Days 8-10- Chicken Galore!

         Monday afternoon, whilst I was enjoying the last day of school, a professional development day so no students, my husband Terry roasted a chicken on our BBQ.  We have been buying our chickens from the neighbour's farm for the past two years, twice yearly we buy 8 whole chickens that range in weight from 6 - 8lbs.  I love these chickens because they are so flavourful, it is impossible not to love them. The only drawback of these chickens is that they require some planning and a commitment to the whole bird.  During the regular year, we will take advantage of sales at the grocery store- buy trays of breast meat separate into dinner portions and freeze. When I come home, thawing a container of chicken takes very little time and supper is at the ready. However each time we do so, we lament the flavour of the other birds. 
        Terry did very little to the chicken. He filled a leftover can with water (no beer on hand), set up the beer can chicken roaster and put the bird in the barbeque covered at medium heat for 2.5 hours. He didn't season it, rub it or even braise it while cooking. If fact we forgot all about it, and drove to the library to return some books and do some banking.
        When we got home the chicken was golden brown and crispy.  Terry brought it into the house and sliced the bird into halves. Juices from the meat poured and immediately he and I were picking at it like crows on roadkill. The meat was so tender it slipped off the bone and onto our plates, fragrant and steaming. 
       We decided to have chicken sandwiches adding Thornloe's mild sundried tomato and basil cheddar. SO DELICIOUS. Seriously, this simple toasted sandwich has us beside ourselves with pleasure. The kids gobbled it up and so did we.  We did add some cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce- not from a local source- but yum.
           Since that lovely bird was so generous, we have had chicken every night since. Sadly, the chicken is gone, tonight is cheddar smokies from ELS and potato salad. 


Happy Canada Day everyone!







     

Day 9 & 10 - Not much to report

We had left over pork roast and potatoes Tuesday night and last night Keith and the kids had omelets and I had a big salad. All local of course!!


Yesterday, I picked up the highly recommended Moosewood Cookbook. I've only looked through the first half and I want to try almost every recipe...definitely the sign of a great cookbook! I also picked up Mark Bittman's Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals along with our book club's newest book. My summer reading list has been made!!


Not sure how Mrs. Duguay is making out with her challenge. Hopefully she will blog soon!


Oh, almost forgot Happy Canada Day! I think we might check out the International Food Fair at the arena and take in the fireworks tonight. 


Shannon A.


P.S. I found Ontario grown and produced peanut butter yesterday. I don't know that the kids will find it a suitable replacement for their sweetened teddy bear on the jar type PB but if they don't it will be great for Thai or Scezhuan inspired sauces for stir fries.

Day 8 - The Grocery Store

I am proud to say that I made it through the first week having spent under $5 at the grocery store. I had no choice but to go today because ELS isn't open again until Wednesday, we were out of several staples and I needed the ingredients for the dessert dishes I'm serving at our book club meeting tomorrow night. I had plenty of time to shop so I really paid attention to the products in the store and where they came from. It didn't take me long to come across my first big shock. I was in the second or third row of the produce section when I came across two side-by-side baskets, each divided in two. In that 3x3 foot space were New Zealand kiwi, Thai lychee, Mexican avocado and Chilean bosc pears. If I had purchased just one of each of those items I figured together they'd have travelled over 25,000kms. That's 25,000 kms as the crow flies, and we all know nothing travels in a tidy straight line. I think we'd all be horrified to see the actual number. I looked around and I also saw the lemons, limes, oranges, bananas, mangoes, pineapple, apples and worst of all, the $2.49 pint of strawberries from California. Who buys 12 Californian strawberries in June for $2.49 when you can drive down the road and pick a 4 litre basket worth of fruit, right off the plant, for $8.50? Who decided shipping fruit all over the world was a good idea? How much fuel is used, and how much pollution is created by shipping this fruit all over the world? Why do we think this is acceptable? I remember my Dad telling me they used to get a box of oranges at Christmas time, I believe it was from a family friend who travelled there, and what a huge deal it was to have citrus once a year....and he didn't die of scurvy! When I went to the Dominican Republic with my Mom and Sister I ate a banana that had actually ripened on a tree and I couldn't believe it was the same fruit. Everyone knows how hard and bland California strawberries are in the middle of winter, yet we buy them. I came away with more strength for this project and I'll be sure to put even more time in to canning, freezing and dehydrating the berries, cherries, peaches, pears and apples that grow in my Province! 


