It was a bit of a challenge for me to figure out how to feed all our houseguests in the morning.
The young ones stayed up until all hours playing cards and slept late; we old folks nodded off and then got up earlier. Some of our company are the kind who are hungry right away while others need numerous cups of coffee before the thought of breakfast even occurs to them. On top of that, one person has a dairy allergy, one is on a low-carb diet, one has to have eggs and one is watching his cholesterol.
For my own family, breakfast is always a do-it-yourself affair on weekdays and often on weekends as well, when everyone fixes what they want whenever they decide it’s time to eat. On special occasions or when there are guests in the house, I try to make a bigger spread with variety enough to satisfy everyone. Personally, I am not too interested in food in the morning, but I felt I ought to do something in the hostess line this weekend for those who like something more than a cup of coffee before noon.
On Saturday morning (after we got the coffee pot going, of course) I mixed up a batch of dried cherry muffins, made with fruit we picked last year on a family trip to a U-pick orchard and dried in our electric food dryer. While those were in the oven, I cut up a local melon that Andreas had bought on Friday at the Farmer’s Market store in Phoenix, where they always have local products, usually labeled as such. Andreas talked with the friendly store owners on Friday about the Eat Local Challenge, and he reports that they were extremely helpful with showing him the best they have in the way of local produce.
While I worked on the muffins, Andreas went out into the garden where the day was already starting to heat up and picked a big bowl of squash blossoms. We love zucchini blossoms; they are a special summer treat. But we also like zucchini, and we worry that taking too many blossoms might harm the crop, so this year we allowed some of the stray mixed variety plants that arise unbidden out of the compost to take root and grow.
The hybrid fruit is generally pretty useless. My thrifty spouse is undaunted in his efforts to make something edible out of them, but they tend to have very thick skin, big seeds and not very tasty flesh. However, the flowers are delicious. One of my favorite lunches at home is to dip them in lightly beaten egg , dredge them in flour seasoned with a little salt and pepper, and then fry them in butter until light brown and a little crispy. But Andreas had other plans for the flowers on Saturday: He cut them up and made a giant squash blossom and chopped onion frittata.
Sunday’s breakfast was similar. There were still muffins left from yesterday, and we had fruit (melon, berries and peaches). But today, instead of the frittata, Andreas made a big vegetable scramble, with sauteed zucchini, tomatoes, onions, basil and bell peppers, all from the garden. When it was done we just set everything out and people wandered in to take what they were interested in. A couple of people asked for fruit juice, and I realized we were lacking there. If I owned a juicer, I could probably have made a pear or peach juice. When we harvest the rest of the grapes, we’ll probably use the big steam juicer that goes on the stove to make grape juice, but that will be later this month and there is none left from last year.
Similarly, I was not able to satisfy the bacon-and-sausage crowd this time. I’ve been watching for locally produced pork products with no luck so far. This is something else I will try to investigate more thoroughly before next weekend. Ah, well. No one is going to starve around here, anyway.
Pass the coffee.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Sunday: A perfect summer evening
The big event of the day for us was the Bill Evans Soulgrass concert at the Britt Pavilion. One of the best things about summer for Andreas and me is spending evenings out on the lawn in Jacksonville listening to our favorite music with a picnic dinner and a bottle of wine. This time the event was made even more special because our old friends, Gary and Terry, would be joining us.
I previously wrote about how we are 11 people in the house this weekend; after a breakfast involving a couple dozen eggs and about four gallons of coffee, the 20-somethings took off for a day of wine tasting in the Applegate Valley. Our friends were interested in looking at property in the area (it doesn’t take long until visitors are beguiled by the Rogue Valley’s charms and want to stay), so Andreas went out touring with them while I stayed home to restore temporary order to the household and get our picnic together.
Andreas had barbecued several extra steaks last night with the idea that I could use them to make something else. I decided to slice up the leftover meat and serve it cold. The meat seemed a little dry, so I looked up a recipe for chimichurri on Epicurious – if you like to cook and haven’t seen this Web site, you should definitely check it out. It’s almost as good as a whole shelf of cookbooks (I’m a librarian, so that’s saying a lot).
Anyway, chimichiurri is a spicy Argentine marinade or sauce for beef. All that I needed for the recipe was in my pantry of local ingredients or growing in the back yard, so I whisked together a batch of that. I harvested some vegetables from the garden. Tomatoes are in full production now, and we have round ones, Romas, red cherry and yellow, pear-shaped ones. One of Dimitri’s friends also had brought us a big bowl of beautiful heirloom tomatoes from her garden (not technically local for us, but a special gift and not be wasted), so I packed up a selection.
