Last night, we had my cousin and sisters over for dinner, and did traditional Fourth of July meal of … pasta. :) It was what we were in the mood for and it’s easy for a crowd. I’m still craving things cooked over fire, but I’m generally craving things cooked over fire; hopefully we’ll break out the grill this week.

We started out with baguettes and butter and chopped up tomatoes doused with a little olive oil, onion powder, salt, and pepper. I’ve made these baguettes for every company dinner involving bread for awhile now, and they’ve never failed me. I doubled the recipe, getting 4 big loaves out of it, and all that was left this morning was one 4-inch long chunk. What can I say - we like our bread. :) Half of it went to work with Jeff to go with his lunch today, and I’ll get the other half. (The flour was organic, and the tomatoes and butter [well, the cream that made the butter] were local.)

Dinner was angel hair pasta (purchased, not homemade; I’m not up to make angel hair yet) and red sauce (a jar of sauce that my mom put up from her garden a couple of years ago, plus a little organic tomato puree to thicken it up, since it just wasn’t thickening on its own), white sauce (local butter and milk, organic flour, little bit of olive oil), with a little grated cheese on top (Ohio, sold at our farmer’s market) and a big tossed salad (Farmer’s market lettuce, tomatoes, and green peppers, and cucumbers from my daddy’s garden). I tried this ranch dressing, and it wasn’t bad. Far too sweet. I doubled the recipe but left the sugar and vanilla at single-recipe doses, and it was still way too sweet. It was also way runny, even with adding extra mayonnaise. However, the spices were dead on, and the dill really stuck out. It works, but will just need some tweaking next time.

Desert was Breyer’s ice cream (buy one get one this week, about the only frozen food we still buy) and homemade blonde brownies, from How to Cook Everything. They took a lot of butter, but they were so tasty:

• 8 tablespoons butter
  
• 1 cup brown sugar (medium, dark, whatever you like. I used half light and half dark)
  
• 1 egg
  
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
  
• pinch salt (I used 1/8 a tsp)
  
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
  

Grease an 8×8 cooking pan (and grease it well; I had a heck of a time getting the first brownie out of the pan). Melt the butter (I just threw it in the microwave for 30 seconds or so). Mix in everything else in order; until you get to the flour, a hand mixer will make it much faster. Pour into the pan and bake in a 350 degree oven 20 to 25 minutes, until just set. These will make your whole house smell like butter and sugar, and waiting for them to be done will be torture. :)

Most of dinner went together in about 40 minutes, so I wasn’t away from the socializing for too long, and it was a good Fourth. We watched a movie and played board games. I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday.

Meal: crustless quiche, bread machine baguettes, green salad
Cost: about $2 each
Time: 40 minutes in the oven, 15 minutes prep for the quiche, plus some time for the salad and bread machine time for the bread dough
Leftovers: a small chunk of bread that I used for a sandwich for Jeff’s lunch. Apparently, we were hungry. (And salad makings, but I deliberately cut up way more than we would need, so that we would have salad makings for dinner tonight.)
Local ingredients: cheese, eggs, milk, salad greens, tomatoes, green peppers
Organic ingredients: flour, carrots

We’ve talked about quiche before, but last night was a new recipe, and it was definitely a winner; we’ll be sticking to this for our crustless quiche from now on. The recipe came from Simply Recipes, where quite a few of our new recipes come from. Elise features recipes that use whole ingredients, that are generally pretty easy to prepare, and that are easily modifiable, and this quiche was no exception.

The original recipe for this quiche calls for 10 ounces of cheese and a cup of cottage cheese for 5 eggs. That is a heck of a lot of cheese. I love cheese, and I’m not sure that even I can contemplate eating that much cheese at a sitting. So, I used to recipe as an idea and took off. I made the roux, and then once it was cool, added the baking powder and salt, and 1/2 a teaspoon of mustard powder to it, then mixed it into 8 eggs beaten with a third of a cup of milk (to make up for not using the cottage cheese, which would have added some moisture). I stirred in 2 cups (8 ounces) of a mix of shredded colby, vintage cheddar, and muenster, and that was it. (There are too many conflicts between food likes and dislikes with the folks we were do movie night with to do any mix-ins or toppings. Eventually, I’ll get around to buying ramekins, and then we can have customized quiches.) That was it. It went into the oven in an 8×8 dish for the proscribed 40 minutes at 350 degrees, and came out slightly brown and puffy. The end result was creamy and cheesy (I could probably easily cut down on the cheese on the next batch, too, and at one-fourth of the pan coming in at 500 calories, I probably will.) I found it to be slight lighter than my normal quiche - more like a souffle - while Jeff found it to be more substantial than my normal efforts, and liked it a lot more. My cousin and sister also approved, so I think we have a new default recipe.

