One Local Summer-Week 1 Recap

A number of years ago I tried playing along with an idea hosted by the blog Farm To Philly http://farmtophilly.com to eat at least one meal a week totally (with exceptions for stuff like salt, pepper, sugar and oil) from food grow or raised locally. Over the years there were several different definitions of local and several levels of exceptions made, some of which I've chronicled here, some that I did on my own. Unfortunately, as the scales of balance tipped in the wrong direction, cooking anything, not to mention cooking healthy, sustainably sourced, locally grown meals fell off. And I've been worse off for it.

But no more. I'm back with a CSA subscription to a new local farm just 24 miles down the road, a farmers market that host only vendor-produced foods grown within 125 miles, and a commitment to make this my summer to back on track. 

One of the reasons I let go of this before was all the rules of what and how far and the guilt of including something "not approved". It made what should have been an educational, inspirational journey into a comparison of who was "really" being local and who could afford to source more expensive meats and exotic veggies to eat well. In an effort to avoiding all of that I'm playing by my own rules this year and celebrating even the little steps as success. 

My rules will be:

Cook at least 3 local meals a week

A local meal is a meal that contains at least half local foods and no exotic items that could not reasonably be obtained  locally. The point is to eat things in season, not how creative can I get at stretching the rules but I will note the non local items. I will also feature things like pickles where the primary ingredient that is ultimately eaten is local even if the liquid and spices are not. 

Local is anything grown or raised within 150 miles. 

I will endeavor to find sustainable, environmentally friendly, economically feasible alternatives where possible but will hold no guilt if I use store bought items or a cheaper product if it results in the ability to provide a healthy, home cooked meal to my family. 

I will source and meal plan from my share first and do my best to fully utilize all the yummy stuff.

I hope to see a gradual transition from partially local to mostly local as I use up non-local ingredients and replace them with local sources. Things like butter, flour, herbs should be easy but I wont just toss usable food to buy new local versions, I'll use up the old and replace with the good. Things like oil, salt and some sugars probably wont be replaced at all but either reduced as I make healthier meals or simply kept as my exlusions.

So for the first week, here is my recap:

Thursday evening I picked up my share and started meal planning but didn't get any cooking done as it was too late. I also still had a few few things left from my last farmers market trip like grape tomatoes, pasta, and carrots.

Friday I cooked a batch of kale (share) chips using a non-local drizzle of oil and dash of salt and pepper following this recipe at http://www.beardandbonnet.com/how-to-make-crispy-kale-chips-gluten-free-and-vegan/.

Then I took half the asparagus from the share and made a jar of refrigerator pickles using this recipe http://shesimmers.com/2010/03/quick-and-easy-refrigerator-pickled-asparagus.html. My BF, the pickle expert in the household found them quite good. 

For the main meal I used all the curly kale (share), a pint of grape tomatoes from Ticonderoga (fm), some fresh linguine noodles from Caravan Pasta (fm), and non local garlic, oil, and feta to make a delicious one pot pasta dinner. We enjoyed the incredibly fresh juicy strawberries plain for dessert.

Saturday I had previously prepared store bought chicken to use up so for local content I made a quick salad out of our lettuce (share) and some shredded carrots (fm) and braised some pok choy (share) in non-local soy sauce to go with the lemon chicken and rice.

Sunday I made a mostly local fritatta from the last of our Lancaster Farm Fresh eggs (share). This version had some non-local feta and paremsean cheese and some commercial lunch meat ham slices but also used up the leftover pok choy (share) and some sauted asparagus (share).

The rest of the week was filled with veggies too but none met my feature conditions. Chard warped salmon with sautéed asparagus, chineese cabbage and carrots in an Asian chopped salad, and kale and carrots in soup used up every last bit of the items in the week 1 share. 

Canning Beans

Its been a while since I've done much preserving and even longer since I've blogged about it. I've started to get back into cooking and deriving pleasure from creating healthful meals for me and mine and even did a massive kitchen, and kitchen gadgets, clean up this week. It was so nice to see my kitchen space neat and tidy. So of course the first thing I wanted to do was mess it up. :-)

I dug out the pressure cooker and inspired by this recent canning beans post from Food in Jars , a long time muse in my blog feed, which reminded me that even in the darkest days of winter there are things that can be preserved, I set out to can some beans. I had some dried white beans left over from a local Mennonite farmers market vendor that I had picked up last year. I also had some of their mixed beans and commercial black beans but for this experiment I decided to stick with the smaller quantity. Now I just needed a few jars.

