Category Archives: Eat Local Challenge

This meal was a long time in the making.  Months!

I was a studio art major in college, and I stuck basically with two dimensions because the priest who taught the ceramics and sculpture department was terribly intimidating.  Ever since then, I have been a frustrated potter!  I finally tapped the urge last summer and took my first ceramics class at the local museum.  It’s been a blast, most especially because I AM AWFUL.  Truly.  Being absolutely bad at something yet still being able to enjoy myself immensely…all new territory for me.  No perfectionism, no fear of failure:  embrace the suck!  It is so liberating!

My first teacher asked us what we were expecting to achieve in her class.  “Making a cassole,” I said, when it was my turn.

I never did accomplish that, so I bribed my second teacher into making one for me.  Although he didn’t completely follow my exacting instructions, it’s a beautiful pot.  And tonight’s meal?  Cassoulet, bien sur.

Precooking the big beans:  big limas, small limas and runner beans

Menu:

• Four-bean, three-meat Cassoulet:  King of the Garden Limas, Henderson’s Bush Limas, Scarlet Runner beans, and flageolets precooked with a smoked ham hock from Providence Farms, a Lancelot leek, garlic, and bouquet garni (even the  bay leaves were local).  Seared, smoked duck legs and breast from our farm.  Potato sausage from my friend’s farm smoked with the Easter ham in our smoker (his potatoes, pig, salt/pepper)
• Sorrel Soup (sorrel, homemade chicken stock, carrots, potato onions, a potato, a bit of garlic, finished with goat milk)
• Leek galette (galette dough:  home-ground flour from Ferris Organics wheat berries, Creswick Farms lard; one monster Bleu de Solaize leek sauteed first in bacon grease)
• Greenhouse salad (mache, spinach, kale, lettuces, green onions, shallots and garlic croutons from Friday’s bread; homemade buttermilk dressing
• Apple galette (our apples, the above galette dough, nonlocal spices, Michigan sugar)
• Local wine, a lot of it!

Ready for the oven

Notice the Most Excellent chicken pot holder my mother-in-law whipped up for me (atop the soup pot)

Served on my own dishes and bowls and wineglasses.  How’s that for homemade??

I am a bit confused:  it appears the Challenge ends on 31 March.  I thought it was a by-the-week thing, therefore ending at week 20.  I had big plans (BIG!) for the last week’s meal…the last of the Dark Days Challenge of eating sustainably, organically, locally and/or ethically for one meal per week all winter long.  Maybe I will post the meal next week anyway:  it has a lot of wacky goodness in it.

So I thought for this week’s Week 19 I would simply feature a meal sourced from home ingredients grown JUST this year (2010) but…inspiration hit me.  Literally!  My bag of saved corn husks from our home-grown popcorn dropped on my head from the top shelf when I was adjusting things in the pantry.  Luckily, corn husks aren’t heavy.

Brown paper packages tied up with string:  not pretty, not numerous, but…tasty and mostly home-grown

When I was in college, one of my best friends was a first-generation Mexican American whose people hailed from Oaxaca.  Homesickness for his mother’s Phoenix kitchen had us trolling for chow in the local Mexican restaurants…but he assured me the comida plated up in our Midwestern college town was but a simulacrum of honest food.  Well, I visited him, often, and he was so right!  And once, just once, I was fortunate enough to sample the tamales lovingly (painstakingly) made by his Mama and Abuelita.  “Labor of love” barely describes the ordeal undertaken by these women, both tiny things, in Mama Maria’s small un-airconditioned kitchen.  They would make 250 in a day, some for family, but most for their church…and they did this twice a month!

I can’t begin to scale up to that level, but with home-grown and local ingredients I can make an attempt at making at least a few.  I did have some cinnamon-laced Mexican chocolate brought back from a friend; why not make mole as well?

