Category Archives: Food

Pasta! Pasta!

When I requested pasta with pesto as an easy weeknight meal (extra easy because we made the pesto earlier in the week), I certainly wasn’t expecting to come home to this.

Homemade whole wheat pasta made from locally grown wheat!

We’ve been talking about making our own pasta for awhile now but feared that we would not be able to get the dough thin enough without some fancy pasta maker.  The full pasta-making kit attachment for our stand mixer costs about as much as the mixer itself, not to mention that you’d be buying some tools that do just one thing — make pasta.

So Matthew found a recipe for whole wheat pasta, pulled out our lovely made-in-Missouri rolling pin, and got to work.

No pasta maker?  No problem.  Matt still wants to tweak some things, but I thoroughly enjoyed our first homemade pasta venture — whole wheat fettuccine.

Green features:

  • 99% local ingredients (flour, water, and eggs) — only the salt was non-local
  • Avoids packaging of store bought pasta

Little dumplings everywhere

We discovered the wonders of butternut squash gnocchi back in February, when we were enjoying last year’s winter squash harvest.  Last week, we made our first batch with this year’s squash.

We used this recipe for butternut dumplings (AKA gnocchi) with sage brown butter.  We substituted whole wheat pastry flour for the all purpose flour, as always.

If you’ve never made gnocchi before, it’s a bit of work, but worth the effort!

After the dough comes together, take a chunk and roll it into a long rope (back of above picture).  Then cut the rope into small chunks.  If you’re feeling lazy, you can stop here, but they cook better (and look fun) if you make an indentation with fork tines and then wrap around the handle of a spoon to make a nice C-shape.

After boiling for a few minutes, you have finished gnocchi.  Drizzle the sage browned butter on top, and dinner is served!

This recipe makes a lot of gnocchi.  After the shaping step, but BEFORE the cooking step, we set half of the gnocchi on plates in a single layer to freeze.

Once they’re frozen, toss them in a container or baggy for a quick, delicious meal some other night.

Quinoa-stuffed acorn squash

Do you have quinoa cooked up?  If not, cook some quinoa.

Cut acorn squash in half and scoop out seeds.  Place cut-side down in a baking dish with a few tablespoons of water.  Bake at 350-400 degrees F (temperature is flexible and can be set to accommodate other things you’re baking at the same time) until the squash is tender (20-30 minutes?).

After the squash is in the oven, chop some onions, garlic, and bell peppers (you can toss in almost any veggie you like here).  Saute in olive oil, then remove from heat and stir in the cooked quinoa.  Add dried fruit — I used golden raisins, but cranberries would be good.  Season to taste with salt and pepper.

When squash is tender, turn them over and fill the squash “bowls” with the quinoa mixture.  Top with toasted almonds and bake for 5-10 more minutes.