This summer, after finally admitting that I wasn't in a good place to deal with canning and preserving I had loaded up all my extra jars, finally empty and the contents used or tossed from my preserving high water mark in 2010-2012, into their boxes and moved those out to the storage closet on my porch. Of course, its 10 degrees out there and snowed 8 inches so I wasn't interested in bundling up and dealing with the cold just for a few jars. So I dove into my pantry/junk storage are in my laundry room and was able to scrounge up 3 wide mouth Ball pint jars in addition to the one I've been using as my coffee cup for the last month, which I would have sacrificed if I had too but luckily that wasn't necessary. In a winning moment for my sporadically obsessive organizational binges my jar lids, rings, and accessories were right where they were supposed to be, right next to the pressure weight for my pressure cooker!

So following Food in Jars helpful tutorial and dusting off my own knowledge gained from years of canning experience I preped my equipment, heated my jars, pre-cooked the beans (which I had soaked overnight), jarred them up in 3 pint glasses (had about 1 cup of beans left over which will go towards dinner) and proceeded to can.

I'll let you know how they turn out.

Stocking Up on Local Food

Despite a rather packed Saturday schedule, somewhere between swim lessons at the Community Center and a matinee of the Nutcracker the munchkin and I braved the cold to get to a winter Farmers Market, this time the Oakton Smart Markets. My first stop was to Heritage Farm & Kitchen to stock up on more dried kidney beans as well as other assorted beans, frozen chicken legs, eggs, lettuce, onions, maple syrup, sweet potatoes and Trickling Springs Creamery butter.

I picked out an assortment of apples—mostly honey crisps, nittany, and gala—from one vendor and a large bear of honey from Celestial Farms before rounding the trip out with 3 bottles of wine from Fabbioli Cellars. My head is filled with visions of what I could make with the chicken and red wine and I'm excited to add butter and not one but two sweeteners to my culinary possibilities.

I also had the good fortune of running into a friend from the neighborhood Sustainability movement and Local Foods Working Group. We took the time to catch up; I shared my commitment to eating local during the 5th annual Dark Days Challenge and she updated me on effort to bring a local grocer/storefront to our town. We also chatted over canning, preserving and fermenting endeavors recent and planned and after lamenting about the difficulties of canning large batches in a postage stamp apartment kitchen I was invited to “borrow” her kitchen the next time. I can get by with small batches just fine but I think I will have to take her up on her offer when tomatoes are back at the markets.

I plan to get to the local grocery near my work soon to as I hear they have Daisy flour and I would like to pick up a whole chicken for roasting so I can make some more stock before I run out.

We've got milk!

A year and a half ago, after living here for part of the winter, I began my search for local milk and cheese (see my post In Search of Milk). After some virtual searching, I found South Mountain Creamery in Middletown, MD and we went to visit. I liked what I saw and when we got home we enjoyed their products but at the time they were not doing home delivery to our area and it was too far to drive on a regular basis on top of the driving we were doing to the farm. So that idea was put on hold and if not forgotten about, at least put on the back burner. Fast forward to last month when for some reason I thought to check their website again and behold, they are now doing delivery to our town. Shout of excitement could be heard.

We've been getting deliveries every Friday for the past 3 weeks and it has been wonderful. I'm paying about what I'd pay at the grocery store for K's organic whole milk and I'm also getting their cheeses, some meats, and K loves their yogurt. The ordering mechanism on the website is phenomenal and I'm quite pleased with customer support. There was a minor delivery issue, one item that I ordered was not delivered, but it was cleared up quickly and courteously with the credit being applied to my next order. I just happened to be home when the first delivery was made and I got the chance to meet our "milk man". I was a little nervous about leaving the cooler in the apartment hallway where the neighborhood kids hang out so he said it would be no problem to leave it on the back porch. If anyone local is looking for a local source of milk, I have not problems recommending South Mountain Creamery.

One Local Summer Week 6

This week its all about the pizza, made with local flour and covered with local toppings, of course. After finally making the time to read Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day I mixed up a batch of dough for last weeks Caramelized Onion Rolls and it was so successful that the book stayed out and the remaining dough went into the fridge. Leaving books on my crowded kitchen counter usually results in one of three things: food gets spilled on them, they get buried under other things that get left on the counter or they get used again in a moment of "I have too much raw food and no meal in mind...oh, I think I'll look in here".

And that's how I randomly flipped to the page on pizza dough and realized that, yes, I could use the same whole wheat dough I had for the rolls to make a pizza crust. I mixed up the next batch using the lite whole wheat this afternoon and now, more than 5 pizza experiments later I will say while that having the proper equipment results in a little less chaos and better looking pizzas, you can make it work with what ever is on hand and though it may be irregularly shaped it will still taste great. From the time I got the idea to make pizza (dough already in fridge) to the time we were sitting down to eat was 40 minutes; 20 minutes to warm the oven and baking stone while I prepped the ingredients and taught K how to grate cheese, 5 minutes to roll out dough and cover with prepared toppings, 8-10 minutes to cook pizza, and another 5 to let it cool and do a little bit of cleanup prior to cutting the slices and sitting down to a very satisfying meal.

