Eating from a Country Garden- Slow Living in Spring

You won't find a perfect garden here but what you will find is lots of good things coming out of the ground that are going to feed our family of six. We have spinach and lettuces and radishes and spring onions coming out of the ground. My body is craving something that is fresh and green and nutritious. So we are going to enjoy making some delicious spring meals this week. Some beautiful gardener before me planted these peonies and I love picking them each spring. They smell like heaven. This house was built in 1918. The original farmstead is just across the way and has a sign that says it was built in 1848. That means that this little family farmstead has been around for a very long time and I like to think about the gardener or the woman who used to live here and built this house over a hundred years ago. I try to imagine what she grew in her garden and as I tore up the kitchen floor in here the tile that was cracking I revealed the original farmhouse wood floors and I like to think of Nadine Clark was her name treading across this kitchen floor and I like to imagine the things that she would cook up and maybe just maybe she was doing something similar to what we're doing today preserving her garden goods and cooking fresh things for her family. The first thing we're going to be cooking up in the kitchen today is pickled radishes something I like to make each spring when radishes are popping out of the garden. It's equal parts water and vinegar, one cup of vinegar, one cup of distilled white vinegar, about three tablespoons of sugar and a tablespoon of salt. You can add pickling spices to this peppercorns, coriander, cinnamon sticks, whatever kind of flavors that you like in your pickled radishes. I love adding some onions to this because I am a sucker for some pickled onions and I never seem to make enough for my two quart jars. It's just enough to go for a whole quart and some more so I always have to return back to the stove and make a little bit more. My neighbor Bill, who is a gardener as well, always tells me that I need to try a radish sandwich so today I thought I would give it a try. He puts butter on his bread and tops it off with some fresh radishes and that's it. It seems pretty simple. It must be one of those simple spring pleasures. I thought it was better with some salt and pepper and I can imagine be even better maybe with a little bit of dill or basil on top. The first real meal that we're making for the family today just hits all of the spots that I've been craving. All of the fresh vegetables and greens from the garden. It is an Asian sirloin tip salad. This is actually a new recipe for me. I love Asian inspired flavors and this recipe calls for a crunchy Asian rice to go on top as a topping. So you take two cups of rice and to that you add olive oil, soy sauce, two teaspoons of red curry paste, some salt and pepper and then you lay it out on a parchment covered baking sheet and put it in the oven at 400 degrees for about 30 to 40 minutes and you toss the rice in between and it's just this lovely crunchy topping with bursting with flavor. And anytime the weather gets good and it's nice and sunny outside I get a hankering for cooking on the grill and so we're going to cook these sirloin steak tips out on an open fire and I'm just going to top them off with a little bit of sesame oil and salt and pepper and go sear them on the grill and then we'll finish baking them off in the oven. I can't tell you how delicious these sirloin steak tips were. Moist and tender and they're actually farm fresh from ButcherBox. I always get so excited when my ButcherBox arrives with all the fresh garden produce that I'm excited to be cooking with. I also get to cook with fresh farm meats. What I love most is knowing that the meat comes from animals that were raised well. That means without antibiotics or added hormones and in lower stress environments and that matters because healthier animals makes better food for us. ButcherBox has a variety of beef, pork, chicken, and fish. Just the other day Jared was telling me that he wanted me to make my healthy chicken wings and so I was so excited to find that they were in my box this week. And now that we are in warm grilling season they have the most wonderful steaks. Just look at the marbling in these steaks. They're absolutely delicious. The 100% grass-fed beef and the chicken tenders are a staple in our freezer. I love how you can individually cut them so I just put them in a container and put what we're going to eat for the week into the fridge to thaw and put the rest in the freezer. Having this all come to your door is incredibly convenient and you can get $60 off plus free protein for a whole year when you use my link. You scan the QR code or you can use my code PIONEERHOME at checkout. The spring weather has just been wonderful. A mix of sunny warm days, days to work in the garden, work on our little tiny house project. We've actually been painting that this week and I will try to get some clips of that for you guys soon. And then there's days that are just rainy and cozy like today and I just love these days. So we're starting out the morning by making a German pancake or a Dutch baby pancake. I'm saving the tops of my strawberries and covering them with distilled white vinegar. I read online that you can do this to make kind of a strawberry vinegar and then make strawberry vinaigrette for your salad so I'm going to give that a try. Today we are going to put some strawberries on top of our German pancake just for fun just because we can and it's strawberry season here in Missouri. I make this breakfast a whole lot. My kids ask for it all the time. It's six eggs, a half a cup of all-purpose flour, and a half a cup of milk. You mix that all up. I like to blend it with my immersion blender and put four tablespoons or so of butter in a 9x13 pan. Melt that and pour it all in. I bake it for about 20 minutes or until it's puffy and crispy and delicious. I didn't know what I was going to make today but what I did know was that my body was tired from the hard work the day before working in the garden and painting in the tiny house and what I was needing was comfort and rest and so this soup was just perfect. I didn't have any chicken broth but what I did have was those chicken wings from butcher box so I put four of those wings in the instapot with some water some onion and carrots and I put that in there for about 30 to 45 minutes on high pressure and voila we have chicken broth for our soup and I just love the herbs that are in this soup especially the dill. Every spring I like to cook some sort of chicken and lemon and dill soup. Today I added some peas to this soup as well. The original recipe does not call for protein but I threw in those chicken wings for a little bit of protein. It does have lentils and rice in it and it was so belly warming and comforting on this rainy day and bursting with bright herbs and lemon flavors. As the weekend was approaching I thought it would be fun to put together some cinnamon rolls but in this case some strawberry rolls. We have all these delicious fresh strawberries. We're gonna make some yummy strawberry rolls for the weekend and I'm making them very similar to how I make cinnamon rolls. I use the same dough recipe but I covered the dough with butter and some of my homemade strawberry jam and a bunch of fresh strawberries. This is the time to lean into spring to take advantage of all of the beautiful and fresh things that are coming out of the garden right now. All of those beautiful delicious seasonal things like berries that just don't last forever. So take advantage of the sweet moments. I look forward to preserving jams and all sorts of wonderful things here pretty soon. If you want to know how to make delicious cinnamon rolls go ahead and pour a little bit of cream over the rolls before you bake them and they always come out gooey and delicious and my favorite is spreading them with cream cheese frosting. So I have a batch of strawberry rolls and a batch of regular cinnamon rolls. If you love vintage inspired living and old-fashioned recipes keep watching this channel. I'm loaded with pioneer living and old-fashioned recipes and if you're crazy about that then you should check out the pioneer post which is my mail club and I will put a link down below along with some recipes. I give a video each Monday and I'll see you next time. Love you lots.