I also picked a bowl of strawberries and raspberries and packed those up. I added a couple of pears to slice there and a wedge of Rogue Creamery Oregonzola cheese to go with them. I put some mixed green salad in a bag and made a little bottle of vinaigrette for it. I baked the slow-rising bread that I had mixed and set out to rise last night and sliced it thin when it was cool, so that people could make sandwiches if they wanted or use it to sop up chimichurri.
I had a little time left and the oven was hot, so I used some of the gorgeous '49er peaches that one of Andreas’s co-workers had given him to make a cobbler (there goes the no-sugar pledge). It seemed too complicated to try and take the cobbler with us, so I left it in the kitchen to have later after the show. I got a yellow zucchini and two green ones from the garden and sliced them thin with my mandoline (a wonderful invention – I don’t know how I got along so many years without one – although Nik’s girlfriend won’t go near it after almost cutting all her knuckles off the first time she used it). I sliced the eggplant from a friend's garden and a yellow onion in thicker slices and brushed all the vegetables with olive oil.
We had about half an hour before we had to leave, and I wasn’t quite ready yet. Luckily, the others arrived home just then and jumped right in to help, Andreas and Terry taking turns grilling the vegetables on the grill pan I use on the stove, while I packed everything up. Andreas and company had stopped at Fred Meyer on their way home to pick up some wine for the evening –a bottle each of Bridgeview cab-merlot and chardonnay. We grabbed the blankets and were out the door in time to get good parking and a perfect spot on the lawn.
Bill Evans, Sam Bush, and a really good gypsy jazz opening act were the hits of the evening, but the chimichurri with the crusty bread turned out to be pretty popular, too. And because we got home before the kids who’d gone to see "Othello," there was even peach cobbler waiting for us in the kitchen. Another perfect summer evening in the Rogue Valley.
I previously wrote about how we are 11 people in the house this weekend; after a breakfast involving a couple dozen eggs and about four gallons of coffee, the 20-somethings took off for a day of wine tasting in the Applegate Valley. Our friends were interested in looking at property in the area (it doesn’t take long until visitors are beguiled by the Rogue Valley’s charms and want to stay), so Andreas went out touring with them while I stayed home to restore temporary order to the household and get our picnic together.
Andreas had barbecued several extra steaks last night with the idea that I could use them to make something else. I decided to slice up the leftover meat and serve it cold. The meat seemed a little dry, so I looked up a recipe for chimichurri on Epicurious – if you like to cook and haven’t seen this Web site, you should definitely check it out. It’s almost as good as a whole shelf of cookbooks (I’m a librarian, so that’s saying a lot).
Anyway, chimichiurri is a spicy Argentine marinade or sauce for beef. All that I needed for the recipe was in my pantry of local ingredients or growing in the back yard, so I whisked together a batch of that. I harvested some vegetables from the garden. Tomatoes are in full production now, and we have round ones, Romas, red cherry and yellow, pear-shaped ones. One of Dimitri’s friends also had brought us a big bowl of beautiful heirloom tomatoes from her garden (not technically local for us, but a special gift and not be wasted), so I packed up a selection.
I also picked a bowl of strawberries and raspberries and packed those up. I added a couple of pears to slice there and a wedge of Rogue Creamery Oregonzola cheese to go with them. I put some mixed green salad in a bag and made a little bottle of vinaigrette for it. I baked the slow-rising bread that I had mixed and set out to rise last night and sliced it thin when it was cool, so that people could make sandwiches if they wanted or use it to sop up chimichurri.
I had a little time left and the oven was hot, so I used some of the gorgeous '49er peaches that one of Andreas’s co-workers had given him to make a cobbler (there goes the no-sugar pledge). It seemed too complicated to try and take the cobbler with us, so I left it in the kitchen to have later after the show. I got a yellow zucchini and two green ones from the garden and sliced them thin with my mandoline (a wonderful invention – I don’t know how I got along so many years without one – although Nik’s girlfriend won’t go near it after almost cutting all her knuckles off the first time she used it). I sliced the eggplant from a friend's garden and a yellow onion in thicker slices and brushed all the vegetables with olive oil.
