  
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.
  
The Midwest:
El (Fast Grows the Weeds) embraced the food of her Lake Michigan ancestor’s and made pasties (short a, I think) for dinner last week. These meat and potato filled turnovers sported local and homegrown ground beef, side pork, potatoes, carrots, rutabaga, onion, celery and herbs with a greenhouse salad on the side. Thanks for reminding me of these El - I think I’ll make them this week!
Over at Wendy’s house (Midwest Green), they roasted a chicken and served it with homegrown potatoes and milk. It might have been beige, but I bet it tasted great  . There are plans for chicken soup with potato, onion, carrot and garlic in the works. Yum!
My Mom (Nordic Walking Queen) stole our menu from last week and made it with homegrown and local ingredients while on vacation skiing in Big Sky, Montana. Aside from breakfast ingredients, they had everything to make a dinner of roast chicken and wild rice. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of the homegrown chickens we took in the coolers on every road trip or driving distance vacation we ever went on. My folks even smuggled them to me in suitcases while I was in college and before Mike and I were growing our own. Mom - I think if you raise it and kill it, you can eat it for as many meals as you’d like. 
Always up for an easy dinner, Angela (Notes from a Country Girl…) used her left over rooster to make stock and then rooster noodle soup (ha!). But not one to take the too easy route, she made her own noodles! Go Angela! And don’t you hate it when you realize that you’ve gotten rid of something you now want? Drives me nuts.
Sara (Put your shovel…) picked up a tub-o-lard at the market recently, so this week she’s been experimenting with it. First up was crust for a spinach, mushroom, sun-dried tomato, zucchini, onion, garlic scape pesto and egg quiche. And then there were enchiladas with onion, ricotta, yogurt and pepper jack filling with homemade enchilada sauce. She even shared her enchilada sauce recipe - which I am so bookmarking!
The West:
Kristen (Arugulove) got her first Marin Sun Farms meat CSA shipment on February 11. For Valentine’s Day they braised beef back ribs and served them over homemade pasta with sauteed kale and cabernet. She even included the recipe for us - I know I’ve got some beef ribs in the freezer that would be perfect for this!
Are you a deep dish pizza lover? Then Anita and Cameron’s (Married …With Dinner) version adapted from Last Night’s Dinner is worth a look. Italian sausage, home canned tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, and more. Wow, I may just have to break out of our flat bread rut to give this a try!
Spring must be right around the corner! Kathleen (Our Life in the Country) found the first of the asparagus at the Saturday market! She simply steamed it and served it with barbequed flank steak smothered in sauce. Simple food and simple pleasures - the best part of being a locavore!
Sara’s (Prepping 4 28) had a tough couple of weeks, but she rejoins us with a dinner of quiche and salad. She decided to make her own crust and then added into it eggs, broccoli, carrots, spinach, bell peppers, cheddar cheese and milk. It was delicious. Up this week? Something to make use of the wheat berries she found at the market.
  
Annette at Sustainable Eats still isn’t feeling well, but managed to pull out quite a few eat local dishes this week despite her illness. She made bread sticks, breakfast shakes, pasta carbonara and another one of her delicious pizzas.
Aimee at Hippie Housewife made potato leek soup and homemade biscuits on her gorgeous new (lead-free) FiestaWare dishes.
Beth at Farming Mom has an encouraging garden report — her strawberries, daffodils and chives are all beginning to sprout. She made a dark days breakfast of home fries with potatoes and leeks, poached eggs and sprouts, along with nectarines that she canned over the summer.
Eugenia at Culinaria Eugenius made a spicy crab soup this week. She’s feeling that her reserves are getting a bit low, and had to be inventive with the soup using dried vegetables and pepper salsa to build the flavor of the soup instead of her fall backs of Old Bay and home-canned tomatoes. Sitting here in cold and rainy San Francisco, I wish I had some of this soup!
Laura at Urban Hennery tempts us with her beef stew recipe, and gives us her recipe. I’m going to be making this next week — sounds scrumptious.
Sarah at Eco Geek made a cheese souffle using local cheeses and eggs and an old family recipe. The souffle turned out beautifully, and Sarah even gives us the recipe. It’s a great choice for eating locally.
Beef stew is a winter standby around here, and last week was no exception. I’ve found that the best way to make beef stew is long and slow in the oven. Even better is to cook it for hours one night and then eat it the next with cream biscuits straight from the oven with a bit of local butter and honey.
This time around we combined grass fed beef from our 1/4 steer with local carrots, parsley and onions, homegrown garlic, tomatoes and thyme and WA red wine. Our exceptions were just a bit of canola oil for browning (need to render more lard), bay leaf, salt, pepper and a cube of organic beef bullion.
