Vintage Home and Farm

For about five years now, I have been harvesting our garlic scapes and making garlic scape pesto ( see our article with the recipe ). This is the first year I've harvested leek scapes, although I've been growing leeks for several years and have noticed they develop a flower on top, similar to garlic and onions. Last year, I observed that our local natural foods grocery store, Country Aire, had bundles of leek scapes for sale in their produce section. At the time, I hadn't known that the flower and stem of a leek are called a scape, similar to garlic, so when I saw the sign on the basket of leek scapes in the store, I was super excited and decided that I would harvest my leek scapes the following year (which is now) and make something with them. Above is my harvest. The tall, long scapes at the front are from leeks. Behind the leeks are the curly garlic scapes. Only hardneck garlic varieties produce a scape. You should always harvest garlic scapes when they are still curled,...

It's been a busy December so far, especially with our daughter in a local theatre performance, with every evening filled with practices and performances. We attended her first public performance last night, and it was fantastic! They will continue for the rest of the month. We also had a farm-related issue to take care of a couple days ago, which I have added to our Bee Journal . Most honeybee hives around here don't overwinter well, and in fact, I just talked to someone last night whose friend lost 5 out of 7 of their hives due to the cold weather we've been having. We still have two hives left. I'm hoping our remaining little bee friends can hang in there. Today, I made figgy buckwheat orange scones that I will be taking to a special "craft day" a friend is hosting. The scones came out very nice, especially considering how significantly I altered the recipe. I have been craving the figgy buckwheat scones that Kim Boyce of The Bake Shop in Portland makes. Her...

Last Christmas, my sister gave us three of these ceramic "The Original Apple Baker" dishes, one for each of us. I've been using the Basic Apple Recipe that's on the company's website. This is my favorite treat right now! The apples are so good baked this way. We bought two boxes of apples from Sunny Farms for pressing cider. I then hid about a dozen of the apples for making baked apples. The baked apples are really good with a scoop of ice cream. The ice cream begins to melt right away because the dish is still warm from the oven. In the middle of each Apple Baker dish is a post that you slide through the cored apple. The ceramic post's presence in the middle of the apple helps the apple bake evenly and keeps it warm as you enjoy eating your baked treat. Anyway, these dishes are so wonderful that I just had to share a note here about them. 

There is a wood stove in our family room (The Corral) that has just enough space on top for a small cast iron pan. I've been thinking about trying to cook on the wood stove for five years now, ever since we installed the wood stove, and finally, this year we bought a small cast iron pan just for this purpose. Isn't it adorable? I didn't realize they made such tiny cast iron pans. We also bought the two hot pads that go around the handle of the pan.  There isn't much space on top of our wood stove for cooking. The vent pipe comes out the middle of the stove. Also, the wood stove is partially recessed into the fireplace, which doesn't give much room above the stove for a tall pan. This short pan is about the size of a slice of bread. In fact, it's intended for making paninis. But, we can also cook eggs and other things in it. There's room on the other side of the vent pipe for another small cast iron pan. I think I will have to go back to Swain's and buy t...

Imagine having homemade sour cherry crumble, four pie tins full, ready, and waiting in your freezer. All you have to do is take one out, let it thaw, and then bake it on a cookie sheet. I'm still working on using up the fruit that I froze last summer, including tart cherries. So, I decided to make a few pie tins full of sour cherry pie filling and then add a crumble topping made with oatmeal, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, and walnuts. In all, the batch I made filled four 8-inch tinfoil pie plates. Then, each of these fits inside a gallon ziplock bag. I used a straw to remove the air from each bag. They're ready to go into the freezer. With any kind of frozen dessert that has a crumble topping, I think I'll thaw it in the fridge first. That way, the topping won't get too brown during baking. Alternatively, I think you could bake it at a low temperature (like 325 degrees F) for a half-hour and then increase the heat at the end if needed. If the top starts to get browned,...

