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

Category: One Local Summer

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 14

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MMmmm Pork.  Also, our goal meal, number 14!  It doesn’t look like much on the plate, but the whole thing was a delicious summer meal, even if it’s getting to be the end of summer.  Corn on the cob cooked on the grill with a Pork Butt Steak and a baked apple sprinkled with maple sugar then given a creme brulee treatment.  The wine is our homemade (and all local) PA Maple Reserve – 2 gallons of PA maple syrup and three gallons of local cider.  So really, aside from the spices, this one is all Pennsylvania!  Husband coated the pork butt steak in a home-blended rub, then grilled it with some smoke chips on the grill along with the corn.  The apple baked in the oven with some wine, and then got that sprinkle of maple sugar that he carmelized with the brulee torch.  Best way to eat an apple ever?  Maybe!

Ingredients:
Pork Butt Steak – Countrytime Farm
Corn – Brogue Hydroponics
Apples – North Star Orchard
Maple Sugar – Miller’s Maple
Wine – Miller’s Maple and Linvilla Orchards
Non Local – Spices, salt, pepper, olive oil

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 13

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Meat and potatoes.. can you guess who cooked?  Yep, the husband!  But, no complaints from me, because chicken and potatoes is a great dinner, especially with fall slowly taking over summer.  This meal was cooked the day after the prior meal, because we happened to have the food on hand for all of it, so we figured we might as well!  A basic tomato and onion salad with oil in vinegar in the bowl using our own tomatoes now that they’re finally ripening on the vine.  The darker color is because they’re mostly Brandywine Black tomatoes, a house favorite.  The vinegar is the stuff we make ourselves using either our own mead or Yuengling lager – we very seldom use commercial vinegar anymore!  Purple mashed potatoes you say?  Yep, made from blue potatoes harvested from the garden earlier that week.  The potatoes didn’t grow so well – our soil is full of clay despite 6 or 7 years of tilling in compost, it  still can’t quite handle growing potatoes.  They still have a wonderful color and taste, and cook up well, they just look like massive clumps of 3 or 4 potatoes that didn’t split up.  The chicken was cooked a-la-beercan-up-the-chicken-butt and came out nice and tender.  The beer used was Landshark, so not local, but it’s basically used for steam and isn’t a major contribution to the meal.  Overall, really delcious!

Ingredients:  
Chicken – Bendy Brook Farm
Potatoes – My Garden
Tomatoes – My Garden
Onion – Brogue Hydroponics
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Butter – Spring Creek Farms
Cider – North Star Orchard
Non Local – Olive oil, vinegar, chicken seasoning, pepper, salt, beer

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 12

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Husband is back home and went for a simple but delicious favorite this week – Sausage and peppers!  The farmer’s market has seen a glut of peppers, so we went with it, using some tomatoes from our garden along with pork sausage and some homemade sourdough bread.  Topped off with a cool glass of crisp, tart cider and we had ourselves a great meal.  It doesn’t look like much, but it’s a quick and easy meal that always goes over well.

Ingredients:
Pork Sausage – Countrytime Farm
Tomatoes – My Garden
Peppers – Jack’s Farm
Onion – Jack’s Farm
Flour – Sunrise Flour Mill
Cider – North Star Orchard
Non Local – Olive Oil, Pepper, salt

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 11

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Another meal down, just three more to go to make the goal line.  I was on my own again for this meal, but I had this idea in mind for a while.  It’s a Philly Cheesesteak on a sourdough roll with Chanterelle mushrooms and blue cheese.  When the right mushroom came along for the last meal, I saved some for this dinner.  I’d been working on a sourdough starter for a while and got it going really well with the same flour from the Eggplant Parm, Meal 9.  I decided to make rolls for the sandwiches instead of a loaf of bread because I wanted more of a roll shape.  I let them rise up in a standard cereal bowl, but should’ve let them go a little longer.  The rolls came out a bit dense, but still had a wonderful sourdough flavor.  The mushrooms and onions were sauteed together, added to the bison chip steak, and the roll was given a thick coat  of the blue cheese spread.  Going counter clockwise around the plate, we have grilled eggplant, blue potato fries, and some green beans.  The whole thing  made for a really great dinner, and the fancy mushrooms and blue cheese worked very well with the bison making for a delicious fancy-pants cheesesteak.

Ingredients:
Potatoes – My Garden
Green Beans – North Star Orchard
Zucchini – My Garden
Bison Chip Steak – Backyard Bison
Flour – Sunrise Flour Mill
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Onions – Jack’s Farm
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Non Local – Olive Oil, salt, pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 10

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Wow.  So this is a pizza.  Kinda.  The crust is polenta that was baked in the oven to help crisp it up.  Then the toppings were added.  OH THE TOPPINGS.  Husband was away, so I was free to add as much fungus as I pleased, and I did.  The mushroom guy was on vacation the week prior, but found a bunch of Chanterelle mushrooms growing in the wild, so he grabbed them and brought them home.  This was the first time I’ve ever had Chanterelles, and just typing about them is making my mouth water.  They’re peppery but sweet and might just be my new favorite mushroom.  I sauteed the mushrooms with some onions and peppers.  Once the crust (a polenta crust with a wee bit of butter) was crispy enough from baking in the oven, I globbed some homemade Cherry Jam (from locally picked cherries), blue cheese spread, then put on the onions/mushrooms/peppers.  On top of that I sprinkled on some more blue cheese and popped the whole thing back in the oven to mush together.  This was INCREDIBLE.  The whole thing disappeared in one sitting since it was about a 12″ pizza anyway.  The cherry jam ended up oozing off the pizza and made the crust a little mushy, but it really didn’t matter – it just meant I had to use a fork and knife instead of picking each slice up.  It was worth it!

