Acorn squash recipe from Johnson’s Backyard Garden
Johnson’s Backyard Garden is one of the biggest and most popular urban farms in the Austin area. The farm always sets up shop at Austin’s farmer’s markets, and the JBG booth seems to have the biggest selection of produce compared to others. On Sunday, Aaron and I purchased some JBG veggies, including an acorn squash. I can’t remember cooking this before, and I didn’t know how to prepare the squash. So I was happy to see the farm’s blog recently published an acorn-squash recipe!
I may try this recipe later this week.
3) Recipes, by Melissa Vance, JBG CSA Member
Glazed Acorn Squash with Spicy Onions and Currants
1 acorn squash
Olive oil
3 tablespoons butter
1 red onion, thinly sliced
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon paprika
Pinch cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons dried currants
2-3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
Kosher salt and black pepperHeat oven to 350 degrees.
Cut the squash in half and scoop out seeds. Cut each half into several lengthwise slices.
Combine squash and a generous drizzle of oil in a bowl and toss to coat. Season with salt and black pepper. Place on a baking sheet and roast until browned and tender when pierced with a fork, about 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until softened. Deglaze the pan with the sherry vinegar and reduce completely.
Add garlic, paprika, cayenne pepper, currants, and honey, and cook over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the onions are glazed. Stir in red wine vinegar, and season with salt and black pepper. Serve the squash hot, coated with sauce.
Aaron’s delicious tomato-egg toast
Photo by Aaron Morris
A couple of weeks ago I posted about methods we’re using to preserve our tomato crop. We also love eating our mouth-watering homegrown tomatoes raw! Here’s a great recipe Aaron came up with off the top of his head.
Ingredients:
- Succulent heirloom tomatoes
- Fresh basil
- Backyard chicken eggs
- Whole wheat bread
- Salt and pepper
Instructions:
- Chop the tomatoes and basil
- Toast the bread
- Fry the eggs over easy, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste
- Top your toast with the tomatoes, basil and eggs
- Enjoy!
Photo by Aaron Morris
What to do with a summer tomato crop
Okay, here’s the dilemma:
Photo by Aaron Morris
We have a healthy crop of homegrown, heirloom tomatoes that all ripen simultaneously. It’s impossible to consume all the tomatoes raw, so we must preserve them before we lose all our hard work. It’s a great problem to have. But we still need a solution.
Solution one: make tomato sauce
Photo by Aaron Morris
Roughly chop the tomatoes, or you can leave them whole if you want to save time. Place oil in the bottom of a stock pot and cook the tomatoes over medium-high heat for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Puree the tomatoes with a hand immersion blender. Simmer the mixture over low heat until it’s reduced by half, or until you’ve gotten rid of enough water so the tomatoes are the consistency that you want. Now you can store the sauce in mason jars and can it (or freeze).
Solution two: make fire-roasted salsa
Photo by Aaron Morris
Roughly chop the tomatoes. Also chop some peppers: we use a mixture of both red and green jalapenos and serranos, but you’ll have to decide based on the spiciness you’re looking for. Add some garlic and onions, too! Place the produce in a pan and roast them on a low-heat grill for about one hour. Cool the veggies to the touch, peel the skins and remove the seeds. Blend the salsa in a blender with some water, lime juice, salt, pepper and cilantro.Now you can put your salsa in mason jars and can (or freeze) it.
Solution three: can the tomatoes
Photo by Angela Morris
This is a little more complicated, but it’s worth it because you’ll be able to use the tomatoes for any recipe. Immerse each tomato in boiling water for about one minute, and then transfer it to an ice-water bath. Cool the tomato to the touch and then peel off the skin. Chop the tomato and remove the seeds. Now your tomatoes are ready to can.
Canning is a complicated process and it should be the subject of its own post! In the meantime, check out this awesome website by the National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia.
Fruits of his labor
Aaron has harvested the first tomatoes of the season, and their flavors are incredible. In this basket are consueto genevese, st. pierre, martin, black crim, and Amish paste tomatoes.
