One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 13

By Sheetar 24 August 2015 1 September 2015

Home alone again, so I decided to try something a little fancier than usual. Most of the recipes I use are really basic, and for a good reason. I’ll admit it, I’m a lazy cook. I like to be finished quickly and be stuffing my face full of delicious food rather than spend two hours creating something that’s gone in under 30 minutes. I just don’t see the point! (Some of you do see the point, and cooking is an art form, and that’s wonderful as I do enjoy eating such creations, but dude, the fact that I’m even actually cooking every week is such a big jump from when the microwave was my best friend, that making complicated dinners may never be my thing, and that’s cool too) Such is the case with this meal. I got the recipe from here, and it’s one of those ridiculous food blogs with more photos than actual recipe content (20 photos for a recipe that takes up only two pages). Sadly, I was out of spaghetti squash from the neighbor, so I used the unnamed bumpy yellow generic squash that arrived along with the spaghetti squash the week prior. Roasted that up in the oven while I prepped the crepes which were actually fairly easy. Cooked up the mushrooms, combined them with the pureed roasted squash and a little maple syrup while the bechamel sauce cooked down. BTW, you can halve the recipe for the sauce because it made half a pot full and I needed about maybe a cup’s worth for the amount of crepes the recipe makes. It’s really absurd, the amount of sauce this made. Anyway, after the crepes were filled, I crisped them up in the pan, popped them on a plate, drizzled on some of the sauce and called it done. They were indeed delicious, but took SO long to make, I’m not sure I’d do this particular recipe again (or, at least, skip the bechamel and just grate some cheese on them and call it done). Also featured are some cheese, a nice juicy peach and another bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers as is become usual around here!

Ingredients:
Cucumber Full Circle CSA
Tomatoes Full Circle CSA
Flour Mill at Anslema, Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
Milk – Shellbark Hollow
Butter – Handmade by Abby
Cheese – Birchrun Hills, Red Cat
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Onions Clover Hill Farm
Maple Syrup – Miller’s Maple
Non Local – Olive Oil, salt, pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 12

By Sheetar 19 August 2015 19 August 2015

This summer has gotten ahead of me so quickly, but I finally have time to sit down and catch up on the blog backlog! This one goes back to June 24th when I was on my own again. A neighbor had dropped off a spaghetti squash since their garden was going wild with them. Never one to turn away free vegetables, I steamed the squash, scraped out the wonderfully nutty and delicious spaghetti strands, added some Italian sausage and tomatoes, topped it off with blue cheese, and called that a dinner! On the side is a tomato and cucumber salad along with a bowl of raspberries from our backyard invader raspberry bush. The neighbor isn’t fond of raspberries, but the plant has special family meaning (I believe it propagated from another family member’s garden and has been passed down and around a bunch), so she’s more than happy to let us collect all the berries we can have. This past year it took off under the fence and found a nice spot in our yard, so we’re happy to let it stay.

Ingredients:
Spaghetti Squash – Neighbor’s Garden
Italian Sausage – M&M Creek Valley Farm
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Tomatoes – Full Circle CSA
Raspberries – Our Yard
Armenian Cucumber – Full Circle CSA
Non Local – Vinegar, Salt, Pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 11b

By Sheetar 24 July 2015 24 July 2015

Another catch-up post, and I’m a week behind on posts! Getting caught up (again) though – it’s crazy how summer can just fly by like this. Husband is away and I decided to try out a few new things. I know he’s not a big fan of fennel or farro (really, wheat berries in this case), so I decided to go crazy and combine the two! I found this recipe (Roasted Fennel & Farro Salad) and went for it. The wheat berries came from North Star Orchard and we’ve had them hanging around in the freezer for a while. They do take a while to cook, but the results are absolutely worth it. Combined with the fennel and peppers, it made for a dish that was great warm or cold. The simple cucumber and tomato salad was a recurring theme for the rest of the week too. Drizzled with a little balsamic vinegar, it made for a great afternoon snack, and there’s just something about fresh tomatoes and cucumbers. The cucumber is an Armenian cucumber and something I’ve never had before. It has a soft fuzz on the outside that I scrubbed off with a vegetable scrubber brush, and I found it a little more crisp and less acidic than a regular cucumber.

