Yummy Butternut Cranberry Bread With Whole Grains

If you read this blog a bit, you know we love winter squash at Aagaard Farms - us, the goats, the chickens: we're all eating squash!  We grow about eighteen kinds, and are fortunate to be able to store them for winter use.  We're always interested in new recipes.  I receive a fantastic e-newsletter from Simple Bites (use the link and go sign up now!), and this past week, it contained a fabulous link to an article on whole grains from Good Life Eats.  We're really committed to using more whole grains, for the health benefits as well as great taste, and there are some great tips in the article for using, storing, grinding and such.  It also contained a recipe for a whole grain pumpkin cranberry loaf.  Just so happened the night before, I had used part of a butternut squash in a chickpea stew so it seemed like it was 'meant to be' that I should try this loaf.  I had put the butternut not used in the stew in the oven to roast while I was cooking so it was ready to go!

Now, the recipe calls for pumpkin, and I have some 'Sugar Pie' pumpkin here but the butternut was roasted and ready to go.  You can replace any winter squash for another in any recipe - it will just change the outcome slightly.  Using butternut instead of pumpkin probably gave me something a little sweeter and a little smoother.  Once you've baked or roasted a squash, you just need to break it up with a fork or hand blender to get exactly what is in a can without preservatives, colorings, BPA or whatever else.  You've got the goodness of just plain, unadulterated squash.  If you'd like a little review of roasting and preserving winter squash, check out this post here.

Here's the recipe link: it called for whole wheat or spelt, oat and barley flour.  I had organic whole wheat, unbleached white and spelt.  Worked well, the result was a moist, dark loaf.  The cranberries add a nice 'zing'.  The recipe called for a little bit of the spice cardamom, which I didn't have, but I just used a  wee bit more of the other spices called for.  Really like this loaf - that recipe is a keeper!  And good to know that Farmer Man is getting his grains!  You don't have to tell them it's good for them - right?

Dinner Rustica!

We could say that we were practicing for The Dark Days Challenge, coming up.  We could say it was because we were organizing and cleaning the freezers.  Nonetheless, we ended up having a largely local meal, from disparate parts.  I made tomato sauce for the first time this summer.  I used a marinara recipe from Sherri Brooks Vinton's excellent 'Put 'em Up!'.  It's a multi-purpose sauce that, with tweaking, can become almost anything: pizza sauce, pasta sauce, bruschetta base.  I had some cooked, cubed butternut left from making this delicious pilaf with quinoa, cranberries and nuts for Meatless Monday.  In tidying the freezers, we found one small package of a gift from our neighbors Mike and Naomi of homemade deer/pork sausage.  There is a good chance the deer was harvested from our farm, and the pig was raised by a friend of Mike's.  The sausage was delightful with a smokey flavor and coarse texture.  After cooking the sausage, everything went into a skillet to warm.  We boiled some spaghetti, store bought admittedly.  We'll get back to making pasta from scratch, now that things are almost closed up on the farm.  We accompanied the meal with home made bread from the much-used 'Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day' by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois.  The pasta was topped with some grated parmesan, also store bought.  This time next year we hope to be having homemade goat's milk parmesan.  Dinner was followed by a cup of tea from homegrown spearmint, hung to dry in the back room! Now, that's not bad for eating local without really trying!  Are you still eating local food?

Preserving Butternut Squash!

We've had a good harvest of butternut squash this year, which I love!  It's not a squash that stores particularly well because it is a bit thin skinned.  In our root cellar, it will be one of the first to break down, get moldy and grow soft.  It can still be used if the skin is moldy - just clean well and peel, but it will get soft quite quickly, too.  We don't want to feast now, and then have none, so we want to preserve some.

Winter squash cannot be safely water-bath canned because it doesn't have the correct acid level and it is too dense to heat up enough to reliably kill bacteria.  It can be pickled, but that's not what we're looking for.  I haven't found any recipes for a jam or butter that could be canned, but filling it with sugar is not we want, either.  So, yesterday I was freezing it!  Quite a simple process, really.  I oven-roasted a whole bunch of butternut, halved and with seeds and membrane removed.  Once I could easily pierce the skin with a fork, it was done!  I scrapped out the cooked meat into a large bowl.  I've noticed this year's butternut has a high water content, so I put scoopfuls in a strainer and let moisture drip out.  Quite an amazing amount: about a quarter cup of liquid for two cups of cooked meat!  I then portioned it into freezer bags and froze!  I've done the bags in one cup portions because we've really been enjoying these muffins with different winter squash.  Now I'm ready for muffins, soups and many other things all winter long!  Hmmm, maybe I need some muffins now!

