Ancient Fire Recipe Contest Reminders

Your Best CSA/Farm Market Menu Contest (closes Today!)
Kate’s Kitchen teamed up with us to challenge readers to come up their best menu from ingredients they picked up in their CSA share or at the farm market. This challenge ends TODAY. Another fresh and local plug, but that is what we are eating right now and we figured there would be plenty of people who would want to share. Post entries in the comments here (contains rules and information) or at Kate’s Kitchen by the end of the day. Winners will be picked randomly and will be featured in our blogs next week.

Boboli Beat BBQ Boredom Grilled Pizza Challenge (closes Saturday)

The grilled pizza recipe challenge runs until Saturday. We have several tasty recipe entries so far, if you haven’t posted yet, hop to it! Refer to the the challenge rules and information in the posted linked above. Our party is going to be so much fun!



Your Best Healthy and Fresh Backyard Barbecue Side Dish

The Manly Housewife and Ancient Fire are looking for healthy side dishes to head off to a backyard barbeque with. We know everyone is melting over their weekly fruit and veggies from the farm market or CSA. Are you going to share? Check out the post at TMHW and our own post for rules and information. Entries are posted in the comments and from the looks of the submissions so far we will all have some new tricks up our sleeves! This contest will be running until August 16th.

Cheers!

Jason

Your Best CSA/Farm Market Menu Contest

Ancient Fire Wines and Kate’s Kitchen and are teaming up to create some buzz for CSA/Farm Market inspired menus. There are so many fresh ingredients the possibilities are limitless!

For the next week we are asking for visitors to submit comments to this post on both blogs with a menu inspired by selections found in their CSA share or purchased at a local farm market. Menus can be for any meal of the day and should include the name and ingredients of each of the dishes being prepared. The majority of the ingredients used must come from the CSA/Farm Market, but staple items from the pantry and fridge are allowed; use your own judgment as to the “staple” nature of items used. Detailed preparation steps are not required for entry. Make sure you also tell us why you love a certain ingredient or what your goals were for combining the flavors, and of course anything else that excites you about fresh, local food.

The prize for the lucky winners will be a feature in each of the host’s blog one day the following week. The hosts will pick multiple winners randomly from all the entries we accept (see the rules above) and will contact winners for more information. Take pictures of anything applicable. If you win and you can get us photos we’ll post them. If you have complete recipes available we will also consider including those or link to your site where they are posted.

Kate's contest post. Please leave a comment with your/recipe menu idea and your contact info both on the Ancient Fire Wine Blog and with Kate.

Cheers!

Margot and Jay

My Grilled Fruit Experiments

With summer in full swing, I’ve been seeing mentions of grilled fruit everywhere. I have to admit that if I have grilled fruit before I must not have paid much attention to it, because I don’t recall the experience. With all the buzz I ventured to give it a whirl.

I found a few blogs recently (new to me) that have good information on grilling, both fruit and the normal fare.

The Grillin’ Fools
The Girl’s Guide to Grilling – a Foodbuzz 24x24x24
The Grill Maestro

The freshness of your ingredients is just as important when you are going to grill fruit, it should be free from bruises, mold and not be overripe to the point of falling apart. I had access to some wonderful peaches for my first experiment and the mere thought of tasty grill marks on peaches made my mouth water.

To top the grilled peaches I used 6 oz of goat cheese and 10 mint leaves, which I chopped , mixed in with the cheese. I halved the peaches, removed the pits and grilled them until warm with healthy grill marks on them. Topped with the mint goat cheese they were warm, creamy and had a wonderful combination sweet and savory flavors.

I brought these to my sister-in-law Celeste’s, another big fan of my food and wine exploits, to a pretty good reception. My brother-in-law asked why I was using his grill to cook fruit on Independence Day. As a former marine and veteran, I thanked him for his service in protecting my freedom to do something crazy on the grill. He smiled and took a peach down to see just how crazy I am.

The second dish I grilled was pineapple topped with a honeyed mascarpone cheese and chopped hazelnuts. The pineapple was cut in ½ inch slices, cored using a donut cutter (yes that was a pretty cool idea) and grilled until warm with pretty grill marks. The mascarpone cheese (16oz container) was prepared with 2 Tbsp of honey and 1/3 cup of chopped hazelnuts, mixed well. After the pineapple was grilled we cut each round into 8 pieces and skewered each with a toothpick. Finished with a dollop of the cheese these snacks did not last long. My wife heard people asking, we took them to a backyard BBQ, who made these pineapple snacks. I had a few myself…

If you want to mix it up a bit this summer try grilling some fruit. Similarly, consider grilling vegetables. I have done that quite a bit, but I do want to try the grilled guacamole recipe you can find at the Grillin’ Fools blog for something a little different.

I didn’t end up taking any pictures of these exploits because I was in a rush to get ready to head out to backyard parties both of the days. In retrospect that is a loss because both snacks would have made for great pictures. Both were excellent eats and I had fun making them, so that is something at least!

Cheers!

--Jason

Local Fruit Wines

Strawberries, peaches, pears and plums.

We have made or are in the process of making wine from all of those fruits grown by farms in town. Much love and thanks go out to Sunncrest, Elwood and Macks for the wonderful products we have acquired so far this year. The wines are better than ever! If you haven't visit any of their farm stands or U-Pick locations you should and often.

I wrote an earlier blog on the strawberry wine and will only follow that up with feedback that it is the best in 4 tries.

The peach wine has a beautiful orange/gold color and a subtle nose of peaches. We have some blending plans for this wine which I will write more about in time.

The pear wine is still fermenting and so far is looking good, but more time and clearing is required before its future self starts to shine through.

The local plum crop this was beaten by weather and as such the quantity we got will be blended with Riesling juice to make a full batch. More on that one later as well.

We also have hard cider on deck, but have not yet decided on who to source it from.

Cheers!

--Jason