Getting Ready for Company

It's been awhile since I have blogged about food, hasn't it? The situation for Wisconsin educators is pretty grim. Teachers are retiring, which would ordinarily be good for someone like me who wants a permanent position, but school boards need to cut (LOTS OF) spending, so they won't be hiring new teachers to replace those who leave. Class sizes are almost definitely going to go up. While the school board in the district where I am subbing (but am not working under a contract or protected by a union) decided to extend the teachers' contracts for two years before our governor got rid of collective bargaining for teachers, the school board in the district where my husband is employed (with a contract) refused to extend their contracts, so he (and all of the other teachers in the district) now have their jobs at the whim of the school board, with no real union protection at all. We're looking at some big changes for next year.

One positive piece of political news is that the Wisconsin legislature may be thinking about making sales of raw milk legal (again). I hope that any such bill survives a veto this time.

In spite of not blogging much lately, I have been cooking up some yummy things in the kitchen. In an effort to streamline my life so that I can focus on teaching during the week, I've been making a huge batch of something on Saturday or Sunday, and living off of leftovers for the rest of the week.

Here are some pictures of the food we've been enjoying:

Spaghetti with grass-finished beef, homemade spaghetti sauce, and zucchini from last year's garden:

The pot roast (which came from Viroqua, not Argyle as I previously stated).


A casserole made with zucchini, onions, mushrooms, pasta, grass-finished ground beef, 3/4 of a jar of homemade tomato sauce, and a full quart of homemade spaghetti sauce, topped with local farmer's cheese. (It is not hard to get local cheese in WI, fortunately!) It was a little bit watery - I a going to keep that in mind for canning next year and really cook down the tomatoes before canning them. (I plan to can at least five batches of plain tomatoes plus two batches of the spaghetti sauce from Animal Vegetable Miracle.)
(Ideally, I would have sauteed the onions in a separate pan to make sure that they got fully softened. I didn't want to make extra dirty dishes, but at the same time, I wanted to really dry the zucchini out, because it tends to be pretty soggy after several months in the freezer. My solution was to brown the zucchini first, then add the onions later so that the liquid from the onions wouldn't keep the zucchini from getting a little bit crisp. I don't know if this worked or not since it all cooked down together in the casserole!)

I made creamy tomato soup from the remainder of the tomato puree. It was delicious.

I have also been experimenting with making bread from scratch.

Delicious. And pretty too, if I do say so myself.
While the bread dough was rising, I was simmering a gallon of chicken stock on the stove.
I was running low from the last batch, but I had a chicken carcass in the freezer from a few weeks earlier, and it seemed like a good day to cook AND bake. I thought about roasting my turkey giblets and neck from Thanksgiving and adding them to the stock, but decided they will make their own stock when I run out of the turkey stock that I made from the turkey carcass after Thanksgiving.

I never posted about it, but I made a batch of crackers from scratch before the Superbowl. They were okay although in spite of baking them twice they never got quite crispy enough. I think that is because I did not roll the dough out thinly enough. Here's what was left after my dad and I took some to the Garden Expo in February:

As I posted previously, I am no longer eating meat from restaurants (unless I know where the meat came from and approve of the way it was raised) or buying it from the grocery store anymore. So yesterday I headed out to the farmers' market to pick up some meat to get me through the next few days with company.

My sister and my nieces are coming to town later this week. They eat "normal" things like Shredded Wheat, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and hotdogs.

I bought the cereal and the blue boxes of mac and cheese. But I just couldn't bring myself to buy hotdogs at the store. So yesterday at the farmers' market I picked up a package of brats (no nitrates)

and a package of hotdogs (with nitrates, but still a better choice than Oscar Meyer because the bison (shhhh) that the hotdogs came from led happy, pastured lives).

I also got a package of nitrite-free bacon for breakfast,
and my mom bought two chickens for next Sunday's big meal. (Not pictured. Yet.)

I'll be serving spaghetti with grass-fed ground beef and homemade spaghetti sauce (my last jars!) for dinner on Thursday night, and the two chickens with mashed potatoes and (frozen) garden peas and CSA corn on Sunday. I'm sure Adele will need to lick some jam off of a piece of homemade bread. And I'm planning to fold some frozen farm stand blueberries into the Rich Cream Scone recipe I haven't made in too long.

Back at the garden, my dad said he'd look into getting our huckleberry seeds and onion seeds started this week! I ordered about $75 worth of seeds from the Seed Savers Exchange, and have been drooling over them for a few weeks now.

Today I'm working on a pork roast that I will serve with wild rice and creamed asparagus (frozen last May). If I remember, I'll take pictures and post them later.