One Local Summer-week 4: Western Region

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Oregon, Washington & Colorado:

Kimberly is predicting rain for the 4th, and she’s probably right. In the meantime, she’s getting her cooking out of the way early in the day. On the list was a loaf of no-knead bread, a roasted chicken and roasted asparagus and cauliflower. The chicken, asparagus and cauliflower were combined with a salad of farro, minced garlic scapes and chopped hazelnuts for a perfect hot weather dinner.

Here at our house dinner was a simple affair of roast chicken, boiled new potatoes, steamed broccoli, salad and homemade strawberry ice cream.

With a week filled with family parties and barbeques, light fare was the name of the game at Monica’s house. Burgers with eggs mixed into the ground beef for juiciness, lettuce, oven fries and red cherries. Sounds like the perfect menu for the weather around here.

JM had a busy, and hot week, but still found time for local salads and fried egg and cheese sandwiches. Instead of having a single special meal to point to, “it was “just” something like “oh hey look, local foods fully integrated into my life.” Hooray!”

Making up for lost time, Lisa had her first all local meal of the challenge this week. Her heat wave appropriate spread included strawberries, raspberries, red peppers, cucumbers, nectarines plus homegrown lettuce, spinach and radishes. Not to mention all the great insight into what she’s been eating the last 4 weeks.

Joan made use of her new Ivy Manning cookbook and made spicy minced pork in lettuce bundles, watercress, snow pea and shiitake stir-fry and asian slaw with peanuts. All shared with friends while traveling.

Even though she started the week with other plans, Donna’s meal this week sounds great to me. She made chili and cornbread with butter and honey. You know it’s good when the kiddo is begging for more!

Ellen got a quick recap up before leaving for vacation. Recent meals included steamed greens with tofu, homemade tortillas with eggs, radish and marinated artichoke salad, eggs and pancakes and more.

*****

California and Alaska:

I got some help this week from one of my favorite food bloggers, Anita, as I’m a bit swamped. She covered California and Alaska (below). Thanks Anita!

Tracy in San Diego starts her week musing about her favorite comfort food: Grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato. So you can imagine what happened when she “found this amazing raw Gouda, made at a creamery not even 60 miles from my house.” She whips up an elegant (and beautiful) tartine for this week’s challenge meal: open-face Gouda sandwiches on French bread, topped with arugula and tomato.

Up north in the Sacramento Valley, Taryn laments her inability to make this week’s One Local Summer meal look as good as it tastes: “I couldn’t make the swiss chard and basil pesto look like anything other than a green pile of yuck,” she tells us. No worries: Her supper of pesto-laced potatoes with sour cream, a simple salad, and a sliced plum for dessert sounds tempting.

At Anita & Cameron’s house, wacky weather and wildfire smoke whipped up a case of the kitchen doldrums. Their planned OLS meal was so “ugly and odd”, but they had another option in their back-pocket: spicy San Francisco-style Sloppy Joes, with bacon-laced cole slaw on the side. “We had a perfectly fabulous — and 100%-local — quick summer meal. Not glamorous, but definitely delicious.” (recipes included)

Green Bean in Silicon Valley has the brilliant idea of whipping up breakfast-for-dinner for her challenge meal. Borrowing Melinda‘s popular yogurt pancake recipe—using homemade yogurt, bonus points!—with a combination of local and fair-trade ingredients. “We topped it off with farmers’ market strawberries, blueberries and blackberries,” she tells us (causing her commenters to lick their screens.)

Dolores in Northern California’s East Bay turned her 100-mile radius finds into “a meal every bit as satisfying as anything I’d seen come out of the Hell’s Kitchen I had playing in the background...” A fillet of butterfish with a strawberry-peach-avocado salad, and roast potatoes with onions. You have to love this kind of simply elegant supper—and you have to admire that she got it to the table in less than an hour!

Further east in the Bay Area, Allison treats us to an al fresco feast: Mount Diablo chicken thighs with grilled veggies. Hope you cleaned your plate, because she’s got a 100%-local dessert, too: Grilled Apricots! “The apricots were freshly picked by me about 2 hours before grilling for about 12 minutes and drizzled with honey.”

Our northernmost participant, Kim finds it hard to get the challenge started: Summer starts a lot later up in Anchorage. “The fish are late and running in low numbers, the days have been overcast and the nights cool which have the farms producing much more slowly than normal.” Kim reports. But she managed to pull together a delicious meal of spaghetti Alfredo, topped with some wild-harvested fiddlehead ferns!