The Beaver Dam Pepper is an heirloom variety from Beaver Dam, Wis. It has a beautiful spice that we are accentuating with an old world spice brine in our pickle. Forget the tabasco sauce or the cayenne pepper. Our Heirloom Pickle Beaver Dam Pepper It is THE secret ingredient in a Bloody Mary!

Our recipe also uses The Scrumptious Pantry Herbed Salt for a more complex herbal note. The original Bloody Mary recipe uses Gin instead of Vodka, so a couple of added juniper berries are also a great tribute to the origins of this classic Sunday brunch pick-me-up!

For the Virgin Mary mix well in a blender:

1 jar (16oz) The Scrumptious Pantry Heirloom Tomato Passata

1 cup water

1 tsp The Scrumptious Pantry All-purpose Herbed Salt

1 oz The Scrumptious Pantry Heirloom Pickle Beaver Dam Pepper (chopped)

3 tbsp The Scrumptious Pantry Heirloom Pickle Beaver Dam Pepper 
pickle liquid

2 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp minced horseradish

2 tsp worcestershire sauce

To make it a Bloody:

Over Ice, fill you glass with Virgin Mary & Vodka or Dry Gin (the original liquor base of the Bloody Mary) in relation 3:1

Know a Bloody Mary aficionado? We offer a Bloody Mary Gift Set over here in our online store. No better hostess gift for a Saturday dinner party or Sunday brunch!

I just love when customers send emails or even call to say how much they enjoyed a product they picked up at an event or that was given to them as a gift. That just makes my day! What totally excites me is when I receive e-mails like this one from our customer Tiffany Sybert, sharing a recipe she developed using our products. In this case Tiffany had bought our Farro Pasta at a Farmer's Market this season, and while she was enjoying the first bag came up with the idea to use this nutty pasta for a Kugel for her Thanksgiving feast. The recipe was a hit with her family and guests, and today we are the lucky ones to benefit!

Thanks you so much, Tiffany, for sharing your recipe! And thanks to Carlo (pictured below) for making this delicious pasta!

Super Special Kugel
Makes a huge 9 x12 casserole

Ingredients

Base:
1.1 lb Carlo's Casarecce Farro Pasta, cooked- do not rinse the pasta!
1 lb small curd reduced fat 2% cottage cheese
8 oz reduced fat (low fat) sour cream
3 oz reduced fat (low fat) cream cheese
6 eggs or 5 eggs + 2 eggs whites
½ cup agave nectar
½ cup butter melted
Salt to taste
1 tbsp pure almond extract
¼ cup slivered almonds

Topping:
1 cup flax cereal crumbs
¼ cup butter melted or coconut butter (oil) melted
½ cup agave nectar
1 tbsp cinnamon
1 tbsp cardamom
3-4 pears, washed with skin on and cut into bite-size chunks (Bosc pears hold their shape well)
1-2 apples, washed with skin on and cut into bite-size chunks (I used Honey crisp)

Method

Combine all ingredients in base, except noodles in blender.  Taste liquid to see if your taste buds desire more salt or agave.  Gradually pour over noodles in a 9x12 or larger casserole dish.  Mix toppings ingredients together and pour over top.
Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour.

Kugel variations:

If you prefer pecans or walnuts than change your pure extract to vanilla, orange, anise, etc.   You may also substitute the fruit as to pair with your preferred nut and extract.  The fruit needs to be able to hold its shape- try persimmons, garnet yams, dried fruit, sweet potato, etc BE ADVENTUROUS!   If you are being adventurous maybe make only half a recipe.

I believe in canning, putting up the glory of summer for winter. I always loved the fresh tasting flavors of the quick refrigerator, but could not get around liking the store bought ones. Even the fancy brands seemed to be tasting too much like vinegar, salt and spices. To my palate that is. Hence I got my mind set on a line of pickles very soon - especially as here at The Scrumptious Pantry it is all about making foods that are connected with the culinary heritage of a region. If not pickles made in the Midwest, then where? All those immigrants from Germany, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe - pickling was their preferred choice of preserving the summer bounty.

