Dark Days: Pork chops, no applesauce

Saturday, March 01, 2008

I really haven’t been doing a lot of cooking lately.  My husband and I have seemingly been passing the plague back and forth, and no one wants to cook when your nose is running or your throat is scratchy.  I did manage to eek out one meal this week, and it was pretty much all locally grown with the exception of salt and pepper and pre-made garlic marinade.

Country Time Farm pork chops spent some time in a garlic marinade and then baked. Mother Earth cremini mushrooms were sauteed in some of the butter I made and Tuscarora Coop yellow carrots were sliced up and boiled.  And finally, I barely cooked some of the spinach that I picked up from Fair Food Farmstand.

And people say eating seasonally in the Winter is hard!  It was delicious!

Tofu Challenge: Chinese Five Spice tofu and veggie stir fry

Friday, February 29, 2008

I can’t believe it’s the last day of February - and the end of the tofu challenge!  As someone who does not routinely eat a lot of tofu, I feel like I learned a lot this month.  Mostly, I learned that I really like tofu...and for the first time ever, I can actually see how people could want to eat and be satisfied with Tofurkey for Thanksgiving.  Not that I intend to give up being a carnivore, but I get it.

Late last week I made a fried tofu dish inspired by a recipe in This Can’t Be Tofu, a book recommended by Allison (as a testament to how crazy busy the end of the month has been, I’m only getting around to posting it today).  It was absolutely delicious and almost entirely local.

This dish could not have come at a better time - there was a bag of local hydroponically-grown yellow bell peppers in my fridge that were getting ready to go.  I purchased them a few weeks ago at the Fair Food Farmstand.  It seems very wrong to have bell peppers in the middle of Winter, but I could not resist at least trying them.  While I can say they were absolutely not as good as Summer bell peppers, it was still lovely to have them and know they were locally grown.

In addition to the bell pepper, I included a locally grown onion, white button mushrooms, spinach, and Chinese Five Spice pressed tofu from Nature Soy [a local tofu manufacturer].  The only thing not local: the tomato, hot pepper flakes, salt and pepper, curry powder, soy sauce, and cumin seeds.

The tofu was cut into cubes and then pan-fried, and then mixed with the other stir-fried veggies.  Delicious!

Dark Days and Tofu Challenge: chili

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Like just about everyone else I know, I’m recovering from some sort of plague.  After spending many hours this past week riding the couch I finally managed to cook a little something.  Between my cold and the cold outside, I wanted something filling and comforting.

Mikaela told me last month that freezing tofu will change the texture and make it more meat-like.  I froze one of the blocks of Fresh Tofu I picked up from the Fair Food Farmstand and thawed it.  I thought it would make a nice meat substitute for chili.  Admittedly, I had my doubts - it seemed rubbery as I was tearing it up.

Oh ye of little faith!

The chili turned out to be really great and almost entirely made from local ingredients.  Aside from salt, pepper, and a small can of tomato paste, that is.  I used a pound of pinto beans from Margerum’s (Clark Park Farmer’s Market), a bag full of frozen corn from last year’s CSA, dried parsley from last year’s garden, and a couple jars of plum tomatoes I canned last year.  And, of course, locally made tofu...which, as Mikaela promised, really does have a meaty quality.  In fact, if I didn’t know it was tofu I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

On a day like today, it was an excellent lunch with a heel of sourdough bread from Le Bus.  Yum!

Dark Days: Lamb and Bread Pudding

Friday, February 08, 2008

The Fair Food Farmstand had sort of a disaster last week - the freezer broke and all their meat had to be sold off at wholesale.  I’m a thrifty kind of a girl, so I managed to snag a good supply of meat, including a pack of lamb chops from Bixler’s Country Meats.

The lamb ended up in a marinade of local garlic, stone ground mustard, soy sauce, and red wine vinegar overnight.  It was definitely warm enough last night to grill outside, but we recently added a cast iron grill pan to our kitchen stash.  Apparently, I still haven’t quite gotten the knack of it yet, because the kitchen filled with smoke and we had to open up a window and put a fan in the kitchen to keep the smoke alarms from going off!  Luckily, the lamb was perfect - rare lamb is the best!

