Saturday: Where's the local meat?

An interesting thing happened on my way to the challenge.

This week last year, my calendar was pretty much clear, with the older kids off at college and beyond, just Andreas, me and our 10-year-old daughter at home. This year, as it happens, there are a few more mouths to feed.

We've had long-standing plans for our good friends, Gary and Terry, to come down from Washington and stay with us so we could go together to a Saturday-night concert at Britt. My youngest son, Nik, also is back living at home this year, so altogether we were to make a weekend party of six, with a Britt picnic to plan for.

Then last week, our oldest son Dimitri called from California and asked if it would be a good time for him and four friends to come up and stay for a few days of Shakespeare and wine tasting. Sure, I said. So now I was planning a Friday-night locavore dinner for 11 people.

Sure, I can do that, no problem. I generally get home from work around 4:30 or 5 p.m., but I figured that with a little advance planning, it was still manageable. It didn’t take long for me to reach a slightly panicked state over the menu. As of Friday morning, I couldn’t find any locally produced meat.

Now, we are not a strictly meat and potatoes family, but I find that my crew does expect some kind of animal protein. They might humor me by allowing a zucchini pasta or a minestrone soup meal a couple times a month, but if I didn’t want the whole household running out for late-night Burger King on the first night of the challenge, I had to come up with something more.

OK, I thought, I see cows and sheep and poultry around in fields all over the place. Surely those farmers are selling their products in local stores. Well, I live in Medford, and I had already made my weekly pilgrimage to Ashland Food Co-op and didn’t want to make another special trip. I assumed the big, chain supermarkets in town would be a lost cause, so last week I called all the small markets and butcher shops I know of around town. While they had Oregon products, in many cases natural or organic, none had anything to offer that fit my 100-mile rule.

So I called local producers and learned that food safety restrictions prevent them from selling directly to consumers except in very large quantities (at least a quarter of the animal), and these have to be ordered well in advance. Lambs and chickens also have to be ordered ahead of time. Uh-oh. Nothing to serve my 11 hungry people.

Finally, I called my husband on my lunch break and asked him to drive to Ashland after work to pick up a load of Magnolia Ranch lamb and Emerald Hills beef, both produced in Roseburg and available at the Co-op. I’m not sure what we’ll do for local meat after the weekend, but talking to the helpful and enthusiastic people at Yale Creek Farms in Jacksonville and Martin Family Ranch in Central Point convinced me I want to try their products, and now I have a quarter beef and a whole lamb on order. I won't have them in time for the challenge, but I'm looking forward to stocking the freezer and enjoying them all the way through winter.

In the end, I made two separate dinners on Friday, and I am proud to say it was almost all local, and I personally didn’t consume any of the deviations. The young people got barbecued beef, ratatouille, watermelon and feta salad, green salad and homemade bread. They also had pasta with pesto, which was where I went astray a little, but it is special favorite of Dimitri’s, and he asked me to make it for his friends.

The basil was from our garden and the garlic was local, the oil was the good California stuff he brought with him, but the pine nuts, Parmesan and the pasta I served it on were from outside the boundaries. If I had had more time, I could have made it with local walnuts and made my own pasta, but not on Friday if the kids were going to get to "A Comedy of Errors" on time.

After the young people got out the door, the rest of us ate roast Magnolia Farms leg of lamb, a potato-onion-tomato gratin, ratatouille, bread, watermelon salad and green salad. It was a bit of work, but there are a lot of leftovers that should cut down on kitchen time the rest of the weekend.