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Fall and Winter Meats – Intro

Meat is meat. You can eat it whatever kind of meat whenever you want to. But some meats seem more suited to certain times of year. Roasts; whole duck, chicken or turkey; and slow cooked meats tend to be better suited to fall and winter. As they slowly cook in the crockpot, on the stove top, or in the oven, they help generate heat for the house. The warm food will also warm the body.

This series will look at the meats we have and ways they can be used. Especially in the fall and winter. Here are links to the meats we have written about.

Pork Roasts

Beef – Meaty Shank Soupbones or Short Ribs

Chicken Broth

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What Do I Do with…a Patty Pan Squash?

This time of year we have patty pan squash. These bowl-shaped summer squash are mostly yellow with a green circle on the blossom end. They can be used in the same way as zucchini or yellow summer squash.

Here is a look at the inside of a patty pan. The top one was cut horizontally and the bottom one vertically. It is meatier than zucchini or yellow summer squash.

Two customers like to slice them horizontally and roast them. They put some basting oil with seasoning in the pan, place the patty pan circles on top, and add some onion or garlic. One customer roasts it like this for 20 min. at 400F, then flips them and roasts them until the edges are brown and it is sort of caramelized. The other customer, after placing them in the pan, sprinkles them with parmesan cheese and roasts them until the cheese browns. Both of them love patty pan season!

I am more simple. I tend to slice and boil them like I might with zucchini or yellow summer squash. OR I wedge/chunk them up and add them to the veggie stir fry mix for the day. With any of these ways they are a good squash, tasty and pretty!

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Hamburger and Vegetables

Recently I made fried up hamburger and added veggies to make a dish to pass. Other than celery the rest of the veggies – green beans, beet greens, Swiss chard, and golden beets – came fresh from the garden. I also roasted potato wedges, lightly oiled, for the starch.

First I thawed the ground beef and then scrambled or fried it. Once the pink was gone I added veggies with generous glugs of olive oil: celery, green beans, golden beets washed and sliced, beet green stems and leaves, Swiss chard. I sauteed these, covering them and letting them steam/sweat in the heat and oil. Once I had steam I turned the heat to low and let them sit for several minutes. When they were soft enough, I took them off the stove and put them in the serving pan. They were a good addition to dinner.

Here is a variation. I cooked hamburger and then added these veggies. They were ones I had and also fresh ones from the garden – green and yellow wax beans, beet greens, yellow summer squash, zucchini squash, beets, patty pan squash.

This variation ended up looking like this. Tasty and delicious!

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Tacos

In the summer tacos are an easy meal. A traditional taco would have ground beef, ground pork, or chorizo as easy meat choices. Add some canned kidney or black beans, refried beans, lots of lettuce, and some tomatoes or salsa. Put it on corn or tortilla chips, or on flour or corn taco shells and you have dinner.

So what is chorizo? Ours is beef mixed with spices and garlic powder, giving the beef a Mexican flavor. It is in casing similar to our sausage. You can remove this to cook it like you would ground beef or cook it in the casing and chunk it up afterwards.

We have also made fish tacos this year. We saute fillets of fish (haddock, cod, perch) in lots of butter. Once it is cooked, it flakes apart easily. Next we make up mayonnaise coleslaw (cabbage, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower all grated and mixed with mayo). Then we spread the fish on a taco shell, cover it with coleslaw, and add some tomatoes and lettuce. Finally we fold it up and eat it. Good eating!

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Tell Me About Your…Duck

This year we raised ducks for meat for the first time. Like our other poultry they arrive in the mail. After picking them up from the post office, we put them in the brooder under heat lamps, give them water to clean their bills and nose off, and provide local organic grain for them to eat.

Once they have feathered out, we move them outside to our portable chicken (duck) tractor. We move this twice daily, providing them with fresh grass, and water and feed as before. This allows them to be raised outdoors, but protects them from predators.

Once they are large enough we process them for meat., similar to how we process chickens and turkeys. Because their feathers are water resistant, we need to do an extra scald in hot paraffin. This pulls off the feathers that didn’t come up in the regular scald.

We finish the process by packaging them in poultry shrink bags. This allows for a nicer presentation and should have reduced freezer burn and ice build up.

We use this recipe when we eat duck. It is simple, duck over apples, made in the crockpot. The leftover broth can be used for a sweet rice pilaf. Enjoy!

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Lettuce

Warm and dry this week! That makes it a good week for lettuce salads. And we have the lettuce – buttercrunch bibb, really red deer tongue, and green deer tongue.

This is buttercrunch bibb lettuce. It is the one others are compared to. It has a soft texture with a pleasant lettuce flavor. The leaves are rounded.

These are the red and green deer tongue lettuce. Do you see how the leaves are sort of shaped like a deer tongue? We like the flavor and sturdiness of this lettuce.

SALE THIS WEEK – These are available as a small bunch for $2.00 or as a large bunch for $3.00. You can mix and match any of the three varieties. Expires 6/24/23.

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Scapes!

It is scape season! This time of year you will see these twirly green stalks. at farmers markets. They are garlic scapes. The hard-necked garlic puts up a flower umbrel. It starts as a curly-cue. If allowed to grow, it will straighten out. But most farmers want the energy to go into the garlic bulb, so they harvest them and sell them as garlic scapes.

These can be used many ways. They can be cut in bean size lengths and boiled/steamed/sauteed as a veggie or added to a veggie mix. They can be blended/processed with nuts, cheese, and oil and used as a pesto, a dip or a spread with veggies, bread or crackers. And if you love raw garlic, you can eat them straight up. They have a vegetative garlic flavor. Lots of uses.

Here is some garlic scape pesto we made this year. It is more like a spread. We use 1 part olive oil, 2 parts shredded cheese, 2 parts chopped nuts, and 4 parts chopped garlic scapes. We eat it fresh and also freeze it, so we can eat it throughout the winter.

Here are links to other posts about scapes: Garlic Scapes , Garlic Scape Pesto , The Allure of Garlic .

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Making Hay

Remember those hot dry days that we had last week? Those are great days for making hay! And we did. First we mowed the field and then let the hay sit for several days to dry.

Next we used the rake to turn the hay over to make sure the underside was also dry. This also gathered it together more into a row.

And finally we baled the hay, threw it on a wagon and stacked it in the barn. Do you notice different colors from the front and the back? The hay in the back is from last year and the hay in the front is this year’s.

Here you can see the color difference better. The back is golden-brown and the front is green. We do this to get ready for feeding hay to the cows and sheep in the winter when we no longer have grass.