Dark Days '10-11 :: Meals #1 & #2

I really intended that we’d start this year’s Dark Days Challenge off with a bang. Unfortunately I haven’t made it to the farmer’s market in weeks and so we’re left to cook what we have stored and what I was able to get at the last day of the local farm stand’s season.

Since this past summer was a miserably cold and wet one here in Western Washington our stores aren’t what they’ve been in the past – we’ve no new pints of tomatoes or sauce, no broccoli/cauliflower/peas in the freezer, very few squash. Luckily, we have lots of meat, jam, pickles, herbs, carrots, leeks, garlic and potatoes stored here, easy access to bread, seafood, wine, milk, butter and cheese and a couple of year-round farmer’s markets 40 miles south in Seattle. This is likely to be our toughest Dark Days challenge yet. But we plan to persevere, and hopefully I’ll get down to a farmer’s market this weekend or next and stock up on a few more interesting ingredients.

In the short-term, we’re likely to cook a lot of traditional protein, starch, veggie meals. In the long term, I hope to get back to making something more creative. Of course, to do that I also need to get a new clamp for my pasta machine – I stripped mine and it’s jammed, no pasta until we get a new one.

Meal #1: Steak and potatoes
Our first meal was a dinner of perfectly cooked t-bone steaks from the steer we buy each year (split 4 ways with friends), cauliflower from a farm near Mt. Vernon, and baked russet potatoes from our garden. We used Mike’s mom’s method to cook the steaks – sear on both sides in cast iron on the stove, then into the oven for 8-12 minutes to finish. Perfection! That’s now our go-to method when it’s nasty and cold outside – no need to get the grill going. We topped the potatoes with local butter, sour cream and scallion greens from the garden.

I took what I thought would be gorgeous photos, but turns out that I didn’t put the memory card in the camera and so got nada.

Meal #2: Coho salmon on the grill

Toward the end of the summer our friend Ron (hi Ron!) found a local fisherman out of Kingston that fishes to order. A group of us got together and bought several hundred pounds of King and Coho salmon from him. Ron smoked some of it (OMG, so good) and the rest of our share we filleted, vacuum packed in 2-person servings, and put into our freezer (about 40-50#). It’s been a couple of year’s since we’ve had a stock of salmon in the freezer and I can’t remember why – I love having the option of salmon any night I’d like it.

Mike melted a bit of butter, mixed it with fresh parsley from the garden (a bit survived the November snow and then I put it in the fridge), homegrown garlic, salt and pepper. He brushed the salmon with it and grilled it until it was perfectly done. In the meantime, I roasted homegrown fingerling potatoes with butter in the oven and then tossed them with more parsley, salt and pepper. We pulled some of this summer’s green beans out of the freezer and gave them just a quick steam. Our only real exceptions for this meal were salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lemon on the fish and beans (organic, from California).