her able hands

I’ve finally mastered the grilled boneless chicken breast. I know, you’re saying what’s the big deal? Everybody can grill a chicken breast. Well, no they can’t. I’m somebody and let me tell you I have wasted many a boneless chicken breast in my day. But this time I decided to butterfly the breast to make it thin, then watched it like a hawk tracking a dumb baby rabbit from a low branch of a tree.

Quick cooking over medium heat and many a flip—all the while brushing with whatever kind of vinegar-y salad dressing I had in the fridge (not local)—made decidedly tender chicken. We were all happy with this one. I almost always cook chicken breasts too long and end up with rawhide that’s burnt to a crisp, all the while afraid that it’s still pink in the middle and going to give us all a hopping case of the runs. It’s happened.

So this was some of the yummy, local Amish raised chicken with no hormones or antibiotics. Not pasture raised, but a big step up from Perdu, let me tell you. Do you remember that advertising campaign a few years back where they tried to convince us that the reason their chicken was so yellow was because they fed confined, debeeked, wing-clipped biddies marigold petals? Yeah. Had nothing whatsoever to do with antibiotic poisoning.

I also grilled a bunch of San Marzano, Bloody Butcher (not half bad grilled) and Juanne Flamée tomatoes along with a bunch of quartered Pattypan. I sprinkled a handful of chopped basil and parsley over the top of it all. Oh, how I love me some Pattypan. I’m going to do a whole separate post on the virtues of this under-represented, funky little summer squash.

I knew the boys would want some carbs, so I made a partially local dish to accompany the meal. It was 94 in the shade that day, so no way in hell was I attempting my first batch of egg noodles, even though they would have gone perfectly with the rest of the ingredients. So the pasta was an away ingredient.

But just look at these Chard stems and Cipollini Onions! I am so psyched that my Chard leaves have finally started to grow big like elephant ears—the stems thick, radiant and Pantone-specific in their color tones. And the flavor is incredible. Sweet, tender, almost peppery.

I added the leaves after the stems and onions cooked down a bit, then dumped in the cooked pasta, crumbled some local goat feta and some not-local canned black olives. Finished it off with some kosher salt and cracked pepper. I exercised a bit of self-discipline and only had a small serving of the pasta, mostly the greens, along with my chicken and veggies. It was a truly delicious meal, eaten in front of the boob tube while we watched the second half of Casino Royale after the bean fell asleep.

Before we know it, we’ll be eating root vegetables and stewed meats, early in the evening with the cold and dark night air pressing up against the house. Our late night summer suppers will be a brightly-flavored memory and something we’ll look forward to again come February when we’re so sick of baked beans and beef stew and mashed rutebega. Hard to believe we could ever get tired of anything so flavorful, but I think that’s the power of February. Just like August has the power to make me long for a good snowstorm, far away from fresh tomatoes.

Summer is almost over, but the Earth, she keeps spinning us through time. Bringing us around to face the many seasons of ourselves again and again. I’m so glad you all are on this ride at the same time.

Technorati Tags: One Local Summer, eat local, garden, harvest, summer, August, gratitude

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On Saturday morning, I went out to check on the Pattypan plants that are limping along in the lasagna bed and there were five huge open blossoms…each with a sleeping bumble bee in it. Actually, one blossom had TWO sleeping bumblebees. At first I thought, holy mackerel, these plants are poisonous and are killing the bees, but when I touched one flower the bee stirred, looked around and then burrowed in deeper. Then thoughts of a long, hard winter crossed my mind, but that’s probably unrelated and the bees were likely just enjoying the shelter of the tunnel-like blooms overnight. Bumblebee motel. So weird that there were six bees, though, all checked in to rooms next to one another. Were the two sharing a room a couple? Or was that just a one-night-stand?

I thought about running in to get the camera, but I was enjoying a few minutes away from the Lila Show (Mo-ooom! Watch what I can do! No! Watch it again! No! Just watch what I can do!). I didn’t want her to bring that show outside where it was relatively peaceful for five minutes. Then a chicken started in, belting out the Holy Crap This Egg Is Splitting Me In Two song like Ethel Merman so I just went back inside to make a grocery list.

I missed OLS week 8. I cooked a local meal, but forgot to take photos and forgot to post about it. We had local Amish raised chicken breasts on the grill with the local Maple BBQ sauce, my potatoes sliced thin and layered with my onions, slices of tomato and local Amish farmer’s cheese, all wrapped up in tin foil and cooked on the grill. I sliced a few pattypan and grilled those, and steamed up some haricot verts. It was a delicious, fresh meal with just nonlocal salt and pepper.

