Hot & Sour Soup

Homemade Hot & Sour Soup

So I've been fighting an upper respiratory infection (a head cold) all week. A good friend of mine, Cynthia, suggested I make some Hot & Sour Soup to help clear my congestion and to feed my body some tasty nutrition. 

Cyn and I share recipes back and forth over the web. Awhile ago, she sent me a version of a recipe for this soup that was close to her own, but not exactly. I took that recipe and also looked up the same soup recipe in my Frugal Gourmet cookbook (The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines: China-Greece-Rome by Jeff Smith). I compared and combined the two recipes to make my own version of this soup that I love to eat in Chinese restaurants, and especially enjoy here at home when I have a head cold. When making it myself, it tastes so much fresher and brighter than the soup from the restaurants. I can also dictate how much heat and how much "sour" goes into the soup. 

So when I made this soup for myself yesterday, I finally decided to actually write down what I put into it! And then today, another friend, Dan, asked me to post my soup recipe, so here I am posting it on my Mountain Harvest Basket blog. 

Although it does come out a bit differently each time I make it, here is how I made it yesterday. It was delicious, even if I do say so myself! And it did help clear my head. 

You can adjust the seasonings to make it hotter, more sour, thicker or thinner as pleases you. You can also make it vegetarian by omitting the pork and doubling the tofu, and replacing the chicken broth with vegetable broth. If you are vegan, you will omit the eggs, too. If you don't like, or can't find, bamboo shoots, you can use canned water chestnuts for crunch. Raw green peas are a nice addition as is fresh green onion added as a garnish.

Jen’s Hot & Sour Soup

Mushrooms ~ (white/brown, small fresh) 3-4 oz (2 handfuls), sliced thin

Onion ~ thinly sliced, chopped, ½ small (1 handful)

Firm Tofu ~ 4 oz, in ½ inch cubes

Pork ~ one boneless pork chop, 4-6 oz, thinly sliced, cubed

Bamboo Shoots ~ 1/3 can (about 1/3 cup), julienned

Chicken Broth ~ 4 cups

Water ~ 2 cups

Black Pepper ~ a few good grinds

Lemon Pepper ~ a few shakes

Real Salt ~ a sprinkle

Garlic ~ 3-4 cloves minced or several shakes of garlic powder

Ginger ~ 2 tsp freshly grated, or several heavy shakes of powder

White Pepper ~ ground, 1 tsp

Soy Sauce ~ 2-3 Tbs

Rice Vinegar ~ ¼ cup

Sesame Oil ~ 1-2 tsp

Chili Oil ~ 3 or 4 good shakes (or use some cayenne to taste)

Corn starch ~ 1-4 Tbs mixed with equal parts cool water (I used only 1 Tbs + 1 Tbs water this time)

Eggs ~ 2 small, beaten

Sauté veggies, pork & tofu in olive oil until just starting to brown & caramelize. Add the broth, water and seasonings in the order given. Bring to a boil then simmer till mushrooms and onions look done and are tender. About 20 minutes.

Stir in the cornstarch mixture well and allow to boil to thicken broth. When desired consistency is reached, gently drizzle in beaten eggs in a thin stream. Wait a few moments, then stir gently and remove from heat.

Taste and adjust seasonings before serving. May be served garnished with a little chopped green onion. Serve piping hot for best effect.

I think this soup tastes even better the next day after the flavors have had a chance to meld. My partner, Jack, told me tonight as he was eating a bowl of it, "This is so good, you could sell it and make money!"

Enjoy!

© Copyright 2012 Mountain Harvest Basket

Artisan Bread Stuffing Casserole

*Note ~ this post was originally written in November 2009 and is reposted here from my MotherHen Jen bread blog because I don't have time to write anything new today, and I wanted to share this easy and fresh bread stuffing recipe with you for Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!


For many years I purchased the box of dried up bread pieces marketed as "seasoned bread stuffing mix" and added my own fresh ingredients to make a bread stuffing casserole to serve at Thanksgiving dinner. It was tasty enough to please my guests who liked bread stuffing. Me, I never much liked bread stuffing. It didn't have the fresh homemade flavor that I thought it should have. It was either too dry or too mushy for my taste.