Also on the plate are peaches with blue cheese, another summer favorite, and beet chips which didn’t come out all that well. My slices weren’t uniform, so they were too crisp on one half and just barely baked on the other. That didn’t stop me from eating the whole beet though, and I really like how they taste when roasted. One final piece of the plate was another new recipe I tried called gougÃ¨res – it’s a fancy french savory puff pastry made mostly with flour, butter, eggs, and cheese. The recipe was part of the Birchrun Hills Kickstarter campaign rewards and I was really psyched to try something new. It was easier than I thought and I sort of felt like a super hero having produced results that tasty and perfect on the first try!

Altogether a delightful dinner and really rather filling!

Ingredients:
Peaches – North Star Orchard
Cheese – Birchrun Hills, Blue and Equinox
Beets – Jack’s Farm
Wheat Berries – North Star Orchard
Fennel – Jack’s Farm
Eggs – Canter Hill Farm
Peppers – Clover Hill Farm
Cucumber – Full Circle CSA
Tomatoes – Full Circle CSA
Butter – Handmade by Abby
Honey – Baues’ Busy Bees
Flour – Mill at Anslema, Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
Non Local – Balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 11a

By Sheetar 14 July 2015 24 July 2015

This is the last week of catch-up posts, I swear. Well, at least for now. I can’t make promises about future weeks, but I’ll try to get them posted on the actual week that they’re made this time! I’m back by myself for this week, and went a little crazy with the vegetables. A neighbor had let his zucchini plants go a little wild and had a few baseball bats sitting on the vines. I graciously offered to take one off his hands so he didn’t have to ding-dong-ditch zucchini all over the neighborhood. It’s hard to tell underneath all the other vegetables, but I spiral sliced the zucchini with my new slicer and made zucchini pasta! I cooked that quickly in a big pan with some olive oil, salt, and pepper, just enough so it still had a little crunch to it, but was warmed thoroughly. In another pan, I had onions, fennel, and tomatoes cooking together to put on top of the zucchini pasta. The sausage was pan seared, carrots steamed, and potatoes roasted. Then the peaches! Oh it’s peach season and these are particularly perfect, eat-over-the-kitchen-sink-because-they-drip-everywhere, juicy and delicious peaches. I smothered them in blue cheese and baked them in the oven and they always make a perfect sweet and savory dessert. The plate is incredibly full this week, but it’s 90% vegetables, so I don’t feel bad about it, not one bit.

Ingredients:
Zucchini – Neighbor’s Garden
Potatoes – Jack’s Farm
Carrots – Clover Hill Farm
Tomatoes – Clover Hill Farm
Fennel – Jack’s Farm
Onions – Clover Hill Farm
Peaches – North Star Orchard
Cheese – Birchrun Hills, Blue and Equinox
Sausage – Canter Hill Farm, South African Borewors
Non Local – Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 10b

By Sheetar 9 July 2015 9 July 2015

Still another catchup post, but I think as of next week I’ll be back on track. This week, even though the husband was home, I contributed a good bit! We have a basil plant that’s gone wild and before it bolted, I thought I’d gather up the basil and put it to good use as basil pasta and pesto. I blenderized the basil with some whey leftover from a batch of cheese the husband made earlier that week, olive oil, and a small amount of non-local pine nuts, then combined that mixture with flour to make the pasta (1 cup flour to 1/4 cup liquid). The meatballs were part veal, part pork with onions, chives, basil, and some salt and pepper, baked in the oven. Then grilled zucchini and a cucumber salad finish the meal along with a glass of mead (technically a pyment) from the Sap House Meadery in New Hampshire. Okay, that’s not entirely local, but it did follow us home from vacation and didn’t take a special trip to get here, so I’ll allow it!

For something special this dinner, we made dessert with leftover milk from the waffles last meal, honey, and raspberries from the bush in the yard. Paired it with a raspberry mead from Moonlight Meadery (another followed-us-home mead from New Hampshire). It was the perfect end to a lovely evening!