Tonight's dinner was a simple local pork roast seasoned with herbs from my garden, mashed potatoes from one of the nearby farms and peas from the CSA. Yum!


Shannon A.

Day 7 - Getting Serious

I cracked the whip on myself and decided to do better today. We had nothing going on, so I had no excuse NOT to cook. I started off the day looking after some of the beautiful strawberries I picked this week and turned them in to freezer jam. I think I have enough left to add to the rhubarb in my fridge to make real jam some time tomorrow. I'm hoping to get back to the field for at least 4 more baskets this week. We had 6 baskets last year and still ran out of jam months ago, and had just enough frozen to get us through.

In the afternoon I made pasta. I LOVE making and eating homemade pasta. My most prized kitchen tool is the beautiful green Kitchen-Aid mixer we received as a wedding present and I've since added most of the attachments that work in the hub at the front of the machine, including the pasta roller to make flat sheets, fettucini and spaghetti and last year I added the extruder to make macaroni, and several other shapes. There is something incredibly hypnotic and relaxing about the sound and action of feeding the chunks of dough through the rollers and working them in to silky, smooth strands of deliciousness. My Dad even gave me this really cool looking pasta tree for Christmas that makes drying my noodles incredibly easy. I had yet to try out the local unbleached flour in a pasta recipe, and I have to admit I was concerned, because this stuff doesn't always behave the same as regular store bought flour. It looks more like whole wheat flour than the bleached white flour we are used to, it contains no preservatives and it's ground between granite stone, so basically...it's still alive. What I love so much about it though is that it actually has flavour! Imagine that! I took out all my equipment and got started...and boy, was I impressed. It turned out beautifully!!

Basic Egg Pasta

4 large eggs (7/8 cup...this is important because the eggs I get aren't graded so they come in all shapes and sizes!)

1 tbsp water

3 1/2 cups sifted (again...very important!) flour

1/2 tsp salt

If you don't get the liquid to flour ratio right your pasta is either too sticky or too dry. It's a lot easier to work in more flour than trying to add more liquid, so it's just quicker and easier to get it right the first time. That said, the humidity of the flour can make a difference...it never turns out the same way twice! I don't care though...real food should be a bit temperamental. Dead things don't have an attitude.

Anyhoo...place the eggs, flour and salt in the mixer bowl. Mix for about 30 seconds with the flat paddle, then change to the dough hook and knead for 2 minutes. Remove the dough and knead by hand for another couple minutes. Let it rest for 20 minutes then have at her with a pasta roller!

For the sauce I decided to make a white sauce and throw in the last of the lobster.

White Sauce

 I didn't really measure anything but my guess is I melted about 1/4 butter (Farquar's) in a sauce pan and then added 1/4 flour (Terza - aka The Flour Mill) and cooked it for a couple minutes. I should of added some garlic but didn't think of it. I then slowly added chicken broth (I though I had some left in my freezer, but I didn't, so I to use grocery store stuff. Boo!) and whisk it in 'til it was saucy. Then I poured in about 1 cup of heavy cream (haven't found a local source for that yet!) and added a couple sage leaves from my garden, and some salt and pepper. I heated it til it boiled a bit and thickened up. Then I added about half a cup of grated Asiago cheese (Thornloe Cheese) and the rest of our lobster. When it was all hot and bubble I poured it over our beautifully cooked pasta. Heaven!

The kids weren't crazy about it, but they ate it. I thought it was delicious.

I just realized we skimped out on veggies today, which I don't let happen very often. Oops!

