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!

In my *extensive* one year of vegetable gardening experience, peas have so far been one of my very favorite things to grow. There is just something so fun about them - the staking, the pretty white flowers, and most importantly, having a constant outdoor snack for the boys to crunch on. I can’t remember how many times last summer that we would be out in the yard and stroll over to the garden to grab a handful of snap peas.

So this year I decided to do more of them, and to include both Snap Peas and Snow Peas (both from Botanical Interests). I also learned that I did a whole slew of things wrong when I grew them last season! So that speaks, I think, to the fun of peas - I can do several things poorly and still consider them to be one of my favorite things to grow.

I’ve just harvested our first real bowl-full of the season, though, and already I can see the difference in how much we are getting. Plus the plants just look a whole lot better, healthier. And so many more of them germinated this time around.

So here’s a bit of what I learned in the past one year about growing peas.

They don’t like to be transplanted. I didn’t know that last year and planted them in cells early in the spring. Then after the frost free date in May I moved them out. I think only about half of them germinated in the greenhouse, and then a few just didn’t like being moved so I lost even more.

So this year I planted them directly where they were going to stay, and I did it a whole lot earlier. Peas can be put outside 4-6 weeks before the average frost free date, so planting them in late March was no problem.

Soak ‘em! In the same way that one would soak beans before cooking them, you can soak the peas in water overnight to soften them up and this helps them to germinate. Gayla Trail told me so . . . in her book. And if I’ve learned anything it’s to do what Gayla Trail tells me to do. My hero. (Grow Great Grub is still one of my favorite gardening books.)

So, between the soaking and the direct sewing, every single one of my peas germinated this time around. Seriously. Every. Single. One.

Say No To The Row. Last year I staked the peas using a few stakes in a row and tying string between them. It was ok, but never looked quite right and wasn’t as supportive as it could have been because they were spaced too far apart; they couldn’t grab onto each other, only the string. I remember that late in the season I had to add a second row of stakes so that they had something else to reach out and grab.

So instead I decided to do a Pea-Tee-Pee using four bamboo rods. When I planted them I circled each rod with the pea seeds and then did a few between each stake too. In so much less space I was able to plant at least three times what I did before.

The boys have affectionately dubbed it the “Pea Rocket” despite my insistence that it’s a “Pea-Tee-Pee.”

So that’s just three stakes with one going up the center and tied at the top. Much more stable and cuter to boot.

They don’t need a freaking foot of space. Each seed only needs about 6 inches of space between it and the next - they grow up, not out.

I’m also trying to maximize my space by planting more under the peas this year. So here I have some mustard greens that are cool with having some shade from the peas. And it appears all is well with the pea/mustard coexistence.

My first pea harvest was today. Immediately after taking this photo Robby ate every single snap pea out of the bowl saying, “num num num num, yummy peas.” How could they not be one of my favorites?

Hungry for peas? Oh, good, because they are this Friday’s From Dirt To Dinner theme ingredient!

Our family is gearing up for a road trip, our longest ever.

It’s my 10-year College reunion. (Now I shall pause so that you can do math and figure out my age, but let me tell you my school does “cluster” reunions, so really it is my 11 year reunion because this year they are including classes 1999, 2000, and 2001.) It’s quite hard to believe that I graduated from college a third of my life ago. (More pausing. More math.)

I’m 33, ok?

It’s not just my reunion though, because my husband and I went to school together. We didn’t date while there, but we sort of “ran in the same crowd,” if you will. We were friends. We did shows together. Once we played brother and sister . . .

Oh, and during our commencement weekend, on one of the last nights before we graduated, he came up to me at this little dance/disco thing we had, clearly, ahem, inebriated as all get out, grabbed me, kissed me, and then exclaimed, “I’ve always wanted to do that!” and walked away.

We got married four years later.

And now we are getting ready to take our brood back to where it all started.

And I’m excited. A little nervous, but not nearly as much as I would have thought (this kind of thing is exactly the type that would normally fill me with potential anxiety). I mean, of course I’m having various dreams about my old play director telling me I would need to have a new costume made for the show because I’ve gained so much weight - seriously, brain, can you at least try to be subtle? I don’t think we can even include that in the “SUBconscious” category.

But really I’m just looking forward to being there. I want to sit with our children on the lawn where I used to spend gorgeous afternoons cutting classes after classes. I want to introduce my boys to old friends, people who have never even known me as a mom. It’s hard to remember that there are some people who don’t know me as a mother, who have never met my kids, but who were a huge part of my life all the same.

And this place - it was a huge, HUGE part of my life.

So we’re going, driving for hours, and sleeping all together, all four of us, in a dorm room. I can’t remember if this is one of the dorms that has the notorious co-ed bathrooms and open showers. Did I mention that our school was a bit hippied out? It was.

Cah-Runchy.

*********Edited to add: My husband has just informed me via email that he has absolutely no recollection of kissing me that night…how romantic.

