Summertime, and the eating is good...

Yeah that doesn't really work with the melody of "Summertime", but it's accurate. The eating is very good in our house.

But I have NEWS. Food-related news. I am on a "diet"! I "" it because I stopped thinking about "dieting" as "dieting" 12 years ago when I started going to weight watchers. I prefer to think of it as "rethinking what I eat." Because what good is going on a diet for a month, losing 10 or 15 or 50 lbs or whatever (don't lose 50 in one month, that's not healthy!) and then realizing you can't maintain your new "diet" long term, and gaining all or most back? That's just depressing. As someone who is more interested in eating delicious food than making sure it's healthy (there's something to be said for that, and you definitely can make delicious and super healthy food, but I have a serious sweet tooth and am somewhat lazy), I'd rather just educate myself on my food intake.

I also went to a new ear doctor at the beginning of July who recommended a low salt, low caffeine and low alcohol lifestyle to keep my ear stable (fluid is vital to ears, and a high salt diet will really mess up the equilibrium), so it was then that I started really thinking about what I was eating. Also, when I went to the national DAR meeting at the end of June last year, I was so busy and was basically eating just fruit and yogurt in any spare minute I could find, not the lavish sit-down meals at Old Ebbitt's Grill that we'd enjoyed in previous years (best crab cakes ever!), that I lost almost 5 lbs in 9 days, which made my size 8 capris fit and me very happy. This year, I was just as busy but sadly did not lose any weight , but a week after we got back, I shot up to a somewhat horrifying weight I hadn't seen since high school. I realized an immediate change, a "rethinking" was in order.

Step 1: I began to write down everything I ate. I didn't count any calories, I just acquainted myself with what I was eating. I learned that I snack a LOT. And I make very poor choices when I snack.

Step 2: I downloaded the My Fitness Pal app on my iphone (it's free!). I did start calculating calories after that first week, and then my husband said, you know, I bet there's an app for that. There is indeed. It's easy to input your food and it helps you calculate the calories and other nutritional info. Based on your current weight and height, your normal activity level and your desired weight loss rate, it calculates how many calories you can have in a day. There's a spot to enter in your current weight. And even better, it remembers the food you've eaten before, so if you eat the same thing every day (like I do, for the most part) it's right there and you just need to select it.

Step 3: I actually haven't gotten here yet: exercise. I am lazy and hate to exercise. I walk instead of driving whenever it's possible, but I choose not to count it as exercise, especially since I'm pretty sure each walk is burning less than 100 calories.

Since the day I stepped on the scale and saw the "horrifying weight", I've lost 11 lbs. I've set my app to lose only 1lb a week, and it's been a month, but I'm still overeating (according to their calculations) yet still losing. This makes me think I was horrible, horrible snacker before.

Now this dress fits! Much excitement :)

Fortunately, with the farmer's market just down the street, it's very easy to eat large quantities of nutritious and low-calorie food, like beets, cabbage, zucchini, etc. I'm not overly hungry, and sometimes when I have a very large helping of veggies (such as the night I decided to just cook up all the broccoli, it was a very small head of broccoli and I'm the only one here who likes it) I'm pretty full. The nestle's chocolate chip cookie recipe comes out to 150 calories per ounce of dough. My "big" cookies are about 1oz. I think my big splurge right now is corn on the cob (usually no butter), it looks healthy but it's like 90 calories an ear.... and I can easily gobble up 4 ears of corn at dinner- I loooove fresh corn.

Anyway, that's my current update. Please note: this isn't necessarily right for everyone. It may not even be the best thing for me, but I feel good, I'm healthy (my doctors agree) and I'm sticking to it. The only thing I can recommend is being fully aware of what you eat. If you're not happy with your weight, write down your food intake. Pay attention to your activity. A lot of weight-gain seems to be because people just aren't paying attention to what they're doing. It's far too easy to open that tupperware container of chocolate chip cookies and lose track of how many you've eaten.

Because of my efforts, I'm not baking much (except bread, since I have toast for breakfast every day) unless it's to bring somewhere or give someone. I reallllly want to make some jerky, we bought some at the VT beer festival and it's delicious, makes a very filling snack (even just a couple bites) and it's only 70 calories an ounce! 1oz of jerky is kind of a lot, too.