Well, this year I decided I could do better than the boxed stuffing mix. So I created a recipe using my own MotherHen Jen artisan breads as the base and then added my other fresh ingredients to make a wonderful and tasty bread stuffing casserole. You can also stuff the turkey with it, but I prefer it as a casserole side dish as I usually stuff my turkeys with a rice & meat based stuffing recipe that was handed down to me from my Mom.


This recipe is flexible on the amounts of fruits, nuts and vegetables that you add in. Add more of what you like best. The broth and juice can be adjusted to your liking as well, depending on whether you like a more moist or a drier stuffing.


It tastes great straight from the oven, warm & moist with a crisp top, but I think it tastes best when served with some nice turkey meat and good homemade turkey gravy ladled over the top.


Here's the recipe:

Bread Stuffing Casserole ~ by MotherHen Jen
for Thanksgiving or Anytime


12-14 oz MHJ Rustic Wheat Bread, (1 small loaf) day old, cut/crumbled into ½ inch cubes
1 C (2 ribs) Celery, chopped
1 C Apple, unpeeled & chopped
½ C Walnuts, chopped
3 Tbs Butter, melted
2 Tbs Olive Oil
1 Egg
½ C Chicken or Turkey Broth
¼-½ C Apple Juice, Apple Cider, Orange Juice or Water
Black Pepper, Cinnamon, Oregano, Basil


Preheat oven to 350 degrees, Butter or Oil a 2 Quart Casserole Dish

1. In a large bowl, gently toss together bread cubes, celery, apple & walnuts.

2. Stir together melted butter and olive oil. Pour over bread mixture and toss gently to coat.

3. Season to taste with black pepper, cinnamon, herbs (fresh or dried)

4. Add egg to cool chicken broth and stir to mix. Add juice and stir again.

5. Drizzle broth mixture over bread mixture and toss lightly to coat.

6. Spoon (use hands) stuffing into the prepared 2 qt casserole dish and bake covered at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake an additional 5-10 minutes for a crisp top. Serve with turkey or chicken and gravy.


Variations:

Substitute other nuts for walnuts or omit nuts

Add raisins, dried cranberries or other chopped dried fruit

Use MHJ Artisan White Bread or Egg Bread instead of Rustic Wheat Bread (or any other loaf of your favorite artisan bread)

To make the savory version, substitute chopped onion for the apples, substitute water or broth for the juice, season with garlic powder instead of cinnamon.

Please tell me about any other delicious variations you create for this stuffing recipe or any recipes using MotherHen Jen artisan bread.

Enjoy!





© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Clever Sun Tea Idea

Sun Tea Concentrate ~ One Quart Jar


I brew tea in a jar placed in the sun - sun tea - to make and enjoy iced tea all year around. I especially like to make and drink it during the warm summer months. I usually fill a 1/2 gallon mason jar with cool water and add about 4 tea bags or maybe less depending on how strong the tea is naturally. I use different kinds of black, green and herbal teas as my mood dictates.

I place the lidded jar outside to sit in the hot sun for 2-4 hours, again depending on how hot the weather is and also how strong the tea bags are. When the tea reaches the color I desire, I bring in the jar of tea, remove the bags and chill it in my refrigerator to enjoy later over ice. I've been making my sun tea this way for years and years. It works very well. It tastes good, it's easy, it's natural and it's inexpensive.

Being that it was such an uncomplicated process, I never thought about making any improvements to the method.

Well a few weeks ago I learned about another way of making sun tea from Sue of Country Pleasures. She read a post about this method in another blog that she likes to read. So the knowledge continues to get passed on and on from one blogger to the next. I love that!

What they recommended was to make a strong tea concentrate using a smaller jar, like a quart sized canning jar, so that it will take up less room in your summertime fridge. This makes sense to me because during my garden harvest season my refrigerator is always crammed full of produce, jars of water and tea, juice and fruit. There's not much room in there usually.

I took a clean quart sized canning jar filled with cool water and added twice as many tea bags as you would normally put in a quart of water. Then I capped the jar and set it in the sun for awhile to brew up very strong. When it was a very dark colored tea, I brought it inside, removed the tea bags and placed the jar in my fridge. I now had a very strong tea concentrate with which to make my ice tea.

