As you may remember, the weekend before last I picked up some swiss chard from the farmer’s market. I knew I wanted to cook it as a side so I went with my old standby way of preparing cooked spinach to see if we’d like it. I used a little over half a bunch of chard. We waited until toward the end of the week so I ended up pulling out a few of the leaves. 
First up, I cleaned the leaves and trimmed down the ends of the stems. You can eat the stem but you want to cut them down so you get rid of the more woody pieces. 
Next, I cut the leaves and stems down to more manageable pieces. I rolled the leaves like I would to do a chiffonade cut and cut them down to pieces about an inch or so wide. 
When they were all cut up, I heated up some olive oil in the pan at medium heat (about 2 tablespoons, just eyeballing) and added a chopped up clove of garlic. 
After it had cooked long enough to be fragrant, I added in my leaves and put the lid on. 
I left it alone for around 3 minutes before using tongs to move the leaves around and flip them to make sure it was cooking evenly, then put the lid back on for another 3 minutes and removed it from the heat. 
We ate the chard with steak and potatoes from the grill. On the whole it was really similar to cooked spinach with a slightly different flavor, just a little bit sweeter. I’m thinking about loading up on some this week and trying to freeze some cooked like you would find frozen cooked spinach in the grocery store. I’m going to do some more research on it to see if there are any good tips out there. I’ll keep you posted on what I find out. I’ll be back this weekend with some boozy dessert!
The Green Room- Stillwater
Hi Everyone! I hope you had a good holiday weekend:)
Like I said earlier The Hubs and I spent some of the weekend in Stillwater, Minnesota. It’s a smaller town that sits on the St. Croix river and is full of antique shops and beautiful older buildings. We checked out a few antique stores until we couldn’t look at another old china set. My favorite find was the signed photo below. The icy blue eyes of a husky……. 30 rock? anyone?
For lunch we checked out The Green Room. It claimed ‘Local Food and World Cuisine’ however, I didn’t see anything on the menu or the website that called out what farms or suppliers they sourced locally. I was disappointed there wasn’t information on it since that was my main reason for picking it out but the food was pretty tasty. We were served warm fresh bread with herb butter and I’d ordered the spaghetti carbonara.
The pasta had really good flavor with a rich and creamy sauce. The egg was cooked just right with a runny yoke and the pepper gave it just the right amount of kick. It was really filling so I didn’t quite finish it but I would definitely go back and have it again. It also made me want to go home to figure out the perfect way to poach an egg!
I’ve got a bit of catching up to do from the weekend, I don’t remember the last time I went to the grocery store, but I’m going to try and squeeze in both the dessert and drink of the month yet this week…. or I might just end up doubling up in June. Either way you win:)
Happy weekend!
We’re hanging out in Stillwater for the weekend.
Hope you enjoy your extra day off, we’ll catch up on Tuesday!
Busy Weekend
After my post last week about cabinets you’d think I’d hop right on that project and get to work. Nope. Didn’t even touch ‘em.
I was up before 8 am on Saturday morning to get a good selection at the Fulton Farmers Market. It was opening weekend and by the open at 8:30 the place was packed. We did a quick walk through to see what we were working with, then went back and made our selections.
We picked up spring salad mix, breakfast radishes and swiss chard from Uproot Farm. We dug into the salad mix right away this weekend. Still have the chard and radishes to eat yet. You can learn more about the farm here. They have a handy tab for recipes by vegetable they grow. I’ll probably be browsing that for some ideas over the summer.
We also picked up some plants from Gardens of Egan, a farm based out of Farmington, MN. From the looks of it they’ll have fresh produce later this year but also a great place to pick up organic flowers and veggies for your yard. Our herbs and tomato seedling just haven’t gotten started this year. I think we may have started to late this year, we’ll know better next time around. We picked up 9 tomato plants, basil, parsley, cilantro, and thyme.
Finally, we treated ourselves to some breakfast to go by way of Patisserie 46. They had one of the busiest stands due to their spread of irresistible pastries. We picked up a couple of croissants and called it a day. It’s still a little early to find a wide range of fruits and veggies, but I’m interested in checking out some of the pickles and jams some of the other vendors were offering as well as some of the other croissants varieties…
When we got home we really got to work. We planted all of the herbs and tomatoes and also put up a canopy of patio lights. It doesn’t sound like much written out, but we were in the back yard from about 10:30-7 or so. We got inside about 5 minutes before we got hit by a thunderstorm that started with hail:( UGH We lost about 5 lights to the hail but the plants looked pretty good.
The lights aren’t too shabby either. I think we’ll have some fun nights chilling out on the patio with a beer or wine.
Opening Day
First Saturday at Fulton farmers market!
My Secret Shame
Ok, so that title is a little intense. For one it’s not so much a secret if you’ve either been in my house or heard me talk about this at work over the last year or so….
But for the rest of you, I’m in the middle of the longest home improvement project ever. Re-re-painting my cabinets. When we moved in, almost 4 years ago, we did a mini kitchen makeover. We put in new countertops, sink, a tile backsplash, and re-painted the cabinets the first time. We tried to do the all of the cabinets at once over Labor Day weekend. Since we wanted to be done before we went back to work that week we really rushed ourselves and didn’t allow for full drying and probably didn’t sand it well enough. The end result were white cabinets complete with newspaper marks on the interior and chips and scratches within the first week.