In other news...Mrs. Duguay called to tell me she got a lead on some locally made wieners today! Wouldn't that be wonderful? I'm impressed with what we are finding when we go looking.  There is certainly a growing trend in the community to go back to the way it was not so long ago, where your food came from someone in your town, not from a packaging plant! I guess it seems fitting that I am one of the early ones to jump in to this as I've often identified more with my Grandparent's generation than my parent's or my own. I wanted to be a Stay-At-Home-Mom, and not only did I choose to have a midwife, I chose to birth my youngest at home. I knit, I quilt, I sew, I garden, I can. In many ways I'm more like my Grandmother than my Mother...although my Mom is an incredibly talented, crafty woman and even Memere thought I was crazy to have a baby at home!! Why would I choose to have a baby at home, when there were perfectly good hospitals? LOL My Grandparent's entire backyard is a garden, my Grandmother is an expert canner, baker and cook...I seriously doubt there has ever been a loaf of store bought bread in their house.. and they live in a farming community, so eating local is just the way it's done. My parent's generation is the one that whole heartedly embraced everything that came from Kraft, Mr. Christie, Lipton and Heinz and now here's my generation, or at least some of mine,  realizing that what they eat/ate when visiting their Grandparent's is/was a lot better than what they grew up on! 

Anyhoo, I'm rambling now and there work to do. I will post some pictures of dinner when I find my USB cable. I may be old fashioned in a lot of ways, but I do love my Mac and my digital camera!!


Shannon A.

Day 7- Serious Improvement

    The trip to the market and Eat Local Store (ELS) has turned this thing around for me terrifically.  This morning I used the Whole Spelt Flour purchased at ELS to make crepes. The recipe I use is a variation from one I found in the Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen (pg 142)- purchased at least 15 years ago and still in regular use. I never liked the density of pancakes. My aunt Cathy makes a thin pancake and over the years I have written down her recipe at least seven times on lined notepad paper. Inevitably the copy gets lost in my purse, recipe books, drawers, wherever- so I have relied upon the Moosewood recipe because that book is very large and difficult to lose, an important note for cookbook publishers, you're welcome.


The recipe I use is a blend of my aunts and the Moosewood:


1 large egg 
(I used my last egg, which was not local. Finding local eggs is trickier than I had anticipated) 
1 1/4 cups milk (thank you Farquar's)
1 cup Whole Spelt Flour (ELS)
here's where I get creative:
1/2 cup yoghurt (use less, or instead, of milk) or 1/4 cup sugar or 1/2 cup sour cream


Mix ingredients together in a large bowl. Pour into a hot frying pan, use butter for the pan. Make as thin or as thick as you like. I like mine paper thin, so  I tilt the pan on an angle so the pancake batter will spread easily and thinly across the pan. I watch carefully for bubbles to form on the surface. Once I feel confident that my pancake will hold its shape, I butter the tip of my spatula so it will slip easily between the pan and pancake and flip it. After only a few seconds (10-30 depending on heat) the pancake is ready to transfer to a plate and enjoy!


I sliced strawberries and served with the last of our fake table syrup. 


My son, Jonah, 5, was apprehensive at first, I usually make the pancakes with white flour. He ate his way through half and then complained "Mom, there's something hard in my pancakes." I explained that the flour was whole grain and was less smooth than the other flour, but much healthier for us. Unconvinced he mumbled, "I think you left the egg shell in."  


Lunch was grilled cheese using Thornloe's Finest with some leftover brown bread. And dinner was leftovers. 


This transition period, using products form before the challenge, does make it easier. Not only because the products are accessible (in the pantry) but also because I know what to buy next week. I am so much more mindful of the food we are eating, and what we will need to have ready for tomorrow. Which reminds me, I must take the chicken out to thaw before bed.


The very best part of my day, was getting a potential lead on local hot dogs.  I'll let you know how that pans out tomorrow.


Mrs Duguay

Day 6 - Damn pink tubes of unknown content

Who would have thought the lowly wiener would be our Achilles Heel?


