Blackberries

 We are running roughly a month late here in western Washington state, but blackberry season is now upon us. Bob has been picking them for me and I've been experimenting with recipes. It's cool to have so many blackberries around here that I can experiment a bit.

Blackberries are an invasive species here. They are everywhere. Lots of people kill them off. I have seen them engulf entire houses if left unchecked. We don't mind them as long as they don't encroach on our space. We can coexist.

I made 2 different blackberry recipes this afternoon. The first one is Blackberry Spice Cake. This is my new favorite cake recipe, hands down. Not only is it just too easy to whip up, you don't need a boatload of blackberries. You only need around a cup or so. You can just eyeball the amount. You don't have to be exact.

This is a simple and delicious cake recipe. I don't feel it needs frosting at all. If you feel the need to put something on it, sprinkle it with powdered sugar. I don't feel it's necessary, however. It can stand alone.

I creamed soft butter with sugar. Then I added in a couple of eggs.

The spice mixture is cinnamon, allspice, cloves and nutmeg.

I picked out a cup of some of the best looking berries and added those in.
Then, while this was baking, I put together an Apple-Blackberry Pie.
The apples came from our orchard.

So, you'll get a bonus blackberry recipe in this post!

This cake is so delicious! I'm hoping I can make it with frozen berries and not have a purple cake. We shall see later on.

And the pie turned out great. It wasn't cooled down by the time I started writing this post, so we'll wait until tomorrow to cut into it.

Blackberry Spice Cake
*Makes one 9x9-inch cake (9 generous servings)

1 cup fresh blackberries
2 cups flour
1/2 cup soft butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 9x9-inch baking pan with nonstick cooking spray. Mix dry ingredients together in a small bowl. Set aside.
Cream butter and sugar together. Add eggs. Add half of the dry ingredients alternately with the buttermilk
Fold blackberries into batter very gently so that you don't break them up. Spread evenly into baking dish.
Bake 45-50 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle pulls out clean.
Cool completely before cutting.


Apple Blackberry Pie
*8 servings

Pastry for a double 9-inch crust
5 cups peeled, cored and sliced tart apples
1 pint fresh blackberries
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 tablespoons butter
1 egg
1 teaspoon water

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Line pie pan with bottom crust.
Mix sugar with cornstarch in a small bowl and set aside. Peel, core and slice apples and toss with lemon juice. Add sugar mixture to apples and toss to combine. Gently toss in blackberries. Add to pie shell. Top with other crust and crimp edges.
Mix egg with a bit of water. Brush over the entire top crust. Cut several vents into top crust to release steam. Bake for 50-60 minutes or until filling is bubbly and the top crust is golden brown.
Cool thoroughly before cutting.

Enjoy!

Harvest Chicken & Rice

 Today was relatively cool at. We barely broke 70 degrees out. I had harvested quite a few of my Walla Walla Sweet onions a few days ago and we had a pretty decent picking of green beans. I also harvested my garlic so that I could get ready for the new seed garlic that I have coming in.

I came up with a new recipe for dinner tonight.

Bob had taken out a package of bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs to thaw a few days ago and I needed to get them used up. We also picked a pretty decent sized mess of beans.

These are a mixture of my Tongues of Fire, Dragon Tongue, Tanya's Pink Pod, Cherokee Wax, Blue Lake and Contender beans.

The Harvest Chicken & Rice recipe starts out with a chopped sweet onion. You could use a Vidalia if you don't have Walla Walla Sweets available. I also chopped up one of my small heads of garlic. It doesn't get much more fresh than this.

I melted butter with olive oil. This is what I used to saute the onions and garlic.

Once the onion gets translucent, add in the rice and orzo mixture.

Saute this until the orzo starts to smell toasty and gets lightly golden brown. I cooked this in an enameled cast iron Dutch oven, so I did this low and slow.

I removed the skin from 4 chicken thighs. Then I sprinkled them, both sides, with a blend of spices.

Those get set upon the rice mixture once it has been browned.

Then I poured in chicken broth and water. I put the cover on the Dutch oven and let it cook in a moderate oven for 45 minutes.

This is a simple and delicious recipe. It hit all the right spots for us.

I served this with simple boiled beans. I cooked these in part chicken broth and part water. I didn't get a photo of the end result because we all know what boiled beans look like.

