One Local Summer - Week 5

We had a little Fourth-of-July cookout this weekend, and my favorite part of the meal was the caprese salad in the picture. The tomato was from Wishwell farms, the mozzarella from Blue Jacket Dairy, and the basil from our CSA at Wayward Seed. (Non-local salt, pepper, olive oil and balsamic vinegar completed the dish.)

The rest of the meal wasn't very photogenic, but was still tasty. Hot dogs from our local farm/butcher Bluescreek (natural casing even), zucchini from the CSA, and the first corn on the cob of the season. They were all cooked on our new charcoal grill, which we are slowly learning to use - there were only a few incidents involving flaming corn husks, thank goodness! Food grilled on charcoal is awfully good, and I use the residual heat to pre-cook root vegetables for later meals.

We won't talk about the ridiculous number of non-local marshmallows that follow every meal on the grill, though - I am like a little kid when you get me near a bag of marshmallows!

One Local Summer - Week 4

It's brunch again for week 4! The eggs (look at those amazing golden yolks! Gotta love pastured eggs!) were scrambled with herbs from the garden (sage, parsley and chives) and a little bit of gouda from Oakvale, bacon was from Bluescreek (as usual), biscuits were homemade with whole wheat from Flying J Farm, and strawberries were from our fruit CSA with Wayward Seed Farm. Honey from Barry's Bees (my favorite local honey!) accompanied both the strawberries and biscuit.

Eggs with herbs are my new favorite thing. I found a recipe for eggs with sage in an Anglo-Saxon cookbook (medieval cooking is an occasional hobby of mine), and I thought it sounded amazing - and it was!

One Local Summer - Week 3

This week's meal celebrated our CSA pickup, with braised greens and roasted hakurei turnips from Wayward Seed Farm. The protein for the meal was a chicken breast from Speckled Hen farm, pan-fried and served with a pan sauce (the best part of pan-frying) that was full of winter savory (a truly wonderful herb, like a very mellow rosemary.) The "dessert" was a bowl of fresh shelling peas, gently cooked then tossed with butter and tarragon. Delicious!

One Local Summer - week 2

Friday night has become "use up the rest of the CSA produce so there's room in the fridge for tomorrow's pickup" night. I should have instituted this last year! Since the CSA is very radish- and greens-intensive I am making a special effort to use them all each week.

This week I had a full head of Napa cabbage, a bunch of tiny scallions, and half a bunch of radishes. There was also a package of oyster mushrooms, a head of green garlic, and some lovely goat feta. I was thinking Asian, and cabbage... why not Asian stuffed cabbage? A google search showed me that Martha Stewart had published a recipe, and after a quick glance I tried to drive it out of my mind. I came up with my own recipe, which does have some of the same components as Martha's (and that tip about the rolling pin rocks, I must confess.) I'll include the recipe, such as it is, below. Can't wait to try a vegetarian version of these!

For a side dish I made a salad of radishes and feta cheese, tossed with a little mint and a ponzu vinaigrette. (I keep a bottle of ponzu on hand for citrus emergencies. Good stuff, and citrus and radishes are a good combination.) The feta is from Blue Jacket Dairy, and it is really, really good.



Since the oven was already on, I made a batch of cream biscuits from Alice Waters' book The Art of Simple Food. I substituted local soft wheat flour for some of the AP flour and used local butter and cream. A little homemade whipped cream and the last of the serviceberries made an excellent dessert!

Non-local ingredients for this meal were limited to seasonings, vinaigrette ingredients, baking powder, and the AP flour in the biscuits.

