This is why the kids love me

8 ounces of ring pasta ("O" shaped) you can make these yourself. A basic flour pasta recipe. As for the shape, I am sure you can buy something to cut them out. My husband has made me a small little machine that will make the rings. Sorry still no camera.

1 can condensed tomato soup or 10 3/4 oz. 1 peck ripe tomatoes (12 1/2 lbs) 4 slices of white onion, 12 sprigs of parsley, 2 bay leaves, 1 tsp peppercorn, 1 tsp celery seed, 1 tsp cloves, 2 TB salt, 1 TB sugar. Wash and halve tomatoes. Place herbs in a piece of cheese cloth, tie and add to the pot of tomatoes, mix in the rest of the seasonings. Bring to a low simmer for 1 hour. Drain through a food mill, into another large pot. can what you won't use for this recipe. You can reduce this recipe without issue. To make the soup (mock) condensed, make a smooth paste of 1 T flour and a little water. Add 1 cup tomato soup slowly and mix well. Cook until thickened.

1 cup (8 ounce can) tomato sauce 1/4 cup olive oil, 6 tomatoes, chopped 3 sliced onions, 2 green bell peppers, sliced, 4 cloves garlic, minced, 3 tablespoons white wine. Place garlic, bell pepper and onions in cheese cloth, tie and add to a sauce pan with tomatoes, stir in all ingredients. Simmer at least 30 minutes, drain through a food mill to make smooth.

dash garlic powder

dash dried oregano

dash dried basil

Cook pasta until tender. Drain well, pat dry. In a saucepan, mix soup, sauce, and seasonings. Simmer gently, stirring often, so not to burn, until it comes to a boil. Remove from heat and add the drained pasta. toss, add more water if needed to the sauce. If canning see below

I do not have the original meatball recipe. But that's ok, I have better meatballs. Use your own recipe, make sure the are small.

Disclaimer time! The USDA says you should not can pasta. But if you are going to do it anyway, I'll tell you how to.

Pack them into the jar, loosely and then add your sauce. Processing takes the same amount of time as your meats do, 75 minutes for pints and 90 minutes for quarts at 10 pounds pressure, unless you live at an altitude more than 1,000 feet; consult your canning manual for directions for increasing your pressure.

Have a great Labor Day! We are off to go apple picking. See you tomorrow.

I'll show you mine, if you show me yours

Here is my finished one local Summer dish

Mushroom Ravioli in an Alfredo sauce

I must say, it look a lot better in real life than it does on the computer and the taste is to die for nummy!

To make it easier on El, who does the Midwest OLS here is the run down

Ingredients

Making the pasta part 1
Pasta part 2

and then

The filling


Now, where is your dinner?

If you want to be in the drawing for this bag

post me a pic of you dinner in the comments by 2 am central time. I will put your name in the hat for the drawing. any dinner get your name in once, pasta dinner twice, ravioli dinner three times, and my recipe {no cheating and giving me my own picture} four times.

Looks like you like . . . One local summer

Mark! Congrats Mark. But wait, you don't want the book. So then shall we give it to Catherine?



pardon me. I am eating.

Where where we? oh yes, boil your pasta 20-30 minutes


Over low heat, melt butter in a skillet. Stir in whipping cream and blend well. Add parmesan cheese and stir until sauce thickens. Do not boil. Thicken sauce with more cheese, or thin with more cream. The alfredo sauce should generally be very creamy.

As for the Mushroom filling

In a large saute pan heat 1/4 cup of the olive oil. When almost smoking, add the mushrooms and salt and pepper to taste. Cook until all the liquid has evaporated from the mushrooms, { 6 minutes}. Add spinach and cook for another 2 minutes. Remove from heat and place mixture into a food processor. Pulse until you get a coarse texture. Stir in cream cheese and Parmesan cheese. taste for seasoning and set aside.

Line upyour wrappers or pasta dough shapes. Brush with the egg and water mixture. Using a tablespoon, dollop the filling on each wrapper Place another wrapper directly on top, pressing around the filling and sealing the edges. Using a fork, flut the edges. Place ravioli onto a floured baking sheet and keep covered with a linen towel. Set aside.

ok, it is now getting hard to keep up with the posts.

and then

continue to roll and cut

Pasta part two

Using a knife slice a small part of the dough away from the ball. If you do not have a pasta machine you will need to use a rolling pin to flatten the dough as thin as possible. I can not find the handle to mine, so this will take awhile.

