Strawberry Madness

Today was a day of strawberry madness.

Madness I say!

Yesterday, knowing that it was most likely the last week for strawberries at our farmer's market, we did a crazy thing--we bought a flat (8 quarts) of strawberry seconds, advertised as "for jam" along with 1/2 a flat (we shared a flat with a friend) of "firsts."

So today, the most important thing that had to happen was we had to process the seconds before they rotted away. I found an awesome recipe for strawberry rhubarb pie, so I started there. Oh yes, I bought 6 giant stalks of rhubarb too.

Here's the recipe: http://jas.familyfun.go.com/recipefinder/display?id=13663

I went though 2 quarts of strawberries, tossing the very bad ones, cutting out the bad parts of others, and simply de-stemming the rest. In the end I had the 4 cups of strawberries needed for my pie recipe. 2 stalks of rhubarb were cut up and added, and Pie was had. It was excellent. Oh and I used Pillsbury crust because I do not make pie crust under any circumstances. Not since the cherry pie incident of 1994. Just don't ask.

Once we decided that the pie was SO GOOD, we decided to put together freezer bags with strawberries and rhubarb, processed and ready to be made into pies! So Adam helped me because it is kind of dull work. We went through several more quarts of seconds and ended up with 2 freezer bags filled with sliced strawberries and rhubarb, for pies, and 2 smaller freezer bags filled with unsliced strawberries with no stems and bad parts cut out. We are going to thank ourselves later in the summer when we want strawberry pie and can have it! 

Meanwhile, there are 4 quarts of fresh delicious strawberries still in the fridge. These will become:

1) strawberry salad, of course

2) strawberry shortcake

3) (as my son would say): "strawberries in a bowl!"

Believe me, they will be eaten. 

Dinner Zen!!

Yesterday was my BIG TRIP to Dinner Zen!

My friend Amy and I arrived just in time to start. We had about a 10-minute orientation on food safety and how to prep the meals. The place was quite awesome. They had coffee and water if you needed it, and also had a baker going around with mini pastries for people to munch on!

Our first station was the crock pot barbeque. It was a good one to start with--a true dump recipe. Start with a pork roast in a bag, dump in barbeque sauce and vegetables, seal up, get your side dish, grab a bag of buns, and store in your bin in the cooler. Move on.

Some of the others were not quite as easy. The Big Bleu Chops, for instance, involved making a filling and then stuffing pork chops! The Mexican Lasagna was also fun but labor intensive. Things like the Bombay Shrimp Bowl, however, were easy and took just a few minutes to do.

As for the portions, OH MY GOSH.

What we signed up for was 12 full meals, to feed 4-6 people each. In almost all instances, they allowed you to split the meal. The only one where you couldn't was the pork roast. So in that case, we might have company, or just plan on eating left overs.

So let's look at the menu again:

Firecracker Chicken Quesadillas: Actually I was running behind and Amy made these for me. But they are so big that I think that 2 people can probably eat one for lunch. So we have 6 quesadillas, but it could be a total of 12 lunches.

Big Bleu Chops: As I said, labor intensive but they are going to be awesome. There were 6 and they are individually wrapped. I think since my son likes pork chops that this will be 2 dinners.

Mexican Lasagna: Lots of work here too. But fun! Think a lasagna only with tortillas instead of noodles, mexican cheese instead of italian, and mexican spices instead of italian. Yum. I split it into 2 pans instead of the 1 and I think they will each be a meal.

Asian Infused Flank Steak: Easy to make. And oh my gosh the steaks are so big. There were 2 steaks, and I think that it will equate to 2 dinners for the family and at least two lunch portions.

Scallion Sesame Burgers: Can I just say YUM. Really messy to make, but fun. You were supposed to make 6 but I made burgers the size we like to have them, and it ended up being 8 burgers.

Crockpot Pork Barbeque: as I said, I'm expecting this will be 2 dinners, just cooked at the same time :)

Bombay Shrimp Bowl: My husband is so excited about this one that we are going to eat it tonight! Very easy to put together, and to split. I split it in two and I forsee it being 2 meals.

Bourbon Chicken: Another dump recipe. Very easy. Split into 2 for 2 dinners.

Asian Pomegranite Salmon Packets: These were individually wrapped! Since my son usually rejects salmon we will probably have these as three meals. The salmon filets are huge too, so even if he likes it 2 are probably enough for all of us.

Quiche Florentine: No prep work at all--they have them pre-packaged. Now, as for our eating them--they are pretty big, and we remain only 2 adults and a toddler. I forsee 2 meals from each quiche.

Lemonade Chicken: How much fun is this? Easy to prep too. There were 6 chicken filets, and I'm now thinking I should have split it into 3 bags, but I did 2. We are used to eating small amounts of meat with more veggies in this house. That said, each dinner should be a dinner for the three of us and a lunch for either my husband to take to work or for me and the kiddo to share the next day. So in all, I'm thinking it's still 3-ish meals.

