days week 5: Sausage and sauerkraut

We were both off our game this week as far as cooking went, so there was a lot of “what’s in the freezer? what’s in the cupboard?” One of the things in the cupboard was a crockful of homemade sauerkraut, made with cabbage from Laughing Crow Farm, that needed to be decanted (?) and [...]

Belated Dark Days Week 4: Piles (part 1)

… another “part 1″ because we eat piles so much, I am pretty sure they’ll come up again.

Looking for something easy early last week, I fell back on the category of meals that we call “piles.” Food piles generally consist of leftover meat if there is any, whatever veggies are available, and [...]

Dark Days Week 3: Comfort food (part 1)

It’s Part 1 because I am sure this won’t be our first display of cozy comfort food this winter.

My mom often made something she called Swiss steak, which I remember fondly. I was afraid that when I went to find a recipe, her version would be nothing like the canonical Swiss steak, but [...]