Why buy local?

This evening I had another experience to reinforce eating locally. I had a hamburger. I purchased the meat from Grassland Farm (Skowhegan, Me) which is also where we get our milk and eggs from. I didn't do anything fancy, no seasonings or such. I just made five patties from the pound of hamburg I bought and fried them in a bit of olive oil. I'm a fan of condiments so after tasting the very tasty burger plain I put it on some homemade bread along with a bit of ketchup, mustard and relish.

"ZOMG" I think is the modern expression. It was fabulous. It was tasty. It was local (which makes it mentally fresh) from a farm I believe in and know the owners of. It was also fabulous because I haven't had a burger in months. The cost means I buy it less, so I eat it less so I enjoy it all the more. Eating locally has constraints, it can limit you, but those constraints can also enrich your life. Or maybe this is just me seeing the glass as half full...and the hamburger as wonderfully tasty!

Garden Update

I'm woefully overdue for a garden update. So here it is (pictures from last week)



The zucchini are doing well. I ended up keeping three of the six that sprouted (didn't want them to crowd). They seem a bit skinny as plants and haven't really filled out, though to date they've put out three very nice zucchini that have made their ways into a cake and a frittata. So I shouldn't complain much.


The kid's garden is quite alive, with both plants and japanese beetles. The death toll is horrific but they seem friskier than ever. The tripods I built for Brenna's pole beans and Delanie's morning glories (or was it holly hock?) were woefully lame. Next year we'll just have these plants grow up the side of the house instead. That should provide more shade to us and give these guys somewhere to expend all that youthful energy.

My pride and joy: onions. I can't wait to chew on these. They're so pretty! Definitely need to grow more of these folks next year. I have a couple of friends/family that have offered up portions of their yards if I want to put a raised bed in and onions are one of those crops that I'm thinking of out sourcing. They grow so easily and have always seemed to do so well. We use a lot of them as well and they store fantastically.



Tomatoes next to the stairs, like many of our tomato plants are doing very well. I picked up the seedlings from a farmer at the Orono Farmer's Market and have been very impressed with the results. Speaking of seedlings the peppers are doing wonderfully as well. Never before have I grown so many types of peppers and I'm not sure I will again, but I happened to come across some great variety six-packs at a local organic greenhouse (on Forest Ave, off Stillwater):

The potatoes have settled into their new home along the fence. While I do not yet know how much is growing within the buckets I'm still very pleased about the current results. The portability and the space saving effects of this means of growing potatoes weighs heavily in favor of doing this again.



I've grown bush beans a few times and sorely underestimated the height requirements of pole beans, as already noted above. This next pic is from the back of the house which only receives a few hours of direct sunlight each day, but ends up with many hours of reflected light from a neighbors garage. The beans have done admirably back here. As noted above, next year this part of the house will hopefully be a wall of green beans and morning glories. I'm super excited for it :)



I've suddenly reached photo uploading burnout. I'll post more soon.

Pizza

There's a lot I don't know, but I'm excited about Alton Brown's pizza recipe. For one its a tasty crust and AB's notion of pizza is to 'decorate' a tasty crust...not bury it. So we add a bit of sauce, a bit of herbs, a bit of cheese (we like asiago and a bit of feta, but you can use almost anything). This is a bit of a revelation in the land of _____-Lover's pizzas where the crust is merely a vehicle for toppings. AB's pizza tends to be much lighter on the cheese and toppings which tends to make the 'pizza is healthy' idea a lot more plausible.

Something else that inspired me was the refrigeration step. After AB makes his crust he pops it into the fridge for 18-24 hours. It will change very little in volume during this phase but as AB points out, we're not looking for volume, but flavor. What I like is that you can make it ahead of time. In fact, as of this post I've used dough that has sat in the fridge (covered) for over a week! So you could whip up a batch on Sunday and then if you're feeling like a pizza night, you're all set.

Some notes: From the fridge, it takes 15-30 minutes for it to loosen up. Try shaping it too soon and it'll tear. Also, realize that the pizza cooks at 500 degrees and it takes a while for the oven to reach that temperature. So once you decide that its a pizza night, set your oven to 500 and take the dough out of the fridge. Half an hour later shape it, dress it up and cook it for 7 minutes. So all in all I'd say you can have pizza (on homemade crust) within 45 minutes.

The Grant Loaf

I've been using the basic no knead recipe I posted on here for a while. But sometimes I goof and I don't plan accordingly and I run out of bread. I've started thinking about how to deal with that. Flat breads can be done fairly quickly. In a couple of hours you can bang out a stack of tortillas or chapatis and they are awesome. But what if you want something more leavened? Well I came across the following recipe in a bread book labeled, appropriately enough, The Bread Book by Linda Collister and Anthony Blake. Generally I feel as though the book is a bit pretentious but it does have a number of good recipes in it and some helpful advice.

In any event, I was reading through some recipes and came across The Grant Loaf (pg. 44). Its a no-knead, one rise (short at that) bread. You mix the ingredients, put them in loaf pans, let them rise for about 30 minutes or so and bake for another half an hour. So within one and a half hours you end up with bread, not bad.

