Dark Days Challenge week 5 - good old spaghetti and meatballs

Spaghetti and meatballs are on our rotation of winter meals here Chez Green Leanings. I've even made peace with the fact that the meatballs are never really round, unlike the ones I remember from my childhood. But lopsided or not, these are darn tasty!

The meal included fresh linguine from our favorite pasta shop (Pastaria in the North Market) along with homemade meatballs made with grass-fed beef and marinara sauce from the freezer. I topped the meatballs with fresh mozzarella (also from Pastaria) and served it with focaccia bread from one of the new winter market vendors, Black Cat Bakery from Pataskala, Ohio. I could eat that focaccia bread all day, every day!

The meatballs contained ground beef, fresh baby spinach, garlic and onion, an egg, herbs, and enough bread crumbs to make it all stick together. This batch of marinara sauce contained tomato skin and seeds, and I don't think I'm sold on it. I definitely prefer the more labor-intensive version that involves peeling and seeding the tomatoes.

Non-local ingredients were salt, pepper, and bread crumbs.

Dark Days of Winter Challenge - week 13

I had great plans to make a very healthy meal this week - plans that were slightly foiled by the amount of butter I used, alas. It was tasty, though!

This meal featured locally farmed trout from Freshwater farms of Ohio. I pan-fried it with fresh lemon juice (not local) and herbs. My second attempt at cauliflower puree was fantastic! I used two small potatoes along with the cauliflower, plus cream and butter and caramelized shallots. Sadly, that was the last of the cauliflower from my freezer. Other side dishes included corn with shallots and butter, green beans with even more shallots and butter, and carnival squash with, you guessed it, butter (along with maple sugar and curry powder. And without shallots.) I've been experimenting with flavorings for roasted squash, and I have to say that maple and curry is a definite winner (cumin is also pretty good, and cumin with coriander is on deck for the next batch.)

So how are your supplies holding out? My freezer is still packed to the gills, and we've been getting fresh lettuce and greens and the odd potato (sweet potatoes this week!) from the winter farmer's market. I have a ton of small, slightly wrinkly and sad potatoes that I bought in the fall, so hopefully they will become soup this week. And plenty of squash are still around, of course - it's about time to roast one of the big ones (probably a marina de chioggia.)

Snowed in, day two: more Dark Days meals!

Yup, it's easy to eat locally when you're at a level 2 snow emergency. I didn't manage to take pictures today, as we were busy with shoveling. Okay, so I couldn't do much of the shoveling, but I tried! It warmed up today so the snow was all heavy and wet, and having a cold/asthma/out-of-joint collarbone is not conducive to shoveling.
No snow blower here at Green Leanings!

We only had two meals today (unless you count the time spent with a pint of Jeni's Pear Riesling Sorbet as a meal) because of late sleeping/the time change/sheer exhaustion from trying to manually clear 20.4 inches of snow from the driveway.

Brunch was the aforementioned peppered bacon (Blue's Creek) and eggs (Raven Rock) with toast (I forget who made the bread, but it was from a Farmer's Market last month.) Eggs cooked in bacon fat are the best thing EVER. Well, aside from the bacon itself. We are big fans of bacon here.

Dinner involved more pork because it was the quickest thing to defrost (it didn't feel like dinner time, what with the extra daylight, so I had to cook at the last minute.) I warmed up some cottage ham from Blue's Creek with honey from Gypsy Bees; with it I served colcannon (red potatoes, leeks, and green cabbage with butter and milk), corn (with butter), and green beans (with shallots, olive oil, and lemon.) Non-local foods were the salt, pepper, lemon juice and olive oil (I was a little tired of drenching everything with butter!)

I confess that I was tempted to get pizza for dinner, but it seemed silly to risk the roads without a pressing reason. I'll be out of town for much of the next week, so there won't be much in the way of local meal reports.

dark days challenge - being snowed in has its advantages

We've had 20.4 inches of snow in the last two days, plus drifts. I'll try to get some pictures tomorrow, if I can stop coughing long enough to shovel. Where are the money-hungry flocks of children with shovels when you need them?

I was very sad that the snow storm coincided with our winter market (which was apparently canceled.) Now I must wait 2 weeks for more spinach and lettuce and onions (which I am out of again! Eek!)

Anyway, today was a cooking kind of a day, and the advantage of being trapped at home is that you must use what is in the freezer and pantry. So we've had nothing but local meals today.

