Presto Pesto!!

What do you do with 12 cups of basil leaves? Make pesto of course. At least that's what Lydia and I did this week when it was just too blazingly hot to work outside in the afternoon.

First we toasted nuts on the stove to enhance the flavor. Walnuts for Lyd's and pecans for me. Walnuts don't like me much. Then we peeled lots of garlic cloves.

Then garlic, nuts, Romano and Parm cheese in the food processor.    

Add the basil and some EVOO. Pulse pulse pulse until it's all nice and mooshy.

Then plop spoonfuls into ice cube trays and freeze. Once frozen, pop out the pesto cubes into freezer bags or containers. Now whenever we want to dress up some pasta or liven up a salad - just pop out a pesto cube and thaw!! I love making our own "fast" food. :^)

Wood Cook Stove Research

When we moved from the big house to the little house on the farm I left my Elmira wood cook stove behind. I didn't want to, but there isn't any place for it in the little house. Much to my amazement, my daughter is learning to cook with wood. Will wonders never cease!

Then we moved to an apartment to be closer to Purdue. Gas prices are way to high to be making a 2 hour commute every day. So my daughter and her husband decided to move back to the little house. Again - no place for the cook stove.
After much thought and deliberation and rationalizing and debating and fussing and hemming and hawing - we decided to re-home the wood stove. It went home with a nice lady from Wisconsin. I hope it serves her as well as it did us.

So now I am researching cook stoves so we'll know which one will be best for us when we are ready to set up housekeeping again on a farm. It's amazing in this age of high tech stoves how many different wood cook stoves are available.

I've found all sorts of antique stoves: a mint green Montgomery Ward circa 1930, an 1882 Arcadian, a 1926 Monarch in need of some repair, and several of the old line cabin kind - the ones with just one or too lids and no oven. Prices vary from a couple hundred dollars ( in need of refurbishing) to a $4000 for a totally refurbished stove with new chroming and everything. 

Then there are the modern wood burning cook stoves... I'm still discovering new and more efficient ones online. I'll have to report back

Inventing better "junk" food

On Thursday it snowed... and snowed... and snowed. So my DD and I spent the afternoon reinventing "junk" food. You see my husband by his one admission only cooks a bare minimum of dishes: chili, ham and beans, burgers. And he has a tendency to run down to the little market in Bean Blossom and grab a frozen pizza instead of cooking at all. We decided we could improve his eating habits if we made some grab and go "junk food" from scratch.
Lydia and I decided to tackle the problem with whole wheat yeast dough, some Red Wattle supper sausage, cream cheese and really yummy German mustard.

Lydia had already cooked the sausage. I cut the long links into about 3 inch pieces and sliced each piece nearly through lengthwise. Then Lyd's stuffed each one with cream cheese and a smear of mustard completed the ensemble. 

We rolled out pieces of dough. Then rolled each piece of sausage up in dough. These "pigs in a blanket" got 15 minutes to rise a bit then popped into a 400 degree oven for 15 minutes.

An unbiased taste test says: DELICIOUS!! we will definitely do this again. They are good hot or cold.