Pepper harvest

Last night we had our first frost. We hadn't checked the weather until late afternoon, so we spent last evening hurrying to get everything picked and inside before dark, mainly peppers and pole beans. All the houseplants came inside as well, and I dug some of the herbs--we'll see if they'll grow inside in pots.

We have many peppers to freeze. How many? Here's an illustration:

On my way home from work today I stopped at a produce stand near our house. I had gotten sweet corn there last year, but hadn't stopped this year. The man running it told me their last day this year is the 31st. I got some Granny Smith apples as a change from our mystery Red Delicious cross, sweet onions, and a free watermelon (last one of the season).

I decided to use my finds along with our abundance of peppers for supper, so I made sweet and sour chicken. I cheated slightly by using vinegar from some of our pickled hot peppers. Here's the recipe, heavily adapted from More-With-Less.

Apple Chicken

1-1 1/2 cups chicken breast and other meat, cut into pieces
1 large onion, cut in wedges
1 red pepper, cut in pieces
1 tart apple, thinly sliced

Saute chicken, onion, and pepper in a large frying pan. Once chicken is cooked reduce heat and add apple. Fry a minute longer.

Make a sauce with:
3/4 cup apple cider
2 Tablespoons vinegar
2 Tablespoons flour
2 teaspoons salt

Add to frying pan, stirring until sauce thickens. Serve over noodles.

Chili!

Tonight was our church's annual chili cook-off. As such, it fell under our free food and social exemptions. In addition, we were on the committee that coordinated the event so we invoked a seldom-used ox-threshing-grain exemption.

With three simultaneous exemptions working for us we ate a lot of chili. Sarah says she gained five pounds since this afternoon--she claims our bathroom scale proves this. I don't have such definitive proof but I certainly feel as though I've gained weight.

By our count, there were twenty-two different types of chili at the event. Sarah systematically tasted each one; I was less deliberate but--I think--equally thorough. We also served fruit, vegetables, cornbread and iced pumkin bars but with that much chili to choose from who needs anything else?

Yesterday was a busy day, so in lieu of cooking a local supper we patronized a great local restaurant, the Little Grill Collective. They serve local meats and eggs and make an effort to buy local produce. So I felt I could semi-justify a meal there during our month of eating locally.

Unfortunately, last night left us with no leftovers for today. My in-a-hurry lunch packing effort yielded a midmorning snack of a sweetpotato, and lunch of radishes, baked potatoes, yogurt and cider. Not quite what my ideal would have been, but filling.

For supper this evening I made hamburger stew and spoonbread. I think it was the first time I had cooked ground beef since living at home before college. This ground beef was from Polyface Farms
(courtesy of a natural food store in Harrisonburg). I remember ground beef as being slighly greyish and greasy. This was completely red before cooking, and when I tried to drain off the fat, as the recipe instructed, there was none to drain. I've been semi-vegetarian for a long time since I don't particularly enjoy most meat, it's expensive, factory farming is an abomination, etc. This discovery of local meats may change things. It'll probably still be a rare thing (because now it's really expensive), but I can think of some very tasty recipes which may need more than the other half of this ground beef pound.

Clam Chowder

The way Sarah tells it, she asked the folks at Kroger if they had any local food and after much thought they suggested Chesapeake Bay clams--the bay just falls within our hundred-mile line. She happily purchased them and created a delicious clam chowder with local potatoes and milk, and cuttings from our herb garden. Since I'm not much for seafood Sarah was even kind enough to make clamless chowder for me. It was delicious too.

To accompany our chowders I opened a jar of homemade white grape* juice. It was the perfect complement: sweet and pungent to set off the creamy, earthy flavors of the soup. I tend to take a utilitarian approach to food but this was a meal worth savoring.

--

* In the past we've waited months for these grapes to ripen to concord purple. This year we were smarter.

A change of pace

This afternoon at work, after eating a non-local lunch (thanks Ben!) I was trying to come up with a supper plan for tonight. I visited the farmers' market this morning, and though I didn't find carrots or onions, I did buy eggs (we were down to one from our hens), beets, and radishes. That combination didn't inspire any supper ideas, however. I jotted down a few ideas, but none of them really struck my fancy.