I’m falling behind with a bunch of things. But I’m exercising some and I’m going to let that count as progress.

I’ll leave you with a couple of garden shots. This is a Bright Lights Chard, taken before we got all of that rain. I tend to let the Chard fend for itself with the straw mulch and maybe an occasional watering, unlike the tomatoes which I watered almost every day in late June and all of July.

Poor thing’s looking pretty limp there. But then we got several days of rain, I think a total of almost 6 inches.

Looking pretty great now. And I finally realized that I have to stop planting my chard like inner-city row houses. I thinned them down quite a lot and gave a good 8 inches between plants and now the leaves are growing big, ruffled and strong.

Technorati Tags: bumblebees, garden, critters, one local summer, eat local

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I missed last week’s post, and that was a meal of grilled pizza with non-local cheese, and a bunch of local veggie salads.

Last night my boss had a big party at his gorgeous home and I brought along my nearly 100% local grilled pizza. I’m so inventive!

I made a ragout of eggplant, onion, garlic, tomatoes, basil and oregano to put on the crust made from local flour, then topped it all with more of that Cleveland mozzarella. Only things from away were the yeast, olive oil, salt and pepper.

I’ll try to come up with something a little more interesting next week. But I’ll be hard-pressed to come up with anything more delicious!

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ETA: My blog was broken, so this never showed up last night, which means I’m late again for the round-up. Ah, well… At least I fixed the problem.

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This weekend is filling up with hefty to-dos, so I decided to get my OLS meal made last night before I escaped out the door of my messy house to the harmony singing group I joined. That was probably a mistake. So was setting about the project without a plan, a recipe or the necessary enthusiasm for the project. People, I was on faulty auto pilot and the meal reflected that sorry state of being.

I knew I had to use the grass-fed ground bison from the farm in Mahoning County because it had already been out of the freezer for two days. I browned it up in the skillet, then added some onion and carrot (from the farmers’ market) to the drippings, and then some kale (market). Now what? Rice is CA, so that’s out. We could just eat it plain. Ew. I dug through the cabinet and saw that I had a box of spinach whole wheat spaghetti from about 400 miles away. OK, I can deal with that. I wasn’t about to start making noodles even though my coop order arrived and I now have 15# of organic flours from under 100 miles away (grown and milled). That’s next week’s project, and not on a day I have to get out the door and try to carry a tune.

So OK, I boiled the pasta, under-cooking it because it was looking kind of gloppy right from the minute it hit the hot water. Yeah, that didn’t really help. I don’t know about you, but a huge part of my ability to enjoy eating anything has to do with the texture, and this meal was dead to me before I even tasted it. When I dumped the noodles on top of the meat and veggie mixture, I felt a little gaggy. This was going to be dry and mushy at the same time. I spooned in half a container of Ohio sour cream, praying it might help it go down—but doubting it had that kind of power. It’s only sour cream, after all.

Just in case you were wondering, it’s never a good thing to call the family to the table with the disclaimer that “dinner’s ready and it’s nasty. you’ve been warned.” Just try to get a four year old to eat a meal she’s just heard called nasty by the cook. She sure enjoyed that big bowl of Gorilla Munch and milk.

The pasta flavor was beyond bitter. The mix might have been just fine atop a bed of buttered rice, but these noodles were utterly and completely disgusting. I’m thinking the chickens are going to turn their beaks up at the leftovers. I know I sure as hell won’t be taking it for lunch today, and I noticed Chris didn’t touch the container for his lunch either.

Better luck next week?

The breakdown:

Pasta: 400-ish miles
Ground Bison: 35 miles
Onion, Carrot, Kale: 30 miles
Sour Cream: 50 miles
EVOO, Paprika, Salt & Pepper: away
My pride: away

After reading that, you might be wondering where the success in my headline comes from. Well, I didn’t have any main ingredients from CA, which is a huge improvement. Also? I managed to sing harmony to several songs last night, even the final round of Amazing Grace. That was so cool.

Technorati Tags: one local summer, locavore, eat local

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After a distracted trip to the farmers’ market this morning with Lila, who insisted we walk sans stroller and then proceeded to throw herself around on the devil strip in front of the market stalls, coming awfully close to falling into traffic, I managed to cobble together a fantastic local meal.

