When Presented with a Landslide of Eggs...

...as my hens and ducks are wont to do, hot on the heels of 3-4 months of relative egglessness, you seek out egg-intensive recipes. These are some of the goodies that my girls and I are making this week -

* Coconut Macaroons (Note that these are the good old fashioned macaroons from your childhood, not the uber-trendy, rainbow colored macarons.) A single batch uses 4 egg whites (save those yolks!), which isn't even a day's worth of eggs. None the less, these are delish and easy enough for a 12 year old kidlet to take the lead in making them.

* Ina Garten's Lemon Bars These call for 6 extra large eggs. I'll use 4 of our biggest whole eggs and the 4 yolks left over from making the macaroons. Who doesn't love Ina's cooking? Never trust a skinny chef! ;)

* Martha Stewart's Chocolate Mousse This recipe is the closest one to the recipe I use from Mah-tha's Cookbook, where it is listed as Chocolate Mousse 2. It's my go-to egg intensive dessert, because it's so super easy (only 4 ingredients!), uses a ton of eggs, and tastes amazing. I always make a double batch of this because it is simply heaven in a bowl.

* Homemade Egg Noodles Be they in the form of plain old fettuccine, stinging nettle linguine, or traditional Ukrainian pita-ha (pirogis), homemade egg noodles are one of the ultimate comfort foods. While they don't use more than 2 or 3 eggs per batch, the recipe, when doubled or tripled, will keep you in tender, hearty pasta for a while. The noodles can be dried or frozen for later use, making a giant batch or two well worth the trouble.

* Breakfast for Dinner - Either a huge pan of scrambled eggs with a side of Aunt Alice's homegrown bacon, a towering stack of cinnamon-raisin french toast, or a deep dish veggie and cheese-filled frittata will use the better part of a dozen eggs, if not more, for feeding a stick-to-your-ribs meal to a family of four.

Our "Chuck" eggs - a joint effort between our chickens and ducks.

Use it or Lose it - Homegrown Pears

Walnuts and pears, you plant for your heirs.

Have you heard this expression before? Apparently, it is an old English adage that eludes to the decades-long wait you could expect between planting and harvesting fruits from a pear or walnut tree. Although advances in grafting techniques and selective breeding have nearly done away with this agonizing wait, in generations past, you might reasonably expect to wait up to 20 years for your first harvest, which made planting a slow-growing fruit tree an act of implicit optimism.

Whoever planted our pear and apple trees, however long ago, thank you. They've brought us, our critters and assorted visiting wildlife much delight and sustenance.

I don't know what we did right, in fact, I don't know if we had anything to do with it at all, but this year, our little orchard really outdid itself. For the first time since we've lived here, the pear tree had an honest-to-goodness crop, about 20 pounds of fruit.

Twenty pounds may not seem like all that much, and in farming terms, it really isn't. But, keep in mind that all twenty highly-perishable pounds come ripe at the same time, and you find yourself with a 5 day window, give or take, in which to use up your bounty or lose it to the compost heap.

I hemmed and hawed for a few days before starting in on my pears in earnest, and just last night, finally used the last of them up. Here's how I used them-

Pear Fruit Leather (I did not add any sugar, as it was totally unnecessary, and I used my little dehydrator instead of my oven. Otherwise, my process was the same.)

Pear Upside-Down Cake
(adapted from Nectarine Upside-Down Cake by Full Circle)
My modifications are noted by *

-10 tbsps unsalted butter, room temperature
-1/2 cup brown sugar
-4 cups pears, peeled and halved, with stem and blossom ends trimmed off, and cores removed*
-1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour**
-1 1/2 tsps baking powder
-1/2 tsp baking soda
-1/2 tsp sea salt
-3/4 cup granulated sugar
-2 eggs
-1 tsp vanilla extract***
-1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Place 4 tablespoons of butter in a cake pan or oven-proof casserole dish, and melt in oven. When melted, sprinkle brown sugar evenly over top. Arrange pears in one even layer in bottom of pan.

In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In a separate bowl, beat remaining 6 tablespoons butter until light and fluffy. Add sugar and beat until well combined.  Add eggs, one at a time, followed by extract. Begin adding flour mixture in small amounts, alternating with additions of the plain yogurt. Mix well between each addition. The result should be a very thick, pasty batter.

Pour over pears and level with a spatula. Bake until cake is dark golden brown, and passes the toothpick test, about 60 minutes. Let cool for 10 minutes, then run a knife gently around the sides before carefully inverting the pan onto a serving plate. Delicious while still warm or served cooled the next day. :)

*I use a melon baller for this
**I used half all-purpose flour and half cake flour, because I like the lightness and silkiness that cake flour brings.
***I used pure almond extract instead. Pears & Almonds=Peas & Carrots ;)

Pear Upside-Down Cake, fresh from the oven

Besides making leather and cake, we also ate some pears fresh and gave some away. I'd wanted to hold back a few to make Martha Stewart's Pear Frangipane Tart, but had neither almonds nor rum to hand, so it'll have to wait for another day, or another year, depending on whether or not I somehow come into some more pears before next Fall.

Use it or Lose it - Ham, Berries & One (formerly) Grumpy Rooster

We're doing our traditional end-of-Summer freezer clean out. Right about this time, when all of the garden goodies, berries, and -when we're lucky- fish and shellfish, are rolling in, I try to make room by using up the dregs of last year's bounty.

In addition to the Summer boom of veggies and fish, we're getting half a pig from husband's Aunt & Uncle. This is the second time we've bought their home raised pork and it is AMAZING. However, that means that I need to make even more room in the freezer. So, this is a no-holds-barred round of UioLi. Here we go!