Menu:

• Tamales (our homegrown, home-milled Calico popcorn, with Creswick Farms lard, homegrown chicken stock, meat fillings, and wrapped up in homegrown corn husk wrappers) with either
• Chicken (our chicken breast, poached and dressed with a garlic/Mexican oregano mash) and served with our canned Tomatillo Salsa (tomatoes, tomatillos, green bell and jalapeno peppers, vinegar, garlic, onions) with greenhouse cilantro and green onions or
• Pork (shoulder roast from Providence Farm, braised in a bit of the above salsa and tomatoes; pulled, chopped) with Mole Sauce (mine didn’t have the usual 25 ingredients, more like 10:  the cinnamon/chocolate, ground/roasted local walnuts, bread crumbs from Wednesday’s bread, onion, garlic, more of our tomatillo salsa, dried homegrown paprika and jalapeno peppers, greenhouse thyme, oregano, and nonlocal cloves, salt, and pepper)
• Greenhouse salad (of course)
• Vanilla souffle (our eggs, someone else’s milk 😦 with Michigan sugar and nonlocal vanilla…no pics because my camera battery ran out

Okay.  That WAS a bit of a labor of love.  But:  I made the mole last weekend, the pork was leftovers from Wednesday night, and the chicken is terribly easy to cook.  With able small hands to help stuff and wrap, this was a fun meal to make and eat.

Viva!

With a nip in the air but a Spring jig in my steps, I prepared a rib-sticking meal for St. Patrick’s Day on Wednesday.  Slainte!

The greenhouse side of the meal:  clockwise from bottom, thyme, parsley, turnips, leek, carrot, and some gorgeous chives

Menu:

• Irish Beef Stew with Parsley/Chive Dumplings: Stew meat (Providence Farms), our Purple Top and Gilfeather turnips, Mokum carrots, russet potatoes, Bleu de Solaize leek, wine vinegar and herbs; dumplings of Ferris Organics wheat berries, Creswick Farms lard, our milk, our parsley/chives
• Colcannon: our potatoes, Des Vertus savoy cabbage, lacinato kale, fresh onion greens, garlic and goose fat
• Greenhouse salad (mache/spinach/Brune d’Hiver lettuce) with buttermilk/herb dressing, Mokum carrots and Golden Self-Blanching celery
• Bell’s Kalamazoo Stout beer for me!

All that’s left is soup for today

Two more weeks in the Challenge!  And I am beginning to see the end of the Dark Days, myself; harbingers of spring are everywhere around me now.  There’s no denying it (and Daylight Savings helps).

This week’s meal was fairly boring, but:  if my husband and daughter had their way, we would have this every. single. day. and not just every week.  And excepting the flour in the bread, everything else was grown and raised on this little piece of land of ours.  We had a friend over and there was much wine involved so no photos were taken of the spread itself; luckily, dinner tonight is soup from last night’s carcass…all the better to cure the hangover I truly have right now.  Ay.

Menu:

• Butternut squash soup (one squash, one onion, our herbs)
• Garlic-roasted chicken (our bird, garlic, and herbs)
• Roasted root vegetables (carrots, turnips, beets, leeks from the greenhouses)
• Mashed potatoes with chives and pan gravy (Burbank potatoes, garlic and regular chives, our milk(!); our cider vinegar to deglaze the pan; flour from Ferris Organics)
• Whole-wheat sourdough bread (Ferris Organics hard red spring flour, my starter)

Monster leek, lacinato kale, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme…

Busy life tending busy lifeforms:  one still needs to eat!

Menu:

• Savory Bread Pudding (ends of two homemade loaves from berries ground from Ferris Organics wheat; our eggs, the last of the milk share milk (hooray!); Bleu de Solaize leeks, garlic, thyme, sage, parsley, salt and pepper)
• Herb-encrusted roast chicken pieces (our bird, our herbs) with pan gravy
• Crunchy Kale Salad based loosely on this recipe (greenhouse Toscano/lacinato kale, mashed garlic, toasted bread crumbs from the above loaves; nonlocal EVOO and lemon from our lemon binge)
• Vanilla pouring custards (milk share milk, Michigan sugar, our eggs, nonlocal vanilla bean)

Forgot to take a pic of the custards!  So quickly eaten…

Five more weeks to go in this challenge! I am wondering if the Dark Days will truly end then…and is spring truly around the corner?  With new snow falling daily here, I am highly dubious.