Loving the Texas climate
Aaron and I brought in our Fall harvest a couple of weeks ago. Our eyes bugged out as we took in the tomatoes, peppers, green beans and butternut squash. The Texas climate can be annoying at times. Just this weekend, it got up to 80 on Saturday and then dropped to the 40s on Sunday. It’s difficult to dress for that type of weather. But thanks to the Texas climate, our season for tomatoes and peppers is much longer than in other places in the country. Recently, our first overnight freeze changed things and reminded us it’s actually beginning to creep into winter. Aaron took down the green bean and tomato plants…Now they live in the compost pile. We still have a lot of lettuces, greens, celery, carrots and some other stuff to look forward to.
Our next task is to learn how to pickle our peppers and can our tomatoes. We have way more than we can use before they go bad.
Trying not to patronize growing factory farms
TreeHugger published an article detailing a study by Food and Water Watch about the growth of factory farms in the U.S. The numbers of farms went down, but the size of the remaining farms has grown 20 percent when you consider the numbers of livestock. These types of farms tax the environment because of the large amounts of animal wastes. They’re also a danger to public health because of the risk of contamination.
Aaron and I have been growing vegetables in our backyard all year. Our harvest this summer and fall was impressive, although we still need to buy some produce from grocery stores. We still buy all our meat from the store, which certainly includes meat from factory farms. We’re not in a position to own livestock, so that’s not going to change in the near future. However, we did just buy six chickens to produce our own eggs! I guess you can only do the best you can.
Ants know sustainable agriculture — Now it’s our turn
Civil Eats interviewed Mark Moffett, author of Adventures Among Ants, who talks about how leafcutter ants in South America cultivate underground food crops of fungi in a sustainable way. Maybe people should study them and adopt some of their practices.
I suspect their investment in environmental safety is ten times what humans put out. Of course we humans are just figuring out how critical public health issues are. So this is a word to the wise from nature: given similar problems and conditions, the ants have evolved a much more serious ability to deal with environmental issues at their small scale than we have at ours.
Free online veggie garden planner
Mother Earth News has an awesome resource for people like Aaron and I who have grand schemes in mind for our vegetable garden. The magazine’s website has an online vegetable garden planner that will allow us to visualize our layout. The software tool is free for 30 days. Using the site, you can see what time to plant different vegetable varieties, plan a site layout for your garden, plan how to rotate your crops, and more.
Photo by di the huntress on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/22863752@N06/)
E.U. lifting restrictions on genetically modified foods
The New York Times reports today that the European Union will allow individual countries to decide whether to allow genetically modified foods.
On Tuesday the European Commission will formally propose giving back to national and local governments the freedom to decide whether to grow crops that many Europeans still call Frankenfoods.
The new policy is aimed at overcoming a stalemate that has severely curtailed the market for biotech seeds in Europe for years. Only two crops, produced by Monsanto and B.A.S.F., are sold for cultivation here.
Stevia, anyone?
Photo by bitzcelt on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitzcelt/)
I’ve always been a fan of Equal sweetener, which I use in my coffee, iced tea and fruit smoothies. My fiance Aaron hates it though, because he says it will cause cancer. I’d always heard Saccarhin has been linked to cancer, but I thought that Aspartame (the sweetener in Equal) was safe. However, Natural Home has an article today about food additives with a note on aspartame:
Aspartame, known as NutraSweet, Equal and Spoonful, accounts for 75 percent of adverse reactions to food additives reported to the FDA and has been linked to cancer in rats.
I have never had any adverse food reactions to Equal, which probably means I’m not allergic like the people who have reported problems to the Food and Drug Administration. Not too worried on that account. On the cancer danger — Toxicity is all about the dose a person consumes and the length of time she consumes that amount. I seriously doubt I’m consuming enough Equal to cause cancer.
However, I had a roommate in college who would put like 20 packets of equal in each cup of coffee. And she was a coffee adict, drinking the caffiene juice throughout the entire day and evening. If she keeps up that dose for 15 to 20 years, I bet she could be at risk for cancer from aspartame.
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