And that is the keyword PRESERVE. We wanted to make pickles that preserve the flavor of the ingredients, accentuate the character of the veggies - not alter it to a point that if you took out the texture component and taste a pickle blindfolded you would be unable to identify the veggie.

Today, we are launching our first two products in the new line of pickles. It has been in the works for two years now. Our obsession with authenticity led us to put up jars and jars of pickles, trying every pickle recipe we could find in historic recipe books. Just for the fun of it, I just counted the open jars in my fridge that represent the various stages of testing (and which I am eating no matter how they taste cause I cannot throw food away. A salty dill pickle for example is great in an omelette w. potatoes) - 38 jars. I still have 38 open jars in my fridge, and 47 jars that have already been cleaned and stored away for the next round of testing. That equals 85 different test batches on four products. Now, surely that is not a lot of R&D for big food companies. It is a lot for us.

Besides canning batch after batch in the test kitchen, this project  led us to browse seed catalogues and speak with agricultural historians, in our quest to identify vegetables that have a history in the Midwest. With all the Polish & German immigration patterns beets made it onto our list pretty early in the process. The Giardiniera was decided on without much discussion, too, because this vegetable medley is the signature "vegetable preserve" of Chicago. The Lemon Cucumber we fell in love with at local Farmer's Markets. And then the Beaver Dam Pepper jumped out at us, when we were researching the Slow Food Arch of Taste – a listing of culturally significant varietals at the brink of extinction. The Beaver Dam Pepper was introduced to Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, around 1913 by an Hungarian immigrant. It has a mildly spicy flavor and is just delicious. But it is very difficult to grow – the peppers can get enormous, requiring to put up trellises. So although it was a great tasting pepper, it was abandoned in favor of the easier to grow varieties

                                                                                       John of Stone Circle Farm with a small (!) Beaver Dam Pepper

Luckily by word of mouth we found a farm in Reeseville – Stone Circle Farm – that had been growing some experimental Beaver Dam Pepper plants last year. And how excited we were to hear that John would be willing to give the Beaver Dam Pepper a try on a larger scale. He brought on another Farm close to Beaver Dam – Good Earth Farm- and we were ready to go. We had some setbacks and we had some great successes. Some beautiful peppers and some pretty ugly ones, scarred up with sunburn. The spice profile for brine we developed for the Beaver Dam Pepper was reminiscent of the flavors of Hungary, and we are pretty excited about what we think is a greatly balanced flavor, supporting the characteristic taste of the Beaver Dam Pepper.

Today, we are launching the Beaver Dam Pepper and the Lemon Cucumber. Giardiniera and beets should follow before Thanksgiving. We want to thank our Farmers - John, Nicole, Rink, Jenny, Alison, Alex, Andy and Dirk - for trusting us with their beautiful veggies. A special thank you also to all our taste testers, that might not have tasted through all 85 batches, but still ate a considerable amount of pickled veggies. I personally want to thank Andy Fair, my partner in the kitchen, for not giving up on me and my quest for the perfect preserved pickle.

All our pickles make great additions to a Cheese plate or as an antipasto, but my favorite match so far are slow cooked beans with pulled pork over rice and a Beaver Dam Pepper on the side. How do you like to eat our pickles? Have a taste and let us know! They are available in our online store and moving to your trusted retailers in these days, too.

The opinions on Slow Food’s 5$ a meal challenge are divided – there is the group that is going after Slow Food for assuming that a family of four can afford a daily food budget of 60$. Then there is the group that heralds Slow Food’s initiative (which is subtitled “take back the value meal”) as the solution to one of this country’s most pressing problems – people do not cook, but eat out. And unhealthy choices to boot. Surprisingly, both groups are right.

