I think it’s safe to say we’ve already been doing a little too much car travel this summer.

Yesterday Robby woke up from his nap in his bed and, while still half-asleep, exasperatingly asked, “Mooooooom, are we THERE YET?!”

I guess a Not So Manic Monday is in order; we’ haven’t had onE in a long, long while.

We’ve had a lot of strawberries in our house over the course of the past 3 weeks.

And one favorite recipe from many (other than just eating or slicing them over vanilla ice cream…mmmmmm…) was this one for Whole Wheat Strawberry Pancakes. Indeed, I’ve made them twice. And I wish I had recorded it when everyone at the table had their first bite because I think Sam might have actually screamed. Like, loudly. And then everyone told me how much they loved me. And how I am “The Best.” So of course I made them twice.

This is Sam giving me the flashing double thumbs up, the highest possible food rating in our house.

I often make pancakes that have some combination of whole wheat and all purpose flour, but I love that this recipe calls for 100% whole wheat. Something about having the fresh strawberries in there changes it up enough that they don’t feel too dense or heavy. They’re quite yummy and I feel like on the whole, they make for a pretty healthy breakfast too. Well, except maybe if you put as much syrup on them as my husband does.

On the local front, we picked all those berries ourselves from an organic farm nearby, Willow Creek Orchards. The whole wheat flour was from Daisy Mill and purchased through our buying club, as were the milk, butter, egg, and maple syrup. I used a full cup of regular milk instead of buttermilk, and used ground flax instead of wheat bran.

Once those main ingredients are accounted for, I’m basically left to the same non-local list I had when I made the rhubarb muffins. It’s some of the baking basics: salt, baking powder, baking soda, and I used cinnamon in place of the allspice. I’m hoping that as I run out of these items I’ll be able to replace them with at least slightly more local alternatives, but really I have no clue as to how one finds local baking powder, you know? It seems wasteful to replace them before I’m through each bottle though, so I guess I have some time to figure that out. And I vaguely remember them having this problem in the book “Plenty,” so at least I’m not the only one who has trouble here.

Anyone else been using local berries lately? If so, join on in and share a link. Please read a little more about what to include in your post for From Dirt To Dinner here.

And coming up on July 2nd we’ve got BEETS!

Strawberry season is passing by quite quickly in my area (has it passed? It may even be over already . . .), but luckily we managed to do some serious damage on the strawberry front. We’ve consumed and/or put up over ten pounds in the past two weeks - about 6 pints went into the freezer in a simple syrup, two more pints became strawberry freezer jam, and I also did one pint of this really easy fresh jam.

On Friday I’ll talk a bit more about how we enjoyed the rest of them for the From Dirt To Dinner Carnival. We’re featuring BERRIES this week, any berries that happen to be in season in your area. In general, berries seem to have such short seasons, maybe because everyone gobbles them up so quickly. But if you have happened upon any local berries lately, I hope you’ll stop by and share what you did with them.

Also, I wanted to point out that the main info page for From Dirt To Dinner, the page that the button links to and the page that I am linking to every time I write, “From Dirt To Dinner,” has a schedule down at the bottom that will tell you what is coming up. We’ve planned it out through the end of August so that people who want to participate can see ahead of time what they should be searching out in their markets - hopefully we’ve done a good job and have estimated appropriately when each ingredient will be in season for most areas.

See?

BERRIES - STRAWBERRIES/GOOSEBERRIES/RASPBERRIES/BLUEBERRIES - June 18th

BEETS - July 2nd

CABBAGE - July 16th

SUMMER SQUASH/ZUCCHINI - July 30th

TOMATOES - August 13th

CORN - August 27th

Much to my horror, Robby did not nap today and then made it through the day relatively unscathed. Normally a lack of nap would have resulted in major meltdowns sometime around dinner or possibly before. But no, he was going all afternoon and into the evening. He didn’t even go to bed much earlier than usual. Any parent of a child who has stopped napping surely knows the hideous fate that awaits.

What on earth am I going to do this summer with one, and very possibly TWO boys who don’t nap during the hot, searing afternoon?! We’re going to be home, together, and awake, apparently, All. Summer. Long.

Mommy needs a nap.