When I desire a fresh glass of ice tea, I add ice cubes to my tall glass and then pour in some of the strong tea concentrate until it fills the glass about 1/4 to 1/3 full. I then fill the glass the rest of the way with cold water from a jug in my fridge. Stir to mix. Add some lemon if I feel fancy, and enjoy my nice cool fresh iced tea.

I thought that brewing the tea concentrate extra strong like that would make the tea taste bitter, but it did not do that. It was very tasty, and that small one quart jar of concentrate lasts for quite awhile in my refrigerator. It takes up less space which I appreciate this time of year.

So I am passing this good idea on to you. Try it. You'll like it.




© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Snow Peas

3lbs of freshly picked Snow Peas!

My snow peas did well this year. Long cool lead in to summer's hot weather made for great growing conditions for snow peas in my garden. The photo above shows 3 pounds of snow peas, the last harvest for the season which happened a couple of weeks ago. Overall this season, I have harvested over 5 pounds of fresh from the garden snow peas. That's a lot for my small raised bed garden.

Delightfully sweet and crunchy raw as snacks or in salads or sandwiches. I've added them to stir fries and steamed veggies. I've given away several 1/2 pound bags to friends. And I still have a bunch in my fridge. I may blanch and freeze them to use a little at a time in stir fries or soups. I don't want them to spoil and I just can't eat them fast enough!

One of my favorite ways to eat snow peas is in a simple Asian inspired stir fry that I call simply Shrimp & Snow Peas.


Shrimp & Snow Peas

Frozen Shrimp (from Trader Joes) + Fresh Snow Peas + Canned Water Chestnuts

Stir fried in a little olive oil , soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, ginger, black pepper, garlic, lemon, and a pinch of corn starch to thicken the sauce. Eaten over a nice warm bed of steamed white rice makes a very tasty and satisfying dinner. It's good even without the water chestnuts. Just shrimp and snow peas.


© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Jam & Bread

Homemade Raisin Bread (left) & Wheat Bread (right) Sandwich Loaves

I finally created a couple of wheat sandwich loaves that were tall enough to produce decent sized sandwich slices. I made one a plain wheat bread and one I turned into cinnamon raisin bread. This was my first time making the raisin bread and I didn't quite get the raisins and cinnamon to produce the nice spiral swirl effect I was aiming for. See the photo below.


Cinnamon Raisin Bread Sliced ~ raisins slightly misaligned

It still tasted good though, even if the raisins were sort of all clumped together in places. Next time I will make a few adjustments to my swirl technique.


Remember that Homemade Strawberry Jam?

I had to make some sandwich bread so that I could eat some of my homemade strawberry jam that gave me so much trouble last weekend. I've been looking at the jars sitting on my kitchen counter all week admiring the deep rich red color. Tonight was the first time I tried some of this particular batch.

It was very good!


Almond Butter & Strawberry Jam on Raisin Bread = Dinner

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

White Bread Rising

White Bread Dough Rising

Homemade White Sandwich Loaf

Same Loaf, Different Angle

Sliced Bread

BLT in the Making (note my homegrown lettuce)

Dinner!

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

OMG PB&J Sandwich-gasm!

Peanut Butter & Apricot Jam on freshly made white bread

It was so good that I almost forgot to take a photo for you all. That was probably the best PB&J sandwich I have ever tasted.

I like this bread baking stuff. Gonna keep doing it.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Bread 101

Freshly Baked Loaf of White Bread

Well, since we have had Muffin Monday and Soup Saturday here at Mountain Harvest Basket recently, I thought it was time for "Bread Baking Sunday". Well, so much for continuing with the fun alliteration...oh well, maybe "Sandwich Loaf Sunday"...

I have baked bread before "from scratch", but always with the aid of a bread machine to do the mixing and kneading etc. I would usually take the dough out of the machine before the baking cycle, and shape and bake it in my oven since I don't like the way my bread machine baked bread turns out. Funny shapes and hard crusts come out of that bread machine, but it does make mixing the dough an easy task. However, easy does not always give a good homemade product. So this time I decided to try my hand at mixing, kneading etc all by hand. I really want to be able to make great tasting, healthy and less expensive fresh breads for myself and my family.