Asian Stuffed Cabbage
1 large head of Napa cabbage
1 pound of ground beef (or pork, or a mixture of the two)
1 small bunch scallions, sliced
1 head of green garlic (stem and head), minced
1 package mushrooms, roughly chopped (I used oyster mushrooms from a local grower, and I can't for the life of me recall the size of the package. 7 oz, maybe? Or 5? I would have used whatever I had on hand, no matter what the quantity. This recipe is elastic!)
2 tsp soy sauce
1 tsp grated ginger
1 tsp ponzu or lime juice
1/2-1 tsp of thai chili paste
1/2-1 tsp sesame oil (I actually forgot to add this and drizzled a little on top)
*one egg, lightly beaten
(I didn't actually use an egg, and I regretted it. Learn from my mistake!)
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Wash & separate cabbage (You can finely chop the smaller leaves and add them, raw, to the filling), and blanch the leaves briefly in boiling water. Drain them well, and roll out the center vein with a rolling pin to make it pliable.

Assemble the rest of the ingredients in a large bowl, and mush it together with your hands. No really, that's a technical term. You don't want to over-mix it, but you do want it to come together into a cohesive, erm, blob. Since I didn't use an egg, I had quite the chore of trying to get all the vegetable bits to stay inside. You may also notice that I didn't use rice - I really wanted to keep this all local (and didn't want to cook rice anyway.) I planned to use oatmeal as a starchy filler, but I didn't feel like it really needed it. (It did, however, need a binder like an egg. My bad!)

Assemble a vaguely-cylindrical blob of filling, and place it along the vein in the center of the cabbage leaf. Roll it up as best you can, trying to make it as tight as possible. I folded the top and bottom of the lead up, then rolled the sides over. I may do it differently next time. Imagine it is a leafy green burrito and go from there.

Place your cabbage rolls in a pan, seam-side down (I found an 8-inch square pan was perfect) and add about a cup of water to the pan. Cover it tightly with aluminum foil, and bake for 30-40 minutes (until the filling reaches 160 degrees F.)

Eat them up, yum. This made 4-5 servings.

And hey, your oven is already on. Why not make some biscuits, scones, or a cake for dessert?

One Local Summer - week 1

Our meal for week one was brunch, which is possibly my favorite meal of the week. This one featured serviceberry pancakes (more on the serviceberry below) with bacon, early cherries, and of course maple syrup!

The pancakes were made from a mix from Quiver Full Farm (~33 miles) along with buttermilk leftover from making butter with cream from Snowville Creamery (~107 miles.) The bacon is from Bluescreek (~30 miles) at the North Market; maple syrup from Pleiades (~42 miles), and serviceberries and cherries from Rhoads (~42 miles.)

So what, you may ask, is a serviceberry? I'd never heard of them either, but my mom has a painting of a cedar waxwing on what must be a serviceberry tree (I spent my childhood trying to figure out what kind of berry it was. I am all about the berries.) They grow on small trees/shrubs and have a crown like a blueberry, and the taste is a bit similar. They are also known as shadbush, saskatoon, and juneberry (although the name seems to depend on the variety, of which there are many.) The city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan is named after the plant (saskatoon is a Cree Indian word); they are called juneberries because they ripen in June, and shadbush because they flower when the shad-fish spawn. There are a few stories about why they are called serviceberries: either they served as a signal that the ground was unfrozen enough to bury the dead, or the blooms were gathered for church services, or they bloomed (in April) when it was finally mild enough weather to travel to church. Or maybe it's because there is a related berry in Europe called "sorbus."

I saw them at the farmer's market on Saturday and couldn't resist bringing home a pint. I've never met a fruit I didn't like, and the serviceberry is no exception. You can eat them raw or use them as you would blueberries in any recipe. They were quite good in pancakes!

One Local Summer!

It's that time again! I'm looking forward to another summer of unique meals and inspiration from other bloggers! The sign-up period ends on May 1, and the challenge runs from June 1 to August 30.

One Local Summer - Week 13

It's the final week! This dinner was a vegan tribute to Debbie, the coordinator for the Midwest for this challenge. (Thank you for all of your hard work!) It was a simple dish, served warm, and was somewhere between a stew and a salad. Local black beans teamed up with onions, bi-color corn, and grape and pear tomatoes from the garden. The only non-local ingredients were the oil (for sweating the onions) and the spices (cumin, chili powder, smoked paprika.) I am sure I will be revisiting this dish over the winter!

