Dark Days Challenge - Week #5 Recap

I’m a bad blogger. Or at least I played one this past week. I cooked a number of local meals, including an informal Sunday dinner for friends, but wrote about none of them. On Sunday we had meatloaf, mashers, broccoli and salad - all of it made from local ingredients. I used my favorite meatloaf recipe again - man is that good! Monday night was steak from our local cow with sauteed Brussels sprouts. Wednesday night was breakfast for dinner - bacon from Herbert, fried eggs and toast with jam. Thursday night we made mediocre penne with pesto. The pesto was great (Thanks Mia!), it was the penne that was poor. As much as I think whole wheat pasta is good for us, I just can’t make myself like it…

Then I spent the weekend doing some sourcing for Thanksgiving. I spent 90 minutes at the U District farmer’s market on Saturday in the pouring rain. There was a pretty good turnout of vendors and shoppers, considering the shitty weather conditions. I was able to get broccoli, spinach, arugula, potatoes, apples, onions, radishes, rosemary, carrots, roasted hazelnuts and cauliflower for Thanksgiving.

I also scored a heritage breed local organic turkey for our holiday meal. Unfortunately it’s only 10 lbs. So we’ll be cooking a second bird from California to get us up to 20 lbs. Oh well - just means we can have two kinds of stuffing and season them slightly different. It’ll be a side-by-side taste test!

And Saara, thanks for the info on what to do with the Sunchokes. I’m hoping to find time to do them justice this coming weekend…

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The Middle:

Anne started her week with a trip to the winter market for greens, eggs, squash and onions. She cooked local that day, having breakfast for lunch, and pork chops, scalloped potatoes and spaghetti squash for dinner. She followed it up with a lovely local meal on Wednesday, doctoring up some frozen pumpkin soup and serving with the last lettuce salad of the season and fresh bread. Hope you’re feeling better Anne!

Chessa (Maybe Local) continues to impress me with her vegan vegetarian cooking. Her meal this week, while including a lot of well traveled spices, was built on a foundation of local ingredients. The first meal included cumin-lime tofu, dumpling squash and coconut creamed spinach. The second was black bean cutlets, broccoli and delicata squash. Finally, she wrapped up with a homemade vegetarian black bean sausage.

FarmMom (Children in the Corn) served a local meal of beef stew and homemade whole wheat bread. Wow, did that look good! She also posted two recipes for sweet potato bread and for her whole wheat bread.

My mom joins us with her first recap. After all the wonderful food we ate in Italy, she came home and made a truly American comfort food dinner of pot roast made with chuck roast from 1000 Hills Ranch, grass fed beef, roasted with local potatoes, carrots and onions from the farmer’s market. We added organic bread from the local bakery with organic local butter. Dessert was apple crisp with local apples but I must admit the brown sugar, cinammon and oats were not local.  Later in the week, she made my (apparently) famous Smothered Pork Chops with Cider and Apples.  Alas the herb folks at the farmer’s market have given up so her herbs were fresh from the grocery store but from a local source.  Flour, oil, pepper and bay leaves were not local.  She topped it off with mashed potatoes, yukon gold from market and slices of fireside apples from a local orchard. Wine was from Italy because she couldn’t resist a good chianti classico for a cold autumn nite.

Penny (Penelopedia) has a new blender and made good use of it this week making smoothies for breakfast. Her “official” meal was a squash, carrot and ginger soup (also using the blender). She served it with cheese sandwiches made with local bread, Wisconsin cheddar and local butter. To make it even better, she shared it with two dear friends.

To prove she’s not a vegan, Daniela (Culinary Student) made a simple roast chicken this week. She made it my favorite way - stuffed with a lemon and rubbed with rosemary. She served it with roast Brussels sprouts and fingerling potatoes. Yum!

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The East:

In the midst of planning her mostly local Thanksgiving, and visiting the winter holiday market, Kim (Yankee Food) managed to make cheese and then use it in an eggplant bake. She used her own canned tomatoes in a garlicky, oniony sauce. Then she baked the white eggplants, place them on her sauce and topped them with fresh basil and cheese. With a side of carrots, it looks amazingly good!

Christy (Farm Dreams) served barbecued chicken breast with salad and roasted winter veggies. Makes me dream of summer…

Ed (The Slow Cook) treated his friends and in-laws to a wonderful dinner of braised pork shoulder, salad from the garden, braised kale with onions. He also made sweet potato and swiss chard mash as well as pumpkin brulee. For hor d’oeuvres there were radishes and  bruschetta with caramelized mushrooms. Also, if you want to see a turkey from start to finish, check out his post on Where Turkeys Come From.