When I got home, I remembered that I had marked a few recipes in the More-With-Less cookbook a couple days before that I thought I could make with all local ingredients. I decided on a breakfast-for-supper theme and made a modified version of High-Protein Pancakes or Waffles (waffles, in this case). Ben made decaf coffee (our exemption), and I blended some of our peanuts for peanut butter, thawed a few strawberries, and got out the honey and maple syrup.

Here's the slightly modified recipe:

1 cup yogurt
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
4 eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup melted butter

Whirl in blender until well mixed and foamy. Bake in waffle iron.

The taste and texture reminded me of cheesecake. I suppose we didn't get our serving of vegetables for the evening, but it was a nice change.

A confession

I need to make a confession: I ate lunch at a Thai restaurant. In my defense, it was a business meeting and my colleagues don't always pack lunches. I carefully saved half the meal and brought it home to Sarah. She assumed I was being thoughtful and was very appreciative; she doesn't realize I was sharing the forbidden fruit.

Gadgets

Yesterday we bought a pasta maker at a kitchenwares store in Dayton. When we got home Ben set to work grinding wheat, setting up the machine on the edge of the counter, and eventually feeding out sheets of thinly rolled whole wheat pasta dough. He made spaghetti while I foraged in the refrigerator, basement, and garden for ingredients for spaghetti sauce. We didn't let the pasta dry before cooking it, which may be why it came out a little gluey, but all in all it was pretty good. Much preferable to my previous mashing out of stiff dough on the counter with the rolling pin.

Ben also was inspired to try using the pasta machine to roll out today tortillas, so I made the dough this afternoon and for supper we had tortillas with scrambled eggs and swiss chard topped with some of our canned tomatillo salsa. Again, the pasta maker made it easy to get things nice and thin.

I also found local maple syrup on our shopping trip (inspiring me to make french toast for breakfast this morning) as well as cheaper local peanuts. These are still in the shell, but at $1.49 a pound, versus $4.99, I'll shell my own. I still haven't made peanut butter. I'm not sure how our blender would handle it, and I'm reluctant to gum up our grain mill. Hmm, maybe we need a peanut butter grinder. . .

The other gadget of the day was the apple sauce strainer. We made another 5 quarts of sauce this afternoon. I currently have the leftover sauce in the oven on a cookie sheet, attempting to make apple leather. I've never done it before--I hope it's done before bedtime.

Where food really comes from

Recently I've been listening to a lecture series by Prof. Brian Fagan about human prehistory. An entire section of the series is devoted to the domestication of wild plants and animals by our early human ancestors. Access to these reliable food sources, in turn, changed the nature of humans' interactions with each other--the whole hunter-gatherer versus farmer-herder dynamic--and allowed humans to create colonies in otherwise inhospitable parts of the planet.

One fascinating side-light of Dr. Fagan's conversations about domestication is the information he gives about where foods were originally domesticated--at least to the extent that archeology can tell us. It turns out that some of the foods we've been eating have--forgive the dreadful pun--deeper roots in the area than others. Wheat, for example, was domesticated in south-west Asia. Chickens, according to Wikipedia, are descended from south-east Asian wildfowl. Corn, potatoes and tomatoes are American crops and have probably been grown in this area for millenia. Beans are found the world over but, again referencing Wikipedia, it's likely the varieties we're eating fresh are American in orgin.

None of this directly relates to our local eating challenge--we're concerned with food that's been grown locally in the past year or so, not the past ten-thousand years--but I find it interesting to think about none-the-less.

Chickens and chicken

This afternoon when I got home from work I was greeted by three of our hens who had decided to escape and explore the front lawn. This is not a usual occurance--especially three at once!--and they seemed to know when I got out of the car that this was not where they should be. They took off for the portable fence we have set up under the grape arbor where I let them graze when I'm home (since it's not secure from preditors.) I figured since they were out anyway I might as well get the other two, so all the hens had a happy afternoon of eating blades of grass and dustbathing.