Leaves are already crunching underfoot in my yard, but with the warm days and bountiful markets it definitely feels like summer is still with us. I did see the first pumpkins this past weekend - but I think I'll wait for watermelon season to end before I start buying fall produce!

One Local Summer - Week 12

I didn't get a chance to photograph this week's meal, so I thought I would include some gratuitous cuteness for your pleasure. The black cat is Jinx, ans the vision of fluffiness is Mr. Grey.

This week's meal entry was a totally local chicken gumbo! It included chicken breast and chicken chorizo, corn, onions, green pepper, garlic, tomatoes, celery, thyme and okra. Non-local additions were salt, pepper and oil. It would have been better with bacon (wouldn't everything?) but sadly we were out. It was the only ingredient missing from the recipe though!

Other than cooking, I've been putting up berries and even made my first batch of marina sauce! I'd forgotten how incredibly messy that is. The weather has been terrible for tomatoes this year, so I hope that some big boxes of romas will make it to market eventually.

One Local Summer - Week 11

This week's meal featured pole beans from the garden, chicken wrapped in bacon, corn on the cob (we aren't tired of it yet!) and the cutest little baby red thumb potatoes. Non-local ingredients were olive oil, red pepper flakes (to jazz up the pole beans) and salt and pepper.

We have actually had local meals every day this week, but I didn't take pictures of them all! We had pizza yesterday, since I thought that both cooking and processing 4 dozen ears of corn for the freezer would be too much work. (And I was right!)

One Local Summer - Week 10

Can you believe it is already week 10? The summer has flown by. I'm finally home from my travels, which means it is time to buckle down and start putting up food - and get back to having lovely local meals!

This week's meal is a chicken thigh roasted with garam masala; potatoes, onions and pole beans pan-fried with cumin and coriander; eggplant, garlic and grape tomatoes cooked in garam masala and cumin; and corn on the cob with lime, butter, and chili powder. Tomatoes and pole beans are from my garden, and all other meats and veggies (and garlic) are from local farmers. Spices, olive oil, and lime were the non-local components.

One Local Summer - Week 9

Happy summer everyone! I am home for a few days before heading off to my next tent-related adventure (this time I'll be at Pennsic.) I have managed to hit a couple of markets and picked up some lovely produce - so lovely that I must spend part of tomorrow putting up corn and peaches.

This week's OLS meal was a quick-and-simple one: roasted chicken thighs with BBQ seasoning, corn on the cob, and broiled zucchini (cooked with olive oil, salt and pepper and thyme and dill) topped with a sauce of thinned Greek yogurt and scallions and mint. Chicken was from Speckled Hen; corn from Wishwell Farms in Bellefontaine Ohio (~54 miles); zucchini from Paige's Produce (~41 miles); scallions and mint from my garden (zero miles), butter from Hartzler's Dairy. Non-local ingredients were olive oil, yogurt, and salt and pepper.

We've been enjoying local berries (blackberries, black and red raspberries, blueberries) as well as peaches, apricots, and the occasional plum. I saw melons at the market today but was out of money. I may run off to another market tomorrow in search of a small watermelon and/or muskmelon.

One Local Summer - Week 8

This week's meal featured meat cakes! Roughly based on the idea from here, my version is basically a flat, round meatloaf (this time I made it with sweet onions and an egg from Elizabeth Telling Farm) which is then topped with mashed potatoes (these were lightly mashed red thumb potatoes, which were a lovely shade of pink) and bacon sprinkles. The meat cake has become a staple in our house, a kind of vegetable-free shepherd's pie, only much groovier. Side dishes were corn on the cob and pole beans with onions. The pole beans were a 0-mile food, right from the garden!

Non-local ingredients were salt, pepper, breadcrumbs, and Worcestershire sauce.