I modified the recipe from the start as it calls for just whole wheat flour. I've had trouble in the past getting my whole wheat bread to leaven enough (for me personally) and so I cut it 50-50 with unbleached all purpose flour. It was easy to make and came out really well. The next batch I'm going to try just using all unbleached flour, then I'll play around with some proportions. In any event, here's the recipe:

The Grant Loaf

4 - 4.75 C whole wheat flour
2 t salt
2.5 C lukewarm water (I just used cold)
2.5 t dry active yeast
1 t packed brown sugar or honey
2 greased loaf pans (I used butter)

Mix together 4 cups of flour and the salt in a large bowl. Mix the water, honey and yeast together in another bowl and let the yeast bloom (i.e. get all ready to munch on some flour). Once the yeast mixture is all nice and foamy dump it in the dry ingredients and mix. The start adding the reserve flour, about a 1/4 cup at a time, until you get a moist dough that pulls away from the walls of the bowl. Put the dough into loaf pans and cover with a moist cloth. Heat your oven to 400 degrees. Let rise until about a 1/2 inch from the top of the pan (depends: anywhere from 20-40 minutes) and then cook for 35-40 minutes.

Further Notes: I'm not sure what would happen if you let it rise further, something to experiment with certainly. As it is, the crumb is soft and moist and it has a pretty even distribution of gas pockets as you can see from the image.

Rain, Rain, welcome back!

So far my garden has only been water with rainwater. Either with rain falling from the sky or rain gathered during rain storms. Yesterday I used up the last of my reserves. I've been using it frugally by watering first thing in the morning and watering close to the base (i.e. not watering the foliage or the surrounding yard). My thought is that by being really careful with when and where I water I can get more to the plant and waste less. It seems to have worked. Despite the hot weather (sans rain) the plants have looked vibrant.

Today its raining and when you collect rain water you tend to look forward to the rain. So the garden is getting a good watering and my water coffers are filling up. I encourage anyone to start. Just grab some pails or plastic bins and put them under the eaves of your roof. You don't have to worry about spigots and screens etc at first. You don't even need rain barrels though they're nice. You just need something to hold the water and then some way of getting it from the container to your plants. While I certainly aspire to more clever (and larger) collection systems, start small and take advantage of that great stuff falling from the sky.

Damn Simple Smoothie

I'm posting this for posterity's sake. I make a damn good smoothie and I make them often (daily currently). So here's one take.

Damn Simple Smoothie

Some yogurt (I use the plain stuff)
Frozen Berries
honey (optional)

Directions: blend, then eat/drink.

I probably use a 2:1 ratio of frozen berries to yogurt, but I don't measure anything. This is one of those great foods where you can experiment. Feel free to add things like peanut butter, or if you use fresh fruit, add ice to make it thick.

Good food for this weather :)

Garden Update

Time for some pictures and comments on the garden, which is the first garden of this residence.



Its the second week of July and its pretty hot and humid up here in Old Town, Maine, but I planted peas late (June) but, I planted them in a really shady spot. This spot (next to our kitchen) gets 3-4 hours of pre-noon sun and then its in shade the rest of the day. As a result, I think, these peas are doing alright considering the weather. There are a few pods and I suspect that we'll have some to munch on by next week. Certainly not early, but its telling me what I wanted to know. Also, notice that I have quite the number of bean plants growing in there as well. I read that green beans would do okay with partial sun and indeed they are. I just need much longer canes as the vines have already outgrown the tee pees I set up last month.



Onto the potatoes. I haven't posted too much about these as I played around with them. Its time for a summary, though the real results won't be in until this fall when I tip the buckets over and see what kind of loot its born. I used buckets I obtained from a local bakery for a dollar a piece. They're not quite five gallon buckets, probably 3-4 gallon. Each bucket got a couple of eyes planted in about 3-4 inches of composted manure. The going was slow at first and I initially used straw to 'mound up' the potato plants. However, for two buckets I used compost (from the town) to 'mound up'. What I found was that the potatoes that were given the compost did better than the ones given straw. I'm a newbie so I can only conjecture but I wonder if the compost doesn't both hold moisture better and provide some nutrients while the straw does little except block light. So I tried switching some of the potato plants from straw to compost. They did much better. Once I saw that, I switched all of them over to compost. Now they all look lovely.



Lanie's garden (our oldest) is a flower garden which isn't very far from flowering. She's got nasturtiums, holly hock, and morning glories. I finally got around to putting up a tee pee for them to climb on.



That is, if the japanese beetles don't eat all them yet. They started showing up a few days ago and these folks will eat at night but are also more than happy to take an afternoon lunch in the sun. They crunch a bit when you squish them and they're smart enough to fly away once you start on your beetle killing spree. So we'll see who wins.

Snack food meets dinner

It has occurred to me (and I hope I haven't already written about this) but guacamole and salsa are just veges. Get yourself some decent tortilla chips and you've got some good summer eats.

It was hot today so I whipped up some fresh salsa (not perfect yet, but its coming along) and a really good guacamole recipe (five ingredients!).

So go ahead, snack, but make it a meal and enjoy some veges!

Our First Raspberries