When Ben put them in this evening he found a brown egg in the coop. We think it might be from one of our two Delaware hens that are due to start laying in November or so. Our Buff Orpington also lays brown eggs, but she's quit while she's molting, and this one was quite small. Egg production has tapered off in the last few weeks to about one per day, so maybe it'll start picking up again.

For supper this evening I cooked some of the chicken a friend has donated to our local eating effort, from broilers that they had butchered earlier in the year. I'm not always a huge fan of chicken, but this meat is delicious. I made some stovetop stuffing with some of our sourdough bread, got some corn out of the freezer and made gravy to go with leftover mashed potatoes. It was a meal that needed almost no adaptation to be completely local. I think I would have used black pepper normally, but that's the only change I would have made.

My stuffing recipe:
2 green onions
2 stalks celery
1 T. butter

Chop onions and celery and saute in butter. Meanwhile, mix in bowl
4 slices bread, crumbled
2 eggs
1/4 to 1/2 cup chicken broth
salt to taste

Add to pan with onions and celery. Lower heat, cover, and cook 10-15 minutes or until eggs are cooked through.

Smells Like Soup

(Apologies at the outset to anyone who now has the John McCutcheon song running through their head. I certainly do. Oh, and full credit to Mr. McCutcheon for the wording, too.)

Today has been a soup day at our house. After a week's beginning that had more in common with July than October the weather has finally settled into a fall groove: highs in the sixties and lows around forty degrees. We were debating whether to start a fire in the fireplace this evening. That means it's time to make some soups.

Soups are one of Sarah's kitchen specialties. I scour our cupboards and conclude that there's nothing there that could ever become food; Sarah glances at their contents and begins assembling a culinary masterpiece.

Tonight's supper was a staid potato corn chowder. Lunch, though, was something different. I'll let Sarah share the full recipe if she likes. All I know is that sweet potatoes, peppers and peanuts went into a pot and half an hour later we were eating a delicious, spicy, filling soup. I think it's magic.

P.S. Eliza, thanks for the tip. I'm trying to work myself up for hot breakfasts; a different texture for the cereal just might help.

The good, the bad, the best

As I drink my local cider and Ben eats his local popcorn this evening, I've thought about what I've missed and what I haven't thus far into the month. As we've said before, this has been much easier than the week in April when it felt like we were surviving on onions, flat bread, and eggs.

What I've missed: Spices have been a big one. I want cinnamon in my cider, black pepper on my potato soup, cumin for my chicken. Of course, we do have many herbs available: cilantro, corriander, basil, oregano, parsley, mint. . . I have fantasies of finding wild ginger in our woods, but since I have no idea what it looks like that doesn't seem very likely.

I've also wished for rice, olive oil, and cow cheese (as opposed to goat cheese). The first two are out of the question, but I still hold out hope of finding at least local mozzerella.

What I haven't missed: Sugar. Okay, not much. I would like to pick up some maple syrup as a change from honey. Lemons, lentils, baking powder--all things I normally use weekly--I haven't given that much thought. Sorrel, lima beans, and . . . well, flatter pancakes have taken their place.

Favorites to rejoice in: Cherry tomatoes straight from the vine, my favorite right-after-work snack. Peanuts! Local peanuts! Pricey, but a very nice addition to lunches. And sweet potatoes in the raised beds, waiting for me to dig my fingers in and pull them out. The one I ate today was about the sweetest I'd ever tasted--perfect just as it was with nothing on it.

Locavore's breakfast

Last night we were invited to eat with friends and invoked our good guests exemption. Supper was pasta with pesto and white sauce, oven-roasted asparagus, and a green salad with choice of  dressings. Desert was locally made (but probably not locally sourced) Kline's ice cream. Very little of the supper was from within our 100-mile limit. All of the supper was delicious.

