Homemade hummus, falafel ...

... And broccoli/cauliflower/golden raisin/walnut/chestnut salad with cilantro/lemon/sunflower butter dressing.
Oh, and pickled onions with star anise.

More winery scenes

Bottling

Our friend Frank bottling his Cabernet franc blend.

Gilda with the grapes

at the winery, preparing to crush.

Bringing in the Harvest

My friend Mark carrying in a lug of Chardonnay grapes at the vineyard. It's Harvest time and my guys are working like crazy. Eric, his dad and our friend Mark are working almost nonstop to pick the grapes, crush them and turn it all into wine. I'll be taking photos and posting them up, along with descriptions of the process, when I get a chance.
The weather is gorgeous, perfect for picking. And it looks like a great harvest! The grapes are super sweet and ready to turn into delicious wine!

Harvest party!

Our friends at Middlebrook farm and Local New Buffalo are having a harvest party at the farm tonight. I made apple pies for the occasion. The other one says, MB. Silly a bit, but I feel like making a fancy crust is half the fun of making the pie. I can't wait to try them - I'm just waiting for the little dumpling tarts to cool!
Pie is so easy. These are made with whole wheat flour and a random variety of apples. We got two huge bags of apples (an entire peck total!) from the owners of an apple farm nearby after their boxer attacked Gilda! Gilda is fine - she's a tough little dog. I think this was the first time that she's met a dog that wouldn't let her be alpha and she didn't know what to think.
Anyway, the pie dough recipe is just: 2 and a 1/2 cups of flour and a tsp of salt into the food processor. Add 2 T frozen butter, sliced in 'pats', and pulse a few times until its pea-sized crumbles. Add about 1/3cup very cold water, pulsing until it hangs together. Squish it together into two balls (but don't knead), add more water if you have to but don't add too much. Then just roll out each ball of the dough, press one into a buttered pie pan, fill it with apples, and put on the top crust. I brush the crush with an egg wash (1 egg + small splash of water) and make the pie decorations stick with a bit of egg underneath too.
The apple filling is peeled and thinly sliced apples mixed with sugar, a teeny bit of salt, and garam masala. It's a little spicy!
Then it's all baked at 375 for an hour (ish), turning it halfway to make sure the crust browns evenly.
Mmm. Pie.

Fungus among us

I've been finding these mushrooms every once in a while out in the woods. They're called Shaggy Manes or Coprinus comatus and they're pretty tasty. They grow on the ground - the ones I've found were growing in little clearings at the edge of the treeline. And they're pretty tasty. We just sauteed them with butter, salt and pepper. Mushrooms are the coolest!

Dutch Baby

I've been wanting to make a Dutch Baby pancake for ages - ever since they hit the blogs a couple of years ago. But somehow I never got around to it until a few days ago. I only have whole wheat flour in the house, so that's what I used, along with almond milk and some amazing eggs from our Middlebrook farm down the road. The yolks were so rich that they actually made the whole batter yellow! I used the recipe from the Food Network that I found by googling and baked the thing in a glass pie dish instead of a cast iron skillet.
And it was delicious! Super filling. Or maybe that's just because no one else was home so I ate the whole thing myself!

Fungus among us

Check out this amazing tooth fungus that Eric found in the yard, growing on a tree that fell down in the recent crazy winds. I think it may have been a locust. The spore print was ivory/creamy but very slight. I'd never seen one like this before!
I checked it out on Roger's Mushrooms (one of my favorite places to go for mushroom info) and it looks like Hericium erinaceus. Edible! I can't wait to try it!

Indian Summer

It's something like 75F out and Julian and I are hangin' in the hammock. Eric and our friend Marc are doing yardwork and Gilda is chewing on sticks. Bliss!

1/2 Marathon Training

Two of my friends from college and I are walking a half marathon in Chicago at the end of October. I've trained by doing a bunch of 4 and 5 mile walks, but I hadn't yet done any longer walks until this weekend.
Yesterday I walked 6.5mi with J in the stroller and Gilda walking along with me. I was planning to just do our regular 4 miles, but J was sleeping so nicely in the stroller that I kept going.
Today Eric watched J while Gilda and I walked to town and back. We stopped for a latte and a blueberry muffin in town, but only for about 15min. Altogether, it was a 9 mile walk and took us 3 hours and 20 min. Including the pitstop. Not so bad! The weather was perfect. I found a bunch of gorgeous yellow Amanita muscaria mushrooms on the way and some shaggy manes (Coprinus comatus)! I have the mushroom magic touch this year - I found the first morel, the oysters, the honey mushrooms, and now these.
My plan is to do one 4mi and one 8-10mi walk each week until the 1/2 marathon. I hope the weather cooperates!

