One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 17

I suppose it’s not even One Local Summer anymore – it’s One Local Fall!  Some of my favorite foods are available in the fall.  Pumpkins and squash, apples and asian pears!  The day the meal was made was rainy and chilly which made for perfect baking and cooking conditions.  And yes, I actually used recipes!  Usually our One Local Summer meals end up on the wing-it spectrum, somewhat simple, and tend to be  basic stuff that doesn’t involve a lot of thinking and prep work.  Grilled cheese and soup are still pretty basic, but I needed a bread recipe and hunting around for soup ideas gave me the soup recipe.

A few weeks ago, we were in central PA and picked 160 pounds of apples at my grandparents house.  We came out with 4.5 gallons of juice that’s being fermented for hard cider, but we threw in the towel with about 10 lbs of apples remaining  since it was getting pretty dark and late and we were dead tired from crushing and pressing all the apples.  Husband went back out to sea and I was scratching my head, trying to figure out what to do with the remaining apples.  I’m not a huge fan of applesauce, but figured it was the easiest way to use them up.  I cut them into chunks, steamed them in batches for 5 minutes, then ran them through the press.  That press made SUCH quick work of the apples that I was done in about an hour!  I added nothing to the sauce – no sugar or cinnamon or spices – and actually like it a lot as just straight up applesauce with nothing else added.  Then came along the bread recipe for Applesauce bread.  It’s a basic sandwich bread with the only non-local ingredient being yeast (and flour, kinda, since the one flour imports wheat from the midwest but they’re both still milled at the historic grist mill nearby).  I used both blue cheese and a nice alpine style cheese to melt between the slices.  The soup is made from delicata squash and leeks for the most part with water instead of broth and a little goat’s milk yogurt.  Those “apple croutons” on top are slices of apple sprinkled with maple sugar and crisped up in the oven.  I didn’t quite follow the recipe and decided it was easier to leave the skins on the squash and just immersion blender them to pulp which was easier than trying to take the skins off the roasted squash.  Add a warm cup of hot cinnamon spice tea, and it was a great meal for a dreary day.

Ingredients:
Flour – Mill at Anselma (Whole Wheat Pastry Flour and Bread Flour)
Applesauce – grandparents house (no sugar added)
Cheese – Birchrun Hills (Blue and Equinox)
Delicata Squash – Jack’s Farm and Charlestown Farm
Butter – Spring Creek Farms
Leeks – North Star Orchard
Apples – North Star Orchard (for apple croutons)
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow
Maple Sugar – Miller’s Maple
Non Local – Olive oil, salt, pepper, sage, tea