The wheat flours for the crust all came from Wade's Mill, stored in the big containers in the fridge shot above. I don't have any local yeast sources yet so I buy it in bulk. I had a great big jar of Bigg Riggs pasta sauce that I needed only half of for a pasta dish I'm planning for tomorrow so I used the other half of it as the basis for all but this one, where I splurged on a container of their fresh pesto at yesterday's market and if you look closely you can just see the hint of green underneath all the toppings.
Speaking of the toppings, because I'm lactose intolerant you won't find the beautifully melted local mozzarella (it's really good but I just can't) orbs or specialty cheeses that are readily available at the farmers markets. But, for my daughters sake, who probably ate more cheese while grating it than was left to go on all the pizzas combined, I did use some of the Colby that I ordered with my milk delivery from South Mountain Creamery (more on that soon) and a little bit of imported Parmesan, because it bothers me less and I really like the flavor. On the first pizza I made (not pictured due to severe deformity) I used the leftover caramelized onions from the rolls and it was so good that made some more with onions from Potomac Vegetable Farms and added it on every subsequent pie. Other toppings included diced cherry tomato's from I forget where, fresh basil leaves from my porch, home-canned raw-packed sweet corn from last years farm share, shredded leftover chicken that came from a whole bird I roasted with a home devised spice rub and had picked up frozen from a local vendor at the Percelville farmers market a while back.

The best part was that when we sat down to eat my normally picky daughter,who only eats cheese on her slices as I've been informed numerous times, asked for a big slice and ate it right up, onions and all.

Search for Local Flour

One of the most difficult and frustrating things about starting to eat local is all the work involved in trying to find out what local products are available from who and especially searching out some of the staples that should be available but are not easily found. I figured that for the first week of the Dark Days Challenge I would focus on my most perplexing ingredient, local flour. The lack of small mills is not surprising in given the ease of quick, cheap world wide shipping. Mills generally operate on the principle of economy of scale. The more grain they can convert to flour and other milled products the less expensive it is for them to operate and the cheaper they can offer their products to consumers. Therefore it is natural for larger mills to locate closer to the mid-west's prime growing areas and near railways where the cheapest grain can be shipped in, converted and shipped out at the lowest cost. A few small operations continue to function but I have found that they are often historical mills which operate on a small scale mostly for demonstrations to tourists and not to produce enough quantity for locavore consumption. One disappointing feature of some of these smaller mills is that while the grinding is done locally, they may ship in the raw grain from other regions.


At first this realization made me sad. After all, northern Virginia was home to many of the agriculturally minded founding fathers and I distinctly remember the pride of this fact displayed prominently as I toured Washington's Mt. Vernon on the Potomac back in the 7th grade. Many of the historically minded locations in the DC region mention mills of old and describe the trials of taking grain to be milled. I found one example of this while flipping through some tourism material I have laying around as I prepare to host guests at Christmas. It is a map (link is to a pdf file) of the grounds at the the living history Claude Moore Colonial Farm and the closest mill is 3 days one way on foot. Still slightly disappointed I turned to google and began searching in earnest.

For those closer to PA there are several readily available options in the Lancaster area and I'm sure a few more that I didn't find because I wasn't looking up there. McGreary Organics' Daisy Flour brand fit my preferences as did the spelt wheat flours from Small Valley Milling but both are just at my 150 mile (driving distance not crow flight) limits. I continued my search for something closer, or at least in my own state and somewhere I might have a chance of visiting someday soon. I located a few more small mills in Maryland and Virginia that offered either limited quantity or not enough online information for me to justify a trip to try their flour. Just as I was giving up hope, I stumbled onto Wade's Mill, located in Raphine.

Wade's Mill has a nice website and even offers online ordering, in addition to a 1-800 number and its catalogue. They have a wide variety of milled grains, flours, baking mixes in addition to jams, syrups, hams and gift baskets. Family owned for a long time and now run my Jim and Georgina Young this mill, while still over my 100 mile preferred distance was worth making an exception at 163 miles. Not 1 day after I had decided to order some flour and give the mill a try I got my monthly email from the Virginia Tourism people and saw a picture of the Young's and a link to a video featuring them talking about their mill and their products. I was sold. I ordered a 30 lbs of flour and some maple syrup immediately. The box arrived quickly, was carefully packed and as I put each pack of flour away I smiled, knowing that I had achieved my goal and would soon be enjoying the fruits of local labor.

I've created a google map of the sources I found during my search: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=105998941988210614683.00045baf78e917bcac07a
I welcome comments and additions and will be updating if I find out any now information.