Friday, February 24, 2012

A taste of summer

We had some crazy weather today.  One moment it was sunny and 75 degrees, the next moment it was pouring down rain with heavy winds.  It felt like a summer day.  I went for a walk in long sleeves and wished I had worn a short sleeved tee shirt.  We even had a rainbow.  You may have to look very hard to see it.  Why don't rainbows photograph well?
Because it was raining so hard and I couldn't be outside, I decided to do some cooking.  It's been a long time since I made homemade pasta.  I used all whole wheat flour from our home-grown wheat.  I had no idea if it would be too dry or what.  Surprisingly it turned out really nice.  The dough was very orangey-brown from the combination of our dark yellow eggs and wheat. 
 I was afraid the noodles would be too dry and crumble when I pressed and cut them but they surprised me.  It was smoother than the texture of the dough led me to believe they'd be.
 I made a sauce out of one cup of frozen pumpkin from 2006 and 2 cups of winter squash from 2010.  It was heavily flavored by 5 cloves of our very potent garlic, fresh sage leaves and the last of our onions from 2011. 
Unfortunately we didn't have any chicken broth, sour cream, salt or nutmeg from our farm which completed the sauce.  While digging through the freezer for the pumpkin I discovered some eggplant.  I brushed it with some olive oil, salt and parmesan, broiled it and placed it on top the pasta then added some goat cheese from October (I don't even know what kind but it was parmesan-like), and there we had a summer dinner.
It will be nice when we have fresh ingredients but for now I'm thankful for this taste from past summers' produce.

2 comments:

  1. Karen, that looks DELICIOUS! I would have loved to had been there. Yummm. Makes my mouth water looking at the pictures!
    Em~

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  2. Looks like a lot of hard work paid off Big time. It took 5 years to make this dinner I hope you didn't eat it in 20 mins.

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