Last summer, we were overwhelmed with the harvest (as usual!), and so rather than canning our sour cherries at that time, we just put the pitted and washed cherries into the freezer, with thoughts of making sour cherry jam sometime during the winter months.  Well, that time has come.  Today I pulled out one of the bags of frozen sour cherries and made jam. In addition to the two bags of sour cherries still in our big freezer (above), there is another big bag in our kitchen freezer.  Plus the bag that I just made into jam!  So many cherries.... Usually I make jam using Pomona's Pectin since it requires a lot less sugar, but today I discovered I didn't have enough of it in the cupboard.  But I did have some Ball pectin that says it's "Low or No-Sugar Needed Pectin".  I hadn't tried this before and don't even remember buying it, but I must have because there it was in the cupboard.  It hadn't even been opened.  Most excellent , I thought, and proceed...

Rich and decadent but a lot less sweet than other versions, this Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie will soon become one of your favorites to serve to family and friends for dessert! It's a quick, easy, and failproof pie that comes together so nicely.  How did we come up with this recipe?  Well, the original version of the recipe came from the Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummand. However, her recipe calls for twice the amount of sugar, as well as a chocolate cookie crust, and it has no cocoa powder in it.  We tried her recipe but found it way too sweet for our liking.  We were also concerned about how many carbs it contained. It definitely wasn't glycemic index friendly.  I began to play around with her recipe, adjusting the sugar, adding in cocoa powder, replacing the cookie pie crust with a walnut version, and viola!  We've made this pie several times over the past year, and it now occurs to me that it is worth sharing our version with everyone. We hope you like it! Cho...

There are numerous old fruit trees on our property, including apple, pear, cherry and plum. The trees' enormous sizes and moss-covered, gnarled branches suggest they are likely at least 40 and maybe up to 70 years old.  Each year since moving here, we have been blessed with fruit from all of these old, beautiful trees.   Yesterday, it was time to harvest the apples and pears. A few of each had fallen to the ground to be consumed eagerly by the deer.  So I took our ladder out there with several buckets and began working my way around each tree, avoiding spider webs (there were several with enormous spiders on them), and using a fruit picker (one of those wire baskets on a broom  handle).  There were only 22 apples on the apple tree, but all were giant-sized.  The pear tree was loaded, however, and generously gave us about 75 pears this year.  I brought the fruit inside and put the two ginormous containers in our mudroom next to the buffet cabinet t...

  This is the first year that we have ever grown fava beans.  We enjoyed watching the plants grow and observing their unique flowers in the spring.   We were also impressed with how the bean pods grew upside down on the stalk of the plant.  It appeared at first that we would have an abundant harvest based on how large the bean pods looked. The other day, we realized it was time to harvest the fava beans, as the beans had grown 6-8 inches long and the plant foliage was starting to dry out and die back.  Although we had only planted one row about 20 feet in length, I really thought there would be a lot of beans and a great harvest. However, once we picked all of the beans off the plants, the entire harvest filled only one grocery bag.  Then, once we had shelled the beans, we noticed that amount dwindled to about 4 cups of shelled beans.  Finally, once we had blanched the beans and removed their outer protective layer, we were down to just 3 cups of ...

  When I was recently out in the garden, I noticed that the garlic scapes had grown big enough to curl into a complete circle over the top of each head of garlic, which meant it was time to make garlic scape pesto. This is the first year I've made pesto from our garlic scapes. It was such an easy task and the result was so delicious that we thought it was worth sharing some information about it.  If you are interested in growing garlic, or you already grow garlic in your garden, don't forget about the scapes. Scapes only grow on hardneck garlic varieties.   You may recall that we planted our garlic last October .  The garlic overwinters and then begins to grow like crazy once spring arrives.  Our garlic is usually ready to harvest in July, but in mid to late June we can cut the scapes off, allowing the rest of the plant to continue growing for a few more weeks. Below is what our mature garlic looked like recently, prior to cutting off the scapes.  Take...

  Our brussels sprouts have bolted and the flowers look a lot like broccoli, which made us wonder if brussels sprout flowers are edible.  There are quite a few articles out there about eating the leaves of the brussels sprout plant, but very little is written about the flowers.  So we decided to experiment with eating some to see how they tasted, since we did read that every part of the brussels sprout plant is edible. We noticed that the flowers not only look like broccoli but also taste similar to broccoli, too. However, we do know for sure that these are brussels sprout plants and not broccoli because we have been watching them form the sprouts and have picked a few off the plant to eat.  And of course, I also kept a record of these when I planted them.  Below you can see the sprouts forming on the plant earlier in the year.   Unfortunately, our sprouts never did very well in the garden. I think it's because we waited until early fall to get them pl...

