The South:
Lynn recently realized that one in four of her family’s 14 Dark Days meals has been breakfast. This week, Lynn’s husband cooked up a delicious potato and sausage frittata for Sunday breakfast. While her family eats dinner together several nights each week, they’ve rarely had family breakfasts until Dark Days.
Recuperating from a cold, Kristina played her “get out of jail free” card, and had breakfast for her Dark Days meal. Her husband made the biscuits (which she says are so good they make grown men weep), which they topped with homemade peach jam and ate with fried local eggs and country ham. I’m hoping she’ll post the biscuit recipe, though I know there’s no recipe for the perfect touch.
After a few weeks away from home, Michelle was glad to be home with her animals and her garden. For breakfast, she cooked up eggs from her chickens with her homemade cheddar and spinach freshly plucked from her garden.
There’s no picture of Jenelle‘s Dark Days meal for this week, as they were halfway through dinner before she remembered. Sometimes you’re just too hungry to take a photo! Although we can’t see them, her local spare ribs basted with molasses, mustard and vinegar, roasted local potatoes and home-canned green beans sound quite tasty.
The East:
When faced with a recipe that called for rice (not local for her), Margo thought about using non-local rice, then decided to used polenta instead. Her Italian Stew mixed bacon, beef, onions and tomatoes with shredded cabbage and chunks of cooked polenta to form a hearty soup. A salad of watercress, arugula and lettuces with homemade dressing rounded out the meal.
Looking for a way to use an abundance of frozen spinach that a) wasn’t soup or frittata and b) didn’t use a stick of butter or block of cream cheese, Peg settled on a casserole of spinach, orzo and mushrooms baked in a light cheesy sauce. Makes me wish I had a freezer full of spinach!
Now that she’s back home after a few weeks away, Melissa is back in the Dark Days game with Saturday lunch. She thawed some homemade leek and potato soup that she’d frozen, and served it with a salad of lettuces, local Camembert and homemade croutons, and the tofu salad to which she admits she’s addicted. (Sounds like a healthy addiction!)
In a late post about her Valentine’s Day dinner, Kaela wrote about the thick-cut heritage pork chops that she served with a vermouth pan sauce and roasted veggies from her freezer. If you think that pork chops are dry and flavorless, Kaela says you should try heritage pork; it really is like a different animal.
Using her gorgeous red Dutch oven, which is great for dishes that start with a quick sear and then cook slowly, Sophie made a hearty beef stew for her Dark Days dinner. A glass of the local red wine that Sophie used in the stew was a nice compliment to the finished dish.
After missing last week’s Dark Days meal (it was Scott’s birthday), Marisa got back on the bus with her go-to pantry pasta sauce. She served the combination of onions, ground beef, home-canned tomatoes, kale and seasonings over local whole wheat noodles the first night and multi-grain angel hair (a less cardboard-y alternative) the second. I wish more recipes ended with Marisa’s instructions: “Eat while watching the Olympics.”
With a bad case of Dark Days fatigue, Stacey didn’t feel up to cooking much with the local food in her house. As many of us do in such situations, she made breakfast: a simple, but tasty dish of grits with butter.
With some of the veggies from this week’s big co-op share, Jennie made roasted turnips and beets with yogurt dill sauce (yum!). She served this alongside pasta with bison meat sauce. To deal with the dearth of canned tomatoes caused by the blight, she used a jar of local salsa as the base for the sauce; adding lots of cremini mushrooms and homegrown oregano transformed the salsa into pasta sauce.
*****
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