One Local Summer

One Local Summer – Week 1

By Sheetar 10 May 2010 10 May 2010

I don’t think farmtophilly.com is doing the One Local Summer challenge again, so I figured I’d just do it on my own for the duration of the summer Phoenixville Farmer’s Market. This past weekend was the first market for the regular season and wow was it incredible. There were so many great vendors, and the market was PACKED! So nice to see. So, the meal!

Clockwise, starting with the pile of mushrooms..

Salad:
Portabella mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms. Always delicious.
Mixed Greens – Jack’s Farm. Crisp and clean. Perfect.
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills. This blue cheese is incredible and a household favorite.

Bread:
Bread – Sweetwater Bakery. The ingredients may not be entirely local, but the baking sure is. This is the first time we’ve tried their bread and we were definitely not disappointed.

Chicken Roulade:
Chicken – Mountain View Organics. Pounded out thin
Bacon – Countrytime Farm. Nitrate free, and if you’ve never had nitrate free bacon? This stuff is amazing.
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms. Same Portabella’s as the salad, and they cooked up perfectly.
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills. Same as in the Salad.

Non-Local:
We marinated the chicken in homebrewed beer, garlic, and spices, then added some BBQ sauce (mixed with Tangerine juice, maple syrup, and Good Ole Jack) and some other spices on the outside (paprika, Montreal Chicken Seasoning) while it was cooking up in the smoker.

This was a pretty easy one. The bacon stayed soft inside the roulade and the fat also kept the chicken moist, not to mention the slow-cooking in the smoker aided as well. The Husband decided to not use mushrooms in his (blasphemy, I know), but did come up with an excellent BBQ sauce and spiced the outside just right.

I’m so excited for another Local Summer to get started, I’m already planning a whole bunch of meals in my head for the next few weeks until my backyard vegetable garden gets growing!

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 13

By Sheetar 30 August 2009 30 August 2009

One Local Summer’s last meal is on the table and consumed already. I can’t believe we made it to the end of the challenge and participated in every single week! This week, we threw a whole chicken in the smoker with some barbeque sauce leftover from the pulled pork sandwiches and let her cook up while some zucchini, garlic, basil, onions, and peppers were simmered together with last year’s tomato sauce from the garden. I decided to pop open a jar of the zucchini pickles, and WOW are they delicious. Definitely worth doing again next year. Non-Local ingredients include some vinegar, mustard seed, turmeric (pickles), olive oil, and McCormick’s Chicken Rub. Here’s the rundown of local ingredients.

Zucchini: My Garden
Basil: Back Deck Garden
Peppers: My Garden
Garlic: Willow Creek
Onions: North Star Orchard
Chicken: Mt. View Organics
Barbeque sauce: Leftover from Week 11
Wine: New Hope Winery’s Raspberry Wine

Final thoughts – I’m SO glad I participated in this year’s challenge and I can’t wait to do it again. This challenge has gotten me into local foods and has actually gotten me cooking (something that shocked and amazed my family and friends). I hope to continue doing one local meal a week since our Phoenixville Farmer’s Market is open year-round and I can get most items (except for seasonal vegetables) regularly. Thanks to the folks at FarmToPhilly.com for hosting the challenge!

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 12

By Sheetar 23 August 2009 23 August 2009

We had a sort of hectic week, but I still managed to get a local meal in. There was a party at the house last night, and I managed to get up in the morning and throw together some pancakes (quickly becoming a favorite around here) with some fresh plums from the farmer’s market. Ingredients are the same as Week 9, but with no blackberries this time. The plums were sliced and plopped on the griddle to warm up, then put in a bowl with some maple syrup and cinnamon while the pancakes were being made. The tartness of the slightly under-ripe plums worked really well with the sweetness of the maple syrup and the whole thing was just plain delightful, receiving rave reviews from the guests who stayed over for the night. Non-local ingredients include cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and sugar.
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma
Egg – Mt. View Organics
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Plums – North Star Orchard
Maple Syrup – Miller’s Maple

