I think I might be nuts...

You see that pretty picture over there to the right. The one that says A to Z Blogging Challenge? That's what I'm going to do in April, along with getting ready for the farmers market season, writing more articles than ever, finishing the two cookbooks and on and on and on...

I can truly blame it on my friend Marie Anne. She's a Marine and I know she could take me if I didn't join in the festivitatin'. Go see her at Marie Anne's Missives.

Now, for the A to Z Blogging Challenge. Arlee Bird over at Tossing it Out has a grand plan for me. During the month of April, I'm going to post every day except Sunday. Take away those 4 Sundays and I'm left with 26 days. Oh, and there just happen to be 26 letters in the alphabet. I've already got A & B in my head...I even know what to write about for Z.

So, are you going to join in? Don't make me send a Marine after you. She handles an M-16 as good as she handles a crochet hook. Click on the pretty picture and it will take you over to sign up.

Spaghetti Sauce by the Gallon!

I love to cook but sometimes we're a little short on time. I love stocking the freezer with the good stuff so we don't fall back on mass-produced crap or think we have to pick up fast food. Double-duty cooking means you take a few extra minutes when preparing one meal to make enough for a second or more.

Hopefully, we'll have luck with growing our tomatoes and maybe score a deal like we did last year. Harry got an amazing price on about 120 pounds of tomatoes from a vendor at the Pataskala Farmers Market in August - $25. I turned most of it into Bloody Mary Mix but also made a couple of quarts of tomato sauce and froze some tomatoes after I peeled and seeded them. They were so good this winter but I'm completely out.

I'm already planning to make this sauce when the tomatoes come in and popping it in the freezer. If you aren't adventurous enough to start from fresh tomatoes, this version of spaghetti sauce uses the canned variety. Quit paying Ragu and Prego and whatever other companies are out there. Homemade spaghetti sauce is a breeze to make. My version makes one gallon for about $5 - how many meals will that make for your family?

Yeah, there's steam coming off of the onions, shallots and garlic. I forgot to take a picture when I used the red wine vinegar to deglaze the pan. Deglazing gets the yummy bits off of the bottom. Be careful to not scorch the garlic.

Here's the spices - seems like such a small amount for so much sauce. Do you know how hard it was for me to actually measure something while I wasn't baking?

After you add the tomatoes and the tomato sauce, throw in the spices. Stir it up, bring to a simmer and leave it on low heat until it's yummy.

I added our homemade meatballs to the mix. You can add browned ground beef or Italian sausage. My friend Trish uses meatballs, Italian sausage links cut into chunks and browned boneless country style pork ribs. Harry was in heaven when I described it to him!

Spaghetti and meatballs with a fresh-tasting sauce - even from canned tomatoes.

Get all the specifics for Double-Duty Cooking: All Purpose Italian Red Sauce by following that link.

Let me wine a bit...

I'm craving wine. I have a bottle of Icewine from our trip to Ontario last fall but that's not turning me on. We thought about opening it at the holidays but for some reason - maybe the whiskey slushies - we forgot about it. I'm craving mead, but was short on cash when we went to Hill's Market a couple of weeks ago. Next trip will involve plenty of cash for goodies from Brothers Drake Mead in Columbus, along with more Belgian-style ale from Rockmill Brewing in Lancaster.

What I really want is what I can't get here in Ohio. Our visit to Peninsula Ridge Estate Winery last fall was perfect in more ways than I can explain. Just a short distance from Niagara Falls in Beamsville, Ontario, I experienced my first tasting in which I understood the phrase "mineral notes". I felt like I grew up overnight.

We tasted several wines and had to make a choice on a limited wine budget. We ended up with the 2007 Merlot and 2007 Riesling. Neither of those bottles made it back to the states!

Aside from the beautiful view of Lake Ontario, Pen Ridge had one of the best cheese selections I've ever experienced at a winery. More than 30 options, many from artisan cheese houses in Ontario and Quebec but some delicious imports as well. The Douanier from Quebec was my first experience with a vegetable ash cheese. Yeah, it sounds icky but trust me - it's a perfect complement to a rich, buttery cow's milk cheese.