So I started with this recipe I got from Farmgirl Susan from her great blogs Farmgirl Fare and A Year in Bread. She calls this bread Farmhouse White. I have tried several of her other recipes over the past year and have always been pleased with the results.



Since Farmgirl Susan's recipe for Farmhouse White bread makes 3 loaves of sandwich style bread, I decided that for this first bread making experiment I would only make one loaf just in case I really screwed up and it didn't turn out. I didn't want to waste 3 times the ingredients my first time up at bat.

I followed her instructions carefully and I was very pleased with the results of my first time making and baking a loaf of bread completely from scratch. Of course, her loaves of bread look so much better than mine do. Mine wasn't as tall and fluffy looking as hers were. She gives some hints on which loaf pans to use to get that tallness, and my pan was not exactly the right size. This does give me a good data point from which to progress with future baking projects.

I was very pleased with the taste and texture of this bread. It was moist yet not soggy. It was elastic enough to make a good sandwich without falling apart as my previous breads had. It tasted great, perhaps a bit salty for me (since I don't use salt in much of anything), and the crust turned out a beautiful light golden brown.



I will make this bread again. I will find better loaf pans. I will experiment with different kneading techniques and play with the ingredients.

Someday I want to make whole grain breads and crusty artisan loaves as well as this basic white sandwich style bread. I had a fun time baking on a cold and rainy Sunday. I just might enjoy this as a new hobby. I'll see how it goes.

Any suggestions from you all on which bread baking book I should buy that will tell me the basic methods and also have other recipes for me to try?

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Cleaning Out the Refrigerator

Fall Vegetable Soup goes into the Crock Pot

Summer is over despite the warm weather. We are well into fall, so it's time for me to clean out my refrigerator and use up the remainder of the fresh vegetables while they are still somewhat fresh and not yet compost.

I woke up yesterday with the desire to putter around in my kitchen cooking and even cleaning up a bit. So out from the fridge and into the crock pot went a variety of veggies:

carrots
potatoes
bok choy
broccoli leaves
onions
garlic
yellow crookneck squash
Roma tomatoes
green bell pepper
red slightly spicy "mystery" pepper
1/2 can of garbanzo beans
extra virgin olive oil
homemade vegetable stock + some water
herbs & spices (including basil, oregano, bay leaf, black pepper, paprika etc)

Turned the crock pot on high and let it simmer for about 8 hours.

Here's my bowl of "End of Summer" veggie soup that accompanied my dinner last night:

Tasty Vegetable Soup ~ and more room in the fridge now too!

For the last couple of days I have had an almost tame deer, a doe, hanging around my house all day and night. I am accustomed to having deer around, I do live in the forest, but usually they don't show themselves so boldly in the middle of the day, nor so close to the house.

I don't usually feed the deer, as I don't want to tame them. I prefer to let wild things stay wild and free. This deer did get a couple of handouts from me. Some old carrots that weren't tasty enough for my soup pot yesterday. She enjoyed those quite a bit.

Here's a photo of her in the background while she was eating the carrots:

My friendly Doe in the background eating her carrots, and my black cat "Charity" (sitting high in his new climbing tree that Jack made for us) in the foreground. Yes, Charity is a boy kitty, but that's a story for another day.

And today I gifted her a big old apple that had been in my fridge for quite awhile. I cut it up for her to make it easier to eat, and she liked that a lot too. She was practically following me around my property earlier. Sort of put me on alert. I am sure I will regret feeding her at some point. Probably when she helps herself to my red petunias on my porch table or when she eats and breaks my fruit trees. She was so cute and so skinny. My heart just softened in a moment of weakness. We are all connected in nature, and she looked hungry. So I fed her.

© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

Tomatoes, More Tomatoes, Eggplant, Dinner & A Visitor

Freshly Picked Romas in my Garden Scale

So my Roma tomatoes have finally been ripening.


5 pounds of Romas ~ harvested August 31st


Once they start they just keep coming...