As easy as I thought this was all going to be on Wednesday night, I forgot that even if food is available it isn't going to prepare itself. I do like to cook, don't get me wrong, I've been making pasta, bread and other goodies long before I even knew what a "locavore" was. What I don't like however, is when I cook and no one is there to appreciate my hard work, nor do I particularly enjoying cleaning up after I've cooked, because I tend to trash the kitchen when I'm working. Keith and I have an agreement that he/she who cooks, get's to put their feet up after dinner (ie - do homework/bath the kids/get them ready for bed) while the other cleans up the kitchen. Well that's all well and good until he's at work...which is for 4 to 5 days in a row! My kids are pretty good eaters. Sydney certainly has a fairly sophisticated palate for a 7 year old, but she is equally content to have a grilled cheese sandwich, a bowl of cereal, or chicken fingers when Daddy is working, as any proper meal that we make for her. Cameron would probably prefer them. I on the other hand prefer a decent meal, but most of the time I'm just too darn lazy or too darn busy when I'm alone with the kids! Who wouldn't be?


And so, the reality of a local supper snuck up on me once again, at 4:30, with nothing planned, tired and hungry, from having worked outside in the garden all afternoon. I pulled out the burgers from ELS but realized I didn't have buns...neither homemade nor purchased. Damn. No local bread, peanut butter or cheese whiz (hahaha!), no local cereal, out of local milk, already eaten too many eggs this week. Shit. What are we going to eat? Then I had a bright idea....the chip stand!! The entire Valley is surrounded by potato fields, surely Bee Bop's uses local 'taters! So off we went. There was no way we were going to leave once we got there, so I decided not to ask, to assume they did, and ordered up a poutine for me (the likely hood of the cheese curds not being from Thornloe were on the low side...again don't ask), fries for the kids and then little Cameron asked for a Pogo. A Pogo? Come on! It's a wiener dipped in batter and deep fried on a stick! Sure this does not qualify as local....it hardly qualifies as food! 

Ugh! I said yes. Why? Because I was hot and tired and hungry and so were the kids and tonight, it was easier than saying no.  Failing grade tonight for Mrs. Allen.


Note to self: get on the meal plan wagon, take out supper while you are waiting for your coffee to brew, and do better this week!  


Shannon A.

Days 3-7: Onward and Upward

It would be fair to say that Week One was a total bust in this house, but that is all behind us now, onward and upward! 

Today, with list in hand, I went to the Farmer's Market and to the Eat Local Sudbury shop, where I found several things that will make this project so much simpler.   Truthfully, I felt quite nervous about being at the Market. I have never made a habit of attending the Farmer's Market to buy food, I felt sort of ridiculous driving up in my car, walking around with those re-usable grocery bags hanging off my arm, wandering past tables of produce and crafts. I felt awkward, like a kid on their first day at a new school, afraid to say the wrong thing, ask a stupid question or get hopelessly lost.

Luckily for me, I ran into a friend, who had a coffee with me and explained that the Eat Local produce was at the market but the dairy and meat were at the store, which was located a few blocks away. I managed to get all the basics- milk, cheese, pork chops, flour, and cheddar smokies.  At the market, I shared some butter tarts with my kids and bought a basket of strawberries. YUMMY.

The greatest surprise was POPCORN!!!! Seriously, at the Eat Local shop, I found popcorn seeds.  What a relief. I love salty, buttery popcorn. It had not occurred to me that I may not be able to find it here, I scooped up the 1kg bag of seeds feeling as if I had fixed a dam before it broke.  I can only imagine my panic next Tuesday, arriving in the kitchen to make popcorn and feeling guilty about ANOTHER cheat. As it is, I will enjoy my locally grown popcorn with local butter while watching TV.  Bliss. 

But I need eggs. I felt sure I'd find eggs today, but alas there were none to be had. So, Sunday morning, over easy eggs will be replaced with buttery toast and strawberries in yoghurt.

I could not bring myself to buy things to replace items I still have in the fridge. I saw local sour cream but I still have a tub from last week and I can't just toss it. Whenever I see kitchen purges on tv, where the family dramatically tosses all offending foods into trash bags and haul it out to the garbage grossly irresponsible. I bought it, I'll eat it and when I need to replace it, I'll buy local.

                                                                                

Shannon D.