The End of Eating Local

Well kids, I’m done with the Eat Local challenge, and celebrated with a blackberry milkshake. (For those of you who don’t know how to make milkshakes, plop a scoop of ice cream, a splash of milk, and some fruit or chocolate or both into a blender and turn on)
For those of you reading this for the benefit of my anthropology class, what have I learned:

Eating local is hard, but definitely doable given a little creativity
Denying myself chocolate is not a good idea
It is ridiculous how so much of what we eat not only comes from far away, but isn’t even marked by where it came from
Eating local isn’t super accessible, and also more expensive. The process has yet to be democratized.
Food is important to me in more than just nutritional value, but also in terms of shared cultural experiences that a lack of food caused me to deny several times.


On that note there is a really interesting (but really long, if you’re looking for the meaty stuff the deep anthropology side is on page 6, and health on page 7, but to be honest the whole build up of the argument has a lot of merit) article on how we’re not interested in cooking but eating. Sort of, its also a critique of the Food Network.

Latkes in July

So I am not the most observant Jew, having gone to Shabbat a handful of times this past year and mostly for the free meals. But even I know that latkes are eaten for Hanukah, a holiday whose whole ideal is things covered in oil. But, as family tradition goes we’ve always been able to pick whatever we want for our birthday dinner and my younger brother always picked latkes for his July birthday. So it isn’t so strange to me to be cooking them on the hottest day Seattle may have ever had.


Having already had to cancel two cooking with friends dates, I was determined to make the third and prove that I could feed myself and others locally. Potatoes are local, onions are local, eggs and flour are local, and thank God oil is my exemption. My friend Brenna and I try to cook once a week to improve ourselves, and it was also Lindsey’s first time eating latkes.

Adapted from my Mother’s distracted advice
Latkes

5 larger potatoes (local)
1 onion (local)
3 eggs (local)
½ cup flour (local)
2 ½ inches zucchini (local)
Oil

Brenna grew up grating everything by hand, but if you have a food processor I’d highly recommend busting it out. Essentially you want to grate the potatoes, onions, and zucchini and put them in a large bowl. Beat the eggs separately before adding them in, and then also in the flour. Mix it all together, pour a significant amount of oil into a skillet and turn it on medium high. When its hot enough that you can drop in a potato scrap and it will sizzle, than you scoop thin patties (think medium pancake size) into the oil until they’re browned on one side. Flip, and cook through, stacking on a pan lined with paper towels. Place paper towels between layers of stacking your latkes, this makes quite a lot. We ate maybe 1/6 the batter between the three of us, and divided up the rest to take home.

All in all, you couldn’t really taste the zucchini (for those non-Jews of you, not a traditional component of this potato pancake), but it made me feel healthier. Sour cream and applesauce is the traditional (and very tasty) condiments, but I abstained from both for the eat local challenge. Which made me sad.

Pilaf

Yesterday I had a lovely meal of something that was like a tasty and not chemically conceived version of rice-a-roni. I finally pulled out my potlatch pilaf mix of grains which I had visions of filling roasted bell peppers with until I realized bell peppers were spendy, and cooked it up. Easy, yes. Tasty, yes. Would have been better with some ingredients I don’t have like mushrooms and chicken and tomato, yes.

Adapted from Bluebird Farms
Potlatch Pilaf

½ cup of rice/grain mix (if you aren’t shopping local you’re best bet would be a wild or long grained rice)
1 small onion
½ tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic
1 ¼ cup water
Basil, oregano, and salt to preference

Brown diced onion and rice in skillet with some olive oil, for 3 to 5 minutes. Then add in garlic clove finely diced and water. Simmer for 45 minutes. Take off heat and add basil, oregano, and salt. Let stand 10 minutes and eat.

As a side note, the anthropology of food class I’m doing this for had the excellent taste to feed us a delightful meal that I have no memory of most of the ingredients.

Honey, Thyme, and Blackberry Granita

I miss dessert also. Besides my cravings for butter and chocolate, I miss that right now? I’m not eating one of those five desserts I had last week. Tonight I had my friend Eunice, who is leaving sadly for law school in a whole different state for away next week, over. I haven’t been able to bake for her before because she doesn’t do dairy products, and granite seemed like just the thing on this hot summer day. Only I don’t have sugar, so I was pretty nervous about how this would taste.
Having been inspired by Fat of the Land, we went out and foraged some blackberries. Most aren’t ripe, but we picked the handful that were.