5 1/2 pounds of Romas ~ harvested September 7th


I grow Roma paste tomatoes mainly to make tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, fresh salsa and for canning whole. Sometimes I can it or freeze it if I make a lot. Below is some fresh spaghetti sauce simmering in the pot.


Fresh Romas plus garden herbs, garlic, olive oil and some ground turkey meat made this sauce extra tasty!

I had several dinners from this one batch of spaghetti sauce.


Whole wheat noodles + fresh tomato sauce = Delicious & Healthy


Enter the eggplant.

The one lonely little eggplant that I have harvested thus far in this odd weathered gardening season. It's a cute little thing. So sweet, smooth and purple. Hardly bigger than the palm of my hand.


Cute little eggplant

So cute that I figured it would be very tasty sliced up as the main flavor ingredient to another night's dinner of Ratatouille! So when I add the cute little eggplant, to the ripened red Roma tomatoes and the prolific zucchini and crookneck squash, then throw in a lot of garlic and olive oil, I get Ratatouille! Not sure I have spelled that correctly, but you know what I mean. Any way you spell it, it is very good eating. And healthy too.


Ratatouille saute


It seems like the vegetarian meal inspired a vegetarian visitor. See gratuitous picture below:


My Deer, or really My Doe

This doe sat outside my kitchen window for a couple of hours one recent morning. I talked with her through the window and took pictures of her at very close range. I believe she is one of my regular does that hang out around here. I have no dogs to scare them off, so I have many deer friends.


© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

In a Pickle!

Yesterday I took some nice National Pickling Cucumbers that I harvested from my garden


Pickling Cucumbers washed and ready

and sliced all 6 1/2 pounds of them


Sliced Cukes

along with some onions and mixed them together in a bowl with a lot of salt. I then covered them with ice cubes 2 inches deep and allowed them to rest in the fridge for 4-5 hours. After their salty cold rest I brought them out and started to make their sweet pickling syrup using the pickling "software" shown below:


Pickling spices, sugar and vinegar

Below is a shot of the pickling "hardware" (see also the "jar lifter" in the above photo, a very necessary tool)


Measuring cup, ladle, wide mouth funnel, cook pot and canner

After boiling the sweet pickle syrup for a few minutes I added the vegetables into the syrup pot and carefully brought the whole thing back to a boil. At that point it was time to fill and seal the hot jars and place them into the canner for their hot water bath. Processing them 15 minutes for sweet pickles at our elevation of 3000ft.


Canner filled with pickle jars at full boil (lots of steam on a hot August night!)

I am now the proud producer of 9 pints of beautiful homegrown and homemade bread & butter pickle chips. I don't always get a really good harvest of cucumbers, so it pleases me very much to have a heavy crop this year. I love to make them into pickles as well as eat them fresh. Some years I have enough to make Kosher Dill Spears too.


Bread & Butter Pickles ~ 9 Pints!

Now I need to hide them from Hardware Bob as he is addicted to sweet pickles...

© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

Yesterday's Lunch

Yesterday I took a store bought potato, a home grown light green (Clarimore) zucchini, a bit of purple onion, a couple of garlic cloves, some home grown fresh basil and parsley and sliced and chopped to make a heap of fresh veggies:


Russet Potato, Clarimore Zucchini, Onion, Garlic, Parsley & Basil


I then sauteed them all in extra virgin olive oil with a bit more garlic powder, some freshly ground black pepper, some lemon pepper seasoning and a bit of paprika. It smelled great and looked like this while cooking:


Potato Zuke Saute

After a few minutes they all cooked tender and started to carmelize bringing out their natural sugars and great taste. I was hungry so I ate it for lunch:


How did that broiled sausage (Bockwurst) get on my plate?
(delicious with horseradish deli mustard!)


© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

My Favorite Basil Pesto & More

Fresh Picked Sweet Basil

My basil plants are not that big this season, at least not yet, but I did manage to give my biggest plant an all over "haircut" and harvested enough leaves to make one batch of my favorite basil pesto so far. I usually make a batch of pesto and then freeze at least half of it in small plastic containers (recycled yogurt cups) to use later. It keeps very well in the freezer for quite a long time. My favorite way to enjoy it is on nice hot freshly boiled pasta. Bow tie pasta being my very favorite. I have also used it on pizza dough, sandwiches and in salad dressings.