Meal: homemade pizza
Cost: more than our normal pizza, because of the vegetarian pepperoni and vegetable toppings that I don’t normally get, but still cheap compared to ordering pizza out. Adding up the cost of the pepperoni, especially, would be an exercise in tedium because I buy my spices in bulk. Maybe $3.50 each?
Time: about half an hour active, plus a couple hours for the dough to rise and 12 minutes baking time
Leftovers: a couple of slices of each pizza. Jeff’s is going with him for lunch, and I’ll eat mine today or tomorrow.
Local ingredients: cheese
Organic ingredients: some tomato sauce, olives, spinach, mushrooms

Last night was our normal movie night with my sister and my cousin, and feeling uncreative, we planned homemade pizza. However, this was different from our other homemade pizza nights (we do love pizza, as evidenced by the fact that we eat it almost once a week) in that I made vegeterian pepperoni, and I tried a new crust recipe. Both met with nearly unqualified approval.

I (for once) didn’t change much about the veggeroni recipe, other than the fact that I didn’t have liquid smoke on hand, so I substituted Worchestshire, and we didn’t have agave syrup on hand, so I used sugar, and it was still very good. We didn’t have aluminum foil on hand, so I formed it into a log and baked it like that. I’ve been waiting to try seitan before but had been intimidated, but this was very, very easy and came out great. It was as good as any commercial vegetarian pepperoni I’ve had, and won approval from the resident carnivores. Be warned - it’s rather spicy. It was too spicy for my sister, and almost too spicy for me at first. I’ll be toning down the heat with the next batch.

As for the crust… we like our normal bread machine crust, but it’s very dense and very chewy, resulting in a very thick crust, and Jeff had requested that we try a thinner crust. I tried just using less of it, the last time we made pizza for just the two of us, but it wasn’t very stretchy, and was difficult to thin up. So, I went off in search of a new crust recipe to try. The Moosewood restaurant cookbooks have yet to fail me, and they didn’t this time either:

Pizza Crust, from The Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates

Yeast Mixture:

- 3 cups hot water (100 to 115 degrees F)
- 1 tbs active dry yeast (not instant)
- 2 tbs unbleached white flour
- 2 tbs honey

Dough:

- 5 cups unbleached white flour
- 2 cups whole wheat flour
- 1 tbs salt

Clean your counter, a pastry board, or a very large cutting board. You are going to need some space to work here.

Mix together the yeast mixture ingredients until the yeast dissolves; let sit for 5 or 10 minutes. It should end up foamy and creamy.

Combine 4.5 cups of white flour with the wheat flour in a large (very large bowl), and mix in the salt. Stir in the yeast mixture and stir for a couple of minutes, until the moisture is evenly distributed and you can form a ball of dough. Flour your hands and the counter/cutting board, and transfer the dough to it. Kneed for 5 to 8 minutes, until you have a smooth ball of dough. This is going to be a soft, slightly sticky dough. Oil a large bowl, place the dough in it, cover, and let sit in a warm, draft free spot until the dough has doubled in size (about an hour). (I used a dutch oven in my oven, the only way to guarantee a uniformly warm spot in my house, even during summer. The recipe recommends covering the bowl with plastic wrap, but if you hate using it as much as I do, I would think a lid or clean towel would work just as well.)

When the dough has doubled, pull it back out, punch it down, and kneed 1 to 2 minutes. If you want to freeze the dough, now is the time to do it; pinch off the sections you want to freeze and store them one to a freezer bag or tupperware container. Otherwise, pinch off a ball of dough and roll it out to your desired size and thickness with a rolling pin. Place on an oiled pan and top, baking 8 to 10 minutes at 500 degrees F or until done.

–

My notes:

This is a rather wet dough. This might be partly because I used all white flour instead of white and wheat in combination. I think I’ll use 2.5 cups of water next time instead of 3 (next time will be awhile, as I have 3 bags of dough in my freezer), and add more as I need to. On the other hand, I had wanted a more stretchy dough, and I definitely got that. It was almost too stretchy - when I rolled it out, it didn’t hold its shape very well and stretched out when I tried to put it on the pan. I ended up having to do some shaping once it was in the pan. We had been aiming for thinner, and got it, but next time, would aim for a little thicker than we got this time - the slices were a little floppy. However, this had a great flavor, and managed to be crispy and chewy at the same time. Freezing the dough might help with the stretchiness of the dough - I’ll report when we use one of the frozen dough balls.