Alternatively titled - “A Lesson In Reading The Recipe Beforehand”

Alternatively titled - “Don’t Eat The Rhubarb Raw”

Alternatively titled - “Make Sure You Have Oil Before Baking”

Alternatively and more appropriately titled: “From Dirt To Dinner - Rhubarb”

All righty. Pull up a seat. It’s time to cook some rhubarb.

I decided to go with this recipe I saw via Pioneer Woman/Tasty Kitchen - Rhubarb Muffins.

First, I want to point out that neat little note in the recipe about what to do if you have no buttermilk, which, in fact, was quite true for me this morning. I’m not a fan of buttermilk, honestly. The first few times I obtained some for recipes, whenever I opened it I thought it had gone majorly bad. Eventually I learned that’s just what it smells like - rank. So I was planning on just using some regular milk I’d gotten through my buying club. But then I saw that note on there about mixing the milk with a TB of vinegar and letting it sit for 5 minutes. Um, Ok, I shall.

Now let’s go string and chop some rhubarb. Why am I showing you a photo of rhubarb standing up against my dishwasher? I dunno, I just want to illustrate what we’re talking about here in case you’ve never worked with it, and so that if you are ordering it via a buying club or something you can know what to expect. It’s so that, you know, in the event that you need some rhubarb for say, a recipe carnival coming up on your blog, you don’t go a little crazy and order two freaking pounds of it, resulting in your receipt of exactly eight stalks of rhubarb roughly the size of a small child.

Ok, the recipe says we need 2 cups of it chopped. I’m going to estimate 3 stems. Stalks. I’m sorry I just can’t call these stems, despite the fact that that’s what they are . . .

String it (I just started that first cut with a knife):

Slice it:

It smells kind of interesting, almost like working with greens or arugula or something. Think I’ll taste it.

It’s a little sour.

Yeah, don’t do that. That’s not good. But look, 3 stalks ended up being just a bit over 2 cups.

Now on to mixing up my wet ingredients. Um, one and a half cups of brown sugar sounds like an awful lot to me. I’m going to go with one.

Yeah, just checked the pantry; I have no oil. Yep, there it is on the grocery list, where it does me no good since I’ve clearly done nothing about that…ummmmm…looks like I have exactly one-half cup of olive oil left. Going with it. And while I’m wrecking things, I’m also going to replace the regular sugar in the recipe with honey, because I have local honey, and because I’d just rather. Plus I didn’t use all the brown sugar so maybe the sweeter honey will help. In we go.

Ok, wasn’t supposed to do that. Was just reading the recipe more closely trying to find out when to add the 1 TB of melted butter, and that would be along with the sugar and cinnamon AT THE END, because it’s a TOPPING. Let’s just pretend I added the honey on purpose to balance out the fact that I am using less sugar, a brilliant choice, really.

So what do we have so far? Um, a bowl of goo with not enough brown sugar, olive oil instead of, well, any other kind of oil, really, and a totally unnecessary 1/3 cup of honey, just thrown in for effect. Shall we continue? Let’s.

Now I’ll mess with this recipe more by substituting in some whole wheat flour for the regular. Usually when I do a recipe for the first time I do about 1/3 of the flour as whole wheat and then with each time after I increase the ratio a bit until it feels like too much whole wheat. This one is calling for 2 1/2 cups flour. I’m going with 1 1/2 cups regular all-purpose and 1 cup whole wheat pastry.

Ok, I’m not changing anything else. But I am definitely noticing that from a “local” standpoint I have no idea where my items such as baking soda and powder have come from. These are things I guess I take for granted and don’t think much about, you know? Um, and my vanilla is from Madagascar. . . something to work on, I suppose.

All righty, filling muffin pan and am thinking this really looks like an awful lot of batter for 12 muffins…yeah, there’s no way …oh, right. Recipe is for 24 muffins. Awesome. Now let me go back through and scoop out some batter from every single hole.

I’m really rockin’ it this morning, don’t you think?

Ok, I’m supposed to make this topping now that was mentioned above, but I’m so done. I’m going with my little pre-mixed thing of cinnamon and sugar I keep on hand. Forget about it.

Ok, first round is done and second is slopped in with some cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top.

Muffin, you’d better be good. I mean, how can you not be, what with being filled with sour rhubarb and olive oil and all.

Now, I shall eat you.

Ok, I know you won’t believe me, but these are actually pretty good! No, seriously, they aren’t sour, but a little tart, I’d say. They’re not at all unlike an apple muffin.

Let’s check the verdict.

Sam is pleasantly surprised. He gives them a thumbs up (which is what he gives to everything he is willing to ingest).

Robby seems to like them too.

Oh, wait, nope. I guess he found the rhubarb.

And now we’ll watch him pick out every little chopped piece.

You know what, considering the “circumstances,” 1 out of 2 ain’t so bad. And I like them too. And perhaps I learned some lessons:) And now I have enough rhubarb muffins to feed us for a week.

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Have a rhubarb recipe and some local rhubarb? Then join us, won’t you? If you haven’t already, go read a bit more about our From Dirt To Dinner project and then link on up!