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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 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 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 16

By Sheetar 9 October 2014 30 September 2014

Oh yes, it’s crock pot season! The husband is a master of the crock pot and always manages to work up meals that blend perfectly together in that steamy cauldron of good cooking. It’s funny, crock pot meals never tend to look all that appealing, but you can be sure my mouth was watering for the last two hours of cooking because the whole house smelled amazing! Starting with a base of apple cider from our local orchard, husband added a Pork Loin Roast to the pot and topped that with cabbage, apples, onions, a little maple syrup, salt and pepper, and a little dried mustard powder. Such easy prep for such amazing results. By the end of the six hours, the pork had become incredibly tender, the cabbage simmered down, and the apple cider had infused its way into everything. Add to that a little bread (not entirely local, but from a local bakery), a chunk of cheese, and some delicious Hopped Blueberry Mead from a Meadery in New Hampshire, and we had a great fall dinner.

Ingredients:
Pork Loin Roast – Countrytime Farm
Onions – Hoagland Farms
Cabbage – Jack’s Farm
Tomme Mole Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Bread – St. Peter’s Bakery
Cider – North Star Orchard
Apples – Grandparents House (tons of apple trees!)
Mead – Sap House Meadery
Non Local – Vinegar, salt, pepper, mustard powder

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 13

By Sheetar 30 September 2014 23 September 2014

Meat and potatoes.. can you guess who cooked? Yep, the husband! But, no complaints from me, because chicken and potatoes is a great dinner, especially with fall slowly taking over summer. This meal was cooked the day after the prior meal, because we happened to have the food on hand for all of it, so we figured we might as well! A basic tomato and onion salad with oil in vinegar in the bowl using our own tomatoes now that they’re finally ripening on the vine. The darker color is because they’re mostly Brandywine Black tomatoes, a house favorite. The vinegar is the stuff we make ourselves using either our own mead or Yuengling lager – we very seldom use commercial vinegar anymore! Purple mashed potatoes you say? Yep, made from blue potatoes harvested from the garden earlier that week. The potatoes didn’t grow so well – our soil is full of clay despite 6 or 7 years of tilling in compost, it still can’t quite handle growing potatoes. They still have a wonderful color and taste, and cook up well, they just look like massive clumps of 3 or 4 potatoes that didn’t split up. The chicken was cooked a-la-beercan-up-the-chicken-butt and came out nice and tender. The beer used was Landshark, so not local, but it’s basically used for steam and isn’t a major contribution to the meal. Overall, really delcious!

Ingredients:
Chicken – Bendy Brook Farm
Potatoes – My Garden
Tomatoes – My Garden
Onion – Brogue Hydroponics
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Butter – Spring Creek Farms
Cider – North Star Orchard
Non Local – Olive oil, vinegar, chicken seasoning, pepper, salt, beer

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 11

By Sheetar 23 September 2014 15 September 2014

Another meal down, just three more to go to make the goal line. I was on my own again for this meal, but I had this idea in mind for a while. It’s a Philly Cheesesteak on a sourdough roll with Chanterelle mushrooms and blue cheese. When the right mushroom came along for the last meal, I saved some for this dinner. I’d been working on a sourdough starter for a while and got it going really well with the same flour from the Eggplant Parm, Meal 9. I decided to make rolls for the sandwiches instead of a loaf of bread because I wanted more of a roll shape. I let them rise up in a standard cereal bowl, but should’ve let them go a little longer. The rolls came out a bit dense, but still had a wonderful sourdough flavor. The mushrooms and onions were sauteed together, added to the bison chip steak, and the roll was given a thick coat of the blue cheese spread. Going counter clockwise around the plate, we have grilled eggplant, blue potato fries, and some green beans. The whole thing made for a really great dinner, and the fancy mushrooms and blue cheese worked very well with the bison making for a delicious fancy-pants cheesesteak.

Ingredients:
Potatoes – My Garden
Green Beans – North Star Orchard
Zucchini – My Garden
Bison Chip Steak – Backyard Bison
Flour – Sunrise Flour Mill
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Onions – Jack’s Farm
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Non Local – Olive Oil, salt, pepper