July 4th Feast Recipe Round Up

The most patriotic of days is coming up next week. Just wanted to share this little round-up of recipe ideas to help make your holiday delicious!

MEAT

Barbecued Beef Short Ribs

Grilled Pork Chops With Balsamic Glazed Peaches

SAUCES FOR GRILLED YUMS

BBQ Sauce

Chimichurri Sauce

Garlic Scape Pesto

SALADS & SLAWS

Creamy Coleslaw

Red Cabbage, Lime, Cilantro & Honey Slaw

Asian-Style Slaw With Carrots, Cabbage & Cilantro

Chopped Summer Salad

Smoky Spicy Sweet Baked Beans

Green Bean & Potato Salad With Lemon Dill Aioli

Creamy Beet Salad

Curried Potato Salad

BREADS & BISCUITS

Skillet Cornbread

Sweet Potato Biscuits

Cheddar-Dill Beer Bread

DESSERTS

Strawberry Shortcake, Cream On Top

Fresh Peach Cobbler With Biscuit Topping

Chocolate Raspberry Tart

Rustic Plum Tart

DRINKS

Strawberry Mint Lemonade

Meyer Lemon & Bergamot Orange Citrus Cooler

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Garlic Scape Pesto

Have you ever seen a field of garlic scapes blowing in the breeze? It's an awesome sight. I could barely believe they were real the first time I saw them growing -- the crazily curling shoots seemed like some wonderfully whimsical cosmic joke.

For those of you who are not yet familiar with this charming-looking treat, the garlic scape is the flower shoot of the hard-necked garlic plant (there are two basic varieties of garlic - hard-necked and soft-necked but the soft-necked kind does not produce scapes).

As it shoots up, it begins to loop around and form these wonderful curlicues before the flower at the end opens. They can also double as avant-garde jewelry -- Medusa would've loved these babies...

If you're growing hard-necked garlic (it's so easy to grow your own garlic - you should try it!), you want to cut the scapes off before the flowers open as that will preserve more energy for the plant to make the bulb (a.k.a. the head of garlic you'll harvest in a month or two) bigger.

But don't throw them away once you've snipped them 'cause garlic scapes are also good to eat. They have a nice flavor that is garlicky (shocker, huh?) but mellower than mature garlic. You can stir-fry them, steam them and eat with butter, pickle them (post coming soon!), sautee them and MAKE PESTO OUT OF THEM!

We had a rather large bunch of these after our first CSA pick up of the year because I had lost my head at the Kingston Farmers Market over the weekend before the pick up and bought a big bunch of them (not realizing they'd be included in our share.) This seemed like the perfect time to make pesto since we had enough scapes to freeze some, too.

Although you can make pesto with just the scapes, I chose to add a lot of herbs as I like the added flavor and also tend to find the scapes by themselves rather intensely garlicky.

As with any pesto, amounts and ingredients are delightfully flexible (I always feel a little silly posting a "recipe" for something as basic as pesto...) I had recently made chimichurri (another magical green sauce...) so I used some of the leftover mint, basil, parsley, and oregano I had on hand. And of course lots of pinenuts (almonds or walnuts would be good, too), Parmesan cheese, olive oil and salt.

The resulting pesto is herby with a decidedly allium-induced kick to it! Toss with pasta or roasted veggies, drizzle over grilled chicken, smear on some crusty bread and eat with fresh mozzarella or goat cheese, and more. Don't be shy!

Garlic Scape Pesto

Makes about 1 1/2 cups

Ingredients (these are all approximate!)

* 1/2-1 cup fresh, washed basil leaves
* 1/2-1 cup fresh, washed parsley leaves (you can also add or sub in oregano, cilantro, mint, etc.)
* 1-2 cups garlic scapes, both ends removed (you want to cut the flower end off as well as the lower part of the stem since it will have gotten rather hard since picking), and chopped into lengths
* 2-3 Tbsps pine nuts (or toasted almonds or walnuts)
* 2 tsps salt (or more to taste)
* Freshly ground black pepper to taste
* At least 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
* 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, grated

Directions

1. Put the scapes, herbs, pine nuts, salt, pepper and cheese in the bowl of a food processor.

2. Process, adding the oil a bit at a time, until desired consistency. Taste and adjust the salt and cheese accordingly.

3. Use right away or store in an airtight container in the fridge - it should keep for about two weeks. You can also freeze any extra pesto in an ice cube tray and then transfer to a freezer bag for much longer-term storage.

You might also like:

• Grow Your Own Garlic
• Pickled Garlic Scapes
• Chimichurri Sauce - Argentinian and Addictive...
• Wild Ramp & Parsley Pesto

Want even more recipes, photos, giveaways, and food-related inspiration? "Like" the Garden of Eating on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter or Pinterest.

Cherry Fruit Leather

I hadn't even realized that there is a cherry season here in the Hudson Valley but, thanks to a fortuitous Facebook post by a friend, we spent a few hours picking the most gorgeous sweet cherries at Fix Brother's Fruit Farm in Hudson last weekend. It was a glorious morning - clear and sunny with a nice breeze that kept us from getting too hot. The cherries hung like jewels from the trees against a backdrop of bright blue skies as I waddled about, letting my almost-7-months pregnant belly lead the way.

Our small son basically ate his weight in cherries by using his mouth as his bucket - it's highly efficient and probably saved us a few dollars since they did not ask us to plunk him on the scale when it came time to pay... By the end of the outing, he looked like he'd committed some sort of grisly murder. It took a lot of wipes to get rid of the "evidence".

Then we spent the rest of the day making things with those cherries -- namely, cherry pie, pickled cherries from the new Food in Jars cookbook and this here cherry fruit leather.

My husband and I had thumbed through a variety of cookbooks for inspiration before we headed out to the farm since we wanted to get a sense of how much we'd need to pick and what kind for various projects.

We were drawn to the fruit leather recipe in Sherri Brooks Vinton's excellent book, Put 'em Up! in part because it was so simple and in part because our son LOVES fruit leathers and we were intrigued by the idea of making our own.

We don't have a food dehydrator (yet) but this recipe just calls for you to bake the leather on a cookie sheet at very low heat in the oven for a few hours.

The resulting fruit leathers are beautiful and very delicious - sweet and intensely flavorful. Roll the sheet up and slice it to whatever width you'd like.

I think I would use a little less sugar than the 1/2 cup Sherri's recipe called for next time, depending on the sweetness of the fruit I was using.

They're a definite hit with our son. We'll see how long the jar on our countertop lasts...

-- print recipe --
Cherry Fruit Leather
Adapted from Put 'em Up!

Ingredients

* 4 cups sweet dark cherries, stemmed and pitted (a cherry pitter will definitely come in handy)
* A large splash (roughly 1/5 cup) of water
* 1/4 -1/2 cup sugar (original recipe calls for 1/2 cup but these would have been plenty sweet with less)
* You will also need either unbleached parchment paper or a Silpat

Directions
1. Put the cherries and water in a medium-sized pot (taller sides are better since you'll be blending in the pot) and bring them to a boil. Simmer until the cherries begin to break down, about 10 minutes. Puree the fruit, using an immersion blender or by pouring it into a blender and then back into the pot again (an immersion blender is sooooo much easier for this type of thing - if you don't already have one, I highly recommend that you get one!)

2. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees. Line a jelly-roll pan or rimmed baking sheet with unbleached parchment paper or a Silpat and set aside (next time, I would use a Silpat as the paper did stick in a few spots when it came time to peel the leather off of it.)

3. Add the sugar and continue to simmer the cherry puree over low heat, stirring frequently, until it thickens to the consistency of baby food - this may take 10-15 minutes.

4. Spread the sweetened, thickened puree onto the baking sheet, tilting to create an even layer about 1/8 inch thick (note, it is challenging to get the mixture truly evenly spread - ours ended up slightly thicker in the middle so part of the leather ended up a tiny bit sticky). Bake in the oven until just tacky to the touch, about 2 hours (this took us significantly longer as our oven kept turning off - it doesn't seem to handle low temps well :()

5. Cool to room temperature. Slide the parchment paper or Silpat onto a cutting board and peel the leather off. Then cut the sheet of leather in half across the middle (the short way), roll each half up and slice the roll into two to three inch-wide pieces. Store, rolled up in an airtight container on the counter for up to a month.

You might also like:

Maraschino Cherries

Sweet Cherry & Onion Chutney

Strawberry Jam