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 11

By Sheetar 16 August 2009 16 August 2009

And another week down, bringing us to week eleven of the One Local Summer challenge. This week we decided to attack the pulled pork sandwich. I wasn’t able to find locally baked rolls that would work for sandwiches, so we found Vermont Bread Company rolls at Kimberton Whole Foods that worked out well, even if they’re not really that local. It’s probably the biggest non-local item I’ve used, but I really, honestly tried to find local rolls that would work and just couldn’t find any. Oh well! We did go the extra mile with the barbeque sauce and made that from scratch. The dinner was delicious and while the pork butt took all day to cook in the smoker and then crock pot, it was WELL worth it. Non-local ingredients used (other than the rolls) were in the barbeque sauce: pepper, salt, cider vinegar. The rest of the ingredient run down follows.

Corn: Kimberton Whole Foods (locally grown)
Peaches: North Star Orchards
Feta Cheese: Apple Tree Goat Dairy
Pork Butt: Countrytime Farm
Maple Sugar: Miller’s Maple
Tomatoes: Jack’s Farm
Garlic: Jack’s Farm
Onion: North Star Orchards

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 10

By Sheetar 9 August 2009 9 August 2009

Week ten of one local summer is cooked and consumed already. The husband is home again and decided to try something different – tacos! I was in charge of the taco shells and toppings while he did the filling. I found a good shell recipe here which used both cornmeal and flour. I went with whole wheat flour instead of regular old all-purpose flour and it didn’t seem to make a difference. They were surprisingly easy to make and then form inside of a napkin holder lined with some tin foil. It looked a little funny, but it worked out well! The husband improvised a taco spice recipe (sadly, none of those are local, but it tasted great!) which he added to some ground bison and onions. I also found these curious little mexican gherkin cucumbers at the farmer’s market on saturday and just had to bring them home after Jack let me taste one. They’re sweet, with a little sour and just perfectly bite sized. It’s really amazing me, week by week, the different things we can make using local ingredients that I never even thought of doing (making taco shells from scratch?!). This is totally spoiling my ideas of store-bought and semi-homemade that I had been used to cooking (and mostly microwaving), but all in a good way. I’ve recently been doing some canning and preserving and I should do a post on that too – it’s another new thing this year that I’m trying and is again, surprisingly easy – much easier than I had thought!

There were a few non-local ingredients in this week’s meal which included salt, canola oil, and the taco spices. Here are the local ingredients:
Ground Bison – Backyard Bison
Onions – North Star Orchard
Tomatoes – Our Backyard Garden
Peppers – Cressley’s Greenhouse
Mexican Gherkins – Jack’s Farm
Fat Cat Cheese – Birchrun Hills Farm
Lettuce – Willow Creek
Corn Meal – Mill at Anselma
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 9

By Sheetar 2 August 2009 2 August 2009

One Local Summer is already at Week 9. Nine whole weeks of making one meal with local ingredients per week. I can’t believe I’ve made it this far! So, this week I went for simple, since I was doing a whole week of zucchini recipes. The simple though paid off with an incredible taste, and something I really hadn’t thought of doing – making pancakes from scratch. Easier than I ever would’ve thought! One egg, one cup of flour, about 1.5 cups of yogurt, and the non local ingredients (2 tsp sugar, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp baking soda, a touch of salt). Whisk together, throw in some blackberries, and VOILA! Fluffy, delicious pancakes. Optionally, add some chocolate chips for a just-one-more dessert pancake. The eggs came from Mt. View Organics at the Phoenixville Farmer’s Market, the flour from the Mill at Anselma, the yogurt from Shellbark Hollow Farm, and the blackberries were hand-picked from a patch of blackberry bushes overflowing with ripe berries at Willow Creek. The whole thing was topped off with maple syrup from Miller’s Maple. The best thing about this is that the whole house smelled like fresh pancakes for the rest of the day!

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 8

By Sheetar 25 July 2009 26 July 2009

Pizza for Week Eight! I saw the post on FarmToPhilly.com about making pizza and I just *had* to! This has become a popular item in the house since the crust is actually done on the grill. I usually do a big batch of them at once and then stick them in the freezer or fridge and throw toppings on later and stick them in the microwave or toaster oven to melt the cheese really quick. It saves time, the crust comes out nice and crispy without using a pizza stone. I’m giving credit to Bobby Flay for this one since we saw it on Food Network a while ago and I thought it was absolute genius. Cooking in the house during the summer is just TOO hot sometimes, so taking everything outside to the grill is a great option. The show featured this recipe, and I really just only use the flatbread part and make my own toppings. On to the ingredients!

