Category: <span>One Local Summer</span>

Category: One Local Summer

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2013 – Week 6

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The bad blogger has gotten behind again.  Never fear, meals were cooked and consumed, I’m just behind on posting.  Thanks so much, Central Air Conditioning, for breaking on July 3rd at 5pm.  No, I’m not bitter. AHEM.  That out of the way, here’s week six.  There’s a magic overlap when dill and cucumbers are both in season at the market and I end up making some variation of this meal every year.  Chicken with a local version of tzatziki and TONS OF VEGETABLES.  Those snap peas made another appearance (because I really can’t get enough of them), along with some squash and scallions.  It’s a pretty easy meal to make, and I just love tzatziki.

Chicken with Tzatziki and Vegetables:
Chicken – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Squash – Charlestown Farm
Snap Peas – Jack’s Farm
Scallions – Jack’s Farm
Dill – Jack’s Farm
Cucumber – North Star Orchard
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Non Local – Olive Oil, salt, pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2013 – Week 5

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Another week down.  This week’s inspiration came from a few different sources.  I want to say it was on Google+ that I heard someone talking about putting chicken in the crock pot and then shredding it like pulled pork.  Brilliant!  I found cabbage at the farmer’s market and decided to combine the two to make cabbage wraps.  Pitas or other types of wraps won’t be local so this is my substitute for wraps.  Works WAY better than lettuce since lettuce can be a little fragile, but the cabbage held up really well.  Sugar snap peas are a big favorite around here and we tend to just eat them raw (and they disappear quickly that way).  The chicken was stuffed in the crock pot with some homebrew beer and spicy peanut satay-like sauce for a few hours, until it shredded apart easily.  The drink in the back (frozen fruit smoothie) is not local, but it was a part of dinner, so I let it hang out in the photo anyway.  We had a lovely bit of weather this week, so dinner was outside on the patio.

Cabbage Wraps:
Cabbage – Charlestown Farm
Zucchini – Jack’s Farm
Garlic Scapes – Jack’s Farm
Fat Cat Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Chicken – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Non Local – Sauce, beer

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2013 – Week 4

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And here we have week four – a Bison stir fry.  The farmer’s market had their first zucchini of the year and I was SO excited to see all the new vegetables at the market, so I grabbed a bunch of different ones, added some bison and sauce and VOILA!  The sauce was definitely not local, but necessary.  The bison vendor advised that the chuck steak would work best and to marinate it overnight in the sauce to make it nice and tender -worked like a charm.  I still have some leftovers from this meal, since it made such a huge pot, but they’re going fast.

Bison Stir Fry:
Zucchini – Jack’s Farm
Carrots – Charlestown Farm
Bison – Backyard Bison
Garlic Scapes – Jack’s Farm
Broccoli – Charlestown Farm
Shiitake Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Onions – North Star Orchards
Non Local – General Tso sauce, soy sauce

 

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2013 – Week 3

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Pardon the blurry photo, but I was so hungry and managed to rush the photo in order to devour the meal.  Week three, and we’ve hit strawberry season!  I went out and picked 12 pounds of berries at a local farm – Walnut Springs Farm – the majority of which went into the freezer for a batch of jam later, and possibly for a batch of mead at a later time.  The meal is a salad, but with lots of fun toppings.  On top of the lettuce and pea shoots are strawberries, goat cheese, smoked chorizo, garlic scapes, spring onions, and the homemade dressing which also included strawberries.  It was REALLY filling, and a perfect late lunch.  I have just enough leftovers for another!

Spring Salad with Chorizo and Goat Cheese:
Lettuce – Jack’s Farm
Pea Shoots – Charlestown Farm
Chevre – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Strawberries – Walnut Springs Farm
Chorizo – Countrytime Farm
Garlic Scapes – Jack’s Farm
Spring Onions – Jack’s Farm
Non Local – Balsamic vinegar, olive oil

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2013 – Week 2

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Week two!  We’re slowly seeing more vegetables show up at the market, and since the husband is away, I jumped at the chance to use mushrooms.  He’s not a fan of mushrooms, so when he’s away, I get to have my fill of them.  You might not be able to see it in the photo, but that’s a BIG portabella mushroom topped with ground pork, kale, spring onions, and chevre.  Pretty easy to make – browned the ground pork in a pot with the onions, mushroom stems, and then added the kale just until it was wilted.  Put a heaping scoop of that on top of the mushroom that had been marinating in olive oil and vinegar, topped it off with some crumbly goat cheese, and popped the whole thing into the oven until the mushroom was tender.  On the other side of the plate is a pile of kale chips.  I’ve heard people talk about how good they are, so I thought I’d give it a try.  They’re good, but they’re time consuming and really fragile – kind of like eating one thin layer of phyllo dough.  They were fun to try, and the entire batch of chips disappeared quickly, but I don’t think I’d make them again.  Overall, the meal was great, and the leftovers are already gone too!