But now to the recipes. We've been eating a ridiculous number of turkey burgers. At about 300 calories a burger, plus an ear of corn and some broccoli or a helping of corn and blueberry salad, it's a very filling dinner for a decent number of calories. I've also been playing around with a lot of Penzey's spice blends: Northwoods on corn on the cob makes you forget you ever even put butter on corn in the first place, and Muskego Ave seasoning on broccoli will make you devour the entire head of broccoli (unfortunately, both of these blends contain salt so watch out).

Turkey Burgers

recipe adapted from a recipe from the July/August issue of Everyday Food

1lb ground turkey

3T panko

1T whole grain mustard

1t dried sage

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Mix all together. Form into 5 patties, and grill or broil until done (like 5-7 minutes on each side)

Easy peasy! We've been buying some delish whole wheat ciabatta rolls at the grocery store, which are 140 calories each, although the photos here are of kaiser rolls- we've tried just about every roll they carry. I should dig up my burger bun recipe and just make my own, because those were pretty darn good.

Blueberry Corn Salad

loosely adapted from Two Peas and Their Pod

kernels from 3-4 ears of cooked (steamed, boiled, grilled) corn, cut off (however much you have)

3/4-1 cup blueberries (or more, or less)

2T lime juice

1T honey

2T minced pickled jalapenos

1/2t cumin

1/4t chipotle powder (or less)

dash salt

Whisk the lime juice, honey, and spices together, then toss with the corn, berries and jalapenos. 

This is delicious. I've made it like 5 times now. Last night I actually got a little crazy and substituted this for corn and bean salad for our fish tacos. There is about 400-500 calories in the entire salad (depending on how much corn and how many blueberries you use, last night's batch was 312g corn (312 cal) and 300g blueberries (170 cal), and we usually get 6-8 servings out of each batch. Help yourself to seconds!

You also see on my plate onion rings. These are not healthy. They're not exactly unhealthy, since they're baked. They're dipped in flour, dunked in flour/egg/buttermilk and coated in panko drizzled with olive oil. They are ridiculously good, but I haven't made them nor calculated the calories since I started paying attention to my food intake. I'll report back when I figure it out! I like to eat them with storebought BBQ sauce. This is also not all that healthy, but it's my little indulgence!

What's Baking? July: Summer Fruits

This month's What's Baking? theme of "Summer Fruits" was chosen by Jaida of Sweet Beginnings. This was perfect for me because one of my favorite summer activities is picking fruit from Tougas Farm in Northboro! I was very eager to get over there on July 6th, as soon as I was back from traveling. I hadn't picked blueberries at Tougas before, only because of the timing in previous years, and I forgot how slow-going it is- I picked by myself and it took me 1.5hrs to get 8.5lbs. I really wanted 15lbs (bulk discount on 15+lbs) but by 8.5lbs I was DONE. Fortunately, I've been able to stretch these berries all month, and will use the last of them tonight in my 4th (or 5th?) batch of blueberry corn salad- our favorite new recipe of the summer.

I picked these blueberries on Thursday, and on Friday we had a seriously blueberry-themed dinner. When I asked Clint what he wanted, he said blueberry cake (not pie? no, cake. That was ok, since it was hot and I was pretty sure pie crust would not cooperate anyway.) and how about blueberry bellinis? I'd never have thought of bellinis. Now we are down to only 2 bottles of wedding prosecco left (September is our 3rd anniversary, so maybe by then we'll finish it all off!)

Blueberry Bellinis, from The Cookin' Canuck

(they look a little weird, from the floating/oxidation of the blueberry puree, but boy are they tasty!)

 Here's our dinner for the evening, which has been repeated endlessly- I'd say ad nauseam, but each repetition is just as/more delicious than the last! Baked onion rings, mustard and sage turkey burgers, and corn and blueberry salad. Stay tuned for those recipes.

But the cake is really want you bakers want to see! I found this on tastespotting and of the cake recipes I found, I chose this for its simplicity.  It also seemed healthier than the other recipes I saw, it uses only one stick of butter (but then, it only makes one 9in round pan of cake, so it's about a normal amount of butter for a cake). It also looked a lot prettier than some of the other things!

