I Made A Pie!

Our family did Thanksgiving last week, like most American families.  And since we're mostly grown-ups now, we all contribute.  My sisters both made food: Erin made lemon glazed sweet potatoes (the dish I made for Friendsgiving), and Claire made a pumpkin cheesecake.  I made an apple pie.
I actually made 2 pies.  My mom insisted I make a "practice pie" the week before, and bring it over so that I could be given corrections.  So I made a pie on Sunday, and then another on Wednesday night.  And you know what?  It was totally worth it.  Because Final Draft Pie was way better.  So much better that 3 days later, as I was leaving, my dad stopped me to tell me how good my pie was.

The recipe was really simple.  I bought pie crust dough (and apples) from Harvest Local, rolled it out very thin, and saved the scraps to make the little lattice on top.  The filling was:

3 lbs Granny Smith apples
2/3 cup sugar (plus a little more, just a little, for taste)
1/3 cup flour
2 tbs. cinnamon

Toss the peeled, cored, and sliced apples with the sugar, flour, and cinnamon.  Fill your crust (it will be very full!), lattice the top, bake at 350 for 1 hour.  (It baked for probably half an hour more at 325 on Thanksgiving, to warm it up/finish baking through.  The top apples were very crisp, which was delicious, but not necessary.  Less time warming would have been fine.)

I'm going to do it again, maybe for Christmas, and I think I'll try and make my own dough, too.  Maybe.

Daisy liked the turkey.  I like Daisy.

Overnight Tomatoes

This recipe is taken from Kinfolk Magazine, volume 1.  It took me a long time to get around to making it, and I regret the time I spent in my life not having eaten Overnight Tomatoes.  I love making something, and then eating it, and thinking, "Wow, I'm a genius."  Even though afterward I need to remind myself that all I did was follow instructions, and there is therefore no genius involved.  But you should know that this recipe is so delicious, you too will momentarily convince yourself that you should have a cooking show.
I further prove my genius by having altered this.  I altered it in that I did not use thyme.  Because I didn't have any.  Becky, my friend who truly is a kitchen prodigy, merely heard this recipe, didn't even read it, and went home and cooked it, and then legitimately altered it by mixing some balsamic with the olive oil in the pan before cooking the tomatoes, which she says was an excellent addition, and carmelized in just the right way.  This will obviously be the recipe I try next time, and afterwards I will again refer to myself as a master chef in my head.

Ingredients:

200 grams (about 7 oz) mixed small tomatoes 

cherry, grape, pear

4-5 small unpeeled garlic cloves

2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

1/4 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper

4 sprigs fresh thyme

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 425 deg F.  Slice tomatoes in half, place in ovenproof dish (or on baking sheet).  Add garlic cloves, then toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Arrange tomatoes face up in the pan.  Pick leaves off half the thyme and sprinkle over the tomatoes, break the remaining sprigs into shorter lengths and add to the pan.

Place in preheated oven, cook for 10 minutes, then turn the oven off.  Leave the tomatoes in the oven to slowly roast, until they reach the desired texture.  (8 hours is recommended.) 

*Resist the temptation to open the oven and smell your tomatoes.  This is really hard to do.*

Bring to room temperature before serving or using in other recipes.

Kinfolk reminds you that depending on the size and variety of tomatoes, cooking times and temperature adjustments may be necessary.  Play with it, make it yours.

 I used my tomatoes to make a really yummy sandwich (like Cosi's TBM.  I'm not really an original thinker in the kitchen). Even the garlic cloves go right in the sandwich, they are so good.  Kinfolk has a recipe for their own sandwich you can put them in.  Becky mixed hers with some provolone and spinach.  You can obviously use these in all kinds of meals.  Possibly all your meals, from now on.

All of these ingredients were acquired from Harvest Local Foods, my favorite source, except the basil, which is from the Pathmark.  Sorry.

Currently

Loving:  My sister finished her DIY calendar today.  It's super-cool.  She made it out of mounted paint color samples and glass.  She can write on it with dry erase markers, so next month it will be just as pretty and November-ready!  If I can convince her, there will be a little feature on this blog showcasing all the things she makes.  (There are a lot!  Wait until you see what she's doing with her bureau!!)

Reading: I read 2 Vogues, and 1 issue each of  Smithsonian, Philadelphia, and House Beautiful Magazines this weekend.  Also bought 4 books this weekend at the Haverford Public Library during Haverford Township Day.  You could get all the books that fit in a bag for $6.  My sister and I filled that bag, me with random stuff (Virginia Woolf, a photojournalism coffee table book, a Second City video from probably 1983), and Erin with ballet, ballet, and more ballet.  

Watching: I just finished season 4 of Dexter today, you know the season when Rita dies?  If you didn't know that happened... oops?  ALSO, I'm pretty obsessed with Call the Midwife, the new series on Masterpiece Theatre, via BBC One.  It's the true story of a young woman who was a bicycling midwife in London's East End in the 1950s.  If it's got pretty hairstyles and babies, I'm totally in.  I thoroughly enjoyed this week, and I can't wait for episode 3 next week!

