Nourish Your Body, Excite Your Taste Buds, and Give Back to the Earth
We are clearing out the freezers for another batch of pork coming in and have an abundance of pork chops! Usually $11/lb, we are selling packs of 2 bone-in chops each for $10. Each package is roughly 1.2-1.6 lbs and usually sells for $16! You can find some listed at the discounted rate this weekend online at the Clemson Area Food Exchange or hop by the farm (call/text/email first) and pick some up…we’ll be here all weekend! Get em’ while they last!
Need some recipe inspiration?
This is a meal you would expect on your plate at a nice restaurant, and I want to show you how EASY it is to prepare it at home! We’ve been fortunate with local radicchio recently, and this recipe is a stellar way to let this cool-weather crop shine. While it is mostly commonly known as that cheerful “red and white crunchy stuff” in salad mixes, radicchio is a delightful green and a lovely addition to meals in its own right. Bitter, yes, but with the right counter-flavors, it is exquisite. It’s great roasted or grilled to bring out the sweetness. For this dish, the bitterness pairs perfectly with creamy risotto. It’s a perfect cook-at-home special occasion meal. Treat yourself or your partner to a delicious, locally sourced fancy dish!
To serve: We served this with pork chops – recipe here (pan seared instead of grilled), but you could serve with a big steak, roasted chicken, pan seared trout and even some beautiful mushrooms or tofu for my plant based friends. Check out original recipe that inspired my version for some plant based variations you might find helpful, too!
Ingredients:
Instructions:
Kohlrabi, Carrot, Scallion Fritters
Recipe adapted from: https://www.acouplecooks.com/kohrabi-fritters-with-avocado/
It’s Kohlrabi season and I love this vegetable! While it is a new vegetable to many of us here in the states, it is a very popular vegetable in Eastern Europe and Australia. It is often cooked and prepared similar to potatoes – soups, mashed, simmered in cream, etc. Peeled, diced, seasoned and roasted like potatoes is probably my favorite preparation (until this creation)! I also greatly enjoy raw (peeled) kohlrabi – it makes a great salad addition, but honestly I also eat them like radishes, smeared with butter and topped with sea salt.
A friend of mine recently texted me in a kitchen emergency situation. She was making veggie fritters and had run out of all purpose flour and wondered if rice flour would work in a vegetable fritter recipe she was making from a cookbook. And that’s where this idea started! We make summer squash and zucchini fritters in the summer all the time. Served alongside something from the grill – it’s an excellent way to use up a bumper crop. So I applied the same technique to some winter vegetables. Honestly – this recipe is super flexible. I used chickpea flour, because I had it and I love the flavor. It can be “thirsty” and an excellent, unique thickener. I also served this alongside a vegetarian spread and was looking to add as much protein as possible to my dinner plate. But you can use all purpose flour, wheat flour, rice flour — all will work great. Not a fan of kohlrabi? I encourage you to try it in this recipe, but if it’s a hard no, I bet butternut squash or sweet potatoes would be divine too!
This was a huge hit with my kids, too, though maybe they were just in it for the avocado yogurt sauce. Either way – they gobbled up their servings!
Ingredients:
For the avocado yogurt sauce
For sauce – blend all ingredients – I wiped out my food processor after shredding and used that, but combining by hand would work out just fine too.
Directions for fritters:
This has been a standard for Farmer B and I for years. Originally based off this recipe , I have adapted and simplified it over the years, to suite our needs and likes. My kids enjoy this dish as much as we do (don’t worry, the alcohol from the whiskey cooks off entirely!), I mean, who doesn’t like pork chops and mushrooms in a creamy sauce over mashed potatoes. Truly a stick to your ribs, comfort food night!
In this recipe, I pair it with some seasonal rutabaga available from a neighboring local farm. Rutabaga’s are in the brassica family (brassica napus which is a cross between a cabbage and turnip), so do have some bitterness to them, but they’re also a root vegetable and can have some of that sweetness if you know how to prepare them right! I do a 50/50 split with rutabaga and Yukon gold potatoes to achieve a similar but slightly different taste and feel to your normal mashed potato side.
I hope you enjoy this dish as much as we do!