Fall Harvest

It's almost time for Harvest at the vineyard! I always think of it with a capital H because it's such a major happening around here. Harvest is so exciting - all the work that went into the vineyard all year long: the pruning, the tying-on of vines, the weed-whacking, the spraying, the vigilance against birds and raccoons and blackrot and mildew ... It's all finally paying off!
The grapes look fantastic. The picture here is of a bunch of the Cabernet Sauvignon and it looks like they'll be ready for harvest next week. You can tell when they're ready by testing the amount of sugar in the juice. Eric can tell just by tasting them, but he also has a little machine that measures it precisely. The level of sugar at which you start harvesting depends on the type of grape and the preferences of the winemaker.
Pretty soon we'll be harvesting and then it will be time for the crush!

Gilda is. A punk rocker.

Gil-da is. A punk rocker. Gilda is a punk rocker now-ow-ow.
Yes, I dyed Gilda's eyebrows pink. I was eating a beet the other day and thinking about how I could use beet juice as a dye. It's the best shade of reddish pink. I actually wanted to use it to make some kind of diy lipstain and tried mixing it with some lipbalm base that I had laying around. Weird to just have that, I know. That was a dismal failure because the juice (water-based) failed to combine with the balm (wax & oil). Duh. I guess I thought that would happen but was hoping that it would somehow work. It was one of those kitchen science days. The next day I made biscuits that looked beautiful until I took a bite and realized that I had added baking soda instead of baking powder. So maybe it's planetary misalignment or something. The comet Elenin messing up my kitchen projects.
So I ate the rest of my beet raw while googling beet juice dye a d came across a story of a woman in Colorado who was fined for dyeing her poodle pink. Apparently dyeing animals is illegal in CO. Her (brilliant, I think) response was that she had merely stained her poodle with beet juice - not dyed it! So I had to try it on Gilda. I only did her brows, but I think she is rockin' the look.
It only lasted a couple of days though. I might do her head-to-toe one of these days. Breast cancer awareness month jumps to mind as an opportunity to have a pink dog.

Two Wine Recommendations

Eric and his dad have a winery here in Southwest Michigan. So we end up drinking a lot of wine - a lot of their wine, to be sure, but also a lot of other wines that we try for comparison. Their wine is fantastic, and I will always recommend it to anyone. The chardonnay is my favorite, but the Shou is really great too. I just happen to be in a white wine mood of late. And the December harvest Reisling: Mmm.

But I actually wanted to recommend some super tasty & inexpensive wines that we've tried lately. One is the Eins, Zwei, Dry Rheingau Reisling from Leitz. We tried this at a comparison tasting in which we were trying a variety of Reislings and this one was the group favorite.

They're a German winery that does fantastic and affordable wines. This one was around $14. I really liked this one. I had their Dragonstone the other night and it was similarly affordable and delicious. So definitely recommendations for Leitz.
The other wine is the 2010 Vigna Rocca Albana Secca from Tre Monti. Tasty and inexpensive. What more could you ask for? We had this one with a tomato-based stew of garden veggies, mushrooms and fennel sausage and it matched it really nicely. No reason to only drink red wines with tomato-based Italian dishes!

Eric's dad Jim brought both of these over, but he got them from his local wineshop (City-Wide), so they should be generally available.

Chikaming

Chikaming Nature Preserve is my new favorite place to take Gilda for a walk. What a gorgeous spot! And it's so close-by; just a few miles north of Three Oaks. The paths are really well maintained - it looks like it will be a great place for cross country skiing this winter too. First you walk along a cornfield, past wild concord grapes growing by its side. You come to a fork in the path - the left tine takes you through the pine forest and past the marsh while the left tine takes you through the meadow, past the crabapple trees and the pussy-willows. The two paths meet up in the middle, near the edge of a little farm. This is exactly the place that I've been looking for since we moved here. Gilda, of course, couldn't be more thrilled. And the little guy loves any opportunity for a backpack ride.

Mushrooming

One of our fallen sugar maples had oyster mushrooms! A ton of oyster mushrooms! Well, about 10lbs so far, actually. Eric made some Asian style rice noodles with some of them and we traded 4lbs to Ellie and Pat at Local in exchange for some of their amazing sausages. We're planning to make a cabbage, mushroom & bratwurst thing for dinner tonight and then to dry a bunch for the winter.
I absolutely love being able to gather delicious goodies from the woods. Especially mushrooms - I feel like I'm living out all my Heideggerian Black Forest fantasies. Not to mention my lower-brow Laura Ingalls Wilder/Lucy Maud Montgomery fantasies. There's something so comforting about finding what you need on the land. and mushrooms are such weird and wild creatures. What a blessing to live on this land.