We’re getting ready for some serious strawberry picking this week, and I don’t know who’s more excited - the boys or me? To put it all in proper context we’ve been reading (and re-reading) some of our favorite books that look at berries and jam-making.

This first one my husband just happened upon by chance at the library the other day. It’s Jam and Jelly By Holly and Nelly. I think he might have picked it up and thought, “Oh, Beth is going to love this.” But little did he know just how truly wonderful it is.

This story - one of a mom and her daughter who decide to pick wild berries and make jam all summer in order to make the money to buy the girl a winter coat - is as beautifully written as it is illustrated. Filled with clever metaphor and gorgeous imagery, it was not surprising to me to find out that Gloria Whelan is a poet.

I absolutely love the way the book goes through the season as each type of berry ripens and becomes ready for harvest. On each trip, little Holly notices different details about their natural surroundings from insects (”a green beetle so shiny he looks like he turned a light on inside himself,” or “A dragonfly with windowpane wings”), to flowers and woodchucks, to so many different types of birds and their calls. The warbler says, “Summer afternoon, summer afternoon, summer afternoon.”

And, of course, the fact that this story focuses on working hard to achieve a goal is invaluable. Sam and I both love it; Robby not so much, just because I think it’s a little old for him.

A great option for the younger set, though, is Bruce Degen’s Jamberry. It’s fun, rhyme-y, and fantastical as a bear and boy go berry picking through waterfalls of blueberries and ride “Strawberry ponies…dancing in meadows of strawberry jam.” I mean, how can you not love looking at a bear and boy in a big raspberry hot air balloon as rockets that explode into blueberries and strawberries shoot by?

I always make sure to read Degen’s last page where he talks about his childhood memories of berry picking with his family and eating berries with cream and blueberry pies while making batches of blackberry jam. That’s my favorite page.

And of course, one could never talk about berry-picking and jam-making without acknowledging the amazing, the wonderful, Blueberries For Sal. It’s one of our family’s favorites and rightfully so. It makes us just want to hustle along and pick some berries - kuplink kuplank kuplunk!

The notion of picking food and canning it so that “we will have food for the winter” is so foreign to us now, I love that this book has nonetheless become such a classic for parents and children today. It just makes me want to go pick some berries and can them so that we have them during the coldest of days, when nothing is truly in season.

And I’ll admit I am more than a little enamored with mom. My favorite illustration in the book is the one on the cover insert of the two of them in the kitchen canning their berry haul. Look at how peaceful she is with her scorching hot pot of blueberries while Sal stands up on the chair messing with her supposedly sterilized canning rings!

And boy howdy does she hold it together when she’s faced with a bear and realizes her daughter is missing on the mountain!

I’m telling you, Sal’s mom is a rock star. Kuplink!

Welcome back to From Dirt To Dinner. Today we are featuring PEAS - any kinda pea - shelling, snap, snow, what have you.

When choosing a recipe for this week I had a few things in mind. 1) I really wanted my kids to eat whatever I made. 2) I most definitely wanted to use the peas from my own garden as well as any other items that I grew myself. And so I ultimately turned to the book that really started this whole local eating/gardening interest of mine, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. This book is written chronologically through the year and includes recipes at the end of most chapters that use seasonal produce and ingredients that are appropriate for each month. I figured at some point they must have eaten some peas, and probably right around now.

And they did, although there weren’t many recipes for them specifically. But that didn’t stop me from finding the perfect recipe to try - Asian Vegetable Rolls. But you know I have to go and mess with any given recipe, right? I do. It’s like a sickness, particularly when I am trying very hard to use only local stuff…and am dealing with very picky children…and am just being myself. It really is a sickness, huh…well, let the messing begin.

Ok, so my plan was to make Shrimp and Snow Pea Vegetable Rolls. I obviously wanted to emphasize the snow peas I had in my garden, and I happened to have no carrots, so there was a tweak. I had also read in The Joy of Cooking that in the 3 pea salad you could use either bean sprouts or pea shoots. And I was like, PEA SHOOTS? Had to replace the bean sprouts in the recipe with pea shoots if I could find some locally. I mean, c’mon; it’s pea week, and I didn’t even know you could eat pea shoots!