I prebaked the crusts for two minutes before topping them, and they cooked for 12 minutes after that, not the 8 to 10 specified. Then again, the pizzas were loaded down. One was cheese and vegetarian pepperoni, and the other had mushrooms, spinach, tomatoes, and olives, as well as garlic and vegetarian pepperoni on one side.

This makes a lot of dough - I made one 16 inch round pizza and one 12 by 16 rectangle, and froze two-thirds of the dough.

In general, we were happy with this crust recipe, and have no need to keep using the bread machine recipe that we have been using, unless we’re specifically going for a thicker crust pizza.

Meal: Breakfast for Dinner…Pancakes, Scrambled Eggs, Sausage Links
Cost per person (7 people): $1.36
Time: about 45 minutes, only because we had to make so many pancakes
Leftovers: 15 pancakes, frozen for later
Local ingredients: eggs, sausage, milk, butter
Organic ingredients: eggs, sausage, milk

Breakdown of Prices
Pancake Mix: $1.00 per lb. - used about that
Milk: 1/2 gallon used in pancakes and to drink, $2.94
Eggs: 1 dozen, $2.19, used in pancakes and scrambled the rest
Sausage Links: $3.39 for 9 links, used 6 for dinner, browned rest for pizza
Already had in the pantry: Organic Applesauce, Pancake Syrup (non organic, from Aldi’s), frozen orange juice (leftover from our ‘non organic’ days)

Every Monday we have our small group (or Bible Study) over for dinner. The numbers change each week, sometimes 3 or 4, other times 7 or 8. So I regularly have to plan meals for many people (rather than just for 2). This past week we had 7 people coming. So I decided to have “Breakfast for Dinner” - one of my favorite meals growing up. And it was an easy and cheap one to make for so many people. The pancake mix wasn’t organic (though I should learn to make my own some day), but it was bought at my local Bulk Country Store. Nearly the rest of the ingredients were local and organic.

I didn’t really get the timing down right, should have started cooking the pancakes sooner. And our apartment’s kitchen is so small, so even though I had many willing people to help (with scrambling the eggs, making the orange juice, etc.) there wasn’t much room for us all. So we ate 1/2 hour later than I told everyone (I hate when that happens). And next time we’ll know to start sooner and just zap the pancakes when it gets time to eat.

But it was a pretty big hit! Everyone enjoyed it, it was cheap for me, and definitely one I will be doing again. Next time I will try to mix my own pancake mix, and make some waffles while I’m at it.

See more about what my husband and I are doing to live a greener & simpler life at my blog.

Meal: Orecchiette with red sauce, apple crisp
Preparation time: about an hour, with about 15 minutes hands off, plus thirty minutes for the crisp to bake
Cost per person: $1.80
Local ingredients: butter, egg, Italian sausage, cheese
Organic ingredients: apples, oats, flour, tomato puree
Leftovers: half a serving of apple crisp, a lunch serving of pasta

Friday night we had out of town guests again, and I went with pasta. The sauce was a standard sauce - half a 28 ounce can of tomato puree, a little water, some garlic powder, dried thyme, dried parsley, salt, and pepper went into the crock pot while I was getting everything else going. I cooked half a pound of Italian sausage in a separate pan, and we shredded a little cheese for an another topping.

I had decided to try my hand at making orecchiette Friday night. I made up my normal pasta dough from Betty Crocker in the morning (I didn’t get it together to make it up Thursday, so that they could dry overnight, so I just went with early in the morning.) Here’s where I made my first mistake - the recipe calls for chilling the dough for half an hour. I skipped that step. I’m not even sure why, as letting it chill in the refrigerator for half an hour would have been no more trouble than letting it rest for half an hour on my counter.

So I came back after half an hour to slice up the coins, and predictably, the dough was a bit soft. I ended up with fairly large coins - I didn’t know it at the time, but too large. I always forget that fresh pasta poofs up when it’s cooked. However, slicing them up was easy enough, and I had all the coins sliced in under 15 minutes. It was definitely easier than having to roll out thing sheets and then slice them up for spaghetti. I covered up the coins and let them dry for the day.

