New Hampshire Mountain Mommy

Death by Berry Containers

Two days ago, I wrote a post about how much I looooooved our Lenten discipline of reducing our household waste. There is a secret pile of plastic hanging out in my garage that I don’t know what to do about...

Maybe my kids are an anomaly, but they love their berries. Blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and especially raspberries, which they like to stick on their fingertips (of course) and suck off slurpily. We do our best to eat seasonally, but, honestly, I have a hard time giving up berries. And cucumbers and green vegetables. We live in New Hampshire. At a certain point, we cut our losses and are thankful for refrigerated shipping containers.

But do you know what berries come in? Those annoying little plastic containers. I’ve tried to cut our waste by only buying the BIG little plastic containers, but basically, strawberries and blueberries are the only things that come packaged larger-than-pint-sized. This makes sense — any more than that in a raspberry container, and we’d have smashed and moldy berries. Nevertheless, this has been the plastic habit we can’t kick.

Even worse, it’s the plastic habit we can’t recycle.

Our town recycling facility accepts five kinds of plastic: pete no. 1 plastic beverage bottles; no. 2 milk jugs; no. 2 mixed household plastic; assorted large household plastics (toys, flowerpots, etc); and no. 5 plastic, which is collected in a “secret” bin beside the trash chute. Don’t try to sneak any no. 1 plastic that’s not a capped bottle: the ladies who keep our waste facilities running have to wade waist-deep through the piles of people’s less-than-clean recycling in order to weed out the recycling that doesn’t belong. And then it gets tossed.

Those little berry containers? They’re no. 1 plastic, but they’re not beverage bottles. So I’ve been collecting ours, hoping to find a way to recycle them. I have a 13 gallon trash bag filled with them. Every so often the bag tips over and spills what feels like a guilty secret onto the cool floor of the garage. It’s overflowing, at this point, and I don’t know what to do with it.

Is there a better way to do this?

Should I petition my town to accept more kinds of recycling at their facility? I am assuming that they don’t because of the cost, but maybe it’s just because people don’t ask for it. [Yesterday, the girl giving me a pedicure disclosed that she had just started recycling, in her mid-20s… It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe people just don’t recycle? Maybe it never occurred to anyone that they needed to recycle those berry containers?]

Should I sneak my berry containers slowly in to my sister-in-law’s recycling bin? — her town does no-sort recycling pick-up. [But what happens at their facility? Are there theoretically recyclable objects that they also have to throw in the trash because they’re not equipped to process them?]

Should I try to figure out a better way to package berries for mass distribution — compostable plastic? Wood baskets for short-distance transport? I can’t possibly be the first person who’s asked this.

Should I just cry, and stop buying berries, and listen to the wails of my children as we trudge past the beautiful displays of bite-sized fruit? My dear children, who have already given up drinkable yogurt, packaged granola bars, more than one box of snack crackers a week, and store-bought bread? My poor children, whose mother asks them, when they ask for milk that comes in plastic containers, “Do you want a duck to get its head stuck in this plastic ring? Are you trying to kill the turtles?” [Thank you, National Geographic Kids, for your well-photographed article on 6 ways our trash is bad for animals who live near or in water… ]

“No, Mommy. I don’t want to hurt the ducks. I can have some jar-milk from the farm instead.”

I don’t want to make them give up their raspberry fingers! What can I do???!

Extremely Customizable Homemade Granola Bars

Kid tested recipe!

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Dry Ingredients

  • 2c rolled oats, ground to your desired thickness (leave as is -> quick oat size -> oat flour, depending on your taste)
  • 1/2-1tsp salt
  • 1/4-1/2c sugar
  • dash cinnamon
  • 2-3 c additions — ie: nuts, chopped or whole; dried fruit (we like diced dried apricots and dried cherries and blueberries); shredded coconut; sesame seeds; chia seeds; mini choc chips; etc…

Wet Ingredients

  • 1/3c peanut, almond, or sunflower seed butter
  • 6tbsp melted butter or oil
  • 1/4c honey (adjust depending on how much sugar you used/taste!)
  • 1/4c warm water

Directions

  1. Assemble and mix together dry ingredients.
  2. Assemble and whisk together wet ingredients.
  3. Mix everything together. If too dry, add water 1tbsp at a time. If too wet, add more oat flour.
  4. Spread and press into a well-greased pan. I use a 13×9 brownie pan for thin, or 9×9 for thick.
  5. Bake 20-40minutes (until brown) at 350F.
  6. (Optional, but a nice touch): Drizzle with melted choc chips!
  7. Cut while warm! Remove from pan. They get less crumbly as they cool

ENJOY!!!