And the shrimp. Ok, yes, I didn’t go out to the bay o’ Philadelphia and catch shrimp. In other words, I knew this ingredient would not be local. And here’s what I have to say about that: sometimes we just have to do our best. My kids like shrimp. My husband and I like shrimp. They seemed like the right healthy protein to add to this recipe. So I decided to go with it and make my best effort. When faced with four shrimp options at Whole Foods - two from Thailand and two from within the US, two farm raised and two wild caught- I just tried to be conscious of what I was purchasing. I went with about half a pound of wild shrimp from the US. And sure enough they had some pea shoots from PA - whoot!

And then it was time to come home and cook.

First I had to go out and see if I had any more snow peas from the garden that needed to be picked.

Yep, there were. Goodness gracious how did they get so big over night? I just harvested some two days ago!

I ended up with between 1 and 2 cups of snow peas. And let me just pause here to say that starting one’s dinner prep by going out into the garden to gather ingredients is just about the best feeling ever. EVER.

I also stopped by the greenhouse to grab some basil leaves that I’d noticed were huge the other day. I figured I’d replace the cilantro in the recipe with basil.

I also intended to use the mint I have in my kitchen window.

Isn’t that a sorry excuse for mint? I know. I lost my big plant last week to aphids. I’m still mourning. Both of these mints and the basil were grown from cuttings of previous plants though, which makes me very happy. I like to think I’ll never have to buy herbs again…

Let’s peel and de-vein some shrimp, kay? Do we all know how to do this? You don’t need any special tools or anything, I don’t care what they say. Peel from the little leggies.

Make a shallow cut down the back of the shrimp using a small, sharp knife. Often you can see the dark vein going down the back. Open it up a little and just pull out the vein. Ready?

Now we’re going to throw these in some salted boiling water for about 3 minutes. When they’re done drain them and put them in a bowl with some cold water to cool them down fast.

In the meantime I’m also going to chop up some scallions and some kind of red variety of lettuce (”troutback” perhaps?) from my CSA.

I’m going to boil those snow peas for just about two minutes as well and cool them down just like the shrimp. When both were cooled down I chopped them a bit. In retrospect I wish I had julienned the peas and chopped the shrimp a lot more, just for the sake of making them fit better into the thin rice papers later.

Speaking of which, I also have an assortment of decidedly non-local ingredients here for the purposes of the rolls and the sauces. They’re kind of the usual suspects, you know - oils, vinegars, soy sauce, rice paper, my coffee pot (awesome shot, Beth, really).

I’m just not sure what to do about that problem yet as I don’t really feel ready to start, like, making vinegar and stuff. Or maybe I am ready, I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve got some rice noodles there that I’m going to cook up and then cool down too.

So far it’s really just preparing lots of little things to go in the rolls - so I’ve got rice noodles, chopped snow peas, shrimp, mint and basil leaves, lettuce and pea shoots.

I’m going to make two really easy sauces for the rolls. One is just a mixture of some soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, a little honey (that part is local, at least)…and let’s bring out the big guns here. I’ve had some cayenne peppers from the CSA last year that I dried and made into a ristra. Well, like a 5 pepper ristra, anyway, two of which I still have.

So I’m gonna cut off a piece and grind it a bit to add some kick to the sauce.

For the kids I’m just doing a simple mix of peanut butter, soy sauce, and a little honey.

Behold, feast o’ Shrimp and Snow Pea Asian Rolls. Here’s all the stuff out on the table ready to be stuffed into some sheets of rice paper.

According to both the recipe and the directions on the rice paper package, you want to just put each sheet in a pan of hot water for about 15-20 seconds until it softens. Have a clean, wet towel ready for it when you take it out so that you can make it flat without it sticking to the plate and ripping.

And then you want to sort of layer the filling ingredients in there as you make a nice little roll (please, for the love of all that is good and holy, read the much better explained directions in Barbara Kingsolver’s recipe).

Here’s Sam putting his shrimp in his rice paper, which is so thin you can’t even really see it on his plate.

I will fully admit we never quite got the rolling down, probably because we were thinking of these little rolls as small burritos. And like I said, everything really needed to be shredded rather than chopped. But you know what, these were darned good, even if they were falling apart and not so pretty to look at.

Yum!

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Made any local peas lately? We’d love to hear about what you did. Please click on over to read a bit about what to include in your post and then link on up!