In the kitchen, July 2022

As a home cook, I spend a lot of my time in the kitchen everyday, and lately, I've been finding so much joy in trying lots of new things in the kitchen with items from our garden, ingredients purchased locally, or new recipes made with my sourdough starter.

From our garden:

I've mentioned in my previous post about our garden so far this year, but I want to be especially intentional about using, sharing, or preserving anything we harvest from our small garden. We have many things that will be ready soon (including a jungle of tomato plants), but so far, we've picked just a few items:

• basil: I made a small batch of pesto, using walnuts and nutritional yeast (no cheese) to try a dairy-free version
• collard greens: sautéed in avocado oil, with salt
• zucchini: grilled, but since we anticipate many more to come, I also have plans to make zucchini bread and shred and freeze some

Food found locally:

This summer, I've had a little more headspace and motivation to source food locally, namely, raw dairy and pasture-raised meats. There's a farm store not far from us that sells the dairy products and lately, I've been shopping there every other week. Another local farm store sells grass-fed and -finished beef and locally milled einkorn flour, and a farm with a booth at our farmer's market sells pastured pork. Typically, our Meijer store also has some good offerings for high quality beef and chicken, albeit not necessarily local, but still high quality.

• raw milk: using it in my coffee, for homemade ice cream, in recipes like biscuits and gravy, and sometimes, I'll drink a glass of it
• raw cheese: on sandwiches, with eggs, for snacking, or on sourdough pizza (see below)
• einkorn flour: for the gravy in this biscuits and gravy recipe (I typically make it with sourdough english muffins)
• wild black raspberries: found on a walk. We ate most of them same-day, and I froze the rest.
• strawberries and rhubarb: the former from the local farm store, the latter from a friend's yard! We made strawberry rhubarb jam this week (see first photo in this post)

Favorite sourdough recipes, lately:

I have been having a lot of fun trying out new-to-me sourdough recipes, and I've gotten into a good rhythm with my starter so I never have excess discard or feel overwhelmed by the feeding of my starter. When I don't plan on using it for a few days, I just feed it, then pop it in the fridge within four hours. Some tried-and-true and recent favorite recipes:

• sourdough bread: my favorite recipe is from Abigail Dodd's book, but its a long-fermented, stretch-and-fold method
• sourdough pizza: this is so easy and so delicious. The best homemade pizza I've ever made.
• sourdough cinnamon rolls: a classic in our home, as of late. I usually sub in cardamom for half of the cinnamon and skip the icing, per our preference.
• sourdough English muffins
• sourdough waffles

Apart from those things, I'm enjoying a frequent afternoon cup of coffee (sometimes with knitting, while Finn babbles and kicks, and Coop plays), and occasional fika with Cooper.

Since we're committed to eating high quality food whenever we can, and making the vast majority of our meals at home, I'm finding a lot of joy and interest in knowing where (more of) our food comes, and in meeting the people who make high quality, local food possible for us.