For supper tonight Sarah made  'buttons,' a tasty Swiss dish. This morning, however, was a challenge. A neighbor's dog kept us up last night and we slept later than we intended. Normally when this happens we scarf cold cereal and skip off to work. This morning that wasn't an option. Wheat kernels, even after they've been boiled then roasted, just aren't the same as Wheaties, even early in the morning before the caffeine's kicked in. They're somewhere between puffed wheat and unpopped popcorn kernels: flavorless and hard enough to chip dental enamel. I had to settle for homemade toast with honey--not a bad breakfast, really--before bolting out the door.

Recipe time

Stir-fry with Noodles - serves 4

Noodles:
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs

Mix eggs into flour and salt and add a few teaspoons of water to form a stiff dough. Roll out as thin as possible; cut into thin strips with a pizza wheel. Bring salted water to a boil in a large pot. Add noodles, boil 5 minutes. Drain.

Stir-fry:
1 small cabbage, chopped
2 green onions, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
handful sorrel and arugula leaves, chopped
1 hot pepper, minced

Heat a large non-stick frying pan over medium-high heat. Briefly stir-fry each ingredient until just tender; set aside.

Sauce:
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup chicken broth
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 Tablespoon flour

Briefly heat honey and chicken broth together in frying pan. Whisk in flour and salt and bring to a boil. Immediately pour over stir-fried vegetables. Serve over noodles.
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I wasn't sure it would be possible to make a decent stir-fry without far-flung ingredients like soy sauce, ginger, and sesame seeds, but this one (our supper) was pretty good. The combination of the sorrel and honey gave it a nice sweet-sour flavor, and the egg noodles added some protein.

Tomorrow: a fellow locavore has passed on a lead on local peanuts! The joy of peanut butter and jelly will soon be mine!

Spilling family secrets

Yesterday we processed apples into applesauce, today it was the tomatillos' turn. A few hours' work (counting cooking and canning time) sufficed to turn a large bowl of tomatillos into four pints of tomatillo sauce. We were handicapped by our shared desire to work and be entertained so one of us read aloud while the other worked. It made the job take longer but we advanced five or six chapters through The War of the Flowers.

In the early evening, after we were finished with the tomatillos and both our voices were tired, Sarah made corn chips while I assembled a quick garden salsa. Most of the salsa components were ordinary enough--and we used tomatoes not tomatillos!--but in place of non-local vinegar or lemon juice we used sorrel from our herb garden. We both agreed that the result was indistinguishable from salsa made with the more traditional additives--a pleasant surprise.

A note in closing regarding mashed potatoes and applesauce: if you haven't tried it you really should. The combination of starchy, slightly salty potatoes and sweet, fruity applesauce is marvelous. My family has enjoyed the blend for years. It's a family secret too good to keep.

Ten apples up on top

We declared an exception to our month of eating local foods for the MCC Relief Sale this morning. Since the funds from the sale go to feed hungry people around the world, among other things, I felt that a higher cause was being served by attending than by skipping it this year. I suppose I could have just donated money instead of buying a donut and plate of Laotion food, but I'm not that high-minded. We did come away with five gallons of local cider, which I managed to wedge into our freezer between the sweet corn and swiss chard.

This afternoon we began making applesauce with our many apples from our tree. This apparently will be a time-consuming project--we have seven pints finishing in the canner right now, plus five we did before taking a supper break. It barely made a dent in the containers in the picture here.

For supper Ben made delicious mashed potatoes from our crop dug earlier this year, to which I added dill, chives, and yogurt, and he added applesauce(!) We also tried some of the edamame--green soybeans--which we bought last week at the farmers' market. They taste similar to lima beans and were quite good.

I couldn't bear to throw away the apple skins left from the sauce, so we may be trying apple skin pie or some other similar concoction in the coming week.

Our Daily Bread

Tonight Sarah and I agreed that, while we spend less money eating locally, we spend more time preparing and preserving food. I'm probably exaggerating but it seems that every minute I've not spent at work or working or studying has been occupied by food. I'm not complaining--not exactly--but at this moment the biggest allure of non-local, commercial, processed food is its casual simplicity. There's a part of me that wants to grab a bag of peanuts off the shelf and chow down, without worry about where they came from or spending hours preparing them.

