This winter is killing me. Any temperature above 20 degrees feels downright balmy. I can't wait for spring. On the upside, I'm get to be more creative with winter produce (kale! root vegetables!) and I am becoming a serious sprout fiend. I usually make popovers that we enjoy with butter and jam, but the savory popover is so good. I expect to do more experimentation in the future. Roasted Kale Parmesan Popovers 1 bunch kale 1-2 tbs lemon juice 2 tbs olive oil 1 1/2 cups flour 1 1/2 cups milk 3 large eggs 1 tsp kosher salt 1/4 tsp pepper 1/4 cup parmesan cheese 1/4 cup ricotta cheese Butter or oil for muffin tin Preheat oven to 400 degrees Remove the stem from the kale and roughly chop the leaves. Toss with olive oil, salt and pepper and roast on a cookie sheet for about 10 mins until wilted and softened, but not charred.

Place the kale in a large bowl (if you have an immersion blender) or blender. and turn the oven up to 450 degrees. Add the remaining ingredients (except for the cheeses and butter or oil for the muffin tin) and blend for a good 30 seconds. You really want to chop up the kale and get the batter frothy (one of the secrets to a popped popover). Lastly, stir in the cheeses.

Grease your muffin tin and put it in the preheated oven. Let it preheat for about 5 minutes. The other secret to a good popover is preheating the muffin tin. So, heat it until it is smoking (really). Remove it from the oven and fill each tin with batter. I divided the batter evenly and got each tin about 3/4 full.

Bake for 15 minutes and serve with butter and soup for a cozy winter meal that makes you not even mind the sub-zero temperatures.

This time it's for real

This is fun! I keep promising myself and my zero readers that I will blog and I never do! But seriously, this time I'm going to blog. I think I have something to say and things to explore with the help of others. I think what I want to explore is cooking and loving my home state of Iowa. So let's forage and cook and figure out fun ways to be thrifty and creative (because otherwise I'm going to spend my time online filling up shopping carts and abandoning them).

mother-fecund-mess

do you know what you're looking at? me neither. let me clarify. i know that this is my "garden" and that i planted many things in it and put much much llama manure on it (like a whole truckbed full), but at this point i find it difficult to distinguish the weeds from the plants. i guess that's the thing about gardens is you have to do stuff with them throughout the growing season; namely, watering and weeding. so, i was in my "garden" the other day and started to panic because all i'm really finding is broccoli and tomatoes and a few leeks and sage which is not all that i planted. my solution was to grab handfuls of seeds and spreading them all willy-nilly throughout the sunniest least weedy areas. i started out the year really on top of my game. i got my starters planted in early march and did the a whole manure/tilling bonanza just so i could avoid this exact situation. oh well, it's not a complete bust. i know i'll have tomatoes and . . . there's always next year.

What my eating?

today was a salad day, which turned into salad and rice (when i read about rice - i'm pretty impressionable, luckily i wasn't reading about beer), which quickly evolved into sushi. i guess it's not technically sushi since it's fish-free, but it was delicious. so i washed and chopped radishes, jalapeno pepper, avocado, cucumber, red pepper, carrots, and some mint and kale from the garden, rolled it all up with some rice . . . mmmmmm. *like how terrible my photos are?

long woods deep

I have to come to terms with something . . . I have a perchance for quitting. I'm a hard worker and I like to start things, but finishing them is another story. I'm a quitter. I have quit or thought about quitting pretty much everything in my life. I quit college and I tried to quit climbing a mountain mid-ascent and I quit my marriage until I thought better of it. I even quit laboring for a few hours while I was giving birth. I'm sure there's some psychological basis for my quitting, but I'm not interested in that. I AM interested in turning over a new leaf and sticking to something for the long haul. So, I'm going to blog. Admitedly, it's not revolutionary and it won't keep my child warm at night (like that half-finished quilt in the closet). It won't even help me keep my house clean or work more (if anything it will help me procrastinate doing both of those). However, it's something I've decided to do for real this time. This will be my third blog attempt in as many years and this time it's going to be awesome. I vow to blog everyday for a year! . . . Maybe every other day . . . Probably a few times a week . . . we'll see how it goes.