I am pretty sure no one at Slow Food would expect every home cook to spend 5$ on every meal every day. If you read this article in the Washington Post, Josh Viertel, President of Slow Food USA, clearly states that 5$ is a very generous budget and that you can assume to be cooking for less – with leftovers. When Slow Food chose the 5$ mark, it was in order to benchmark against the classic fast food meal. Taking part in the 5$ challenge is for those people that do not cook, buy their breakfast at the coffee shop, their lunch at a foodcourt in their office building and call the Chinese restaurant for take-out on their way home.

Now, the question is, will the 5$ challenge reach these people? I sure hope so, but I am sceptical. Because in order to leave behind take-out food and start cooking from scratch, you first need a lifestyle change. You need to decide that good food is important for you. That the way you nourish your body counts. That you can only perform as well as you fuel yourself.

I do a lot of tastings in grocery stores and speak to many customers at our Farmer’s Markets. Most people do not cook. It is a chore. Grocery shopping, cleaning pots and pans for a meal that you inhale exhausted in front of the TV is not something many people with a busy lifestyle find attractive.

But why – and this is the mystery to me – does cooking seem too difficult for most people to attempt in the first place? What triggered the misconception that you either cook four star gourmet meals at home or eat out of a Styrofoam container? What happened to the good old casserole loaded with nutritious beans and veggies? The one you cook on Monday with the bones of the Sunday roast and that costs $2, does not need any attention while on the stove, feeds a family for two days and even has a portion or two left over to store in the freezer for emergencies?

Is it really the happy meal that stands in the way of people to eat healthy and home cooked meals, or is it Top Chef and other spectator cooking shows that instill in viewers the sense that cooking is too complex? That you cannot serve a simple and tasty frittata for dinner or a hearty chili?

Or is it the fact that we have no one to eat with? I agree that cooking for myself and eating by myself is far less fun than feeding a crowd. Maybe we should foster food exchanged in our neighborhoods? Know a neighbor that lives alone, too? Take a bowl of casserole over and hopefully you will be rewarded with a nice piece of lasagne the week after.

There are many ways to “take back the value meal”. The 5$ challenge is a great way to draw attention to a home cooked meal. And if you do not know where to start: all our recipes are simple to prepare and cost way less than 5$ per person. Even if only using fresh, farmer raised ingredients with a provenance.

I am a big fan of Farro, the most ancient grain from the Mediterranean. It was found in archaeological excavations and ancient tombs, some sites as old as 10,000 years. And it sure is a great tasting grain – no wonder people are falling in love with it again and again. It has become a staple in Tuscany since it was rediscovered in Israel around 1906 and reintroduced in the cuisines of the Mediterranean. Farro is served as salad in summer, as thick soup in winter - and they make Pasta out of it, too. Carlo has been growing Farro medio (compared to Emmer in the US) for a long time on his small farm and makes great Farro Pasta with it. I enjoy the nutty taste profile of Farro Pasta with fresh veggies to complement that heartiness, so a Farro Pasta salad is my go to summer meal!

And before I forget, great news: we have launched our little online storefront, so you can now order your Scrumptious Pantry fix online anywhere in the USA! Also, we would like to ask for your vote in the Slow Money Favorite Business Competition - and check out all the other great businesses and entrepreneurs working to bring about change in our food economies! Thank you very much!

Ingredients

1 cup Carlo's Farro Casarecce

1 small eggplant (2 cups diced into 1.2” pieces)

1.5 tbsp Darro's 100% Mission Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil

½ tsp Roberta's Fine Herbed Salt

1 small bell pepper (1/2 cup diced)

¼ cup onion, diced

½ lemon, juiced

1 pinch Cayenne pepper

2 small or 1 medium sized tomatoes, diced

Parmesan cheese (optional)

Method

(1) Heat oven to 375. (2) Bring water to boil. (3) Dice eggplant, toss with ¼ tsp Fine All purpose Herbed Salt and ½ tbsp EVOO, put in oven for about 15 min or till done. (4) Add pasta to boiling water, turn down heat and cook for 8-9 min or until almost al dente (the pasta will soak up the liquid of the salad, so you do not want the pasta cooked perfectly well done! (5) Drain, mix with onion, lemon juice, the remaining 100% Mission Extra Virgin Olive Oil, All-purpose Herbed Salt, cayenne. (6) Add roasted eggplants, peppers, tomatoes and toss well. Let sit for 10 min. (7) Add parmesan cheese before serving.