One Local Summer - Week 7

This week's designated meal was a main course of BLT's (well, okay, they were actually "BL's" because I don't like tomato on sandwiches) with corn on the cob and zucchini capaccio, based on Eric Ripert's excellent blog recipe at at Avec Eric. The bacon was from Blues Creek, zucchini from Paige's Produce, and corn from... well, I forget the farm's name but it was grown in Circleville Ohio (~40 miles.) Non-local ingredients were olive oil, salt, pepper, and Parmigiano cheese (I had some local Gouda but the dish really called for the imported Parmigiano Reggiano, so I used it.)

I made the mistake of turning the oven on for the zucchini, since my toaster oven only holds so much. Bad choice! I am not touching the oven again until fall is in the air.

One Local Summer - Week 6

I'll be off living in a tent for the next few weeks, without internet access. (I know, the mind boggles!) So I will be posting a few of the meals I have been collecting, to cover me while I'm gone.



This week's meal featured BBQ chicken (chicken from North market Poultry, sauce from City BBQ), green beans (Bird's Haven Farm) with scallions (Just This Farm) and butter (my own homemade!) and potatoes (H-W Farms) with red onions and smoked paprika. Non-local ingredients were olive oil, salt and pepper, and paprika. I made the chicken in the toaster oven, which is currently my favorite kitchen device!

I also *finally* started putting things up. I froze a few pints of berries and some chopped sweet onions (I will not run out of onions this winter! I won't!) In past week I managed to put up a little bit of asparagus and English peas. These were all frozen and vacuum sealed.

One Local Summer - Week 5

This week's meal was a vegetarian pasta dish. I even skipped the cream sauce this week! Fresh linguine from the North Market met olive oil, roasted grape tomatoes (roasted in the toaster oven with olive oil, salt and pepper), english peas, shitake mushrooms, garlic and fresh basil. This week's salad included cucumbers, plum purple radishes (my favorite radish ever) and more grape tomatoes. Non-local ingredients were olive oil, salt and pepper.

I didn't even miss the cream sauce!

One Local Summer - Week 4

This week I learned that I am terrible at cooking steak. I understand the theory and all (I've read my McGee and watched Top Chef contenders cook steaks in a variety of ways) but I have this deep-seated fear that it (all meat, really) will be underdone, so I tend to overcook it. Too many years as a vegetarian, perhaps. As this was my first attempt at cooking steak I should probably cut myself a little slack. It wasn't too bad, just a little tough.

I seared the steak and finished it in a pan with lots of butter. It is topped with sautéed oyster mushrooms and garlic scapes (cooked in the same pan as the steak so there were plenty of butter and fond) and the sides were English peas (briefly boiled and buttered) and mashed redskin potatoes (with butter and milk.) Dessert was mango lassi frozen yogurt from local artisan ice creamiere Jeni's.

Non-local ingredients were salt and pepper.

Steak from Long Meadows Grass-Fed Beef in Utica, Ohio (44 miles)
(Here's an article about Ed and Nancy and their beef.)
Mushrooms from Toby Run in Bellville, Ohio (~50 miles)
Garlic scapes from Just This Farm in Galloway, Ohio (~24 miles)
Potatoes from H-W Organic Farm in Sullivan, Ohio (~85 miles)
Milk and butter from Hartzler's Dairy in Wooster, Ohio (~88 miles)
Ice cream from Jeni's at the North Market (ingredients weren't local, but Jeni is our local ice cream star (small batch artisanal ice creams, sorbets and frozen yogurts) so we feel no qualms about including all of her works in our local diet. My waistline owes at least an inch to her!)

One Local Summer - Week 3

It's that time again! No picture this week, as I was hungry and dinner was a little less than lovely. Tonight's OLS meal was a stir-fry of veggies and mushrooms with one breast of chicken (shared between two people.) One of my goals is to reduce our meat consumption, which has gone up a little since we discovered humanely-raised local meat. Being able to stretch one small chicken breast (really a half-breast) into one meal is a good thing (I have managed to make one feed four before, in a stew or curry with plenty of veggies. Grandma would admire my thrift!