I served the lamb with wax beans from last year’s garden, and parmesan and butternut squash bread pudding.  The bread pudding was so good - the bread was Le Bus challah bread that was about a week old, butternut squash from last year’s CSA that had been roasted and frozen, Hendrick’s parmesan, and local eggs and milk.

Dark Days: It’s the sausage, stupid!

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

I can’t say enough good things about Griggstown Quail Farm chicken sausage.  The white wine sausage is good, but the broccoli rabe sausage is tremendous!

Lancaster Farm Fresh sent some really great looking spinach over to the Fair Food Farmstand recently, so I served the sausage with lightly cooked spinach.  There’s something so awesome about fresh spinach at this time of the year.  It makes me want to get out in the garden and plant some seeds!  Granted, I probably could - it’s supposed to be 70 degrees here tomorrow!

I also had a couple of purple carrots on hand from Tuscarora Organic Growers Coop.  I used a vegetable peeler to slice the carrot into thin ribbons and then gave them a quick blanching.  Sadly, the carrots turned from purple to light brownish-purple.  But the cooking water was bright purple!

wintry, local food

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Obviously, eating local food in the winter takes a little more perseverance and planning than in the summer.  The frequency and geographical locations of farmers’ markets may not be as profuse, but Philadelphia is certainly fortunate that there is still a diversity of local food available amid the winter cold.  I’m still working for some of these local-food organizations, and I’ve done some investigation into other sources, so here are my thoughts!

Let me talk about Winter Harvest first, partly because I work for Farm to City but also because I’m posting this entry today primarily to remind everyone that it’s the last day to place your orders for February.  Winter Harvest is a winter buying club run by Farm to City, and I’ve already described the way it works.  (The ordering window closes TODAY at 5 pm, and if you don’t have an account already you can use PayPal to deposit some initial money.) There are literally hundreds of items—herbs and bread and coffee, almost any kind of meat cut desired, goat dairy products, and even some vegetables like potatoes (of course) and baby greens.  And I’m sure you can make your weekly Thursday pick-up at one of our dropsites that’s convenient for you!

(Photo from Farm to City.)

Then, there are still two farmers’ markets that continue year-round in Philadelphia; both are on Saturdays, 10-2.  The larger of the two is in West Philly at Clark Park, 43rd & Baltimore— and it is a superb farmers’ market anyway, in a wonderful neighborhood!  (Not that I am at all biased by living within a couple blocks.) I know the market manager, and I asked him recently about what farmers are still coming during the winter.  There is an Amish farmer with baked goods and noodles and eggs and such, Keystone Farm with apples and meat, Landisdale Farms with a variety of beautiful certified-organic vegetables and beef, Slow Rise Bakery, Margerum’s with the previously-discussed dried beans and a large selection of herbs & spices, Maury Sheetz with vegetables, Rineer Family Farms with roots and salad greens and (new!) beef, and Betty’s Tasty Buttons fudge.  Every other week, there is also a farmer there with chickens… So, as Naomi has described before, clearly there’s still plenty of local food to enjoy these days!  The other market is at Fitler Square, 23rd & Pine, which I think has two farms.  I think one is called Highland Orchards—can anyone confirm this?  They grow a variety of crops in greenhouses, but also may buy some vegetables to supplement their variety.  Rineer Family Farms is also there over the winter, before moving back to Rittenhouse Square when it opens!

And of course there’s the Fair Food Farmstand, still conveniently open Tuesday-Sunday at the usual Reading Terminal hours.  There are lots of apples and potatoes, mushrooms, citrus sourced through a PA co-op from family farms in Florida, a full selection of grass-fed meats and dairy, and treats like maple sugar and fudge and biscotti. 

Dark Days: Deep freeze

Thursday, January 24, 2008

I mentioned recently that I’ve felt compelled to really dig in to my freezer to eat up all the fantastic vegetables I froze last year.  There’s a certain amount of guilt attached to wasting things that I either grew myself and/or spent time to preserve.  There’s really only four months or so left until Spring crops come available, and I want to face the season with an empty freezer.

There was a Delmonico steak from Natural Acres in my fridge, so I dug around in the freezer to see what I could find.  As it turns out, I had a big bag of Delicata squash from my CSA share that I roasted with local honey and then froze, as well as some really lovely Swiss chard from my garden.  I even remember the day that I froze the bag of Swiss chard - it was in September and the Swiss chard patch was going crazy!