Here's my favorite basil pesto recipe that I found long ago in the cookbook "The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines: China, Greece & Rome" by Jeff Smith. I modified the recipe just a bit.

Basil Pesto

(recipe can be halved or quartered successfully if you don’t have 4 cups basil)

4 Cups tightly packed fresh basil leaves, big stems removed
¼ Cup raw pine nuts, walnuts or almonds
½ Cup extra virgin olive oil, dark
At least 2 cloves of fresh garlic, crushed, more if desired
Season with black pepper or lemon pepper to taste
½ Cup grated parmesan or Romano cheese, or a blend of both

Put basil leaves in the food processor. Add the nuts, olive oil, garlic, and pepper seasoning. Process until all are chopped very fine and blended, but not really smooth. Remove pesto from processor and stir in the grated cheese. Serve on fresh hot pasta, in soups as a garnish, mix into mayo on sandwiches, salad dressings etc.

This recipe makes about 2 Cups of Pesto. Store it in the refrigerator for no more than a few days, covered. Freezes well and keeps for months in the freezer without losing taste.
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Stealth Veggies

While I was in here last night blogging and boasting about how prolific zucchini can be, my zucchini plants were stealthily growing huge specimens for me to find amongst their big leaves this morning. I picked 3 large zukes totalling 3 1/4 pounds. I swear none of them were out there yesterday! Here come the zucchinis...


Sneaky Zucchinis


© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

Lock Your Car Doors! Here Come the Zucchini!

First Zukes of the Season

I've been so busy caught up in the sweet fruit frenzy of blogging about apricot pie and ice cream, that I have fallen behind in my vegetable garden reports. Time to talk about some "hard core" summer veggies like zucchini, a type of summer squash.

While I was trying to think of a catchy title for this post, I remembered that my Mom, who grew up in New England, told me that up there the zucchini grew so prolifically that you had to lock your car doors otherwise your neighbors would fill your car with their extra zucchinis! Well, that's the story they tell up there in New England anyway. I've heard that story told about other parts of the US also, but I still think of my Mom when I think about growing zucchini.

Zucchini are usually very productive plants, and this season is starting out strong in my small garden. The photo above shows 1 1/4 lb each of dark green zucchini and my favorite light green Clarimore variety. I like the Clarimore for its beauty, but also for its mild tasting skin. I rarely peel zucchini. I prefer to eat them skins and all to get color and fiber in my meals. Both of these varieties of zuke came from the same seed packet. Renee's Garden Seeds offers packets that have 3 different kinds of zucchini in the same pack. Makes it very convenient to grow a few of each kind. I don't need more than 2 or 3 plants of each variety, so one pack of seeds works very well for me.

I also planted another variety of dark green zucchini from Peaceful Valley Garden Supply. So far it has not produced any edibles. I have faith that it will soon.

So today I had a vegetarian sandwich made with sourdough bread, lettuce, a slice of cheddar cheese and layers of very thinly sliced (I used my mandolin) light green raw zucchini. A little mayo, mustard and some seasoning, and it made a very tasty and nutrious lunch. If I had had a tomato in the house, I would have added a slice or two to the sandwich.

I was also busy later in the day turning another zucchini, this one much larger than those in the photo, into some delicious pureed zucchini soup. I got the soup zucchini as a gift from Hardware Bob, who received it as a gift from one of his customers. (he is always receiving gifts like that from his loyal customers)

This big zucchini was a dark green variety and weighed about 2 lbs! I peeled this one and then sauteed it with onions and garlic in olive oil and added in some vegetable broth and seasonings. I pureed it in the pot with one of those big immersion hand blenders and then finished the soup by stirring in a cup of rice milk. The recipe called for milk or cream, but I rarely have that around. I find that rice or soy milk works well. Today I actually added in a bit of half & half that I had left over from making ice cream the other day. It made for a delicious dinner. Satisfying yet light.


