Week ten of one local summer is cooked and consumed already. The husband is home again and decided to try something different – tacos! I was in charge of the taco shells and toppings while he did the filling. I found a good shell recipe here which used both cornmeal and flour. I went with whole wheat flour instead of regular old all-purpose flour and it didn’t seem to make a difference. They were surprisingly easy to make and then form inside of a napkin holder lined with some tin foil. It looked a little funny, but it worked out well! The husband improvised a taco spice recipe (sadly, none of those are local, but it tasted great!) which he added to some ground bison and onions. I also found these curious little mexican gherkin cucumbers at the farmer’s market on saturday and just had to bring them home after Jack let me taste one. They’re sweet, with a little sour and just perfectly bite sized. It’s really amazing me, week by week, the different things we can make using local ingredients that I never even thought of doing (making taco shells from scratch?!). This is totally spoiling my ideas of store-bought and semi-homemade that I had been used to cooking (and mostly microwaving), but all in a good way. I’ve recently been doing some canning and preserving and I should do a post on that too – it’s another new thing this year that I’m trying and is again, surprisingly easy – much easier than I had thought!
There were a few non-local ingredients in this week’s meal which included salt, canola oil, and the taco spices. Here are the local ingredients:
Ground Bison – Backyard Bison
Onions – North Star Orchard
Tomatoes – Our Backyard Garden
Peppers – Cressley’s Greenhouse
Mexican Gherkins – Jack’s Farm
Fat Cat Cheese – Birchrun Hills Farm
Lettuce – Willow Creek
Corn Meal – Mill at Anselma
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma