So to wrap this whole thing up, what are my thoughts and plans at the end of these 10 days?
For starters, I’m very much looking forward to having a bit of chocolate next week, but I’ll look for a local manufacturer. In the longer term, I know I have to have lemons, but I will make an extra effort to barter with traveling friends and relatives who can bring them from warmer climates, and I will continue to bring back boxfuls myself from our own trips south (the juice freezes well). We will plant more tomatoes next year so I have enough frozen to last all year. We will plant a garden for winter, and put up a cold-frame to extend the season on some of our summer vegetables.
Argentine olive oil is still worth it, and I will continue to buy in bulk instead of wasteful glass bottles. I’ll still buy frozen phyllo dough. I’ll still buy fish, too (we can only rely so much on the generosity of friends, and we haven’t the inclination to learn to fish for ourselves), but we’ll stick to Northwest varieties. In the winter when our local fresh fruit is over and I tire of Washington apples, I will probably buy some bananas because my family loves them. And then there is the fact that soy and fish sauce, sesame oil, rice and rice noodles, none of them local, open up a whole continent of Asian flavors that I am not willing to forgo forever.
There are other things I didn’t miss over the course of these 10 days, grown or manufactured outside our region, that I will probably realize I am unwilling to go without. You can be sure, however, I will look at each one carefully before I allow it back into my pantry.
On the other hand, I have a great new local flour source (news flash: white, unbleached Black Ranch flour is available in bulk at Ashland Food Co-op). Maybe I’ll get a sourdough starter going, and then I won’t even have to buy yeast to make entirely local bread.
I will definitely start to make my own cheese, as soon as I find a local milk source for non-homogenized cow and goat milk, although I will still want to buy foreign Parmesan and manchego. I’ll try out the microwave method for making my own yogurt that my son learned from an Indian friend. I now have sources for local beef and lamb, and no reason to get meat from farther away than Jacksonville. We fully intend to start raising our own chickens for eggs.
I may never be a total locavore, or completely self-sustaining here on my own little quarter acre, but I’m getting a little closer each year. I’ve made a lot of changes this week, and as they say change is hard; it takes a lot of extra time and work at first. But awkward ways soon become new habits and streamlined routines. It gets easier, just like making my own bread each day has gotten so much easier since I started a year ago that now I hardly think about it.
I hope the choices I make to buy non-local will be deliberate ones. Though it might be rationalization in part, I believe there are sometimes legitimate reasons for eating outside the locavore boundary. Supporting local businesses is a very big one: The local pasta makers, bakers, and other specialty food manufacturers need local customers.
Also, sometimes purchasing foreign products can do a social good; I am reminded of a documentary film I saw last year, about a small skin-care products company that helped support a collective of African women growing the raw ingredients for their soaps and lotions. I am sure the same principle applies to some food products, but I need to do a little research to choose the right companies to support.
Getting pretty theoretical here. But it is clear to me that the dollars I spend have an effect in other arenas besides the transportation/fossil fuel problem addressed by food miles. As others have also pointed out, you sometimes have to weigh a local, big-agriculture choice against a more distant, sustainable one and consider which option does the least harm (or which provides the greatest benefit).
At the personal level, this week has been a real success for me. My family is happy with many of the new recipes we tried. The slow-roasted tomatoes, the chimichurri and the homemade feta and ricotta are keepers for sure, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of those around here. I know where to get many more local organic ingredients, too.
I was not so good at figuring the relative expense of local eating since we had so many extra people coming and going from our household this week. I think I probably did spend more than normal; it costs more to produce organic foods on a small scale, even if the transportation cost is less. Was it worth it? Absolutely yes.
I think the biggest lesson I learned is that to be successful at local eating, I have to make a shift in my meal-planning thinking. Instead of dreaming up what I should like for dinner and then going out to find the ingredients, the best approach is to begin with fresh seasonal ingredients and proceed from there. It sounds simple and obvious, but it’s a pretty major shift in how I usually do things. I am confident I can adjust.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Sunday: Lessons in cheese and friends' generosity
In the words of the inimitable Monty Python, "blessed are the cheesemakers."
I spent today at Pholia Farm learning the basics of home cheesemaking, and now I am feeling very blessed indeed. Pholia Farm is a wonderful family-run sustainable goat farm that operates off the grid in Rogue River. They not only create their own cheese by hand out of the milk produced by their herd of 30 adorable Nigerian Dwarf goats, they also use solar panels and a micro-hydro water turbine to generate all the electricity they need to keep the place running. You can find them on the Web at www.pholiafarm.com. Pholia Farm offers lessons in goat husbandry, as well as several different one-day cheesemaking classes.
My class, Beginning Cheesemaking, consisted of a hands-on morning creating three different cheeses. Class sizes are small – only eight for this one, as that is about all that will fit in the little room where the cheese is made. Our group enjoyed a delicious outdoor lunch featuring the cheeses we had made plus others produced at the dairy. Afterward, the Caldwells' teenage daughter gave us a tour of the property and all its livestock inhabitants. I came home from my day at the farm carrying a little bag of cheeses we’d made and crowing about my newly acquired skill.
In the evening, after dropping off the tray of Greek goodies I’d made yesterday for the ballet fundraiser, we made our way to my school pot-luck with more dolmas and spanikopita. There, Andreas proceeded to tell anyone who would listen all about how easy it was to make cheese. Well, not quite, I’m afraid.
One thing I learned today was that cheesemaking is both an art and a science. That is the basic fact that makes it fascinating to me. Like wine- and bread-making, it is pretty clear that there is a scientific chemical basis to it that requires knowledge, but at the same time there are many uncontrollable variables (humidity, temperature, microbes in the air, to name a few) that only experience and a learned ability to improvise can overcome. Gianaclis Caldwell, who with her husband Vern owns Pholia Farm and who taught our class, explained to us that cheese “recipes” were just guidelines for beginners; expert cheesemakers learn by trial and error how to plan backward to work toward a desired end result. So I know that I can expect to experience multiple failures before I can produce a feta or a fresh mozzarella worthy of the name, but even mistakes can be tasty if you just call them something else.
I feel the need to mention here the generosity of some of our friends this week in regard to local bounty. I don’t know if it was the blog that did it; I suspect it’s just the way they are by nature. Andreas’s co-worker Jeff generously gave us a package of frozen salmon that he caught himself in a local river (I sent a loaf of homemade crusty bread in return but we still owe him big-time). When I arrived at work yesterday, I found four big, beautiful comice pears on my office chair, a gift from my library buddy Jan’s tree. Andreas’s co-worker Sherry has been showering us with beautiful garden eggplants, something we cannot seem to grow ourselves. Rex, one of my students, brought me biscotti he had made – I don’t know which ingredients were local, but some things I don’t care to know, because these cookies were delicious and homemade.
And then there have been the various squash appearing anonymously on our desks and doorsteps – I’m sure others are familiar with that phenomenon. It makes me think that if everyone had a garden and produced their own food, we could get through a Medford summer just bartering with friends and never visiting the store at all. Perhaps an experiment for another week.
I spent today at Pholia Farm learning the basics of home cheesemaking, and now I am feeling very blessed indeed. Pholia Farm is a wonderful family-run sustainable goat farm that operates off the grid in Rogue River. They not only create their own cheese by hand out of the milk produced by their herd of 30 adorable Nigerian Dwarf goats, they also use solar panels and a micro-hydro water turbine to generate all the electricity they need to keep the place running. You can find them on the Web at www.pholiafarm.com. Pholia Farm offers lessons in goat husbandry, as well as several different one-day cheesemaking classes.
My class, Beginning Cheesemaking, consisted of a hands-on morning creating three different cheeses. Class sizes are small – only eight for this one, as that is about all that will fit in the little room where the cheese is made. Our group enjoyed a delicious outdoor lunch featuring the cheeses we had made plus others produced at the dairy. Afterward, the Caldwells' teenage daughter gave us a tour of the property and all its livestock inhabitants. I came home from my day at the farm carrying a little bag of cheeses we’d made and crowing about my newly acquired skill.
In the evening, after dropping off the tray of Greek goodies I’d made yesterday for the ballet fundraiser, we made our way to my school pot-luck with more dolmas and spanikopita. There, Andreas proceeded to tell anyone who would listen all about how easy it was to make cheese. Well, not quite, I’m afraid.
One thing I learned today was that cheesemaking is both an art and a science. That is the basic fact that makes it fascinating to me. Like wine- and bread-making, it is pretty clear that there is a scientific chemical basis to it that requires knowledge, but at the same time there are many uncontrollable variables (humidity, temperature, microbes in the air, to name a few) that only experience and a learned ability to improvise can overcome. Gianaclis Caldwell, who with her husband Vern owns Pholia Farm and who taught our class, explained to us that cheese “recipes” were just guidelines for beginners; expert cheesemakers learn by trial and error how to plan backward to work toward a desired end result. So I know that I can expect to experience multiple failures before I can produce a feta or a fresh mozzarella worthy of the name, but even mistakes can be tasty if you just call them something else.
I feel the need to mention here the generosity of some of our friends this week in regard to local bounty. I don’t know if it was the blog that did it; I suspect it’s just the way they are by nature. Andreas’s co-worker Jeff generously gave us a package of frozen salmon that he caught himself in a local river (I sent a loaf of homemade crusty bread in return but we still owe him big-time). When I arrived at work yesterday, I found four big, beautiful comice pears on my office chair, a gift from my library buddy Jan’s tree. Andreas’s co-worker Sherry has been showering us with beautiful garden eggplants, something we cannot seem to grow ourselves. Rex, one of my students, brought me biscotti he had made – I don’t know which ingredients were local, but some things I don’t care to know, because these cookies were delicious and homemade.
And then there have been the various squash appearing anonymously on our desks and doorsteps – I’m sure others are familiar with that phenomenon. It makes me think that if everyone had a garden and produced their own food, we could get through a Medford summer just bartering with friends and never visiting the store at all. Perhaps an experiment for another week.
Saturday: Taking a seasonal cue from the Greeks
A few summers ago, my family spent time on the obscure and relatively unspoiled Greek island of Ikaria, where Andreas’s parents were born and where he still has aunts, uncles and many cousins. There we searched restaurant menus in vain for dolmades. These grape leaves stuffed with rice and other ingredients were (and are) one of our family’s favorite Greek specialties, and we were eager to see how they were prepared on the island. When we finally asked why we didn’t find them, the waitress gave us a “you silly Americans” look as she patiently explained that grape leaves were out of season, and that we would have to come in May to order dolmades. Well duh, I should have figured that out.
Suddenly I was struck by how independent that place remains in terms of food production. Ikarians on their remote and rocky island are far more in touch with seasonal availability than this Oregonian living two blocks from the supermarket. Twice a week, a boat would come from the mainland or other islands carrying goods for the local shops, but the cargo comprised mainly things like breakfast cereal, flour, ice cream and canned soda. Fresh meats, fruits and vegetables are nearly all grown right there (with the exception of barge-loads of karpouzi, fresh watermelon, a summer essential that apparently can’t be produced in large enough quantity on the island to satisfy its summer residents).
When we toured some family property with a cousin, we saw where as late as the 1970s Andreas’s relatives were threshing wheat by hand and picking olives to produce their own oil. Both of these activities are largely left to commercial operations these days, but even now there are still some individuals who make their own (especially the oil).
Tonight’s big cooking project is a Greek appetizer platter. Several months ago, I agreed to put together one of these as part of a wine-tasting fund-raiser for an organization I support, not knowing that it would coincide with the final days of the Eat Local week. The promised platter will hold dolmades, individual spanakopita, feta and olives. It would be a breeze to do locally, if this were Ikaria in the springtime. Hence the project involves a few cheats. For the dolmades, the onion, dill and parsley at least were no problem.
Because I knew the dolma obligation was on the calendar, I asked my oldest son before he came for a visit last weekend to stop by his local farmer’s market for locally grown rice and lemons (he lives in Davis California, where they grow both of those). Not local to us, but at least they came from small, sustainable farms and didn’t make a special truck trip to get here. Pine nuts were purchased in bulk from the co-op, another cheat: I could have left them out but dolmades are so much better with them, and this is for a good cause, after all.
The grape leaves themselves come from our back yard. I used to buy them in bottles, at considerable expense. Then when we first planted grapes and I called the Extension Service to find out how to bottle my own, I was told that home canning of grape leaves was not recommended under USDA home canning guidelines, and so I gave up the idea for several years. But then a couple of years ago, Andreas hit on the idea of freezing the leaves. He picks young leaves in late May, blanches them in boiling water, dries them and then freezes them flat in small batches, well-wrapped. It works great. I just have to add a little salt to the filling to make up for the salt that is in bottled leaves; this is better anyway because I can control the amount of salt in the final product.
For the spanakopita, almost everything in the filling is local: green onions, dill, parsley, egg, with chard instead of spinach (so technically the dish is hortakopita, not spanakopita – greens, not spinach). Siskiyou Crest makes a delicious artisan goat feta, but price considerations prevented me using it this time and I went with a cheaper, non-local brand instead. Homemade feta is on my short-term list of things to learn to make. I also bought frozen phyllo dough. Perhaps someday I will try making my own, if one of Andreas’s aunts can show me how (Aunt Koula is a wonderful teacher in the kitchen – she doesn’t measure things, so I just follow her around with a notepad and watch carefully). But I doubt I would ever give up the frozen dough. Even Aunt Koula uses it.
The wine-tasting event is tomorrow, and so is a staff pot-luck for my work, so I made extra of everything and stashed it in the fridge (the spanikopita are folded and ready to bake right before they are needed). Dinner tonight was a quick affair, grilled meat and veggies with bread and a few leftovers from previous dinners. My daughter’s school friend who is spending the night was skeptical when my daughter told her that we were “eating local,” wondering aloud at what we could possibly find to have for dinner. I think the second helping of peach cobbler convinced her that we would get by.
Suddenly I was struck by how independent that place remains in terms of food production. Ikarians on their remote and rocky island are far more in touch with seasonal availability than this Oregonian living two blocks from the supermarket. Twice a week, a boat would come from the mainland or other islands carrying goods for the local shops, but the cargo comprised mainly things like breakfast cereal, flour, ice cream and canned soda. Fresh meats, fruits and vegetables are nearly all grown right there (with the exception of barge-loads of karpouzi, fresh watermelon, a summer essential that apparently can’t be produced in large enough quantity on the island to satisfy its summer residents).
When we toured some family property with a cousin, we saw where as late as the 1970s Andreas’s relatives were threshing wheat by hand and picking olives to produce their own oil. Both of these activities are largely left to commercial operations these days, but even now there are still some individuals who make their own (especially the oil).
Tonight’s big cooking project is a Greek appetizer platter. Several months ago, I agreed to put together one of these as part of a wine-tasting fund-raiser for an organization I support, not knowing that it would coincide with the final days of the Eat Local week. The promised platter will hold dolmades, individual spanakopita, feta and olives. It would be a breeze to do locally, if this were Ikaria in the springtime. Hence the project involves a few cheats. For the dolmades, the onion, dill and parsley at least were no problem.
Because I knew the dolma obligation was on the calendar, I asked my oldest son before he came for a visit last weekend to stop by his local farmer’s market for locally grown rice and lemons (he lives in Davis California, where they grow both of those). Not local to us, but at least they came from small, sustainable farms and didn’t make a special truck trip to get here. Pine nuts were purchased in bulk from the co-op, another cheat: I could have left them out but dolmades are so much better with them, and this is for a good cause, after all.
The grape leaves themselves come from our back yard. I used to buy them in bottles, at considerable expense. Then when we first planted grapes and I called the Extension Service to find out how to bottle my own, I was told that home canning of grape leaves was not recommended under USDA home canning guidelines, and so I gave up the idea for several years. But then a couple of years ago, Andreas hit on the idea of freezing the leaves. He picks young leaves in late May, blanches them in boiling water, dries them and then freezes them flat in small batches, well-wrapped. It works great. I just have to add a little salt to the filling to make up for the salt that is in bottled leaves; this is better anyway because I can control the amount of salt in the final product.
For the spanakopita, almost everything in the filling is local: green onions, dill, parsley, egg, with chard instead of spinach (so technically the dish is hortakopita, not spanakopita – greens, not spinach). Siskiyou Crest makes a delicious artisan goat feta, but price considerations prevented me using it this time and I went with a cheaper, non-local brand instead. Homemade feta is on my short-term list of things to learn to make. I also bought frozen phyllo dough. Perhaps someday I will try making my own, if one of Andreas’s aunts can show me how (Aunt Koula is a wonderful teacher in the kitchen – she doesn’t measure things, so I just follow her around with a notepad and watch carefully). But I doubt I would ever give up the frozen dough. Even Aunt Koula uses it.
The wine-tasting event is tomorrow, and so is a staff pot-luck for my work, so I made extra of everything and stashed it in the fridge (the spanikopita are folded and ready to bake right before they are needed). Dinner tonight was a quick affair, grilled meat and veggies with bread and a few leftovers from previous dinners. My daughter’s school friend who is spending the night was skeptical when my daughter told her that we were “eating local,” wondering aloud at what we could possibly find to have for dinner. I think the second helping of peach cobbler convinced her that we would get by.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Friday: Hoping local food comes closer to home
Looking back yesterday at my previous blog entries, I noticed that a reader had posted a comment about the Black Ranch wheat flour that is available at Ashland Food Co-op and at Shop 'N' Kart. I had brought my reading glasses with me last week when I checked out the Co-op bulk bins (as the reader pointed out, they are labeled in “really small” type), but somehow I missed this one. Perhaps I overlooked it because it was labeled “California” and therefore assumed it was from outside my range. As it turns out, Black Ranch is in Etna, just across the border in Siskiyou County.
My husband picked up some whole-wheat flour and some wheat berries for me yesterday on his way home from work, and I used it to make up a loaf of part wheat bread with wheat berries. I don’t know if Black Ranch makes a white flour variety; I would certainly buy it if they did. I don’t care much for 100-percent whole-wheat bread, so mine still has some regular Northwest white flour in it. But it’s more local than the last loaf, so I am making progress!
Today I had a pear with Rogue Creamery blue cheese for a snack. Lunch was leftover tuna, aioli and grilled vegetables with a little lettuce. For dinner I made a batch of gnocchi that I served with a choice of either browned butter with sage or the leftover tomato-and-meat sauce that Nik made a couple of nights ago. I had read that making gnocchi was easy but had never actually tried it until tonight. It’s true – very easy.
I had boiled the potatoes a couple of nights ago and peeled and riced them with my antique potato ricer (a very useful tool given to me by my mom; I don’t know why they ever went out of fashion). This afternoon I mixed the riced potatoes with flour, an egg and a little salt, then kneaded it for about five minutes. After that you just roll it into ropes with your hands, cut it in little pieces and boil for about a minute. I used three pounds of potatoes and two cups of flour and it made a lot. I will probably make pesto tomorrow to go with the leftovers.
Tonight’s dinner also included more of the roasted tomato crostini and a green salad. Last night I was excited to receive an e-mail update from the Medford Market Board of Directors, who are working to revive the local food co-op that didn’t quite get off the ground a year or two ago. I love the Ashland Food Co-op for its sustainable choices but hate having to go so far to shop. I relish the idea of something similar that is closer to home. Andreas and I signed up as members of the Medford co-op as soon as we first heard about it.
Unfortunately, starting a grocery business takes more financial and human capital than one would expect, and the co-op hit an apparently insurmountable roadblock. But now it’s starting again from the ground up, hopefully with the benefit of a few lessons learned. I am looking forward to the day – soon – when I can find a wide range of natural, organic and local choices (including Black Ranch flour) in one Medford location. The co-op has a page where you can follow the project’s progress and find out how to get involved at http://medfordmarket.org/blog/
My husband picked up some whole-wheat flour and some wheat berries for me yesterday on his way home from work, and I used it to make up a loaf of part wheat bread with wheat berries. I don’t know if Black Ranch makes a white flour variety; I would certainly buy it if they did. I don’t care much for 100-percent whole-wheat bread, so mine still has some regular Northwest white flour in it. But it’s more local than the last loaf, so I am making progress!
Today I had a pear with Rogue Creamery blue cheese for a snack. Lunch was leftover tuna, aioli and grilled vegetables with a little lettuce. For dinner I made a batch of gnocchi that I served with a choice of either browned butter with sage or the leftover tomato-and-meat sauce that Nik made a couple of nights ago. I had read that making gnocchi was easy but had never actually tried it until tonight. It’s true – very easy.
I had boiled the potatoes a couple of nights ago and peeled and riced them with my antique potato ricer (a very useful tool given to me by my mom; I don’t know why they ever went out of fashion). This afternoon I mixed the riced potatoes with flour, an egg and a little salt, then kneaded it for about five minutes. After that you just roll it into ropes with your hands, cut it in little pieces and boil for about a minute. I used three pounds of potatoes and two cups of flour and it made a lot. I will probably make pesto tomorrow to go with the leftovers.
Tonight’s dinner also included more of the roasted tomato crostini and a green salad. Last night I was excited to receive an e-mail update from the Medford Market Board of Directors, who are working to revive the local food co-op that didn’t quite get off the ground a year or two ago. I love the Ashland Food Co-op for its sustainable choices but hate having to go so far to shop. I relish the idea of something similar that is closer to home. Andreas and I signed up as members of the Medford co-op as soon as we first heard about it.
Unfortunately, starting a grocery business takes more financial and human capital than one would expect, and the co-op hit an apparently insurmountable roadblock. But now it’s starting again from the ground up, hopefully with the benefit of a few lessons learned. I am looking forward to the day – soon – when I can find a wide range of natural, organic and local choices (including Black Ranch flour) in one Medford location. The co-op has a page where you can follow the project’s progress and find out how to get involved at http://medfordmarket.org/blog/
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Thursday: Back in the groove and the garden
Lorna has her cooking groove back.
Breakfast was another Crossroads latte, with a pear mid-morning. For lunch I'd packed a chef’s salad of lettuce and radishes, topped with sliced hard-boiled egg and the rounds of baked goat cheese I made last night, with homemade vinaigrette and some carrot sticks and homemade bread on the side.
Later in the afternoon I snacked on a handful of home-grown and home-dried raisins and cherries. We have a food dryer, a fine little machine that whirs away on the back porch for much of the summer, whenever we have an excess of fruits and sometimes vegetables. My husband Andreas is the food dryer guy. He uses it for pitted cherries from our own trees and from the U-pick, which go into muffins and salads year-round and which we pack with nuts as a snack for school or work. He uses it for the many grapes we have growing on arbors around the edge of our property (we planted them for wine, but after a couple of spectacularly failed attempts at home winemaking we are happy to have the raisins). He also uses it in the winter to make ginger-spiced persimmon fruit leather from the persimmons that grow on the tree in our front yard.
We have raised a garden of some kind for all 17 years we’ve lived in Medford. We moved here from Los Angeles with a couple of pots of basil, an intensive pesto-production center that was all we could manage in the way of home-grown food in UCLA student housing where we’d been living. Our Medford home, in an older section of town on a normal-sized city lot, came with two plum trees and a fig. Since then we have added apple, pear, cherry, persimmons and (new this year) pomegranate trees.