Zuke Soup ~ doesn't look like much in the photo, but tastes really good
(that's a garnish of fresh basil floating on top)

There are more zucchinis on the way! Lock your car doors....


© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

A Cool Breakfast

Apricot Ice Cream

Homemade apricot ice cream makes a wonderful breakfast on a hot day. Delicious, if I do say so myself. It turned out great, so I posted a photo as promised. I love the color.

© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

Peas on Earth

Fresh Snow Peas ~ 1 lb

Today I picked over one pound of fresh crisp snow peas from my garden. Even with my homemade twine trellis for the snow peas to climb, the heavy pea pods were making the tall plants fall over. I picked the peas that were ready and then spent some time securing the plants to the trellis with some of that stretchy green garden tape. I need to make sure I don't wait so long to pick more snow peas. I know that I need to pick them every few days to keep the peas producing more edible crunchy pods.

I like them raw, cold and crisp in salads or just directly out of the refrigerator as a snack. I also enjoy eating them in one of my quick stir fry dinners as I did tonight. See the photo below.


Dinner Stir Fry with Fresh Snow Peas

What are your favorite ways to eat snow peas? Any good snow pea recipes you'd like to share with me?

© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

Fruit & Nut Breakfast/Snack Bars

Dried Fruit, Nuts & Seeds make these bars tasty & nutritious!

Well, late last night I finally gathered all of my ingredients and got around to making those wonderful fruit and nut breakfast bars that I read about in the January 2008 edition of Sunset magazine! It only took me 6 months to get around to making these. Sheesh! The mag has been sitting on my dining room table all of this time just waiting for me to make this recipe.

These tasty snack bars are chewy, moist and also crunchy. Not too sweet either. They are made with dried fruit, nuts, seeds, a little fruit juice and pinch of salt. That's all. No cereals or grains, although I suppose adding some oatmeal might make a nice taste variation, if not a drier texture.

The recipe called for dried apricots, dates and prunes, raw almonds, sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds. Some orange juice and a little salt. You mix it up in the food processor and then shape the bars and bake them for a few minutes. Bake them longer if you want a drier bar. An easy and quick recipe. I was pleased with the taste and texture of the snack bars.

Although I did have all of the ingredients on hand, including the prunes, I also had some very nice black mission figs that I had just purchased. So I used the figs instead of the prunes in the recipe. They tasted fine in there and the texture was similar. I think you could substitute dark or light raisins, dried cranberries, cherries or blueberries for the prunes and they would still be a very tasty treat with some flavor variation. Using raw walnuts or pecans in place of the raw almonds would also work, however I believe it would increase the fat content some.

The "sticky-ness" of the dried apricots and plump Medjool dates are what hold the bars together, so I probably wouldn't substitute anything else for them. Besides, I really like their taste!

These little bars are great with coffee or tea in the morning and I think they would work well as a hiking trail energy snack or in your lunchbag to satisfy those afternoon sugar cravings. Better for you than a candy bar from a vending machine. (Yes, I used to do that too when I worked in an office environment)

Check out the recipe. I think you'll like them.


© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

A Light Lunch

Garden Salad with Shrimp & Blue Cheese Crumbles

As the weather has been warmer, I've been trying to eat lighter meals and especially meals that I can prepare using freshly picked homegrown veggies from my organic garden. Today's lunch was a light but satisfying green salad topped with some shrimp and blue cheese crumbles. It was very tasty. You'll also notice my favorite plastic tumbler full of ice tea in the photo above. It's my Lion King glass that I got at some fast food joint about a decade ago. I still love it!

The mixed salad greens were a combination of the spicy mesclun from my garden, some organic leaf lettuce from the grocery store and some organic spinach from our local farm store. I sliced up one of those huge homegrown radishes that I showed you awhile back and added a little tomato. The blue cheese and shrimp were purchased at Trader Joe's. As was the cocktail sauce adorning the shrimp. A squeeze of lime, some balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil and a few spices added the finishing touches.

It's a good thing I enjoy fresh salads. I have a lot of salad greens in my garden!



Aren't these beautiful?

I just had to show off the velvety red roses that Bob gave me a few days ago.


© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket