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Buy PA Local

Meet Veggie Girl - she was created to grace the pages of the Calico Cutters Quilt Guild cookbook - titled "Quilters in the Kitchen". Veggie Girl Says "Buy PA Local" - in February - with over a foot of snow still left on the ground??? That's right - once a month in the winter my local grower's market - the West Chester Growers' Market - holds it's winter market - and yes - there is some wonderful produce available in February in Pennsylvania, as well as local cheeses, baked goods and soaps.

Here's my market basket loaded up with my purchases from the day. I stocked up on my favorite lotion from Ellen April, lavender scented, promising spring is on it's way. And, yes, all of this produce was grown in Pennsylvania in February. One of my favorite stands at the market is Windy Acres, owned and operated by a comical young Amish man, Abe Stoltzfus. Abe grows all of his winter produce in hothouses. Today we purchased baby bok choy, kale, collards, carrots, beets, beautiful lettuces and organic eggs. I am a veg-a-holic, openly admit it.

Dinner was easy tonight - I sauteed 2 links of chorizo (purchased last week at the Lancaster Farmers' Market) with an onion and garlic clove. Once the onion was translucent I added about 4 cups of mixed cooking greens (kale and bok choy), a chopped up roasted red pepper "fresh from the jar", and a quarter of a preserved lemon - preserved lemon can kick up the flavor of almost anything - click here for a great recipe to make preserved lemons at home. I allowed the greens to cook down, then added 2 cups of cooked pasta and finished the dish off with a grating of Parmesan cheese.

I made a simple chopped salad of English cucumber, cherry tomatoes and crisp celery dressed with a touch of honey vinegar vinaigrette - crunchy and healthy. Honey vinegar has a very special flavor - I purchase it at Carlino's in West Chester or Ardmore. I love chopped salads - I'll pull anything out of the produce drawer, chop it up and toss it with some homemade dressing.

I called these meals "pantry meals" - basically because I am using up the basic ingredients I keep on hand in my pantry and fridge - and they are some of the best meals I make. No recipes - this is where I wing it, play with the ingredients. I am so lucky - I've got a great pantry - and I love to keep it stocked. Every well stocked pantry has it's own quilt art - I display the three quilts I made for the guild's cookbook - check out my website if you want to see them close up.

I have to give a shout out to my big guy Ryan, my nephew - he celebrated his big number 2 birthday today and we got to party on down with him - Happy Birthday Ryan!!!

Lasagna for Empty Nesters

Since my husband and I have become empty nesters I have found it difficult to adjust my cooking habits. The standard comment is "how many neighbors are coming over for dinner" - I just can't seem to be able to cook for only the two of us. And, while I love leftovers, once, I need to try to get a handle on the volume of food I produce. I found an intriguing recipe for Individual Lasagna with Asparagus and Prosciutto at the Williams Sonoma website - http://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/individual-lasagnas-with-asparagus-and-prosciutto.html - this should be perfect - built in portion control!

A quick funny little story about prosciutto - spell checker used to correct "prosciutto" to "prostitute" - honestly. I've served many menus with "melon wrapped prostitute" and "prostitute stuffed figs" - makes a dinner party interesting - serves as a fantastic ice breaker!

I changed up the recipe a bit to lighten up the calories and to use ingredients I had on hand. For the cheese filling I used a part-skim ricotta, and substituted a low-fat Greek yogurt for the mascarpone cheese. And while the recipe called for mozzarella cheese - I instead used up some Gruyere and a local blue cheese. I think my version, with the blue / Gruyere, is more interesting than the mozzarella.
I only had dry lasagna noodles on hand, the "no cooking required" sheets - I cooked them - it's kind of difficult to fold a dry noodle. This is the layering process as described in the recipe.

Here is the completed package - single serving - a hearty portion - it is winter - - - we need to keep up our fat stores in the event we lose heat - right?
All ready for the oven - cover with foil and follow the baking instructions.
Yum - out of the oven and ready to serve. Yes, I know it's just the 2 of us, and I made 3 servings - as I said - I like leftovers - once.
To accompany our lasagna I made a wilted salad of arugula, carrots and cherry tomatoes. First I saute sliced carrots in a teaspoon of olive oil over medium flame - just before they start to brown I add 2 tablespoons of water and allow the water to cook off over low heat - this is a great way to stretch the olive oil glaze without adding unnecessary calories. Throw in the tomatoes to slightly char, and then toss in the arugula to wilt, and add a dash of balsamic vinegar. I added shredded basil after cooking for flavor. This is such a simple preparation with a big return on flavor, and minimal on calories.
Mmmmmmm - yummy dinner! The asparagus stayed nicely crisp, the pasta cooked perfectly and the "prostitute" added a lovely saltiness to the lasagna!

