We haven’t posted in forever because we’ve been crazy busy, so where to start?  With food of course.

Our farm share through the Community Supported Agriculture program is in full effect, so we have been buried in veggies since June.  It’s always a challenge using all of them up each week, in spite of only having half a share.  But it also means we eat some pretty kick-ass stuff and learn to make fun new things.

At the beginning of spring I often crave salads after the long root-vegetable-filled winter, but I try to wait to actually eat them until the veggie share starts, because I know we will have truckloads of greens for about a month straight.  We try to be creative and eat lots of different kinds of salads, but no matter what, after a month of daily salads my body kind of stages a protest. Luckily that’s about the time the greens start to run out.  Phew.  This year we made cobb salads for the first time, and I made a super yummy fennel-yogurt-dill dressing.  I was determined to use all the dill from the farm share and our out-of-control garden crop, so I also made a delicious dill scallion butter (in the little container by the beer and homemade dog-biscuits), froze some dill, and then dehydrated the rest in our dehydrator (which, by the way, was about the most noxious smelling thing EVER – Nate put it outside with an extension cord.  Blech.).  So everyone, be expecting to get dill for Christmas.

In other culinary adventures, we’ve been making our own yogurt.  With my ever-increasing obsession to reduce our waste, yogurt was really bugging me, because we kind of go through a lot of it, and Minneapolis doesn’t recycle the plastic containers.  The Kastlers had recently started making their own yogurt, so Madeline got me started, and we’ve been making it ever since.  It goes something like this: heat a bunch of milk to a certain temperature, cool it to a certain temperature, add a yogurt starter to a portion of it, add that back to the rest of it, mix it all up, put it in jars, and put it in a cooler and keep it a certain temperature for several hours after that.  Voila. Delicious, organic yogurt in reusable jars, and the whole process costs us half as much as buying already made yogurt. 

Nate’s also been expanding his bread-making repertoire, which I fully support.  Check this out:  pain d’epi and chocolate ganache brioche!  Num num num.  We’ve also been taking big ole containers to the co-op and buying tons of flour in bulk, which makes me happy.

So while we’re on the subject, indulge me for a moment as I brag about some of the things we now either make for ourselves or take our own containers for and buy in bulk, thereby eliminating the need for packaging:  yogurt, dog biscuits, eggs, flour, milk, soy sauce, olive oil, canola oil, granola, hand soap, dish soap, laundry detergent , pasta, beans, oats, and nuts.  I already have my sights set on more things to add to that list soon, and can’t wait for our co-op to open it’s new store, which will have an expanded bulk section!