We have many grape vines, and each year we till up a large section of the back yard for an assortment of summer fruits and vegetables. The array varies, but this year between May and September we have enjoyed snow peas, English peas, cucumbers, pumpkin, several varieties of peppers, several varieties of tomato, corn, green beans, Italian flat beans, zucchini (yellow and green), eggplant, lettuce and lemon cucumber. I am probably forgetting a few things but it’s too dark to go outside and look right now.
Chard seems to do well all year. This spring Andreas moved our strawberries to a sunnier spot where they are quite happy, and he added blueberries and raspberries. Everything is completely organic, nourished by the compost pile along the alley that we feed all year with kitchen scraps and which Andreas uses to amend the soil in springtime. We have better luck with some types of plants than others, and our fortune varies from year to year. A couple of years ago we had a bumper crop of green beans, and I was able to make enough dilly beans out of the surplus to last us all winter. Sometimes we have great loads of cucumbers or pumpkins. This year the tomatoes were late, but we have been fortunate to avoid the blossom-end rot that I have heard so many gardeners complain about this season. We have never had good luck with corn or eggplant, but we keep trying.
We are thrilled to have friends who grow more than they can use and are generous with sharing the wealth. And when I go outside in the morning to find a zucchini like a baseball bat that I could swear wasn’t there yesterday, I know I can pass it along to my friend Kim who will use it in her Italian family’s beloved stuffed zucchini recipe. I say “we” when I talk about the garden, but really it is Andreas who gets all the credit for the bounty. I only get away with shunning the garden gloves by being the chief cook and bottle washer. This year one of the great new additions Andreas made to our garden space was the three large planters he built into the deck, all devoted to herbs and edible flowers. I just have to step out my back door to harvest everything from calendula petals to tarragon. Instead of running to the store for the forgotten parsley, I find it just a couple of steps away.
The main course for tonight’s dinner was the Oregon tuna loin I ordered yesterday from The Wharf. There’s no way to know where off the coast the boat was when they caught it. And wherever that boat came in on the coast, it was surely more than a 100-mile drive from here. But I will pretend that fish hit land at Gold Beach and then flew to Medford. Yeah, I know that’s a stretch but, boy, was that one tasty fish.
I marinated it in a little oil and vinegar, garlic and fresh herbs. We grilled it, and I served it with a homemade aioli mixed with more herbs. Nik grilled slices of eggplant, zucchini and onions. I served the roasted tomatoes I’d made yesterday with toasted slices of homemade bread and Siskiyou Crest chevre (spread a little cheese on the toast, top with a roasted tomato – delicious).
And Andreas made his wonderful Ikarian potato salad, a specialty of the Greek island his family comes from. He used the fingerling potatoes I’d steamed yesterday, cubed and mixed with chopped tomato, cucumber, red onion, purslane (growing wild in the garden and considered to be a weed by many Americans who don’t know what they’re missing) and fresh herbs, with a vinaigrette dressing. There was loaf of fresh bread and a green salad. And thanks to the hands of my whole family in the kitchen, it was all done by 8 p.m.
Breakfast was another Crossroads latte, with a pear mid-morning. For lunch I'd packed a chef’s salad of lettuce and radishes, topped with sliced hard-boiled egg and the rounds of baked goat cheese I made last night, with homemade vinaigrette and some carrot sticks and homemade bread on the side.
Later in the afternoon I snacked on a handful of home-grown and home-dried raisins and cherries. We have a food dryer, a fine little machine that whirs away on the back porch for much of the summer, whenever we have an excess of fruits and sometimes vegetables. My husband Andreas is the food dryer guy. He uses it for pitted cherries from our own trees and from the U-pick, which go into muffins and salads year-round and which we pack with nuts as a snack for school or work. He uses it for the many grapes we have growing on arbors around the edge of our property (we planted them for wine, but after a couple of spectacularly failed attempts at home winemaking we are happy to have the raisins). He also uses it in the winter to make ginger-spiced persimmon fruit leather from the persimmons that grow on the tree in our front yard.
We have raised a garden of some kind for all 17 years we’ve lived in Medford. We moved here from Los Angeles with a couple of pots of basil, an intensive pesto-production center that was all we could manage in the way of home-grown food in UCLA student housing where we’d been living. Our Medford home, in an older section of town on a normal-sized city lot, came with two plum trees and a fig. Since then we have added apple, pear, cherry, persimmons and (new this year) pomegranate trees.
We have many grape vines, and each year we till up a large section of the back yard for an assortment of summer fruits and vegetables. The array varies, but this year between May and September we have enjoyed snow peas, English peas, cucumbers, pumpkin, several varieties of peppers, several varieties of tomato, corn, green beans, Italian flat beans, zucchini (yellow and green), eggplant, lettuce and lemon cucumber. I am probably forgetting a few things but it’s too dark to go outside and look right now.
Chard seems to do well all year. This spring Andreas moved our strawberries to a sunnier spot where they are quite happy, and he added blueberries and raspberries. Everything is completely organic, nourished by the compost pile along the alley that we feed all year with kitchen scraps and which Andreas uses to amend the soil in springtime. We have better luck with some types of plants than others, and our fortune varies from year to year. A couple of years ago we had a bumper crop of green beans, and I was able to make enough dilly beans out of the surplus to last us all winter. Sometimes we have great loads of cucumbers or pumpkins. This year the tomatoes were late, but we have been fortunate to avoid the blossom-end rot that I have heard so many gardeners complain about this season. We have never had good luck with corn or eggplant, but we keep trying.
