Day 1 Food

You may hereby disregard my earlier post regarding this morning's potential frost.  It did indeed warm up quite nicely.  I was a little thrown off, since I was planning that giant salad for lunch and then reconsidered.  Adding to my confusion, dear hubby and our friend Dan took our skiff out this morning to check and bait the lobster traps, and go surfing.  I thought they'd be pretty chilly after spending a few hours on and then in the water, so I wanted to make some lunch that would warm them up.  I started making a big cream of vegetable soup with ham.  Not to brag or anything, but it was a pretty gorgeous spread.

As luck would have it, as I prepped my soup and got the stock simmering, the sun continued to do its work and before long it was 75 degrees outside.  I should know the way it works around here by now. . .   Oh well, I decided to make a quick side salad of romaine, cucumbers, and tomatoes.  The challenge without any oil or vinegar was the dressing.  I've seen yogurt-based dressings in the grocery store so I minced some garlic and shallots, finely chopped some fresh basil, and mixed it with my homemade yogurt and sea salt.  It was still a bit thick, though, so I added a splash of cider and whisked it all up.

The guys returned from their boat ride and announced that the engine had been acting up and they hadn't been able to do both surfing and lobstering.  I'll give you one guess at which activity they chose . . .   Don't hold your breath for lobsters around here, but oh well - believe it or not, we get sick of them during the summer when they're coming out of the traps like water all summer.

We topped the soup with diced ham, chopped parsley, and a spoonful of goat's cheese.  

There are two things that I've figured out in our first day.  First, eating locally produces a lot less waste.  I have been filling our compost bin like crazy, but the only things I've thrown in the trash so far are the plastic bag that the chicken came in, and the paper towels I drained the bacon on.  Second, until we have our staples all sorted out, eating locally takes a lot of time.  Breakfast was a fairly quick prep since I made the cornbread yesterday, but the eggs and bacon created more dishes than we'd typically be doing on a Monday morning.  A normal lunch for us would be sandwiches or salad, but without any wheat we don't have flour to bake bread.  I could grind the oats down into flour, but they weren't cheap and remember, baby grommet loves his oatmeal.  So, making a soup and salad dressing from scratch probably took about an hour, as opposed to the fifteen minutes of throwing a sandwich together.  

We have our friends Dan and Ashley over for dinner tonight, and Dan is an awesome and generous chef so he is taking care of the veggies tonight, but I spent some time making a cornbread stuffing (I'll post the recipe later, it tasted awesome) and prepping a whole chicken to roast with root vegetables.  I'm lucky that we have our bacon fat, sea salt, cornbread, and fresh herbs all ready to go because that helps.  Dinner's currently in the oven and smelling great.  

 I didn't have any twine for binding up the chicken so I had to use the ridiculous skewer method but it works.  And, oh yeah - the honey ice cream came out awesome.