Tag: <span>garlic</span>

One Local Summer – Week 14

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My little garden in the backyard has finally started producing something! After a REALLY disappointing zucchini season – read: Lack Thereof – the garden has made up for things by giving me a ton of cucumbers. I planted lemon cucumbers, regular old green cucumbers, and miniature white cucumbers.  I’ve foisted some off on the neighbors, and have been eating a lot of them fresh out of the garden, but there are still too many.  So, I found a wonderful recipe for cucumber soup.  I doubled the recipe, using three green cukes, two lemon cukes, and two of the over-ripe white cukes that turned bright yellow.  Used cilantro, oregano, basil, and sage from the deck herb planters, plain old water instead of broth, and left out the avocado.  My soup isn’t bright green like the picture in the recipe, but I let the onion get a good carmelization going which contributed to the brownish tinge to the soup.  It’s great both hot and cold, with or without the dollop of yogurt.

Cucumber Soup:
Cucumbers – My Garden
Herbs – My Garden
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Garlic – North Star Orchard
Non-local – pepper, olive oil, lime juice, salt, cayenne pepper

OLS: Week 11

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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

Zucchini Week: Day 5

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Day five of zucchini week already. I had other plans for today, but the crazy storms that rolled through right around dinner time spoiled the outdoor cooking idea, so I switched days up a little. Today was this neat polenta zucchini tart. I became a big fan of polenta the first time my study abroad Italian host mother made polenta lasagna. MMmmm Cornmeal. So, I’ve been searching for neat recipes that use polenta and came across this one.   Sadly, the recipe didn’t include instructions on how to make  polenta  from scratch, so I borrowed Alton Brown’s savory polenta recipe with a few changes.  The ingredients are ALL local this time (well okay, the olive oil isn’t, but who’s really counting that anyway). The feta cheese added something I think the parmesan wouldn’t quite do in the same way, plus, I didn’t have parmesan cheese on hand. This is absolutely delicious and will probably be made again as tomato season rolls around, using tomatoes in place of zucchini. Zucchini Polenta Tart – Recipe on ChocolateandZucchini.com
Ingredients Used:
*Zucchini – my garden
*Cornmeal – Mill at Anselma
*Feta – Amazing Acres
*Onion – North Star Orchard
*Garlic – Willow Creek