Quiche is a healthy and fast dinner for the middle of the week or a simple weekend lunch, or breakfast. Check out Eric’s Quiche Recipe
You can learn more about the magazines we mentioned in this Gardenfork.tv episode here: Edible Nutmeg and Edible Brooklyn.
Rachel Wharton appeared in the How to make Southern Biscuits, and is planning on appearing again in another show on southern food.
Super Easy Cheese and Leftovers Quiche
1 pre made pie crust ( the kind that comes with a foil pie pan )
6 eggs
1 1/2 cup milk, skim or low fat works for me
Meat Leftovers: turkey, chicken, beef, pork
1 cup Grated Cheddar Cheese , other cheeses are fine, but I like cheddar. you can also mix cheese.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees
In a bowl mix together the eggs, add the milk, salt & pepper.
Stir in milk
Cut into meat into small pieces and place in pie crust
Pour egg mixture into pie crust and bake for 30 minutes.
Check at 30 minutes, the quiche should be puffed up a bit and browned slightly. The quiche should not wiggle much when shaken. If it wiggles, bake for another 7 minutes and check again.
Allow to cool for at least 15 minutes before serving, it stays hot for a while.
I was recently contacted by Seventh Generation about a new product they are coming out with, and they are going to send us some. we’ll see what it is. This reminded me of our Green Your Bathroom : Toilet Paper episode of Real World Green.
Once our site redesign is complete, we’ll fully integrate the Real World Green video series into the Gardenfork site, for now you can watch them all on the RWG page here.
On Christmas Day we went out to the garden to take care of what we should have done in the fall. And we made a video about it. How unusual.
I’m a big fan of Eliot Coleman, and his book, The Four Season Harvest. Its full of a ton of information, one of the things that stuck with me is that South of France is on the same parallel, the 44th, as Eliot’s house in Maine. France grows vegetables in the winter, and we don’t. Or most of us don’t. Eliot does grow vegetables in winter. Check out his site here Eliot has a new book out on winter gardening, The Winter Harvest Handbook, which you can buy from your local bookstore or here.
I usually put a cold frame on one of our raised beds to grow cold hard greens in the late fall and early spring. I have yet to master Eliot’s methods of getting greens thru the winter. You can see our video on how to build a cold frame on this page of our site.
Watch this Gardenfork episode for more on plastic mulch, cold frames, and of course the Labradors.
Be green this Christmas with more ways to Green Your Holiday from Eric Rochow and Real World Green. Today, learn how to wrap presents in a green way, and see eric in his santa hat. fun. watch.
Deep Fried Twinkies, coated in a Beer Batter Recipe, and rolled in Corn Flakes. wow. There is a long history of deep frying candy bars, snacks, cookies, treats, most anything. From what I know, people who work in fish and chip shops have tried to deep fry all sorts of food. Some foods work, some don’t.
But do Deep Fried Twinkies work when Eric makes them with his Corn Flake Beer Batter recipe? Watch and learn here on Gardenfork.tv
Eric’s Corn Flake Beer Batter Deep Fried Twinkie Recipe:
Put your Twinkies in the freezer for at least 4 hours.
Fill a large pot – a cast iron dutch oven works well – with peanut or vegetable oil to a depth of about 2-3 inches.
Heat the oil to 350 F and then turn down the heat to hold the oil at 350 F.
Batter Recipe:
1 1/2 cups flour – all purpose, bread, organic, all work –
1 can of inexpensive lager beer – Pabst Blue Ribbon is my favorite
1 egg
approx 3 cups of corn flakes, crumbled to about their original size.
Roll the Twinkie in the beer batter, coat it around all sides.
Now roll the Twinkie in the crumbled corn flakes.
Using tongs, place the coated Twinkie in the deep fryer.
BE CAREFUL! stand back from the oil, as it may spit.
Turn the Twinkie over after about 2-3 minutes, its cooked when its nicely light gold-brown all over.
Drain on paper towels, and allow to cool a bit.
Then eat, and savor.
Have you tried this? let us know below. And tell us your deep fry stories. thanks, eric.
Buying a Christmas Tree every year, instead of using an artificial tree, is very green, in terms of eco-friendliness. Watch and Learn here on Real World Green.
Wondering how to make pizza at home, or need a good pizza dough recipe? Here we go. Using the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day dough as a base, we create some super great and fun pizzas here. You’re best off with a bread – pizza stone to make these.
Watch the How To Make Pizza episode and share with us your pizza recipes.
In this Beginning Beekeeping show, we get the hive ready for winter. Raising bees is a great hobby, and here we show how we prepare the beehive for the coming winter. Below the recipe are links to our other beekeeping vids and sources.
Grease Patties:
I made my own based on reading thru the various online forums and blogs.
2 cups vegetable shortening – NOT butter or other flavored shortening
4 cups white sugar
10 drops of food grade pepperment oil or wintergreen oil
1/4 cup mineral block – this is a mineralize salt lick you can get at a farm – ag supply store. break off a chunk with a hammer.
mix this together and form into 4″ wide patties, they have to be thin enough to be placed between hive supers.
you can wrap these patties in wax paper , put in a freezer back and freeze for future use.
Today we learn how to bake bread the Artisan Bread way. I picked up Zoe Francois and Jeff Hertzberg’s great book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, after reading about it in Alexandra Stafford’s food blog Alexandra Cooks. So we fired up the Gardenfork kitchen to see what would happen. Baking bread is not hard, even I can do it. Watch here and see how we make bread based on Zoe and Jeff’s concept, which is a bit like Jim Leahy’s No Knead Bread, but different. I like what they are doing to spread the word about making your own food.
