dark days week 10
I've never actually seen Iron Chef, but I imagine it's a bit like cooking this time of year for the frugal-mostly-local-eating-midwestern cook who hates to let things go to waste. This week's use-it-or-lose-it ingredient is:The rapidly deteriorating butternut squash!
It actually wasn't too bad inside, even on the top, though I gave the softest bits and the inside seeds to the chickens. They, in turn, gave us the makings for these:
I know somebody else made farfalle for dark days recently, and it was a new pasta shape I haven't tried yet, and it looked so easy! We're pretty new to homemade pasta, I picked up a pasta maker at a garage sale last summer (the same day I found a brand new UNIVENT for four bucks! It was quite a day).
It also reminded me of the recipe from here which I made a few months ago when I had fresh sage. I used dried today, which worked fine, and subbed organic sunflower seeds for the pine nuts (I've used walnuts before too).
Pasta ingredients were either homegrown (garlic, sage, eggs) or from the farmer's market (squash, onions). Oh and Farmer John's awesome Parmesan on top. The only nonlocal ingredients were the sunflower seeds, olive oil, S&P, and flour.
Oh and on the side some of that foccacia I had made a couple of weeks ago (with SD tomatoes and herbs from our garden). It made a ton and I froze half of it, I was thinking it would make a great savory bread pudding too....maybe next week.
And just as a side note, look what I have, in Wisconsin, in January! My sad, sad Meyer Lemon is hanging on despite a lack of sunshine indoors and a bad case of scale, and has had several ripe fruit. What to do with three or four teeny little lemons?
The lemons don't look quite ripe enough for picking. Hope your plant survives until it's warm enough to put back outside!
ReplyDeleteYour pasta dinner looks and sounds delicious. Since you are using homegrown ingredients, would you like to enter this post in our Grow Your Own roundup this month? Full details at
http://chezannies.blogspot.com/2010/01/rambutans-plus-grow-your-own.html