leeks – Sheetar.com

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 22

By Sheetar 19 October 2015 2 October 2015

Husband is at it again for this installment of One Local Summer. It was more like a One Local Fall sort of day – gloomy and rainy – so soup it is! The soup is a chunky potato leek soup since we happened to have all those things on hand and husband is truly the soup master. He somehow manages to make everything work well together in one pot whereas I tend to make disasters that skirt the line between edible and fodder for the garbage disposal. We used up the last of the pretzel rolls from the freezer and paired the roll with some mustard seed gouda made from local milk. Top the whole meal off with a glass of cool cider and we have a filling and warm dinner for an icky day. This may be the last of the meals for 2015 seeing as there was a vacation happening during the time the last three OLS posts went up, but fear not, we’ll be back next year!

Ingredients:
Flour Mill at Anselma
Egg Deep Roots Valley Farm
Butter Spring Creek Farms
Honey Baues Busy Bees
Cider – North Star Orchard
Leeks – North Star Orchard
Onions – Clover Hill Farm
Potatoes – North Star Orchard
Garlic – North Star Orchard
Cilantro – My garden
Milk – Birchrun Hills for homemade cheese
Whey – frozen from cheesemaking using Birchrun Hills milk
Non Local – mustard seeds, salt, pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 21

By Sheetar 12 November 2014 12 November 2014

Husband cannot get enough of cooking One Local Summer, so we’re still marching along! The idea for this one came up two months ago when we purchased a waffle iron. Husband spent a while researching irons to get the right combination of affordable, easy to use, and durable, and we came up with a winner. It’s surprising for a brand of appliance I don’t generally associate with reliability and quality, but hey, nearly 1500 amazon reviewers can’t be wrong! Anyway, in case it’s not obvious at this point, we made Chicken and Waffles! The version we’re familiar with is the PA dutch version that used something that looks more like pulled chicken with gravy (or creamy chicken soup) instead of fried chicken. Adding a little more food history for you, the PBS program The History Kitchen has a great article on the origins of Chicken and Waffles (thank you again, Holland). In any case, they came out DELICIOUS and so very filling. Both of us barely managed to finish off one waffle heaped generously with the chicken mixture and we both quickly lapsed into a deep food coma post-dinner.

Ingredients:
Raw Milk – Camp Hill Kimberton
Butter – Spring Creek Farms
Flour – Mill at Anselma
Chicken thighs – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Eggs – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Leeks – North Star Orchard
Red Onion – Jack’s Farm
Non Local – Salt, pepper, beer

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 19

By Sheetar 29 October 2014 29 October 2014

Still chugging along into October. We should be winding down in the next month or so since the availability of fresh vegetables tends to fall off after the first hard frost. Fortunately, our mushroom guy grows indoors in a climate controlled environment and still has PLENTY of fresh mushrooms every week. I used a recipe this week, kinda. As usual, I used the recipe as an idea and then modified it to suit the local ingredients available, putting the whole thing into one large casserole dish instead of individual ramekins to save on cleanup time. What I should’ve done is made mashed sweet potatoes and made a sort of mushroom shepherd’s pie, adding in other root vegetables, but this still came out really great and surprisingly filling. I used three types of mushrooms – Shiitake, Crimini, and Chicken of the Woods. I’d never had Chicken of the Woods before, so that was a new mushroom to me. It cooked up a lot like chicken with a thicker, more solid texture that was a little reminiscent of extra-firm tofu. The beer used was our “house” beer, the Flying Pig Stout named for a hilarious incident involving a pig shaped dog toy on a rope and a pot of boiling wort. We pretty much keep a keg of that on tap throughout the year since stouts are a big favorite in the house. It’s not really local, but it is brewed and poured in about a 50 foot radius which is far fewer food miles than trucking in beer from California. What’s best about this is it’s all for me! Husband would never touch a meal made nearly entirely from mushrooms, so the leftovers are safe. Add some butternut squash ‘fries’ and a couple of slices of asian pear on the side and it’s a full plate!

On a side note, my annual saffron harvest is now over and I need a recipe that uses saffron and local ingredients. I’m open to suggestions! Keep in mind that I don’t/can’t eat anything that once lived in water, but will eat every vegetable available! In past years, I’ve made saffron pasta and saffron polenta, so something new would be fun. Maybe blue potato saffron gnocchi?

Ingredients:
Onions – Jack’s Farm
Leeks – North Star Orchard
Garlic – Jack’s Farm
Butternut Squash – Jack’s Farm
Asian Pear – North Star Orchard
Tomato – Our Garden
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Sweet Potatoes – Jack’s Farm
Flour – Mill at Anselma
Non Local – Beer, salt, pepper, oil, thyme

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 17

By Sheetar 16 October 2014 13 October 2014

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

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2013 – Week 21

By Sheetar 2 January 2014 2 January 2014

I got really behind on getting posts up during busy November and December, but, better late than never (I seem to be really good at the late). Husband prepared this one as sourced from the market at the Mill at Anselma. The ribeye was cooked on the grill and topped with blue cheese, carrots cooked with some maple syrup, and the soup simmered all day. It was absolutely incredible and very filling, finished off with a glass of cold cider.

Ribeye with Salad and Potato Leek Soup:
Ribeye – Bendy Brook Farm
Carrots – Maysie’s Farm
Salad greens – Maysie’s Farm
Maple Syrup – Miller’s Maple
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Potatoes – Maysie’s Farm
Leeks – North Star Orchard
Celery – Maysie’s Farm
Cider – North Star Orchard
Non Local – salt, pepper, salad dressing

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2012 – Week 26

By Sheetar 9 November 2012 4 November 2012

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 22

By Sheetar 24 October 2012 24 October 2012

Another week down, this one cooked by the husband. Husband had an outing with a friend to go ‘hunting’ for quail and pheasant. They managed to get a few, and this is part of the result of that. The hunt was local-ish so we’re calling it good for the Local Summer. The dish is basically Waterzooi (a Belgian chicken stew) made local. Waterzooi typically has cream added to it, but goat’s milk was easier to find, so we went with that. The vegetables can be different depending on who you ask, so we’re pretty good there, using mushrooms, leeks, carrots, celeriac, onions, potatoes, and sage. Everything was simmered together in a big pot with chicken stock we saved from the last time we did wings (using locally sourced chicken wings), so it’s very very local there. The only thing that’s not are the spices.

Quail Waterzooi:
Quail – hunted and shot locally
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Leeks – North Star Orchards
Carrots – North Star Orchards
Celeriac – Jack’s Farm
Onions – Jack’s Farm
Potatoes – Jack’s Farm
Goat’s Milk – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Sage – Back deck planters
Non Local – spices, salt, pepper