Locavore In Training

Last night I roasted the very last red pepper from my garden (the only thing I grew successfully this year). I'm not even sure how it made it to harvest, we've had a light freeze already. I roasted and froze the bumper crop that I'd received as part of my CSA share already - a great use of peppers, especially if no one else in the household likes peppers.

Since I was on my own for dinner last night, I took the opportunity to make an open face roasted pepper and goat cheese sandwich. The goat cheese was delivered along with our milk. Bread... homemade on Tuesday night. This was local eating at its best!

I really didn't plan on spending most of my Sunday in the kitchen. But, after the pumpkin killing, I was on a roll! Cooked and pureed the pumpkin, resulting in 11 cups of yummy, fresh pumpkin puree. 10 went straight into the freezer for future (yay!!) cooking projects. The remaining cup sat on the counter awaiting its fate.

Meanwhile, I baked a loaf of the Master Recipe from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes A Day. I need to stop doing that though because that's a really long title to keep typing out! Once that was done, I popped a loaf of pumpkin bread into the oven. I used my grandmother's recipe (two more eggs down!) which is easy and really tasty. I did notice that the pumpkin flavor isn't as concentrated as the canned stuff. I don't think that's a bad thing, but for something like pie, you might want to cook it down some.

I thought I'd been done baking at this point, until I realized we needed to eat dinner. (Yes, this was a realization, sometimes I conveniently forget about dinner.) Since I had no plan and nothing thawed, I whipped up some pizza dough. I meant to use my favorite whole wheat recipe, but after adding half the flour, I realized I'd been adding white flour. Oopsie. Half the dough into the freezer for the future. (All this planning ahead! Oh my!) Monterrey Jack Cheese with  BBQ sauce. Totally hit the spot. And after dinner, I roasted up the pumpkin seeds.

It was a full day of baking, but everything turned out so well! I was tired, but really pleased with my results! Breakfast today was pumpkin bread, lunch was (store-bought) soup with Artisan bread to dip. Carving out a little slice of 'la dolce vita' each day...

I did it. I killed the pumpkin. It turns out the farmer's market (Annapolis Mall) I planned to hit this afternoon (because I was too lazy to get downtown Annapolis for the morning one) has finished for the season. I headed over to Trader Joe's and it turns out, there were a bunch of cooking options there. I ended up buying a 5 or 6 pound Fairy Tale pumpkin. Some locavore, huh?

Photo source (because I suck at taking blog photos!): The Pumpkin Connection

It was a bit of a challenge cutting the thing up. I kept imagining taking off my finger all for the cause, so I took it sloooow and steady. Scooped out the goop and seeds, and it's roasting in the oven. I took my cooking cues from The Pioneer Woman, who has a handy step by step guide for making pumpkin puree and roasting the seeds. You'd better believe I'm roasting the seeds later! I guess because my slices are bigger and there's more pumpkin to cook, her estimate of 45 minutes at 350 is WAY off.

This pumpkin was so vibrantly orange inside, it almost didn't look real. I cannot wait to try it!! Minor detail... I haven't quite figured out what I'm doing with it!

In the end, it's a California pumpkin, so it misses many of the qualifications I'm searching for. But, I gotta believe doing it myself is better than buying the cans of pumpkin (if you can find them!) at the store. C'est la vie!

I've also got dough rising - made from yesterday's Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day session. It's getting yum in here!

Edited to Add:
Submitted to Fight Back Friday! Check out the other Fight Back Friday posts!

I've been thinking quite a bit about food, particularly meat, and how to best approach it given my new sustainable, local priorities. I haven't really needed to buy meat for months because we've had a really full chest freezer. This is because last year, when I was laid off at the beginning of the year and didn't get a permanent job until Fall when we knew Jay would be laid off soon, I shopped the sales and stocked up as much as I could. We have been eating through that stock, because regardless of the impact caused by the production of said food, I can't believe that wasting it does anything but continue the problem. And with 2-3 of us here, we still have quite a bit.

