Eat Local Challenge and Local Foods Week

October is a busy month! First of all, in Columbus we are celebrating Local Foods Week with the organization Local Matters. They have some excellent programs for food in schools and urban agriculture, and they are working to make fresh local produce available to underserved communities in Columbus. Check them out!

Also, the Eat Local Challenge has finally been announced (it started on October 1st) and I am participating. That participation will start on Tuesday, however, as I am currently at a hotel in Chicago for a family wedding and reunion.

A Summer of Meals

Wow, did I fall off the planet or what? Apparently blogging is like exercising, and once you fall off the wagon it can be hard to get back on. We've had a long, hot summer of delicious local meals though, so I will try to play a little catch-up!

July:
I miss peaches already! This dish was simply pan-grilled peaches with a little honey and cinnamon, topped with golden raspberries. Simple and delicious. I wish I'd made this dish more often when peaches were in season!

Next we have magical pig fresh corn chowder, with bacon and ham as the meats of choice (along with corn, potatoes, cream, chives, and onions.) It was good, but I really prefer my chowder to contain both bacon and shrimp. Next time I may try a vegetarian version, because a tasty vegetarian corn chowder should be possible!

August:
This was my first attempt at gazpacho, and as you may guess by the color, I went a little heavy on the onions. It was very good and very refreshing (despite the fact that the excess of onions made it kick like a mule), and I can see this becoming a summer favorite. Anything that doesn't involve turning on the stove is fine by me!

This next meal took a lot of work! The chicken thigh is covered with a ground cherry-apricot mostarda that I made in a fit of industry; it was good, but getting the balance of fruit/sweet/mustard was a little tricky. (A mostarda is an Italian condiment made of sweetened fruit and mustard.) I think it would have been easier with ground cherries alone. On the side were a few grilled apricots, chard with leeks and cherry tomatoes, and zucchini with Parmesan and balsamic vinegar.

This was the quickest and most healthy chicken soup I've ever made. I did cheat and use the chicken soup base from Penzey's, but everything else was local: shredded carrots, thinly sliced celery, and summer squash cut into ribbons as an alternative to noodles.

One local product we've been eating a lot of this summer is the Luna Burger. They are vegan, made from local ingredients, and pretty darn good as well! Our favorite is definitely the farmhouse chili burger. You can see that I managed to get bacon into the meal as sprinkles on the corn (though I resisted the urge to put bacon and cheese on the vegan burger.)

Everything, aside from the obvious (salt, pepper, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, Parmesan cheese, Penzey's soup base) was grown or produced locally!

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!