What I need to use-

*5 pounds ham (from last year's pig)
*1 - 6 pound rooster
*Untold amounts of frozen berries - blueberries, blackberries, huckleberries, Oregon Grapes, Salal, etc.

Magically transformed into-

*Sliced ham for lunchmeat
*Ham bone broth
*Roast chicken - I learned the hard way that a cranky old rooster makes for incredibly tough meat, no matter how hard you try to cook him up right. :(
*Chicken Stock
*Blueberry and Marionberry Buttermilk Waffles
*Goat Cookies (uses berries)
*Fruit Leather

The ham has been baked and sliced, and the remaining odd bits - the bone, skin, fat, etc., have been set to simmer with celery, carrots, onions & fresh thyme. I also added a dash of homemade apple cider vinegar to help de-mineralize the bones, releasing the nutrients into the broth. I'm then freezing the broth in silicone freezer trays, then bagging up the broth blocks for use later in soups and sauces.

The leftover roasted rooster bits are also simmering with a shallot and some celery, and turning into a nice, rich broth. If I can scare up the ingredients, I might have to make some pho soup with this guy. :)

Use it or Lose it - Buttermilk & Sweet Potatoes

This week's featured "everything must go!" ingredients are-

*Jewel Yams (actually a variety of sweet potato), about 2 pounds
*Goat Buttermilk, 1 quart
*Sour Cherries, 4 pounds
*Goats milk, 2 1/2 gallons
*Rendered Leaf Lard (pork), 1 cup +/-

It almost goes without saying that this time of the year, we'll have more milk than we know what to do with. Things could be worse! :)

This is our second year of having this very fortunate predicament, so we're slowly but surely learning how to use goat milk in things that we'd otherwise have used store bought cows milk in (white sauces, custards, etc.), as well as using it to make some of our own dairy products (cheese, butter) to replace or at the very least, reduce the amount of cow's milk dairy that we buy & consume.

We've also started socking a little bit of milk away in the deep freeze, for those dark days when the gals are lactating no-more, and we have a hankering for something creamy.

So, we popped 1/2 gallon of milk into the freezer for later use in cooking and/or soap making. We also pitted and froze the sour cherries for use in my very favorite jam, Summer Solstice preserves.

1 and 1/5th items down!

The buttermilk was homemade, using a quart (1/4 gallon) of whole goat's milk, warmed to 86 degrees, then inoculated with buttermilk culture and left to ripen overnight. What a delicious difference that little culture makes!

I used up the 3/4 of the buttermilk making a triple batch of buttermilk waffles that I also squirreled away in the freezer for a rainy day.

The rest of the buttermilk was used, along with 1 1/2 cups of the pureed yams, and 1/2 cup of the lard (in place of half of the butter), in a double batch of Martha Stewart's Sweet-Potato Biscuits. Heaven. on. earth.

As you can see, I used a small-mouthed mason jar ring in lieu of a proper biscuit cutter. It worked just fine, and that makes one less thing I have to hunt for in my kitchen. ;)

So, having frozen the milk & cherries, baked the biscuits and made the waffles, I'm left with 1 3/4 gallons of milk, 1/2 cups of lard and 1 cup of sweet potato puree. I put the puree into a silicone freezer tray and chucked it into the freezer to set-up. I'll pop out my yam cubes and bag them up, to eventually be used in soup.

As for the milk, I'm going to try and bribe/sweet talk Billy into making a double batch of 30-minute mozzarella to be used on Friday Pizza Night. I'll hang on to the lard, since I'm not exactly under the gun to use it, like I am the more perishable goods on my use or lose hit list.

Whew! That was a lot of baking and dish-dirtying for one day. I'm wiped! Now, excuse me while I go snarf down my third butter and jam smothered Sweet Potato biscuit. Being the chef has its perks. :)

My Fridge Runneth Over

How can it be that we've only been milking our girl, Sidney, for about a month now? I have a serious case of milk fatigue! Our fridge is so full of half-gallon jars of goats milk and cartons of eggs that there is practically no room for anything else.

The batch of feta that I made last week came out too soft, so I'm challenging myself to a Chopped-style cook-off. I have eggs, goat milk & smooshy feta galore, plus a few items in the produce drawer which have entered the "use or lose" zone.

My available ingredients include-
*Feta, 2 lbs
*Eggs, 4 dozen
*Whole, Raw goat milk, 3 gallons
*Golden beets with greens attached, 1 bunch
*Dill fronds, 1 bunch
*Raspberries, 1 pint
*Cherries, 3/4 lb

I have (tentatively) on deck-

 *"Spanakopita" deviled eggs (Feta, dill & beet greens) Uses maybe 4 ounces of the feta, 15 eggs, all of the beet greens, and maybe 1/4 of the dill.

 *Goat's milk Chocolate pudding Uses 3 cups of goat milk and 3 eggs.

 *Roasted beet & feta salad with raspberry balsamic vinaigrette Uses all of the beetroot, all of the raspberries, and another 4 ounces or so of feta.

So that leaves us with cherries, dill, a pound and a half of not-well-formed feta, and a crapload of eggs & milk. Cherry ice cream? Feta & dill omelettes? Aidez-moi!

In addition to all of these dishes, I see another super cheese-a-thon in my near future. Maybe a harder cheese, that I can set to press/dry/age and forget about for a little while, rather than being under the gun to use before it goes sideways? I'm also thinking of starting a (weekly) challenge for myself and anyone else who might be interested called "Use it of Lose it", about creative ways to use/preserve/share the bounty from our gardens, critters, foraging, or even a really good sale at the market. Who's in? :)