I've written a more detailed review of Pen Ridge that you can find here.

Happy wining!

Ohmygosh! Chocolate AND Icewine? I might break into that bottle of 200 Vidal Icewine from Mountain Road Wine Company sooner than I thought!

Meatballs, meatballs, meatballs - subs & spaghetti!

A good meatball sub is hard to find. Harry loves them but doesn't like how the spheres roll out when you try to bite into it! These little beauties are perfect for spaghetti or subs.

I wrote this recipe and left out the veal for anyone who freaks out about eating baby cows. My preferred blend of meat is 2 parts ground beef, 1 part Italian sausage and 1 part ground veal. But, in the interest of all, no baby moo-moos were harmed in the making of this blog post. The photos you see are beef & sausage.

I prefer making a bunch at once and freezing them. Double-duty cooking is huge around here. Why just cook for one meal when I can put something in the freezer for a night that we might not have 2 or 3 hours to spend in the kitchen.

There it is in a big ol' bowl. Ground beef, sausage, our own homemade bread crumbs, some egg and spices and just a bit of Frank's Hot Sauce. I use granulated garlic for these so I don't have to worry about scorching garlic bits while I'm sauteing the meatballs.

All squished up and ready to be rolled. I wish I could find that picture of the mountain of meatballs in my food porn file. This recipe makes about 40 meatballs.

FOUND IT! YAY! It only took about 10 minutes to roll all these by hand.

 I love my collection of cast iron. The "youngest" I have was one that Mom gave me when I first got married in 1983. I needed it to make corn bread and it honestly took about 5 years before I could say it was truly "seasoned" properly. All of the rest of my collection is at least 70 years old.

Sorry - back to the meatballs. My friend Trish showed me how to make them years ago and how to keep them semi-round. Don't overcrowd the skillet - you need some room so cook them in batches. Roll each meatball into the skillet and shake the pan to keep them moving. You're not trying to cook them all the way through. I have another friend who has gotten the method down to not even brown the meatballs before adding them to her sauce. Must mind-meld with Pam Gaulin.

Isn't that pretty? No, I'm a dork and each time we've had meatballs subs, I keep forgetting to take a picture.

For all the ingredients follow the bouncing ball to Double Duty Cooking: Italian Meatballs

Yes, really. Frank's Original Red Hot DOES come in one gallon jugs! I try to catch it on sale at GFS Marketplace for around $10. If you don't have a GFS around you and you put that sh#t on everything, you can order it here.

Homemade Pizza and YES! It's almost round!

There's a few places I love to get pizza from. Rotolo's in Grandview is worth the trip. They don't have inside seating, so we eat in the parking lot while it's still piping hot! Those perfect little crispy-edged pepperoni, curled up and filled with grease - heaven! Fracasso's in Center Village has a patio and a dining room - oh, and BEER! I'm fond of Pizza Burg in Centerburg even though they use a conveyor oven.

I prefer the old school places that still have a real pizza oven - stone baked at about 500 degrees so the crust pops and crisps quickly. We lined our ovens with unglazed quarry tiles two years ago and never looked back. I leave them in the oven full-time. It doesn't affect the pan baking in any way.

We love pizza night. No, I mean the nights that we make our own. The tiles in our ovens at 500 degrees make a crust we love and the pizzas are done in about 7-8 minutes.

After I originally wrote the recipe for the sauce, I changed my method a little bit. Rather than adding the balsamic vinegar with the tomato sauce, I use it to deglaze the pan after sauteing the onions and garlic. Well, this time I used shallots - because I can.

Isn't this gorgeous sausage? We bought the house grind at Carfagna's. I had to let Harry go a little crazy with the seasonings to give it more of an Italian flavor.

 This is the closest I've ever gotten to making pizzas that were actually round. I've tried everything - and trust me, you don't want to ever see me trying to throw a crust in the air. We used a pressing method this time - Harry squeezed the dough between two round cake pans and that gave me a good start.

Mmmmm....pizza sauce! As I worked, putting on the ingredients, the crust continued to relax a bit and I was able to smooth out the parchment paper.

 We love lots of cheese and put on a thin layer just above the sauce to help everything stick together.

