Sunday, September 16, 2012

Preparations



I was excited about eating locally, but I was concerned about the costs as well.  It had long seemed absurd to me that eating food grown and produced down the road could cost so much more than eating something grown and packaged (usually excessively) thousands of miles away.  So as I considered our week of local eating, budget was a necessary concern for me.

I wanted nothing to go to waste, so I got to work looking at recipes and menu plans that would allow me to fully utilize the ingredients we purchased.  In order to be effective at this, I needed to source out what food was available locally, and I needed to do some trial runs of new recipes.  

I made trips to our local orchard shop and found local honey, cider, fresh apples and peaches, and fruit wine.  I visited a farm stand and found fresh corn, garlic, shallots, and onions.  Another farm had squash, carrots, lettuce, chicken, bacon, ham, and even a late season harvest of honey dew melons.  I was also able to buy strawberries and blueberries earlier in the season that I had frozen for later use.  From our CSA we had potatoes, leeks, celery, parsley, turnips, green beans, tomatoes, and peppers.  And growing in our own backyard there were tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, cucumbers, oregano, basil, and thyme.  Then there was the local dairy with milk, cream, some cheeses, and butter.  And though many, many farms offered local eggs, we bought ours from a cooler on the side of the road with a handwritten sign reading "Eggs: $2.50/doz".  

The most difficult thing to source was grain, but after some research we were able to find both cornmeal and oats.  The oats were from admittedly further afield, but with a baby at home who could subsist almost entirely on oatmeal, this was a necessity for us.  




So knowing what I could get, I began to sample recipes.  I made cornbread and johnnycakes.  I made eggplant fritters (though I had to alter this recipe quite a bit to keep things local), honey ice cream, and ricotta cheese (though I used vinegar instead of lemon juice, and will need to find a local vinegar to use next week.)  

The cheese was easier than I expected.  Once it's heated and you add the acid to curdle it, you just wrap it in cheesecloth and allow it to drain:



I let it sit about half an hour, squeezing gently periodically:

And at the end I got from about four cups of milk, 2 cups of ricotta, and a lot of whey.  I wasn't sure what to do with the whey, though I am sure that there are probably tons of healthy uses for it and that there are plenty of people out there who will cringe when they hear that though I had every intention of putting it to good use, in the end I eventually fed it to the dog.  Hey, I'm sure the hound would argue that qualifies as "good use."





I also made yogurt and corn flakes.  More on those later but suffice it to say, both were relatively easy and pretty tasty too.  I made pasta sauce and polenta.  I blanched, peeled, and froze fifteen tomatoes from our garden for later use.  

We are almost ready. 

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