We're an ordinary family, complete with picky eaters, budget concerns, and time management issues. But to prove that "eating local" works - even for busy families in cooler climates - we're trading Chick-Fil-A and goldfish crackers for grassfed meat and local produce. Join our adventure in learning to eat (sort of) sustainably for the summer!

Friday, June 15, 2012

Dandelion update

Okay, so pulling the little buggers by hand in the spring is a pain, but when I mowed the grass yesterday? NO DANDELIONS. Huzzah!

Monday, June 11, 2012

Recent recipes

Kale got you down already?  Skip the kale chips and use it for breakfast instead!  There's a great breakfast casserole recipe here (thanks to my CSA for passing this along - it's a keeper!).  I made it this weekend, and heated the leftovers up this morning, and it was still tasty.  I highly recommend serving it with salsa.

And now for something completely different: Lemongrass Consomme with Pea Shoot and Mushroom Dumplings, from The Conscious Cook by Tal Ronnen.  Don't ask me what I was thinking when I copied this recipe last year to try - I was probably so deliriously happy to find a recipe that used that mysterious bag of "pea shoots" that showed up in my CSA share that I didn't read the rest of the recipe (which someone was nice enough to post here).  Yes, it calls for lots of ingredients, and it takes quite a bit of prep, and making the dumplings is fiddly work that really shouldn't be undertaken on an empty stomach.  That being said, YUM.  I subbed white button mushrooms for the ones specified in the recipe, and used some lime juice in place of the lime leaf, but it still turned out wonderfully.  And you really couldn't taste the "pea-ness" (heh!) of the shoots in the dumplings, so if you wanted to sub another tender green for them when pea shoots were out of season, I don't think it would mess it up too much.