Pretzel Roll Toastie with Turkey: Have I saved the best for last? Haha. These are rolls that are made of pretzel dough, spread with honey mustard on both sides, with swiss and cheddar cheese, and turkey in the middle. You can bake them from frozen and they get crispy and melty. YUM. Can't wait. We have 6 of them, and they will probably be shared lunches for me and the boy (though I think the husband will probably take some to work too!)

All in all I am guessing that we have over 30 meals in the freezer right now. For $240. Worth it? YES. I seriously love how packed my freezer is today! I feel like I can make it for the next month with nothing more than defrosting and baking/crockpotting. My friend Oz asked me if I was going to do it again before the baby is born. I think that it would be a really good idea, though I might have to send my husband to actually do the work! It was two hours on my feet, and then I had to go out and show houses!

OK I suppose that if I hadn't had to show houses yesterday, two hours of standing would not have been so bad!

I mentioned to one of the staff that I was shocked at how much food there was. He told me that the owners like to err on the side of bigger portions. It was really cool. I can't wait to eat all of it!

So if you want to come with me in July, let me know, and we'll see what we can do!

OAMC Waffles

I have been resistant to doing breakfast as part of Once A Month Cooking, because, frankly, my freezer is small and making room for something that doesn't take a long time to make in the first place seems an unwise use of space to me.

That said, we recently started making waffles using Bisquick. Now, we have tried, and I mean tried HARD, to have healthy waffles. We buy the Oat Bran Mix or the Multigrain Mix, and let's face it--they don't taste like waffles. They come out soggy or just plain wrong. And anything with flax in the mix, as healthful as flax is, makes our dishwasher into a seedy mess. It's just impossible to get anything clean. 

So, Bisquick. The problem is, we are a small family of three, and the recipe calls for one egg, and you end up with 6 or 7 waffles. We were trying to save the extra batter, but we really don't like eating waffles that often, and cleaning the waffle iron multiple times each week is a pain.

So last weekend, when my husband made waffles, I asked him to make all of them, rather than letting the batter go bad in the fridge. Now, these are not Eggos. There's no way they were going to fit in my toaster. But I recently got a pizza stone from Pampered Chef, and I thought that they might reheat well on there. Adam made 6 waffles, we ate 3, and I froze the rest.

When you freeze waffles, you MUST tray freeze them first, and then store them in a gallon freezer bag. Fortunately, I knew this tip. They only took about 15 minutes of tray freezing, and they were then ready to be packaged.

This morning, the kiddo and I got up early and I decided it would be our waffle day. I set the oven temp to 350, spread out 3 waffles on my pizza stone, and threw them in for 5 minutes. I came back, flipped them, turned the oven down to 300 and left them in for another 5 minutes.

And they were Awesome. With no mixing, no messing up the waffle iron, no bowls filled with mix, and with all three of them finished at the same time, the kiddo and I had an awesome breakfast of waffles and strawberries (the end of the strawberries from our CSA share!) They were, perhaps, even crispier than the ones that came straight from the waffle iron last weekend. I was amazed.

So, what do I think? Is it worth doing a month's worth of waffles? Maybe, maybe not. My husband really likes cooking breakfast for us on the weekends, and I hate to take that away from him. But we will certainly be freezing the leftovers again, for another weekday breakfast like the one we had today!

More CSA Meals

So the mystery herb was definitely oregano! Tonight we had a fantastic dinner of sausage and peppers.

Now, I made it differently than usual because I had so many fresh ingredients. Here's the recipe I used tonight:

4 sweet Italian sausages (from the farm market)

The head of the giant spring onion from the CSA, sliced

1 green pepper, sliced

1 garlic curl, chopped

large pinch of salt 

some freshly ground pepper

leaves from 2 stems of fresh oregano (from our CSA--yay!)

scant cup of water

Brown sausages on all sides, remove from pan, slice into bite-sized pieces, and return to pan.  Add pepper, onions, garlic curls, salt, pepper, and oregano and mix. Add slightly less than 1 cup of water to the pan and scrape anything from the bottom of the pan. Cover tightly with a lid and continue cooking about 10 minutes.  Serve over pasta.

We also had salad, since we have a lot of lettuce. We used romaine lettuce, mixed greens, a carrot, a couple of stalks of celery, and lemon tahini dressing that we bought at the farm market last week. 

We still have a lot of lettuce. I'm not entirely sure what we are going to do with all this lettuce, but I'm going to make a genuine effort!  My friend is also sending me a recipe for the escarole, which should be excellent. The Potomac Vegetable Farms web site has a recipe for garlic curl pesto, so I think I might make some of that, too. 

I am fairly certain I am going to make some lasagna or something similarly Italian-ish :) Maybe a veggie lasagna. 