Shedd Aquarium

Oh, how I wish that I had time to sit down and properly write some posts! But teaching is getting crazy, Julian is wigglier than ever, and we had a weekend packed with events to celebrate my step-daughter's 13th birthday! It was actually the best weekend ever. Clara had a party with her school friends at the go kart/blacklight minigolf place and then a second party at our house - 10 preteens running around fueled by s'mores until they crashed. Woo! And then we went to Chicago the next day to visit the Shedd Aquarium. Which rocks. Check out the photo above from the jellies exhibit!
And here's a photo of Julian communing with the dolphins: 

Eric & Julian

I took this photo to prove to the lovely ladies at xoJane that it is indeed possible to rock a fanny pack! We're at Boyd & Julie's in this pic, and you can see the camper where we spent our wedding night in the background. Boyd & Julie hauled it over to the Avonlea vineyard for us and made it romantic with candles, etc. So fun. I love that camper.

Eric in front of his brugmansias

Aren't they gorgeous? They're growing like crazy this year. Brugmansia, also known as Angel's Trumpets, have amazing flowers and this intoxicatingly delicious smell. Anthropologie actually has an Angel's Trumpet perfume right now, designed by Ineke Ruhland, who seems like a totally amazing perfumer.
Brugmansias are tropical though, so we have to move them back in during the winter - then they live in our plant room/sun room. They've grown so much, I don't know if there will be enough room for them all this year! The cat's box is in there too - I think she's going to love it when they're back in. But we won't have to move them until late September/early October. Our first frost around here is usually October 10-15th.

Black bean, yellow squash & pumpkin seed tacos

Yum! I was starving last night and we had some meat (delicious local ground beef from Pat and Ellie's shop Local) in the freezer, but I couldn't wait. Plus I had a shredded yellow (crookneck) squash in the fridge that I wanted to use up. As a result: Black bean, squash and pumpkin seed tacos. Not only are they vegan, but they're so tasty. Even tastier than the meat ones. But then again I always lean more towards vegetarianism since I tend to think that meat is fundamentally icky. You should have seen me squirm when I was preparing that chicken last week! I almost couldn't do it. Only Eric's laughter made me determined to overcome my squeamishness and roast the damn chicken. I was a vegetarian for years, actually, and just started eating meat last year when I got pregnant. I started craving pork so badly, I had to eat it. 

Anyway, these are easy. The big secret is the taco seasoning. Don't use the stuff in the little packet from the store! Or, use it but know that - it has MSG and the spices are probably all old and not tasty. Eric makes his own taco seasoning. It's really simple and so much tastier than the store packets. 

Taco Seasoning: 

Roast the dried peppers of your choice at 350F until the whole room smells delicious and the peppers are crispy - you can snap them easily and they don't bend. We use anchos (dried poblanos) and pasillas.

Pulverize the dried, roasted peppers in a spice grinder (or a small coffee grinder that you don't mind pepper-ing up). We get them from the Hispanic grocery store.

Add to the mix: cumin, cinnamon, allspice, thyme, oregano.
Eric adds a little salt to, but I prefer to add the salt later - that way you can adjust it for each dish. Add the spices to taste. I'd suggest more cumin and not too much cinnamon but definitely some. Eric makes a bunch (about a pint) at a time. That much taco seasoning takes about 4 of each kind of pepper. This isn't spicy taco seasoning. We just add the spice in later. But you can put some spicy dried peppers right into the mix if you like it that way.

Tacos:
Toast a few tablespoons of the taco seasoning in the dry skillet. Then add a splash of oil (we use peanut), a rinsed can of beans, the shredded squash (one large squash, shredded in the food processor), a diced fresh hot pepper (we used a jalapeño), and a handful of roasted pumpkin seeds (pepitas). Adjust the taco seasoning - taste it and add more if you want more. Sprinkle in some white truffle salt if you have some (this is another secret ingredient - it makes everything more delicious!). If not, use regular salt. At the end, add finely chopped garlic. You don't want to burn the garlic because then it will taste bitter, so that's why we add it at the end.
And then you're done! Toast up some corn tortillas, fill one up and top it with some chopped onion and cilantro. I was too hungry to chop cilantro and we already had some chopped onion in the fridge left over from breakfast.

I know it's weird that I write this stuff down without real measurements. But that's the way I cook - measuring by eye and then tasting to adjust. Use your senses and make it the way that tastes best for you! Baking is another story, but I like to live dangerously and sometimes bake by eye too.