Pasta Salad

My brother and his wife will be renting a cottage in Michigan over the next week, and my parents, two sisters, their spouses and kids, and me and my husband will all be converging to spend time with them. It is on an all sports lake, so they've rented a jet ski and boat as well. I'm pretty excited and have been busy preparing food to take out there tomorrow. The grape leaves were the start a couple days ago, today I made a cream cheese, sour cream, habanero,  and spring onion spread that will be put on tortillas, a pasta salad, a red velvet cake with blueberries on top. Next, I preparing a potato salad and a self-designed garbanzo/avacado/tomato salad. I'll leave a cucumber salad, hummus, and tzadziki for tomorrow.

In honor of Foodie Friday and Vegetarian Foodie Fridays, here's a picture of the pasta salad (the dressing is homemade). This time I put zucchini and summer squash in the salad, which is unusual, but I'm sure it will be good. One of the things I do that is a little different is that I like to put poppy seeds on my pasta salad because it seems to add visual interest.

Grape Leaves

We haven't had an opportunity to go grocery shopping on a big trip in quite some time, so I've been eking out meals from the random sundries in the pantry. I have beans, rice, flour, but I've run out of pasta and bread so you see, the cupboard is not entirely bare, but it's on the way. When thinking about what I might still be able to make, I realized we also have grapevines growing along our back fence, and some type of wild mint mingling with our bushes. (AKA ingredients for vegetarian grape leaves!) So, armed with this knowledge I went in search of recipes. I didn't find one that sounded right so I just added what I thought would make sense. First I harvested the goods from outside.

 Can you see the mint hiding in the middle there?

Next I brought them in and cleaned the leaves off.

After washing the leaves and mint, I boiled some water, removed the pot from the heat and soaked the grape leaves in the hot water to soften. While the leaves soaked, I made some rice (about 2 c. cooked), and selected the healthy (unmolested by bugs or beasties) leaves from the stem and chopped them.

I pressed three cloves of garlic, added some olive oil, parsley, dill, vinegar, lemon juice, a small onion, some sea salt, fresh ground pepper and a dash of paprika to the rice.

And, I wound up with this:

I removed the grape leaves from the now fairly cool water using the stem, clipped each stem off and placed the leaf vein side up. I put a bit of the mixture onto each leaf and rolled it tight. I placed the finished grape leaves in a pan oiled with olive oil.

I added a little water, a little more olive oil, and squeezed a little more lemon over them. I cooked for about 1/2 hour at 300 degrees. I've packaged them away after drizzling them with a bit more olive oil for use within the next week.

 I had enough of the rice mixture left over to eat for dinner. It was surprised by how delicious it was. It tasted buttery, but there was not a stitch of butter in it, and hardly any oil either since most of it was added to the pan and finished grape leaves. The mint, onion, garlic, dill, parsley sure did their jobs. And then, halfway through my meal, and even though I've used the mint in my lemonade before, and checked before,  I freaked myself out and needed to make sure there was no poisonous mint that grows in Michigan. I couldn't find any reference to any mint being poisonous to humans, and I learned something. Did you know that mint stems are square?

Farmers' Market and Homemade Cheese

On Saturday, I went to our local Farmers' Market, which I love to do. This week I went in search of pretty things for the home... flowers and greenery. I also bought some tomatoes and apples for good measure. The morning was cool, overcast and drizzly, which to me is a perfect enviroment - especially when beautifying the home for the snuggly winter months. I found some great items, but didn't spend much. I bought a bouquet for $5, some chives and oregano (which will be planted outdoors) for $3 each, a little whimsical hand made clay hanging pot with moss growing within for $8. Simple pleasures indeed - here they are:

I also found these cute little bottles/vases that stick to windows or mirrors and hold small groups of flowers. They are quite lovely I think!

Later that day, I went to the local health food store to get some TVP (Texturized Vegetable Protein) so I could make a pot of vegetarian chili. While there, I found some vegetarian rennet for cheese making. I had looked for vegetarian rennet earlier this summer without luck, and just gave up cheese all together since the cheeses made that way tend to be incredibly expensive. While in Italy on our honeymoon, I had no kitchen to cook my own food in. And, without a kitchen, and with a language barrier, I gave up my cheese-free ways until we returned to the USA. With rennet in hand, I purchased a gallon of organic vitamin D milk, and went in search of citric acid so I would have all the ingredients to make mozzarella. I did not find citric acid so had to make due with lemon juice. I also hadn't realized my candy thermometer didn't go low enough for me to measure temperatures under 100 degrees accurately. So, I used the juice (not predictable pH-wise like citric acid is), and I guessed at the temperature. I thought that the cheese would be an absolute failure since there were so many things I was doing incorrectly - even though I was using modified recipes for a psuedo mozzarella (I compared about 6 different sets of online instructions to figure out how to proceed). Real mozzarella takes a couple hours longer. All in all, my cheese tasted right, but turned out a little spongy and was not smooth because of that. I will definately try cheesemaking again!

Presenting the cheese: