Local Spagetti Sauce

This is my local Santa Fe style spaghetti sauce. Basically I sauteed some onion and garlic in some olive oil, chopped up tome tomatoes and added a little honey and balsamic vinegar. Then I simmered it until it was thick added the corn and pine nuts and salt to taste. Sometimes I like this with black beans too. If you like meatballs you could make those too. Of course no meatballs is lower calories.

I always use cast iron pans as it added a little iron to my diet and I don’t have to worry about off gases or chemicals leaching from a scratched pan.

Picked up a few things from the coop today: bread from Chocolate Maven, eggs from Rancho Capilla, local pomegranates and some goat cheese from Colorado that was marked down.

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Make Your Own Butter

Homemade Butter, originally uploaded by SFHandyman.

We have a local dairy hear in New Mexico called Rasband Dairy. They have milk and cream but no butter. So again I am searching for an easy way to make my own.

I am not interested in buying equipment or anything new so I was hoping to find a way to make it with my Kitchen Aid. I found a great little tutorial on Bay Area Bites (I love the internet).

Homemade Mayonnaise

Homemade Mayonnaise, originally uploaded by kemih.

I don’t know about you but I don’t have a local source of Mayonnaise so I decided to try to make some. I do have a source for local eggs (year round) but I have not yet found a local source for veggie oil. I did however find a machine you can buy to press your own oil, but it is very expensive. So I have figured that I either need to go without oil or buy the most environmentally oil I can find.

Anyway here is a great site that shows you how to make your own mayo with eggs and oil. I am hopping that I can use my kitchen aid for this but will let you know if I end up whisking it by hand.

Cooking From Scratch

Macaroni and Chees, originally uploaded by David Recordon.

Mac and cheese is a lunch time staple in my house, definately one of my kids favorites!
OK, I have to admit it has been awhile since I made Mac and Cheese from scratch. So of course I just threw some milk, butter and cheese in the pan and poof it’s mac and cheese. NOT. Just like all cooking there is a little bit of a trick to making good cheese sauce. It’s not quite as easy as using powdered cheese from a box. As I learned with a little web research its best to mix equal parts butter and flour/starch together (melt the butter first) and then add milk to make a basic white sauce. After that take the pan off the stove and add the SHREDDED cheese. Let the heat from the mix melt the cheese. If the cheese is over heated it gets stringy (which was my problem). Tadah! creamy mac and cheese.
Of course mine didn’t turn out like the picture but I am sure it will next time.