I’ve been craving Borscht, and snagged 2 bunches of gorgeous beets, some shallots from the beautiful garlic growers, and bunching onions from a new vendor. I used a recipe I found on Martha Stewart’s website. I like to add green beans to the soup, just for the last ten minutes of simmering, so they’re still a bit crunchy. Unfortunately, due to the above distraction, I forgot green beans, and my snap beans are only just beginning to flower.

I ran out to the garden and picked through the Vermont Cranberry bushes, full of speckled bean pods just about ready to pick, until I found a fat handful of young beans, easy enough to slice thin and toss in at the last minute.

They got added along with some dill heads to complement the giant bunch of dill fronds I snipped from the herb bed by the kitchen door. I know, it looks as if I snipped the heads off of neighborhood children in this photo. Borscht preparation leaves the kitchen looking, well…dangerous.

Soup isn’t quite enough of a dinner, so I thought I’d do a little summer squash, a salad and some garlic bread. I seem to have been in a yellow-to-orange mood today.

I accidentally bought only yellow patty pan and not green zucchini (except for the ginormous one I snagged for .50, with the intention of making more yum zucchini fritters). I also thought I’d make a caflouti for dessert, and accidentally bought white (yellow) cherries, instead of the black cherries that were sitting on the table right next to the bland looking white ones. Nitwit.

So yellow, yellow, yellow. The woman who sold me all of my yellow foods (also 3 yellow tomatoes and an onion, the hell?) said her friend cubes the patty pan and sautées it in olive oil until lightly browned, then drizzles it with honey and chopped fresh mint. That sounded interesting, but I didn’t have any local honey. I should have a jar because last Saturday I bought a small one at the market, but again with the Lila distractions, I paid for it but walked away from the table without it. That was naturally on my list of things to remedy today, but with her throwing herself under a bus every five seconds I just couldn’t focus.

I do, however, have a small jug of local maple syrup, which I drizzled on the squash, then sprinkled it with fresh thyme. It was kind of gross and we all wound up dumping a glop of the Raita I made for the soup on top of the squash, which helped immensely. It was scrumptious in the soup, as well.

I needed salad, and believe me when I tell you I searched high and low for some local lettuce, but I could not find a single leaf that came from anywhere but California. My hearty greens have all gotten much too big to make a salad with, so I caved in on that and bought the high mileage lettuce. My colon thanks me.

I made the garlic bread with a gifted loaf from Rafael at the market. What an interesting guy. He says he missed the bread he grew up on in Spain so much that he planted a small wheat field, and mills his own flour, then bakes bread in his kitchen and sells it at the market. He gave one to us because I’m writing the guide. Too sweet. I melted some Amish butter from Wooster, Ohio, chopped some of my young garlic, basil and oregano, then spooned it all over the loaf that I halved lengthwise. Put the two halves together, wrapped in foil and warmed while the caflouti baked. It was most excellent for sopping up the dregs of the soup.

The jury was out on the caflouti until about five minutes ago when I got up from the computer to answer the phone and spooned out a few bites. Oh. My. Yum. It’s not the prettiest thing, so I’ll spare you the yellow photo. Let’s just say that I need to hurry up and finish this post so I can go have a proper dish full.

Borscht:
Shallots (40 miles)
Onions (3 miles)
Cabbage (30 miles)
Chicken Stock (made with local, Amish chicken –40 miles– and local veggies)
The same chicken shredded
Beets (10 miles)
Carrots from the garden thinning (0 miles)
Green Beans from the garden (0 miles)
Dill from the garden (0 miles)
Red Wine Vinegar (away)
Salt & Pepper (away)

Squash (30 miles)
Maple Syrup (20 miles)
Olive oil (away)
Thyme from the garden (0 miles)

Salad:
Lettuce (away)
Cukes (30 miles)
Grape Tomatoes from PA (75 miles or so)
Dressing was Newman’s (away)

Garlic Bread:
Bread (10 miles-wheat grown and baked!)
Garlic (from the old garden, 14 miles)
Unsalted Amish Butter (40 miles)
Basil & Oregano from the garden (0 miles)

Caflouti:
Eggs from my hens (0 miles)
Milk (organic but away)
Vanilla (away)
Cointreau (away)
Sweet yellow cherries (30 miles)
50/50 organic flour (400 miles…next week I hope to have the PA flour)

It’s weird to have my garden just hanging out in this green stasis. Some ripe fruit would be grand, but I’m thinking it’s going to be another couple of weeks before we have any realistic harvesting going on.

Technorati Tags: eat local, locavore, borscht

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