So, what does one of these loaves cost to prepare? Using the price of flour given by the American Farm Bureau — a 5-lb. bag of flour costs on average $2.39 — and prices for yeast and salt listed at Henry’s Market — a 3-lb. pound box of kosher salt costs $3.49 and a three-pack of yeast costs $2.39 — a one-pound loaf of homemade artisan bread costs about 60 cents to prepare from scratch. (Flour costs about 3 cents per ounce; yeast, 35 cents per teaspoon; and salt, 1 cent per teaspoon.) Using Henry’s Market prices, too, this estimate of 60 cents is likely on the high side.
The average price of a loaf of La Brea bread is almost nine times more expensive. Even the cheapest loaf of bakery-style bread, priced at $1.29 a pound, costs over twice as much as a loaf of homemade bread. Upon closer analysis it seems the man who called into the radio program actually might be on to something.
Even if saving money is not your goal, however, give this recipe a stab purely to experience how truly simple bread making at home can be. I’m dying to try other recipes in this book such as roasted red pepper fougasse, Italian semolina, and sun-dried tomato parmesan but for now, I’m extremely happy with the results of this master boule: It’s perfectly salty, moist and airy and delectable all around.
What do you think? Can you bake your own bread in this modern crazy world? Watch us try. Below is the 2nd video we did on Artisan Bread, and the basic recipe.
Here is the basic recipe as adapted by me, the Artisan Bread book has a ton more stuff in it, you should go buy it.
3 cups warm water
1 1/2 tablespoons yeast
1 1/2 tablespoons coarse salt
6 1/2 cups all purpose unbleached flour
In a large plastic food container with a lid, add together the water, yeast and salt
mix this up, then add in the flour, mix together.
all the flour needs to be wet, but no over-mixed
place this container in a warm area and let it rise for 2 hours,
then you can use some of the dough,
or better yet,
put the container in the refrigerator overnight, the dough will have a better flavor.
pull off a hunk of the dough, shape it into a ball, let it rise on parchment paper in a bowl for 40 minutes,
preheat the oven with the dutch oven and lid in the oven at 450F
when you are ready to put the dough in the dutch oven, use a razor blade to slice a few lines through the top of the ball of dough
take out the dutch oven, place the parchement paper with the dough in the dutch oven.
put in oven for 30 minutes,
then remove lid of dutch oven, and bake for about 20 minutes more.
bread should have a hollow sound when thumped when it is done.
This is our first year raising honeybees in our new beehives, and I wanted to make how to raise bees beekeeping videos to show you all that you too can raise bees. We are not the experts here, but one learns by doing. So we do things, and we make beekeeping videos.
The sugar syrup we feed the bees in the fall is a 2:1 mixture. 10 lbs of sugar to 5 pounds of water. 1 pint of water weighs about 1 lb, so we heat up 5 pints of water and mix in 10 pounds of white table sugar. Do not add sugar to boiling water, boil the water and then take the pot off the stove, put it on a heat proof platter and use a immersion blender to mix in the sugar.
The first gallon of the fall sugar feeding has Fumagilin added to help the bees thru the winter.
We are using powdered sugar for our varroa mite treatment. watch the video to see how we do this.
While my Ford Fiesta was on the CBS News, Ford Motor loaned me a new Ford Escape Hybrid. So, we piled the Labradors into the Escape and went up to the house. Here’s my video review of the Ford Escape Hyrbrid, and of course, shots of the Labradors
Our friends at Ford Motor and the Fiestamovement ( who have provided us with a Ford Fiesta and funds to produce videos ) suggested we do a 2 minute take on our favorite TV show, and I’m a big fan of Chris Kimball, America’s Test Kitchen, and Cook’s Illustrated, so we had to do a parody of their Tasting Lab segment.
I’m calling this the Balsamic Vinegar Hack, or cheat. Chris Kimball of Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen posted about making grocery store balsamic vinegar taste like the expensive kind, so I wanted to try it and see. So check out our balsamic vinegar recipe video here and let us know what you think.
As part of our series of beginning beekeeping videos, here we did a hive inspection this summer. Bees are easy to raise, you just have to maintain a few things thru the season, and a few hive inpsections are necessary. Watch here how how are learning to raise bees and become beekeepers.
I cooked up this simple rice and beans recipe after making beans for a few years. These are great, cheap and healthy. There are many recipes for beans, so let us know yours.
Quick rice and beans recipe
cook one bag of black beans, drain, and reserve liquid
chop one large onion and saute in oil until golden brown.
clear a space in the center of the pan to add the spice.
add 1 tablespoon of smoked pimenton or smoked paprika ( you can use a mild chili powder if you like, but us a lot less. add to taste, start with one teaspoon )
let this spice cook for 30-60 seconds in the center of the pan, don’t burn it though.
now stir back into the center the onions and allow the flavors to meld for 2 minutes or so.
add the drained black beans, and enough of the bean cooking liquid so the beans are thick but not like soup.
allow the beans to meld with the onion spice mixture on low heat and serve with rice and yogurt or sour cream.
Installing a new bath or sink faucet is not hard, you just need a few tools and the knowledge you will gain from watching Eric. or maybe not. who knows what can happen when Eric tries something.
Quiche is a healthy and fast dinner for the middle of the week or a simple weekend lunch, or breakfast. Check out Eric’s Quiche Recipe
