On The Side: Tomatoes with Mozzarella

All the 90-degree days of the past month had me serving up this up quite often.  Heirloom tomatoes, Vermont mozzarella, avocado oil (sometimes hazelnut or sunflower oil), and pink Australian flake salt.  Sure bet as a side/salad, but works as a refreshing main when it's too hot to cook.

Monday Menu: Barbecued Rib Sandwich

That's smoked, pulled meat (veal) with marinated, grilled portabellas and oven-roasted tomatoes.

I cut the mushrooms horizontally and marinated them in commercial dressing for over an hour on the counter.

Could have made my own, but why not use what is to hand?

I set the grill to "high" and it took almost an hour to cook these the way I wanted.  Turning, turning, waiting for them to exude all their excess moisture and concentrate their flavor.

You can almost see the umami.

Finally, they were flat, a little shrunken, and nicely browned.

In the meantime, a bunch of tomatoes were coated in sunflower oil, salt, and placed in a 400f oven for about an hour.

Ready for a sandwich. The excess was frozen for sauces, later.

Great flavor and texture combination. Sweet BBQ sauce on the meat, mustard on the buns.  Sweet/sour, more sour with the marinated mushroom and more sweet with the roasted tomato.

Layers of perfection! It was a bit of a time commitment to make, but for someone who doesn't have sandwiches that often  - well - I had put a lot of thought into how it was going to go down, and was completely satisfied with the result.

Chicken Burger

I've had another recipe and story printed in the Free Press.  The link to it is here.

Weekend Cook: Veal Ribs on The Big Green Egg

The results?  Three pounds of meat, about the same as a small pork shoulder.

The last time we went to the processors with veal, we came home with these rib racks.  Didn't order them, but that's normal, no order comes back 100% right.  They've been popular and we have sold out.

I split the ribs, coated them in mustard and Dizzy Pig, and into the Big Green Egg at 250f for six hours or so.

I was some pleased that they fit.

At six hours, I covered them in foil and placed them in the oven for about six more hours.  There's a trick to keeping them moist - I placed them meat side down on the tray.

So good! Kept them covered on the counter with a heavy towel for another hour or so while they cooled. Pulled and refrigerated for other dishes, like the sandwich post tomorrow.

Weekend Cook: Shepherd's Pie

Another real shepherd's pie with smashed new potatoes from farmer's market.

Boiled potatoes were mixed with butter, 1/2 and 1/2, and a bit of chive cream cheese I had in the refrigerator. Salt and peppered to taste.

One pound of ground lamb from Willow Hill Farm sauteed with five cloves of garlic and five cipollini onions, chopped.  Add 1 tsp ground Cumin and 1 tsp hot Paprika.  Salt and pepper to taste.

These carrots were boiled along with the potatoes, cut into pretty rounds.

I wish I had the time to drive up the road, visit the local cornstand, come back, and roast my own corn - but this was a 40-minute meal, so I gave myself a break and opened up a can of Jolly Green.

375f for 38 minutes.

Done!  Awesome and delicious.  Shepherd's pie vs Cottage Pie?  The lamb wins every time.

Burlington Farmer's Market #17: The Quietest Fest

Last weekend, we sold quite a bit of meat and cheese, coming back home with many empty coolers.  This week we will have a full complement of pork and veal cuts, and bratwurst.  Gotta have brats for October.

The festival of the day was the Vermont Eco-Fest, and they were the perfect market companion.  I didn't even notice as all the booths were setting up, and they held off on the loud music until the 2:00 pm farmer's market end time.  This only made me suspect that all the other festivals were told to play nice and be good neighbors, and they chose not to.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Biggest dog ever, exciting things to buy, bratwurst coming soon, time to start stocking up.  My Christmas shopping is almost done!

See you at market.

Life on the Farm 083010: MY MRI

At long last, I was on my way to the Northwestern Medical Center (NWMC) for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on my chronically collapsing right knee.

(The Elispis, which Dan has also stopped using.)

To recap: it’s been five months since the injury and only now have I been granted access to the upper echelons of health care as dictated by my insurance company.   

This occurred only after our high deductible medical savings account has been eaten away by examinations, physical therapy, x-rays that showed absolutely nothing, and my all-time favorite professionally prescribed activity – doing nothing, and waiting to see if it gets any better.  All the while, still paying those pricey monthly insurance premiums.

It was a winding path through the halls of the diagnostic imaging department, then a short scissorlift to the magic MRI machine.  Aside from having my wisdom teeth removed 25 years ago, I haven’t been this deep inside any hospital.  If I had been on my own, I wouldn’t have been able to find my way back out of the maze.

What was the experience like?  Think of lying on a board in a cement culvert being rolled down a hill, with all of the noise and the shuddering, but none of the actual spinning or vomiting.

My thoughts?

How very un-Star Trek it all was.

For over 40 years, I’ve been pop-culturally prepared to expect futuristic diagnostic beds that quietly beep, analyze in holographic 3-D, and are governed by talking, nearly sentient computers.

It was reasonable to anticipate a glimpse of what’s been envisioned for the 21st - 23^rd centuries.  My expectations were quite high. (That's a bad jpeg of an MRI device taken from the internet, btw.)

After all, I have a communicator  cellphone with a touch-screen, that I can use as a tri-corder GPS or speak to a person face-to-face via various devices in full sci-fi fashion.

On another note: at check-in, I was asked if I had meds for claustrophobia.  Well, ‘no’, I said, wondering why no one had offered me any, since I wrote “severe claustrophobe” on my patient history and circled it repeatedly until it was scratched into the paper. 

‘Just how deep am I going to be jammed into yon hi-tech cruller?’  I said.

‘Not to worry’, the nurse replied, ‘you’ll only be going in chest deep’. 

It sounded like a promise that I won’t be over my head in the pool.

I believed her.

I managed to put my phobia aside – no mean feat – so long as I wasn’t to be confined inside anything similar to what Uma Thurman was in Kill Bill 2.  But sadly, there I was with an iPod soundtrack that I couldn’t listen to due to the proximity of the giant magnet.

The whole experience was a bit of a let down.  This will probably be the only chance I’ll have to be scanned by some pricey contraption, and it wasn’t a model that looked like it belonged in Dr. Crusher’s sickbay.

I’m sure that’s where things are heading, and it would be just my luck to be healthy enough (or perhaps too dead) to miss the awesome coolness of it all, when it finally gets here.  

Turkey Update

The turkeys are keeping this end of the pen eaten down, but the other side is full of tall weeds.

Happy turkey days.