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Chinese Chicken Salad

We had some bok choy left over from stir fry the other night, so I improvised a salad for lunch today.

Dressing -- mix these in a bowl:

• 2 Tbsp mayonnaise
• 2 Tbsp Greek yogurt (strained yogurt)
• 1 Tbsp seasoned rice vinegar
• 1 Tbsp spicy sesame oil
• at least 1 Tbsp minced ginger (I like lots, probably closer to 2)
• soy sauce to taste

Combine in another bowl:

• about 1 cup cubed cooked chicken
• 2 large leaves/stems bok choy, chopped
• about 1/2 cup toasted pine nuts (that's a guess, I didn't measure at all)
• 1 scallion, sliced fine
• the dressing

Yummy. You could have this over rice or noodles -- cold or warm -- or rolled up with some extra greens in a wrap. You could also add carrot slivers for color (and vitamin A). I pretty much ate it straight out of the mixing bowl. :)

Happy Year of the Ox, everyone!

But I was using my whole ***

You might call this a half-***ed entry into the inaugural week of One Local Summer 2008, and you're be right. However, I was using my whole *** at the time, and I make no apologies (even to Homer Simpson). It was just spread across two meals.

It poured all day Saturday, so no pictures. For lunch I made corn chowder, using local milk and corn I froze last summer, and enjoyed it with some French bread from Nashoba Brook Bakery. (Probably nonlocal onions, celery and butter were also involved.) For dinner, we had a delicious delmonico steak from Blood Farm, along with baked fingerling potatoes (unknown provenance) and salad (greens from our garden and Verrill Farm, tomatoes and celery from probably not local).

This was one of the first meals for which I was back in the kitchen, queasiness abated, so half + half is fine for me. For the first week anyway. :)

Simple Corn Chowder

Chop 1 rib of celery finely and chop 1 medium yellow onion likewise. Cook in butter in soup pot until softened, then remove from pot. Melt 2 Tbsp butter in the pot and begin warming 4 cups milk in another pot or in the microwave. Add 3 Tbsp flour to the melted butter and stir for roux. After the roux has cooked a bit, add milk a little at a time to the roux, stirring till milk is absorbed and mixture is smooth. Finally, add the vegetables back to the pot along with 4 cups sweet corn kernels (and their milk if you are lucky). Season to taste with salt, pepper, bouillon, parsley, etc. You can process half the soup in a blender, or use a stick blender in the pot, to thicken it up a little.

A few slices of French bread go very nicely with a hot bowl of chowder!

Back on the Wagon

The last three months have been... well, to get it out in the open, they've been your typical first trimester blah (plus two weeks of nasty poison ivy rashes). Of course that does mean I got on the proverbial temperance wagon, but I fell off the blogwagon around the same time. Sorry about that.

Things have gotten better over the last week, though, and I had enough energy today to:

• start cleaning up the guest room (inlaws coming!)
• run multiple errands
• go through 4 boxes of hand-me-down maternity clothes
• spray Roundup on the poison ivy
• GO TO THE FARM! YAY!

Thank God I got my groove back in time for One Local Summer signups! Barely in time. Today's the last day, so if you meant to sign up and haven't, get over there! I have definitely been eating non-local what with trying to get enough greens in my gullet, during a cold New England spring, but our CSA share should be starting up in a couple of weeks, and our garden has baby spinach and lettuce and onions and more. A strawberry patch, too. That was a complete surprise as the snow melted.

We've been greening our garden in other ways, too -- we installed a couple of rain barrels so that we're not watering from the town wells. Except for the Roundup, we're not using any industrial pesticides or fertilizer. Just compost and manure and soap. (I wouldn't even use the Roundup but severe allergic reaction means we have a zero tolerance policy for the plant, and it's nowhere near the food plants.)

We were biking in Western MA yesterday, out near Zoar, and we rode past one small homestead with a long road frontage. The veggie garden gave way to the rhubarb patch, which was followed by a dozen or so blueberry bushes, which yielded to a few venerable old apple trees. Blessed people!

Pancakes of the Gods

If your gods are the earthy sort, partial to whole wheat and apple butter, that is. None of that ambrosia crap.

Lord, I wish these were this morning's breakfast, instead of exploding oatmeal in the microwave at 5 am. They're terrific when you've got a little more time on your hands. Mark Bittman says you don't have to beat the egg whites if you're not using buckwheat flour, but I did it anyway, and they were so fluffy.

Here is the recipe. I used 1 cup white flour and 2/3 cup whole wheat, instead of the WW/buckwheat combo, and the cardamom. In the future I'd use a little less cardamom, and probably halve the recipe, since there are just two of us and it was a shame to waste pancakes even after stuffing ourselves. We ate them straight off the griddle with dollops of apple butter. They're so good, I completely forgot to get out the maple syrup.

I don't think we'll ever make "white" pancakes again.

January Feast

Yes, I know, it's February. It was a good dinner.

Beets, I hardly knew ye. First encountered from a can, at a church supper, and avoided everafter; until I saw this Beet and Goat Cheese Salad over at Slashfood, that is. I didn't follow the directions exactly much at all, and my beets weren't quite as lurid-looking. But they had a subtle, earthy sweetness, and I'm a convert. For the dressing I improvised with goat cheese, too much cider vinegar, and plenty of honey to balance out the vinegar.

We had some stale sourdough bread in the fridge, so I tossed it with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and baked at 350 F (I think) for about 20 minutes, checking every 5-10 minutes and shaking the pan.  Croutons are yummy; nay, addictive.

But the salad looked like ham. Never mind, on to the main course.