And that was pretty much it. The coins were too thick, so they turned out more like dumplings than noodles. They still tasted great, but they were heavy. Next time, I’ll chill the dough, and I’ll slice it as thin as I can manage. I tossed together the apple crisp while the noodles were boiling (about 14 minutes). For fresh pasta, this was totally easy, and everyone liked it.

lasagne two ways and biscuits

Meal: lasagne, salad, herby biscuits, snickerdoodles
Cooking time: about an hour and a half prep time, plus some baking time
Cost per person: about $2.50 each
Local ingredients: lettuce, milk, eggs
Organic ingredients: flour, spinach, tomatoes
Leftovers: about half the red sauce lasagne, three biscuits, and salad (the biscuits got eaten by me for lunch Monday, and the salad provided most of Sunday night’s dinner, along with some leftover lasagne, which lasted several days)

Saturday night we had my two sisters and my cousin over for board games and dinner. All the recipes were from my big red Betty Crocker cookbook.

We made two lasagnes: one with TVP and red sauce, and one with white sauce and spinach. (Small confession: I have been fiending for spinach lately. I finally broke down and got some for the lasagne on Saturday night. Yes, it was from California, thus eatting into my gratuitious food miles for awhile. Yes, it was organic. Yes, it was utterly delicious.) The pasta recipe was our standard recipe, and two 8×8 pans of lasagne took the entire recipe. The red sauce lasagne took about a cup of dry TVP, which made about 2 cups of hydrated TVP (cover TVP with boiling water; wait.) You can do a lot with TVP, and it would be better if I started learning how to do things with it instead of using it plain, but in the highly spiced tomato sauce, plain TVP was fine. Thanks to the advice of multiple people, I did not boil my noodles this time, and they turned out great.

The white sauce was dead easy. Melt two tablespoons butter (or heat two tablespoons olive oil, which will make a lovely rich sauce) in a small saucepan. Add 2 tablespoons flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 1/8 teaspoon pepper, and combine well. Reduce heat and slowly add in a cup of milk, stirring weel after each addition to prevent lumps. Bring to a boil and boil for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Add a touch of garlic powder and nutmeg.

The biscuit recipe was my stock biscuit recipe; I added some parsley, garlic powder, and pepper to make them more dinner like.

The snickerdoodles were a treat:

- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 1/2 cup stick margarine or butter, softened
- 1/2 cup shortening (I used vegetable oil. They tasted great.)
- 2 large eggs
- 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- sugar
- cinammon

Heat oven to 400. Cream together sugar, butter, shortening/oil, and eggs. Add in flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt. You will not have your standard creamy, almost liquidy cookie dough. You will have a bowl full of lumps. Do not despair. Mix up some sugar and cinammon in a bowl. Take some dough, roll it into a ball, and roll it around in the cinammon sugar. Place cookies on an ungreased sheet. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes (I like mine on the shorter end of that range). I made a half batch and got 2 dozen cookies, most of which vanished Saturday night.

I made up the lasagnes in the afternoon before people got here; I made up the biscuits right before everything was due to go in the oven (and discovered that saying “Well, I’ll just put in the biscuits at 350 and cook them with the lasagne” doesn’t work. They really do need to be cooked at 400.) The salad got thrown together while the lasagne had come out and the biscuits were browning. I made up the cookies during a break between games.

This coming week is spring break. This means catching up on blog posting, and trying new recipes. :)

Meal: homemade pasta, tomato sauce with Italian sausage, baguettes
Cooking time: about 45 minutes, plus lead time for the bread
Cost per person: about $2.50
Local ingredients: egg, cheese, Italian sausage
Organic ingredients: flour, tomatoes
Leftovers: sauce. Went on couscous for lunch Monday. Very tasty.

Friday night, we had a friend visiting. We were on two missions - she wanted to learn how to make noodles, and she was delivering kitten unto us that she had been fostering (we already had two, and decided that we had the room and love for another.) Upon reflection, making a slightly complicated meal like homemade pasta perhaps wasn’t the best choice for a night when we were going to be surrounded by hissing felines, but she was only going to be here one night, so. At any rate, injuries were minimal (the only blood shed was Jeff’s) and the pasta was delicious.