We are thrilled to have friends who grow more than they can use and are generous with sharing the wealth. And when I go outside in the morning to find a zucchini like a baseball bat that I could swear wasn’t there yesterday, I know I can pass it along to my friend Kim who will use it in her Italian family’s beloved stuffed zucchini recipe. I say “we” when I talk about the garden, but really it is Andreas who gets all the credit for the bounty. I only get away with shunning the garden gloves by being the chief cook and bottle washer. This year one of the great new additions Andreas made to our garden space was the three large planters he built into the deck, all devoted to herbs and edible flowers. I just have to step out my back door to harvest everything from calendula petals to tarragon. Instead of running to the store for the forgotten parsley, I find it just a couple of steps away.
The main course for tonight’s dinner was the Oregon tuna loin I ordered yesterday from The Wharf. There’s no way to know where off the coast the boat was when they caught it. And wherever that boat came in on the coast, it was surely more than a 100-mile drive from here. But I will pretend that fish hit land at Gold Beach and then flew to Medford. Yeah, I know that’s a stretch but, boy, was that one tasty fish.
I marinated it in a little oil and vinegar, garlic and fresh herbs. We grilled it, and I served it with a homemade aioli mixed with more herbs. Nik grilled slices of eggplant, zucchini and onions. I served the roasted tomatoes I’d made yesterday with toasted slices of homemade bread and Siskiyou Crest chevre (spread a little cheese on the toast, top with a roasted tomato – delicious).
And Andreas made his wonderful Ikarian potato salad, a specialty of the Greek island his family comes from. He used the fingerling potatoes I’d steamed yesterday, cubed and mixed with chopped tomato, cucumber, red onion, purslane (growing wild in the garden and considered to be a weed by many Americans who don’t know what they’re missing) and fresh herbs, with a vinaigrette dressing. There was loaf of fresh bread and a green salad. And thanks to the hands of my whole family in the kitchen, it was all done by 8 p.m.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Wednesday: No shortcuts or time-savers
Today was about learning the hard way that the key to local-food success is in the planning and preparation.
I normally already have a sense of that, which is why I spend a little time each weekend planning the menus that I post weekly on a chalkboard in my kitchen. It’s written in chalk, and there are inevitably changes throughout the week, but at least it gives me an idea about what to shop for and also warns family members against making a snack out of any essential ingredients.
But somehow I had a lapse. It was not smart of me to go to bed last night without an idea of what I was going to make today. I am finding that trying to eat entirely local (other than my few allowed exceptions) requires considerably more advance planning than what I ordinarily do. The main reason for this is that I cannot rely on pantry items as time-savers. Some of the quick fixes I occasionally fall back on during the week – a bottled spaghetti sauce I can doctor up; a jar of Trader Joe’s curry to cook a chicken in – are off limits this week.
Some of these shortcuts might be considered local by some standard because they are made here in the Rogue Valley: the tamales, handmade and sold by my friend in Talent, that I keep in the freezer; fresh pasta in a package, made in Ashland; the fresh pico de gallo made for Quality Market in Medford. But the way I’ve chosen to approach the challenge requires that I not use food products if I can’t identify where each ingredient came from. If a cookie is made in a bakery in Ashland, but the flour comes from Montana, the eggs from Washington, the butter from California, the cocoa from somewhere in the tropics before being turned into chocolate chips in Pennsylvania and so on, then it seems to me that little chipper has got an awful lot of miles on it, and I can’t legitimately call it local. This necessitates making pretty much everything from scratch myself.
Before you write me off as a hopeless over-the-top fanatic, let me explain that for me this is much of the value of the challenge: it raises my awareness of just how tangled up I personally am in the complex system of food production and transportation that we depend on. It’s an eye-opener for me, a person who thinks of herself as a “slow-food” home cook. If I let myself "cheat," then I lose the opportunity for that insight. The inconvenience makes me look for other possibilities – for example, delicious as it is, I really am awfully tired of lamb and beef right now. That made me want to get on the telephone today to see what else I could find that’s local. I searched again for poultry, with no luck. (If anyone knows where to get a chicken this week I’d love to hear about it.)
But realizing how unavailable that commodity is as a local product has inspired Andreas and me to look into raising some of our own; by next year’s challenge, our eggs and the occasional chicken should be available right in our own back yard. If we weren’t missing chicken so much this week I doubt the idea would even have occurred to us.
I also looked (briefly) for fish today. The manager at The Wharf was extremely helpful. They had nothing today, but she called her supplier and got back with to me with the promise of some local tuna for tomorrow. There is still further hope on the fish front, as Andreas is talking with friends who fish local rivers to see if they would be interested in selling some of their frozen catch.
After my lack of success in the fish and chicken department, I finally settled on a meatless dinner menu plan that was probably overly ambitious even before circumstances conspired against me to make it impossible. I had figured that if I started as soon as I got home from work, I would be able to make gnocchi with walnut pesto (no cheese, for Nik the non-dairy guy), pumpkin ravioli with brown butter and sage (for the dairy people), roasted tomatoes, bread and green salad.
I started off by harvesting the garden as soon as I got home (more zucchini and a big bowl of tomatoes) and was just drizzling the sliced and seeded tomatoes with olive oil when my daughter asked me if I was ready to leave for parent night at her school. Aargh. Here was something I had forgotten about completely but would never miss for anything.
So the seasoned tomatoes went into the oven (they need to cook at 250 for three hours, so that part worked out OK) but all my elaborate pasta plans went out the window. After the excitement of parent night, my answer to “what’s for dinner?” was "make it yourself." It is very rare that my whole family does not eat together family-style, but I could not think of anything in the kitchen that satisfied all three criteria of a) local, b) something everyone could and would eat and c) there was enough of it for all five people standing around the kitchen.
Fortunately, I have a spouse and kids who all know a shallot from a scallion, and each made his or her own mostly local dinner. The youngest made pesto with (non-local) pasta and a green salad. Andreas built a chef’s salad of lettuce and garden vegetables (with foreign salami – he’s on a high-protein program). The Iron Chef prize goes to Nik and company for their homemade tomato sauce with ground beef and a pan of sauteed squash (with more non-local pasta). Me, I had home fries with onions and an egg on top. I don’t like breakfast in the morning, but I love it for a comfort-food dinner when my day doesn't go quite right.