A little deeper in the freezer was a small bag of red bell peppers from the CSA share that were roasted on the grill.  I froze them instead of preserving in oil because I wasn’t sure how long the peppers would last in oil.

I grilled the steak (just barely - I like my beef to moo), heated up the squash in the oven, and sauteed the chard with some chopped local garlic and a bit of olive oil, and at the last minute seared the roasted peppers.  Along with a slice of the bread and a little bit of the butter I made on Tuesday, it was a really great Winter meal and a good use of my frozen vegetables.

Dark Days: Bangers and Mash…sort of

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

The last couple of potatoes in my kitchen were on their last legs.  I grabbed the mandoline and sliced them up real thin, planning a potato galette.  I love the look of a galette, the potatoes all spiraling from the center.  It’s pretty.  I’ve never had much luck doing a skillet galette, but I continue to try.  This time was no exception - I melted a little local butter in the bottom of a skillet, layered in some potatoes followed by a sprinkling of dried parsley from last year’s garden and little chunks of butter and a bit of salt, and kept layering until I ran out of potatoes.  45 minutes later (on low heat), the potatoes on the bottom were nice and brown.

And this is where it always goes wrong: the flip.

I seem to be incapable of flipping a galette without completely destroying it.  No longer pretty, I did manage to brown the bottom of the flipped galette...and it still tasted good.  But it wasn’t perfect.  I guess I’d rather have a good tasting galette than a pretty galette.

Pretty or not, it was the perfect accompaniment to the fantastic chicken sausage with white wine and herbs from Griggstown Quail Farm in Princeton, NJ.  Even my husband loved them, and he usually turns his nose up at anything other than pork sausage.

Dark Days: frozen treasures

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Now that it’s January, and both garden and CSA programs are looming, I feel pressured to use up all of my preserved food from last season.  For dinner last night, I hauled out a local chicken from Godshall’s Poultry in Reading Terminal, and then rooted around in my chest freezer for ideas for side dishes.  Every time I roast a whole chicken I’m compelled to make mashed potatoes, but I knew that my freezer would hold some kind of alternate treasure.

As it turns out, I was right - one of the first things I pulled out of the freezer was a back of roasted butternut squash.  Hmm.  Chicken and butternut squash.  Good.  And then I pulled out a bag of broccoli.  It certainly would make for a nice color combination, so I went with it.  Both have good, strong flavor, too - perfect to stand up to the citrus marinated chicken I planned.

This past weekend at the Fair Food Farmstand, I snagged about half a dozen of the organic oranges from a family farm in Florida, knowing that I wanted to use them for marinade.  Those oranges are really the only non-local part of the meal.  The other marinade ingredients: garlic from Landisdale Farm, bay leaf from my garden, and a bit of salt and pepper.  After the chicken was done roasting, I combined the pan drippings with the leftover marinade and reduced it, mixed it with local butter for a great gravy for the chicken.  There’s something really fantastic about fresh citrus in January, and what’s better is that even though it’s not local, I’m still supporting a small grower.

The broccoli was one of the last things I received in the CSA program last year.  I simply reheated it with some local butter.  The roasted butternut was also from the CSA program.  I heated it with some buckwheat honey from Linvilla Orchards and local butter.

It was a really great mid-Winter meal, and I felt great about getting to use some of my freezer bounty!

Dark days: the perfect burger

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Sometimes you just want a burger.  And since the weather has been so incredibly wacky and totally unseasonable this week, we felt compelled to grill.  With a couple of Angus burgers in hand from Buck Run Farm, I looked around to see what else I could throw on a burger.  Some of the provolone from Cherry Grove Farm was the perfect cheese for it - it melts perfectly!  And I had nearly forgotten about the bag of cute, little baby shiitake mushrooms from Oley Valley Mushrooms I purchased.  They got a quick saute in local butter and went on top of the burger.  The bun was a roll from Le Bus.

And the perfect finish: a bit of my homemade catsup.

It was the best burger I’ve had in a long time!

Coincidentally, I discovered something of interest when I was looking around the Buck Run Farm website.  They only have a license to sell Angus burgers...but if you want steaks or a roast or something, Buck Run is willing to sell you a market-ready steer or part interest in one.  I’ve heard of farmers doing this in other places, but I didn’t realize that any local farms offered this.