Crust: Whole Wheat pastry flour from the Mill at Anselma. Non-local Olive Oil, Salt, Yeast
Toppings: Heirloom Tomatoes and onions (hiding underneath) from the North Star Orchard, Colby Cheese from Agape Acres, and a little basil from the back deck. Couldn’t find a local Mozzarella, and really, all cheese is delicious in my humble opinion, so Colby it was. I didn’t even bother with sauce since the tomatoes were nice and juicy.

The pizza made for a quick and easy meal. I actually botched a batch of the pasta dough from last week by using a bad recipe that had me adding way too much water. I decided to throw in some more flour and gave up after a certain point, added yeast, and let it sit to see if it would work for pizza dough. Happily, it worked out just fine. After the flatbread was grilled up, I turned the heat down low and set the flatbread with toppings off the direct heat, closed the lid, and came back in about 15 minutes. The cheese had melted nicely and it looked perfect.

I have so many ideas for using local ingredients in meals, I feel like there won’t be enough weeks for all of them!

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 7

By Sheetar 18 July 2009 18 July 2009

One Local Summer rolls into week seven. This week it’s back to being all me and I went all out. Let’s start in the front with the zucchini, from my very own garden. Next around, clockwise, is a zucchini bread muffin. Finally we have a DELICIOUS bison with pesto and sharp goat cheese ravioli.

Zucchini – Yep, zucchini. Non-local salt, pepper, and olive oil. This one was perfectly ripe and gosh I could’ve eaten the whole zucchini at once.
Zucchini Bread Muffin – I’ve been getting a LOT of zucchini from the garden and decided to give this recipe a try. This was tricky since I was trying to keep as local as possible and the result isn’t quite perfect, but considering the amount of zucchini I’ll have this summer, there’s plenty of time to get it right. I used my own garden zucchini, wheat pastry flour from the Mill at Anselma (stone ground there too from PA wheat), honey from Baues Busy Bees, eggs from Mountain View Organics, and goat’s milk yogurt from Shellbark Hollow Farm. Non-local ingredients include salt, baking soda, baking powder, canola oil, and vanilla extract. If you’re keeping tally, yes I left out the spices, walnuts, and apple sauce. It still tastes delicious and I love what the honey adds to the recipe, but I think I need to add more flour or less wet ingredients since it didn’t rise as much as I had expected and is a little dense. Still, incredibly good, and worth a repeat.
Ravioli – WOW. Wow. Wow. This was the most labor intensive part of the meal, but it was 100% worth it. I dug out the pasta roller for the Kitchen Aid mixer and went to town. Used the same wheat pastry flour as above for the pasta along with some non-local salt (and tap water, of course). The filling is ground bison from Backyard Bison, with basil and oregano from my back deck planters, some of the frozen pesto sauce from Week 1, and Sharp II goat cheese from Shellbark Hollow Farm. Non-local salt, pepper, and olive oil were also used. The sauce is from the same batch of tomato sauce I made last year with the tomatoes from our garden (there were lots, and lots, and lots of tomatoes, in case I haven’t mentioned that before). I haven’t ever made ravioli, so it was a learning experience for sure, but now that I know what I’m doing, I expect next time, this will go MUCH faster and be much easier. I’m not quite sure if it tasted so good because it really was that good or that the amount of effort I put into doing something new mentally enhanced the flavor.

Really though, I’m quite proud of myself for pulling this whole meal off and not giving up in the middle, leaving the kitchen a complete disaster and my stomach empty. Through doing this whole challenge, I’ve been finding myself spending less time inside grocery stores and more time outside at farmers’ markets – I might go once every other week to the grocery store for things I can’t get at the market, essentials, etc. It’s neat, and I hope to continue this as long as possible, maybe even freeze some meals to pull out in the dead of winter when I need a dose of *real* food.