We had about half an hour before we had to leave, and I wasn’t quite ready yet. Luckily, the others arrived home just then and jumped right in to help, Andreas and Terry taking turns grilling the vegetables on the grill pan I use on the stove, while I packed everything up. Andreas and company had stopped at Fred Meyer on their way home to pick up some wine for the evening –a bottle each of Bridgeview cab-merlot and chardonnay. We grabbed the blankets and were out the door in time to get good parking and a perfect spot on the lawn.
Bill Evans, Sam Bush, and a really good gypsy jazz opening act were the hits of the evening, but the chimichurri with the crusty bread turned out to be pretty popular, too. And because we got home before the kids who’d gone to see "Othello," there was even peach cobbler waiting for us in the kitchen. Another perfect summer evening in the Rogue Valley.
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.
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.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Friday: First, some ground rules about 'local' food
This will be my second year doing the Eat Local Challenge. Last year it was an educational and gratifying experience -- and much harder than I expected! I learned a lot, and there are a few things I’m going to do differently this year as a result, but at the same time I’ve got some extra challenges of my own built into the week that should keep it -- well -- challenging.
I became interested in doing this for several reasons. The first one is that I love to cook. I look at this as an opportunity to explore new ingredients, new sources and new recipes. I’m a firm believer that local, organic foods taste better, and I enjoy finding new places to get fresh, good-quality ingredients. Secondly, I'm concerned about the impact that all the trucking and flying around of foods has on the environment when there are so many delicious things growing right here. I also want to limit the pesticides my family consumes, and I'm not sold at all on the idea of genetically altered frankenfoods. Eating local means you know where it came from. Lastly, like many families, ours is concerned with rising costs. I don’t mind paying a bit more for organic, because I find that choosing local, in-season ingredients and preparing them myself is generally more economical than purchasing foods that are preserved, processed or out of season. This challenge gives me the opportunity to look at my grocery bill to see how local-only eating affects my food budget.
Here we are on the eve of the challenge and I can’t wait to get started. The first step is to establish some parameters. I’ll start with the idea that everything I provide for my family to eat has to have been grown, raised, produced, packaged or whatever within 100 miles of my home in Medford. I tend to be something of a purist about things like this; I wouldn’t forgive myself easily if I wimped out. So I’d better make any special allowances at the beginning. For starters I know I am going to need coffee. Last year I virtuously swore off that exotic bean for the week, with the result that on Day 3 I awoke with a splitting headache that stayed with me the rest of the week. So this year I will allow myself an organic, shade-grown, fair-trade cup of morning coffee.
Also, because I don’t want to carry the hair-shirt thing too far (this is supposed to be a fun and tasty experiment, after all), I am going to claim what I’ve heard called the “Marco Polo exception”: powdered spices traded by the ancients are allowed. Bought in bulk and used in small quantities, they do very little harm and add a lot of flavor. Salt is included here. Sunset Magazine recently published an in-depth account of their One-Block Feast that included instructions for homemade salt. You can check it out at http://www.sunset.com/sunset/i/misc/pdfs/OneBlock_Salt.pdf Their conclusion: “unless you live right on the shore of a verifiably pristine sea, with sunny clear skies for evaporating, it’s totally impractical and possibly risky to make your own salt.” Wars have been waged over the stuff; but fortunately there is a jar of nice organic sea salt right in my own cupboard, and I plan to use it.
It’s my habit to bake bread every day, and I have searched with no success for local flour. Locally ground yes, but grown here, no. Calls to Bob’s Red Mill and Butte Creek Mill both yielded the information that the wheat they grind is grown in Montana -– too far to qualify as “local.” The knowledgeable folks at both operations explained that Montana flour has a higher protein content, making it a more nutritious choice. My family will desert me if they don’t have bread, so I will make another exception here for Northwest grown flour and also for yeast. I can’t decide what to do about sugar -– to start with I think I will avoid it and then see how things go as the week progresses. I have lots of company coming this week and certainly there will be many more dessert options if I allow sugar. We’ll have to see.
Then there is that big problem of dependence on foreign oil -- olive oil, that is. My normal cooking habits involve quite a lot of the stuff. I could probably manage with butter, but my younger son is allergic to all cow’s milk products and I’m not too keen on making two versions of everything. Last year I searched for a local oil, finally securing one produced in the Napa Valley -- still almost 300 miles away. I used it, but to be honest it tasted more like WD-40 than the spicy, fruity Argentine variety I normally buy in bulk at the Ashland Food Co-op. Our oldest son is visiting this weekend from California and he brought me a present of two bottles of olive oil grown and pressed near where he lives –- a quick taste test tells me there is hope! It’s from outside our local area, but it’s in his, so I’ll just be stretching the rules a little. To make salad more interesting, I’ll also add vinegar to the list. I found instructions for making vinegar on the Sunset Web site I mentioned earlier, but I would have had to start making it a long time ago to be able to use it this week.
