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What a difference a couple full days of sun makes! Our tomatoes have grown above their cages and all four of the plants have green tomatoes on them. We tried a different tactic this year- we planted less tomatoes in hopes of having a higher yield per plant. Last year they were a little crammed together and we think that we didn’t get as much out of each plant as we could have. We chose to plant one each of Early Girl, Jet Star, Sweet Chelsea and Super Sweet 100 varieties. If we continue to receive some more sun, we may have some tomatoes by the end of the month.

                                                  -Josh

ss_100

saladOne of  the by-products of the larger dinners that we do is that we have all these little bits of leftovers floating around in the refrigerator…which can easily turn into multiple meals for the following week…add some greens from Friday’s market and all those tomato, radish and beet pieces can build a pretty substantial salad…

                                                -Josh

nasturtium_soup

Happy Fourth of July everyone! We used Friday night to kick off the long weekend festivities by having a few friends over for dinner. We tried some new things out on a willing bunch of guests and Chris brought down some of his great homebrew to sample (as well as a few “nuggets” from his beer cellar- including a 12 year old Imperial Stout that he brewed while we were living in NH)…

…first off, Nasturtium flower soup with cucumber shallot marmalade (the Nasturtium flowers and leaves came right out of our backyard garden).

 

 

Spherical_Beet

                                                    

 

            Beet Juice Spheres…

 

 

Cucumber_Gelee

 

 

                                              Cucumber Gelee with almond…

 

 

 

Dry_shot

 

 

 ”Dry Shot”- dehydrated pepper, garlic, breadcrumbs, fried capers and fried oregano leaves (also from our garden)…

 

Soup_sandwiich

 

“Soup and Sandwich”- Mini grilled cheese and tomato consomee….

 

Tobacco_cream

 

 

 

Tobacco cream, blackberry and mint…

 

 

Strawberry_sorbet

 

 

Strawberry sorbet- Ingrid picked the berries five hours before making the sorbet…

 

 

Salmon

 

 

Salmon, white truffle sauce, celery and black truffles…

 

 

We neglected to take pictures of dessert, but we had home made vanilla ice cream with butterscotch…all in all, it was a fun meal with some great people who were perfect subjects for our kitchen foils!

                                                                         -Josh

Today marks the first anniversary of RI100MI in cyberspace! It’s been a great year and we’re looking forward to our next 365 days…this month is especially busy- the markets are now all in full operation and we’re taking a culinary swing to New York City at the end of the month…and then it’s back to strict 100 mile format for August and September…so stay tuned and thanks for reading!

                                             -J+I

QuicheAll this abnormally cold and dreary weather we’ve been having lately hasn’t been super beneficial to doing much outside, but it has motivated me to try a few things in the kitchen- one of them being a quiche. I settled on trying to make one from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon cookbook…it ended up taking multiple days to make, but it was well worth it. I sort of botched the crust by not using pie weights, so it shrunk and sank into the pan a little more than desired so we ended up with a 1″ thick model instead of a 2″…I used eggs and spinach from right here in Rhode Island to make it as local as possible. Seeing that this was our first go-around, I don’t think it  ended up too shabby!

                                                                                                                                           -Josh

It’s me Ingrid – and I am eating one of my favorite desserts.  I’m not sure I would have come across this particular dessert if not for our 100 mile challenge last July and August.  At the time, we were eating a lot (and I mean A LOT) of Narragansett Creamery’s ricotta cheese for lunch and dinner.  I really wanted something sweet one night and I remembered seeing, trying, and liking ricotta pie.  I had never made ricotta pie and I couldn’t make the real thing during the challenge because of the whole crust/flour thing but I thought, I’ll add some sugar to the ricotta ( I still had some sugar therefore I was playing by the rules) and I’ll put it over some fresh berries.  It became our favorite dessert last summer and I have served it over various berries throughout the year.

Well, with the pounds and pounds of strawberries mom and I picked last Friday, there were still some sliced berries in the fridge tonight.  And, I still had a little ricotta left from a previous trip to Goddard State Park.  So now I am happily eating (scarfing is probably a better description) fresh strawberries with some sweetened ricotta on top.  It really tastes like summer for me.

                          -Ingrid

bacon_1

So much for the first day of summer! It was cloudy, cool and gray here in Rhode Island again, so I used the weather to my advantage and tried out another food experiment. This time it was from the Alinea cookbook and it involved bacon, butterscotch, granny smith apples and thyme. I dehydrated some bacon and roasted apple puree (160 degrees in the oven for four hours) to create some “apple leather” and succulent bacon. The bacon was drizzled with the butterscotch which acted as the glue to hold the apple leather strips…a little snippet of thyme was attached to the bacon using the butterscotch as well…bacon was already good, but this recipe brought it to the next level!

                                                                                                -Josh

                                                                                                                                  bacon_2

Not the best day for picking...
Not the best day for picking…

 

…so high water came and Ingrid and her parents headed out to Schartner’s to pick berries.  While her Dad smartly stayed in the car listening to an audio book, Ingrid and her mom managed to pick 19 pounds of berries while trying to dodge the raindrops.

 

 

All laid out to dry

All laid out to dry..

 

 

It took her a while, but Ingrid got all the berries washed, dried, cut and into the freezer. She even delivered a bunch to a friend!

 

 

 

Ready to eat!

Ready to eat!

…and of course, we saved some from the freezer to eat until the next picking session (next week).
Soft shell crab sandwich.

Soft shell crab sandwich.

Later in the day, the sun finally did poke out of the gray skies and it dried up enough for us to eat outside…I had bought some bread earlier in the day over at the Goddard Park Farmer’s Market with the intention of cooking some mussels for dinner. I headed over to Di Mare Seafood in East Greenwich and saw that they had received a shipment of live soft shell crabs in from Maryland. I had cooked them before, but not live ones. I figured that they would make good appetizers- I thumbed through our cookbooks and came up with this open faced crab sandwich. I took two slices of the aforementioned bread, grilled them and then pan fried the crabs in clarified butter for a few minutes. I served them with a simple sauce of cooked egg yolk, oil, parsley and onion along with some fried capers…
Mussels and bread.

Mussels and bread.

…for the mussels, I wanted to try something new. Usually, I do a white wine, dijon and saffron broth but we had some fennel in the fridge along with some frozen tomato pulp left over from another food experiment. I ended up using some onion and garlic in the broth as well, along with some vermouth and steamed the mussels in that for about five or six minutes. The broth was very light (no butter) and went extremely well with the sweet mussels (and was easily sopped up by the bread!).
bee
….as the sun was setting, we noticed that there were a lot of bees taking advantage of the dry weather. We found this one in our Astilbe just hanging out collecting pollen…he stayed there long enough for us to grab a couple of close-ups.
                
                                                                                 -Josh

Come hell or high water (I have a feeling it’ll be high water), I am picking  strawberries tomorrow at Schartner’s on Route 2 in Exeter RI.  It seems like the strawberry season is only 2 weeks long so I need to get out there now.  Last year I picked over 20 pounds of strawberries and I want to get at least 30 pounds this year.  My five servings of fruit a day for a while will be fresh strawberries!  We’ll use the frozen ones for smoothies, strawberry sauce, . . . and I think that’s it.  I’ll have to find more recipes for frozen strawberries.    Ingrid

…we’ve decided to move the blog over to WordPress…hopefully the major transition went well. There should be more features and better content forthcoming, including the ability to comment without having the need for a gmail address! …the www.ri100mi.com address should redirect you here, so no need to look for another one! Keep visting and bear with us while we make the change.

                                                -Ingrid and Josh

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