Summer Time and the Eating is Easy

  Coming in a bit late, but I am here nonetheless.  As the school year ends and summer takes hold, I am beginning to relax and ready to begin blogging for summer.  As Shannon A. pointed out in her first post, eating local is just how we do things, pretty much the norm in this house. However, I get a little nervous as blogging approaches, wondering am I still on track?

Quick Summary:
  - every Friday I visit the staff at Eat Local to pick up Farquar's Milk, Thornloe Cheese, and some meat from Dalew, Burt's, or Golden Beef
- Dalew Farms takes care of our veggies thru the summer, and eggs year round.
- Brabant chickens year round, we've finally gotten into the habit of cutting the meat apart, wings, breasts and legs BEFORE we freeze the chickens.
- Although my passion for my garden is waning, I continue to grow vegetables. Tomatoes are my favourite to grow.

Yup, pretty much old hat.  Routine. Truth is, I'm pretty proud of that.

   This summer my family isn't planning to travel very much, we plan to stay close to home and enjoy some stay-cations.  So, along with a renewal of the local bread experiment, some of my better recipes, I thought I'd include some great local places for a family to visit.

To celebrate our first day of summer vacation, we had pancakes- all local, all delicious.

From the Fridge

to the table!

Pancakes

2 Dalew or farm fresh eggs

1 cup of Farquar's skim millk

1 1/2 cups of Pocshaven Organic All Purpose Flour

Seguin Maple Sugar to taste, 

Mix, I like mine more crepe than cake, adjust flour to liquid ratio as you desire.

Serve with Farquar's butter, Seguin Maple Syrup, or fresh strawberries from Beaulieu Farms.

Celebrate Summer!

So Far So Good!

I'm finally sitting down, after spending the past two days putting up 12 Litres of strawberries! I've managed to make 3 different kinds of strawberry freezer jam, 2 kinds of cooked strawberry jam, and a batch of strawberry passion syrup with a bi-product of spiced strawberry butter. Phew! Tomorrow we go back and pick berries for eating and freezing and I'd also like to make Rhubeena with the rhubarb I picked at a friend's house.

Eating local is going very well. Friday, the kids and I made our own pizzas:

The dough was a simple recipe from my Moosewood Cookbook...just yeast, Board's Honey, Poschaven Farms Unbleached Flour, and salt.

I made a pizza sauce from my canned tomato sauce, herbs and some of the leftover spinach/scape pesto. We used Burt's Farms salami instead of pepperoni, and topped it all with Thornloe cheese and shredded kale from the back yard. The kids said it was the best pizza EVER!

Saturday night we were at a special little friend's Birthday Party, so I didn't need to cook.

Sunday night we grilled a beautiful rainbow trout I caught at our cottage the weekend before. We grilled it whole in a basket, stuffed with garden herbs and a few lemon slices. We made a yummy salad with Dalew lettuce, spinach, green onions, Thornloe Cheese, and a vinaigrette made with the raspberry vinegar I put up quite a while back, Pristine Gourmet Canola Oil, and Board's Honey. We also ate some pickled beans and beets.

Tonight was a very simple dinner. We sautéed some tender young backyard kale with the leftover pesto, BBQ'd potatoes with rosemary, and my kid's favourite Cheddar Smokies from Burt's Farms.

Shannon A.

We're Back...

and hopefully better than ever...or, at least better than last year!

     Truthfully, despite the complete lack of blogging, our family did pretty well last summer. When we were home. Which wasn't much. This eating local thing has just become the norm for us, rather than the special challenge we took on 2 years ago. We certainly don't eat 100% local all year round, but most of our meats, cheeses, flour, eggs, potatoes and preserves continue to be, as well as the veggies and fruits I manage to freeze when they are in season (I haven't bought a single container of berries in two years, yet yet the kids eat strawberries and blueberries almost daily!). I'd say we are probably about 50% "Locavore", and about 80-90% processed food free all year round.

     And so, since yesterday was the first full day of Summer, we once again started our completely local dinners. As luck would have it, our first Dalew Farms CSA delivery was Wednesday, the strawberries are now ripe and I've heard rumour that the blueberries are starting too! 

     Our bin contained, garlic scapes, green onions, spinach, three bunches of lettuce, strawberries, storage carrots from last year, as well as a bag of frozen butternut squash. We also picked up 2 dozen eggs, and a bucket of Mapleton's Organics vanilla ice cream. I'm pretty sure we can come up with some pretty awesome meals with these goodies!