Quiche and Roasted Carrots

Meal: Quiche, roasted carrots, and biscuits
Cooking time: about 50 minutes in the oven, betweeen everything, and about 30 minutes prep
Total cost (fed 4 people dinner and Jeff and I quiche for breakfast today): about $8.50
Local ingredients: eggs, cheese, potatoes, butter and buttermilk (homemade from local cream)
Organic ingredients: flour, carrots, sugar

I had my cousin make the carrots last night. He’s a self-professed non-cook, but he’s more than willing to help out, so I directed him while I was dealing with the quiche. They were the same roasted carrots as last week, and they proved themselves amazingly flexible, going in at 425 when the quiche was started, then down to 325 for awhile longer, then back up to 450 when the biscuits went in. The baking dish full vanished, so he must have done something right. :)

I found myself having oven issues last night. The carrots needed 30 to 40 minutes at 350. The quiche needed 15 minutes at 425 and 20 minutes or so at 325. The biscuits needed 10 to 12 minutes at 450. This was a bit of a quandary. I solved the problem by putting in the carrots with the quiche, and as I said, just cooking them at whatever temperature everything else needed to be cooked at. When the quiche was done, I pulled it out (it was in the big 8×12 Pyrex) and set it on top of the stove with a cookie sheet over it while the biscuits went in. It was still perfectly warm when we cut into it 15 minutes later.

Into the quiche last night went 4 large potatoes, 1 cup of cheese, 2 cups of fat free milk, and 8 eggs. The eggs were a surprise - 3 of them were double-yolked! I’d never seen a double-yolked egg before, so that was a bit of a delight. I ended up using the 8 planned eggs, anyhow, because the double-yolks were about half the size of what we normally get. I microwaved the potatoes until they were soft, and then chopped them up and distributed them into the bottom of the 8×12 Pyrex. The eggs, cheese, and milk were beaten together and poured over the potatoes, and the whole thing was salted and peppered. (Side note: one of my birthday presents was a pepper grinder. Freshly ground pepper is heavenly; now I’m annoyed we waited this long to get a grinder.) It went into the oven at 425 for 15 minutes, and then the heat was reduced to 325 for 20 minutes. The result was poofy, starting to brown just a touch around the edges, and just set and creamy in the middle - in other words, perfect.

Lastly, we had biscuits. I used butter I’d made that morning, and the buttermilk from it, and it doesn’t get much better than that.

Meal: teriyaki tofu, udon noodles, stir-fried green peppers and zuchini
Cooking time: about an hour, partially hands-off
Cost per person: about $1.50, with enough tofu leftover for one lunch (it helped that the tofu was on sale for 99 cents a package)
Local ingredients: green pepper, honey
Organic ingredients: zuchini, flour, tofu

For our Tuesday night movie night, we made teriyaki tofu, stir-fried vegetables, and homemade udon noodles.

The only modification I made to the noodles was that it took a whole cup of water, rather than a half, to get a ball of dough going (I did haul out the food processor for this, and I’m glad I did; the dough was stiff.) Also, the recipe calls for “high gluten white flour”, so I did what I do when my bread recipes call for high gluten flour - added gluten, at one teaspoon per cup plus an extra teaspoon. This is great for sandwich bread, but made for a very stiff noodle dough - so I think next time I’ll back off on gluten and see what that does for the dough. Otherwise, these were great - thick and chewy (a little too thick; next time, I’ll roll them thinner.) They were utterly unlike store brought udon noodles, and I suspect, much closer to the real thing than what we can purchase at the store. It took me about half an hour to roll out and cut noodles for 4 people, and there were no leftovers.

The tofu used our normal teriyaki sauce. It went into the sauce about three hours prior to dinner to marinate. I made 28 ounces of tofu - almost 2 pounds - and there was just enough tofu for a lunch salad for me the next day. Wowsers. When it was time for the tofu to cook, it went in the oven for about 20 minutes at 350.

The zuchini and green pepper I just sliced and tossed in a wok with a little seasame oil until they were done. I like my vegetables just barely cooked, so this didn’t take long.

And that was it. Everyone piled their food into our big soup bowls, poured a little extra sauce on top, and feasted. We neglected pictures, as we were distracted by how good dinner was. :)

birthday dinner

So, I turned 30 yesterday. I wasn’t up for planning a big party, and most of the folks I would have liked to have seen for my birthday would have had fair drive, and I had seen a couple weeks ago. But I wanted to do something (an improvement on the last couple of years, when after the holidays and the start of the semester, by the time I got to my birthday, I had no energy for anything) so we invited over my sisters and my cousin for a pile of good food and board games, and it was a delightful evening.

