Meal Plan: May 30 - June 4

Monday:

Red leaf salad with radishes, scallions, leftover grilled asparagus served with potato salad and beans from Sunday's cookout.

Tuesday:

Roasted free-range chicken with spinach sauteed with scallions, baked beans and cranberry-rhubard crisp.

Wednesday:

Chicken salad over lettuce with radishes and scallions

Thursday:

Sauteed Swiss chard with leftover baked beans and Italian sausages

Friday:

Pizza - barbecue chicken, greens and ricotta and plain

Saturday:

Pasta pesto with chicken

Meal Plan: May 23- May 29

Monday:

Spinach Nudi with sliced tomatoes

Tuesday:

Rice and beans with chutney and radish greens

Wednesday: (Annie makes dinner)

Pasta pesto!

Thursday:

Zucchini fritters with sliced tomatoes, ricotta and sweet and sour sauce

Friday:

Split pea soup with fresh bread

Saturday: (market day!)

Big vegetable combination with deviled eggs and bread

Sunday: (Memorial Day cookout)

Barbecued meats from market with potato salad and grilled vegetables

Monday: (parade day!)

Roast chicken and vegetables from market

Meal Plan: May 8 - 14

Eight days post-move and we are a fully functioning household. We will be unpacking "non-essential" belongings throughout the summer, but for now we can cook, dress, wash clothes, park our car in the garage and play with our full range of Legos and other toys. This Saturday, as I may have mentioned, was the first outdoor market of the Norwich Farmers Market season. The kids and I spent the morning there getting reacquainted with friends made last year and dancing to the live music and snacking on our weekly treat of "choco-doodles" made by Susie at Timeless Herbs Farm in Woodstock, VT.

One of my favorite farms is Hurricane Flats in Royalton, VT. Their produce is beautiful, delicious and plentiful. This week we found ramps (wild leeks), fiddleheads, arugula, radishes, spinach and chard. It is a pity I will be traveling this week, so I couldn't buy everything that I wanted. This week's meal plan consists mostly of meals I have already prepared ahead to make the week go more smoothly with one less set of hands in the house. You may notice that this is a meat-heavy menu for us, but we are trying to use up some very generous meals that were made for us over our moving weekend and a steak I bought for next week ended up in the refrigerator and not the freezer, so there you have it.

Sunday:

Mother's Day Steak Salad

made with pan-fried New York Strip steak from On the Edge Farm, Yukon gold sauteed potatoes, mesclun and arugula greens, browned ramps (the bulbs and greens) beets, radishes, deviled eggs and a chili, scallion yogurt dressing.

Monday:

Split-pea soup with swiss cheese toasts

Left over from last week and made with the end of our Easter ham!

Tuesday:

Beef and broccoli stir fry with Swiss Chard and leeks.

Made with the end of a delicious roast beef aged by my Dad and served over our moving weekend.

Wednesday:

Pasta with creamy pesto sauce

Thursday:

Reuben Casserole

Made with a beef corned by my Dad also for the moving weekend and "horsey-kraut" and homemade Russian dressing.

Friday:

Zucchini and Scallion frittata

The BEST Hardboiled Egg Method

No meal plan this week because we are moving on F R I D A Y !!!!!! Until then, we will be eating the leftovers of our Easter Feast. I will post a follow-up on the recipes and how we liked them as soon as I can. Until then, I leave you with the very best hardboiled egg method I know of which came from Elise at Simply Recipes and some shots of what I think are some pretty fantastic Easter eggs.

Easter 2011 Menu

Easter truly is my favorite holiday. It reminds me of my grandmother, whose birthday is around this time. I cling to the tradition of buying new "Easter outfits" for my kids, I make sure to have a hyacinth every year to make my apartment smell like her living room and I try to incorporate as many colors as possible into our holiday meal, they way she did.

Spring in the Upper Valley is later than in the rest of the country (did I mention it was snowing this morning?!?), so I had to make some serious changes to my original concept. I had envisioned making Deborah Madison's infamous Asparagus and Morel Bread Pudding that appears in Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, but that will have to wait until May or so. Our menu will rely mostly on storage crops and what we have canned or frozen, with two ever so important, though non-local treats. Can you guess what they are?

We bought our ham from On the Edge Farm in Woodstock, VT and will be glazing it with a mixture of the the apple jelly Scott made from leftover cores and peels last fall and the maple syrup we bought during Vermont Maple Open House Weekend at Center Hill Maples Farm. Though it will be several weeks before we have that quintessential spring opening meal with local asparagus, morels, rhubarb and an abundance of greens we are grateful to celebrate the oncoming spring and the mere fact that we made it through our first winter in the Upper Valley eating locally most of the time.

Easter 2011 Menu

Appetizers:

Deviled Eggs

Carrot Soup

Main Course:

Maple and Apple Glazed Ham

Roasted Beets, Celeriac and Asparagus, sauteed Swiss Chard

served with Hesser House Macaroni and Cheese

Dessert

Cranberry Apple Crisp (variation on our Cranberry Rhubarb Crisp)

BEST EVER Bacon and Tomato Sandwich

I just have to gush about the most AMAZING sandwich we had the other night. I can see that a bacon and tomato sandwich may not sound that exciting to most people, but if that's the case, they can't possibly have eaten a bacon and tomato sandwich at the Hesser House. This one was made on Scott's multigrain bread that was still warm and smeared with our homemade mayonnaise. We were lucky to find some thick cut maple-cooked bacon from On the Edge Farm in Woodstock, VT who sources most of our meats. I don't like to play favorites among my farmer friends, but I was quite smitten with the organic tomatoes from Long Wind Farm in Thetford, VT. They specialize in tomatoes and sell their products at the Coop Food Stores. This sandwich was perfect beside the tomato soup we are still making from the juice we canned over the summer. Only 18 days until the start of the outdoor markets. Here's to a healthy growing season!

Meal Plan: April 17-24

We trying to eat down some of our heavier stores this week because that means less to move!

Sunday:

Leftover roll-ups

Monday:

Bacon Sandwiches with Tomato Soup

Tuesday:

Broccoli, Cauliflower, White bean casserole with coleslaw on the side

Wednesday:

Sauteed Swiss Chard with Bacon over rice

Thursday:

Pizza

Friday:

Pesto with Zucchini over pasta

Saturday:

Easter Dinner (menu to be posted later)