CSA Meals!!

Since I was excited but not mentally prepared for the amount of food that showed up in my home yesterday, dinner was stir fry. Let's face it, large number of veggies + no ideas = stir fry.

So, our stir fry:

One head of Mei Qing Choi, chopped coarsely

2 spring onions (from the farm market last week), chopped

1 garlic curl, chopped

2 small chicken breasts, marinated for 1/2 hour in harissa (from the farm market) and soy sauce

Stir fry in olive oil. Serve.

We wrapped the kiddo's into an egg roll, and everyone else just ate it plain with no starch or anything, and it was great!

I need to look up some recipes for escarole and kale, but we should be eating very well this week. Also, with three heads of lettuce, I think we will be eating salad. A lot of it.

The unidentified herb was identified by my husband as oregano. Since we have that and basil, I forsee something Italian, too!

Any ideas?

CSA Week 1!!

Today was our first pickup day from our Potomac Vegetable Farms CSA, and OH MY GOSH what a haul we brought home. I haven't completely identified everything yet, but here's what I think we have added to our fridge today!

1 bag of mixed salad greens

1 bag containing 3 small heads of lettuce

some kind of small cabbage

3 heads of baby Mei Qing Choi 

a head of escarole

some kind of green that looks like kale from the stems but isn't quite as curly. It may be in the kale family based on the stem though (and based on the fact that our "In the Bag" info says we have kale)

an unidentified spicy herb. It's very peppery. It's not on the "in the bag" sheet so I don't know what it is.

a small bag of basil

a whole lot of garlic curls

a large onion with the greens still on top

a box of strawberries

1/2 dozen eggs

Now, we paid for our CSA back in February, and when you divide what we paid by the number of weeks we have, it comes out to about $30 per week for this food. OH MY GOSH. I just never expected there would be so much food for $30 per week. And yes, I'm aware that we're looking at a lot of salad and greens in the next week, but they are going to be awesome salads and greens! My friend Amy came with me to watch the kiddo in the car while I went to pick up the share (I didn't know how long a walk it would be), and we were tasting everything in the car on the way back. I even gave her a garlic curl to use tonight, because I have way too many of them now (though apparently I now have a recipe for garlic curl pesto which I may have to try).

From what I hear, the amounts of food just keep increasing as the summer goes on, so I can't imagine what we'll be getting in a few weeks! How exciting!!

Looking Forward to Dinner Zen!!

I have been looking forward to this for a few months now. On Saturday morning at 10:00 am, right after going to the market to get my new flat of strawberries, I will be heading over to Dinner Zen to make my meals for the next month. I am SO INCREDIBLY looking forward to having my Once a Month Cooking Prep done by someone else this month, I cannot even describe my glee.

I really have to fix the freezer issue before I go. Thanks to a zealous husband, and I love him dearly, we have way too many convenience foods in the freezer right now. I may move some to the teeny tiny freezer in the teeny tiny refrigerator in the basement. We really don't need 3 bags of fish sticks in the freezer, even if they were really cheap. Meanwhile, we'll be having a Mango Curry Chicken meal tonight, which is great and will remove one bag of meals, and I can see the last of the pork chops being eaten this week as well. Mainly I have to move around the frozen veggies and convenience foods.

So here's my menu.

Dinner Zen Meals Qty Firecracker Chicken Quesadillas 1 Big Bleu Chops 1 Mexican Lasagna 1 Asian Infused Flank Steak 1 Burger of the Month: Scallion Sesame 1 Slow Cooked Southern Pork BBQ (Crockpot) 1 Bombay Shrimp Bowl 1 Bourbon Chicken 1 Asian Pomegranate Salmon Packets 1 Quiche Florentine (Pre-Assembled) 1 New! Lemonade Chicken 1 Pretzel Roll Toastie with Turkey 1

There are 12 different meals, each of which makes 4-6 servings. My plan is to gauge the serving size and split each into 2 or 3 portions. I'm SO excited. Doesn't that look awesome?! The Pretzel Roll Toasties are made to pop in the oven and become a melty delicious lunch! I don't even have to make the quiche, just pick up the 2 pies and add them to my order! 

I know this is not something I'll get to do every month for the rest of my life, but give me a moment while I revel in the one part of the end of my pregnancy that I'm really looking forward to. NOT COOKING. They say it should take about 2 hours to put together the 12 (really 11) meals, and then I will have food for 24 or more meals! Plus, I still have my convenience foods and a few bags of things I've made recently and had extras of (meatballs and taco meat). So we should be GREAT through at least the end of June, and probably longer as I can definitely forsee a few nights of spaghetti and other boxed convenience foods. 

I have one friend joining me already! If you are local and want to come at the same time, head over to the web site and put together your own menu, and join us on 6/6 at 10 am. :)