To fit with the stereotype that all that can be eaten in winter are dull root veggies and cabbage, this week’s meal features…cabbage!

Slug-tattered but highly edible

In my quest to end root-cellaring certain items, I planted cabbage seedlings into one 3’x6′ greenhouse bed in early September.  I had just cleared it of its blooming lettuces, so I figured I would transplant about 12 and see if they made it through the winter.  (The twenty-odd other seedlings got transplanted outside and harvested while still small (3-4″ diameter) until the snow came and stayed in December.  This size, incidentally, is perfect for our small family:  not practical for kraut, maybe, but no waste.)  Well, the greenhouse cabbages did make it.  In fact, they continued to grow throughout the winter.  These were Des Vertus Savoy, a somewhat crinkly cabbage that can reach 5 lb. easily.  So, my root cellar this year houses ONLY potatoes!  No root veg, no cabbage.  Apples and pears on the back porch.  Whew, that was easy.

Menu:

• Bubble and Squeak (Mashed Burbank (russet) potatoes, Copra onion, Des Vertus Savoy cabbage, salt and pepper, fried up in homegrown goose fat)
• Round Steak (Tenderized, marinated in salt/garlic/water/homemade red wine vinegar all day and then pan-seared; from Pekel Farm in Shelbyville)
• Bitter greenhouse salad with roasted foraged walnuts (Giant Winter spinach, mache, mustard, Triple Purple orach, Italian Dandelion, arugula, red and green lettuces; chopped shallot and greens; buttermilk dressing from our milk share)
• Pumpkin bread (Triamble squash, home-ground hard red spring berries, our eggs, buttermilk, Michigan butter, Michigan sugar, nonlocal baking spices and leavener)

Tasty if not pretty

A bit of Michigan on the plate tonight!

Half of my family hails from the Lake Michigan coast of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  Both sides of my dad’s family had long history up there, mainly on islands of both Lake Michigan and Lake Huron as they were all fisherfolk if they weren’t lumberjacks. This is knowledge that comes to me, incidentally, from my own genealogical research and not family yore: Dad wanted nothing to do with his family and died when I was 13, so all tales and secrets and recipes died with him. Suffice it to say I have since filled in a lot of blanks, and I would hope that at least one or two of my ancestors had a recipe for pasty up their sleeves. If not they, then loads of other Yoopers know how to make them.

These are basically meat-and potato-filled turnovers. The typical recipe includes rutabagas, and so I did as well; carrots, celery, onion…no other spices other than salt/pepper is customary but, well, I adore my spices and so added a few. Supposedly these lunchbox pastries hail from the Cornwall-born coal- and copper miners who worked the U.P.’s northwestern mines in the late 19th century. Now you cannot drive 30 miles on any major road in the whole peninsula without hitting a tourist-y eatery that sells PASTIES (all caps always).

Menu:

• Pasties (crust:  home-ground hard red spring berries from Ferris Organics; lard and bacon grease from Creswick Farms; ground beef from the Pekel farm in Shelbyville; chopped side pork from Creswick Farms; Carola potatoes, Atomic Red carrots, Laurentian rutabaga, Clear Dawn onion, Golden Self-Blanching celery, sage/thyme/savory/parsley from greenhouses; salt, pepper.
• Greenhouse salad with homemade buttermilk dressing (milk share milk, our shallot/garlic/parsley)

Blueberry waffles with blueberry syrup is a great way to start the day

I’m posting this before I even make the meal:  is that cheating?  No, it’s beating the posting deadline!

Victory!

For Valentine’s Day, the girl and I got up early to harvest a Monster Carrot.  It’s been a gorgeously sunny weekend, so the greenhouses are quite warm:  warm enough to pull off the Reemay covers and let that sun shine in.  (I spent a lot of the weekend just puttering around in there:  who can blame me, working in a t-shirt in February?)  This carrot, a Long Keeper storage carrot, is the main ingredient in tonight’s carrot cake.