Anway, on to the dinner! The stir-fry included snow peas, garlic scapes, early carrots (SO good!), rainbow chard, asparagus tips, green pepper, mushrooms (shitake and yellow oyster) plus the chicken. Only the seasonings were non-local (soy sauce, black bean paste, ginger, sesame oil.) I meant to serve it over (local) soft wheat berries, but it was so hot I couldn't bring myself to boil water. Dessert was a strawberry granita (local strawberries and non-local sugar) which is a wonderful thing on a hot day!

One Local Summer - week 2

This week's challenge meal featured these lovely calypso beans:



Dinner was calypso beans with green garlic and chorizo, braised greens with green garlic, plus a salad of mixed lettuce, snow peas, cucumber, grape tomatoes, and French breakfast radishes. The dressing was a homemade creamy peppercorn with a spice mix from Penzey's. Non-local ingredients were salt, pepper, and most salad dressing components. I forgot to get a picture of the salad, but here are the beans and greens. (The bean dish is not pretty, and as I was eating I realized that I had made a version of beans and franks! Much tastier than the canned stuff, though. Chorizo is my new favorite thing.)



I am slowly learning to cook dried beans. Here is the method I used to cook dinner:

Beans with chorizo
serves two

1 heaping cup of dried beans (mine were calypso beans)
some sort of allium: you can chop a small onion and a clove of garlic, or a small bunch of leeks. I used 4 or 5 stalks of green garlic
2 links of chorizo or similar spicy sausage

Beans: the hot soak method.

Rinse and pick over the beans. I like to spread them out on a cookie sheet to look for rocks and other non-desirables. Place your beans in a pot on the stove with plenty of cold water (I like to have it at least 3 inches above the top of the beans. You do NOT want to run out of water!) Bring the pot to a rolling boil, stirring occasionally, then turn the burner off and cover the pot. Forget about it for 2 hours (though more time is fine.) After two hours I like to drain and rinse the beans (especially if they are kidney beans! I am weirdly paranoid about kidney bean poisoning, which comes from kidney bean lecithin or Phytohaemagglutnin. It happens when the beans are soaked and undercooked, so be sure to drain the soaking water and cook them well.) After the beans are drained and rinsed I put them back into the pot with plenty of water (again, you do not want to run out of water!) and my allium-of-choice (you can sweat the onion/garlic/whatever before adding the beans and water, but it is also okay to just toss them in raw.) Bring the pot to a boil then reduce to a simmer and cook, covered, until the beans are done. Stir occasionally. But wait, she hasn't mentioned salt! A good rule of thumb is to wait until the beans are soft before you add the salt. Don't be stingy with it, as beans need salt - but also remember that sausage will be joining the party in a little while. It will bring a little saltiness to the mix.

So that's pretty vague, isn't it? Really, the cooking time varies by type of bean, probably age of bean, and possibly what day of the week it is or what phase the moon is in. I plan for at least 1.5 hours but it really can vary. The first time I made calypso beans it took an hour; the second time it was more than 1.5 hours. I usually don't taste-test until the beans have had an hour in the pot. Be sure to stir them, especially if your stove is an electric relic with uneven burners like mine. If the beans have too much liquid in them when they are nearly finished you can use a ladle to remove some of it. They should be a little moist but not too runny. You can always add another dash of water after the sausage goes in, if it ends up being too dry.

When the beans are almost done I add in the chorizo, which has been cooked as I decribe below:

(You may have noticed that whenever I am in doubt about the cooking time of a grain or legume, I tend to cook the major components of the dish separately to have better control over it.) In this case I browned the chorizo in a small skillet then braised it (use water or beer) until it was mostly cooked through. I am squeamish about sausage casings so I peeled them off before slicing the cooked sausage into 1/2 inch rounds. This does make the sausage fall apart, which is actually quite nice for a bean dish.

So we have cooked chorizo and almost-cooked beans. The two are united and cooked on low for about 5 minutes, or for however long it takes for the beans to be cooked through. I like mine to be quite soft, so they do tend to fall apart a little.

One Local Summer - first meal of the challenge!

