Kinderhook Farm

In our goal to try and have most of our meats come from local-ish and happily raised animals we took the jaunt out to Valatie NY to check out Kinderhook Farm. I was a gorgeous day and perfect for a short trip. The farm store was small, just a few freezers of meat and a fridge with their eggs. The eggs, by the way, were totally beautiful light green, browns, and tan; sadly we had just gone shopping so we had about a dozen and a half already hanging in the fridge at home. We called Georgia, one of the owners, she met us at the store and helped us out. After chatting for a bit we decided on a nice brisket, sirloin, and some marrow bones. Everything comes frozen but according to the website you can call ahead and they will pull stuff out of the deep freeze to start defrosting in advance of your visit. The super friendly and helpful Georgia took us on a quick tour of the farm where they were in the early days of "lambing" which meant there were oodles of wee day-old lambs just cold-chillin with their moms. There was also a brandy-new calf that had been born the day before as well.

As far as the meat, we have not had any of it yet. I will definitely post on that once we bust into the stash.

Oh, and as far as posting, which I suck-diddly-uk-at, my new goal is to wow you all with at least one post a week. This should help "goal orient" stuff a bit more. Here is hoping it works!

Mommy sheep

home made goat cheese

Even though I have made mozzarella at home, for some reason I thought the process for goat cheese would be different or more difficult. Turns out it is probably easier and with ingredients that don't involve a trip to a special market providing that you have a hook-up for goat milk or it is in your regular market. I followed Kiss my Spatula's recipe pretty much to the letter, except that I doubled it. doubled for no other reason than I purchased a half gallon of goat milk rather than a quart and we were not to apt to use it in coffee or over granola.

Draining cheese looking, well, sacky

We chopped up the green parts of a handful of scallions to add into the mix for some additional zing and color. To sample my freshly made cheese I went for dates with goat cheese wrapped with prosciutto. It was really hard not to make 14 of these and cram them into my gaping maw.

English Muffins

Look at the patient muffins chillin in their rings, aw.....

Months ago on a whim I purchased some english muffin rings in the hopes of making my very own nook and cranny filled muffins. Fast forward till a week ago and the rings were still sitting lonely in the cupboard. While prepping for the previously mentioned post-christmas brunch, I figured that it would be a nice time to test out the lonely rings. I used the recipe and directions that came with the rings and as you can see they turned out pretty fluffy and giant. I wish that I had taken a better side shot since they were seriously about 2 1/2 inches tall, at least! Our guests commented that they looked more like the "grands" style of refrigerator biscuits from the grocery store. They did taste great, but not the chewy-crunchy way that a traditional english muffin tend to be. I need to experiment with a couple of different recipes. The one that came with the rins produced a rather stiff dough and I had imagined that it would have been different with a looser more slack dough with less in the rings initially. Overall they were pretty good considering it was an early morning experiment.

"working with what you got" muffins

We found ourselves the hosts of a pot-luck brunch on the day after Christmas and since we had been traveling in the days before and would be traveling in the days after our few days at home I refused to make a special trip to the market for grub. I did however find time to hit a liquor store to procure the requisite bubbly for brunch, not to be a poor host, obviously. These blueberry cottage cheese muffins were a bit of an iron-chef-to-the-interwebs creation. I based the recipe on this one that I found here. These muffins were very well received by Lady Giblet of Ridiculous Food Society fame, and that makes them a winner in my book.

oh hai! I still do this from time to time

There has been an overwhelming lack of time and motivation in the land of monkeys and cupcakes and for that I apologise.

However, I bring you a surprisingly delicious and pretty health-full dish! Chard and spaghetti squash gratin. Yes, yes, very rarely do you see healthy and gratin in the same sentence but this fits the bill fairly well. I adapted these two recipes found here and here. I went for fat free fage greek yogurt in place of the sour cream and it worked like a dream and boosted the protein a bit. I am sure that it may be a touch richer with regular or low fat sour cream but I wasn't missing it. This is totally a make again and I really look forward to seeing what else I could mix in, hmmm mushrooms? salmon? the list really could go on.

Glamorous leftovers at desk shot

Dulce de Leche

First off, I do not recommend this cooking method and it could be dangerous. Proceed at your own risk. That said, I am totally going to make this again using the same method.

I have seen this recipe kicking around the interwebs for some time and I opted for the crockpot-you-won't-be-home-if-the-cans-explode method found here. There are tons of different ways to do this and many require much, much more attention and stirring so I went for the lazy one.

Into the crockpot went four cans of sweetened condensed milk with the labels removed and were then covered with water. Cook on low for eight hours. The cans will be hot when you fish them out of their watery home. Be careful when you open the cans, there will be a bit of pressure and some of the delicious dulce de leche will blurp out. I urge anyone who tries this to resist consuming all of it with a spoon during this initial step. It will be hard and you may fail.
I served this up at two sorriees over the weekend with apples and it was very well recived.

Chicken liver roasted butternut squash pate

After having some amazing pate at the nearby wine bar I decided that I should try my hand at it. This was also nice since it incorporated the butternut squash which lightened it up a bit and made good use of the abundance of butternut squash that we had from our CSA. This was a hit at one of the Halloween parties that we attended this weekend, I brought wee toasts and some crackers to serve as the pate vessel, however I observed most people dunking pretzels in it. What can I say we are nothing but classy. If you want the recipe check it out here.