Even with her 100% Maine restriction raising it’s head again, Wendy pulled off  two all Maine lunches. The first was a happy hodgepodge of grilled cheese, homemade potato chips (recipe please?), sloppy joes and pickled Brussels sprouts.  The second was individual pizzas. Happily she’s also added 1/4 of a local Maine cow to her freezer. Also be sure to check out her anthology of pictures matching hens and eggs, and her almost all Maine meal.

Celeriac soup and celeriac apple slaw were Beth’s (Sustainable Food Blog) dinner of choice this week. She’s got my respect as celeriac is one thing I haven’t been brave enough to try. She added apples to the soup to give it some extra sweetness and complexity. I may have to try it.

Making use of the plentiful mushrooms, Nicole (Farm to Philly) hatched a plan for a delicious gnocchi with mixed mushrooms. It looks so good I can almost smell it. Hmmmm. Good luck with your hunt for local mushrooms secrets, Nicole!

Despite her internet troubles, Jasmine (40 Shades of Green) shared her experience and recipe with squash bake. Her recipe uses both spaghetti and butternut squash and looks like a pan of bubbly delicious goodness. Look here for the recipe.

 Over at The Purloined Letter, dinner was a turnip n’tater n’tbeetroot pie at the request of her son. This is my kind of recipe as there’s no measuring required. Served with a side of okra, it sounds like just the thing to use up some winter veggies.

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The West:

Anita (Married with Dinner) continues to impress me with her meals and photos. Of course I’m just generally impressed with her blog, so that’s no surprise… Last weeks meals included zuni chicken & bread salad, pasta alla gianni, chili and carolina coleslaw.

Trying to recreate a long-loved soup recipe from Africa, Donna (Chocolate Crayons) made a “doctored up” leek soup. Her experience again proved that bacon makes everything better. She served it with buffalo grapes and honey dinner rolls. Yum.

Cameo apples have stolen Laura’s heart (Hello, Sunshine) and her ode to them reminds me of how I feel about Honey Crisp apples. “…the perfect apple: tart, sweet and extremely crisp”.

In between enjoying adventures with Grandpa, Ellen (Daily Grind) made two local meals. The first was mashed potatoes with punk rock chickpea gravy, garlicky kale and black bean loaf. The chocolate pudding with tofu wasn’t as great. The second, a roasted acorn squash soup and homemade rolls, even impressed G’pa!

 Melinda (Elements in Time) had a busy week exploring bread, missing carrots and her fears of domesticity. They continue to eat 85 - 100% local for every meal, 7 days a week. I’m so jealous. The pictures are fewer this week due to a camera snafu - but the menus are just as impressive!

Saara (Skagit Foodshed) thought she was holding up my recap, and while I would definitely wait for her if asked, really I was just having a hard time finding the 3 hours that this takes. She decided to show off by cooking on her woodstove this week. Now that takes skill! She made burgers on bagels with sides of sauteed parsnips and ranch beans. She even made the ketchup!

Wishing she knew which farm it was from, Katrina (Kale for Sale) enjoyed the sweetest delicata squash of her life last week. It was so good it needed nothing beyond a touch of salt. Even the cute guy enjoyed it - summing it all up with a “wow”.

Trying to outrace two hungry kids for a photo, Jennye (Wool Fairy) enjoyed a dinner of hardboiled eggs, pugliese bread with goat cheese, and a trio of roasted root veggies (potatoes, turnips and parsnips).

Marcia in Wyoming dropped a note about her chicken pot pie made with home grown carrots, frozen green beans, and onion from the root cellar cooked in butter until soft, then home grown grilled chicken breast cut into small pieces added and homemade chicken stock and cream and some flour to thicken along with seasonings, topped with a crust made with Montana Wheat flour and baked for about 1 hour.  On the side was an apple and cabbage slaw made with shredded homegrown cabbage from the root cellar, diced apples (from the zucchini trade) mixed with non-local mayo, buttermilk, vinegar and sugar. As a side note, she’s anxiously awaiting “butcher day” for the pigs - they are getting huge.  They’re down to just a couple of roasts in the freezer. She notes that she has home-butchered lambs and deer with great success, but pigs are way more work - she did it once and won’t again if she can help it!

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