Make sure your surface is floored, as well as your pin. Cut shapes out with a knife or cookie cutter.

Time to prep dinner/ One Local Summer

I know, it is only 3 pm here. But this has to be done in stages. In case you have forgotten, the ingredient list can be found here.

First we need to make the pasta.

To prepare the mixture by hand, place the flour on a clean counter top or rolling board and make a well in the center.

Break the eggs into the well and using a fork, beat the eggs, gently drawing in flour from the sides. Continue dragging flour into the center well, stirring the ingredients together until the dough begins to form a mass.

Begin kneading the pasta, first sprinkling the surface with flour. Knead until the egg has become well incorporated.

If the pasta is too dry or crumbly, spray with a little lukewarm water. When the right texture has been reached, form a ball and leave to rest under an inverted bowl for 10-15 minutes. The heavy your flour is the more water you will need.

And They Said It Couldn't Be Done

Thunder is a pleasant sound to wake to, if you live in Kansas, in August, during a drought. This morning I hear the thunder, something that over the long dry days you forget what it sounds like. {Anyone else thinking, I ride through the desert on a horse with no name...} Looking out my window I see the telltale signs of hail. That is not a good sign. One problem is my garden, plants tend not to fair well when being pounded on with ice cubes. Another problem is that more often than not, hail here means a tornado. But wait! It's August, we are out of tornado season. I am hopeful that this menacing, looming doom is just a freak, and that we have not entered swing season prematurely.

Swing season? Yes, swing season. It's the time of year where mother nature can't make up her mind. She still enjoys the 90f degree {32c} temperatures one day, but the next her hot flash has turned into chills and you must suffer the 40f degree {4c} temperatures with her. This is when she is temperamental and we get tornadoes. Every year between winter and spring, summer and fall. Officially, Tornado season in Kansas is only in the spring, but we know and remember some nasty ones in November. I'd better bring Toto in the house.

I had a very busy weekend. As I told alrescate, canning season will be over soon, and we will get back to the more mundane things. With the new dehydrator at hand, I dried out some spinach and made Florentine. You'll be glad to hear that I waited for the noodles to dry, via food dehydrator {these things where invented for impatient people like myself}

I ignored the recipes I was given and went with what I thought a good Florentine recipe should be. It worked, and I am happy I didn't blow it.

But what would this blog be without me screwing up. I brought in one ear of Hickory Corn. I felt the overwhelming desire to make corn nuts. Please tell me, that some one that reads this has a decent corn nut recipe they are willing to share with me! I couldn't find a recipe in the homesteading books, so I went the route of the internet. There seems to be all of 2 recipes floating around out there. I copied them and followed the directions. The "corn nuts" tasted like burnt, hollow popcorn shells. Good choice.

I needed fruit, apparently lots of fruit. I wanted berries, but that was not in the cards this weekend. The family piled into the car and we headed over to the "local pick your own" farm. Only to discover that they were no longer a "pick your own". Bummer. People had been destroying the trees. So the fruits were already picked and the berries and been turned into jams and butters. But I wanted to do that myself. I bought some pumpkin butter, as I have never had it before, and some honey. A half peck of apricots, a half peck of pears and 4 plums. The plums were promptly eaten.

Home again home again, where my husband ran outside to play with his new weed eater. I gathered eggs and tomatoes. Once inside, I smelled watermelon wine coolers. Something I don't drink. Panicky, I remembered the watermelon that my two youngest boys had poked holes in and I had set aside to deal with later. I found it where I had stashed it, fermenting. The only thing it was good for now, was leather.

Nothing in the books about watermelon leather. But it did talk about how to thicken up the very thin pureed fruits. Watermelon would fall into that category. I cut, sliced, removed seeds and slowly boiled until thought it was a good thickness {but what do I know?} Poured it on the leather sheet and placed it into the dehydrator. While waiting I remembered to search online. {thus I did} No recipes on making it, but I did find a forum that was talking about it. "No, you can not make watermelon leather. You would have to have a lot of melon because of the little amounts of pulp it contains." or..."mix it with some applesauce, that might work".