If you’d like to make beef stew but don’t have a perfect recipe, might I suggest ours? It’s pretty darn good.
*****
Beef Stew - Hennery Style
Stew Meat :: 2.5 pounds, cut into 1″ pieces, cleaning off fat as you go
Oil or Lard :: enough to brown the meat
Carrots :: 3-4 medium, diced big
Onion :: 1 large, diced
Thyme :: 3 springs
Garlic :: 4 cloves
Bay Leaf :: 1 dried
Parsley :: about 2 TBS minced
Diced Tomatoes :: 1 quart
Red Wine :: 1.5 cups
Beef Stock :: enough to cover the meat (I usually cheat and use water plus beef bullion)
Salt & Pepper :: to taste
Salt and pepper the beef at least an hour, and up to 24 hours, before starting. Preheat oven to 325 F.
In a dutch oven over med-high heat, heat the oil until hot. Brown the meat in small batches and then set it aside. Turn down the heat to medium, add a touch more oil if needed and saute the carrots, onions and thyme until just soft, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and continue sauteing until the aroma knocks you over, about 1 minute.
Add the beef back to the pot plus add in the bay leaf, parsley, tomatoes, red wine, beef stock. Bring to a light boil and then add salt and pepper to taste. Put the lid on solidly and put in the oven to simmer away.
Simmer at least 3 hours, until the meat is tender and melty.
Serve with Alice Water’s Cream Biscuits.
This weekend was enough to make us think that spring had come to Seattle. But alas, it’s just a bit of nice weather that will be replaced by rain again later this week.
We worked on the bathroom a bit this weekend, but we also just got out and enjoyed the sun. I pulled some winter weeds, raked beds and planted the first of the shelling and snow peas. I’m hoping to sneak some radish and snap peas in tomorrow while waiting for the farrier.
The chooks were out in their newly enlarged yard - they’ve discovered the garden and so have earned themselves containment - enjoying the sun and dirt baths under the cedars.
Cody and Whiskey enjoyed the sun as well - it was perfect for a bit of grazing, lazing and sniping at each other the way geldings do.
Ah, the joys of buying a house whose former owners fancied themselves to be contractors.
About a month ago we set out to re-caulk the tub in our master bathroom. After letting it dry thoroughly for a month (we got busy and the downstairs shower turns out to be not that bad an option) Mike went up to clean out all the caulk, bleach the tub and get ready to re-caulk. In the process he noticed that the grout around the window (I hate windows in tubs) was not only cracked, but separating, and that we had some cracked tiles in the wall around it.
As we looked at it we realized that there was a good chance that something very bad could be going on behind that tile. The window sill was tiled flat, not sloped, so water that got on it just sat. And the whole cracking and lifting issue made us really suspicious. So Mike decided to lift the tiles off the sill and see what we had.
And you know what we had? Some idiot tiled directly over the wood framing around the window, no waterproofing at all. And it was wet and rotty, as you would expect. So we went a bit further and found that they had put the tile on some type of tile board (not cement board) but hadn’t done any waterproofing before setting the tile. Luckily, while the backing board was damp throughout, the wet that penetrated into the actual wall seems to be confined to the area under and directly around the window. It could be so much worse but luckily we think the tile job is only 3 years old so it hadn’t had time to fail completely.
We’ll have to replace the insulation there as well as maybe replace a bit of framing. We’re also going to remove the window from the bathroom - I personally hate having a window in the shower and while it will leave the bathroom windowless, at least it won’t have the potential to leak anymore. Then we have to put up concrete board, fix the drywall around the outer edges (we hate drywall work), waterproof and re-tile.
The only positive in all of this? I hated that ugly tile alot and so am secretly glad that we have a reason to replace sooner than we would have otherwise. Unfortunately this project doesn’t get us any closer to a new laundry room or to re-doing the downstairs bath that is currently decorated as an outhouse (I kid you not) thanks to the same former owners. Oh well, luckily we’re handy and the year is young.
I was at Target the other night picking up a couple of things and found this great box. Just what I needed to get the seeds out of the shoe boxes they’ve been living in.
In it are all of this year’s seeds, alphabetized by type. It’s always amazing to me that a) I can fill a box that big with seeds and, alternately, b) that they fit in a box that small.
Monday I started broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, lettuce, parsley and chives in flats and put them under lights with heat mats out in the barn. Just 3 days later the first of the brassicas and lettuce are poking their heads up to say hello.
Up this weekend, it’s time to start tomatoes and peppers under lights and radish and peas outside. It looks like the weather is going to hold so I may try to sneak in a bit of prep work for onions, shallots, leeks and carrots as well.
I’m using a version of last year’s spreadsheet modified to reflect what we’re planning to grow this year. Have you set a seed starting schedule yet?
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