Gazpacho

There are so many tomatoes and cucumbers ready to pick in the garden these days.  It reminded me of an old favorite recipe for gazpacho from The Victory Garden Cookbook by Marian Morash.  The book is terrific and suits my cooking style by including tasty, reliable recipes arranged by vegetable.  Each section includes some basic recommendations for harvesting, preparing, seasoning, cooking, and storing the vegetable.

This gazpacho is simple, but good.  Here's the basic recipe.

Peel, seed, and chop 4 large tomatoes and 2 cucumbers.
Wash and chope 1 large green pepper and 10-12 scallions.
In a mortar, mash 1-2 cloves garlic and 1 t. salt.
Beat in 1/4 C. red wine vinegar and 1/3 C. olive oil.
Combine the dressing with the chopped vegetables and stir in 3 C. tomato juice.
Add 1 -1 1/2 C. water or beef broth.
Season with a dash of hot pepper sauce, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper.
Chill.
Serve cold with slices of cucumber on top.

Note:  I don't bother with peeling and seeding the tomatoes.
I just use spicy veggie juice and skip the beef broth and hot pepper.

Breakfast Sausage

Our breakfast sausage is popular with our farm customers and sells out quickly!  We plan on having a lot more in the fall but in the meantime, we do have plain ground pork.  It can be seasoned lots of ways so is pretty versatile.  Yesterday I decided to experiment with making my own breakfast sausage.  It was quick, easy, and delicious, my favorite kind of recipe.

Farm Breakfast: Pickled daikons, fried egg, homemade breakfast sausage.
All grown and prepared at Sweet Morning Farm!

I did a bit of research online to find a sausage recipe, merged a couple of recipes, substituted some items because we didn't have all the herbs called for, mixed up the sausage, let the mixture sit overnight in the fridge, and we cooked it this morning.  They turned out great. This makes me think that the seasonings can vary a lot and still be good.  So have fun with that.

After mixing in the desired seasonings, put the sausage mixture in the refrigerator for at least 8 hours.  Shape into patties and cook.

This is what we used, as best as I can remember.  I was definitely winging it!

1 pound ground pork
1/2 T. salt
1 1/2 t. ground pepper
1 T. dry sage
1 t. anise seed (substituted for fennel seed)
1/2 t. thyme (unlabeled jar!  Pretty sure this was thyme)
1/8 t. clove
1/8 t. nutmeg
1/2 t. paprika

Both recipes called for rosemary and cayenne but we were out of both.  Next time!