Don’t discount fresh herbs:  they add a substantial kick to what I consider The Good Life.  Par-cel cutting celery (a nice cross between parsley and celery) grows nicely year-round in the greenhouses

And while we were in there, I harvested a bunch of different herbs for the marinade for the evening’s main course.  Morning is often when I start making dinner. When the girl and I made the waffles, I also started a batch of no-knead whole wheat bread, thawed the roast, and started a new batch of buttermilk.  Then, with our carrot and herbs all cleaned up from the greenhouse, she peeled a head of garlic while I stripped the thyme and rosemary from their branches and pounded them, along with a large bunch of the par-cel cutting celery, salt, pepper, olive oil, and homegrown paprika, making a nice paste to coat the pork loin roast.  Fresh herbs are marvelous, and thyme, parsley, rosemary, sage, and savory keep green and ready all winter in the greenhouse.

Alice Waters has a wonderful method for braising those tougher cuts of meat like a shoulder or loin roast.  Including the long marinade, the roast is cooked in a low (350 degree) oven and flipped quite often in its half-bath of cut-vegetable filled broth.  It alternately caramelizes and tenderizes the meat that way, and the resultant pan juices make a wonderful gravy.

The greenhouse’s leeks are thickening rapidly and are quite sweet, so lots of them are finding their way into most savory dishes lately.  Tonight’s treatment was in a milk bath with radicchio.  The milk calms the bite of these chickory hearts, and sweetens the leeks.  Two leeks and one radicchio are halved, quick-seared in brown butter in a skillet, then baked in a casserole and bathed in an herbed cream.  A quick trip under the broiler at the end caramelizes their tops.

Menu:

• Blueberry waffles with blueberry syrup for breakfast (Ferris Organic flour, our eggs, homemade buttermilk from our milk share, nonlocal butter, and blueberries from a half mile away; syrup made from the same batch of blueberries with Michigan sugar)
• Greenhouse salad with homemade buttermilk dressing (milk share milk, our shallots and herbs)
• Braised loin of pork (Amish-raised piggy, above marinade from greenhouse herbs, Copra and red onions, Chantenay carrots, red potatoes in the broth)
• Oven-braised Bleu de Solaize leeks and Treviso radicchio in cream
• No-knead sourdough whole wheat bread (Ferris Organic flour, my sourdough starter)
• Carrot cake (Ferris Organic flour, our eggs, our buttermilk, our carrot, Michigan sugar; nonlocal spices and cream cheese for the frosting)

Serious child minding the crepe.  It’s a glorious, wonderful, spectacular day when your child becomes tall enough to reach the stove unassisted!  It also means she can turn on the kitchen faucet and load the dishwasher.

Illness has visited our house this week, so Saturday night it was just the girl and me eating solid foods.  And, as is typical, I revert to my vegetarian ways when I don’t need to feed my husband, so…the girl and I made crepes.  Crepes are wonderful.  They can be savory, they can be sweet, they can be in-between.   And they hide all manner of leftovers, should you have them.  Leftovers, or food failures, as was the case with the feta I made this week, which came out decidedly unset and lumpy (oh it tasted fantastic, the texture was off), so melted with a little butter and milk, it became the topping for the crepes.

Menu:

• Whole-wheat crepes (milk share milk, our eggs, Ferris Organics wheat berries, Michigan butter)
• Choice of fillings: our leftover oven-roasted chicken with sauteed Bleu de Solaize leeks for the girl; Grex beet greens/Bleu de Solaize leeks/white onions for me
• Feta/cream sauce topping (milk share milk)
• Big greenhouse salad (carrots, turnips, lots of arugula and mache; homemade yogurt/shallot/parsley dressing)
• Applesauce for dessert (our apples, Michigan sugar)

Cropped photo so you can’t see the unpretty feta sauce

Bean carnage

Let’s just say our meal this week is terribly…beany.

Gosh, I think I have even posted about beans, what, twice before for this challenge?  Three times, maybe?  We do love our beans, it is true; probably one dinner a week is Beans.  That leaves six other meals per week that I could choose from that are Not Beans, pretty good odds!  I have a couple of things to say in my defense, though.