Ruffled Feathers

We spend so much time on our quilt tops and then all too often write off the quilting phase - throw some stippling on it, or hand it off to a long-arm quilter - I do it all the time. But I've decided I want to be more involved in the quilting process. One of the most impressionable quilting books I've ever owned is "Quilting Makes the Quilt" by Lee Cleland - long out of print. The purpose of the book was to show you just how different a quilt can look based on the quilting. The book features multiple identical quilts - Lee made the same top 5 times - and then quilted each one with a different design - it is amazing to see how dramatically the quilting can alter the appearance of the quilt. If you ever run across a used copy of the book I suggest you add it to your collection.

This is one of my quilts that I am currently working on - a friend of mine, Christine, named it Snowballs in Spring because of the snowball border. I think I'll stick with the name, but I certainly hope it's not the forecast for our spring - enuf with the white stuff! I'm at the quilting stage, and I really wanted to do some interesting quilting to highlight the overall piecing design. I've taken many machine quilting classes, most recently with Philippa Naylor - an amazing quilt artist from England. Her machine quilting is simply extraordinary - every stitch controlled and calculated. This would be my feather quilt - I will conquer my fear of feathers - no more aimless wandering and meandering - this quilting would have purpose, add an extra dimension of interest.
Round One: OMG - how pathetic! Quilt Police, I surrender - tar and feather me - all of these years of quilting, of classes, multiple books and tutorials and this is the best I can do??? WAIT - can you believe I actually kept quilting these feathers in some vain belief that the more I quilted the better they might look - that all the stitches would fall into place when I finished and they would look "right"? What was I thinking? I pity the poor bird that gets stuck with my feathers - it has no hope of ever taking flight. Back to the drawing board and the seam ripper - all traces of my first attempts must be removed. Pull out the books, stack up the practice sandwiches - I will not ruin this quilt with shoddy quilting. And, I will not relinquish this quilt to yet another stippling experience. Don't get me wrong - stippling and fill has it's place, and I'm very good at both, but I want to master ("master" might be a strong descriptive here - I'm not completely at the edge) more technical quilting techniques.


Deep breath - I can do this. When I first started machine quilting years ago all of the instructors encouraged you to move fast - keep the quilt moving. Well that may be fine for meandering, but when you want to incorporate some meaningful quilting motifs, you need to slow the speed down, significantly. Move slowly, and reposition your hands often. I always sew with my needle in a down position - that way when I stop sewing my needle is in the quilt holding it steady. I've learned that when I resume sewing it is best to lift the needle before taking the next stitch to be certain your quilt hasn't shifted. While these feathers are not perfect, they are dramatically improved. I'm finding the larger the feather, the easier it is for me to get the best results.
You're going to see a lot more of this quilt as I progress with the quilting phase. I have no aspirations to become an incredible machine quilter, I just want to move it up a notch or two. I think it will be a good learning experience for me.

Ready for Fastnacht Day

Bring on Shrove Tuesday, or Fat Tuesday as it is known in New Orleans - the day before the start of Lent. It is Pennsylvania German tradition to make and eat fastnachts on Shrove Tuesday. What is a fastnacht - it is basically a potato based, yeast raised donut - but without a hole. It's commonplace for churches and bakeries in Pennsylvania German communities to make fastnachts to mark the beginning of Lent. Every few years I get the urge to make fastnachts and I thought you might enjoy the process. Here is my dough after it's finished proofing.

Once the dough proofs, it is rolled out,
and then cut into 3 inch squares, making a slit down the middle. They are now ready for the final proofing before frying.

Here are my fastnachts frying in LARD, yes lard! O.K. - I know it's all wrong, but this is a once a year tradition, sheer decadence.
And here is my gem of lard fried dough-y goodness - notice - no hole! Fastnachts can be coated with sugar (either powdered, granulated or cinnamon sugar) or eaten plain. I'm a purist - I prefer my fastnacht plain, split open and drizzled with syrup, Turkey Syrup, a malt flavored syrup.

And so begins the diet!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Wishing everyone a very Happy Valentine's Day - please help yourself to a delicious, calorie free chocolate from my favorite candy shop - Reppert's of Oley, PA (www.reppertscandy.com). If you have any reason to be in the Oley Valley area it is worth planning a visit - check their website first - they do close for a few months out of the year. Their Easter candies are stunning!I apologize for my absence - it was my birthday last week and, well, life got busy. I had a surprise weekend visit from my daughters - Meredith attends Boston University and Olivia is at Parsons School of Design in NYC - I wasn't expecting to see them again until the snow melted - it is going to melt, right?