Adapted from Food Down Under, just barely
Blackberry and thyme granita

2 cups fresh picked blackberries (local)
¼ cup honey (local)
3 cups water (local)
2 sprigs thyme (local)

Wash the blackberries thoroughly, put them in a saucepan and pour honey over them. Then cover with the water and start to boil, add the thyme and keep boiling for a couple of minutes. Then pour into a glass pan so that the mixture is half an inch thick. Wait for it to cool down and then place in the freezer. Every half hour mix with a fork to keep the ice crystals coarse, granite is a sort of ice shaved creation.

Just a few more weeks and these will all be ripe!

I miss butter

Those blueberry muffins I made yesterday that I was kind of meh about? So damn good on day 2. Maybe the flavors just needed time to meet each other, but the two I had with breakfast next to my peach and blueberries were excellent, and filling enough to sustain me on my 18 mile bike ride I took this morning.

By the end of last night I was in desperation for the rest of the week. I had tried to make pasta, but something went wrong and my dough was just not going to make pasta. Frustrated I threw it into the oven and made plain scrambled eggs instead. The ‘bread’ obviously didn’t turn out that well, for to dense and hard to really eat as bread. So this afternoon I cut it into chunks and roasted it alongside some awesome varieties of potatoes and a clove of garlic. The ‘bread’ (nothing like what I made a couple of days ago that was splendid) was still pretty bad but at this point I’m much more wary about just throwing away food.

One of the fun benefits of the Eat Local Challenge is that I get to try a lot more different varieties of produce then is normally sold. These potatoes were just dug up the morning before I bought them, and the men assured me that there would be more variety of them next week.

Adapted from my Father’s advice
Roasted potatoes

5 potatoes (local)
Olive oil
Salt
1 clove garlic

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Rub potatoes with olive oil and salt, then put in oven for about an hour along with unpeeled garlic clove. Poke potatoes with fork to make sure they are tender, then take out and eat.

Obviously you can adapt this however you want, I put in a clove of garlic to use to flavor them since I’m not eating butter right now.

I miss butter. A lot. When I made brinner tonight (breakfast for dinner), I looked at these gorgeous pancakes and you know what I wanted? Butter, and syrup. I’m starting to feel like I’m on a diet which is not what I wanted.

But these pancakes? Still good stuff, made me wish I bought the bomb looking sausage at the farmer’s market, maybe next trip. I added in blueberries because that’s what I’ve been eating nonstop, but these would be excellent with chocolate chips as well. These pancakes were so thick that it was hard to cook, so maybe lessening the baking powder. Of course, this flour is a whole different beast to work with.

Adapted from allrecipes.com
Blueberry pancakes
Serves four

2 cups whole grain flour
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 ½ cups milk
2 tablespoons warm water
Blueberries (optional)

Mix the wet ingredients in a separate bowl, except the water. Then stir in flour, baking powder, and salt. Add water as needed to thin out batter.
Heat up skillet, grease with olive oil. Put batter down with a three inch or so diameter. Place blueberries on top of pancake, then flip and cook. And eat.

These are the rules: All parts of the food must be grown within 150 miles of where I’m out. My exemptions are olive oil, baking soda and powder, salt, and yeast.

The morning started out with some blueberries (Olympia) drizzled with clover honey (within 150, but not sure where, they were a gift) for breakfast. I need to make sure to buy milk, because just drinking water is a little sad for me right now. Obviously this needs no recipe.
After a shopping spree at the farmer’s market (flour! I have flour, thank God for Bluebird farms), I headed back home to start cooking.

Adapted from Allrecipes.com
Blueberry Muffins

1 ½ cups whole grain flour (local)
¾ cup honey (local)
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 egg (local)
¼ cup olive oil
¼ cup milk (local)
1 cup fresh blueberries (local)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix together honey and flour, then add salt and baking powder. Add in egg, oil, and milk, and finally fold in blueberries. Grease the muffin pans (I used olive oil spray), and fill about halfway. Put into the oven and cook for 20 minutes.
Since I substituted honey for sugar, I changed the recipe to cut down on the olive oil and milk, if you’re going to use sugar the original recipe would probably be better to follow. These are good, but not the best muffins I’ve had. They taste and look pretty healthy though.

For lunch, I chopped up a sweet onion and part of a giant zucchini from the farmer’s market, and threw it in the sauce pan with a little olive oil, basil and oregano (both fresh from my garden). Not really worth a whole recipe, but pretty tasty. It’d have been good with some salt too, but I was trying to use the less non local ingredients that I could.