Remember the carnivore? Yes, we must have lots of pepperoni.

I like onion on my pizza. I try not to force Harry to eat too many vegetables with his pizza, so it's a rare occasion that I might throw on some green olives or fresh tomato slices.

And Harry's special-seasoned sausage. There's one pizza joint that we like but we can't order sausage for our pie there. They always put it on top, the cheese is on the bottom and you always lose the sausage.

So - to save our sausage, we always put the cheese on top. Lots of cheese. No, I didn't shred this myself because I was being slightly lazy. 

Now - how good does that look? No we didn't eat three pizzas in one night. The leftovers were breakfast and midnight snacks for Harry for a few days!

This crust recipe really is a breeze. It's important to let it rest for at least an hour to make it easier to work with. When Allison came home for the holidays, I made the crust and sauce and browned the sausage before we headed to the airport and kept it all in the fridge. Works like a dream.

Follow the link for Easy Homemade Pizza Crust and Sauce

For the price, this is a decent stone. Oh, and don't buy one of those fancy-schmancy wooden pizza peels. I have a restaurant-size stainless steel pizza peel that I picked up at Wasserstrom's for about $12.

Yes, The Wright Taste is going to try it again...

Hopefully, without killing ourselves. At the end of the farmers market season last year, I decided I'd had enough. The market had changed and our profit margin was abysmal. After returning our kitchen to its normal winter "fun" condition without all the evidence of a business kitchen, I was able to think with a clear head.

New rule No 1! (Thanks Bill Maher!) No more than one market on any given day. This means that we'll only do 3 markets a week at the most. We've picked our three most profitable - Delaware, Pataskala and Mount Vernon. Wednesday, Friday and Saturday - I can do this without spending 80 hours a week in the kitchen.

New rule No. 2! Stick to the basics. I let my home bakery license expire last fall and have no intention of renewing it. Most of the products we sold at the markets fell under Cottage Food guidelines (more on that later). Even our special orders almost always fell under cottage foods, so less stress.

New rule No. 3! Get back to the shelf-stable items. That means working my tail off writing in April so I can afford all the ingredients and supplies for our spices and mixes. Yes, Buffalo Dust, Fiesta Dip and more!

Not a rule. Well, maybe. If all goes according to plan, the first two cookbooks from Debbie & Harry's Kitchen will be ready by the start of the market season. One will include recipes to make the best use of the market season bounty. The other will feature, well, the recipes of The Wright Taste. In the past, I was reluctant to share those recipes but we had a lot of discussions this winter and decided it was definitely the way to go. There's a lot of products that we aren't going to make anymore and hopefully, I'll still hear "but why don't you make this anymore" from customers.

So, hello spring. Looking forward to summer and a successful market season for The Wright Taste.

If you're looking for a way to make some extra money in the summer, follow the links to learn about Ohio's Cottage Food and Licensed Home Bakery regulations. Good luck!

Cottage Foods in Ohio: Low-Cost Home Business
Licensed Home Bakeries in Ohio: Homemade Business that Works

See you this summer!

 

If you decide to open a cottage food business or licensed home bakery, the best investment you can make is a digital scale. Labeling requirements include an exact product weight.

Homemade Cadbury Creme Eggs

No, I can't take credit for this recipe for Cadbury Creme Eggs. My favorite Canadian Savannah dweller, Angie Mohr, came up with this one. She and I have a lot in common - we both want safe, local food sources to outweigh mass-produced crap. She beats me in some ways because she has actually *made* her own sea salt. Of course, living close to the ocean makes that a little easier.

Think about it - those addiction-inducing Cadbury eggs that are gone as soon as Easter is over are possible to make at home. Oh, and when you look at the recipe, you'll see that there aren't any chemicals. No, light corn syrup is not the same thing as high fructose corn syrup that is used to cheaply sweeten so many products.

So here you go - follow the link to Angie's recipe and indulge yourself year round.

Homemade Cadbury Creme Eggs

Thanks Easter Bunny! BAWK BAWK and thanks to donzeladef over at sxc.hu for the cute pic!

And - if you can't quite get the hang of shaping the homemade eggs by hand, Amazon has a mold for you!