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- Inga Witscher: One of the very best things
about living on a farm
is growing your own food.
When you're eating from your garden,
you can really be eating
healthy foods from healthy soils.
So, what you put into your garden
with composting and cover cropping,
and really building that nutrient-dense soil,
you're gonna get out--
not just in healthy food, but in tasty food.
And that's why
I love growing good ingredients
because you can cook with it simply.
And one of the simplest ways is by
using all of those ingredients in a delicious bacon tart.
So, I'm going to use the potatoes from my garden
that I dug a little bit earlier.
I'm going to use some delicious kale,
and I'm also going to add in a fresh onion,
a little bit of garlic, of course,
and finally, some of our very own cheese,
made from the milk from our cows right here at the farm.
So this is a very homemade, home-grown meal,
and the best part is it's easy to make.
I can put it together
before I go out and milk the cows this evening,
and it can bake away,
and dinner will be served when I'm done with chores.
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So, to get started with our tart,
I'm going to make a filling.
We're going to layer the potatoes
with the kale and the onion mixture,
and then fold everything together with the bacon.
It looks really pretty when you're putting it together,
and it looks really pretty when you're serving it, as well.
I harvested these a few days ago,
and then, I let them cure in the sunshine
so they could sort of get that papery outside.
They're so different than going to a grocery store in December
and getting an onion that was shipped across the country.
These have so much flavor and so much moisture in them.
It's just absolutely delicious.
And then, I just take the bits of all my vegetables,
and I put them in a pile.
I can either put them in my compost
or give them to the chickens.
The chickens actually love the little bits of herbs
that I give them this time of the year.
And speaking of herbs, I'm gonna load this tart up
with some fresh herbs from the garden.
I love growing parsley, and because of that, I decided,
"Oh, why don't I just grow 20 parsley plants this year?
I'll use it every day."
It's a lot of parsley to use,
so every different way I can find to use it,
I've been using it.
And in this dish,
I'm just gonna chop up
about a good heaping tablespoon,
maybe even two.
When I'm baking, I'm always really good
about measuring all of my ingredients really well.
But when I'm cooking,
I want to measure with my eyes
with my nose, what I'm smelling,
and with my heart to see how much of an ingredient
you should really be adding,
depending on the flavor,
depending on your likes and your dislikes.
You really should cook with all of your senses.
And then, I'm gonna add some basil to this
because I have it in the garden and it's delicious,
along with these other herbs.
But you can feel free to mix and match any herbs
that you have on your patio or in your garden
or that you're finding at the farmer's market.
Now I'm just going to slide these into a bowl
and get ready to microplane my garlic.
Microplaning is really just what the tool is called
that I'm using.
It's kind of like a grater,
and it's a very fine grating.
Sometimes I use this for parmesan cheese
or even if I'm doing something with ginger.
It's going to give it
a little bit more of a mellowy, creamier flavor
and almost makes it like a beautiful paste,
if you're chopping your garlic
and adding that to a recipe that can maybe be more pungent.
So, how you're using your garlic
is determining the taste of the dish.
And I like using the microplane for salad dressings
and dishes like this
because it's a little bit more mellow.
And now I'm just going to add some kale
that I just wilted inside,
just to cook it down a little bit.
All right.
Now, I'm going to set the kale mixture off to the side.
And the moment I've been waiting for is... to unwrap this cheese.
This is one of our cheddars that's about two months old,
and it's starting to really develop
some of those beautiful cheddar flavors,
and it's gonna be fantastic in this tart.
So I'm gonna start by just taking off the cheesecloth,
which we wrap it in.
We use cheesecloth in the aging process
to make it so the cheese can breathe
because this is a living being, right?
And we want it to be able to breathe and age
and build character through that.
The color is just so beautiful.
The thing I love about cheese,
especially the cheese that we're doing here,
is it's a way for me to capture the summertime,
capture what's happening in the pasture,
what's happening in the field,
what's happening with the cows.
It's like canning, right?
You're canning your tomatoes in August.
This is me being able to capture my pastures in the summertime
to be enjoyed all year long.
You can feel the butterfat in the cheese,
and that's part of the Jersey characteristics
is all of that beautiful butterfat.
And then, look at that.
It almost looks like it captured that July sunshine in there too.
I'm gonna cut it now into a wedge.
Look at that, oh!
[sniffs]
It's incredibly rewarding
to be able to pick out the pastures for the cows,
move them every day, work with them every day,
have this relationship with them,
and then milk them,
and then be able to make cheese
and then see the cheese and cook with it.
This is a very, very exciting moment for me.
I'm going to go ahead and grate this up.
And I think this is going to add
a really beautiful flavor to our tart.
* [folksy music]
All right, now
you can just put your cheese in with your kale.
And the last thing we need to do to prep for the tart
is slice some of our garden fresh potatoes.
I don't use a mandolin anymore
because I just cut off the tips of my finger.
So, just slice 'em thin.
And that should be enough potatoes.
So, now we're ready to start putting our tart together.
Continue layering your bacon all the way around the pan,
leaving part of the bacon out of the pan.
That's okay.
We're going to fold that over afterwards,
creating the top crust.
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Now go ahead and shingle your potatoes
all the way around the bottom,
making one complete layer.
Add a good handful of the potato, kale, and cheese mixture
right on top of the potatoes.
Now, add another layer of potatoes.
Finish it off with the rest of the kale mixture,
Now, go ahead and fold the bacon over the top of your mixture.
This is going to create the top crust.
And that's how easy this is.
This is a wonderful way to use up
all of those farm-fresh ingredients in one dish.
I'm going to cook this on the grill.
I love cooking outside in the summertime.
It's going to take about two hours,
which is going to give me plenty of time
to finish my chores.
And it'll be done
just as soon as Chance gets home from work
and we can enjoy a garden supper together.
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