We had a wonderful weekend. Saturday we took a drive out to Lancaster County. Our first stop was Central Market in downtown Lancaster - this is the oldest farmer's market in the country and will get a post all it's own very soon. We lunched at the Lancaster Brewing Company (www.lancasterbrewing.com) - a great local brewery and restaurant located on Plum and Walnut Streets in downtown Lancaster - keep it in mind while you are visiting Lancaster for the quilt show in March - what - quilters love beer! We had delicious beer and very respectable bar food.

We tried to take country roads home from Lancaster - it was challenging as the snow drifts were massive in places - towering over the car. At one point we were traveling on Stratsburg Road when the road simply ended - the wind had drifted a wall of snow across the road at least 5 feet high - thank heavens for the GPS! The scenery on that ride home was breathtaking - the angles and ripples of the drifting snow, the icicles lacing down from every rooftop and more, the beauty of the landscape blanketed in snow. I know there are many places on this earth that see far more snow, but to see this amount of snow, here in our home, is a rare opportunity. If you have the time, take a ride out to Lancaster and enjoy the scenery.
These past few days have been all about food - some very good food - definitely too much food. Friday evening we went to one of my very favorite restaurants - Restaurant Alba in Malvern (www.restaurantalba.com).Dinner was amazing - for appetizers I had the pig trotters and my husband had the grilled octopus; for dinner it was goat for my husband the the delicately sweet Birchrun Hills veal special. Sean and Kelly Weinberg are wonderful hosts - the service and the food are always excellent.

I really wanted to keep dinner light for our Valentine's Day. I cooked up a flavorful broth using clam juice as the base and infused it with red chili, lemongrass, ginger, basil and garlic. I allowed the broth to simmer for 30 minutes to develop flavor, then strained it and seasoned it with fish sauce, soy sauce and rice vinegar. I added sweet potato, bok choy, asparagus, and cooked udon noodles to the broth, then topped the vegetable rich, noodlie-broth with a serving of grouper that I had bathed with Korean barbeque sauce and roasted till just flakey. I topped the dish with slivered red chili and a chiffonade of basil. It was delicious - light and healthy. O.K. - here is a peek at a quilt I was working on last week - it is a breath of spring. Most of the fabric in this quilt is from one of Amy Butler's first lines. As I said - this is just a peek - I don't want to spoil the surprise. I have it all sandwiched and ready to quilt which I hope to start and, maybe, finish tomorrow.

Cabin Fever Epidemic

If you live in the mid-Atlantic. you simply cannot believe your eyes when you look outside - SNOW EVERYWHERE! We had about two feet of snow this past weekend, and today, in the blizzard of 2010, we had another two feet or more. I was outside helping my husband shovel today when I met this lovely snow lady all bundled up in a quilt. I expect she is enjoying this weather.

I did make forward progress on Olivia's quilt today - I have now finished quilting all of the geometric shapes. This is a big quilt, queen size, and I think I need to surrender it to a long arm quilter to complete the background. You can get a taste for the design in this photo - the inspiration for the design was a mobile the shapes have a very 3-dimensional appearance.

Dinner - I like nothing better than spending time in the kitchen when trapped by a winter storm. Thing is, after the snow melts I am going to need some serious time working off all of the extra calories I've eaten. I actually think I am going to focus on healthy eating next week - a recipe a day for a low calorie meal - I hope to have the menu together soon, complete with a shopping list. For tonight, I'll let you guess what I'm cooking up --- if you guessed Linguine with clam sauce --- you're right.

Not just any linguine, home-made linguine. I use the recipe from Marc Vetri's cookbook, il Viaggio, it is the best pasta recipe I have ever used - calls for 9 egg yolks! The recipes in the book are based on the menu from his restaurant Vetri (http://www.vetriristorante.com/) in Philadelphia. I had the pleasure of having dinner at Vetri - an unforgettable experience! I've tried many recipes in Marc's cookbook, every one has been exceptional!


Making pasta is so easy. One hint - always weigh your ingredients to achieve the best results. I use my Kitchen-Aid mixer to combine the ingredients and then knead the dough by hand. I have an Impreza pasta roller / cutter which makes quick work of handling the dough - no motor for me - I need some physical exercise - cranking the pasta cutter is the least I can do!

I dry the pasta on one of our wine racks - works better than the pasta rack I have. When I double the recipe I use my laundry drying rack to dry the pasta.

This was the finished dish - linguine with a simple pantry clam sauce. I added mustard greens to the sauce - I love the flavor of mustard greens in soups and sauces - it is the most flavorful of the "greens".

I also sauteed some fresh baby artichokes with shallots, garlic and grape tomatoes for a quick side dish. You can see below how I process the artichokes - simply remove the tough outer leaves, trim the tip, slice in half length-wise and scoop out the choke. After processing be certain to place artichokes in acidulated water (water with lemon juice added) to prevent browning.


Enjoy the blizzard!