Chicky Salad

In our quest to learn what to do with a bounty of eggs (see the 9-egg question post), here is a chicken salad recipe.

Mmmm…. chicken salad… it brings back memories of picnics in summer, family road trips, fighting with my brother in the backseat because he was irritating me by just looking at me– I mean the nerve of the guy!  Oh well, anyhow, ahem… back to the egg salad recipe:

Egg Salad (from Adapted from Community Chickens):

1 dozen hard boiled eggs*, diced

1/2 cup mayonnaise (or make it homemade)

1 tablespoon vinegar

salt, pepper, fresh parsley

• Stir eggs together the mayonnaise (or an oil-&-cooked-veggie-paste) and vinegar.
• Season with salt and pepper.
• Fold in the diced eggs and your favorite veggies either raw (e.g., avacado, onion, celery, peppers) or sauted (onion, garlic, mushroom, etc.).  And add meat if you like (bacon!).
• Add more seasoning or herbs as you like (e.g., mustard or mustard powder, garlic, paprika, pepper)
• Garnish with fresh herbs such as parsley, cilantro, chives, ramps, chickweed, tarragon, etc.
• Some recipies even call for adding a bit of cream, or sour cream, or yogurt.
• Refrigerate about an hour before serving.

*Hard boiling eggs:

They can be a bit of work, if you’re not used to it.  Here are some tried-and-true methods:

– Instapot:  place eggs on the rack in the pot, use one cup of water, pressure cook on high for five minutes. I allow the steam to slowly release, and then I submerge the eggs in a bowl of ice water.  Thank you Tipsy Housewife Blog!

– Boiling water-method.  From Downshiftology:. Cover eggs with at least 1-2″ of water in a pot.  Don’t overcrowd, or the boiling will end up cracking the eggs.  Then take out the eggs!  Bring the water to boil, then reduce to simmer.  Then add the eggs into the hot water with a spoon or skimmer!  Cook ~ 12-13 minutes for hard-boiled.  Then take out the eggs and immediately cool them in ice water for ~15 minutes.

– Peeling eggs. From Cooks Illustrated:  After cooling the eggs in ice water, put the cooked eggs in a container with a tight-fitting lid.  Once the eggs are chilled, pour off half of the water and — holding the lid in place — shake the container vigorously using a vertical motion (the eggs will hit the top of the container) until the shells are cracked all over, about 40 shakes. Peel, rinse, and use as desired.  Check out their link they have an awesome video!

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Rabbit, the other white meat?

It wasn’t that long ago that rabbit was a staple of the frontier diet.  Well, commercialization and industrial agriculture sure had something to say about that — they’d rather have us eat huge animals that are cheaper to confine and bulk up quickly.  Well what about a small-farm and a small animal?

Rabbits are usually raised in cages or hutches, which are basically like the chicken coop of the rabbit world.  But what if they could live in domesticated colonies, such as they live in the wild?  That would require a huge change in how to raise rabbits, but it would be better for the rabbits, all things considered.  Well, move over hutches, now there’s something better!

Trish’s rabbit colony!

Trish has been figuring out how to raise rabbits in colony for a while.  Her guest blog post proves it — read all about it here.

She is now selling her butchered, brined, prepared rabbits for sale!  They are $17.15 each (~3lb each; ~2-4 meals).

To purchase them, you can order them through me, but you will be paying her directly, either cash or check.  They cook up like a lean chicken — and taste like chicken (of course).  Trish has a few recipes, which will also be delivered to you along with your frozen rabbit.

If you are looking for a sustainable alternative meat product, try out a rabbit.  Enjoy this food adventure!

The 9-egg question

Sometimes you drop a dozen eggs and 9 get cracked– and then what do you do?!  What can you make with 9-eggs?

