Summer Homemaking | Farmhouse Meals, Cottage Kitchen, Harvest

Hello and welcome to Cottage Time. I'm Alicia. Today's video I'm going to be sharing some of our summer meals and harvests in the cottage kitchen. I gathered some potatoes for our dinner today. I'm going to be making potato salad. I'm using the Organic Valley recipe. I'll link it in the description. I did tweak it a little bit. I'm not going to be putting eggs in the potato salad. This year I planted the Kennebec potatoes. Our harvest done before the potato plant. It's completely died back and I have these new potatoes. The flavor of these is so good. I plan on planting these potatoes from now on. And potatoes are a crop that are really easy to grow in containers if you don't have the space for a garden in the yard. For our summer meals I'm trying to use as much as possible from the garden. Eating seasonally is a goal of mine. While I was in the garden I also clipped some chives for the potato salad and some dill. I clipped extra so we could have some to put on salads and just cooking throughout the week. So right now we're eating a lot of potatoes. We have a salad several times a week. I'm slowly bringing in purple hull peas. And we just picked up our beef for the year. So red meat and vegetables from the garden is on the menu a lot right now. Growing up potato salad was one of my favorite dishes that my mama would make. She doesn't make it much anymore so she can't really remember how she made it. But the organic valley recipe tastes very similar to how she would do it. And my youngest son loves it too. Anytime I serve it then hours later he'll be going to the fridge checking to see if there's any leftover. The day before I made two pounds of sloppy joe. So we are having leftover sloppy joes with potato salad. And I'm gonna eat some fresh veggies with mine. I'm not doing bread right now but everyone else will have a sandwich. This is the first year that I've gotten such a good onion harvest. I was recently watching the wartime kitchen documentary and they showed how to hang your onions. So I am going to hang some in my cottage kitchen. Shawn has already hung a bracket over here for me. And we tied a string and then put a knot in the bottom. I'm gonna start by wrapping the string around one onion and tie a knot. And then all the other onions will rest on that one going up the string. So you take two onions of similar size and cut the green part leaving several inches. And I'm just gonna twist the green part for those two onions and place them on top of the onion that is on the string. And as I go up the string I will alternate sides filling in where the onion needs to needs to lay. I really like the rustic look of the onions hanging here. And as I use them through the next few weeks I will just take from the top cutting off an onion as I need it. Now my onions are not as clean as you would find in the grocery store. I guess they would be cleaner if I had a more loomy soil. But mine is clay and the dirt just don't want to come off. So I'm not gonna pick at them too much because I want them to last as long as they can. Now it is a new day and I am chilling some purple hull peas that I picked this morning. These always make me think of my grandma Mamie. She grew these every year. And I have such sweet memories of us sitting under the shade tree and chilling purple hull peas. I didn't get quite a whole mass of the peas. So I'm gonna stretch them by adding some potatoes to them. And that way we can all get a little bit. With the peas I'll be making meatloaf and we'll have coleslaw and some fresh cucumbers. I'll leave the recipe for the meatloaf in the description. This is gluten-free. Instead of breadcrumbs I'll be using oatmeal. Shawn and the boys love to eat a meatloaf sandwich with any of the meatloaf left over. If you've been here for a while you know that we not too long ago hung the copper pipe to hang cast iron on. Well the brackets are not strong enough. So for now I just have a basket and one small cast iron until I can go pick up some stronger brackets. I do have a loaf pan but I just prefer to cook it in this pot. And I will shape it kind of in a loaf with my hands and cook it on 400 degrees for 25 minutes or until it's temp's done. I always use ketchup on my meatloaf for the top. My kids love the ketchup and they will sometimes even add more ketchup once it's done. But I was curious if you make a meatloaf what your topping is. If you would let me know in the comments below. I'm gonna cook the peas and potatoes with some chopped onion and jalapeno. And I will usually add butter but I'm out today so I'm gonna add a little bit of olive oil. I cook the peas and potatoes on medium low for about 20 minutes. We have our meals together around the dining room table. Sometimes I'll put the meal on the dining room table but then other times I'll just put it on this table. We fix our plate in here and then go to the dining room. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you have a joy-filled homemaking week. And if you would be so kind please leave me any video suggestions that you would like to see in the upcoming weeks. And I'll talk to you in the comments below.