It has been quite hot lately - I guess that is fair to say. And with heat, I tend to eat less (but you should see me eating in the cold Midwestern winters!) Especially a lot of warm food is not really up my alley when the thermometer scratches the 95 Farenheit mark. So you can imagine how delighted I was when Stephanie told me about a recipe for a chicken salad she had made using the Cranberry Catsup in the vinaigrette.

I loved the idea of it and so set out to recreate her dish with a bunch of fresh veggies, juicy grilled amish chicken and as a special touch some smoked cheddar cheese. It is the perfect mix of protein and veggies, very light and thanks to the Cranberry Catsup it has a nice tang to it.

The ideas for recipes we are getting from you guys are really amazing! It truly makes me happy to see that our products inspire you to play with new taste combinations in the kitchen. So - if you have an idea as how to use our products, please let us know via email or facebook and you could win a goodie bag if you win the popular vote by the end of the month.

Ingredients (four happy bellies)

2 cooked chicken breast (ca. 10 oz), medium dice

1/2 cup celery, chopped

1/2 cup carrot, grated

1/4 medium red onion, finely chopped

4 oz smoked Cheddar Cheese in small cubes (optional)

for the Vinaigrette

4 Tbsp Darro's 100% Mission Extra Virgin Olive Oil

3 Tbsp Ruth's Cranberry Catsup

2 Tbsp Red Wine Vinegar

Salt and Pepper to taste

Method

(1) Mix the salad ingredients together in a large bowl. (2) Whisk together the vinaigrette ingredients (you can also use a small blender). (3) Toss with salad and season to taste.

I consider ourselves the luckiest people - because we have all this great customers with the most amazing culinary creativity sharing their recipe ideas using our products. It's like a giant think tank - and a tasty one to boot!

Today, we are sharing a recipe from Andrew Cheng. A former pastry chef gone video game developer, he loves kitchen projects and one of them is to see how The Scrumptious Pantry products can elevate classic pastry and desserts. Lucky us! While he is still experimenting with finding the best application of your various EV olive oils (ice cream? pound cake? brownie?), he has fine tuned this flaky shortbread cookie using Roberta's All-purpose Herbed Salt. It is a buttery sensation with just enough salt to tickle your tastebuds and the elegant note of rosemary, sage and oregano. We think it tastes pretty spectacular.

Surely a strong contender for this month's recipe give-away! Do you have recipe ideas to share on how you used our products? Eggplant spread in deviled eggs? A great pasta salad recipe for summer? Share your ideas on our facebook page or send me an email lee (at) scrumptiouspantry (dot) com to enter the contest - all recipe ideas submitted will be voted on on our facebook page on August 1st! Who receives the most "likes" wins.

Shortbread with herbed salt (courtesy of Andrew Cheng)

cream together:

6 oz (1.5 sticks) butter
3/4 tsp The Scrumptious Pantry All-purpose Herbed Salt
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

add

1 cup all purpose flour
2 Tbsp cornmeal

and mix just until combined. refrigerate the dough until chilled.

Roll out on parchment, to a even thickness (i use chopsticks), and cut in rectangles, but leave together. Dock with a fork.

Bake at 325 degrees F for... 30 to 45 minutes?, until just lightly browned, depending on the thickness. When you take them out, immediately recut the shortbreads along the original cuts. Let cool before eating.