Mainly, it’s a bit of a crazy week.  Our daughter turns 6, and every day, it appears, there’s something else to be done to aid the celebration.  There are at least three meals that are directly birthday-related (food is love) and sadly not all of them will be Dark Days-worthy…or they would be if Michigan grew chocolate.  But!  My husband wanted to cook (is the sky falling?  was that just a pig I saw flying?  did hell freeze?) and he said he wanted to make some beans.

A LOT of beans, it turns out!  And:  I was so shocked I forgot to photograph it.

Menu:

• Cuban Black Beans: our Black Turtle beans, Turino red (sweet) pepper, Hungarian (hot) ground red pepper, Copra onions, garlic, nonlocal cumin/pepper/salt, and greenhouse thyme and my friend’s greenhouse bay leaves.
• Baked Beans: our Navy beans, Copra onions, garlic, Golden Self-Blanching celery, smoked pork belly, local honey, and a friend’s maple syrup.
• Biscuits: home-milled hard red spring wheat, butter, home-made yogurt from our milk share.
• Greenhouse salad with homemade, homegrown yogurt dressing (yogurt, shallots, apple cider vinegar, parsley, applesauce with Michigan sugar).

I’m cheating this week by showing you something I made for dinner last week.

Oxtails:  The majority of Americans just have never eaten them, despite their high overall beef consumption. As a newly-returned carnivore, I was shocked by how much meat cost, even the “cheap” cuts of meat!  Sixteen years of not having a “meat tax” on my budget…let’s just say life as a veg was cheaper.  S0 as a carnivore I’m predisposed to be cheap, or, rather, thrifty. Well.  This means I’m not afraid to try new-to-me cuts, and oxtails were a revelation.  So much flavor!

Of course by cheap I don’t mean cuts from cruelly treated feedlot animals.  Nope.  We buy our beef and pork by the quarter and half, respectively, from small farmers who pasture their animals, raising only a few per season.  By ordering these quantities, you can usually have your say about how you want the meat processed (lots of chops, say, or more ground) AND if you are adventurous, you can request the odd bits that the butcher usually just takes as his, er, cut of the cuts.  Like oxtail, which is simply the tail of a steer.  In my last beef order, I asked for it: and got all 3!  It seems nobody else wanted it so the farmer sent all the tails to my order, gratis.

So maybe Americans don’t eat it much (hey: more for me at the butcher), but leave it to thrifty folks like the French (indeed) and Koreans (among others, of course) to really know how to use oxtail.  Pot-au-feu is a double dish:  a beef broth, then a meat dish; pho, likewise, often utilizes oxtail to give it its strength.  Many French recipes do suggest oxtail be used for two meals.  Gotta like THAT kind of meat thrift.

Singularly unattractive photo

Menu:

• Gnocchi in Oxtail Ragu: Russet potatoes, winter white flour in the gnocchi.  Roasted cut-up oxtail, braised in red wine then stewed in our tomato sauce with our celery, onion, garlic, and herbs.  Recipe very loosely based on this one.
• Mokum Carrots, julienned and pan-roasted in brown butter and thyme
• Greenhouse salad
• And the rest of that red wine, a Meritage.

Yum!

Throughout this Dark Days challenge, I never go into each week thinking:  Tonight’s dinner is IT!  Time to post! Nope; it’s more like, what’s photogenic? I have, quite honestly, tried very hard not to show off for this challenge.  No real food pyrotechnics or frankly anything terribly difficult for someone with less-than-average kitchen skillz; what’s the point?  There’s enough to do just growing all this stuff, people!  AND:  that’s what I am trying to get you all to do:  get out and GROW IT!

bread and buttah

Tonight’s fare is, again, very simple.  This morning, I started the bread on a fast no-knead schedule (normally, 12-18 hours, I went with 6: just up the yeast!) so I could take advantage of the sprouting spelt berries I had growing on the counter.  Thinking, “what goes well with bread,” I retrieved a can of “bean starter” from my stash of canned goods and started some soup.