Breakfast was a big pot of oatmeal from Stutzman Farms with a granny smith apple from H-W farm, sweetened with maple sugar from Pleiades. Salt, cinnamon and nutmeg were non-local additions (and I grated the latter from whole spices.)

Lunch was another rendition of pasta and meatballs. The angel hair pasta came from Pastaria at the North Market; the marinara sauce was made from scratch from frozen tomatoes from the freezer (it came out quite well, but there was a lot of liquid that I drained off), and the meatballs were again with grass-fed beef from Long Meadows (plus local bread soaked in local milk, local herbs, local egg, local onions and garlic.) Non-local ingredients were salt, pepper, and Parmesan cheese (terroir, from the local Italian market.) It was quite tasty, and just the thing for a snowy afternoon.

While the oven was on from the meatballs, I cut up my one rouge vif d'etampes pumpkin and roasted it for soup. I sweated garlic and the last of the onions, then added the roasted pumpkin and some veggie stock from the freezer. As it cooked I grated a GIANT carrot from the root cellar project (it was buried in sand in a cooler in the garage, and aside from some sprouting was still quite fresh-looking and tasty) and cooked it with some ginger and curry powder. Eventually it joined the rest of the soup and the whole lot got punished with the immersion blender (aka The Punisher, after a very amusing blog post by A Hunger Artist, aka Bob del Grosso.) I added a little more ginger and a healthy dose of thyme, and it was quite good. If I'd had cream on hand I would have mixed a little in at the end, but instead I just grated some Parmesan on top and served it with crostini from Whole Foods (I made crostini last week but they didn't toast quite enough and went stale.) Non-local foods: seasonings and cheese and crostini.)

While the soup was simmering I made a batch of scones using 1/2 local (soft) wheat flour, and local butter, milk, egg, and raspberries from the freezer. The combination of raspberries and whole wheat made them a very strange color (purplish grey) but they were quite tasty and rather light. I look forward to having one for breakfast.

Brunch tomorrow will be more local peppered bacon and eggs (cooked in bacon fat, my favorite.) You see what a hardship this eating locally thing is?

Dark Days Challenge - breakfast for dinner, and too much excitement at home

Life has been a little too exciting chez Green Leanings. First of all, we both have contracted the plague, aka a really nasty upper respiratory bug. I am pretty much coughing non-stop, and my partner is just getting sick. Yesterday evening a guy from the gas company came out to investigate "a non-flammable intensity gas smell" near the meter (that was mentioned 4 months ago by a meter reader.) No detectable gas with his equipment, but we could both smell it. Then he dug into the ground, and bingo. Gas at 10 times the flammable level near the foundation of the house. He turns off the gas. I have a panic attack.

Repairmen come out today. The area with the leak is covered by a deck, and they won't touch it. So my partner manages to rip out the decking single-handedly while the repairmen attend to another house on our street. Did I mention the blizzard? Yes, we are in the midst of what some people are calling "the blizzard of '08." The repairmen return and manage to fix the leak, despite the worsening of the weather. The gas company tells us they can turn the gas back on... on Monday. At this point it is about 55 degrees F in the house. We mention that we are at home and freezing, and they tell us maybe tonight... maybe tomorrow. Maybe. Miracle of miracles, the same guy who turned off the gas is on duty, and recognizes our address. He tests the line (took about an hour in the heavy snow), turns the gas on, and makes sure the furnace and hot water heater are working properly. And he's a cat person, so a few of our curious furkids get a scritching in the process.

I had been planning to go to a nice, nearby Embassy Suites hotel for the night (and enjoying their manager's reception, hot tub, and cooked-to-order breakfast) but the roads were getting worse and worse, and suddenly we had hot water again. So I pulled out the (local) bread I was defrosting, cut a few slices for toast (with local butter), and cooked up some (local) peppered bacon and eggs. Since it was a celebratory dinner we had a little more bacon than usual. This batch is really fatty, and the joys of lightly crisped fatty bacon cannot be underestimated. For dessert I enjoyed some lapsang souchong with armangac prune ice cream from Jeni's (as a lover of things smoky I find it quite fabulous.)

It was rather nice to have a totally local meal in the face of adversity. And having hot water to clean up the bacon grease? Priceless.

Plus there's enough bacon left for breakfast. Life is good (except for the coughing, and the gaping hole where the deck used to be, and the foot of snow. But since I have heat, I'm not complaining.)