And the best part is that I also took time to roast and puree the pumpkin, cook and rice the potatoes for gnocchi, set up a batch of bread dough to rise, steam some fingerling potatoes for a salad, bake some rounds of goat cheese to go with salad greens for lunch and put the roasted tomatoes in the fridge, all so that later in the week I’ll be much better prepared.
I normally already have a sense of that, which is why I spend a little time each weekend planning the menus that I post weekly on a chalkboard in my kitchen. It’s written in chalk, and there are inevitably changes throughout the week, but at least it gives me an idea about what to shop for and also warns family members against making a snack out of any essential ingredients.
But somehow I had a lapse. It was not smart of me to go to bed last night without an idea of what I was going to make today. I am finding that trying to eat entirely local (other than my few allowed exceptions) requires considerably more advance planning than what I ordinarily do. The main reason for this is that I cannot rely on pantry items as time-savers. Some of the quick fixes I occasionally fall back on during the week – a bottled spaghetti sauce I can doctor up; a jar of Trader Joe’s curry to cook a chicken in – are off limits this week.
Some of these shortcuts might be considered local by some standard because they are made here in the Rogue Valley: the tamales, handmade and sold by my friend in Talent, that I keep in the freezer; fresh pasta in a package, made in Ashland; the fresh pico de gallo made for Quality Market in Medford. But the way I’ve chosen to approach the challenge requires that I not use food products if I can’t identify where each ingredient came from. If a cookie is made in a bakery in Ashland, but the flour comes from Montana, the eggs from Washington, the butter from California, the cocoa from somewhere in the tropics before being turned into chocolate chips in Pennsylvania and so on, then it seems to me that little chipper has got an awful lot of miles on it, and I can’t legitimately call it local. This necessitates making pretty much everything from scratch myself.
Before you write me off as a hopeless over-the-top fanatic, let me explain that for me this is much of the value of the challenge: it raises my awareness of just how tangled up I personally am in the complex system of food production and transportation that we depend on. It’s an eye-opener for me, a person who thinks of herself as a “slow-food” home cook. If I let myself "cheat," then I lose the opportunity for that insight. The inconvenience makes me look for other possibilities – for example, delicious as it is, I really am awfully tired of lamb and beef right now. That made me want to get on the telephone today to see what else I could find that’s local. I searched again for poultry, with no luck. (If anyone knows where to get a chicken this week I’d love to hear about it.)
But realizing how unavailable that commodity is as a local product has inspired Andreas and me to look into raising some of our own; by next year’s challenge, our eggs and the occasional chicken should be available right in our own back yard. If we weren’t missing chicken so much this week I doubt the idea would even have occurred to us.
I also looked (briefly) for fish today. The manager at The Wharf was extremely helpful. They had nothing today, but she called her supplier and got back with to me with the promise of some local tuna for tomorrow. There is still further hope on the fish front, as Andreas is talking with friends who fish local rivers to see if they would be interested in selling some of their frozen catch.
After my lack of success in the fish and chicken department, I finally settled on a meatless dinner menu plan that was probably overly ambitious even before circumstances conspired against me to make it impossible. I had figured that if I started as soon as I got home from work, I would be able to make gnocchi with walnut pesto (no cheese, for Nik the non-dairy guy), pumpkin ravioli with brown butter and sage (for the dairy people), roasted tomatoes, bread and green salad.
I started off by harvesting the garden as soon as I got home (more zucchini and a big bowl of tomatoes) and was just drizzling the sliced and seeded tomatoes with olive oil when my daughter asked me if I was ready to leave for parent night at her school. Aargh. Here was something I had forgotten about completely but would never miss for anything.
So the seasoned tomatoes went into the oven (they need to cook at 250 for three hours, so that part worked out OK) but all my elaborate pasta plans went out the window. After the excitement of parent night, my answer to “what’s for dinner?” was "make it yourself." It is very rare that my whole family does not eat together family-style, but I could not think of anything in the kitchen that satisfied all three criteria of a) local, b) something everyone could and would eat and c) there was enough of it for all five people standing around the kitchen.
Fortunately, I have a spouse and kids who all know a shallot from a scallion, and each made his or her own mostly local dinner. The youngest made pesto with (non-local) pasta and a green salad. Andreas built a chef’s salad of lettuce and garden vegetables (with foreign salami – he’s on a high-protein program). The Iron Chef prize goes to Nik and company for their homemade tomato sauce with ground beef and a pan of sauteed squash (with more non-local pasta). Me, I had home fries with onions and an egg on top. I don’t like breakfast in the morning, but I love it for a comfort-food dinner when my day doesn't go quite right.
And the best part is that I also took time to roast and puree the pumpkin, cook and rice the potatoes for gnocchi, set up a batch of bread dough to rise, steam some fingerling potatoes for a salad, bake some rounds of goat cheese to go with salad greens for lunch and put the roasted tomatoes in the fridge, all so that later in the week I’ll be much better prepared.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Tuesday: Local leftovers to the rescue
I awoke this morning after our weekend social extravaganza a rather tired person. The routine at my house is that I have breakfast with my daughter, we pack lunches together, and then I drop her off at school on my way to work – if we get going early enough, we go on foot, but today was definitely a car day.
Breakfast for her was piece of toast (from homemade bread), a sliced pear – my grandmother used to tell me a pear always tastes better when someone else slices it for you, and I agree, so that’s how I fixed it – and a glass of milk.
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m not a breakfast person: just coffee is usually enough. Sometimes the coffee for me happens at home, sometimes I stop at somewhere for a non-fat latte. Luckily for me my local coffee stand, Crossroads, has recently changed hands, and the friendly new owners are committed to sustainable choices. Their milk is Umpqua, the only practical local option here for dairy, and their coffee is from Noble roasters, a small Talent-based operation that works with shade-grown, fair-trade beans. So I was able to enjoy as guilt-free a coffee experience as possible.