Harvest Chicken & Rice

4 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
1 small chopped sweet onion (like a Walla Walla Sweet or Vidalia)
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon olive oil (or avocado)
1-1/2 cups long grain white rice
1/3 cup orzo
1-3/4 cups chicken broth
1 cup water

Spice Rub for Chicken:

1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
Sea salt and black pepper, to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Pull skin off of chicken thighs and rub with spice rub on both sides. Set aside.

Saute onion and garlic in butter and olive oil over medium heat until onion is soft and translucent. Add in rice and orzo. Stir to coat with oil/butter. Cook until the orzo begins to smell nutty and gets lightly golden brown.
Place seasoned chicken thighs on top of the rice, add broth and water. Remove from heat. Cover tightly. Place in preheated oven and cook for 45 minutes or until chicken reaches an internal temperature of 165 degrees on a meat thermometer.

Fluff rice and serve.

Enjoy!

Spring Frittata

 We decided to have a veggan meal today. Not vegan. It's veggan. Veggans eat eggs. It's spring. I have some fresh veggies in my fridge. I felt like making a quick meal and that would be a Spring Frittata. This is fantastic served with toast or with a green salad. We made a couple of pieces of toast from that loaf of bread I baked off yesterday.

This recipe starts out with a bit of milk and a cast iron skillet. It doesn't matter what type of milk. You can use whole milk (like I did), you can use 2%, you can use skim, you can use half and half...you can even use oat milk, if that's what you like! It doesn't matter. Just use what you have or what you want.

Next, you crack 6 eggs into the milk. I added in some herbs and freshly cracked black pepper before I mixed it all up.

I used a Penzey's Spice blend called Parisien Bonnes Herbes.This blend contains chives, dill, basil, tarragon, chervil and white pepper. It's absolutely delicious and it's right up there in my top 3 favorites from Penzey's.

Next up, I opted for some nice spring type flavored veggies. I used some spring onions, frozen peas and asparagus.

Just measure out your veggies so that they total one cup. 

These get cooked in a tablespoon of olive oil for about 7 or 8 minutes. You don't have to cook them that long. You could just sprinkle them over the eggs, but for Bob, they have to be cooked. I'm okay with that. 

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Add your beaten eggs in. Sprinkle the top with 1/3 cup of cheese (again, whatever cheese you like will work). I used pepper jack. This goes in to the oven for 20 minutes and it comes out like...

This was our veggan dinner tonight. 

So, this dinner was completely from scratch and that includes the strawberry jam, as well.


Spring Frittata


6 eggs
1/4 cup milk
1/3 cup grated cheese
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup total chopped spring onions, asparagus and frozen peas
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon Penzey's Parisiene Bonnes Herbes herb mix

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Whisk eggs with milk, pepper and herb mix.
In cast iron skillet, saute vegetables in olive oil for 5-8 minutes, sprinkle with 1/4 teaspoon salt. Add egg mixture, shake to distribute evenly.
Put in preheated oven. Bake 20 minutes. 

Bread Making Day

 Today was my day to bake bread and cinnamon rolls. Bob has a medical procedure in a few days and he has to eat a low fiber diet for next few days. Anyhow, I didn't feel like going to the store for white bread, so I decided to just make him some. Since I had enough time leftover and I found the optimal place to let dough rise, I decided that I would make cinnamon rolls for the first time ever. He can eat those, too. They are basically white bread and he's allowed to have sugar and spices.
Anyhow, I started with the white bread recipe. 

The bread starts out with proofing the yeast. I always do this. If you use instant yeast, I think you can skip this step. I don't use instant yeast, however.

Whenever I work with yeast dough, I let my KitchenAid stand mixer do the work for me. 

I don't even have to knead it! I'm all about work smarter, not harder. 

There was a lot of humidity in the air today, so this took quite a bit more flour than the recipe called for. 

The dough gets covered with a clean towel and I set it up on top of my Keurig coffee maker. It's pretty warm and it did the trick nicely.

I put it into a loaf pan. I wanted a more square shaped loaf, so I flattened it out a bit. 

It may not be a thing of beauty, but it turned out exactly as I wanted it to. This will slice up nicely.