Case in Point: Eat Local Dinner #1

BBQ pastured pork chops from Dalew Farms, with spicy raspberry glaze (kids had rhubarb BBQ sauce on theirs) and "Spring" pesto potatoes and green beans!

The  "Spring" Pesto Potatoes Recipe (it's technically summer, but the traditional ingredients of a pesto aren't ready yet, so I used spring garden finds as an alternative):

• as much fresh Dalew Farms and backyard garden spinach as will fit in a food processor
• 3 Dalew Farms garlic scapes, flower bud removed and chopped in to smallish pieces
• a good hunk of Thornloe Parmesano Cheese
• salt to taste
• stream of EVOO or if I had some, Pristine Gourmet Canola Oil

Blend until smooth. Makes about 1/2 a cup. 

Scrub Don Poulin (they don't have a website) potatoes and cut in to bite sized pieces. Coat bottom of cast iron pan with a couple glugs of oil, throw in potatoes and toss to coat. Sprinkle with salt and pepper (or Herbes Salees if you have 'em!), cover with foil and cook on med-low heat on the BBQ until cooked to your liking. Meanwhile steam green beans until just tender (green beans were frozen from last year). Toss cooked potatoes, green beans and a couple big spoonfuls of pesto in the cast iron pan. Grate some more parmesano choose over the dish and pop back in the BBQ until the cheese is melted.

The raspberry glaze is a raspberry/chipotle freezer jam I made and forgot about until recently. I have at least 4 jars of this stuff to use up, so we've been putting it on everything....Keith discovered it's really good on vanilla ice cream. The chipotles weren't local, but I'll call them a spice, and spices are legal in my project! LOL I just scooped a big spoonful on to the pork chops just as they were finishing up on the Q. It was a bit spicy for the kids, so they chose the Rhubarb BBQ sauce I canned last summer instead.

Meal was delicious! Ice cream with the above noted jam for Keith, vanilla rhubarb jam for me, straight up plain vanilla for Sydney, and we knew Cameron would get some kind of junk after T-ball so we suggested he pass on dessert. He agreed and ended up with a Tim Horton's donut from one of his team mates. Seriously. At 7:30 PM. On a school night. After T-Ball. Sigh. 

Managed to pull him away before he noticed they were also handing out Koolaid Jammers. Double sigh.

Shannon A.

Locavore Movie Night

My favourite night time snack is buttery popcorn. I tried the local Uncle Bob's hull-less white poppong corn from Eat Local Sudbury, popped up like a dream. If you're thinking of trying to replace one meal/snack with a local option, here's one that is super easy,

Hull-less popcorn doesn't stick in your teeth.

I so badly wanted popcorn action shots

Nearly ready!

My locavores

 My own garden has been neglected this year, too much time away from home I guess. The plants I bought in July have struggled, The peppers thrived, but the squash did not, thankfully the CSA keeps me in zucchini and cabbage. Our family reunion is this weekend I plan to keep it local so I'll be posting more later in the week.

Shannon D.
  

Kohlrabi Fritters (Alien Smackdown)

This is kohlrabi:

    It is a cousin to the cabbage,  a very exotic cousin.  When I first discovered this peculiar vegetable in my CSA box, I had to do some work to identify it and figure out how to serve it. So far, its been raw, raw, raw and more raw. It's bland and I am bored of it.

   Last weekend, at a visit to my friend's cottage I managed to weave kohlrabi into the conversation. My friend Kelly's husband Jamie told me about the kohlrabi fritters he had made, which sounded delicious. Immediately I imagined crunchy little kohlrabi buddies to delight the family, maybe even pakora?  Thank you Jamie, for the inspiration!

  I couldn't wait until he sent me his recipe, I searched the internet and found My Conscious Eating, an awesome food blog, which I am now following.  I followed the recipe at the above link.  

Local eggs, local flour

Local Kohlrabi, grated.

Add the herbs, yummy (but not local)

Local oil, hot and ready.

Drop in a spoonful and smash it flat.

Set on a plate, cue ohhha and ahhhs.

   I did change the recipe, I left out the mint and coriander and used cumin, but not enough, next time I'll be more generous. I have so many onions I added extra.  The final result is good, I put them in my toaster oven for extra crispiness.  They are a bit to eggy, I likely could have done with only one egg, but they are good, an excellent starting off point.  I hope there is a new Kohlrabi in tonight's CSA box!

