All right, I realize it's been awhile since the last post. The single biggest reason is this time of year is not the best for working out in the garden. However, that does not mean the garden doesn't provide great material to work with in creating good meals. The pictures with this post are of tonight's dinner. As you can see, it fit on one standard size dinner plate and in a soup bowl. Don't let this simplicity fool you into thinking we don't eat well around Farmville these days. Quite the opposite, actually. First let's describe what this meal was and then we'll describe the ingredients, and as usual, my two cents on how those ingredients found their way to my pan tonight.
The main dish, if you have to have one, was a variation of a San Francisco specialty called "Joe's Special". For those that have never had it, use Google to find out what it is. Nothing too fancy, but it hits the spot when you're hungry. Since I like to use what I have on hand, this was made up of Italian Sausage, mushrooms, onions, garlic, brown eggs, Swiss chard, and cheddar cheese. The soup in the bowl is a butternut, wild rice, and smoked sausage soup. The garnish you see on the plate is garlic chives and spearmint. We'll get into that later, if I remember.
For the Joe's Special knock-off, the tie-in to the garden and other things I tend to discuss in this blog are this. The brown eggs are symbolic of another time back in the 1970s when Lynda and I had the dubious honor off going out to collect the eggs from her dad's chickens. He got this batch of Rhode Island Reds with the belief they were all going to be laying hens. As time went on, this pretty much was the case with the glaring exception of this one rooster. Apparently, those that sorted this batch by gender made a slight error on one of them. As he got bigger, he did the usual rooster stuff and tried to kill anything he thought should be killed because he thought so. Since Lynda was the one that did most of the chores at that point in time, she had to face this crazy rooster everytime she went to gather eggs from the hens that were laying by that time. Being the crazy rooster he was, he would charge at her and attack with full rooster force. One day she told me about this situation and me, being the protective kind of guy I am, decided to go out and take care of the egg gathering myself. This rooster did his usual routine and attacked, but this time, the person he attacked had a 2 by 4 in his hands. Being a former baseball player in junior high school, let's just say I hit at least a triple that day. It didn't do much much good though, because that stupid rooster kept on doing his psycho attack routine way after I batted him into the outfield. OK, back to the eggs. Those eggs from the Rhode Island Red hens were the best I ever had. They would have free run of the garden to peck at things and Lynda and I would go to Florin Feed and get a feed mix that was formulated for laying hens. The eggs we would gather were very good. The yolks were so intensely yellow and the taste was very rich. In the years since then, I have never had comparable eggs and I look forward to being able to raise some hens again and have a steady supply of great tasting eggs.
The soup was made with Farmville butternut squash and highlights why winter squash should be in everyone's garden. What other vegetable can you harvest in November and still have around to cook with in March of the following year? All I did to make sure these would keep this long is made sure they were clean and stored in a basket with good air flow. I put this basket in the corner of the shed and have been using squash from it all winter long. The wild rice in the soup is from a farm up in Fall River. Fall River is in the northeast part of California and right in the middle of some of the best fly fishing anywhere. It was nice to use an ingredient from that area and think about next summer, chasing trout in some of my favorite creeks around there. The smoked sausage was plain old store bought, but in the future, the plan is to get back into sausage making. Who knows, once we are settled in the new place, maybe I'll raise a hog or two each year and make sausage from my own pork. I just have to keep Lynda from naming them.
OK, I did remember to go back and talk about the spearmint and garlic chives used as a plate garnish. I stumbled on both of them while I was getting the Swiss chard. Since the plan is to move later this spring, it didn't make much sense to plant anything after the fall garden wound down. This pretty much means the majority of the garden is a jungle of weeds. Under these weeds were very healthy clumps of spearmint and chives. I was feeling a bit lazy and decided to wash and use them for garnish rather than chop and sprinkle over the food. Both would have added some interesting flavors to the dishes. It did show just how hardy some herbs can be and they are definitely going to be included in the next garden project.
