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One Local Summer – Week 4

By Sheetar 5 June 2010 16 June 2010

My sister-in-law was visiting this past weekend so I took her to the market and we cooked together this week. Bockwurst with mushrooms, asparagus and a salad. Delicious! We both had fun cooking and gobbling down the dinner as a nice way to end a long day.

Bockwurst & Mushrooms:
Bockwurst – Birchrun Hills Farm. We boiled these on the stove with some homebrewed beer and then tossed them on the grill to finish cooking.
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms. Crimini mushrooms cooked in Chamborcin wine from Kog Hill.
Non-local – Olive Oil, spices.

Asparagus:
Asparagus – Hoagland Farm. Tossed on the grill in a tin-foil package with some non-local olive oil, salt, pepper, and parmesan cheese.

Salad:
Spring Greens – Jack’s Farm. One bag of greens seems to last me quite a while. Topped off with some non-local salad dressing.

food

Zucchini Week: Day 4

By Sheetar 30 July 2009 30 July 2009


We move into day four of Zucchini Week with a heavily modified version of our recipe. My mandoline didn’t have a plate that would slice wide but thin slices of zucchini for proper pappardelle noodles (think wide fettuccine), so i went with the square-spaghetti-sized slicer instead. This gave me these awesome zucchini spaghetti noodles and I was just in total awe. Why hadn’t I thought of this before! Ingenius. Michael Chiarello uses a whole bunch of spices and ingredients that I just didn’t have and was not going to go out and buy just for this recipe, so I improvised. A LOT. Sweet smoked Spanish paprika? Grey Salt?! Yeah. I had regular old paprika and table salt, and those worked out just fine. Instead of arugula, I happened to have some red leaf lettuce in the fridge and went with that. The feta is a goat’s milk feta that I’ve been layering on sandwiches all week. I still had two heirloom tomatoes from last week’s farmer’s market run and used those in place of the cherry tomatoes, sliced thin. I didn’t have olives, so they didn’t make it into this dish. Overall though, I think this worked out well and the idea of the recipe is still there. The warm tomatoes and zucchini noodles over lettuce made for a really great, refreshing and light lunch.	Zucchini Pappardelle Salad – Recipe on FoodNetwork.com
	Ingredients Used: Zucchini – my garden Lettuce – Kimberton Whole Foods locally grown Tomatoes – North Star Orchard Feta – Amazing Acres

food

Introducing the Lemon Cucumber

By Sheetar 26 July 2009 26 July 2009

I’ve taken to growing this peculiar little vegetable in the garden every year after finding a packet of seeds in Target (Thank you Martha Stewart). I thought, Wow, that’s different, let’s give it a shot. Well they grew like weeds the first year, but our soil wasn’t quite ready to support them, so I got a few, but the vines died off. We tilled in a little compost this year and they’ve all but taken over the garden.

They’re somewhere between baseball and softball sized usually and, when ripe, have a yellow skin that ranges from a very pale yellow to nearly orange. All the information I can find online says that they’re less bitter than traditional cucumbers and have more seeds. Today, one little cucumber was destined to be a part of my sandwich, paired with some bison bologna, lettuce, goat’s milk feta cheese, and some rustic wheat bread. DELICIOUS! This upcoming week, we’re going to review the Zucchini, all week. If you’ve ever grown zucchini, you understand the agony of finding new things to do with zucchini after you’ve already steamed it, fried it, and grilled it. I’m going to try and do all the recipes using only local ingredients to go along with my One Local Summer challenge.

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 4

By Sheetar 28 June 2009 28 June 2009

Week four! This week was a full dinner for two and I may have cheated a little more than I usually do with the locality of all of the ingredients, but to do a meal like this, well, sometimes you have to do what works. This week features most items coming from a trip to the Anselma Farmer’s Market.