So, with the exception of coffee, spices, flour, yeast, olive oil, vinegar and (maybe) sugar, everything has to come from within a 100-mile radius of my home in Medford. Tomorrow is Day 1 -- I’ll let you know how I do!
I became interested in doing this for several reasons. The first one is that I love to cook. I look at this as an opportunity to explore new ingredients, new sources and new recipes. I’m a firm believer that local, organic foods taste better, and I enjoy finding new places to get fresh, good-quality ingredients. Secondly, I'm concerned about the impact that all the trucking and flying around of foods has on the environment when there are so many delicious things growing right here. I also want to limit the pesticides my family consumes, and I'm not sold at all on the idea of genetically altered frankenfoods. Eating local means you know where it came from. Lastly, like many families, ours is concerned with rising costs. I don’t mind paying a bit more for organic, because I find that choosing local, in-season ingredients and preparing them myself is generally more economical than purchasing foods that are preserved, processed or out of season. This challenge gives me the opportunity to look at my grocery bill to see how local-only eating affects my food budget.
Here we are on the eve of the challenge and I can’t wait to get started. The first step is to establish some parameters. I’ll start with the idea that everything I provide for my family to eat has to have been grown, raised, produced, packaged or whatever within 100 miles of my home in Medford. I tend to be something of a purist about things like this; I wouldn’t forgive myself easily if I wimped out. So I’d better make any special allowances at the beginning. For starters I know I am going to need coffee. Last year I virtuously swore off that exotic bean for the week, with the result that on Day 3 I awoke with a splitting headache that stayed with me the rest of the week. So this year I will allow myself an organic, shade-grown, fair-trade cup of morning coffee.
Also, because I don’t want to carry the hair-shirt thing too far (this is supposed to be a fun and tasty experiment, after all), I am going to claim what I’ve heard called the “Marco Polo exception”: powdered spices traded by the ancients are allowed. Bought in bulk and used in small quantities, they do very little harm and add a lot of flavor. Salt is included here. Sunset Magazine recently published an in-depth account of their One-Block Feast that included instructions for homemade salt. You can check it out at http://www.sunset.com/sunset/i/misc/pdfs/OneBlock_Salt.pdf Their conclusion: “unless you live right on the shore of a verifiably pristine sea, with sunny clear skies for evaporating, it’s totally impractical and possibly risky to make your own salt.” Wars have been waged over the stuff; but fortunately there is a jar of nice organic sea salt right in my own cupboard, and I plan to use it.
It’s my habit to bake bread every day, and I have searched with no success for local flour. Locally ground yes, but grown here, no. Calls to Bob’s Red Mill and Butte Creek Mill both yielded the information that the wheat they grind is grown in Montana -– too far to qualify as “local.” The knowledgeable folks at both operations explained that Montana flour has a higher protein content, making it a more nutritious choice. My family will desert me if they don’t have bread, so I will make another exception here for Northwest grown flour and also for yeast. I can’t decide what to do about sugar -– to start with I think I will avoid it and then see how things go as the week progresses. I have lots of company coming this week and certainly there will be many more dessert options if I allow sugar. We’ll have to see.
Then there is that big problem of dependence on foreign oil -- olive oil, that is. My normal cooking habits involve quite a lot of the stuff. I could probably manage with butter, but my younger son is allergic to all cow’s milk products and I’m not too keen on making two versions of everything. Last year I searched for a local oil, finally securing one produced in the Napa Valley -- still almost 300 miles away. I used it, but to be honest it tasted more like WD-40 than the spicy, fruity Argentine variety I normally buy in bulk at the Ashland Food Co-op. Our oldest son is visiting this weekend from California and he brought me a present of two bottles of olive oil grown and pressed near where he lives –- a quick taste test tells me there is hope! It’s from outside our local area, but it’s in his, so I’ll just be stretching the rules a little. To make salad more interesting, I’ll also add vinegar to the list. I found instructions for making vinegar on the Sunset Web site I mentioned earlier, but I would have had to start making it a long time ago to be able to use it this week.
So, with the exception of coffee, spices, flour, yeast, olive oil, vinegar and (maybe) sugar, everything has to come from within a 100-mile radius of my home in Medford. Tomorrow is Day 1 -- I’ll let you know how I do!
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