Ratatouille!!

When my husband and I were living on a sailboat and running study abroad programs for high school and college students, everyone on the boat took turns cooking.  My signature meal to cook was ratatouille.  It was perfect for many reasons.  First, it filled what I sometimes viewed as a gap in our diet onboard by providing us with so many vegetables.  Second, it met every dietary preference we'd seen onboard: vegetarian, gluten-free, and dairy-free.  Third, it's a one-pot meal.  I usually served it with a side of rice and parmesan, but it was fine on its own, too.

So when I surveyed our garden after breakfast and found it overflowing with eggplants, I decided on ratatouille for lunch.  I served it over grits and topped it with goat's cheese.  Mmmmm good.

Here's what I put in it - this is recipe is by no means precise and is completely driven by what was available.

1 diced shallot
3 cloves minced garlic
2 small bell peppers
2 small eggplants, diced w skin on
7 diced tomatoes
1 diced summer squash

I sauteed the shallot, garlic, eggplant, bell pepper, and squash in a bit of (yup, you guessed it- ) bacon grease.  Next added the tomatoes and let the mixture simmer down.  Added a pinch of sea salt and dried herbs.

The grommet had some honeydew melon and some ham from Tendercrop Farm, but what he really enjoyed was the grits.  He LOVED the grits.

And you know what's for dinner? Fresh steamers, clam chowder, and salad - plus, I'm off to pick up some more hard cider.

Jonnycakes!

The little grommet did not sleep well last night.  He was up often and inconsolable.  The only thing that would finally got him back to sleep was a little local eating of his own . . . if you catch my drift.  But then he'd be up again and crying.  Being a first-time mom, I of course assume I've done something wrong, or apply adult emotions to him and draw the conclusion that he resents having no say in the eating local challenge.  Realistically though, I think he is just teething.

Anyway, I only mention this because when we got up this morning (the time we got up at 7, I mean - not the time we got up at 1 or 3 . . . ) I wanted something quick and easy for breakfast.  I used up most of the yogurt yesterday so that couldn't happen, and I didn't want to do boiled eggs because I think at the time I thought that would waste too many eggs, but now this reasoning seems ridiculous and I wish I had.

Instead, I made jonnycakes.  

1 c. cornmeal

Pinch of salt

1 c. boiling water

1/2 cup milk

Fry like pancakes in bacon grease or butter.  Serve with butter and maple syrup.  

They were good but they take a long time to cook and the grommet was still fussy so I had a steady stream of jonnycakes flowing his way, and minimal cakes for myself.  In fact, by the time I'd cooked three jonnycakes, grommet had eaten two, plus two slices of honeydew melon.  So I ate while I cooked and had three with maple syrup.

Oh, and in case you're wondering why I was only feeding myself, dear hubby and Dan took the skiff out first thing to catch the low tide and dig clams.  Actually, Dan sat in the boat and drank his tea while hubby dug.  It's not that Dan is lazy, though; he just doesn't have a clamming license so his spectator status is a legal necessity.  

The guys are excited to make some clam chowder later today.  I have no clue what I'll whip up for lunch.  Maybe some polenta and pasta sauce.  It's supposed to rain.  

Dinner was good

Cornbread Stuffing - I made this up as I went so it's a work in progress, but I have to say it was good!

2 slices bacon
1/2 c. red onion, diced
1/2 c. celery, diced
1 c. tart apple, diced
2 c. cubed cornbread
1/4 c. milk
Chopped fresh herbs
Sea salt

Fry bacon until crispy.  Set aside to drain and reserve grease.  Fry onion, celery, and apple until tender in 1 tbs bacon grease.  In a bowl, toss together cornbread and sauteed vegetables with apple.  Add milk, fresh herbs (I used thyme and oregano because that's what I had) crumbled bacon slices, and a pinch of sea salt.  Bake in chicken.

I prepped the chicken with some bacon grease and a simple rub of sea salt, thyme, and oregano.  I added chopped potatoes, turnips, garlic, pearl onions, and carrots to the pan and salted these.  I roasted the whole thing for 1 hr at 375 then 20 minutes at 300.

Dan made a salad with grilled corn, chopped kale, basil, cherry tomatoes, and feta cheese with a tiny bit of leftover dressing from lunch.  The whole meal was awesome.

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.

And so it begins

It is cold this morning.  Granted, this comes after months of humid, sticky heat and my body has likely sweated its way into a state of expectation wherein I wake up every morning fully prepared to spend the day seeking shade and cool, precious air conditioning.  So, of course, when I'm overheating and thinking about food, I think fruit, salads, and cereal.

Well, go figure, when I woke up this morning it was 42 degrees out, so there goes my plan of enjoying a bowl of cornflakes with the last of the honeydew melon harvest.  Not what I want when I'm checking to see if there's frost on the tomatoes.  A little dramatic, yes, but point taken.  The menu is out the window already.

Breakfast this morning was cornbread with butter, fried eggs, and bacon all served with a side of cider (slightly fizzy because in my naivety I didn't realize that a week in the fridge was a little long for fresh-pressed, unpasteurized cider) and coffee (not local, our guilty pleasure).  It was good, very good even.

Our little grommet seemed to enjoy the cornbread and a bit of egg, then spent the rest of breakfast time siphoning homemade applesauce through his teeth.

I think dear hubby was a little surprised when he sat grommet down in the high chair and reached into the cabinet for some rice puffs only to have me verbally slap his hand away.

"Not local."

"He's eating local too?" Quizzical expression given - maybe mommy is taking this pioneer lady thing a step too far?  We'll see, but I didn't make 32 oz of homemade applesauce for nothing . . . .

We saved the bacon fat for cooking with later.  I had planned a big salad with potatoes, boiled eggs, and bacon bits for lunch and I'm thinking it will warm up enough by then to make this feasible.  Only problem being, I hadn't thought much about salad dressing and I don't think bacon grease salad dressing sounds very good.  I do have some of the yogurt I made a few days ago, so here's hoping I can work some magic with that.

In any case, the first meal is over, the family is warm and happy.  Only complaint so far - this eating local thing sure seems to create a lot of dirty dishes.

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. 

The fat

I routinely drive by fields of sunflowers around here.  Of course, when it came time to actually think of where I had seen these fields, I couldn’t remember a single one specifically, but I know they are everywhere.  

This is why it came as a surprise to me when I couldn’t find local cooking oil.  I knew we’d have butter, and I knew we’d have bacon grease, but what about something lighter?  Certainly there are not olive trees around here, but some kind of vegetable oil?  Something for dressing my salad? Aha - I knew what I could get - sunflower oil!   

Turns out, no I couldn’t.  I found two different places doing it in Maine (see here and here) but none widely distributed, and certainly nothing within a few hundred miles.  This was one thing we’d have to do without for the week.