The wine is the May Wine from the Mount Hope winery. Not sure if the grapes in the wine are local or not though, but it was a great bottle of white wine. In the back is a salad using red lettuce (still) from Week 3 and cucumbers from the Anselma Market. There’s also a piece of Dillicious cheese from Week 3. The blueberries for dessert are also from the Anselma Market and were perfectly ripe and delicious. The main plate was the bulk of the cooking, but 100% worth the time involved. The pork chops come from Wright’s Meats at the Anselma Market. They were brined in a salt/water/maple syrup for about 5 hours. The Maple Syrup we have is from Miller’s Maple in PA, so even though it’s not from around the corner, it’s closer than Vermont and still counts as local for me. The chops were then browned quickly on the stove and put in a baking dish in the oven with a vinegar and maple syrup glaze that was basted over the chops every 15 minutes or so. The idea isn’t mine, so I’m giving credit to Elise of Elise.com for the recipe which I modified a little, omitting the onions. The potatoes are again from the Anselma Market and were tossed with olive oil and roasted in the oven. There’s a dressing that goes on top of the potatoes, another recipe from Elise.com, which again I modified a bit to fit my local theme. I used basil and oregano from the back deck, omitting the mustard and vermouth but adding vinegar. Overall, pound for pound, the non-local ingredients I used when put in contrast with the local ingredients still keep the mileage total down. So, even though it’s not 100% local, the spirit of local ingredients is there for sure, and the husband didn’t seem to mind if it was local or not, because he ate everything on the plate. It was fun to make a nice dinner for two this week for something different and I’m glad I challenged myself to do so, especially when I’m the first to admit that I’m not a great cook and don’t necessarily enjoy the kitchen. These past four weeks have taught me a lot already about my culinary skills (which I previously thought were non-existent) and that sometimes, cooking isn’t so bad, especially when the results taste SO good.

Not Local: Salad Dressing; sugar, vinegar, olive oil, pepper, salt (pork chops); olive oil, lemon juice, vinegar, salt, pepper (potato dressing).

I really need to start bringing around a notebook to the markets with me so that I can keep track of what comes from where. These incredible vendors deserve credit and I never seem to be able to remember what comes from which stand, especially after the dinner is done and the packaging is in the garbage.

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 3

By Sheetar 22 June 2009 22 June 2009

I’m a little late on this one, but we spent all of week 3 in Scotland. So, I think that’s okay, right?

For the record, this was a lunch meal and I tend to go heavier on the green things and lighter on the meat for lunches, hence the big blob of green on the plate and little bitty blob of chicken. In the back is red lettuce from Kimberton Whole Foods, marked as grown locally, unknown farm. On top of the salad are little turnip chips – dehydrated turnip slices from turnips found at the Phoenixville Farmer’s Market during Week 1. In the very front is that delicious back-porch dill and goat’s milk yogurt from Week 2 (frozen while we were away, and then thawed to enjoy again). The chicken roulade is made with chicken again from Eberly Poultry – pounded out thin. Inside the chicken is dill and basil from the deck, bacon from Country Time Farm, sundried tomatoes from last year’s garden, and ‘Dillicious’ cheese from Clover Creek Cheese Cellar.

Not Local: Olive oil for cooking the roulade and the salad dressing.

This meal gave me a whole lot of leftovers since I used the whole pound of chicken for the roulade and will likely keep me well fed for the week. I still have the leftovers from last week’s meal in the freezer too! I think I’ll make a trip to the Anselma Market on Wednesday to find ingredients for Week four. If anyone knows of a source of local flour, I’d love to hear about it! I might be up to try my hand at home made pasta for something different.

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 1

By Sheetar 6 June 2009 6 June 2009

This is my first week doing the One Local Summer challenge. Here’s my entry!

In the front are some DELICIOUS oyster mushrooms from Oley Valley Mushrooms. In the back is a turkey breast from Mountain View Poultry, cooked up using the rotisserie in our mega toaster oven. That toaster oven sees way more action than our big oven since it makes more sense for the two of us (and usually the one of me), using less energy and not heating up the whole house like the big oven does. A 9×9 pan fits comfortably in the toaster oven which is generally more than enough for me. The pesto sauce was made from the container full of basil on the back deck and was brushed on while the turkey was cooking as well as on the finished product. Salad greens are from, well I can’t remember which farm was selling them at the Phoenixville Farmer’s Market, but they were the highlight of the whole plate, honest. Crisp and fresh and very tasty.

Non-local items used: Olive oil (on the mushrooms, salad, and in the pesto sauce), Salt, Pepper, Pine nuts (Pesto sauce), and vinegar (salad).

Not bad for a first try, huh? I found it really challenging to come up with something not using olive oil – I use it all the time and it’s difficult to think up a meal that doesn’t need some king of oil when cooking. For next week, I think the dill plant will be up for a serious pruning. 🙂