Ingredients:
Zucchini – Clover Hill Farm
Basil – My Garden
Cheese – Birchrun Hills, Equinox
Ground Veal – Birchrun Hills
Ground Pork – Countrytime Farm
Cucumbers – Clover Hill Farm
Onion – Clover Hill Farm
Flour – Whole Wheat Pastry Flour, Mill at Anselma
Milk Camphill Kimberton
Honey Baues’ Busy Bees
Raspberries – Our Yard
Raspberry Mead – Moonlight Meadery
Pyment – Sap House Meadery
Non Local – Pine nuts, salt, pepper, olive oil, homemade vinegar

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 10a

By Sheetar 7 July 2015 30 June 2015

Another catch-up week here, but to switch it up a little, we have a one local breakfast! Breakfast is a pretty simple meal to make, and we’ve become quite fond of our waffle iron (btw, our waffle iron is surprisingly amazing for the price and we get these ridiculously fluffy and perfect waffles from a cheapie iron, you know, in case you’re in the market for a waffle iron). Halving the recipe that comes with the iron gives us two full waffles, so it’s easy enough to do without a ton of cleanup. We even substituted honey for the sugar, so aside from baking powder, the waffles were as local as it gets! On the plate on the left is a delcious link of maple sausage, then, of course, maple syrup, a shot of espresso (not local, but absolutely necessary to fill my caffeine habit), and a small bowl of Maple yogurt. There’s definitely a maple theme going on here.. The breakfast was probably more of a brunch, but it was still a great meal to start the day!

Ingredients:
Eggs – M&M Creek Valley Farm
Milk – Camphill Kimberton
Flour – Mill at Anselma, Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
Honey – Baues’ Busy Bees
Yogurt – Seven Stars Farm, Maple Yogurt
Maple Sausage – Birchrun Hills
Maple Syrup – Miller’s Maple
Non Local – Baking Powder, coffee

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 9b

By Sheetar 2 July 2015 30 June 2015

Another installment in the catch-up posts for One Local Summer. Husband had originally planned to do these pork chops on the grill, but the sky got dark and opened up so quickly that he ended up pan searing with the cast iron skillet and finishing it up in the oven. Apparently, this is my new favorite way to cook pork chops because I have never had a pork chop quite so perfectly juicy before. Pork can go from juicy and moist to shoe leather in a split second it seems, but man, skillet in the oven is IT. Even though it was delicious, I only managed to finish off half of that pork chop because of the ridiculous amount of veggies. Steamed green beans and carrots, that huge salad as usual, and then potatoes with olive oil, chives, and onions. Top that all off with a glass of Spring Wine from Chaddsford Winery and we have a great rainy day dinner.

Ingredients:
Radishes Full Circle CSA
Turnips Full Circle CSA
Mushrooms Oley Valley Mushrooms
Lettuce Full Circle CSA
Carrots – Full Circle CSA
Cucumber Clover Hill Farm
Tomatoes Clover Hill Farm
Potatoes – Jack’s Farm
Pork Chops – M&M Creek Valley Farm
Chives – My Garden
Onions – Clover Hill Farm
Green Beans – Jack’s Farm
Wine – Chaddsford Winery, Spring Wine
Non Local – Olive oil, salt, pepper.

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 9a

By Sheetar 30 June 2015 30 June 2015

We’ve gotten rather ahead of ourselves with One Local Summer, so I’m going to double up this week with two posts to get back on track. Sometimes we just cook local meals by default and then I forget what week we’re on and things all go crazy. I figure doing extra local meals isn’t a bad thing and since we made them, I might as well share them! So, here’s a catchup post and in two weeks I’ll be all caught up, I hope.

We dug into the freezer for this one and found a Bison roast. Husband rubbed it down with freshly ground pepper and salt and put it on the rotisserie on the grill. While I realize it may be blasphemous to red meat eaters, the end chunk was cooked nicely well done (brown the whole way through) but was still tender and DELICIOUS. Also cooked on the grill were those skewers with zucchini and tomatoes, covered in olive oil, salt, and pepper, then there’s a cucumber salad with red wine and vinegar, and finally the salad bowl just like every week, with the same mix of greens and vegetables. It all came out great, and we found a local Cabernet Sauvignon to pair with the dinner.

Ingredients:
Radishes – Full Circle CSA
Turnips – Full Circle CSA
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Lettuce Full Circle CSA
Cucumber – Clover Hill Farm
Tomatoes – Clover Hill Farm
Bison – Backyard Bison
Zucchini – Clover Hill Farm
Wine – Sand Castle Winery, Cabernet Sauvignon
Non Local – Salt, pepper, olive oil, homemade vinegar