I know all the reasons why we're not eating this way, of course. I know that convenience for the end consumer is purchased at every other stage of the production chain. I know that some of those purchase costs are represented in the supermarket price tag but many of them--environmental, economic, health, even spiritual costs--are not. I know all this but when I'm tired from a week at work I find it a little hard to care.

When she spoke at EMU last week Mary Beth Lind, one of the authors of our favorite Simply in Season cookbook, encouraged us to think of activity surrounding food--its consumption, yes, but also its preparation, preservation, even planting--as a spiritual exercise. When I keep that in mind I'm grateful that Sarah and I are spending more time on our daily bread. It nourishes more than our bodies.

Green bounty

Today I got to share the joy of local eating: I brought our grain mill to school and the kids ground corn and wheat, shook cream into butter, and baked cornbread in the toaster oven. They all ate it and liked it too.

When I got home I canned tomatillo sauce--like tomato sauce, only green. Though our tomatoes did poorly this year, we've had a huge abundance of tomatillos. We've had green spaghetti, salsa verde, green pizza. . . and after much fruitless searching on the internet and finally one quick phone call to the county cooperative extension, a recipe for canned tomatillo sauce.

Since Ben had class this evening I didn't bother to cook supper, just had some garlic bread and some of the sauce as it was cooking down. Mmmm, local garlic!

Oh, the conversations we have...

To celebrate our third day of eating local I'll recount for you a bit of our dinner table conversation.

Me: Dr. Brian Fagan, professor of anthropology and well regarded lecturer on human prehistory, says that says that far-flung trading networks were a hallmark of early civilizations. Ten thousand years ago those networks already spanned continents. If humans could do all that back then I think I should be able to put pepper on my vegetables.

Sarah: Mmm.

I didn't get the pepper. Then again, the vegetables didn't really need it.

Day 2

This morning got off to a tasty start with pancakes and grape jam. I had purchased a 50lb bag of wheat from Heartland Harvest Farm in Augusta County last week, and we ground some for the pancakes. Along with an egg from our hens, butter and milk from Homestead Creamery, and a bit of non-local salt, it made very tasty, if flat, pancakes. They were sort of like small crepes. The jam was from a batch we canned a few weeks ago, a recipe that used just grapes (from our vines) and honey (from Singer's Glen). It turned out more like syrup anyway so it was perfect for the pancakes.

Lunch was leftovers from the weekend, using our "don't let it spoil" exemption. For supper we made a recipe from Simply in Season for spinach squares, using sorrel and swiss chard instead of spinach. We have an abundance of apples from our tree this year, so we made an apple pie with honey for dessert. We debated adding cinnamon--dried spices in tiny amounts can't use that much fossil fuel to ship, right?--but I ended up forgetting to put it in and it was delicious as it was.

We still don't know what kind of apple tree we have. The apples look a lot like red delicious, but they sure don't taste like it. And they held together in the pie fine, which I've heard red delicious don't. So it's still a mystery.

A new month, a new challenge

Though we've been eating more local food since our week-long stint in April, we've decided to try another intentional challenge--this one for the entire month of October. Though we didn't go hungry this spring we're better prepared now. Our pantry shelves are full of canned goods, the garden abounds in produce and--wonder of wonders--I found locally grown popcorn.

We've also decided to be a bit more flexible this time. Since they won't keep for a month, we're eating our (non-local) leftovers which makes for a gentler transition in to locavoraciousness. Further, we've decided that we can eat locally and eat socially too: we have no objection to offers of meals or church potlucks. On the other hand, fishing for invitations to get around the local diet restrictions is very bad form. In addition, we're maintaining our list of exemptions from last April: coffee, tea and salt are permissible.

To kick off our month of local food Sarah made a delicious soup made from garden produce and served with sourdough bread made from locally-grown, home-ground wheat. Thank goodness we've been able to find local butter.