Picking at the Farm

In my constant quest to "put up" enough food for the winter, I got my friend to come with me and Colin (my son) to a local Pick Your Own farm to get food to freeze/preserve. We made out like bandits!

We went to Larriland Farm in Howard County. The place looks like a postcard. Rolling green hills, rows upon rows of fruit laden trees, and a cute red barn to boot! Since we brought the babies, we had to decide how to best spend our picking time. While Emily fed Jack his cereal, I had my first experience picking beets. I thought you'd need a shovel to dig up beets, but when they are ready to be harvested, they pop up out of the ground. I picked a 5 lb bag in about 5 minutes.
Next, we picked blueberries. Colin was so helpful-he kept grabbing the branches and holding on to them while I picked the berries.
I picked the raspberries while Emily stayed in the car with the air on for the babies. Then it was off to the red barn to pick up some of the produce that the farm offers. I left with the 3 lbs. of blueberries, 1 lb of raspberries, 5 lbs of beets, 2 lbs of potatoes, a dozen ears of corn, 4 lbs of plums, 3 jars of honey from bees kept on the farm, some edible flowers, and some chocolate mint (chocolate flavored plants!). All for less than $70. What a bargain!
Then began the hard part. I spent the rest of the day freezing, preserving, and making jam. I froze the blueberries and the corn, and canned the plums (I forgot to ask if they were the freestone or semi-clingstone variety. Alas they were not, so I spent a lot of time cutting out the pits). I made jam from the raspberries. The recipe called for equal parts of berries and sugar (4 cups each), but I've used up my last sugar, so I substituted honey for the sugar. I only used half of the amount of sugar and I cooked the jam for twice as long. Some websites suggested using pectin if using honey instead of sugar, but I couldn't find local pectin. So, we'll see how the jam turns out. It might turn out to be more like raspberry sauce than jam. I'll test it before giving it away as gifts.

A good day.

Running out of non-local ingredients...

I feel like I spent the whole day in the kitchen yesterday. As always on the weekends, I was trying to use up all of the veggies left from the CSA share before we get the new stuff today. So yesterday, I made zucchini bread. That used up the last of our sugar and chocolate chips. For lunch I made Alu gobi with my purple and green cauliflower. It was definitely the most colorful Alu Gobi I've ever seen.

We had friends over for dinner, so I made Swiss Chard and Chevre Philo pockets (instead of spinach and feta Spanakopita) for an appetizer. For dinner, it was seared corn salad with the last of our canned beans, sauteed onions and sweet bell peppers, with a little Chipotle Pepper for spice.

So far, I'm loving the culinary challenge of using only local ingredients. We're getting more zucchini today from the CSA, so I'm thinking I'll modify the zucchini bread recipe (from http://smittenkitchen.com/2007/07/summer-of-the-bats/) to the following...

2 Loaves

3 eggs
1 cup applesauce or yogurt (instead of vegetable oil)
1 1/2 cups honey (instead of sugar)
3 cups grated zucchini-I used 2 cups this time, but I think I could add more...
3 cups whole wheat flour
3 teaspoons cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup dried local fruit

Preheat oven to 325 degree (lower temp because of hone)

Grease and flour two 8×4 inch loaf pans.

In a large bowl, beat the eggs with a whisk. Mix in applesauce and honey, then zucchini.

Combine flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, baking powder and salt, as well as dried fruit

Stir this into the egg mixture. Divide the batter into prepared pans.

Bake loaves for 45 minutes, plus or minus ten, or until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean.

We'll see how it turns out...

Once I run out of baking powder and baking soda I can always make zucchini yeast rolls.

Why I love CSAs and Farmers Markets

Before we decided to go all local, Eric and I had joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) group for the spring/summer. Basically, every week we pick up a box with fresh, organic fruits, veggies, and herbs. Whatever is ready for harvest is what we get. So we have tried some things that I never thought I would cook, including beets, garlic scapes, and swiss chard. Sometimes we get quite a lot of the same thing for a few weeks. Lately it's been zucchini.

Zucchini really is a marvelous vegetable that I never really appreciated before. In the last couple of weeks, I have grilled it, roasted it, sauteed it, put it in salads, and served it with pasta. I haven't pickled it yet, but that's the next thing to try. Last night I sauteed shredded zucchini with finely chopped onion and served over whole wheat pasta with toasted walnuts. I still have one zucchini left for this week, what should I do with it tonight?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am obsessively hoarding away food for the winter. It takes WAY more fresh fruits/veggies than you would think to get 6 pints of the canned good. So in addition to our CSA share, we also go to the local farmers' market in Silver Spring, and to farms in our areas (my favorite is Heyser's Farm on New Hampshire) to get massive amounts of the food that we want to pickle/preserve. Today we picked up some purple cauliflower, more nectarines, micro-greens, organic free-range local chicken, and an italian style goat cheese (the farm where the goat cheese is made is about 115 miles away in Garrett County, MD, but I didn't know that until after we bought it)

A note on goat cheese-I never liked it, but I had only tried some very sharp varieties. If you have the same problem, try Chevre; it's so light and creamy and very mellow.

