It’s been my goal, since the inception of the farm, to grow year round. To say that we’ve been hit with setbacks is a tremendous understatement. Last year, everything that could have gone wrong did and what did survive that slow moving train wreck, was…
Of all the AVAs in Oregon, the Eola-Amity Hills AVA holds a special place for me. It’s where I studied Oregon Pinot Noir, after all. And it’s where I met the divine Miss Betty O’Brien. Betty and her late husband, Dick, are one of the…
There’s this little blink of a town in Oregon called Amity that is home to a farmstand that makes the best pies I’ve ever had in my entire life. Besides my gramma. But I’m guessing she would have agreed that they even beat her best efforts. The place is called Blue Raeven Farms. We love them so much that we even opted to have their pies in lieu of a cake at our wedding. Every time we’re up that way, we make a point to grab a couple….or ten….of their pies to stick in the freezers at home. Yeah. I said freezers plural.
You can buy them frozen or baked, mostly, and they come in full or individual sizes. The cream pies can’t be frozen. At the farmstand you can also get pot pies in chicken or beef. Blue Raeven sells fruit pies to a couple of select markets in Oregon like Market Of Choice and Roth’s and I’m pretty sure they ship frozen pies. If you ever find yourself meandering around Oregon wine country, make sure to stop by and grab a pie. Or ten. My favorites are the cherry, blueberry, and pumpkin, but I’ve heard that the key lime is incredible. Here’s a link: http://www.blueraevenfarmstand.com/
It so happens that I learned to make gravy from little old Sicilian ladies in Brooklyn when I lived there a million years ago. When I look on the internet for recipes for gravy (marinara), there’s all kinds of celebrity chef recipes that put all…
Welcome to Salt~Leaf! We grow mostly heirlooms with a special affinity for ugly tomatoes, hot peppers, weird cucumbers, and a smattering of other off the wall greens, vegetables, and fruit. We are a tiny urban farm in Southern Oregon. Life is so charmed here on…
Such a simple thing and, for me, a complete godsend. I like to store enough tomatoes to last us the year. This year we planted 300 tomato plants. Canning is so much work for tomatoes. And I’d have to can them in gallon size jars. Half of the tomatoes have individual weights of 2 pounds! And where would I even put all the giant jars? And all that blanching. I’d be blanching for days. Actually, I was still blanching tomatoes to store in the freezer when a friend of mine, Diane, told me that I can freeze the tomatoes with the skin on. She told me that the skin slips right off when they thaw. I clutched my pearls and gasped. Well, she was right. All I had to do was core them and move on. Love that woman. No more ice baths and standing for hours over a pot of boiling water. Needless to say, I was still stabbing myself in the hand with a paring knife when I came across this lovely little gadget. I can process so much faster now and with way less mess. Now if I just had another chest freezer…..
Cherries are definitely one of my favorite things in life and I use them as often as I can in savory dishes. I put them in salads, which coincidentally we had just last night! The store had some fresh black cherries and they cost a…
If my gramma was alive she’d roll her eyes at this recipe. Her deviled eggs are by far still my favorite. But how many times can a person eat the same deviled egg over and over again? I had some leftover caviar….who even says things…
If I ate as much red meat as I’d like I’d probably keel over. As a kid, a rib eye was a treat and it was also the cheapest cut because back then filet mignon was the desired cut. Now I can get an entire tenderloin for less than what a prime rib can cost. When we switched our meat buying from plastic coated styrofoam trays in the grocery store to whole animals through a local butcher, we started thinking differently about how to eat red meat.
We eat less of it now because the cow has to last us a year, and locally raised beef, especially pastured beef, tend to be smaller than the behemoths you get at the grocery store. And buying whole animals has saved us a ton of money. Not a little bit of money, but a lot of money. We know where the meat came from, how it was raised, what it ate, and I get it cut and wrapped exactly the way I want it. I save one whole prime rib and I make it on Christmas day. And this is the way I’ve made it for years. Enjoy!
My Prime Rib
1 prime rib with bones (about 8lbs boneless)
1 bunch thyme destemmed
¼ cup Alder smoked sea salt
¼ cup fine ground black pepper
1 cup red wine
4 cups beef broth
1 or 2 lg sweet onions
Olive oil
Preheat oven to 350. Mix together salt, pepper, thyme and add just enough olive oil to make a paste.
Slice onion into four very thick slices, place on bottom of roasting pan, rub beef with olive oil salt and herb mixture, place on top of onion slices, add 1 cup beef broth, about a cup of red wine.
Bake until desired temperature about an hour and a half to two hours for medium rare to medium. Remove beef from pan to rest, pouring drippings and onions into a sauce pan, adding remaining beef broth and boil for 10 minutes. Strain au jus before serving.