I’m always so happy when I can my dried beans for quick meals:  there are jars of black bean/carrot/onion, black bean/tomatoes/peppers, lentil*/kale/carrot/onion, and white bean/kale/onion, as well as just plain jars of beans downstairs.  I canned them in my pressure canner:  I would make the bases when I was making some other bean-y dish; I would chop a whole bunch of stuff and then, in a couple wine-besotted evenings with a friend, canned them all.  All I need to do now, then, is harvest something to augment one of those jars, or…open more of my own cans to create soup, chili or whatever.

Makes dinner really a no-brainer on those days I have no brain.

Menu:

• No-knead loaf: half winter red, half winter white wheat ground up in my brand-new mill (!!) with sprouted spelt berries
• Stew-y soup:  Black bean/carrot/onion starter, canned from our produce last October; one Mokum Red carrot, one Chantenay carrot, Red Russian kale, Lacinato kale, Par-Cel cutting celery and one Bleu de Solaize leek, all from the greenhouses; garlic from storage; homemade red wine vinegar to finish, with butter.
• Salad:  Lots of reds in this salad, mostly lettuce.  Vinaigrette made with our vinegar, herbs, shallot; nonlocal olive oil (duh!) and mustard.  Nonlocal but home-sprouted alfalfa.

*Lentils are the only thing not home-grown.  With only 2 beans per pod, good golly who has that kind of time to shell them!

Today we put our muscles into our dinner!  This dinner illustrates three things:  one, how to feed a family of 3 on one little chicken breast; two, how delicious a non-rice pilaf can be, and three, how sometimes it’s too cold to go outside to fetch a salad.  Thus, the pantry/freezer meal.

She’s wondering if she can make dimples with the end

Menu:

• Chicken breast prosciutto-free saltimbocca (thin-sliced chicken breast smashed into submission with rolling pin, dredged in flour and quick-sauted in butter; gravy from the drippings of garlic jelly, homemade white wine vinegar, hard white wheat flour and thyme)
• Blue Coco green beans from the freezer
• Spelt berry “pilaf” (butter, Copra onion, Golden Self-Blanching celery, Par-cel cutting celery/thyme/sage/oregano, in chicken stock)

One thing you need to realize about dinner in this house, ANY dinner, is that it’s a bit of a process.

First, there’s the harvest, then the impromptu semaphore dance with the leeks.

Then, there’s the lengthy discussion about meat or no meat in this dish:  we went with meat.

Then, unseen, the kitchen fairies made pate brisee.  Salad.  Soup.  Galette, and pie.

Dinner:

• Mache salad with Long Keeper carrot, toasted scavenged walnuts and non-local but homemade mustard vinaigrette (our herbs, shallots)
• Chicken soup (our bird, Scarlet Nantes carrot, Golden Self-Blanching celery, Copra onion, our herbs)
• Leek galette (2 Bleu de Solaize leeks, one cube smoked pork belly, thyme; spelt flour/butter crust)
• Pumpkin pie (spelt flour/butter crust, Amish Pie pumpkin, our eggs, cream from our milk share, and nonlocal spices)

I looked forward to posting this week’s meal because I figured it would well illustrate two things:  one, what it is I eat when I eat alone, and two, how much of a glutton I can be on really simple peasant fare.  You see, I planned on telling you all about a lovely vegetarian dinner of polenta with foraged wild mushrooms:  both main ingredients being things verboten, nay, HATED by my family…thus, best to eat when they’re away.  And:  it’s a meal I *crave* for them to leave so I can make it.

But a funny thing happened on the way to dinner.

I had to dig, deep, in the bigger chest freezer to retrieve the last two-pound bag of Bloody Butcher cornmeal from a grower in Nashville, MI: wonderful meal that yields gritty, deeply-flavored polenta or cornbread; cornmeal well worth digging to the bottom of a freezer for.  But, with each successive layer of frozen items I dug through, the angrier, and colder, I got.  And:  what I was digging through was so much more…in the way of instant gratification (i.e., steaks) that I finally said SCREW IT!  gimme some MEAT!