After making beef stock a couple of weeks ago, I had (local, ahem) stewed beef loitering in the freezer. Pot pie is a perfect vehicle for leftover stewed beef. It doesn't dry out the beef any further, the veggies can impart a lot of flavor, and it speeds up the total time needed to make the pot pie. Leftover roast beef works as well, but you might want to cut it into smaller pieces.

Recipe for Beef Pot Pie

• 1 generous double pie crust, and a deep dish (my favorite recipe for pie crust is Julia Child's -- should really branch out, but this one is pretty dependable). It should be at the ready-to-roll-out stage and waiting in the fridge while you make the filling.
• Have a package of frozen peas thawing and ready to go in at the last minute.
• 1 large bay leaf, 1 tsp (or more) whole mustard seeds, 1 large onion chopped, 1 very large clove garlic minced -- Fry these in a little hot olive oil in a heavy pot (enameled is good).
• When the spices and onion have sizzled and are just beginning to brown, add a little more oil and let it get hot. Add 1 cup cubed potatoes (small cubes). Fry these along with the rest. Some starch will stick to the bottom of the pot. This is goooood. Just avoid burning.
• Transfer the cooked veggies to a heatproof bowl. Add some more oil to the pot along with 3 diced carrots and 2 stalks celery, also diced, both a little smaller than the potato cubes. Cook for another 3 minutes or so, till partly softened.
• Throw in some sliced mushrooms according to taste (I think that's about a cup up there) and cook several minutes, till they have released their liquid and it's pretty much cooked off.
• Put the onions/potatoes back in the pot. Add 2-3 Tbsp flour (hold off on that third tablespoon until the first two are well stirred in) and stir with the veggies. This should form a thick (delicious) paste. Cook for a minute or so, stirring. Add 1 cup beef or veggie broth, or beer, or red wine cut with water, a little at a time. This should loft the paste up into something admirable.
• Turn off the heat under the pot. Stir in about a cup or so of leftover beef chunks. Put the lid on the pot, preheat the oven to 400 F, and roll out your pie crust. Get the top crust rolled out too before you fill the bottom crust.
• Stir the peas into the filling and check the seasonings (need more salt? Parsley?). Assemble the pie, crimp the edges, poke some holes in the top, and put it in the oven. When you can hear the insides bubbling, and the crust is golden, it's done. Wait too long and it can dry out. This time, it took about half an hour, but it really depends on the oven and the pie.

Dig in.

Teach By Example?

Hook 'em while they're young

This got my dander up. And if there's anything you don't want in a kitchen, it's dander up.

"Who has time to inculcate the next generation in the ways of the culinary world?" You, that's who. Your kids are far more likely to imitate you than some teacher in yet another after-school lesson. You don't have to be able to make souffle or brioche to teach them the culinary basics: Wash your hands. Use tasty ingredients. Point the knife away from you. Enjoy yourself.

It's Habit-Forming

The Eat Local Challenge is starting up as OLS ends, so I'm going to just roll right into that. What, you thought we'd stop eating local foods just because the party wound down? Hah. It just tastes too damn good. Not to mention I love the macro mode on our camera.

Funny how the ELC steps read just like a Girl Scout badge ("Learn more about a farmer or local producer by talking to them"...) -- it would be neat to earn a big red tomato badge at the end of the month. This would be a good project for my Scout troop too. They got more excited about food than anything else last year (they're teenagers). To qualify as a "real" Scouting badge, there would have to be a service component as well; e.g. "help your local food bank hook up with local food producers" (actually I think a lot of them ARE hooked up for "seconds" and day-old baked goods). Getting your school cafeteria hooked up with local food producers would be a terrific service project.

Not done thinking about this.

One Local Tortilleria

Well, we don't have a local tortilleria -- so I jumped on the DIY bandwagon and found it wasn't that hard. Fun, actually, and not too finicky. I followed Deborah Madison's recipe in VCFE (using regular flour, and milk). Now that the pancake griddle is no longer a single-use item, expect we'll be making gyros soon too. Maybe naan, if that's doable outside of a tandoor.

For the fajitas, I turned to Simply In Season and marinated the beef strips with cilantro paste, and tried out their Fresh Summer Salsa recipe. Everything fresh was local: steak from Blood Farm; bell peppers, onions, jalepenos, cilantro from Verrill Farm; pepper jack from New England; tomatoes from our balcony. The lime juice, vinegar, and spices not so much, and I'm still killing off the Stop n Shop flour. But we're getting there.

Too bad there weren't any leftovers...

One Local Supper: Zucchini Boats

The stuffing was delicious; I could have eaten it raw. I looked up a stuffed zucchini recipe in Simply In Season, but decided to make it Italian-flavored (basil, thyme, Parmesan) rather than southwest-flavored (cumin, chili powder, Jack cheese).

Toss together:

• one burly zucchini, hollowed out (gift from coworker's garden)
• any zucchini that wasn't too tough, chopped up
• 1 cup fresh corn (Verrill Farm)
• 1 cup chopped seeded tomatoes (our own)
• 2 big cloves garlic, minced (VF)
• small handful of dried onion
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• 1 tsp oregano
• 1/4 cup chopped basil (our own)
• a shake of salt
• a driz of olive oil

Stuff it into the zucchini boats, grate Parmesan over the top, and bake at 350 F for half an hour or so. We had this with a little leftover lasagna. Garlic bread would have been a nice touch...

That's all for today -- long day of fieldwork (literally). But there will be tomato and peach craziness coming up here! Just haven't had a chance to sit down for a while.

Globe articles on eating locally

[This post has turned into a page, which I will keep updating.]