Eating Local: Vacation Cooking Edition

At the end of August, we took a 5-day trip to Kingdom Trails. We rented a room at the Inn at Mountain View Farm that we’ve stayed in before, which we knew had a full kitchen. Because we’d spent the previous week in Maine, eating out, and had a week of riding in front of us, I wanted to make sure our nutrition was spot-on and that we ate well every night. It was a challenge – although I had a four burner stove and plenty of prep space at my disposal, I knew that the cookery available to me wasn’t what I’d choose. In order to minimize how much we had to pack in the car – we also had the kids’ bikes to load in, and two Rottweilers taking up the best space in the back of our bigger vehicle – I decided to bring only knives and three trusty iron skillets – one small (12″), one large (16″), and our grill pan. It wasn’t like cooking at home, but we still managed some lovely meals! Here are two of them:

 

Chicken Under a Brick and warm Corn Salad with Local Shishito Peppers and Tomatoes

Two locally grown chicken breasts seared under a “brick.”

Chicken under a brick is probably one of my favorite meals. Simple and pleasing, it lends itself to endless variations in seasoning, and is great as a main dish or salad topping. This time, we went super-simple and seasoned only with salt & pepper, throwing a few smashed garlic cloves into the pan for some extra flavor. I set the pan over med-high heat and constantly adjusted it because the stove I was working with was wonky; put in the breasts skin-side down; and set the other two skillets on top, covered in tin foil, to act as my “bricks.” After around 10 mins, when the skin was crispy and fat was rendered, I took the pans off and flipped the meat, cooking it over low for another 10-ish minutes.

It’s really important when choosing your meat to get SKIN-ON breasts. This way, as the fat renders, the skin crisps and gives a nice pop of crunch to your chicken breast. Skinless chicken gets a dry, flavorless, chewy texture when cooked this way.

Colorful and satisfying, this salad was a good way to use up leftover August corn!

After I took the “brick” pans off, I set the small one over high heat with a splash of olive oil and seared a pint each of shishito peppers and tomatoes. Once they’d swelled and popped with the heat, I added the corn cut from two leftover ears and heated it through. Voila. Dinner!

 

 

 

 

 

Seared Steak, Broccoli from the Garden, and pan-fried New Potatoes 

Good fuel for the next day’s ride.

We ate this feast halfway through our trip. It was not the most successful iteration of this meal, because we were working with an oven and stove that weren’t behaving like ours at home, and because we were already exhausted from riding when we cooked. We brought the steak to temperature (some temperature – not 115 degrees, which we were hoping for) in the oven, then seared it quickly in butter and vegetable oil over high heat. I cut the broccoli florets into approx. 1/2″ heads – largely because this is what the kids will eat, but also because, at this size, it cooks quickly and ends up with a soft crunch when sauteed gently with garlic over medium heat for a few minutes. The potatoes were boiled at the beginning of the steak-warming process, and then cut in half or quarters, according to their size, and fried in olive oil with copious amounts of pepper and salt. They were the star of the meal, because they were delicious and because we rarely eat potatoes any more, and also because we were ravenously hungry.

 

 

 

 

Cooking Local: Tomato and Green Bean Salad with Cheese

This year has been particularly bad for pesky wildlife. We’ve lucked out – red squirrels have only wiped out our peaches and half my tomatoes. Deer jumped an electric fence and ate an entire crop of lettuce at a farm down the road!! Fortunately, I’ve been able to source any produce I don’t or can’t grow myself from farms close by. My goal with summer cooking is to keep everything as fresh and quick as possible, especially while the northeast suffers through record heat. The green beans and basil in this recipe came from our garden; beautiful heirloom cherry tomatoes came from Work Song Farm; and the sheep’s milk feta — I can’t rave enough about its mild flavor and creamy texture — came from Gilded Fern Farm. 

Tomato and Green Bean Salad

1 qt green beans, trimmed, halved, and blanched

1 pt cherry tomatoes, halved or quartered

6 oz sheep’s milk feta (or other fresh feta), cubed or crumbled

15-20 basil leaves, chiffonade

Mix all ingredients together. Add olive oil, salt, and pepper to taste.

Cooking Local: Haddock with Summer Herbs

One of the things we love the most about living in New Hampshire is that, in the summer, we can eat almost exclusively NH-grown products. We like to eat what we can from our own garden and fruit trees; pick our own at other farms; visit our farmer’s market; and make trips to farm stands and stores. For the past two years, we’ve also done a fish CSA through New Hampshire Community Seafood. Most of the fish we get is white, flaky groundfish. This past week, NHCS was selling fresh haddock at the farmer’s market in one- and two-pound bags. A quick, delicious meal was just waiting to be made!  

NHCS Haddock with Fresh Garden Herbs

1lb fresh haddock (or other whitefish) filets

4tbsp fresh herbs, roughly chopped (I used parsley, lemon thyme, and summer savory)

1/2 lemon

Olive Oil

Salt and Pepper to taste

Pat fish dry and lay filets out side-by-side in oven-proof baking dish. Squeeze lemon and drizzle olive oil over fish. Sprinkle herbs evenly over the fish. Cook under HIGH broiler until done – approx. 10 mins/inch of fish thickness. Whitefish will flake easily when done!

Fresh from the oven!

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