Here are some ideas:

• Frittata — french for “lots of eggs baked in an oven” (see below)

And coming to you in later posts:

• Egg salad — a midwest favorite
• Pavlova for the egg whites– think a New Zealand-Australia meringue-marshmallow cake.
• Custard for the egg yolks — or make Creme Brulee if you are fancy!
• Egg noodles — easier than you think

Frittata:

Begin pre-heating oven to 350 or 375 (you’ll be baking your egg-veggie-etc mixture in the oven)

Saute about your favorite sauteing veggies (enough for 4 servings; add meat if you like) in a skillet with lots of butter or oil or lard.  Add garlic or other herbs.  Use an oven-safe 12″ skillet if you want to use this skillet to later to pop in the oven — otherwise get a oven-dish (~8″x8″ or a 12″ pie dish or equivalent) ready for later.

Scramble 9-12 eggs in a separate bowl.  Add salt to taste (taking into account any salt in the herbs or meat if you’ve added that).

Pour the veggie mixture into the bowl-of-scrambled-eggs, stirring into the eggs so that everything is covered in egg.

Oil up your skillet or oven-dish so that all the bottom and sides are oiled.  Pour in the egg mixture into the skillet.

Bake in oven for 20-40 minutes or until it is beginning to brown on top and poked clean with a knife.

Fun Fact:  Rhett dropped a dozen eggs from 3 feet high, and when he opened the carton, 9 had cracked real good, and 2 just barely cracked.  I’d say that’s a win for modern egg-carton technology.  At any rate, he quickly cooked up a frittata, and he’s never been the same since.  Okay, that last part is a stretch, but he did cook up a frittata!

 

Get ready for spring veggies!

The spring bloom will be blossoming — and the greens are the first things to pop.  Eat ’em up!

Various farms will be having greens-out-their-ears, so if you’d like to get signed up for a weekly delivery of greens when they become available, let me know.

Prices and content will vary, but the offerings will be something like what’s described below.  Let me know if you’d like to try any one (or two, or three) of these out:

From Peggy’s Dome & Garden

• Peggy Gray’s Dome and Garden — $10 bags of lettuce, stir-fry greens, and other salad things (~14 oz); available now!
• With the Wild Farm — $10-15 of wild greens (dock, sorrel, chickweed, lambs quarter, etc); available starting mid-April.
• Opportunity Gardeners (first-year entrepreneur gardeners from CCUA) — $~10 of a spring salad bag (greens, radish, etc.); available starting late-April/May

And if you’re game, there’s a 10% discount for signing up for 6 or more weeks of greens (while available)!

Cheesy local food news

What did the curds say to the cheese?

No whey?!

Oh yea, and the jokes just get worse.  Anywhey…

There is some new foods available — goat cheese from Goatsbeard Farm (Harrisburg, MO).  Check out the menu for all the soft and hard cheeses you can shake a cracker at.

It’s cheese-thirty somewhere!

https://molocalroutes.wordpress.com/menu/#E

 

Pure Cacao milk – your way!

The beauty of homemade is that you get it to taste just like you want.  And while you do have to do the work, there is a satisfaction from creating your own joy.

Here’s the secret to milk with pure cacao (ground cacao beans; no roasting):  the “most-easy” way and the “usual-easy” way:

Most-Easy Cacao milk (not sweet)

• -Pour cacao powder directly into your cold milk.  Use about 1 Tbsp/cup (4 Tbsp/quart), or whatever you like.  (If you don’t like it later, you can just add more milk or more powder)
• Add some cayenne (or other pepper) to make it spicy.
• Shake, shake, shake, sinora (or blend).
• Let it sit overnight to let the powder soak in.
• Drink it cold and enjoy the rich, bitter, cacao-y flavor!

