Miscellany

Somehow I thought there would be more knitting-related posts when I began this blog. The knitting hasn't ceased -- I'm just trying to finish those darn socks. One down and about half an ankle left on the other!

Tim finally accompanied me to Verrill Farm yesterday. He didn't experience rapture in the vegetable section, but he didn't complain about coming home with Swiss chard, either. I'm going to try braising that this week. See if I can't get a whole local meal instead of piecemeal.

I forgot to mention some of the other local things we enjoyed last week:

• A huge dinner salad with local red leaf lettuce, spinach, hoophouse tomatoes, and green onions, and nonlocal carrots (purchased prior to OLS) and dressing
• More delicious breads from Nashoba Brook Bakery
• Strawberries and blueberries for breakfasts, with Shaw Farm milk
• Kimball Farm's ice cream!

And here are a few things I'll be trying in the next few days:

• Homemade mozzarella and/or ricotta, homemade pesto --> white and green pizza
• Scallion pancakes (maybe for lunch on Saturday, not sure how to round that one out)
• New potatoes, red onions, bell peppers, exotic spices, homemade yogurt --> aloo dam
• Chocolate chip zucchini cookies (from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle)
• Perhaps a frittata or omelette with the Swiss chard -- our eggs are now from Chip-In Farm, Bedford, MA (That's about 2 miles away!)

This should use up most of the flour in the house. Does anyone know whether King Arthur Flour is grown in New England as well as produced here?

One thing I've noticed, while planning meals around the fresh veg, is that we've been eating much less meat than usual. This week I made a kind of sofrito salad with whatever I could find in the fridge and pantry: local lettuce and tomato, onions, garlic, canned corn and beans, probably-New-England pepper jack. I'm not trying to pass that off as a local meal -- just a little astonished at what could be pulled together when the larder was nearly bare of fresh produce. It was hardly our usual "exhaustion supper." We must be getting used to this kind of eating.

I'm really looking forward to replacing our mystery meats, i.e. the chicken-without-a-past, with locally raised meats. The sofrito salad was tasty but it could have used a little meat (or corn chips) to round it out. We were both hungry again by bedtime.

Quickie garden update: nothing's ripe yet. Some tomatoes had blossom end rot and were chucked into the woods. I'll get a photo of the jungle that is our back porch, after work, if it isn't raining.