Listening to: The Velvet Underground and Nico (separately and together) are all I've been listening to this week.  "Shiny, shiny..."

Thinking about: Greed, America, and politics.  This upcoming election has been getting me a little worked up about a lot of things.  I try not to get too political, mostly because I've known people who think about nothing else.  Politics can be very divisive, and that's the thing I dislike the most - the fact that people seem to not work together anymore, or even work against each other.  And then I start thinking, "Well, maybe this is how it was years and years ago, but we just didn't see it, or recognise it, or know it was happening, because we didn't have this magic instant-news/opinion machine called the internet?"  But whether it was happening years ago, or is a new(er) phenomenon, shouldn't it be better?  Why can't we all get along?  Why is everything motivated by money, and not what's right?  Capitalism and moralism can't be mutually exclusive, right?

Looking forward to: The enchilada stuffed peppers that are in my oven RIGHT NOW.  I can't wait to eat them.  They were ordered from my favorite, Harvest Local Foods, and have been in the freezer since they arrived.  I'm also looking forward to my food order this week, since I didn't order anything last week.  (Still getting used to having fresh food in the house - it goes bad so fast, and I eat it so slow!  I need to learn to order less in order to not waste.)

Making me happy: Snugglepuss here next to me.  She hasn't left my side all day, we played tag this morning, and then we snuggled down for TV and blogging.  Yes, "she" is the cat.

Inspired by Dani at Sometimes Sweet.  :)t

Harvest Local Foods

So I joined this food co-op, based in Lansdowne, called Harvest Local Foods (HLF).  My friends Hilary and Gabe use it, and recommended it, and I was so excited to look it up after they told me about it.  Here's how it works:
1. You sign up.
2. You get an email Saturday night that tells you it's time to order.
3. You sign in, you go through the long list of super awesome foods, and you pick what you want.  You do this all before 8am on Wednesday.
4. You wait.
5. You go and pick up your cooler full of everything you want OR if you live locally, they will deliver it to your door.
6. If you have it delivered, you wait ALL day while you're at work, just KNOWING that there is a cooler full of beautiful food WAITING on your doorstep for you so you can't even take it and then you rush home because you're so excited and then you open your cooler and you look at everything and you oooh and aaah and put everything away until the day when you eat it and then you are SO happy that you can't wait until next Saturday to order more.

Here's why HLF is really great:
1. Almost all of the food is local.  Everything is labelled, so you know exactly how local it is: "We label each item as “L”, for local (within about a four hour drive), “R” for regional (east of the Mississippi River), or “D” for domestic (US) so that our customers can make informed choices.  We make every effort not to sell produce from outside North America with the exception of fair-trade bananas (from South America). Our dairy, meats and pantry items, excluding domestic olive oil and fair-trade vanilla, are local year-round."
2. Because it's local, it's fresh.  The portobello came in a paper bag with the dirt still on them.  Some people might be turned off by this, but for ME, that was pure truth in food.  It was keeping those mushrooms in the dark, which they like, and I could tell they seriously were just in the ground.  Like, recently.
3. They deliver.  This means I am saving myself time driving to Lansdowne to pick up my food.  It also means that I'm not buying something less local and less fresh at the supermarket simply because it's convenient, which is, in the end, greener AND healthier.  It also means I get to open that special cooler at the end of the week, which is like getting a present.  ONCE A WEEK.  
4. It's better than a CSA, at least for me, for a lot of reasons.  One, I get to pick WHAT I want and HOW MUCH I want.  This means I'm not ending up with a whole lot of something that I won't eat. I am only one girl, and a whole lot of anything isn't going to do any good.  It will get wasted, which will break my heart.  And if I don't like it, well, then it will all get wasted, and that's even more heartbreaking.  Also, it's important to note that while I do live towards the slightly-more-rural end of Delaware County, I'm not in farm country.  HLF also caters directly to the city of Phila, which means that those people who are definitely farther away from the farms have access.  Yes, there are gardens in the city.  (I met a dude at Terrain who was a beekeeper in the city, which was such an awesome thing.)  But I think we need to support companies that promote this kind of eating and buying in the immediate burbs.

So here are some pictures of what I got last week, which was a lot, because I was really excited.  This week I got less food, simply because some of last week's is still here and waiting to be eaten.  I forgot for a minute that I'm only one girl, and really don't need THAT much food.  So I am still working on it, but I am determined to eat it all.  Please also note that the group picture of the food is awful, but I can't go back and retake it, because, well, I ate most of it:

green beans

apple ginger almond granola (from regency cafe, lansdowne) with honey vanilla goat's milk yogurt

these beans have my name on them

oveview (l to r): fresh mozzarella, pickles, avocado, raisin nut bread, granola, garden dill cheese, golden delicious, yogurt, cherry tomatoes

portobello