The idea of packing lunch was not too exciting after all the time I spent in the kitchen over the weekend. But this is what I do, and it works for me. I can probably count on my fingers the number of times I’ve gone out to lunch from work – partly it’s the nature of my job (I prefer to stick around and keep an eye on things), but I’m certain it’s what I would do anyway.
One benefit is I get a chance to touch bases with my co-worker Jan, who also is a brown-bagger. Additionally, I know I make healthier eating choices by packing the food in the morning when I’m not really hungry instead of choosing whatever sounds good off a fast-food menu when it’s lunchtime and I’m feeling starved. Not to mention the money saved!
I talk to people who tell me their husbands or children won’t eat leftovers, or that they prefer not to face them themselves. I find this somewhat mystifying: if it was good last night, it’s even better later when I haven’t just stood over a hot stove smelling it for the last two hours. Leftovers are like going to a restaurant where someone else has done the cooking. And I don’t have to wash the pots. Today I took the leftover ratatouille – that’s a dish that definitely improves after a day or two – some crispy crackers I made from yesterday’s bread and a few slices of some really yummy Rogue Creamery rosemary cheddar. I also packed a local peach for a mid-morning snack and a handful of homegrown raisins in case I got hungry in the afternoon.
Then my daughter and I packed her lunch. She is 11 and usually has pretty good ideas about food, but I’m not holding her to the eat-local standard this week. She did get a local carrot and peach today, but the slices of Trader Joe sopressata that she loves and the chocolate-chip cookie had further-flung origins. At least the cookie was homemade by her hands yesterday. If you want cookies around my house, the rule is you have to learn to make them from scratch. She learned early!
After work, I was even more exhausted and therefore relieved that there were still things to eat in the fridge. Andreas stopped at the Co-op on the way home to replenish our supply of salad greens, and he also picked up two more Emerald Hills sirloins to cook on the grill pan. I baked today’s bread loaf and made a little pot of mashed potatoes. Andreas blanched a bunch of mustard greens and also the tops I’d saved from some beets I roasted on Saturday. I reheated the little dish of ratatouille, sliced the last heirloom tomato and pulled the jars of homemade vinaigrette and chimichurri out of the fridge; at 7:30 we had a very pleasant, mostly leftover and entirely local dinner for four.
The cupboard is looking a little bare now. I’m sure I can still find a few things to bag up for lunch, but I’ll have to come up with a fresh dinner menu for tomorrow. I’m tired of beef and lamb and also just plain tired – I’ll have to wait for tomorrow for some new inspiration.
Breakfast for her was piece of toast (from homemade bread), a sliced pear – my grandmother used to tell me a pear always tastes better when someone else slices it for you, and I agree, so that’s how I fixed it – and a glass of milk.
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m not a breakfast person: just coffee is usually enough. Sometimes the coffee for me happens at home, sometimes I stop at somewhere for a non-fat latte. Luckily for me my local coffee stand, Crossroads, has recently changed hands, and the friendly new owners are committed to sustainable choices. Their milk is Umpqua, the only practical local option here for dairy, and their coffee is from Noble roasters, a small Talent-based operation that works with shade-grown, fair-trade beans. So I was able to enjoy as guilt-free a coffee experience as possible.
The idea of packing lunch was not too exciting after all the time I spent in the kitchen over the weekend. But this is what I do, and it works for me. I can probably count on my fingers the number of times I’ve gone out to lunch from work – partly it’s the nature of my job (I prefer to stick around and keep an eye on things), but I’m certain it’s what I would do anyway.
One benefit is I get a chance to touch bases with my co-worker Jan, who also is a brown-bagger. Additionally, I know I make healthier eating choices by packing the food in the morning when I’m not really hungry instead of choosing whatever sounds good off a fast-food menu when it’s lunchtime and I’m feeling starved. Not to mention the money saved!
I talk to people who tell me their husbands or children won’t eat leftovers, or that they prefer not to face them themselves. I find this somewhat mystifying: if it was good last night, it’s even better later when I haven’t just stood over a hot stove smelling it for the last two hours. Leftovers are like going to a restaurant where someone else has done the cooking. And I don’t have to wash the pots. Today I took the leftover ratatouille – that’s a dish that definitely improves after a day or two – some crispy crackers I made from yesterday’s bread and a few slices of some really yummy Rogue Creamery rosemary cheddar. I also packed a local peach for a mid-morning snack and a handful of homegrown raisins in case I got hungry in the afternoon.
Then my daughter and I packed her lunch. She is 11 and usually has pretty good ideas about food, but I’m not holding her to the eat-local standard this week. She did get a local carrot and peach today, but the slices of Trader Joe sopressata that she loves and the chocolate-chip cookie had further-flung origins. At least the cookie was homemade by her hands yesterday. If you want cookies around my house, the rule is you have to learn to make them from scratch. She learned early!
After work, I was even more exhausted and therefore relieved that there were still things to eat in the fridge. Andreas stopped at the Co-op on the way home to replenish our supply of salad greens, and he also picked up two more Emerald Hills sirloins to cook on the grill pan. I baked today’s bread loaf and made a little pot of mashed potatoes. Andreas blanched a bunch of mustard greens and also the tops I’d saved from some beets I roasted on Saturday. I reheated the little dish of ratatouille, sliced the last heirloom tomato and pulled the jars of homemade vinaigrette and chimichurri out of the fridge; at 7:30 we had a very pleasant, mostly leftover and entirely local dinner for four.
The cupboard is looking a little bare now. I’m sure I can still find a few things to bag up for lunch, but I’ll have to come up with a fresh dinner menu for tomorrow. I’m tired of beef and lamb and also just plain tired – I’ll have to wait for tomorrow for some new inspiration.
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