Tonight I made a pasta dish, inspired by a recent post from Laura at (not so) Urban Hennery. It is based on a recipe from Nigel Slater, and it involves cooking bacon in butter. It sounded so wonderfully insane that I had to try it. I added in a few extras from the market this week, and produced the best creamy pasta sauce I've ever made.

Creamy pasta with bacon and spring market finds: baby leeks, green garlic, shitake mushrooms, and asparagus
(serves two)

~3 tablespoons butter
5 slices of bacon (or so), as lean as possible*, cut into lardons (I used peppered bacon)
3 baby leeks, roughly chopped
3 stalks of green garlic, sliced thin (I use the whole green stalk but not the leaves)
~1 cup of shitake mushrooms, chopped
~1 cup of thin asparagus spears, in 2-inch pieces
1 cup of heavy whipping cream
Fresh chives for snipping
pasta for two (I used fresh linguine, so the timing below is for fresh pasta)

Get your pasta water ready to go. I use my electric kettle for rapid boiling (then I add it to the pot I'll be using) or at least put a lid on the pot when heating the water (saves energy by bringing it to a boil faster.) Don't put the lid on when cooking the pasta though!

Prep all ingredients beforehand. It will make your life easier, trust me.

Melt butter in a large skillet. Add bacon and cook over medium heat until the bacon begins to color. Add in the leeks and green garlic, and cook until tender. Once the bacon takes on a bit more color and the leeks/garlic are soft, add the shitake mushrooms to the pan. When they start to lose a bit of their raw look, add the asparagus.

Drop your pasta into the boiling water, and cook for the recommended time. When it is done to taste, drain it, reserving a half cup or so of the cooking water (I like to catch the last bit of water that drains off - it has a lot of starch from the pasta, and makes an excellent thickener for sauces.)

While the pasta is cooking and once the asparagus is tender, add the cream to the bacon/vegetable/mushroom mixture. Stir well, and allow it to bubble briefly. Add a little of the pasta cooking water (I used maybe 1/4 cup) and allow the cream sauce to gently bubble until it thickens a little. Turn off the heat and add the drained pasta to the skillet, tossing to mix. Divvy the pasta into bowls, and top with snipped chives (and maybe a grating of local cheese, or parmigiana reggiano.)

*The bacon I had wasn't very lean, so I cooked the lardons from fattiest section in a separate pan, discarding the fat (or saving it for a spinach salad or other application.) I cooked it until crispy, then sprinkled it on top of the bowls of pasta. The texture contrast was heavenly!

This pasta was served with locally made whole wheat bread and a salad of (local, hothouse) cucumbers and grape tomatoes. Dessert was a bowl of fresh strawberries, no sugar or cream required! Although I have to say that hothouse or hoophouse vegetables make me feel like I'm cheating!

All of these ingredients were locally grown or produced. They were purchased at either the North Market Farmer's Market, the North Market proper, the Clintonville Farmer's Market, the Westerville Farmer's Market, or the Worthington Farmer's Market. The butter was purchased at The Raisin Rack.
Butter: Hartzler's Dairy (Wooster, ~88 miles)
Shitake mushrooms: Toby Run (Bellville, ~50 miles)
Asparagus: Anderson's Orchard (Pickerington, ~26 miles)
Leeks: Comb's Fresh Herbs (Gahanna, ~12 miles)
Green Garlic: Just This Farm (Galloway, ~24 miles)
Cream: Snowville Creamery in Pomeroy, Ohio (They sell it in 1/2 gallon cartons! What a fabulous idea!) They are about 95 miles away, and the only local dairy to sell whipping cream.
Pasta: Pastaria in the North Market
Bacon: Blues Creek (Marysville, ~30 miles)
Cucumbers: Bird's Haven Farms (Granville, ~25 miles)
Grape tomatoes: H-W Organic Farms (Sullivan, ~85 miles)
Strawberries: Rhoad's Farm (Circleville, ~40 miles)
Bread: Der Bake Oven (Fredericktown, ~45 miles)
Chives: pot of herbs (my back yard, 5 feet)

One Local Summer - now with button!

(I just learned how to put the link into the button. The real trick will be doing it twice!)