Local comfort food for freezing temperatures.
Christmas tree is down and all the house plants are dead. Besides the amazing winter sunrises over the river (red, orange and purple skies) and sunsets over the mountains, things are looking pretty dismal around here. Then I took a drive up to the Boone Street Market in Jonesborough, TN.
Turn that oven on! Christmas morning scones to warm the house.
I’ll admit, most of my desire to bake upon waking comes from a necessity to immediately warm my kitchen/house by whatever means necessary. Don’t feel bad for me, I live in a charming old house on a river, but sometimes I just can’t pull myself out of bed at 4 am to stoke the fire and I wake up quite cold. And I bake.
These scones are very easily and deliciously made vegan by substituting butter for coconut oil.
Happy Chanukah all! I’m not Jewish, but man is their food good! Bagels, Knishes, Lox, Brisket, Kugel….some of my favorite foods are Jewish. I lived in New York a long stretch of my life so I feel that I have had the best version of many of these foods. Avocado cream on top is where four years in California meets my New York roots. And honestly I had some greek yogurt in the fridge along with some avocados ripe on the counter and I figured, why not?
Hummus and homemade crackers. An easy holiday appetizer.
Over the next few weeks, people are attending holiday party after holiday party. I’m gonna plead with the masses here to give the old cheese ball a rest. Even the most conscientious of eaters (myself included) consume more dairy and processed foods during this time that we would even like to think about. This year, I am looking to bring healthy, tasty alternatives to holiday gatherings, starting with these whole wheat crackers and walnut oil hummus
Miso en place. (see what I did there?)
It’s inevitable, you overdid it around Thanksgiving. You are possibly PRE-regretting the overabundance of Christmas and New Years Eve. No worries, even though it might be wrong to say that you can detox when it’s all over, you can still do your body right, right now. Traditionally you will find wakame seaweed and tofu floating around in your miso soup but I find comfort in my own version of “local” miso every winter. This one includes fennel, carrots, kale, onion and herbs from the farm.
Pretending to be a real southern woman, Catfish and Greens are served.
I may talk like a Yankee, but I’d like to believe I can cook up a good Southern meal. Everyone knows I really moved to the south to indulge in my love of fried chicken, catfish, sweet potatoes and hush puppies.
Heirloom tomato soup with Grilled Herb Flat Bread.
August and September are some of the most rewarding months of the year for a farmer. You are literally reaping all that you have sown. Late spring and early autumn have always been the busiest times of year for me. Not only am I spending many hours harvesting but also preparing ground and new seedlings for fall planting. And the fun doesn’t stop there because when I go home at night there are boxes of tomatoes just waiting to be turned into salsa or sauce. The tomato soup dinner that occurred recently was purely the result of trying to find a way to make dinner and tomato sauce at the same time. I am a big fan of multitasking (coffee and breakfast in the bathtub, don’t knock it til you try it).
Put an egg on it. Chunky sweet corn in creamy polenta.
We are rich in sweet corn this week on the farm. Our earliest variety planted, Ashworth, is ready to be picked and steamed, boiled, sauteed and more! Ashworth is an open-pollinated non GMO yellow sweet corn developed in by Fred Ashworth and marketed by Johnny’s Seeds in 1978. Unlike hybrid sweet corn this variety is less sweet with good corn flavor. Although I will spend the weekend, shucking and freezing corn for the winter for now I am putting fresh corn in every single thing I eat.
Whole Peeled Garden Peach Tomatoes.
After 6 years of farming I have concluded that farming is all about excesses and failures. Lucky for us, that these excesses lead to year round abundance. I started a lot of traditional varieties of sauce tomatoes like Amish Paste and San Marzano but it was a bit too early and they did not make it out of the greenhouse this season. This is totally fine with me because a few years ago I started canning this heirloom variety of tomato called Garden Peach that falls in between a large tomato and a cherry tomato in size. The thick skin peels off easily after being blanched and I’ve enjoyed them for 2 winters now in soups, chillies, stews and braises.
The stuff February dreams are made of.
Considering we harvested 50 lbs. of heirloom tomatoes last week and then I harvested 51 lbs. again just today, I think they are here to stay. Every day I find a new one bursting with color, ready to be picked. And the cherry tomatoes are popping off as well. Since I had a bunch of cherry tomatoes piling up in my refrigerator and heirlooms all over the counter, it was time for a fresh pasta sauce.
Eating Greeneville 