Usual-Easy Cacao milk (sweet or not)

• Wisk in cacao powder to a pot of cold milk (~1 Tbsp/cup; 4 Tbsp/quart)
• Add cayenne to spice it up if you like
• Warm up milk to steaming while stirring (~150F).  (avoid boiling, but it’s not ruined if you do)
• Turn off heat
• Add sweetener to taste (local raw honey, sorghum, or maple syrup is great)
• Drink!
• Store left-over in fridge

Pro-tip:  there is 2 tablespoons to an ounce and 4 cups to a quart

Cacao-Milk “Kit”?!  —  Yes, just ask, and I’ll get you an 8 oz packet of raw cacao powder

The Mayans called cocoa beans “kakaw”, and wrote it like this in their hieroglyphic language.

for $13, along with your gallon or half-gallon of cow or goat-milk (and these instructions!)

Order online (https://molocalroutes.wordpress.com/menu/) or call or text Rhett at 816-807-6420.  Enjoy either way!

The warmth of “Golden Milk”

Golden milk is made from milk, turmeric, ginger, black or white pepper, and a sweetener if you like.  Do not buy a powder when you can make it at home!

Steep it like a “milk-tea”, and then settle down with a good (audio?) book or your favorite music(ian?).

The way to make it is as such:

• Warm up your milk (cow, goat, coconut, hemp, etc.) to steaming, not boiling.
• Get some ginger and turmeric root (see “kit” below).  You’ll want about twice as much turmeric as ginger.  But do it to taste!
• Chop off about a pinkey-joint size of each root (~a half ounce ginger, one ounce turmeric).
• Squeeze the flesh through a press or microplane, directly into the milk (to save the juices!) or dice up the remaining flesh and toss it in the milk. 
• Crush and toss in at least 1 whole peppercorn (it only takes one!), and any other spices you like (cayenne, vanilla, cinnamon, etc.)
• Let steep in the simmering milk for at least 15 minutes (or longer), until the color turns a golden orange.  (The fat and liquid from the milk will each extract different compounds from the spices.)
• Strain into a mug and enjoy!  (freeze or ‘frigerate the leftovers…)

Pro-tip:  It doesn’t take much, but peppercorn has a chemical (piperine) that increases the absorption of curcumin, which is in turmeric.  Like other forces in nature that can affect medicine (grapefruit or sunlight, anyone?), this combination has been used in traditional medicine for a long, long time.

What about a “Golden-Milk Kit”!? — Yes, you can get the whole kit and caboodle (technical term, don’t ask…) of the turmeric (2 oz), ginger (1 oz), and ~2 peppercorns for $3 when you buy some cow or goat milk, too.  This will make one pint (2 pints in a quart, 8 pints in a gallon).  So get as many kits as you’d like.

Order online (https://molocalroutes.wordpress.com/menu/), or call or text Rhett anytime at 816-807-6420.

The goats are done with this Winter!

Maybe the fact that the Miller Dairy’s goats are getting fresh (meaning they are now giving milk after their winter “hibernation”), is a reminder that spring is near?!

We can only hope…

Maybe then, you’d like to celebrate with some goat milk.  Of course!  It’s $7.50/gal or $3.75/half.  Keep your immune system and your gut biota on it’s toes by diversifying your probiotic diet.

At least, that’s what the goats told me.  In goat-talk, of course.

The Miller Dairy delivers into Columbia every Tuesday and into the nether counties on Fridays (Howard, Boone, etc.)

Order anytime, online (https://molocalroutes.wordpress.com/menu/) or by text or call Rhett at 816-807-6420.

 

Egg cartons we’ll take

A pithy limerick-y poem for your egg cartons and the tree-hugger inside you:

Egg cartons we’ll take,
Re-using we’ll make
a way to restore our wake.

Free press!

Woo-hoo, MO Local Routes got some free (national) publicity!

Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund (a non-profit representing farms and companies that sell direct to customers) promoted some of their businesses, and MO Local Routes made it!

Check out Chris Gingerich on top of the hay cart from 2017.  That became milk for the winter!  Yum!

Click here to see the many farms highlighted:  https://www.farmtoconsumer.org/blog/2019/01/01/decembers-member-photo-monday/

Gingerich Farm (Clark, MO)

Hay up!