Holly & Heather’s Helpful Hint: Celebrate the Fourth of July!

It’s easy to take our freedoms for granted. We live in a country where we are blessed to be able to enjoy our rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Not everyone in the world has these rights. There may always be something to complain about in life but we have the freedom to complain or not to! So we try not to!  On July fourth, we celebrate our country’s independence and our own individual freedoms. We are thankful for all those who fight or have fought to keep these ideals a reality. We will proudly fly our flags this week along with our fellow Americans! Happy Fourth of July!

Holly & Heather’s Helpful Hint: First Week Farm Share Adventure!

Two weeks ago, we began blogging about our new adventures in buying farm shares.  It has been a fun and challenging start, trying to utilize so many different kinds of produce we had never heard of or eaten before (garlic scapes anyone?).  You receive whatever the farm is ready to harvest, everything in season. This week brought in a lot of different lettuces (5 varieties), strawberries (which we picked in the fields ourselves because it is so labor intensive for the farm owners to pick a quart for everyone that has a share), asparagus, radishes and bok choy.  The large amount of produce we got, especially so much lettuce, will be challenging to eat before it goes bad.  We have small families and since everything has no preservatives it has to be consumed within a few days.  The farm gives a newsletter with your share the day before you pick it up letting you know what you’re getting along with some recipes (lots of different salad dressings for this week!) and storing instructions to keep it fresh as long as possible.

We have been experimenting with recipes – some simple, some not so much. Here’s Holly’s recipe for asparagus.  It was the most delicious asparagus we ever tasted!!

Asparagus and Ham Pie

Ingredients: Asparagus, diced ham (fully cooked), three tbsp butter, two tbsp flour, one cup chicken broth, 1/2 cup milk, 1/4 cup water, garlic powder, one egg, one cup Bisquick

Melt butter in a large skillet, add flour to make a rue. When combined, add broth, 1/4 cup of the milk and water. Stir till thick and bubbly. Add garlic powder, asparagus and ham. Cook till heated through. Pour into an oven safe pie dish. In a separate bowl combine egg, Bisquick and remainder of milk. Pour this batter over the asparagus/ham mixture in the pie dish. Place in oven and bake at 350 degrees about 15 minutes until the top crust is golden brown.

Here’s Heather recipe using the bok choy.  This is a stir fry with other store-bought vegetables, it was quick, easy and delicious!

Cauliflower Fried Rice with Bok Choy

Ingredients: 2 tbsp sesame oil, 2 cloves minced garlic, 1/2 tbsp minced ginger, 1 carrot diced, 2 small baby bok choy sliced, 1 cup frozen peas, 1 small head of cauliflower (chopped in blender to resemble rice), 1/4 cup soy sauce, 2 eggs scrambled (pre-cook them and set aside)

Heat 1 tbsp of sesame oil in a non-stick pan and stir fry garlic and ginger for no longer than a minute.  Add carrots and bok choy and stir fry until softened a little.  Add peas and cauliflower and 1 tbsp of sesame oil and heat thru.  Add soy sauce and stir.  Add cooked scrambled eggs and stir to combine.

Holly & Heather’s Helpful Hint: Celebrate Father’s Day!

This Sunday is father’s day and we would like to wish our dad the best father’s day ever!  If you have a great dad (like we do!), a partner who’s a dad or a father figure in your life, we hope you can take this weekend to do something special for him.  We will be having breakfast with our dad and making a bbq for him and our husbands – you must know by now that our family loves everything food related, a gift we got from our dad! – as well as sharing time together.  It will be low-key but relaxing and enjoyable time spent together.

Happy father’s day!  We love you dad!

Holly & Heather’s Helpful Hint: Adventures in Farm Shares!

Heather’s Farm Share This Week:

 

 

 

 

 

Holly’s Farm Share This Week:

We are always thinking about ways in which we can help make this world a better place and supporting local organic farms is a great way. You are helping the environment by supporting chemical-free growing as well as buying your produce locally which saves on shipping. Plus your family is eating healthy and that’s a plus for a happy home when everyone is feeling great!

On to the farm share – So here is a weird twin-thing that we did…out of the blue we both got a share in a local farm on the same day without knowing the other one did and it’s the first time we are trying it!  We are often on the same wave length about things and when we told each other, we got the idea that it would be fun to blog about the experience.

If you aren’t familiar with the process, here it is in a nut shell:  You give the farm a set amount of money for a certain period of time (Heather’s is for the growing period of June-November, Holly’s is a week by week commitment) and in return you receive whatever they are growing that week.  So we are assuming you could get lettuce, carrots and cucumbers one week and maybe radishes, beets and asparagus the next.  If you get an unfamiliar vegetable they give you some recipes to help you out too.

Since we love cooking and try to eat healthfully, we thought (at the same time!) it’d be fun to blog about being a novice in a farm share.  So we’ll share our adventures with you from time to time as we try something new!

Holly & Heather’s Helpful Hint: Plant!

It’s planting season for us here in the northeast. Things are blooming all around us and we are doing yard cleanup’s and getting our hands dirty planting new things. Each year we container garden a few vegetables, plant some new shrubs, and sow some decorative seeds for flowers in pots of all different colors. But even if you can’t get outside to grow something new, keep some plants around all year round in your home. They add color and life to corners of rooms and window sills and say to the world – this is a happy place, things grow here! They are great at helping to clean the air too. So get digging in the soil to bring a little more joy to your surroundings!