HA! I give you pure watermelon leather!


After 6 hours, it was firmed up enough to pick at.{ that's not mice nibbles or little fingers, that would be me taking the small chunk}

Did I by chance say pure? Pure concentrated watermelon. I felt the need to don a purple velvet jump suit and solicit others "psst, you want some? It's pure stuff man, can you dig?"

This stuff hurts your teeth. It's not the pleasant "pink" taste that you get from watermelon candies. oh no!

I like watermelon, but this...this was just too much.




I rolled it up anyway, just so I can say I did it. It's a little sticky, but I had rubbed some oil on the sheet before pouring the puree on it, that helped.

Now what to do about the taste. I don't want to add sugar, as it is sweet enough, plus I read that leathers that have sugar in them will crumble in storage. Maybe applesauce?

I do have 4 quarts of the puree waiting for me, and as it only took 1 cup to make the one leather, I have enough to play with, for a while.

Homemade Noodles and Rooster soup

Lets Cook! Now this is the creepiest picture I have taken yet, and I decided it had to be shared.

Place one very relaxed rooster carcass into a pot and allow to simmer for two hours or more. The meat should fall right off the bone. {This is the second rooster that I dressed}

Once the rooster has cooled off enough to handle, peel off the skin and remove any bone you happen to find. Place in a smaller pot and add as much carrots, onions, Pok Choi {or celery, but as we couldn't find celery seed to grow, we grew the Chinese cabbage that is similar} potatoes, peas and whatever vegetable you wish to add to it. Add more chicken stock, garlic, salt and pepper. {If canning use canning salt over the table salt. Table salt contains anti- caking ingredients that will discolor your jars. White residue looking stuff at the bottom of the glass that is a joy to remove} Allow the mixture to slowly "stew" while you make noodles. Make noodles for the first time, realize that it will take longer than the soup, place soup in fridge, and worry about it the next day

How hard is it really to make homemade noodles? If you have the right gear, not hard at all. Of course this is my journal, and I must make things more complicated than necessary.

Make a well with 2 cups of flour, pour 2 goose eggs or four chicken eggs into the center, and add 1 tsp of salt. {Simple} Mix well. If sticky add flour, if too dry add a little oil. That's the recipe I had to follow. It wasn't too sticky, nor was it dry, it just didn't want to stay together using a spoon. I kneaded it a bit, that seemed to work. Yet because of my meddling, it became sticky and I had to add a lot of flour to be able to roll it out. Once you have rolled it out as flat as you are capable f doing without it shrinking back up on you, you need to allow it to dry before cutting. Destiny, my name is Impatience. Half a day later, I was caught slicing up the noodles, the dough still wasn't dry.
Slicing noodles shouldn't be such a chore. But if you do not have one of those there fancy modern noodle slicing thing-a-ma-bobbers, you will spend the next hour or two of your life painstakingly cutting flat dough into string. {I wonder how old school I am going to actually get around here} The dough was still wet. When I was finally finished, I had to allow it to dry some more. BAH HUMBUG! Destiny, my name is incredibly impatient. I have other things to do besides watching dough dry. I sucked it up and started canning preparations. And that when it happened {Please insert that dramatic music here}



This, Ladies and Gentlemen is what happens when a rooster gets his revenge. That would be a puncture wound. I was cleaning out the pot that I had first cooked the rooster in, as it is the only large one I have. Apparently I hadn't got all the small bones out of it, and I merrily began to scrub away, it embedded itself into my middle finger {Think the rooster is saying something there?} I made sailors a couple of States away blush. My loving husband could be heard over the cursing with a very caring "What!?!" as he sat in the other room, unaware of how close to death I was. I managed to do a wonderful tap dancing recital, as I sang in French. Then ran out and handed my husband the camera. "ALL MUST BE DOCUMENTED! My audience demands it." I never said I wasn't a dork. HA!

With death thwarted, I went back to my canning. The pot was cleaned out with no other incidents.

I packed the noodles into the bottom of the jars, poured the soup over them, and processed for 25 minutes in a pressure cooker. Have no idea what it tastes like, but it is canned and ready for the winter.