After a quick round of washing dishes, and having Bob dry them, I decided that I had time to make cinnamon rolls, too. 

These were a bit messy to make, but I was able to contain it all on my cutting board for the most part. 

I fit 10 into a 9-inch pie plate. There were another 4 that went into another pan. 

They baked up really nicely. I impressed myself!

Of course, I had to gloop them up with cream cheese icing! That's a given!

So, on a day when the skies looked like this...

and Ravioli was playing with Lily-Pill, like this...

It was a good day to just bake bread.

Click here for the bread recipe.
Click here for the cinnamon roll recipe.

Bread recipe is from Sally's Baking Addiction.
Cinnamon roll recipe is from Ambitious Kitchen.
Both recipes are keepers in my book.

Braised Potatoes & Chicken Thighs With Scallion Butter Sauce

 It appears that we got through that atmospheric river with minimal damage. I think we sustained a knocked over trellising pole that is cemented into a 5 gallon bucket and our arch blew over.

We will rebuild.

I did get potatoes planted and I planted out some of my old wooden raised beds with spring greens, radishes and turnips. I planted various types. I am going to stagger planting and I'll seed more stuff in 2 weeks from now...fill in the blanks, so to speak. I do love to practice the art of cramscaping!

In the meantime, I needed to figure out what to make for dinner tonight. I had originally thought about making Chicken Cacciatore but, over the years, I've had that so many times that I'm, quite frankly, rather bored with that recipe. I knew I wanted a braised dish but I didn't want to use canned tomatoes. I can only eat so much citrus because I have a sensitivity to citrus and I've been eating oranges like crazy.

This recipe evolved from there.

I even dug out my cast iron skillet so that I could properly braise in it. I have a small 8-inch skillet and it works perfectly for portion control for the 2 of us. With this recipe, you'll definitely need portion control. It's that friggin' delicious!

I prepped everything ahead of time. There's bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, diced red onion, sliced lemon, lemon juice, butter, garlic and scallion. You'll also need to peel up a large baking potato, as well. You're going to boil the potato until it's barely fork tender. 

The thighs get browned up in a cast iron skillet (use one that can go into the oven). Brown for 5 minutes on one side, turn them over and cook for 5 minutes on the other side. By this time, your potato should be cooked. Just drain it and set aside to cool just a bit.

Don't rush it. Let them brown. You'll thank me later when you taste them. 

Once the chicken is nicely browned, add in the other ingredients and pour in the chicken broth. Don't add the lemon juice or butter yet. Reserve those. 

I covered my skillet with foil and popped it into a preheated 400 degree oven. I set a timer for 35 minutes. The timing made perfectly cooked, tender, fall apart chicken.

Melt the butter in the hot skillet once it comes out of the oven and drizzle with lemon juice. Enjoy!

Braised Potatoes & Chicken Thighs With Scallion Butter Sauce

Serves 2

4 chicken thighs
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large russet baking size potato, peeled and cut into 8 pieces
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 small red onion, diced
French grey salt and freshly cracked black pepper, to taste
1/4 cup chicken broth
Juice of half of a lemon and the other half sliced thinly
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 thinly sliced scallions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Boil potato until barely fork tender. Drain and set aside.
Heat olive oil in a cast iron skillet that can also go into the oven. Season chicken on both sides, to taste, with freshly cracked black pepper and French grey salt. Brown chicken, skin side down,  in skillet, for 5 minutes, or until golden brown. Turn over and brown the other side.
Once chicken is golden brown, nestle the potato pieces in with the chicken, sprinkle the onions, garlic and lemon slices over the top. Add 1/4 cup chicken broth. Bring to a simmer, cover skillet and put in preheated oven for 35 minutes or until chicken is 165 degrees on a food thermometer.
Remove skillet from oven. Remove foil cover. Gently lift a piece of chicken up and add the butter and very gently move butter around until it is melted. Drizzle lemon juice over the top and sprinkle with scallions.
Serve.

Blueberry Sour Cream Pie

 Our temperatures here have been fluctuating. We had beautiful sunny days, up in the 60's. We had some very cold nights. Now, we're under yet another atmospheric river and we're getting dumped on with rain. Last night, there were some wicked wind gusts. I'm glad I didn't insist that my 12-foot long portable (probably flimsy) plastic greenhouse be set up. It wouldn't have made it through. 

