Shop Small Business Saturday 2014

Hope to catch up with you all at our ONLY retail event this Holiday Season!  Midwest Pantry's Shop Small business Saturday  If you can't make it to the event you can still pick us up in the Specialty Cheese Department of these great retailers!

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Lucille's Chicken Wing Challenge

Fall has officially arrived and football season is in full swing.  While you don't need to watch football to eat chicken wings, the two go perfectly together.  If you are like me and your team is putting you through the usual emotional roller coaster, it can sometimes be a nice break to focus on the food.  We spend many of our game days with our great friends Heather and Wade.  Our last game was all about the wings complete with wing dip, three flavors of wings and buckets of blue cheese dipping sauce.

 Wade busted out the recipe that I am sharing with you today and it quickly eclipsed the other usual suspects.  I would describe these wings as having a spicy thai flavor.  The creamy tartness of the yogurt rounds out the heat of the our Lucille's Kitchen Garden Hot Red Pepper Jam and creates something close to the perfect wing.  This particular wing doesn't need a dipping sauce but Heather mixed up a quick peanut sauce and it was fabulous.  The peanut sauce gave it a very pad thai flavor and reduced the heat for those of you who don't want too much spice.

All this wing love has put me in the mood to have a cook off.  Share your wing recipe using Lucille's Kitchen Garden Pepper Jams.  We will test each recipe and the winner will get a six pack of a variety of Lucille's Kitchen Garden jams.  Get us your recipes by Oct. 20th and we will announce the winner on Oct. 27th.

Now for a little inspiration. . I share with you Wade's fantastic recipe.

Wade's Delicious Hot Wings with Greek Yogurt

12 chicken wings

1 cup yogurt

1 cup Lucille’s Kitchen Garden Hot Red Pepper Jam or Garlic Pepper Jam

⅛ cup whiskey or cider vinegar

I recommend buying whole wings and jointing them yourself.  It is less expensive and you get meatier wing portions.  For a quick tutorial on how to joint your own chicken wings check out this video.  I usually keep the wing tips that I don’t use for my hot wings for stock.

• Preheat oven to 400 degrees

• Cover your baking sheet with parchment paper.
• Place on baking sheet and sprinkle your wing joints with salt .
• Roast in a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes flip and roast another 20 minutes or until they have an internal temp of at least 165 and are crispy on the outside.  
• Mix ½ cup Lucille’s Kitchen Garden Pepper Jam with ⅛ cup whiskey or cider vinegar.
• Dip wings in your pepper jam mixture and place back on baking sheet and return to oven or 5 to 7 minutes.  Watch to be sure that they don’t start to burn.
• Pull wings out and dip in yogurt
• Serve with lots of napkins and celery.  

Rhythm of the Season

Eating seasonally is the natural extension of eating local.  It connects us with the rhythm of the growing season and adds a cozy structure to the year.  As Andrew Zimmern said last week on MPR's Appetites, in the fall we stop craving tomato, basil, and fresh mozzarella salads and start turning our minds to roasted root vegetables, and hearty soups.  Many of you, like me, will spend the next few weekends canning the last of the summer tomatoes and dreaming of how it will perk up your winter chili.
At Lucille's Kitchen Garden we are literally buried in apples and pears as our customers turn from the bright flavors of strawberries to the comforts of cinnamon and ginger. This week I was thinking about how we all benefit from the fact that we crave things when they are in season.  First, our produce doesn't have all the food miles created by shipping heavy items like apples and pears across the country.  We still carry many of the flavors throughout the year, but we can usually stock up on them now.  Secondly the price of raw ingredients is about 1/3 less when they are in season, which allows us to keep a competitive price point and make our products available to a wider audience of people.  Finally, it just shows how many of us have embraced this natural rhythm of the season in our food lives.
I was especially excited this week to see that The Heavy Table combine our Ginger Pear Jam with Donnay Dairy's Granite Ridge, amazing aged goat cheese in a fantastic sandwich that I will be making this weekend.  Check out the blog and let me know how it goes.  Don't worry, in about 9 months we will be back to pure bliss at the idea of a caprese salad!

New Hot Red Pepper Jam

We are so pleased with our new Hot Red Pepper Jam!  I had in on the table at our families Labor Day Pig Roast and people loved it on the pork sandwiches. . .so much so that the jar disappeared near the end of the meal.  I am serving it as an optional addition to a Roasted Pumpkin Thai Curry soup that I am making for friends this weekend.  I will let you know how it goes and share the recipe next week!