   I have a new tasty treat to test and perfect, all thanks to the farmers at Dalew and Jamie's brilliant inspiration. Those alien cabbage won't be messing with me, I'll grate them up, drop them in hot oil, smash them and eat them. AHAHA!

Mid-Summer Update

 I realized this morning that the kids have been out of school for a month now, and I just counted up that we've been home for supper 10 times! I had no idea that we'd be travelling so much this summer. This means that we haven't been doing very well eating local meals unfortunately, and I haven't had anything to blog about. Don't get me wrong, I've been enjoying our time out of the house, but I'm getting sick of restaurant food! We still have a few more days of travel ahead of us this week, then we'll be home for a week before I have to make another quick over-nighter to pick up Sydney from camp. The rest of August will be spent in the garden and  kitchen, getting the kids ready for school, and enjoying the last few dog-days of summer...all of my favourite things!!

Mother Nature has been slow to produce this summer, so the abundance of Foodland Ontario "Grown Close To Home" fruit has just started to trickle in to the grocery stores, so thankfully I'm not behind in my canning. There was absolutely nothing at the biggest of our grocery stores yesterday, so I spoke to a produce manager and he said he can't believe how little they are receiving for fruit right now...he figured 80% of what they normally get has not been arriving! I picked up a bunch of bananas and left sulking. The smaller grocery store behind our house had a small display of baskets filled with peaches, so I happily scooped up one of those. On my way home I stopped in at Frosted, a brand new bakery that just opened up last month, to find something to bring to my Father-In-Laws house for dessert. The lady there told me she had strawberry rhubarb pies in the oven made with strawberries from Bealieu Farm (same place where I picked my berries a few weeks ago) and garden rhubarb. Score! I paid and stopped in again an hour later to pick up the piping hot pie. It was a resounding hit at dinner! Hooray for local fruit!

Today I have to deal with my CSA box that I picked up frm Shannon D yesterday...who was kind enough to pick it for me from the darm delivery Wednesday night! The bin weighed a ton and was too full to snap the lid on! I guess that's a bit of a "problem" with a summer CSA share...it keeps coming even if you aren't home to eat it. That's fine, I'll freeze what we can't eat.

Off I go. Happy Eating!

Shannon A.

Grocery Day!

  The bread was a hit! This morning we had fried eggs and buttered toast- yummy! Summer eggs are beyond delicious They are so lovely to look at;  deep yellow yolks, almost orange really, even the whites seem to fry up whiter- altogether perfect.  

Dalew sliced ham is perfect in sandwiches, chopped up in a
salad or fried up along some eggs for breakfast.

   Today was grocery day, and one of those grocery days when the cupboards are bare! I baked the rest of the dough for bread, picked up my half share of CSA veggies and eggs from Dalew Farms, stopped by Eat Local Sudbury for some sugar and canola oil, and rounded out the trip at my local grocer who now carries Farquhar's Dairy and Thornloe Cheese for a block of cheddar, milk, and some butter. 

Eggs, Granulated Maple Sugar, Butter, Cheese, Milk, Green &
Yellow Beans, Snap Peas, Zucchini, Potatoes, Lettuce, Cabbage
and Broccoli.

 

    I am an all or nothing sort, well a recovering all or nothing sort. I will have this picture in front of me and only see what is not in the picture. Like the marshmallows in the cupboard I bought for a campfire with the kids, the slice of cake at a friends house or the orange juice I use for my morning smoothie in the fridge. I get discouraged with myself and think,  if I cannot get it 100% local, what difference am I making?   I am still plagued by Locavore Dilemmas: Can I really bake bread all year round? What the hell am I going to do with all these radishes? 

   As I said, I am recovering from this kind of thinking, I continue to seek ways to have local food, if I can get it locally, I do. I am replacing as much as I can, growing as much as I can, and getting better all the time. More importantly I am thinking about local food and talking to others and learning all the time. I may have ketchup in the fridge this year, but who knows? When the tomatoes are ready I may make it myself.

   If you're interested in having a veggies CSA share there are some available at Dalew Farms. A bin full of locally grown veggies every week, check out this web site for more info: http://www.dalewfarms.ca/. You'll be delighted!