Green Bean Bonus Makes More Dilly Beans

Unfortunately, I can never make green beans last around here. I love dilled green beans so much that even if I have a bumper harvest, there's never enough to can. I can eat a jar like this in two days flat. Lucky for me, our green beans took advantage of the late warm fall weather to produce a second harvest. I got a couple of colanders full, and now I have at least a few days supply of dilled green beans.

Here's my easy-peasy way to make dilly beans (from my mom):

1. Save the pickle juice from a big Costco-sized jar of dill pickles.
2. Remove stems from green beans and snap in half
3. Lightly steam them just until tender
4. Throw them in the pickle juice for a few days
5. Enjoy!

Nice Website for Local Foods and Prep

I was looking online for a recipe for fresh pumpkin pie (since all the Betty Crockerish cookbooks carry is recipes with canned pumpkin) and stumbled across this nifty little site: http://www.pickyourown.org/

From the website description:

This website provides local listings of pick your own (also called U-pick or PYO) farms in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other countries. There are crop calendars for each local area to tell you what is available to pick throughout the year, local weather forecasts and really easy illustrated directions to show you how to make jam, jelly, salsa, pickles, spaghetti sauce, applesauce, apple butter and 150 other recipes with step-by-step directions to can, freeze, dry or preserve the harvest.

So far, our family can vouch for their pumpkin pie recipe. This is a great time to get deals on pie pumpkins at local farms, with the Halloween rush over and the Thanksgiving rush not quite yet starting. I'm really enjoying the roasted pumpkin seeds too. There's nothing commercially available that even comes close to my home-roasted seeds, which is a bummer because they usually go fast around here!

Dark Days "Special Eggs" and Pumpkin Pie

For this week, I fell back on an easy mostly locally-sourced favorite for our main dish. Our family calls it "special eggs", since that's what my son started calling it years ago when he was younger. I make eggs scrambled with milk, sun-dried tomato pesto, feta cheese, and chives. Each year I've been sourcing more and more of the ingredients. First the eggs, from our chickens starting 3 years ago. Then the goat milk, about a year after that, then the cheese, which I got at the Farmer's market last week, and the chives from our garden. Only the sun-dried tomato pesto is not local, but next year when we grow a bigger tomato crop, I plan on making that myself.


But the tour de force of this week's preparations was a homemade pumpkin pie. I've been skimming the cream off of our raw milk to save for making pie. I picked sugar pie pumpkins to grow in our garden this year so that the ones that didn't get turned into jack-o-lanters could be made into yummy pies. The kids helped pick them, then we roasted the halves, toasted the seeds for snacking, and mixed with eggs, cream, and spices for a pie that the kids pronounced "the best pumpkin pie we've ever had!"

My tip for pumpkin pies: if you have extra pie fillings, pour it into ramequins and bake for a crust-less pumpkin custard. Top with whipped cream or eat plain. Our entire family likes to eat this for breakfast!

DIY Yogurt

Speaking of making foods yourself, I made yogurt for the first time. We buy all of our milk raw from a local person with a few goats. It's really great goat's milk, miles better than what you can get in the store (very little of that goaty flavor, for one thing). And since the kids love yogurt, I thought I'd try my hand at making some from the goat's milk. I used the directions on this site: http://www.makeyourownyogurt.com/ and it worked out very well. I think I'll let the next batch go about half an hour longer though, just for a little more thickness.

The great thing is, my mom had this yogurt maker from sometime in the 1970s, and she brought it up to me and it works great! It's easier than leaving the yogurt on a hot pad or other warming methods, because it keeps it at a constant temperature that's just right. And since strawberry season it upon us, it's just the perfect time to get my yogurt-making underway.

Pancakes That Are Not Empty

After a recent triathlon, they served a pancake breakfast for athletes and families. My son came through the line with me and loaded up on a stack of traditional pancakes, hot off the griddle. After pouring maple syrup on (and commenting how it was soaked up like a sponge), he tucked in. Almost immediately, he looked at the pancakes strangely and then said "These pancakes are completely empty! There's nothing inside them." LOL, he's used to my nutrient-dense whole grain and nut pancakes, and these were just white flour, butter, and salt.

It reminded me of a story my mom tells about me when I was three or four years old. She had taken me over to a babysitter's house for the day and I refused to eat this lady's sandwiches because they were on strange white bread. I think it shows that what kids are raised with is what they get used to, and I've always said that there's a small window of a few years to help kids get used to what healthy food really is before they've got the rest of the universe to compare it with. In our case, my kids have grown up with my pancake recipe, and anything else tastes strange. If they'd grown up with balloon pancakes (the other word my son used for the white flour kind), that's what they'd think of as normal. In extreme cases, some kids eat such a narrow diet that what you feed them in the early years really matters. I've known two kids who really only ate a few foods by the age of five or so. One of them ate blueberries, cashews, a ginger-granola mix, red peppers, black beans, orange juice, and oatmeal. The other ate processed frozen waffles, french fries, white bread, american cheese food slices, crackers, and some kind of juice drink mix in little boxes. In both cases, the kids had settled on what they were used to by a couple years of age, so what they ate in those first couple of years hugely determined the nutrition that they would get overall growing up.

I'm lucky in that my kids both have a very broad range of foods that they eat, and it is pretty overwhelmingly nutritious. So I don't have a lot of food worries. I do think that when kids garden and pick fruits and vegetables and carry in the eggs from their own chickens, and pet the goats that are giving them milk, it really helps connect them to the food that they're eating and encourages healthy choices.

As for the pancakes, here's what's in them:

Robin's Non-Empty Pancakes

1 cup raw milk (ours is goat's)
1 cup yogurt
1 1/2 cup whole grain flour (sometimes I combine oat, spelt, wheat, coconut flour, whatever I have available)
1/4 Cup Ground Flax Meal
1/4 Cup Hemp Seeds

If I have time, mix everything above together and let it soak for 12 - 24 hours to ferment a little bit.

Then, the next morning, I mix in:
6 eggs
4 Tbs coconut oil or butter
1 tsp Vanilla
2 Tbs Raw Evaporated Cane Juice (Sucanat)
1 tsp sea salt

Sometimes I make them with bananas and pecans or blueberries or huckleberries in season. These also make great rollups with peanut butter and honey for a middle of the day snack. If I have the time, I'll mix up a double or triple batch and freeze a bunch so the kids can get pancakes any day of the week. It's both more nutritious and much more cost-effective than breakfast cereals.