We had a veritable pile of food. As far as how long it took me to cook everything, it was awhile; I didn’t keep track, but I did split the tasks between Thursday and Friday. I also refuse to total this up cost-wise, since it was my birthday dinner. But, for the curious:

- baguettes, same recipe as Tuesday night. This time I doubled the recipe (which overflowed my bread machine, but just barely; next time, I’ll want to tweak it so I’m making three loaves, not four if I don’t want it to overflow.) Also, I made these Thursday afternoon, and by yesterday, they were rather hard - as it, too hard to cut. However, a few minutes in a 200 degree oven fixed that nicely. There is half a loaf of 4 left. (We like bread in our family. If there is also cheese, it’s all over.)
- cheese: baby havarti and Cotswold with chive and onions, and parts of the blocks of vintage and muenster leftover from this week (the last two local).
- bruschetta. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, it is the bread that is the bruschetta, not the topping, which is how I’ve always used the term. (So how do I refer to it? Topping?) To be really good, this should be full of fresh basil. Mine wasn’t, it being February, and our attempts at a container herb garden having given up the ghost months ago. Chop up a few tomatoes, pour a little olive oil over, season to taste with salt, pepper, garlic powder, and dried basil. Let sit in the fridge for a day or so. My sister who doesn’t normally like raw tomatoes was eating this up. (local: hothouse tomatoes)
- twice-baked potatoes. These could have been better; I think I skimped on the milk and butter when I was making them. They weren’t bad, though. Microwave a bunch of potatoes until they’re soft but not squishy, about 8 to 10 minutes depending on the size and quantity. Slice them in half, scoop out the insides, and mix with butter, milk, and cheese of your choice (in this case, 4 ounces of muenster). If they’re going to be sitting in the fridge overnight (like these were, because I made them Thursday), you probably want a little extra milk and butter; these were a touch dry. Cook at 350 until they’re melty and browning, 20 to 25 minutes. (local: butter, milk, cheese, potatoes)
- stuffed mushrooms: there are 800 ways of making these. I went with simple. I washed the mushrooms, pulled the stems, chopped them up, microwaved them for two minutes, let them cool slightly, mixed them with a couple ounces of grated vintage and a bit of minced garlic, stuffed that back in the caps, and cooked them at 350 in the toaster oven until the whole house smelled like cheese and garlic, about 15 minutes. (local: cheese; organic: mushrooms)
- grilled steak: This was a sirloin steak from Rocking F that I did nothing to, save a little salt and pepper. It went on the grill until it was just done (we were aiming for a little red in the middle, but we missed) and promptly vanished. The meat was so good, it didn’t need anything else. (local: beef)
- grilled tofu: This was the hit of the night. Everything was great, but what we kept talking about, of all things, was the tofu. I sliced one pound of extra firm tofu thinly and marinated it in our normal teriyaki sauce, except it was half honey and half maple syrup, owing to a lack of honey in the house. It got laid out on aluminum foil and went on the grill for about 10 minutes. I think we would have eaten 2 pounds if we’d had it. (organic: tofu, maple syrup; local: honey)
- grilled Italian sausage: This ended up falling apart when it came off the grill, so we ended up with Italian sausage crumbles. It was still wicked tasty, but not quite what I was aiming for. I’m not sure how to remedy that, either. (local: Italian sausage)
- brownies: chocolate and blonde. I substituted the nuts in the chocolate brownies for a handful of chocolate chips, and left out the walnuts and chocolate chips completely from the blonde ones (I didn’t have nuts on hand, and the blonde brownies were for the sister who doesn’t like chocolate, though the rest of us certainly had our share, too. :) ) I reduced each recipe down to a quantity that would require only one egg, and got enough batter out of each recipe to just make 6 brownies of each kind in 1/3 cup muffin tins (if you like your brownies all edges, make them in muffin tins. Make sure you butter the tins well. It also makes for a pretty presentation). (local: eggs, butter; organic: sugar)
- ice cream: nothing local or organic about this, alas. Breyer’s was on sale, buy-one-get-one, when my sister stopped at the store for her diet Dr. Pepper.
- wine: local. Very reasonably priced (under $7 a bottle at Total Wine, for most varities.) We got a bottle of Bald Head Red, which is our favorite. We also got a bottle of sparkling apple cider for those folks who didn’t want wine last night.

And that was my 30th birthday dinner. We had a great time.