So, here’s the meal:

• Broiled grass-fed “sizzler” steak from the Pekel farm in Shelbyville
• pan-fried All Blue potatoes, fried up in goosefat from one of our goslings
• garlic-mashed Triamble squash
• greenhouse salad with roasted, foraged walnuts and an apple cider/yogurt vinaigrette

And it went down well with two glasses of red wine put up by a friend of ours in honor of his son’s birth, six years ago.

For this week’s Dark Days dinner, the selected meal was a pantry-raided, complex-carbohydrate-rich affair.

We were itchy for something toothsome the night before, so the next day I baked some beans and bread.  Baked beans, bread and salad:  simple, hearty fare that was so welcome on this, the first harsh night of our winter season.

• Beans: One cup of our cranberry beans, one Copra onion, two cloves of Big Stinky (an unknown but huge hardneck garlic), with dried sage and other garden herbs; two chunks of smoked pork belly (Hopeful Farms pork from Ligonier, IN; smoked at Miller’s Smoke House of Middlebury, IN: both these are Amish-run, so, no websites), and honey from Honey Hound Bee Farms, Eau Clare, MI.
• Bread: Whole-wheat boule with 50/50 spelt/hard red spring wheat from Ferriss Organics;  butter made from cream from the school’s cow share
• Salad: greenhouse goodies

I confess we’re not much for leftovers here.

It has been argued that making “extra” food might save you time later:  that, say, doubling your rice means you have enough to quickly make a stir-fry, or pudding.  Knowing me, knowing my family, knowing the Black Hole of Shame that our refrigerator becomes if I actually SAVE leftovers, I have been making a huge effort over the last few years to Never. Ever. Have. Them.

That never quite works out around Thanksgiving, though.

If I were ever to teach basic cooking, I would teach two things:  pate brisee (piecrusts), and biscuits.  [Both make you quickly familiar with a pastry blender (two butterknives also work) and heartily at ease with a rolling pin (excepting drop biscuits, my personal favorite).  Both, too, make you a genius as far as disguising leftovers, if you have them, and hey, even fresh food is special with a crust of browned buttery bread!]  As it is, I teach my kid instead.  And she’s becoming a whiz with a piecrust.

The meal:

• Turkey pot pie (crust: spelt flour from Ferriss Organics; home-rendered leaf lard from Creswick Farms; filling:  our own Bourbon Red turkey, two Carola potatoes, one Scarlet Keeper carrot, one Gilfeather turnip, one Bleu de Solaize leek; home herbs (sage, thyme, oregano, garlic), bechamel sauce with turkey gravy, spelt flour and milk).
• Salad (raw sunflower seeds from who knows where, but home-roasted; greenhouse salad of arugula, red and green lettuces, shallot greens; homemade yogurt/garlic dressing)

good enough for leftovers of leftovers!

Our Thanksgiving was fabulously local, and mostly home-grown.  But I’m not going to blah-blah about Thanksgiving for Week 2.  Nope.  Saturday night’s dinner will be discussed instead.

The Dark Days Challenge was put together by Laura of (not so) Urban Hennery to get people to try to eat locally at least one meal per week.  Her encouragement also went so far as to challenge us to source that food within the guidelines of SOLE:  sustainable, organic, local and ethical.  She asked me to join because Michigan is not exactly a hothouse of fresh produce in winter, but she knew that we eat as fresh as we can, thanks to our greenhouses and root cellar.

Steering away from turkey and fixings, then, we barbecued a pork loin roast from the now-defunct Providence Farm, serving it with steamed Red Norland potatoes (gotta hurry and eat this crop, as it’s one of the first to sprout) in a butter/parsley/chive mix, as well as Marconi strain Romano beans from the freezer, a greenhouse salad of cold-hardy lettuces (Amish Deer Tongue, Brune d’Hiver, Forellenschuss, Grand Rapids, arugula, mache and others) with Red Beard bunching onions, a gigantic Scarlet Nantes carrot, and a medium-sized Zefa Fino fennel bulb with some fronds thrown in.  Buttermilk/yogurt dressing (our cultures of both) with lots of garlic.  And, yum, Galeux d’Eysines pumpkin custard for dessert!  Local wine too:  Round Barn Red Demi-Sec.

