admine9519, Author at Morning Song Farm - Page 14 of 44

These are fun, and kid-friendly little bites of deliciousness. You can use a regular muffin tin if you grease carefully, but if you pick up one of the new flexi-tray products that are rubber-like, you won’t have to use grease to keep them from sticking.
Ingredients:
A little local olive oil to saute mushrooms
The entire bag of this week’s baby spinach
4 farm fresh eggs
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
1 half pound of mushrooms, chopped
2 Tablespoon cream
1 clove garlic
Salt, pepper and dash of Tabasco to taste

Heat your oven to 375. Using the olive oil, saute your mushrooms and set aside.
Using the same saute pan that you used for your mushrooms, combine spinach and 1/4 cup water; cook spinach until just wilted. Scoop spinach out of saute pan and press water out through a colander or sieve.

Combine all ingredients and fill muffin tin. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cauliflower is so mild and sweet, that prepared correctly, even the pickiest kid will often enjoy this recipe.

Ingredients:
3 cloves crushed garlic
3 Tablespoons local pressed olive oil
1 head of cauliflower, cut up
1/3 cup grated parmesan cheese
salt, pepper and dash Tabasco to taste
2 Tablespoons chopped cilantro

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Use a little of your olive oil to grease a large casserole dish.
In a bowl , mix cauliflower and ingredients except cheese and cilantro.
Bake for 25 minutes, stirring halfway through. Then top with your cheese and cilantro, and broil for 3-5 minutes until golden brown.

Couscou looks out from his barn that he grudgingly shares with the farm’s dairy goats.

Yet another way to enjoy your butternut squash!

Ingredients:
1 butternut squash
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 Tablespoon honey
1 Teaspoon dried oregano
1 Teaspoon dried basil
Salt and pepper, to taste
Dash of hot sauce
1 chopped bunch of black kale, (main stem removed)
2 cups collage cheese
12 cooked whole wheat lasagna noodles
1 1/2 cups shredded mozarella cheese

You need to start this recipe with a cooked squash. You can microwave it in pieces until soft, or bake at 350 for 45-60 minutes. Either way, cut at least in half, (smaller pieces cook faster) scoop out seeds and place in a dish of water.

After it’s cooked to roughly the softness of a cooked potato, remove, cool enough to handle and scoop out into a bowl.

Put garlic, honey, spices and dash of hot sauce in Cuisinart or other blender and blend until smooth.

In a pan of boiling water, steam chopped up kale until just slightly soft.

Then combine cottage cheese and kale. Put 1/3 of your cooked, mashed squash into the bottom of a 9×12 baking dish. Layer with 3 lasagna noodles. Spread 1/2 of the cheese/kale mixture over the noodles. Layer with 3 more noodles. Repeat, finishing with the squash layer. to[p with mozarella cheese. Bake for 45 minutes at 350F.

Enjoy.

We weren’t sure how Boo’s first birthday party would pan out… as, well…you never quite know with a spoiled-beyond belief miniature goat with a mind of her own. Lance made quite the deal out of it, certainly more than he’s made out of any one else‘s birthday around here for a while. Ha ha! There never was a prouder goat owner, that’s for sure. He even went to a bakery and picked up a healthy blueberry muffin for her birthday cake. No unhealthy frosting here! Boo didn’t want anything to do with her “goat cake,” unfortunately, and her other guests stomped right over it to get to that tasty looking book.

Boo waits impatiently for her guests to arrive at her first birthday party.

Boo chooses “content over calories” and eats a book instead of her birthday cake.

Daddy Carl supervises the party

Most of his daughter’s guests ate their hats; but Carl…ever the good Dad, wears his proudly.

This week we’re putting a little something in large shares that at first glance fails to impress. It’s the weird looking lemon thing with a little hat on top. That’s our Pakistani Sweet Lemon. Although the juice of the fruit is usable, it’s not very sour. Where the jewel of this fruit lies is in the skin. The peel will impart a scented-geranium flavor and aroma to baked goods and more. Here’s how to use it easily: grate the entire fruit usign a potato peeler, sharp knife or cheese grater. Throw in your Cuisinart or high speed blender (I use a Vitamix) and add sugar. Blend. Let sit overnight in the fridge. Then use in baked goods, lemonade or salad dressing. It makes a killer sugar cookie additive.

Another easy use: grate and mix with lime juice, (you can use the juice of the Sweet Lemon, too), good quality olive oil, salt, little rosemary, a little bit of water (I actually use ice) and blend. It’s a salad dressing with ingredients that appreciative guests have a hard time putting their finger on.

The family-wide debate over the worthiness of owning a goat herd continues, with strong partisan leaders in opposing camps. Frankie, at 18, sees the herd as never-intended-to-be-eaten-meat-on hooves and has zero interest in their finer attributes. He lives in fear of the day one of them jumps on his micro-managed clean-beyond-belief fire engine red Mustang. That would just do him in. Enough so, that if he can’t get opposing counsel to see his point of view, he is up for relocating the herd to somewhere, over there. As in on the other side of the farm. Or the planet. Or perhaps as a reasonable compromise, someone else’s farm. “You could visit, often, mom.” He has, however, finally prevailed in his long held belief that Lance and Boo Boo should conduct their “mommy and me” time, not in our living room. Now in Lance’s defense, Boo Boo is Lance’s little mental health provider, and he likes hanging out with her away from the rest of the herd in peace. Like any mother-daughter relationship, they do need their alone time. And though the internet says it can’t be done, Lance has house trained Boo. That’s not to say she’s house trained like, say a cat. It has been argued that the term “house trained” should be species specific. As in a house trained goat shouldn’t be held to the same standards as a house trained dog. Boo would have eaten the entire Christmas tree if Lance allowed it, dragging her away from it each and every time she entered the living room for the duration of the holidays. He actually suggested throwing our hands up in defeat, and having a Goat Tree this year, just let Boo go to town on the tree and there’d be less to decorate he argued. Really Lance?

On a side note, Carl the Menace did manage to eat the entire Christmas wreath I hung 6 feet up, over the front door. I never saw how he actually managed this….I’m assuming a running start and a body fling toward the wreath perched over the doorframe? Whatever, the wreath was consumed 24 hours after hanging, which pretty much finalized daughter Tessa’s non-partisan position in re the goat issue.

Anyway, Boo’s Christmas Tree nibbling habits, in a certain camp here on the farm, entrenches her firmly in the not house trained category. And then there’s her predilection for prose. Lance has been getting rid of paperbacks he doesn’t want anymore, and Boo Boo is delighted to help in the recycling process. This trait, too; has been pointed out as a character trait that removes the Boo from the house pet category and firmly supplants her in the livestock division. And as the argument goes, livestock shouldn’t be found in the living room, mom. Really mom? We have to discuss this? I don’t know exactly how it happened to me that I found myself debating this, but indeed there has been some debating going on here at Morning Song Farm in re the whole Boo Boo in the living room issue, which is happily now put to rest. Again, we don’t sleep in the barn, and the goats don’t hang out in our living room. We’ve gone over this before, but this time I swear it’s settled.