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.

Gearing Up

On Tuesday I was supposed to pick up our fresh, local, free-range turkey at a farm about an hour away from my house. I ended up taking a subbing job for an elementary music teacher Tuesday morning, so my mom picked up the turkey, then brought a few supplies to my house - like her huge crock pot for keeping the turkey warm while my dad carved it, dessert plates, and goodies for the little girls. And a surprise for me - a new card table, which is still in its box in the garage because we were able to scrape together enough chairs for all 11 people. But next time we need them, we'll be thankful for a new card table with four matching chairs!
My mom also brought a cornucopia, which we used as a wedding decoration last year, because Adele loves cornucopias. Her first job when she got to my house was to find the cornucopia.

Michael and I had spent many hours the previous weekend cleaning and getting set up - I even put the china out on the tables to see how it looked (then put the china back in the cupboard until Thursday afternoon without having taken a picture). Michael didn't realize we had gotten such nice linens as shower/wedding gifts last year.
Wednesday while working at the law firm I was keeping an eye on the weather, as our out 0f town family members were traveling down from Minneapolis and up from Indianapolis. While central WI was in a relatively clear zone (although we had some very heavy rains in the morning) both sets of relatives were driving through mixed snow and rain, with a little ice thrown in the mix for good measure. I had been planning to do the grocery shopping after work, but I'm terrified of driving in ice, and Michael works right down the street from the grocery store, so I asked him to pick up the groceries instead. It goes a little bit against the grain of my control-freak nature to ask him to do the shopping for me, and make decisions about what kind of crackers to get or the size/type of orange juice, milk, and cream cheese containers . . . but he did an amazing job. (And brought home LOCAL, ORGANIC, Pasteurized (not Ultra-Pasteurized) milk in the process! I wanted to cry when I saw it. Of course, that milk was $6.00 a gallon instead of the $3.57 I paid for the non-organic variety of the same brand, but it was not ultra-pasteurized. I was pretty tickled.

We were pretty hungry Wednesday night, and I'd been trying to keep the fridge relatively empty of non-Thanksgiving-related food, so we ordered Chinese, watched on episode of The Office on Netflix, and got to work. Michael finished vacuuming and picking up, and I started in with the baking - a loaf of bread for stuffing (in which I forgot the egg, even though I had it sitting right on the counter - oops),

dough for rolls,
which I decided to make with half whole-wheat flour this time (I don't know why I played with this recipe for a holiday meal - although they turned out mostly okay),
and the pumpkin pie. (This time I made it with half whole-wheat flour instead of all white.)
Oliver is sure interested in lard.
My first try at the crust didn't turn out so well. I had to ball this back up and roll it out again. It worked much better the second time.
Here's another picture of my grandma's old (1960s) Tupperware dough rolling mat, and her rolling pin too. I have my own rolling pin and dough mat that I picked out with gift cards from our wedding, because I didn't get my grandma's until this past spring. I tried to give my newer ones to my sister this weekend but she wasn't interested. I guess she'd just as soon I make the pie. (I went in to the museum on Tuesday night and had a conversation with several of the members of the museum's Advisory Board about our Thanksgiving plans. One woman gave us her perfect recipe for turkey: "My sister makes it.")
I saved a little bit of the pureed pumpkin for Anna - who heartily enjoyed it during our big meal on Thursday.
My recipe said to stir the pumpkin, brown sugar, and spices until shiny. The pumpkin and sugar were already so shiny when I added the nutmeg and ginger that this picture turned out very white, even though I used the cuisine setting on Michael's camera.
That one is actually milk and cream.
I put the rolls together while the pie baked.
Then while the pie cooled I did dishes, put the root beer and diet coke on ice, brought frozen vegetables into the house,
took appliances I would not be using into the basement, found outlets for my mom's coffee maker, her crock pot, and my crock pot, baby-proofed the kitchen, bookmarked all of my recipes, pulled pots and pans out from their nooks in my cupboards, and cubed the bread for my stuffing.
That was a lot of bread. And of course I made way too much stuffing.
and washed all of the potatoes.
I finally headed to bed around 1:00, with plans to get up again at 7:00 to bake another loaf of bread (in case Adele needed a sandwich), soak the potatoes to lower the potassium level (my dad has problems with high potassium), and get the turkey in the oven by 10:00.