Talking Potatoes and Squash in Hartney!

The Hartney Horticultural Society invited us back this year for a fall vegetable talk.  We'd done a squash night last year that was great fun!  This year, we thought to focus on potatoes and baking with winter squash.  We've got quite a unique collection of potato varieties: twenty eight kinds!  Figuring that everyone has had a basic red, white and baking potato we took five of our more unique and rare varieties.  Monday afternoon we steamed up German Butterball (like Yukon Gold, but yummier), Russian Blue the all purple potato, Alaska Sweetheart which is all red potato (yes, skin and flesh is pink/red), one of our favorite fingerlings Linzertans Delicatese and the rare fingerling Pink Fir Apple.   We also baked a butternut squash and Hubbard.  The evening was hosted at the delightful Red Door Cafe in Hartney, so we had access to a kitchen.

Farmer Man gave a little info on growing potatoes and different kinds.  We warmed up our five kinds and served out tastes one by one, just plain so that people could really experience the flavor.  German Butterball and the Pink Fir Apple seemed the favorites of the evening!  Next, we talked a bit about winter squash and baking with it.  We served up a taste of butternut and Hubbard plain, simply roasted.  Then, we offered a taste of a loaf made with Kabocha Japanese pumpkin, and Claris from the Red Door offered tastes of pie and cheesecake made with Boston Marrow, a relative of Hubbard that we had gotten to her earlier in the week.  I think everyone had a chance to try something they'd never eaten before, which we love!  And, we shared with everyone just how easy it is to bake with real pumpkins, or hubbards, or butternuts......

Butternut Apple Curry Soup and a Farm Open House!

What a fabulous day Sunday was!  Our first ever Farm Tour and Open House, and Squash Sale!  Thank you so much to everyone who came out!  It was so nice to have CSA members and Farmers Market regulars out for a tour, answer questions, show them where all their food came from.  We had a beautiful day, perhaps a wee bit windier than we might have liked, but sunny and warm for October on the Prairies! The 'stars' of the afternoon were definitely the kittens in the barn, with the goats a close second!  The dogs were lapping up the attention and the chickens were... well, chickens: bobbing and weaving and staying out from under foot but hanging around to see if anybody had treats.

I must confess I didn't get a single picture of the day - just totally spaced out on that front (bad blogger, bad blogger).  I have asked a few guests if they have any to share and I'll get them up on the Aagaard Farms Facebook page.  But, we did get a few pictures as we were preparing the night before.  We served a butternut squash, apple, curry soup and roasted pieces of Kabocha and Butter cup squash.  The soup was quite a hit and here's the details for everybody that was asking!

The recipe for the soup came from the late Ken Kostick's book 'Ken's Soup Crazy' - an awesome book (which can be had for a very good price on Amazon Canada from some of the re-sellers right now)!   We've had this book for a long time, and have made this soup before.  Butternut squash is one of the most popular winter squashes, partly due to great flavor and texture but also because of it's small seed pocket and large serving of 'meat'.  We chose a big eight pounder - we wanted to make sure we had plenty and we'd happily freeze some leftover soup!  Farmer Man cut the butternut in half, tough even for him.  To get through a large squash or a thick-skinned one like Hubbard, we get the knife embedded and then tap it through the squash with a hammer.  Farmer Man actually reached for the rolling pin, but I made him put it back as I don't really want dents in my rolling pin, thank you very much!

Once cut, it's easy to remove the seed pocket and then Farmer Man peeled the squash.  This one was nice an ripe, so not much rind.  The butternut was then chopped in cubes.  Goodland apples from our young tree were next, much easier to peel and cut!  We're happy to say that a lot of the ingredients came from the farm: squash, apples, basil and onions were all ours.  Everything goes in a pot with the spices.  At this point we had a bit of an emergency: we realized we didn't have enough curry powder for the large batch we'd decided on.  We probably didn't have enough yogurt, either.  So, at 10:40 PM, Farmer Man went racing into town and got to the grocery store just before closing.  A little excitement for our Saturday night!  Unfortunately, when he got home and returned to his task, he realized we didn't have enough vegetable stock but it was too late to do anything about that.  He proceeded to make a large pot with what he had.  We did have the good fortune of good pal Deb offering to come help clean and prepare Sunday morning, so she was able to bring us the extra stock we needed early Sunday morning to get the second batch going.

