Archive for September, 2008
dark chocolate rosemary ice cream
I wasn’t planning on putting up a post today. The agenda’s a little cramped as it is. But I couldn’t keep this recipe under my hat. It’s just too amazingly – perhaps even surprisingly – delicious to hold back until there’s more free time for blogging.
Dark Chocolate. Rosemary. Ice Cream.
I’ll let you digest that combination for a minute.
Think about it.
I know. I know. You’re scrunching up your forehead, trying to decide if that’s the best or the worst idea for an ice cream flavor you’ve ever heard. I wasn’t so sure myself at the outset. I had been planning on just plain old run-of-the-mill rosemary ice cream but got to thinking about a conversation I had recently with my dad. He, being an old pro at homemade ice cream, believes that chocolate based ice creams are by far creamier and longer lasting in the freezer. Oddly enough, I’d never made a chocolate ice cream on my own and was curious to test his theory.
I thought I might be crazy though to pair chocolate and rosemary so I google the two and saw a recipe on Godiva for a rosemary and chocolate mousse. I knew the best chocolate makers in the world couldn’t be off their rockers so I went ahead with my plan for Dark Chocolate Rosemary Ice Cream.
Farm Harvest Festival – Oct. 11th
Weavers Way Farm Harvest Festival
October 11, 2008
12:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Directions here
Please join us for an afternoon of autumnal fun as we celebrate the first annual Harvest Festival at Weavers Way Farm, located in Awbury Arboretum, 1101 Washington Lane, Philadelphia, PA. Festivities will feature a variety of musical entertainment, hay rides, raffles with great prizes, plenty of farm fresh food, and much more! And of course, enjoy visiting the fields of this funky urban farm surrounded by hundreds of trees in their full fall splendor! For more information about the farm and what to expect, visit the farm’s webpage at http://weaversway.coop/index.php?page=the_farm.
Posies for PASA
This isn’t a food related post, but it is a “straight from the farm” topic and a fun one at that so I thought I’d share. I was asked recently to do the centerpiece arrangements for a fundraising dinner for the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA), which happens to be the organization behind the “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” campaign that’s done so much for small farms like Weavers Way Farm. I was obviously thrilled to do the floral designs for this lovely event being held in the conservatory of Longwood Gardens, and I worked exclusively with flowers grown at our farm and in my own garden to create these pieces. The pumpkins were also locally grown on a farm in Lancaster County.
Cut flower production and floral design with locally grown flowers is fast becoming an intense passion of mine since I began working and studying at Longwood Gardens. I was pleased to have this opportunity to demonstrate how locally grown seasonal flowers, even in late September, can be just as sophisticated and opulent as a bunch of hot house roses or otherwise. I hope you would agree.
So don’t just think about buying local vegetables, fruit, meat and cheeses. Also think about buying your flowers locally as they are also an important of most small farmers’ palette of products. Local flowers also avoid the environmental issues of the energy consumed in growing flowers out of season in greenhouses far away and often shipping them across international borders.
Roasted Red Pepper Sauce
Insomnia, old friend of mine, has been plaguing me all week. A few moments ago, I was laying flat on my back in bed, eyes wide in the dark, watching the clock roll over to yet another minute where my brain just wouldn’t turn off. Then it dawned on me. I have to remember to put up that post about the Roasted Red Pepper Sauce since everyone’s enjoying the eggplant meatballs so much, and they’re even better with the sauce! So, insomniac that I am, I figured the best course of action was to endure the jarring sensation of turning the lights back on and get this recipe to you pronto instead of wiling away one sleepless minute/hour at a time in bed.
Making your own roasted peppers is a breeze and so much tastier than the stuff you get in a jar at the store. And once you’ve gotten the knack of making your own roasted peppers, it’s even easier to whip them into a sauce that’ll make plain ol’ tomato sauce seem boring and so-last-season! It’s fantastic over the eggplant meatballs, but I could certainly see this smoky yet brightly flavored sauce doing miracles for run-of-the-mill fish, chicken, beef or vegetable entrees.
While peppers are in season, you might as well just go ahead and roast a batch every weekend and keep them in the fridge with a little oil to pull out to make this sauce in a jiff as you need it (or to make this spread for your sandwiches). Or if you’d rather, make the sauce on the weekend too, and it’ll keep a few days so you can use it on weeknights or in quick lunches.
Toppling Assumptions
Mmmm… I’ve been having one of those relaxed mornings where I’m puttering around and yet somehow still accomplishing things. It’s nice. But now that I’ve finally pulled up the blog to get another post written, I’m finding myself drifting off in daydreams, mostly about what it would be like to grow white tea in some remote Asian mountain. It’s probably because I just finished the last cup from my stash of organic white peony white tea, and I’m really desperate for more.
But enough about daydreams and tea – it’s time to get down to the business at hand, which is, to be more precise, Eggplant Meatballs. This recipe is another homerun from the Totally Vegetarian cookbook I told you about the other day. I’m usually skeptical of vegetarian “meatballs” since they tend to be either crumbly and dry or soggy and dense, and they almost always lack any unique flavor. But since I had several dozen eggplants I’d just brought in from my garden and didn’t have any particular plans for them, I decided this version of the vegetarian meatball was worth a shot.
Well, I stand corrected in my assumptions about vegetarian meatballs, at least in this instance. These were superb! I might even go so far as to describe them as succulent. The texture was just right; not overly dense and not at all crumbly. These little balls of eggplant were perfectly moist, tender and very flavorful. Drizzled with a little roasted red pepper sauce, which I’ll get you the recipe for next time, they stood up on their own as a delicious dinner entree. Even D liked them, and he’s a tough sell sometimes.
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