Scrounged apples from one of 9 neglected trees on neighbor’s land:  spotty but delicious Jonathans

How to do it?  How to do ANY changing in terms of one’s habits?  Well, don’t jump in feet-first.  Start small.  Remember, this is what I am trying to do with the Eat Local Challenge:

My goal, again, in taking this challenge was not for me, but rather as a tool of conversion.  If others of you start gardening, or gardening more, or getting a greenhouse, or buying a freezer and starting to can stuff, I will feel so gratified!

Start gardening: it’s now autumn in this hemisphere.  Now’s the perfect time to bust some sod to build some garden beds!  Not so strong?  Well, you probably can lift newspapers or flatten old cardboard boxes, and rake up bags of leaves or lawn clippings.  Read up on lasagne gardening a la Ruth Stout.  Even if that’s not the way you envision yourself gardening (I don’t garden that way), it is a sure way to start making garden beds this fall.

Gardening more: Make new beds now!  Also, look at what it is you had been growing if you were a vegetable gardener.  Is there anything you LOVE that you hadn’t bothered to try this year, like broccoli or beets?  Make some space next year and promise yourself you’re going to grow what you know you will eat.  Chuck the things you wasted, like all those zucchini.  Consider the idea of succession planting, instead of that one back-breaking spring planting day you did this year (you know who you are).  Spring/summer/fall (and even /winter) is a lot of growing.  This could mean three crops of lettuce, two crops of summer squash, five crops of carrots…all in the same space in one “growing” season.

Buying a freezer: Well, this is a big step, financially.  However, if you are in the habit of shopping weekly and picking up, say, one cut-up chicken, one package of ground beef, and one package of bacon I have news for you.  You are wasting money.  Instead, you could hook up with a local farmer and buy 20 chickens (whole or cut-up), a quarter of beef and a half a hog and your meat needs would be met for most of the year.  Don’t think you can do half a hog?  Find a friend, or two!  Start a buyers’ club!  Again, this is another big bite in the wallet:  start small, save now, and consider all the gasoline and TIME you will save next year.  (Plus, learning what one can do with half a hog can be quite fun.)  Half of my freezer is devoted to frozen fruit, veggies, meat stock, and flour, so it ain’t just about the meat.  And chest freezers are a lot more energy-efficient than upright ones:  they don’t dump their cold air out every time you open the door.  Sears is the best nation-wide store that offers the most types.

Starting to can (or freeze) stuff:

1. Sourcing: Your biggest friend in the world of preservation is your local farmer’s market or U-Pick farm.  For regular vegetable eating, you can also join a CSA (again, worried about “but that’s too much stuff for our house” then find a friend) and ask the CSA farmer if you can help them glean at the end of a crop’s season:  you can get the stuff they can’t give away (like spotty tomatoes).  Also, canning or freezing is usually the response one has to bounty.  Having a CSA share does not mean one will have “bounty,” but…do you know of any untended fruit or nut trees near you?  Ask the owner if they wouldn’t mind sharing.  Is there anything that your neck of the woods does comparatively well, like oranges or maple syrup or peaches or corn?  Then go nuts and get a bunch of it.
2. Equipment: Go to Goodwill and pick up used canning equipment.  Garage sales are likewise great places to find things, especially the jars themselves.  Old-time hardware stores and even some grocery stores sell boiling-water bath kettles, and canning equipment like the jar lifter and jar funnel you’ll need.  Canning jars are easily found, luckily; but make sure you have lots of sealing lids; you will go through a lot.
3. Great equipment: Really seriously consider purchasing a pressure canner (quite different from a pressure cooker):  unlike the pickles and jams and fruit your boiling-water bath can do, all low-acid stuff can be put by via the pressure canner.  Soup to nuts, I kid you not; you can even can milk, or meat!

Getting a greenhouse: This is a big step, but not if you are a gardener itching for a winter salad.  I had been dreaming about a greenhouse for YEARS before mine came to be.  Start small by doing a PVC hoop house or a cold frame with a bunch of used windows.  But if you really do want to dig in and get a big one, by all means DO IT.

SO get busy and start gratifying me!