Chopped squash, chopped apples, chopped onion, basil, cinnamon, curry, pepper, stock and apple juice are brought to a boil, then simmered fifteen minutes or until the squash softens up. Use a stick blender to puree in the pot, add yogurt and serve!  We were serving from a crock pot on low and found the soup separated a bit, so next time we wouldn't add the yogurt until transferring to the serving dish.  We've made this soup before with Hubbard Squash, equally good!

The recipe, straight from Ken Kostick's book:  2 cups chopped, peeled squash, 1 apple peeled, cored and chopped, 1 small onion chopped, 2 tbsp mild curry powder, 1/2 tsp dried basil, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon black pepper, 6 cups low-fat vegetable stock, 1 cup apple juice, 1 cup non-fat yogurt (we used plain Greek yogurt).  We quadrupled this recipe, without any loss of flavor, the original recipe officially served eight.  According to the book, this is a low calorie soup with less than one gram of fat per serving.  And yummy - what more could you ask for!

Frost!

The zucchini this morning!

Truck of Hubbard

 Yikes! Yesterday, Tuesday, frost was predicted and for today, September 14, hard frost is predicted.  Yesterday being CSA day, it was hard to balance getting ready for CSA and preparing for frost.  We concentrated yesterday on the really delicate things like summer squash, tomatoes, basil and cucumbers.  Fortunately, our employee Henry was able to come back later in the day and, while we were meeting our CSAers and holding the wee Neighborhood Country Market, he was picking tomatoes like crazy.  He did an awesome job of picking and sorting, so that the golden are together, the paste types are together and so on!  We still have to 'deal' with them all, picking out the ripe, storing the unripe properly - but that will be another day.  There's something, roughly, like three hundred pounds of tomatoes out there!

After returning home from CSA, about 7:30 PM, we had a bite to eat, unloaded the truck and then Farmer Man put on his head lamp and went to harvest all the cantaloupe and watermelon.  He was out until well after dark.  It actually got colder than predicted: about -2 C with a 'feels like' value of -5 C (about 28 F, feeling like 22 F).  We woke up to frost on the grass and roof, and shrivelled plants all over!  Now, for those of you not in Manitoba, perhaps not even in Canada, frost on September 13th is not bad for us!  It has been known to come in August!  It has also been known to come as late as the end of October, so it was inevitable, but still too early for any gardener!  It was a harsh one, too; this was no light touch of frost!

Up this morning and back at it with an even colder evening predicted for tonight!  We had figured that root vegetables would all be all fine; winter squash could take one night, but probably not two of freezing temperatures.  Frost causes water-soaked areas where rot is more likely to start.  It wouldn't really affect the meat, but it makes them rather ugly and more prone to quick deterioration.  Our great selection of winter squash is a mainstay of our Farmers Market business through to the end of October, so worth spending a little time!  We had Carissa and Henry coming to pick potatoes, as we are trying to finish that harvest and get potatoes cured so that we can sell bigger bags for winter storage.  We got that done in toques and scarves.  A little rest and a snack and we were off to the north field, which holds carving pumpkins, Sugar Pie pumpkin, Hubbard squash and the popular Butternut.  Our Butternut have done awesome this year, but few are ripe!  We loaded the back of the truck with Hubbard and the related heirloom Boston Marrow, as well as ten gorgeous Halloween pumpkins.  The bucket of the tractor was stuffed with Butternut.  The truck was unloaded into the garage, and we returned to the field and stuffed it again, this time with more Hubbard and Butternut!  It was an afternoon and evening of cutting stems, picking up squash and carrying them to the truck.  Some of the Hubbard and a couple of the Boston Marrow were well over thirty pounds!  I didn't carry any of them.....

Back at the house, a wee rest, and back out!  Farmer Man took the head lamp and the tractor and went up to the Sugar Pie pumpkins.  He dropped me, drop clothes and a few crates at the lower field of winter squash.  I harvested or covered Australian Blue Pumpkin, Spaghetti and Delicata squash.  The Kabocha and Buttercup will have to fend for themselves - there was no more daylight, energy or drop clothes!  There were still goats and chickens to put to bed.  Farmer Man returned with a bucket load of pumpkins, which are all just parked in the barn.  The last truck load of Butternut and Hubbard was backed up to the garage and covered; there was no energy for unloading.  Now, we wait and tomorrow we'll see what the night brought us!