And I seem to have chosen right, it's quite delicious. I made it the following weekend for a potluck picnic and it was *devoured*. It doesn't have a huge amount of sugar, so I didn't feel guilty having a piece for breakfast, either ;)

Blueberry Buttermilk Cake
recipe from Kitchen Confidante

1 stick of unsalted butter, at room temp
1/2 cup + 2T white sugar (original was 3/4 cup)
1 egg
1 cup flour (on my second batch I used 1/3 WW flour and 2/3 AP)
1/2 t baking soda
1/4t salt (I used a pinch, having made this 3 days after my doctor recommended a low-salt diet :( )
1/4t allspice (original recipe called for 1/8t cinnamon, but allspice is now my spice of choice when using blueberries)
1/2 cup buttermilk (seriously, don't bother buying is: 1/2 cup milk + 1/2T white or cider (depending on what you're baking) vinegar. Let sit for a few minutes before using)
1-1.5 cups of blueberries, divided

Preheat oven to 350F. Butter/flour (or Pam-spray and flour) a 9inch pie dish.

Cream the butter and sugar, add the egg and beat til fluffy, a few minutes. Whisk the dry ingredients and add in small batches to the butter/egg mixture, alternating with the buttermilk. Finally, fold in half the blueberries gently, and transfer batter to the prepared baking dish. Drop the remaining blueberries on top.

Bake for 25-30min (more like 35-40 for me, my oven has issues (even though the thermometer says the temp is accurate!)), until the top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Serve alone for breakfast, with whipped cream, ice cream or a sprinkle of powdered sugar for dessert, double it and bake in a 9x13 (with enough batter leftover for a loaf pan) and cut into squares for a quick snack. The only thing I can't recommend is baking these in a muffin tin, because somehow that completely failed for me- no idea why.

But do you notice how quick the instructions are? The first night I made this, I turned the oven on, got all the ingredients out, made the batter, washed the berries, added them, got the batter into the pan, all before the oven was up to temp! This is the perfect weeknight dessert.

The cake itself is incredibly light and fluffy, and for some reason I'm used to cakes with fruit being heavier, like a pound cake (my mom's favorite blueberry cake is in a bundt pan and pound cake-like, but oh boy that's delicious, she's been making every summer that since Martha Stewart had it on in like 2001) or more like a gingerbread cake consistency. But this is the ideal cake for a hot summer day- and fortunately, I've been living on our screen porch just off the kitchen, so I'm perfectly happy to have the oven on! :)

Loving Local: Tougas Farm

It's the MA Loving Local Blogathon week! (Find more MA localvore bloggers at In Our Grandmother's Kitchens and Loving Local). This blogathon is to raise money for Massachusetts Farmers Markets during the official Massachusetts Farmer's Market Week, so please consider donating here.

This Loving Local Blogathon week for Farmer's Market week is pretty exciting. I'm a total localvore (although I've been known to buy Chilean grapes sometimes when I really, really, really want some grapes). I started trying to buy mostly local food when I became acquainted with local farmers, and I wanted to support people in my area- mostly for the same reason I'd go to a mom & pop store instead of Walmart. It makes sense to get food from your own area, grown in the same soil you walk on, with the same air you breathe, and the same water that soaks you when you forget your umbrella. Plus, isn't it nice to have a tomato that didn't have to travel for 2 days by truck, and a melon that doesn't have its own carbon footprint? And raspberries that don't go moldy after one day in your fridge?

For all newcomers, my husband and I have lived in MA for a little over a year, and before that we lived on the border of NH and VT, in a rural area full of localvores and local farms. Almost all the produce at our grocery store was local, and they provided info on the farms everything came from. We got pretty spoiled.

Now that we're in Worcester, local food is harder to come by, and the farmer's markets near us are very small (compared to the massive event-of-the-week market we used to visit every Saturday) and held at less convenient times, but we participate in the Many Hands Organic Farm CSA. This is our first time with a CSA, and it's great fun. I'm the main cook in our household, and while I'll eat almost anything (except potatoes and green bell pepper), I've found there are many veggies I've never really thought about. I've had to quickly learn about new veggies, to eat them up before they go bad!

Today I'm excited to tell you about our morning of peach and raspberry picking at Tougas Family Farm, in Northboro. I'd seen the signs on the highway, but I'd never been there. 2 weeks ago, I decided I needed to pick some fresh fruit (at the beginning of my jam-making frenzy), and Tougas Farm came up in a google search.

