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Michael Pollan: Sec'y of Agriculture?

First thought: "I wish...."

Second thought: "WHY NOT?"

If you're of like mind, please sign the petition.

If you've never heard of Michael Pollan, you may have heard of his books -- my favorite is The Omnivore's Dilemma. Wikipedia has a decent summary of his work (scroll down for linked essays and interviews) and you can even view some of his talks online.

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!

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.

Globe articles on eating locally

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

Boston Globe article

"The Localvore's Dilemma"

Somebody at the Globe has been paying attention.

A friend of ours brought up this same concern this weekend, as we were floating lazily down the Nashua River by kayak, watching the food chain at work. Barn swallows swooped crazily over the water, snatching junior dragonflies mid-flight. Muskrats pulled up mouthful after mouthful of grasses. Great blue herons stalked fish and frogs. Cows in a nearby field... produced methane. (We paddled faster through that stretch.)

I know that our container garden wouldn't exist without interstate trucking. The pickle buckets and the name-brand potting soil certainly found their way to Middlesex County, MA, at least partially by truck -- to say nothing of their constituent materials.

And you know what? This is an experiment. It doesn't have to be guaranteed to succeed, or be sensible, before we've tried it. What matters the most is that we keep our eyes open and honest, and learn from trying. What do you think?

Two Local Panini

Spread pesto on two slices of bread (rosemary and olive oil bread, today). Layer tomato slices and mozzarella inside, with a touch of salt. Pan-cook in a little bit of olive oil.

Die and go to heaven.

Two-Face Pizza

[Note to self: must find better lighting in the kitchen]

The stats:

• Homemade pizza dough, using whey instead of water
• Pesto with local basil and garlic, "furraway" pine nuts and olive oil and Parmesan, thinned with whey
• Homemade mozzarella!!!
• Commercial sauce (bought it for camping, honest -- normally I make all of ours)
• Commercial sausages from the freezer

Yummmmmmmmmmmm.

The pesto recipe is in Simply In Season, just your everyday pesto. There are two blobs of it in the freezer for future delight.

Mozzarella question: when you buy fresh mozzarella, it's much softer, almost spongy. Is it soaked in something special? I put ours in cold water overnight, but it was pretty stiff after 24 hours. Is it something to do with the heating process instead?

Thursday night we had burritos made with local beef, probably-local onion-pepper sofrito, hoophouse tomatoes, local cilantro, probably New England pepper jack, and nonlocal rice. Probably the best burritos we have ever had. I finally got the meat seasoning right -- browning it before stewing is regrettably, deliciously essential. Three and a half pound roast, stewed in about 2 c beef broth, 2 Tbsp chili powder, and 1 Tbsp cumin. When the meat was shreddable, I threw in a big handful of dried mild green chili bits and a small pinch of habanero powder, and let the liquid cook down. The ultimate compliment was that Tim didn't spice his up further. It was so good (and so late in the evening, what with the slow stewing), the camera never had a chance.

Oh, and the Zucchini Chocolate Chip cookies are pretty darn good. I took 40 into work and they disappeared in a flash.

One Local Supper: Not Omelettes

The farm stand we visited all of last summer really doesn't have much going in the way of dinner ingredients yet. I was getting a little desperate, but then I remembered the big farm stands in Concord and Lexington. Wow. One of them even had a coupon for a free pint of strawberries, so that's where I headed after work on Wednesday. (Sorry, 5:30 am work schedules and 11 pm hockey games kind of get in the way of posting. This supper was actually served on Wednesday, not tonight.)

Before we get started, this is what the thermometer read when I took it out of the kitchen drawer:

That should explain the sultry lighting. We actually had a glorious thunderstorm during all of this. "This" being the making of yogurt, strawberry jam, and then supper.

First, the farm stand finds!

Milk: Shaw Farm, Dracut, MA
Garlic herbed goat cheese: Westfield Farm, Hubbardston, MA
Spinach, broccoli, golden zucchini, two cousa squash, and Romanesco zucchini: Verrill Farm, Concord, MA
Tomatoes: a hoophouse somewhere in MA
French bread (not pictured): Nashoba Brook Bakery, Concord, MA

Strawberries (for snacking): Verrill Farm

This had to be a quick and easy and light dinner, because (1) I'd been up since 4:45 am, (2) did I mention it was 100 degrees F in the kitchen drawers? (3) we had a hockey game at 11 pm and didn't want to be ill. So I pretty much grabbed whatever looked delicious and wouldn't heat up the kitchen. We had goat cheese on toast:

Tim grilled the squash after I brushed them with a little olive oil and black pepper (neither local). I liked the Romanesco the best -- it had an almost nutty flavor. I'll definitely be making zucchini bread with it.

We also had a simple salad of spinach and tomato, with Italian dressing (Good Seasons, definitely not local). (It seemed best to use the one in the fridge before buying anew.) And of course, there were strawberries!

The yogurt I made from MA milk, but not the Shaw Farm stuff. I wanted to use up the milk we had. The first time I made the yogurt it was very runny -- this time I tried 3 tbsp of starter instead of 2. We'll see how it is tomorrow morning; just haven't had a chance to try it yet.

The strawberry jam is more like strawberries preserved in syrup, as I only had 4 cups of sugar and knew there wouldn't be time to get to the store before the strawberries spoiled. It went in the freezer just the same and will be delicious with yogurt all winter long.

So, anyway, I noticed a few interesting things about the super-local, super-fresh produce. First of all, both the strawberries and the tomatoes had thinner skins than what we get at Stop n Shop. We've been eating Backyard Beauties for the last couple of months, but the hoophouse ones were more flavorful. When I hulled the strawberries, I didn't have to dig, and the flesh was much sweeter (not that I mind tartness). That being said, they didn't take long to get mushy, even in the fridge.

Oh, and I also picked up some Shaw Farm ice cream! We'll have to try that tonight. It's been an extremely long week, the jury's still out on the field test results (the reason I got no sleep), and we're about to go on vacation with my parents and sister for a few days. Ice cream will really ease the slide into the weekend!