Yesterday I decided to use up some bananas that I had put in the freezer. Homemade banana bread sounded good, but the recipe I've followed for years just wasn't exciting enough. So I added chocolate chips, ground flaxseed meal and chopped pecans. Yummy enough for dessert but also kind of healthy, right? Chocolate Chip Flax Banana Bread Ingredients: 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour (we use organic unbleached flour) 2 tablespoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons ground flaxseed meal 1/3 cup shortening 2/3 cup sugar 1 1/3 cups mashed banana (about 3 bananas) 2 eggs 3/4 cup chocolate chips (we used dark chocolate) For the Topping: 1 cup chocolate chips, melted with 1 tablespoon milk (we used soy milk) 3/4 cup chopped pecans (walnuts would also be good) Directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Grease a standard-sized loaf pan (8-1/2 x 4-1/2 x 2-1/2 inches). Sift together flour, baking powder, soda and salt in medium bowl.  Stir in the ground flaxseed m...

I've been baking sourdough bread with starter for long enough now to have come across what I find to be the easiest, most consistent and tasty recipe. It's time to share! The recipe I'm using started as a dough for making cinnamon buns, which I found on the King Arthur Bread website. But then I altered it (of course!) to make it lactose free, replacing the milk with soy milk and the butter with canola oil.  Then I tried using the basic dough to make not only rolls but also bread, and it came out light, soft and incredibly yummy! In the bread version, I omitted the sugar from the recipe.  I've then used this recipe to make bread that has herbs in it as well as bread stuffed full of roasted garlic.  Then there was the sweet version of the bread that had a swirl of cinnamon, sugar and chopped walnuts rolled up into it.  One day I patted little balls of the dough into rounds and placed them into a greased muffin tin, brushed the tops with a little olive oil and garlic po...

If you love lemons, then you will surely enjoy this green tomato pie recipe. My mom and I came across the concept of green tomato pie back in the mid-1980s, when I began baking as a teenager and discovered a knack for pies. Who knew unripe tomatoes (also knows as green tomatoes) could be used in a sweet pie?  I was fascinated by the concept and have been evolving our recipe for green tomato pie ever since. Now that we have a garden every year and there's an abundance of tomatoes that will never ripen before the season ends, we're more determined than ever to find ways to use up green tomatoes.  Green tomato salsa (salsa verde) is another option.  But while there are unripe tomatoes, there must be a sweet green tomato pie on our table at some point in the fall. You can use any variety of unripe tomatoes that you have in the garden. The tomatoes that we grew this year were mostly Roma, and unfortunately they were rather small.  Also, any size of green tomatoes works ju...

We came across this pizza crust recipe from Bob's Red Mill. It is BY FAR the best pizza crust recipe we've tried, and believe me, we've tried many recipes before this one!  We've tried them all - including sourdough recipes that used sourdough starter, and nothing has beat this one.  This pizza crust tastes like it was made in a traditional pizza restaurant! Additionally, some of its awesomeness is due to the fact that it's pretty much foolproof (when you follow the easy technique laid out below) and it's super easy to make.   I will have to tell you that the BIGGEST part of what makes this pizza crust so great is the technique that we've come up with through trial and error. It has to do with exactly HOW you let your dough rise (you need to proof it at a good temperature for dough) and then how you bake it (you need to bake it on a hot pizza stone). If you do those two things, then this recipe will be AMAZING! During a pandemic when going out for pizza is ...

Finding time to harvest and preserve every day is challenging, but during this time of year it's our goal to carve out a bit of time in the schedule each day to do so.  In order to take advantage of all the food growing in the garden, as well as to make sure we have home grown food to last us all year, diligence is required. Doing a little bit each day helps ensure we don't become overwhelmed.   When we first started preserving food, we didn't know what we were doing.  Canning initially seemed to be the thing to do, however, canning is very time consuming. We've come to realize how much easier it is to freeze food and how more nutrients are saved by freezing rather than canning. We still enjoy having a portion of our preserved food as canned for the sake of convenience and because we have limited freezer space.  But at least half of what we save nowadays is either frozen, fermented or dehydrated. I wanted to share with you the ways in which we have been preservi...