Day 7 - Getting Serious

I cracked the whip on myself and decided to do better today. We had nothing going on, so I had no excuse NOT to cook. I started off the day looking after some of the beautiful strawberries I picked this week and turned them in to freezer jam. I think I have enough left to add to the rhubarb in my fridge to make real jam some time tomorrow. I'm hoping to get back to the field for at least 4 more baskets this week. We had 6 baskets last year and still ran out of jam months ago, and had just enough frozen to get us through.

In the afternoon I made pasta. I LOVE making and eating homemade pasta. My most prized kitchen tool is the beautiful green Kitchen-Aid mixer we received as a wedding present and I've since added most of the attachments that work in the hub at the front of the machine, including the pasta roller to make flat sheets, fettucini and spaghetti and last year I added the extruder to make macaroni, and several other shapes. There is something incredibly hypnotic and relaxing about the sound and action of feeding the chunks of dough through the rollers and working them in to silky, smooth strands of deliciousness. My Dad even gave me this really cool looking pasta tree for Christmas that makes drying my noodles incredibly easy. I had yet to try out the local unbleached flour in a pasta recipe, and I have to admit I was concerned, because this stuff doesn't always behave the same as regular store bought flour. It looks more like whole wheat flour than the bleached white flour we are used to, it contains no preservatives and it's ground between granite stone, so basically...it's still alive. What I love so much about it though is that it actually has flavour! Imagine that! I took out all my equipment and got started...and boy, was I impressed. It turned out beautifully!!

Basic Egg Pasta

4 large eggs (7/8 cup...this is important because the eggs I get aren't graded so they come in all shapes and sizes!)

1 tbsp water

3 1/2 cups sifted (again...very important!) flour

1/2 tsp salt

If you don't get the liquid to flour ratio right your pasta is either too sticky or too dry. It's a lot easier to work in more flour than trying to add more liquid, so it's just quicker and easier to get it right the first time. That said, the humidity of the flour can make a difference...it never turns out the same way twice! I don't care though...real food should be a bit temperamental. Dead things don't have an attitude.

Anyhoo...place the eggs, flour and salt in the mixer bowl. Mix for about 30 seconds with the flat paddle, then change to the dough hook and knead for 2 minutes. Remove the dough and knead by hand for another couple minutes. Let it rest for 20 minutes then have at her with a pasta roller!

For the sauce I decided to make a white sauce and throw in the last of the lobster.

White Sauce

 I didn't really measure anything but my guess is I melted about 1/4 butter (Farquar's) in a sauce pan and then added 1/4 flour (Terza - aka The Flour Mill) and cooked it for a couple minutes. I should of added some garlic but didn't think of it. I then slowly added chicken broth (I though I had some left in my freezer, but I didn't, so I to use grocery store stuff. Boo!) and whisk it in 'til it was saucy. Then I poured in about 1 cup of heavy cream (haven't found a local source for that yet!) and added a couple sage leaves from my garden, and some salt and pepper. I heated it til it boiled a bit and thickened up. Then I added about half a cup of grated Asiago cheese (Thornloe Cheese) and the rest of our lobster. When it was all hot and bubble I poured it over our beautifully cooked pasta. Heaven!

The kids weren't crazy about it, but they ate it. I thought it was delicious.

I just realized we skimped out on veggies today, which I don't let happen very often. Oops!

In other news...Mrs. Duguay called to tell me she got a lead on some locally made wieners today! Wouldn't that be wonderful? I'm impressed with what we are finding when we go looking.  There is certainly a growing trend in the community to go back to the way it was not so long ago, where your food came from someone in your town, not from a packaging plant! I guess it seems fitting that I am one of the early ones to jump in to this as I've often identified more with my Grandparent's generation than my parent's or my own. I wanted to be a Stay-At-Home-Mom, and not only did I choose to have a midwife, I chose to birth my youngest at home. I knit, I quilt, I sew, I garden, I can. In many ways I'm more like my Grandmother than my Mother...although my Mom is an incredibly talented, crafty woman and even Memere thought I was crazy to have a baby at home!! Why would I choose to have a baby at home, when there were perfectly good hospitals? LOL My Grandparent's entire backyard is a garden, my Grandmother is an expert canner, baker and cook...I seriously doubt there has ever been a loaf of store bought bread in their house.. and they live in a farming community, so eating local is just the way it's done. My parent's generation is the one that whole heartedly embraced everything that came from Kraft, Mr. Christie, Lipton and Heinz and now here's my generation, or at least some of mine,  realizing that what they eat/ate when visiting their Grandparent's is/was a lot better than what they grew up on! 

Anyhoo, I'm rambling now and there work to do. I will post some pictures of dinner when I find my USB cable. I may be old fashioned in a lot of ways, but I do love my Mac and my digital camera!!


Shannon A.