But pretty soon, I'm going to run out of a couple key things. We might have 1 package of chicken breasts left, 1 whole chicken and no ham. We have plenty of ground beef, which makes me sad because that's the one thing I really want to purchase from safe(r) sustainable sources.

I recently found out there are two custom butchers in Annapolis. I'm pretty excited about this, even though I don't relish the idea of having to grill the workers about the source and methods of their products. I'm much happier to research online, but it's clear that's not always possible. I figured I'd go over there this weekend and see what I can come up with. (Even though really, I don't need to buy much if anything right now.)

But then I was reading this article and it has me questioning. Am I any better off at a local butcher than the organic (or even regular) options at the grocery store? As important as I know this is, sometimes I am tired at the work it takes to research all the foods we buy. But then I am reminded that that's exactly what the commercial growers and CAFO owners want.

The last PolyFace Farm delivery is coming up in November, and considering they've become the leader in all things sustainable farming, this had been part of my plan for months. Once it became clear that there was no. way. I would be finding a place for their bulk beef option (seriously, so. much. beef), I missed their ordering deadlines. We're coming up on their last delivery of the year, and I'm determined to get my order in this time. It's really hard trying to plan for what would likely be close to 4 months of food. I'll give it my best shot, and we'll see where we end up!

Well, not 100 exactly, but 67.

We had planned to go camping this weekend with a group of our friends. Leading up to the trip, there were many, many discussions about food and activities. Since a couple of our friends are vegetarians, it made the planning slightly more complicated. When we settled on eggs for breakfast for two mornings, I offered to get the eggs for the trip. 4 dozen seemed about right - 11 people, 2 days. Well, fast forward to this week, the weather looks awful and Jay's coming down with something. Of course, we realized this AFTER I missed the deadline to change this week's farm order. Thursday morning, the nice delivery driver dropped off 5 dozen local, organic eggs, 2 lbs bacon (also for the trip) and a half gallon of the best 2% milk ever. The driver politely, but firmly requested we get a bigger insulated bag in the future.

I already had 7 eggs in the house, so now we're lousy with eggs. I whipped up a frittata last night, reducing the total count to 60. I know this doesn't seem like a huge problem - too many local, organic eggs? I hardly expect a pity party... but still - what am I going to do with 60 eggs??

My coworker offered to buy a dozen off me. She wanted to try the farm order this week, but had planned to be out on delivery day.

48 to go...

I wouldn't call this week the most successful week, in terms of the local food movement. We ended up eating out more than usual because my grocery purchases were so much less than normal. Sure, we could have eaten salads every night this week, but we didn't.

Not only that, so far, the most challenging meal is lunch. Jay and I usually take our lunches to work, his with sandwiches and fruit, mine is usually some type of frozen meal and fruit. We did have some fruit leftover from the previous week's shopping, as well as the bananas and mandarins I bought. It was still much less in both quantity and variety than usual, and there's just no such thing as a "local" frozen meal. I'm really stumped on how we can incorporate local food into our regular lunches. I'm sure there's a way, but I'm not sure to thinking out of the box yet.

Last night we had an almost completely local dinner though. We had a potato frittata and mixed green salad. The frittata was easy and really tasty.

I think, short term, my goal will be to just have the healthiest foods I can. This will include as much local food as possible, but in the absence of those options, I'll supplement with whole, healthy organic options as well. I'd rather eat an organic pear than none at all.

I found a great use for Swiss Chard tonight. It comes together quickly, and is quite filling. So pretty and it tasted great!

I managed to make partially local dinner today. We had honey-garlic grilled chicken featuring cilantro from the garden! I based it on this recipe, using olive oil and lemon pepper, and marinated for about 90 minutes. On the side was a very large salad featuring the falsely-labeled local greens from California.

I intended to take pictures, but it was eaten too quickly! The recipe was a definite hit. Very tender chicken. I'm not sure is I'll ever be able to get local limes, but otherwise, this could be a completely local meal.