Ingredients:
Corn Meal – Mill at Anselma
Butter – Spring Creek Farms
Peppers – Charlestown Farm
Chanterelle Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Onions – Jack’s Farm
Blue Cheese (spread and crumble) – Birchrun Hills
Cherries – Walnut Springs Farm
Non Local – Sugar (in jam)

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 9

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I really sort of love having visitors over for One Local Summer meals because they’ll bring new and  fun ideas to the One Local Table.  There were a TON of beautiful eggplants at the market this week, so I grabbed two thinking, hmm, well I’ll find something to do with them.  Talking about it with my sister-in-law who was visiting, we ended up with Eggplant Parmigiana using local ingredients.  We didn’t have mozzarella, but I had plenty of blue cheese on hand, so it was a little different, but the flavor was incredible!  And, unintentionally, we ended up with a vegetarian dinner.  While the spaghetti squash was roasting in the oven, we prepped the eggplant by slicing thick slices then breading them with flour and an egg/yogurt mixture.  We double dipped a few of them (egg then flour, repeat) and those seemed to come out better.  They got a quick pan fry in the cast iron pan, then were set on a wire rack in the oven to finish baking for about 15 minutes.  I found some sauce from summers past in the freezer, so we heated that up on the stove to top the spaghetti squash once it was done.  On the side, a small bowl of tomatoes with oil, vinegar, and a sprinkle of salt finished off the meal along with a glass of wine.  Really a great dinner, and we even used the leftover eggplant on sandwiches the next day!

A quick note on the flour.. it’s not ENTIRELY local.  I picked this up at the Phoenixville Farmer’s Market a year or two ago.  From what I remember, the owner was visiting family in the area and brought along his flour from Minnesota to sell at  our local  market.  In that sense, it travelled along with a person who was making a trip anyway, and wasn’t using up extra “food miles” just to get to my doorstep, so while it’s not local, I’m going to allow it since it still follows in the One Local Summer ideals of a lower food carbon footprint and not using excess food miles to transport food from across the country when I can find it basically in my backyard.  I do occasionally make exceptions for things like this that come home with us on our travels.  The Sunrise Flour Mill also uses varieties of wheat that are heritage wheat varities and more along the lines of what one might have eaten 100 years ago, so it’s pretty unique and will be fun to work with!

Ingredients:
Eggplant – North Star Orchard
Tomato Sauce – My Garden
Spaghetti Squash – Jack’s Farm
Flour – Sunrise Flour Mill
Eggs – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow
Tomatoes – My Garden and Jack’s Farm
Non Local – Wine, vinegar, oil, salt.

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 Meal 8

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Another one down, and just six more to go till my goal of 14 for the summer.  So far, it looks like we’ll more than surpass the goal of 14 meals, and I really do like the pacing of meals vs. weeks MUCH better.  It feels less like an obligation and more like fun this way.  What’s on that plate?  A sort of remix of chicken parm.  I breaded the chicken using goat’s milk yogurt and cornmeal for more of a cowboy sort of version of chicken parm, topped it with tomatoes, blue cheese, and mushrooms (MUSHROOMS!  Oh how I love fungus).  Some potatoes and zucchini on the side and KABAM.  A pretty easy one local summer meal.  Instead of frying the chicken, I popped it on a tray and baked it which kept it lighter and, in a weird way, crispier.  Sometimes the greasiness of pan frying just doesn’t work, and I’m glad I baked it instead.  The leftovers from this are already gone even, it was that good.

Ingredients:
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow
Zucchini – My Garden
Potatoes – Jack’s Farm
Chicken – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Cornmeal – Mill at Anselma
Tomatoes – Jack’s Farm
Non Local – Salt, Pepper, Oil

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 Meal 7

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Okay, so this one was OUT OF THE BALLPARK good.  I know I say that often when I talk about One Local Summer meals, but seriously.  I’m not sure there is too much that will top this.  We finally found a local source for butter and husband immediately remembered that the only thing holding us back from making these pretzel rolls was the butter.  BINGO!  Thus, dinner was Pretzel roll burgers with watermelon, grilled peaches with blue cheese, and a wonderfully delicious salad.  Even though there are some non-local ingredients in the rolls (baking soda, yeast, oil), they’re still really minimal in comparison to the whole of the meal, and we were even able to substitute the required sugar with honey.  Our rolls came out a little flatter than the recipe’s photos, and I had a feeling we should’ve used more flour (the dough seemed a little too squishy), but for a first time, they’re still 100% edible and delicious.  I was really glad we had leftovers of this meal so I could enjoy it a few more days, and we even have four more rolls tucked away in the freezer.  Definitely expect to see more pretzel rolls in our One Local Future!

Ingredients:
Flour – Mill at Anselma
Watermelon – Hoagland Farm
Peaches – Hoagland Farm
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Egg – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Veal & Pork Patty – Countrytime Farm
Lettuce – North Star Orchard
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Tomatoes –  Brogue Hydroponics
Cheese – Lambsquarters from Valley Milkhouse
Butter – Spring Creek Farms
Honey – Baues Busy Bees
Non Local – Baking soda, yeast, oil, salt, pepper, dressing.