tomatoes – Page 6 – Sheetar.com

One Local Summer – Week 10

By Sheetar 18 July 2010 18 July 2010

I really cannot believe it’s week ten already. I just didn’t feel like getting everything together and seriously cooking this week, but I did manage a meal. This week, I bring you a veggie panini!

Vegetable Panini:
Bread – Saint Peter’s Bakery. This is their wheat bread.
Yellow Squash – Arrgh I can never remember the name of this producer at the Anselma Market
Zucchini – Smith’s Produce
Onion – North Star Orchard
Cherry Tomatoes – Jack’s Farm
Eggplant – Smith’s Produce
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms. Crimini Mushrooms.
Colby Dill Cheese – Conabella Farms. This cheese is absolutely amazing.

One Local Summer

One Local Summer – Week 9

By Sheetar 13 July 2010 13 July 2010

Rotisserie chicken and grilled vegetables was on the menu for this week. I picked up a whole chicken and a bunch of different vegetables for the grill wok. The chicken was basted with some non-local jelly and olive oil, but otherwise, everything else is local!

Chicken:
Whole Chicken – Why Not Farm

Vegetables:
Onion – Smith’s Produce
Tomatoes – Brogue Hydroponics
Flying Saucer Squash – I can’t remember which stand this one came from, but it was delicious!
Portabella Mushrooms – Marsh Creek Farm

One Local Summer

One Local Summer – Week 7

By Sheetar 30 June 2010 30 June 2010

Another week is on the books. Or Blog. I’ve always been a big fan of Greek food and gyros in particular. So, this week, with dill running amok in the planter on the deck, I decided to prune it back a little, make some tzatziki and work up some chicken gyros. This was also the first meal we had on our brand new patio, and what a way to start many summers of relaxing dinners! MANY thanks to Ryan Steckel of Steckel Building for his amazing work on the patio. We’re positively thrilled with the results. Onto the ingredients!

Chicken Gyro:
Pretty basic, when you get down to it. Pitas were homemade using this recipe and really were more time consuming to make than difficult – I did substitute one cup of flour for whole wheat pastry flour and used plain old bread flour for the other two. I decided to throw them on the super-hot pizza stone on the grill since it was just so incredibly hot this past week and I wasn’t going to heat up the house with any baking. Turns out, it worked out perfectly, once I got the hang of it. The thinner the dough is and the hotter the stone is, the better the pitas puff up and shrink back down. The chicken was marinated, skewered, and grilled while the pitas cooled a little, and the vegetables were in the grill wok on the next burner.
Bread Flour – Anselma Mill
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Anselma Mill
Chicken – Mountain View Organics
Oregano – Back deck planters (used in marinade for chicken with Olive Oil, Vinegar, and Lemon Juice)
Tomatoes – Brogue Hydroponics
Onions – Smith’s Produce
Sharp II Chevre – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm. Used this as the base for the Tzatziki
Cucumbers – Smith’s Produce
Dill – Back deck planters
Non-Local: Salt, Sugar, Olive Oil, Yeast, Pepper, Lemon Juice

Vegetables:
These cooked up and were so tasty. The first zucchini of the year are always my favorite.
Zucchini – Smith’s Produce
Yellow Squash – Smith’s Produce
Carrots – Jack’s Farm
Non-Local – Salad Dressing as a marinade

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 11

By Sheetar 16 August 2009 16 August 2009

And another week down, bringing us to week eleven of the One Local Summer challenge. This week we decided to attack the pulled pork sandwich. I wasn’t able to find locally baked rolls that would work for sandwiches, so we found Vermont Bread Company rolls at Kimberton Whole Foods that worked out well, even if they’re not really that local. It’s probably the biggest non-local item I’ve used, but I really, honestly tried to find local rolls that would work and just couldn’t find any. Oh well! We did go the extra mile with the barbeque sauce and made that from scratch. The dinner was delicious and while the pork butt took all day to cook in the smoker and then crock pot, it was WELL worth it. Non-local ingredients used (other than the rolls) were in the barbeque sauce: pepper, salt, cider vinegar. The rest of the ingredient run down follows.

Corn: Kimberton Whole Foods (locally grown)
Peaches: North Star Orchards
Feta Cheese: Apple Tree Goat Dairy
Pork Butt: Countrytime Farm
Maple Sugar: Miller’s Maple
Tomatoes: Jack’s Farm
Garlic: Jack’s Farm
Onion: North Star Orchards

One Local Summer

OLS: Week 10

By Sheetar 9 August 2009 9 August 2009

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

food

Zucchini Week: Day 7

By Sheetar 9 August 2009 9 August 2009


Day 7, a week late. Oops. I’m a bad, bad blogger. Well, the meal was made on day seven, however the picture didn’t make it off the camera until today. Yeah. Anyway, in all of its glory, I present to you my own creation, a zucchini pasta salad. The idea took form after I realized I could make pasta noodles from zucchini using my mandoline. Since I heavily modify recipes anyway, I’m just going to give you the basics of what I did. Onions were browned in some olive oil, then the tomatoes were added along with the zucchini and a bit of homebrewed beer. While that was simmering, I grilled the chicken and portobello mushrooms. The mix on the stove went into the fridge after the liquid was drained and so did the finished chicken and mushrooms. After everything was well chilled, I brought it out, sliced the chicken and mushrooms, added some local blue cheese on top and finished it off with a blackberry vinegarette (Olive oil, crushed blackberries, red wine vinegar, fresh basil). All the flavors worked well together and it made for a light afternoon lunch.	Zucchini Pasta Salad – My Own Recipe
	Ingredients Used: Zucchini – my garden Tomatoes – Charlestown Farm Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms Cheese – Birchrun Hills Farm Chicken – Eberly Poultry Onion – North Star Orchard *Blackberries – Willow Creek

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

Zucchini Week: Day 3

By Sheetar 29 July 2009 29 July 2009


Day three! Are you sick of zucchini yet? I’m not! In fact, it’s pretty fun using up zucchini left and right in all these different recipes with the whole meal coming out pretty different every time. Today was a Zucchini Breakfast Casserole, another recipe from Elise’s vast collection. This is the last one from her for the week, I promise! I’ve come to love casseroles because they’re just so easy – put all the ingredients in one dish, bake, refrigerate leftovers to enjoy all week. And, I’m willing to bet that this is just as good the next day as it is fresh. I used a fresh goat’s milk ricotta cheese, basil from my back deck herb planter, and substituted fresh heriloom tomatoes from the farmer’s market. The bread was a “rustic wheat” that was really delicious in sandwiches, but I happened to have just one slice leftover for this recipe. I also added a lump of that spicy chipotle chevre again. There aren’t a lot of ingredients in this one, but the simplicity is what makes it so attractive and delicious. It’s easy and quick to make and goes a long way.	Zucchini Breakfast Casserole – Recipe on SimplyRecipes.com
	Ingredients Used: Zucchini – my garden Basil – my herb garden Egg – Mt. View Organics Tomatoes – North Star Orchard Cheese – Shellbark Hollow Farms Bread – Oley Baker *Chevre – Amazing Acres