Dark Days: A well-balanced meal

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

I recently discovered the wonders of vegetarian caviar - it’s called Cavi-Art.  In no way is Cavi-Art local, but ever since my order arrived, I’ve been looking for ways to use it.  And that’s how I ended up building a meal around a baked potato - simply so I could top the potato with a spoonful of sour cream and a dollop of the not-caviar.

It ended up being my Chriskwanzakah Eve meal (my second Dark Days Challenge meal of the week!) and it was scrumptious!  A baked potato with the aforementioned fixings (not local: sour cream and the Cavi-Art), along with a Natural Acres Porterhouse steak with a bit of olive oil and rubbed with salt, pepper, rosemary, and thyme (not local: olive oil, salt, and pepper), balsamic roasted cauliflower with parmesan (not local: balsamic vinegar, salt), and spinach in lime juice and olive oil (not local: lime juice, oil).

Even though I was fixated on the potato, it was the cauliflower and spinach that stole the show.  I used a Romanesco cauliflower from the Fair Food Farmstand and the spinach was from Livengood’s.  The cauliflower is so pretty, and the spinach was just amazing - so sweet and fresh-tasting.  It has convinced me to try growing some spinach next Winter.

Christmas Dinner

My family also celebrates a secular Christmas holiday, and when there are no kids around (such as my nephew, who is Jewish), we are more minimalist still.  With just my parents and M and me, we had a lovely quiet Christmas dinner (about 1 p.m.), pictured below.  You can see a leftover from my mother’s British upbringing--the Christmas cracker.  We have them every year, and they make a loud POP! and provide bad jokes, a toy, and a paper crown.  (Hit joke this year?  Why is an elephant big, wrinkly, and grey?  Because if it were small, smooth, and white it would be an aspirin… Groan...)

Dinner was local lamb chops, bought through our Farmto City Wintershares program; another version of my crazy what-local-foods-do-we-have-in-the-freezer dish that included local mushrooms, lima beans, cranberries, and corn; non-local potatoes (we brought local ones for my folks to use, but my Dad had already started cooking the non-local ones).  On the right is a glass of sparkling cider.  Yum.

A side note about meat:  For the last two years, M and I have been vegetarians at home, and starting in March of this year became full-time veggies (or Cranks, as they are known as in England).  However, we were left with two holidays that seemed unimaginable without meat--Thanksgiving and Christmas.  For Thanksgiving, of course, there was turkey, and while neither of us had a serving at dinner, we both had a pinch (literally) afterwards.  But Christmas has always meant lamb in my family (oddly, my relatives who own an organic sheep farm in Wales told us they were having turkey today!).  So we told my parents we would eat lamb if we could get it from the Wintershares program.

In the end, however, I was amazed at how little I really needed it today.  I was a pretty respectable meat-eater up until two years ago (partly due to a high premium being placed on protein when you have cystic fibrosis), and when I decided to go (forgive me) whole hog this March, I never thought Christmas could be Christmas without lamb.  I’m not opposed to eating meat on principle.  I think I have a moral obligation to know the animal had a good life (closest to what it likes best--i.e. grass for cows) before it died, and I believe I have a moral obligation to think of meat as a rare treat, and not an every week, let alone every day, event.  However, I guess I’ve just lost my interest.  Ah, well.  I wonder what other people have thought about this?

Merry Whatever You Celebrate!

Dark Days: Kale and Sausage with Wine-Cooked Lentils

Sunday, December 23, 2007

There’s been a package of Eliza’s Lamb Sausage from Jamison Farm in my freezer for about a month or so now.  I’ve been hemming and hawing over what to use it for and after seeing some tempting Lacinato kale (also known as Dinosaur kale) yesterday at the Fair Food Farmstand, I decided on skillet dinner of sausage and kale with some of my precious Margerum’s lentils and some local onions cooked in red wine.  I just cooked it up for lunch with some Hendricks parmesan shaved over the top and, despite the fact that it is unseasonably (and kind of creepily) warm outside today, it was the perfect Winter weekend lunch - hearty and warming and delicious!

Everything in my lunch was local except the red wine and salt. 

Yes, it’s December and the choices (at least in fresh produce) aren’t as plentiful as the choices in, say, July...but for all of that, I’ve been having some really great local meals lately.  The grits I had a few days ago were excellent, and the soups have been wonderful.  I have a dinner for tomorrow night planned that is going to be great.  Initially, when Farm to Philly started, some of the writers were concerned they wouldn’t have much to post about - I haven’t found that to be the case at all!  I’m sure that come April I’ll be craving a decent tomato, but the range of locally grown foods available fresh right now and the all the foods that many of us have put up for the Winter...well, I feel really lucky.

On a related note, I highly recommend the Lacinato kale - I bought enough so that I’d have enough for my lunch and for a big old pot of soup.  The taste is outstanding!

Dark Days: Hominy grits with leeks and butternut

Friday, December 21, 2007

I got home from work last night and was all alone - my husband was finishing his holiday shopping.  The idea of making anything I wanted was almost too much for me.  In the kitchen I weighed my options.  And then my eyes fell on that bag of locally grown grits I bought a few weeks ago.  Well...why not?

Having never cooked grits before in my entire life, I winged it - I boiled up a few cups of water and a cup of milk, threw in some salt and parsley, then a cup of grits and waited to see what happened while I stirred like a maniac.  Miraculously, it all cooked up rather nicely.  And while it was, I sauteed up some sliced leeks and cubed, roasted butternut squash in butter.  As a last minute addition to the grits, I stirred in some sharp goat cheese. 

It turned out to be a delicious combination - goat cheese grits topped with sauteed leeks and butternut squash and finished with a couple curls of parmesan and a splash of balsamic vinegar.  Best yet, aside from the salt and vinegar it was all local and in season.  The grits were from Lancaster County (purchased at Kauffmann’s at Reading Terminal Market); the leeks, butter, and milk were from the Fair Food Farmstand; the butternut is a leftover from my last CSA share, the parsley was dried from my garden, the parmesan from Hendricks Farms, and the goat cheese from Shellbark Hollow.

Dark Days: Winter Vegetable Chowder

Sunday, December 16, 2007

I practically live on soup in the colder months.  That should be obvious - this is my second Dark Days Challenge meal of the week that was soup...and in truth, both were pots of soup, so I’ve been eating both soups all week.  The pot of soup I just made is my secret weapon soup - it’s always good and uses up whatever Winter vegetables you have on hand.

In my case, that was carrots, turnips, parsnips, and celery root (all picked up from the Fair Food Farmstand).  The recipe calls for four cups of any Winter vegetable.  I’m not sure beets would work, but any other root type of vegetable probably would.

The other thing I really like about this soup is that it gives me a chance to forage in my own back yard - it calls for five crushed juniper berries.  My juniper bushes are full of berries right now!

For all the ingredients in this soup, only a few aren’t local - the salt and pepper.  That’s it!  The parsley, thyme, and bay are from my garden, the vegetables were picked up at the farmstand (except the potatoes, which are leftovers from the last CSA share), the milk and butter are local, the flour is local Daisy flour, I used local raw milk cheddar, and the bread is from Le Bus.

2 c. milk
3 parsley branches
1/4 tsp dried thyme
2 bay leaves
1/2 onion, sliced
10 peppercorns, slightly crushed
5 juniper berries, slightly crushed
2 Tbsp butter
2 large leeks, chopped
4 c. chopped winter vegetables [I used turnips, celery root, and carrot
3 potatoes, peeled and chopped
2 small bay leaves
2 Tbsp chopped parsley
salt and pepper
2 Tbsp flour
slices of sourdough
shaved parmesan cheese

Put milk, parsley stems, thyme, 2 bay leaves, onion, peppercorns, and juniper berries in a saucepan; bring to a boil, remove from heat and let steep while cooking vegetables.

Melt butter in a soup pot over low heat.  Add veggies, 2 bay leaves, parsley, and two pinches of salt; cover and cook for two minutes.  Add flour; stir well.  Add five cups of water; boil.  Lower heat to simmer; cook 20-25 minutes until veggies are fork tender.  Strain milk into soup pot and toss the solids.  Season with salt and pepper.

Place a slice of bread in the bottom of a bowl, sprinkle with shaved parmesan, and ladle soup over bread and cheese.

A word of warning: this is some of the most filling soup ever!