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February (At Home)

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!

Go Play Outside

Last weekend we went skating up on Freeman Pond in Chelmsford. We'd had about 4-6 inches of snow (with lightning!), which then got saturated by freaky huge rainstorms, which then froze nice and solid. You couldn't ask for nicer ice. (But I'm new to this, so you probably can.) That's my DH on the left and our touring-skating friend on the right.

Got another 6 inches of snow on Friday, nice powdery stuff. Today we went for a walk in the woods near our house and came upon a medium-sized pond with all sizes of boys playing hockey. Also an ice fisherman, a few snowshoers, and a dog, who made off with one of the "goalposts". Too bad the camera was at home!

It wasn't too cold, so when we got home from our walk I grabbed the pruning shears and went to work in the garden. There's been a vine choking the lilacs, bittersweet from the looks of it, and there is no bad time of year to cut that stuff. (Well, clearing it before it sets berries is better than afterwards...) It was SO nice to be out in the yard again, even if it is under a foot of snow.

A red-tailed hawk circled and cried out several times, while I was out there. This place is definitely home, and it's good to be here.

Long Days, Short Days

The days are dwindling, and so is the amount of light available for photography. My favorite contrast is that of slightly fluorescent leaves against a stark, wet tree trunk, or a conservative sky.

However, the leaves show up best when the sky is overexposed or just plain exuberant.

I found some leaves of another sort, gracing my countertop, about ten minutes ago. (Click to enlarge; they're subtle.) Now that the trees outside the kitchen window have given in, the sunlight pierces into the kitchen more strongly, and picks out the china pattern in relief.

And, finally, here is why the days get longer as they get shorter, this year:

Happy haunting, everyone!

 

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.]

One Local Trifecta

Now that we're getting in the habit, we'd have to make an effort not to eat locally. (Just kidding. We still eat out at least once a week.) However, all three meals today were locally delicious, and I wasn't really trying, since the potato soup was our "official" OLS meal for the week.

Breakfast: Tim made eggs scrambled with onion, bell pepper, tomato, and scallions (plus some of the mushrooms from earlier in the week), and bacon bits left over from potato soup night
Lunch: strawberry ice cream from Bedford Farms (I mentioned it's HOT, right?)
Dinner: a tomato-cucumber-basil gazpacho I made up, with a little vinegar, onion, and chives; BLTs on local bread with goat cheese instead of mayo. (That's the last of the nonlocal bacon from our freezer.)

One thing we haven't tried to localize: beverages. Aside from milk, we drink a fair amount of OJ, cranberry juice, cider, and our own particular poisons, coffee (me) and Gatorade (Tim). This is something I'll work on in the fall. Cider will be easy to get for a few months, but we just don't have the freezer capacity (or a reliably cold outbuilding) to stock up and store it all winter. The OJ is at least from concentrate. Cran-grape juice may well be local to New England, but I'll have to find out.

The good news is we are finally eating our own tomatoes! My cupholder runneth over.