So for lunch today I made a potato and onion frittata, green beans sauteed with garlic and tomatoes, and a micro-green salad with crumbled goat cheese and pecans.

The only problem so far is that I'm starting to seriously crave a Hershey's chocolate bar...

Why I'm A Pickleidiot

Let's start out by being honest - Emily is a much better cook than I am. She doesn't think that's true, because she uses recipes a lot and I tend to cook freestyle, but the fact is that I'm good at making a dozen things that way, and she's good at making pretty much anything she tries. But even though she may disagree about who the better cook is, she's smart enough to be wary when I try something new (she learned that in a disastrously failed experiment involving a soup that included both beer and cinnamon, which I conceived after a number of beers).

Anyway, so I made pickles. Regular pickle spears. No big deal. Cut the pickling cucumbers, put them in the sterilized jars, make pickle juice with vinegar, sugar, and a few spices, pour it over the cucumbers, put on the lids, and then boil them in the water bath canner. Simple.

Except I'm an idiot. So, instead of using narrow-necked jars, I used wide-necked jars, and the pickles floated up to the top. I kept pushing them down. And then they would float up. Down. Up. Down. Up. And somewhere in there I began to feel very, very stupid. So I just put them in the canner anyway, sticking up above the juices. Now, I'm not sure whether they will last less long this way, but erring on the side of caution means that we'll have to eat them within two months, instead of saving them for the winter. Which sucks, and it wasn't until today that I realized the problem was the type of jars I used. Emily, meanwhile, immediately assumed that they would be mushy and terrible because, well, she remembers the cinnamon beer soup. Luckily, they turned out to be pretty darned good.

But I'll have to do the pickles over again. Luckily, pickling cucumbers are really cheap.

Preserving

One of my first objections to this whole scheme was "What the crap are we going to do in the winter?" Don't get me wrong, I love winter squash and potatoes, but it seems like that is going to get old really quickly. My husband's answer was, "well, we'll just make our own preserves."

I've been trying to clean up my potty mouth since my son was born, so I won't write down what my first thought on that was. But, the more I thought about it, the more it sounded reasonable. After reading so much about how poisonous BPA is in almost everything food is packaged in (including the lining of canned goods), I was ready to think about alternatives.

Once I was sold on the idea of canning, I went a little nuts. After many trips back and forth to my hardware store and local farm, I came home laden with a 10 lbs of tomatoes, 7 lbs of nectarines, 5 lbs of plums, and 9 lbs of Lodi apples. After scrutinizing the USDA manual, I leapt right in with canned plum sauce and sliced nectarines. The next day I made cranberry and red onion relish and tonight I am making Applesauce.

So, for the last 3 nights after my son goes to bed around 8, I have been peeling, pitting, slicing, simmering, and canning. A note to all those who decide to try this for themselves- buy nectarine and peach varieties that are "semi-clingstone." I made the mistake of buying a variety that was not, and spent about 2 hours just working on getting the stones out of the nectarines. Not Fun!

So now I have filled a whole shelf of my pantry of home canned products and I obsessively check and re-check each can several times a day to see if the seal is still good. I just can't believe that I can actually make something that can keep for a year in my closet! I feel like a squirrel hoarding away for winter.

Here are some pics of me making applesauce from Lodi Apples. This variety is harvested from mid-July to August , cooks quickly, and has a nice tartness. Very delicious applesauce!

The Experiment Begins

The Experiment: To only eat foods grown, manufactured, and produced within a 100 mile radius of our home in Burtonsville, MD for at least 1 year.

Why: I love fresh, seasonal food and a culinary challenge. My husband is an environmentalist who worries constantly about global warming. We can't afford to buy a Prius, but this is one way we can reduce our carbon footprint.

After we decided to go whole hog with this idea, we started to research on how feasible this will be and what kind of sacrifices we will have to make. We bought the book, Plenty: Eating Local on the 100 Mile Diet, by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon, we found out where all of the local farms and farmers' markets are, and we downloaded the USDA manual on preserving and pickling (http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/publications/publications_usda.html).

Sure, there are a lot of things that we can't have, but I'm sure we'll manage. We can't have sugar, but we'll use honey. We can't have OJ, but we can have all of the Apple Cider we want.

No Coffee and no chocolate-that might prove to be a serious problem.

We modeled our rules after those we found in the book, Plenty.

• All of the food we eat at home must be grown/made locally, and organic whenever possible.
  
• All of the ingredients in the food we buy must be local
• We can eat out at restaurants occasionally, and at friends' houses
• We can use all of the non-local food we currently have in the house
• We can use spices and tea (I absolutely refuse to give up tea)

So, we're off!