I’d been living with it up until last summer when I was finally fed up with it and thought after all that work we should have decent looking cabinets to go with the rest of the updates. Last summer I started on one end of the kitchen and made a goal to take my time doing a bit at a time each weekend until I was completely done with doors and bases, target date Thanksgiving 2011. Well, this is what it’s looked like since then….
I got 11 doors/drawer fronts done and 5 are still sitting in the garage waiting for the last coat of sealant. Yup, they’re basically done, but I never finished that last step before I could bring them inside. No good reason, just got lazy. Now that it’s May I really can’t say I’m worried about it being to cold for the paint to dry, not that I could in March either with the record heat….whatever. With that, I’m announcing here and now that I will start again this weekend and hope to be done by Labor Day of this year. Ugh…. I’ll let you know how it goes
Garden Update- Sprouting *Update*
Where did the last week go? I had a busy/late week at work and then my parents were up over the weekend. The week went by in a flash and all of my best intentions of posting got passed up for dinners of popcorn and frozen pizza at 9pm while watching a bit of TV just pooped. Things seem to be slowing down a bit though so hopefully we can get back to business as usual.
Since it’s been a couple of weeks I thought I’d show you how our container veggies are doing…
Huge onions
Potatoes well on their way
Carrots are sprouting too
Tomatoes aren’t quite doing as well as we’d hope. A couple might be ok to plant but we’re debating on whether or not we should bite the bullet and buy some plants at a greenhouse. We’ll see how they look toward the end of the week.
Hope you all are getting to enjoy some warm spring weather! See you soon!
UPDATE: Sorry for posting without pictures. Had a few issues on the tech side of things. To make it up to you here’s a friendly visitor we’ve had in the backyard since the pups have been banned while we’re re-seeding. Isn’t he CUTE! He didn’t like me sneaking around the yard to take pictures of him, I promise he’s not stuck inside our garden just outside the fence:)
Drink of the Month- Manhattan
I’ve been meaning to start a Drink of the Month post for awhile now and after a few too many late nights at work last week I thought this was the perfect time to get it going. I thought I’d start off with a classic cocktail, The Manhattan. Drinks like this are making a bit of a comeback thanks to the new season of Mad Men, although I’m not quite ready to go drink for drink with Don.
To make my Manhattan, I used some almost local whiskey, Templeton Rye. Templeton Rye is stilled in Templeton Iowa, and close to my hometown. I know at least one person out there is going to consider it sacrilegious that I used Templeton Rye to make a mixed drink, my apologies. It’s only available in 4 states, and even then not in every liquor store, but if you ever come across I highly recommend picking some up. They have their own recipes if you check out their site, but I used the recipe below. Be warned, it goes down smooth.
Manhattan
1 parts vermouth
2 part rye whiskey
3 dashes of Angostura bitters
3 dashes of simple syrup
stir well and serve over ice
Springtime Frittata
Hi There.
So it’s safe to say I’m more than a day late on this post. Sorry about that, work got away from me a little this week. But as promised, here’s the frittata I was telling you about. I used a recipe from Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks. I was given her latest cookbook for Christmas this year and I’ve enjoyed every recipe I’ve tried so far.
Making a frittata was fairly easy and it’s a flexible recipe that allows you to use whatever veggies are in season. I used new potatoes, shallots, peas and my farmer’s market eggs. One of the biggest things I liked about this recipe was that it allowed me to use up 10 of the 12 eggs! I always run into having about half a dozen left over after baking something or just making an omelet. They’ll sit there until i’m not sure when I bought them and then it’s just a waste of food. No longer!
Making this did get me thinking about some of my kitchen supplies. My skillet was a bit small and the straight sides made it difficult to run my spatula around the side to keep the edges from getting too brown. My spatula is also permanently curled on the end from forcing it…. maybe I just created the perfect frittata spatula
So Long April
Hi All,
I hope you’re having a good start to your week! I have a bit of catching up to do with you.
I went back to the farmer’s market and picked up more asparagus, morel mushrooms, radishes, rosemary and wisconsin cheddar cheese. It was a good haul and the number of vendors easily doubled from the last time I was there. I’m going to freeze more of the asparagus and keep some fresh for dinner tomorrow too. I’m undecided with the rest of the haul. Do I make another pasta dish with the mushrooms? Radishes in a salad? Or dipped in vodka and salt like I had at my photography class? Do I eat the block of cheese all in one sitting or shred it over tacos or burgers. Decisions, decisions….
All day Sunday the Hubs and I worked in the yard. I’m talking 6-7 hours of work. We planted almost all of the herb garden. The final piece will be some mint plants and one more rosemary to finish it out.
The container veggies are also all planted and ready to grow. 2 potatoes, 2 onions, and 2 carrots. Don’t they look exciting right now?
We also transplanted our teeny, tiny tomato seedlings into some larger pots to get them better established before we put them in the larger garden. They’re looking pretty spindly, I’m hoping their new homes will encourage them to pick up the pace a bit.
The largest chunk of our day was spent doing a combo of mowing, picking up sticks, picking up dog presents, weeding and re-seeding the lawn. We’ve got a lot of watering to do over the next few weeks between the different gardens and lawn. We’ll keep our eyes on things and hopefully we’ll get some herb sprouts soon and some strong tomato plants.
I’ll be back tomorrow to fill you in on what I did with the eggs I bought last week. Time to start the sprinkler!
