Homemade Pizza Upgrade, Squash & Kale Gratin, Steak Skewers, Pork Chops with Dill Sauce, Crispy Tacos, Blackberry Upside Down Cake & More!
Basil, beets, cucumbers, summer squash, lettuce, mushrooms, spring mix, spinach and spring onions featured in lots of cooking at the farm recently, along with our beef and pork, chicken and the last of the strawberries and the first of the wild blackberries of the season!
A Major Upgrade to Homemade Pizza Nights!
For years, Grant has been on the hunt for a used 16-inch Ooni pizza oven. These are outdoor propane ovens that can get up to 850 degrees and cook pizzas in 2 minutes, bubbling the dough like a wood-fired Neopolitan pizza restaurant!
After the pandemic, there were a lot of used 12-inch Ooni ovens available for sale, but very few 16-inch. It seemed the people who liked and used them wanted to upgrade to the bigger model!
But a few weeks ago, Grant saw a listing for a 16-inch in Tickfaw and quickly snatched it up (for less than half price of a new one).
And now we are off to the races with amazing homemade pizza. Bellegarde’s dough is perfect for this, although at the rate we’re going through dough balls, we will need to play around with our own long-fermented dough recipe.
There’s definitely a little learning curve with how to assemble the pizzas quickly so the raw dough doesn’t stay on the peel too long and stick and there’s certainly a finesse in sliding it in without it sticking or sliding too far back into the flames (hence the “char” on some of these, we’ll get there!).
After the second pizza night with a chef friend over, we ordered a wooden peel to use to sliding the pizzas in and will stick to the metal peel for turning and taking pizzas out.
I’m also working on mise en place and having salad or other sides ready to go because it can be hectic when you’re trying to make multiple pizzas and they only take 2 minutes to cook! It all happens fast!
Some of our favorite topping combinations include:
Andouille and olive salad with mozzarella and fontina.
Tomato sauce, meatballs with Italian sausage and beef with fresh mozzarella and topped with pesto.
Mixed mushrooms, truffle oil, mozzarella, fontina and scallions.
Barbecue chicken with red spring onions and smoked gouda.
Pesto chicken with summer squash (not pictured).
Goat lahmacun (goat meat pulsed in the food processor with red onions, cilantro, sumac, coriander, cumin and cinnamon and cooked right on the raw pizza dough). We also added goat feta and topped with more cilantro and scallions.
Meatballs, Summer Squash & Kale Gratin & Pesto Pasta
The night after one of our pizza nights, I had plenty of meatballs left since we only used a few for pizza, plus pesto! And lots of summer squash and kale to use up.
So I made a big squash and kale gratin with lemon zest, breadcrumbs and parmesan and a veggie loaded tomato sauce with spring onions, carrots and even Swiss chard stems for the meatballs.
We also tossed some fresh Il Supremo canestri in the pesto and had a salad with some of the last fresh strawberries of the season. It was a meal with a big variety of seasonal produce — the best kind!
Black Pepper Beef Skewers & Cucumber Salad
I pulled some NY Strip Steaks from a retired cow to test the tenderness and overall quality and flavor.
While NY Strips are cut from the short loin, one of the most tender parts of a cow, there is more connective tissue and elastin on the outer edge of the short loin. It looks like a fat cap but contains a more chewy elastin versus just fat. It is less pronounced on young animals and I think even less so on animals quickly finished on grain.
But it’s a perfect cut for a stir fry or skewer! I just trimmed the outer piece off and sliced into strips.
I used this recipe from Pinch of Yum, but it was a little bit of a miss for me because of the method — it just didn’t get as brown, crispy or caramelized as I wanted it to.
To be fair, it is designed for an air fryer but supposedly also tested in the oven under the broiler. And perhaps the way my oven is, or the distance from the broiler or the way the beef was so close together on the skewers, I could not get them to brown the way I wanted, so I ended up taking some off and finishing on the stove top!
