Local Food

My husband and I really like to support local business and eat food grown or made in our region. To that end, we took a trip out to our local dairy farm and creamery today for their spring festival. It was a great opportunity to sample their products which includes everything from milk to ice cream to meats. It also featured some other local businesses that sell items made from the products of local farm.
We sampled, goat cheeses, and coffees, and granola, and hummus (Old Bay Hummus, anyone?) and ice cream (still managed to keep in my calorie range). It was all delicious and so fresh!
We came home with a couple of gallons of milk, some hummus and some yummy goat cheese spread. I had been wanting some whole milk that wasn’t ultra-pasteurized like that in the supermarket so that I could make some crockpot yogurt. Now that I have some, the milk is pasteurized just no ultra, I’ll be trying out the yogurt instructions. Lil Lean Green eats yogurt likes it’s going out of style and all that YoBaby is getting expensive.  I’ll do on post on my experience when I do it.
The best part of the day was getting Lil LG up close and personal with all the animals that she sees in her books.
She moo’ed at cows, adored a little lamb, chicks, piglets and bunny rabbits and got really excited when she found some ducks.

In the background, you can see their delivery trucks. They deliver milk to your door! So old school and awesome.

The South Mountain Creamery, where we went to day is a sister organization to the one that does out veggie delivery. Which I discussed in a previous post.
This week, one of the delivered items was kale, something with which I don’t have much experience. So I looked up recipes and settled on Kale Chips, which looked simple and had comments stating how delicious they were.
I washed the kale and and cut it into chip size pieces. Then I put it though the salad spinner several times to get it good and dry.

I coated them with 1 tbsp of olive oil and laid them out flat on a cooking sheet and sprinkle them with salt.

I cooked them for 20 minutes at 250.

And the result? They were AWFUL!!! OMG, all those people who said they were awesome are sooooo off my Christmas card list. Ugh. I ate two and just couldn’t do it anymore. Hubby made it through a few more but he didn’t think much of them either. Maybe I did something wrong. Maybe it was bad kale. I don’t know, I won’t be trying them again to find out.
I paired them with a portabella burger, which was delicious. I didn’t document the preparation of this but it basically a portabella cap marinated in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, grilled, put on a bun and topped with some fresh mozzarella and basil. Delicious.