For the Pork Chops
Rosemary Rutabaga Mash
Directions:
1. Season pork chops with salt, pepper and fresh thyme leaves on both sides. Let sit while you prep your ingredients.
2. In a large pot, boil rutabaga and potatoes until fork tender, about 25 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, in a small wide saucepan, brown the butter. On medium, let the butter melt and then continue cooking. It will start foaming and then milk solids will drop to the bottom and the butter will start to smell nutty and delicious. This takes about 5 to 10 minutes depending on your heat. Keep a watch and don’t let it burn! Once it’s browned and smelling great, remove from heat and drop the rosemary springs and garlic cloves in — they will sizzle. Swirl to combine and set aside to let the rosemary and garlic infuse into the butter.
4. Heat oil in a large cast iron skillet over medium- high heat. Brown the pork chops for three minutes on each side to create a nice, brown crust. Remove from the pan and set onto a plate. Cover with foil. Set aside. This is the initial step to create flavor, but you will complete the cooking later.
5. Turn the heat down a bit to medium, and melt butter in the same cast iron skillet used for the chops. Add the onions and mushrooms, and season with salt and pepper. Sauté for about eight minutes, stirring frequently, until the mushrooms release some liquid and onions are well-cooked and browning.
6. Turn the heat back up to high and deglaze the pan with the whiskey, scraping up any bits on the bottom of the pan. After about a minute and the alcohol has cooked off, turn the heat to low. There should still be some liquid, you don’t want it to evaporate entirely. Add the sour cream and stir to combine. Taste to adjust your seasonings, and when you’re satisfied, place your pork chops and any accumulated liquid back in your pan. Cover with foil and let it cook on your lowest setting while you finish your mashed rutabaga.
7. Strain the rutabaga and potatoes, and place back in the same pot. Discard the rosemary and garlic from the browned butter and add any remaining butter to the potatoes. Season with salt and pepper and start to mash. If you need more liquid, slowly add only a splash of milk/cream. Rutabagas have a higher water content than potatoes so you’ll find you don’t need as much liquid when mashing them. Keep mashing to desired consistency and taste as you go.
8. Test your pork chops to ensure they’re done cooking. If you’re a temp person, you’re looking for an internal 145 degrees, and if you’re a feeling kinda person you can test by pressing for firmness to your liking.
9. Load your plate with mashed rutabaga, top with a pork chop and a heart helping of the creamy mushrooms and onions. We served it with a Caesar salad!
We are stocked with pork right now! We realize how busy this season can be and know that sometimes it’s just easier and more convenient to buy from the grocery. So, in an effort to make things easy and accessible for all, we’re offering a pork sampler pack with discounts and various options for pickup and delivery! Here’s how it will work:
The possibilities are endless as to how to use them up! Here are some awesome ideas of how to use pork for this holiday season!
Can’t wait to see what you’ll create with yours!
As always – thanks for choosing to support our little family farm this holiday season. It means the world to us!
We are so excited to share with our community a truly local farm-to-table dinner. We have hosted two previous dinners at Sisters Restaurant (Salem, SC), and are excited to invite you to our next one as we continue to grow this truly local event. As a small farmer, sometimes it can be discouraging to put a product out into the world and for it not to be appreciated widely or to get the word out to a larger audience. There are so many barriers to small farms. For some, there’s simply not enough time or money to market their farm/product. Most small farmers have other jobs that supplement their farming income. For many, farmer’s markets aren’t accessible due to hours, days, staffing, distance, etc. Other times, small farms do not produce enough consistent quantity to supply a store or restaurant. On the restaurant side of things, we have found that chefs and staffs often aren’t accustomed to working with small farms, or perhaps there isn’t incentive to support small farms (it can cost more to buy local, another topic for another post). Over the years, when we had the privilege to be featured at restaurants, stores, etc, it brings such immense pride to our small operation! We also see farm to table dinners happen that don’t seem to be sourcing ingredients from their immediate local community and we want to yell, “over here!”.
After a few years of watching these frustrations continue as a small farm, and being solution oriented people with a family restaurant, we jumped on the chance to create and host a ultra-local farm-to-table dinner that features the small farms you shop at or perhaps didn’t even know existed in your own community! We want to provide a space to go out to dinner and still support local farms. We want to provide a space to inspire you in your own kitchen too! Come taste some different and unique preparations…something that you might not find at a local restaurant.
So, we hope you’ll join us. We hope we can find the people who want a night out and to know their money goes back to the earth, on the land that we live on. There’s no middle man, just local farms, good food, and great company. You can reserve a private table or sit communally. We have reservations starting at 5pm (almost full!) and going through 8pm. Bring a friend, a group, an adventurous appetite and join the movement to eat local! Browse the menu below, share it, call 864-944-8100 or email callywoodfarms@gmail.com to reserve your seat! See you there!
Callywood Farms 