(And trust me, I did think about popping them in the new pizza oven, but even though I soaked the wooden skewers for hours in advance, I still think the wood might have burst into flames immediately at that high of a temperature!).
With the beef, we had Jasmine rice and a cucumber salad with scallions, sesame oil, soy sauce, coconut aminos, rice vinegar and lime juice. Topped it all with chili crisp!
Pork Chops with Roasted Potatoes & Dill Sauce
We’re in our pork chop era right now as we make them once every few weeks lately!
For these large sow chops, I seasoned with dry mustard, mushroom seasoning and thyme and seared in a cast iron pan.
I poured off some of the fat and juices and made a sauce with a few tablespoons of the remaining, plus flour, mustard, white wine and dill and thickened with cream at the end.
I also made a big batch of roasted potatoes to go with the chops and to have as leftovers for breakfast tacos all week.
We had a salad with marinated gold beets, feta, cucumbers, pumpkin seeds and an almond sauce as the dressing.
I had more sauce than I had leftover pork chops and since I wanted to use the leftover potatoes for breakfast, I pulled out some brats to make a pasta dish with the leftover sauce for my lunches for the week.
First I roasted the brats in the toaster oven to cook them through and make them sliceable. I let them cool and rest for a bit so that when I did slice them, they didn’t lose all their juices immediately.
I had some frozen broccolini I wanted to use up, so I added it to the pasta after the pasta was almost fully cooked and briefly blanched it.
Then I added the sliced brats to the pan to give them a little sear and added some grated summer squash and fresh spinach and then the leftover creamy dill sauce from the pork chops and finally the cooked canestri and broccolini.
The combination was really good and loaded with veggies!
Crispy Beef & Cheese Tacos
My dad got to town on Thursday to bring the 2025 batch of Maple Syrup, so I whipped up this weeknight sheet pan crispy taco situation to welcome him.
I sautéed a two pound pack of our ground beef with spring onions, garlic and seasonings and added in tomato paste and a little salsa, too.
Then I warmed up corn tortillas over the burner and put them in the beef pan with a lid on to steam a little and get even more pliable.
I grated some cheese, and then filled the tortillas with cheese and the beef mixture and made sure there was plenty of avocado oil on the pan for them to crisp.
I put another sheet of parchment paper and a smaller sheet pan on top for the initial bake so they would stay closed and get crispy on the bottom. Then I flipped them to crisp on the other side. We served with a salad with those marinated gold beets, cucumbers, spring mix and radicchio and drizzled the tacos with jalapeño cilantro almond sauce.
Blackberry Upside Down Cake
Also for my dad’s visit, I wanted to make a dessert with dewberries I had picked.
Sidenote: it took me awhile to learn the difference between wild dewberries and blackberries. Dewberries are more of a ground vine and they have a distinct red stem. They tend to ripen a little earlier than wild blackberries. And blackberries have more of an upright cane, with a green stem.
I have done lots of crisps and cobblers lately, it was too late to do a pie (needing to make the dough and chill it properly) and I didn’t have all that many dewberries anyway.
So I decided to go with this blackberry upside cake with a simple vanilla cake batter baked on top of jammy blackberries. (But of course this is technically a dewberry upside cake, but a lot of people don’t even use the term dewberries anymore!)
It was really delicious, pretty easy, came together quickly and a nice change of pace from cobblers and crisps, as much as we love them!
Peach Blackberry Crisp
Speaking of cobblers and crisps, the most recent one I’ve made is this rye and oat crisp using some fresh picked dewberries and the last of my 2024 peaches from the freezer supply.
I love a peach and dewberry or blackberry combination because the sweetness of the peaches goes so well with the more tart berries.
I used lots of lemon zest in fruit mix, as well, and then butter, all purpose flour, rye flour, oats, brown sugar and vanilla in the topping. I baked for over an hour and it came out jammy and perfect.