The Barter Economy

I have a buddy who has always kept bees.  Even long before he got us involved with that addictive hobby.  Each week he would trade us 2 pints of his honey for our two gallons of fresh milk.  We had this arrangement for years.  I'm sure you are wondering, "What in the world did you do with all that honey?"  Well, we ate it and saved a bunch of it.  Honey will last forever.  It was a great arrangement.  The barter economy.  Two parties making a deal and both happy with the proceeds.  At that time, I was scared of bees and had no intention of keeping them.  My buddy did not want to wake up and milk cows everyday.  It worked for both of us.  

We no longer have that barter arrangement going, but we have another one that works for both of us.  Unfortunately, our friend no longer has laying hens.  Hawks, owls and other predators ate every last one of them.  What is one to do without fresh country eggs?  I don't know how you live without them.  We eat dozens and dozens of them.  Although he no longer has hens laying eggs, our friend has some land down by the bayou that is prime location for chanterelle mushrooms.  In the spring or early summer, after a rain, you can walk through the woods that slope down to the bayou and see the golden yellow chanterelles pushing up through the leaves that line the forest floor.  It doesn't take long to fill up a paper bag with them.  They smell faintly of apricots and they are so delicious to eat.

The other day we came home and found a paper bag by our door.  Upon opening it and seeing the contents, we knew exactly what they were and who they were from.  Chanterelles!  We quickly cleaned them up.

We dried them and cut them into bite-sized pieces.

Then we sautéed them in a cast iron skillet with some butter.

Tricia has recently discovered a new use (for us) for sour dough bread.  She makes sour dough pizza crusts that she lines with tomato sauce, cheese, fresh cut onions, peppers and fresh chanterelle mushrooms and then bakes them in the oven.

When these come out of the oven, I'm telling you, it's time to eat and these pizzas disappear in no time at all.  So good!

The barter economy is alive and well.  We got a nice mess of chanterelle mushrooms that we ate for supper and for those we traded our friend some fresh country eggs from our hens.  Everyone's happy.  No cash changed hands and no taxes paid or collected.  

Eating the Bounty from the Garden

Every day we're bringing in buckets of fresh produce from the garden.  We preserve some of it, and we will show you some of the ways we do that in posts this week.  We give some away.  We eat the rest of it.  One of the really fun things to do around this time of year is to find new and exciting ways to eat the produce.  We have 'old stand by' recipes that we make again and again.  One of those is Fresh Vegetable Pizza with nothing but produce from the garden.

We first make a nice pizza crust, incorporating rosemary and oregano into the crust to make an herb-infused crust.  Its rolled out onto a pizza stone. The crust is then drizzled with olive oil.

Instead of using a tomato sauce, we substitute pesto that we've made last year from the basil crop.  We spread it liberally over the top of the pizza.  Pesto is the best-o!  You've just got to be extra judicious in checking your teeth after eating it.  Pesto has a tendency to stick in your teeth and creating an embarrassing situation going in public with green stuff stuck in your teeth.

We then cut some fresh sweet corn off the cob and sprinkle it on top with some grated parmesan cheese.

Sliced tomatoes are put on as the final topper.

Mozzarella cheese is grated on top and it's popped in the oven.  When it comes out, we cut up fresh basil on top.

Talk about a fresh meal!  Even people who aren't as crazy about vegetables as we are can enjoy this.  We made another couple of pizzas this weekend and added Italian Sausage to have the best of both.

This is always a big hit at our house.

Tomatoes 'A Plenty

Each afternoon we go out to the rows of tomatoes and do some picking.  We have a number of heirloom varieties planted.  It is a decent, but not stellar year.  After the deluge of rainfall, some of the tomatoes gave up the ghost and shriveled and died.  Others slowed, but continued to produce.  Some you're gonna win, Some you're gonna lose, Some are gonna get rained out, as they say.

We have Black Krim, Black Vernissage, Cherokee Purple, Roma, Creole, Pink Brandywine, Big Rainbow, Thessaloniki, and a few other varieties planted that slip my mind right now.  So far, the stink bugs haven't been as bad as in prior years, but we have had some worm issues.

We pick what we can and make homemade salsa, and Italian tomato salad, dried tomatoes.  We plan to can a bunch of stewed tomatoes.  I've had the envie for homemade garden fresh pizzas.  We'll use some creole tomatoes for that.  There's only four of those pictured below, but we had a bunch more.

The better half cuts them up to ready for topping.  In the meantime, she's made some crusts.

The basil is producing nicely so she slices some of that up with some mozzarella pearls.

The fresh crust is brushed with some pesto that we made and froze from last year's basil crop.  So good!

She sprinkles some fresh frozen sweet corn from last year over that and then arranges the sliced creole tomatoes and mozzarella pearls over the top.

Pop in the oven and slice and serve.  We learned to wait until out of the oven to sprinkle sliced basil over the top as basil loses its green color and turns black and unappetizing.  In the photo below, we hadn't topped with basil yet.

I didn't get a final photo as we immediately began eating and didn't stop until it was mostly gone!

A Good Fresh Summertime Pizza!

One great thing about the summer (let's talk positive things!) is coming up with delicious ways to use all the fresh produce coming in from the garden.  I am going to admit, my sweet corn produced in dismal fashion this year.  The germination of the heirloom varieties I planted was bad on the first planting and hardly any came up.  Then I went and bought hybrid sweet corn from Tractor Supply and experienced the same thing!