Tougas is really nice and has a picking conditions page, so if you're obsessed (like me), you can monitor the fruit picking conditions daily until the day you go. I originally planned to pick peaches, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries, but we ended up only picking peaches and raspberries (this is good- I could barely handle this load as it was!).

We started with the peaches. It's $28 for up to 5 people to pick a 1/2 bushel of peaches. ($18 for up to 3 people to pick a peck). This works out to about $1.17/lb, compared to the New Jersey peaches that were on special at Shaw's for 79 cents/lb that week, but let me tell you, I would have paid $3/lb for the Tougas peaches. They were The Best peaches I'd ever had. Whether they were fresh from the tree, or stored in my fridge, they were incredibly sweet and flavorful, super juicy, and just smelled like a real peach. I did buy the cheap Shaw's peaches, and I ended up making them into chili-peach jam- they weren't worth eating on their own, and definitely needed extra flavors added into their jam.

We picked Elberta peaches. As we approached the rows of trees, all you could smell was peach. So exciting!
We picked (I did most of the picking, Clint was in charge of holding the box) and picked and picked...


... and ended up with a very full box of beautiful peaches. I think it took us about 20 minutes to fill this box, even including photography time.
Tougas is very helpful, and likes to tell you how to care for your fruit:
(they also have these great info and recipe booklets to take).

Next, we drove over to the main part of the farm, briefly visited the barnyard animals, had a couple cider donuts ($4.75 for 6, go buy them right now), and walked across the street to the raspberry field.

Raspberries were on special, $3.99/lb for 7 lbs or more. We picked 8.7lbs, a flat-full.
There were bees- this was troublesome for me (not allergic, just terrified), but they were indeed more interested in the fruit than in me.



Raspberry picking was more tedious than peach picking, and I think we were at it for about 1.5 hours. It was hot, and I'd worn jeans to protect my legs from the prickers (my arms were very, very scratched by the end- but it was totally worth it!). We were very smart and brought spf 50, but I should have brought a hat as well. Despite being tedious (hence the lack of photos!), raspberry-picking was pretty exciting- there were big bunches of raspberries hiding under leaves, so it was kind of like a treasure hunt.

When we got home, I divvied up the ripe from less ripe peaches, like the sign recommended. We ended up with 59 peaches (plus the one I bruised when I picked it, and therefore ate immediately).

I made peach gazpacho, and we grilled some peaches with a brown sugar-rum-cinnamon glaze to have with dinner (DELISH. I did a warm-peach-happy dance).

I ate 2-3 peaches a day all week, either whole or cut up with some yogurt. I gave away 18 peaches to my parents, turned another 18 into my Great Grandmother's famous jam (oh, success, I'm so excited about that), and I currently have 9 left that I plan to use for peach pate de fruit. I think I'm brave enough for that.

And we did lose 2 peaches to mold. I checked the box every day for ripeness, but I didn't check one of the corners. Fortunately, it was only two of the peaches, and the remaining 9 are in the fridge and should be used within the next 2-3 days.

What about the raspberries?

I used 3.5lbs to make jam. (raspberries, 2.5cups sugar, splash of lemon juice, a package of low-sugar pectin, all boiled together and then jarred. It's good, but a little seedy, maybe I should have strained it at some point.)

I froze 2.5lbs to use this winter, when grocery store raspberries will cost about as much as gold (and be about as tasty).

I kept 1lb in the fridge, spread out in a single layer on a paper towel-lined dish. (Even 7 days after picking them, they were all still in great condition- this is why you should buy local produce. Grocery store raspberries would have been a huge mess of mold by now)

We ate about a pound that afternoon (I'm not kidding, we ate nearly one whole green container).

And I made raspberry cobbler!

Biscuit topping:
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup AP flour
2t baking powder
1/2t salt
1T sugar
1 stick cold butter, cut into pieces
3/4 cup cream (I meant to use fat free 1/2&1/2, but I accidentally pulled out the light cream container instead)

In a food processor, pulse the dry ingredients. Add in the butter and pulse til mixture resembles coarse meal. With the food processor running, pour in the cream in a steady stream, stop when it just comes together.

Fruit filling:
6 cups raspberries
1/4 cup sugar
2T cornstarch

Toss together, transfer to 8x8 baking dish.
Form biscuit dough into 9 balls, line up on top of berries. Sprinkle with sugar. Bake at 375 for 45 minutes.