We finished up watching 1883 on Paramount+ this morning. I won't post any spoilers but I will say that the show was one of the best shows I've ever seen. I can't wait for more! 

I need to get my tomato, pepper and eggplant seeds going here in the next week or so. We planted a small asparagus bed, with 6 crowns for now. I do have asparagus seeds, so I'll be adding to it. We also planted 10 red raspberry bushes, 2 gold raspberries and 2 blue blueberry bushes. I'm going to be taking cuttings from my Pink Lemonade blueberries and I'm trading those for quite a few things to expand my berry garden: mulberries, 3 colors of currants: red, white and black, purple raspberries, black raspberries, (just need white to have all the colors), 2 types of figs, gooseberries and Concord grapes. I didn't realize how much these pink blueberries are sought after! Who knew??!! So, I'll be using my greenhouse for berry/fruit cuttings to get established as well as other things.

I put up another 5 pound batch of sauerkraut and will post a blog about that in a few weeks after it gets sufficiently sour for us.

Today, however, I'd like to talk about a recipe that I created this morning after looking at a Lemon Sour Cream Pie recipe. I have lemons, for sure, but I also bought some really nice looking blueberries (speaking of which, in the next few years, I plan on NOT buying blueberries again from anywhere). I wasn't exactly sure what we were going to do with the blueberries, but a quart was only $3.50, so it was one of those deals that was just too good to pass up but it was an impulse purchase. I know that Bob was talking about wanting a slice of pie the other night, so this sounded like the ticket. Anyhow, looking at sour cream lemon pies turned to perusing single crust blueberry pie recipes and this recipe is a result of that.

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

It starts out as you would think with a bit of flour, a pinch of salt, some sugar and an egg.

I also used a cup of sour cream. This recipe is very helpful when you have a container of sour cream that is nearing the expiration date and you can only eat just so many baked potatoes. 

I only use the best vanilla extract. By "the best" I mean vanilla extract that I made myself, using a fifth of locally made craft vodka with around 20 to 25 vanilla beans soaking in that sucker. There's no better vanilla extract on the planet, as far as I'm concerned.

Everything is whisked together until nice and smooth.

I like that this only uses a single crust. I had some pre-made crusts hanging out in the freezer and taking up space that could be used by more important things. I'll use the other crust to make a Buttermilk pie. When I do that, I'll post about it.

The blueberries get gently mixed into the sour cream mixture. Make sure to fully coat them all.

Then pour it all into a the pie shell. It's not going to look like it's enough filling. It's supposed to look that way. You'll understand later on. I promise. Spread the blueberries out evenly throughout the crust. Pop this in the oven and set a timer for 30 minutes. 

In the meantime, make the topping for the pie. This is the standard flour, sugar, butter streusel mixture that we're all familiar with. It's pretty straight forward. 

This is what you're pie will look like when you pull it out 30 minutes later. See? I told you that there was plenty of filling in there. 

Sprinkle the streusel mixture evenly over the top of the pie and put it back into the oven for 15 or so minutes. I have a little RV propane oven, so mine took an additional 25 minutes. Just check after 15 minutes to see how it's starting to brown up. 

I don't let my streusel topping brown up too much because Bob wouldn't be able to eat it. It makes a stunning looking pie. 

No matter how you look at it, it looks scrumptious!

Blueberry Sour Cream Pie

1 pie shell for a deep dish pie, either pre-made or make your own

Filling:
3/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup sour cream
1 egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 quart fresh blueberries, rinsed and well drained

Streusel Topping:
3 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1-1/2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Mix all the filling ingredients, except blueberries, in a large mixing bowl, with a whisk, until completely smooth and all ingredients are well incorporated. Gently fold in blueberries, coating them all, taking care to not smash any.

Bake in a preheated oven for 30 minutes.

In the meantime, make the streusel topping by cutting the cold butter into the flour and sugar until all the dry ingredients have been combined. I use a fork for this. Set aside.

After 30 minutes, remove pie from oven, sprinkle streusel mixture evenly over the top of the pie. Put back into the oven between 15-25 minutes or until the struesel has browned up to your liking.

Remove from oven. Let cool thoroughly before slicing. Refrigerate leftovers.

Enjoy!