This weekend the same gentleman from our church that blessed us with all the Crack Peas also gave us a garbage bag full of fresh picked sweet corn.  It was a bag so full, I could hardly carry it.  We shucked it, cleaned it, and removed all the silk.  Then we blanched and froze some whole (on the cob).  Then we began to cut some off the cob and bagged and froze that as well.

With more corn than we knew what to do with and a copious amount of tomatoes ripening, we decided to make a few homemade pizzas.  We made pizza dough in the bread machine and spread homemade pesto on the crust, sprinkling fresh cut corn on top complimented by fresh sliced tomatoes.  This pizza is coming together!

Lots of cheese was grated on top as we waited for the oven to warm up...

We removed the pie from the oven and sliced fresh basil on top and cut the pizza into eighths.

Time to eat!

Many trendy 'farm to table' restaurants popped up in the past few years boasting about local foods and relationships with local farmers and ranchers.  You don't have to go to a restaurant to experience this, though.  Any gardener can do this.  Food is best when fresh.  Nothing can be fresher than something that you put labor into and can go out in the garden, harvest, and find a good recipe to use nature's bounty in making a meal that you won't forget. 

Dutch Oven Outdoor Cooking with Benjamin - Pepperoni/Italian Sausage Pizza

Saturday was a spectacular day.  We were greeted by a brilliant sun, blue skies, perfect temperature and it was just a great day to be alive.  We finished off a bowl of leftover guinea gumbo for lunch and I went out to work a bit in the garden.  For some reason I began thinking of when the boys were in scouting and that led me to remember that we haven't cooked anything outdoors in the dutch oven lately.  We have a dutch oven with legs on it, specifically for cooking outdoors on a campfire.

I asked Benjamin if he might like to cook something and he said, "Yes!"  So we got to researching what we might like to cook and I let Benjamin select Dutch Oven Pizza from Scouting Magazine.

We cut up some parchment paper and aligned it so that it covered the bottom of the pot.  Then I drizzled it with olive oil.

Tricia mixed up a batch of pizza dough in the bread maker and let it proof for about 45 minutes.  We flattened it out on the counter, forming it into a circle that would fit nicely in the bottom of the dutch oven without touching the sides.  We poked it with a fork so that air bubbles wouldn't form.

With dutch oven cooking, one charcoal briquette produces 10 degrees Fahrenheit, so this recipe called for cooking the pizza at 290 degrees.  So that means that you would need 29 briquettes in all.  I used my chimney charcoal briquette starter and in no time I had the briquettes grey with hot ash.  Since hot air rises, you separate the coals, putting 10 coals underneath and 19 coals on top of the dutch oven.  In the photo below, I wasn't quite finished moving the coals to the top.

The pizza dough was allowed to bake for 8 minutes.

When the 8 minutes is up, we opened up the dutch oven and spooned tomato sauce on top of the pizza crust and sprinkled some crumbled Italian sausage on top.

Then Benjamin loaded down the pizza with enough pepperoni to clog our arteries.

Finally, he sprinkled almost 3 cups of shredded mozzarella cheese with some Parmesan cheese to the top as well.

We put the lid back on and let it continue to cook for 20 minutes.  When the timer went off, we opened the lid and the pizza looked... PERFECT!

We brought the dutch oven inside and set it on the counter and we each grabbed edges of the parchment paper and lifted and the pizza eased right out and onto a cutting board.

We used a pizza cutter to cut it into 4 pieces - two for Benjamin and two for me. Then it was on!  Benjamin and I ate that pizza like it was our last meal.  In fact, I intended to get a better photo of a slice of pizza, but by the time I remembered to do so, I only had a little sliver of pizza left.  We wanted to eat it so fast, but exercised great restraint so as not to burn the roof our our mouths on the steaming hot pizza.

Benjamin wants to institute a new tradition and cook outdoors in the dutch oven once a week.  I think that is a good idea.  He has his eye on a few different recipes - a few desserts looked interesting to him as well as a jambalaya.

What we do with homemade mozzarella

Admittedly, it is easier to just go to the grocery store and purchase mozzarella cheese.  There is something liberating, though, to be able to produce your own from your own cows living on your land.  You know the ingredients and you've observed firsthand the cleanliness of the "factory."

Yesterday we documented how we turn fresh raw milk into mozzarella cheese.  Today we'll show you what we do with it - we eat it!  I don't know about your family, but we love pizza.  Pizza Hut Super Supreme Pan Pizza used to be our favorite, but Tricia's homemade pizza now holds that designation.

First, we grate the freshly made mozzarella cheese:
 

Freshly made and grated mozzarella cheese

Then we make up some pizza dough and spread some tomato sauce that has basil and oregano in it.   Then we add some ground hamburger meat and begin to sprinkle the mozzarella on top.


Sprinkling the grated mozzarella

No sense being stingy!  Might as well liberally pour the cheese on top.



It's not easy being cheesy

We made a couple of pizzas as we've discovered one just won't do.  Here is another one made on the pizza stone that is fresh out of the oven.


Time to eat

This is another family favorite that we make often.  In the summer, when the tomatoes and basil are fresh, we'll make a Caprese Pizza.  Easy.  Fresh.  Delicious.

Editor's Note: I just wanted to take a brief moment to sincerely thank those of you who drop by and read our humble blog and take interest in what we're trying to do.  We're learning day by day and make plenty of mistakes, but we're having FUN!  Our family thanks you for reading and thanks you for your kind words.