Stuffed Portabella and Kale Chips:
Kale – Charlestown Farm
Chevre – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Ground Pork – Countrytime Farm
Spring Onions – Jack’s Farm
Portabella Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Non Local – salt, olive oil, vinegar

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2013 – Week 1

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Back at it again for the FIFTH year! We missed the first two weeks of the farmer’s market due to travel, but it seems like we didn’t miss too much. The market is really short on vegetables this year so far, and it seems spring has taken a hiatus for the weekend, with temperatures down in the 40s at the end of May.  Ridiculous!  Husband was pretty excited to get started on One Local Summer again, so he took the lead on the first meal of the year.

Just a re-cap, in case you’re just picking this up this year, One Local Summer involves making one meal a week through the summer using only locally sourced ingredients.  The end game is to eat better and reduce your carbon footprint by finding local sources for food instead of buying things that are trucked in from across the country.  In my experience, the food is FAR better in terms of flavor and quality, and if you have any questions about how it was grown, you can ask the grower in person!  My little market has also never had a single case of salmonella contamination or any recalls either.  It’s considered acceptable to use non-local ingredients like salt, pepper, oil, spices, etc, as long as the big ingredients are local.

The meal!  Husband had been itching to use his new smoker to cook up some pork ribs.  Our pig farmer finally had ribs back in stock, so we grabbed them up along with some HUGE asparagus (that’s a 9″ plate, for scale) and made a salad from some lettuce and spring onions.  Sadly, the dressing (not pictured) was not local, but that was the only big non-local item in the meal.  Here’s the rundown of ingredients and sources, and here’s to another One Local Summer!

Pork Ribs and Asparagus with Salad:
Pork Ribs – Countrytime Farm
Asparagus – Hoagland Farm
Lettuce – Jack’s Farm
Spring Onions – Jack’s Farm
Non Local – spices, salt, pepper, vinegar

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2012 – Week 26

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I’m still sometimes not sure how I manage half a year of doing this.  And it might be more than half a year, but TWENTY-SIX weeks of blogging about making one meal each week using only locally grown food.  The number of different things we’ve done, the amount of gas saved from not having to transport produce/meat from another part of the country, the amazing quality of the meat and produce, the neat things that we can find at our farmer’s market that we can’t find in grocery stores, the challenge of cooking (for me, it’s a challenge anyway), the rewards of the healthy food.  All of it.  If you’re reading this, it’s probably preaching to the choir, but I’m proud of it anyway.  So, we’ll call this the last week of One Local Summer for 2012, and we’ll return the blog to genealogy and fiber arts, and some neglected posts on travel for the winter.

This meal is pumpkin soup with some toast.  The pumpkin was a long necked pumpkin which I chopped up and roasted in the oven for about a half hour.  I took a container of chicken stock (from boiling wings for chicken wings, also local!) and brought that to a boil on the stove.  Added in the pumpkin which was now nice and tender, and let it simmer until I could get the immersion blender (BEST KITCHEN TOOL EVER) into the pot and mush things down. Then I added leeks, sage, some salt and pepper, and some curry seasoning to the mix.  Ran it through another go-around with the immersion blender and let it simmer a little while longer.  Finally, added some goat’s milk yogurt at the end to make it creamy, and topped the whole thing off with fresh goat cheese, a sharp chevre.  I really love the blend of the tangy goat’s milk yogurt and cheese with the curry.  Finally, I added a slice of toast (the ingredients aren’t local, but the bakery is!) topped with hot pepper jam made by a friend.  If I remember correctly, the peppers were grown locally.  The whole thing was delicious and the perfect meal for a chilly fall day.

Pumpkin Soup:
Long Necked Pumpkin: Charlestown Farm
Sage – My Garden
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow
Chevre – Shellbark Hollow
Leeks – My Garden
Toast – St Peter’s Bakery
Hot Pepper Jam – A friend, who told me it was made with local peppers.
Non Local – Salt, Pepper, Curry

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2012 – Week 25

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Breakfast!  This is another don’t adjust your monitor type meals.  Yes, those are potatoes, and yes, they’re sort of a purplish blue.  AND, I grew them myself!  I’d always wanted to try potatoes in the garden, but we have really terrible clay-filled soil and it didn’t seem like they’d work given the soil we have (we’re working on that, tilling in compost every year, but it takes time).  I found something online this year about planting potatoes in big barrels or planters, so I gave that a go.  Unfortunately, I think a got a very late start with them, so I only got two smallish potatoes (plus two wee little potatoes I’m using as ‘seeds’ for next year) and they amounted to what’s on the plate.  They’re blue potatoes, which is what makes them so neat.  They seem to have a higher starch content and are a little firmer than regular potatoes, but cook up just yummy as home fries.  There’s also sausage and scrambled eggs, and since I slept in a little this morning, it ended up being a perfectly sized plate for brunch.  The mug has Lemon Gingersnap tea in it to finish off the meal.

Home Fries, Eggs, and Sausage:
Eggs – Mt. View Organics
Potatoes – My Garden
Sausage – Countrytime Farm
Non local – Salt, Pepper, Olive Oil