Leftovers, Lamb & Off The Grid

 Dinner Menu:

Mixed Salad Greens, Basil, Lamb and Flowered Broccoli Salad (farmer's market, Don & Laurel's house)
Leftover Curried Zucchini and Summer Squash Soup (Stokesberry Sustainable Farm, farmer's market)
Skeena Cherries (farmer's market)
Raw Whole Grass-Fed Milk (Sea Breeze Farm) -- only Will and I drink this in our house

The kids and I went to my Aunt and Uncle's place today out in Port Orchard, which is super fun because it involves a ferry ride, and ferries are fascinating to a three year old.  Don and Laurel live on an acreage, where they have epic gardens, bees, goats, chickens, apple and pear trees.... and so on.  It's the kind of place that's so off the grid that when you drive down their driveway, your GPS doesn't even show a road.  They do have neighbors, but everything there is so thick and overgrown that you wouldn't know it from inside their property.  And they grow more food than they need for themselves, so they are quite generous with their bounty when we come to visit.

They are awesome.

We love them.

I also love the fact that I can take the kids out there and we can show my 3 year old where broccoli comes from and where cauliflower comes from and what carrots look like when they are still in the ground.  And every time I go out there, I learn something new, too.

For instance, have you ever seen broccoli that looks like this?

I hadn't until today.  This is broccoli that's starting to flower and go to seed.  Don told me it's perfectly safe to eat and has a mild broccoli-like flavor.  But they don't transport well at all, which is why you never see them in stores or at the markets.

Lucky for us Don picked this for us at noon today and we ate it for dinner tonight.

I just chopped it up and added it to our leftover salad greens from last night and Will raved about it, saying it was one of the top ten salads I've ever made for him, that it was such a great flavor combination.

This is no small compliment.  I make a lot of salads.

While at Don and Laurel's today, we had a simple picnic lunch with the kids and Laurel prepared some lamb with onion and rosemary, which was, of course, from a lamb they had raised themselves.  And she so generously sent home the rest of the lamb meat with me, and so we chopped it up and had it for dinner on our salads with a bit of fresh basil.  The kids tolerated their salads and broccoli, but they shoveled the lamb and cherries into their mouths.  The baby was a goopey red smeary mess by the end of the meal.  But a happy goopey red smeary mess!

We topped off the meal with the rest of the curried zucchini and summer squash soup from last week and the rest of the cherries from the farmer's market this past weekend, and called it a night.  We're always so thankful for the opportunity to visit Don and Laurel's place and spend time with family, and always thrilled when we get to bring home big bags of kale, sage, broccoli and cauliflower to eat for the week!