Tennessee Locavore

Wordless Wednesday

It's Fall, isn't it?

This is the time of year when a food lovers thoughts turn to apples, potatoes, roast pork and gorgeous winter squashes.  After all, Fall starts tomorrow and all the food magazines are publishing gorgeous spreads of food featuring hearty autumn fair.  It's time to make rich stews and bake apple pies and snuggle up with your significant other in thick cable knit sweaters in front of a roaring fire.  

If I tried snuggling in front of an roaring fire right now, I'd pass out from heatstroke.  I live in Tennessee and while the temperatures have cooled down some, days in the low to mid 80s and evenings in the low to mid 60s don't exactly cry out for chili. In fact, right now is when our gardens tend to be producing the most.  If our plants have survived the dog days of summer, the cooler temperatures are encouraging our tomatoes to actually set fruit.  And the lack of high 90 degree heat actually encourages me to get back outside and reclaim the garden I gave up a few weeks ago.  The peppers are full of blossoms and the second crop of cucumbers and squash I planted are starting to set fruit.

Even when the leaves have turned, it doesn't mean our gardens stop producing.  I get tomatoes well into October and I've even heard tales of some crazy people (present company excluded of course) who have draped their tomatoes with plastic clamped together with large binder clamps and managed to keep their tomatoes going well into November.

The farmers markets are still full of summer produce.  You can find everything from okra to watermelon.  Peppers are still in abundance and the only thing that seems to be in scarce supply are cucumbers and summer tree fruits.  Apples are available and sweet potatoes and winter squash are starting to appear.  Jerry's got new cornmeal and sweet Fall broccoli will appear in a few weeks.

September is the month I really focus on getting a lot of foods preserved and put up for the coming winter.  I don't have air conditioning in my kitchen and although I do have to attempt some canning in August, standing over a steaming kettle is not my favorite thing to do when it's blazing out.  I end up freezing a lot of tomatoes whole and dealing with them when it's a little cooler.

My favorite way to use those tomatoes that are piling up in the freezer is in Roasted Tomato Sauce.  It's a great way to take a mountain of produce and reduce it into a concentrated sauce that's my favorite pasta sauce in the whole world.  I pressure can mine but it also freezes well.  The long cooking concentrates the flavors and caramelizes all the wonderful sugars in this sauce.  My husband has been known to can it himself because he says if I do it, I end up eating half of it before it's even canned.  

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to run Office Depot for some (cough, cough) office supplies. I hear the binder clips are on sale and everyone can always use more binder clips, right?

Roasted Tomato Sauce

First off - you need to understand that this recipe is very flexible.  None of these quantities are set in stone.  If you have tons of red peppers, use them!  If you want a sauce with a lot of garlic flavor, add lots of extra garlic.  You're also going to need to be flexible with time.  If you start out with frozen tomatoes, it will obviously take longer.  If I have a lot of tomatoes, as the sauce cooks down, I add in more frozen tomatoes to make more sauce.  This slows down the cooking process as well.

Heat your oven to 425 degrees.  I take a large baking or roasting pan and fill it full of tomatoes. Some of these are fresh and some of them are tomatoes that I threw in the freezer to deal with later.  I added three onions that were peeled and quartered, a few sweet red peppers that I seeded and cut in half, four Big Bomb hot peppers that were seeded and approximately 25 cloves of garlic - separate the cloves but you don't need to peel these.  Then drizzle on 1/4 cup of olive oil.  Put it in the oven.

This batch contained 10 pounds of tomatoes:
 

I couldn't fit all the tomatoes in at the start so I added them as the sauce cooked down.  I usually stir this sauce about every 30 minutes.  After a couple of hours, the sauce looks like this:

As you can see, the skins are getting very brown.  Keep stirring every 30 minutes.  This sauce is going to reduce quite a bit.  Those ten pounds of tomatoes and other vegetables ended up reducing to about five cups once it's been pureed.  When it's done, it will look like this:

As you can see, there's very little juice in the bottom of the pan.  I cooked the above pan of sauce for 4 1/2 hours.  Let the pan cool for about 30 minutes or until you can handle it without burning yourself.  You want to put it all through a food mill on the finest setting.  This will take all the seeds and skins out of your sauce and puree all the vegetables together.  Once you've put it through the food mill, make sure to stir the sauce thoroughly.  If you don't have a food mill, you could use a fine sieve and press it through. 

The sauce you've just made is very concentrated.  For two servings of pasta, we usually use around a 1/4 cup of sauce, diluted with pasta water.  

Now that you have this stuff, what do you do with it?

• Toss with pasta and some of the pasta water to thin it out a bit and serve.
• Saute some eggplant, red peppers and zucchini until done.  Add sauce and thin with pasta water.
• Thin it out with a little bit of milk or cream.
• Thin it out with red wine and add some more herbs to it.
• Soak some diced, sun-dried tomatoes (I use ones I've marinated before drying) in a half cup of hot whole milk.  Puree in the blender and add to roasted tomato sauce.
• Puree it with a little bit of canned tomato and use it as a pizza sauce.  Or just thin with a little bit of water and use as a pizza sauce.

I pressure can my sauce in quarter pint jars.  This is not a tested recipe so I don't recommend following my example but I follow the recipe for pressure canning meat sauce in the Ball Blue Book.  This sauce cooks down so much that freezing is much simpler to do.  I just tend to have stuffed freezers this time of year so I can it to save room.

For printable recipe, click here!

Facing the cruelty behind my cooking

The Clinch River is one of my favorite places in Tennessee. Sure - It's a creation of TVA and that in itself is a strike against it. But it's such a beautiful place that I find even that can't diminish my love for it.

TVA or the Tennessee Valley Authority has a very mixed heritage in our area. During the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley was a very poor area, even by Depression Era standards. TVA projects displaced over 15,000 people, covering over towns, native burial grounds and land that had been in families for years. On the other hand, TVA provided jobs to an area that was surrounded by poverty. Marcus's grandfather was an electrician at Norris Dam and a few other TVA projects. TVA reduced the devastating floods in this area but they also destroyed pristine areas when they built projects like the Tellico Dam. The creation of the Tellico Dam ruined one on of the best trout fisheries in the area when they dammed the Little Tennessee, and land that TVA acquired through eminent domain at a very low cost is now being sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre to developers.

No matter what my feelings towards TVA are, Norris Lake is here to stay. The Clinch River starts in Southwest Virgina, near Tazwell. The Clinch and Powell River meet up at Norris Lake, formed when Norris Dam was built in 1936. Norris Dam is the first dam built by TVA and at the time was constructed in a modernist style - considered quite advanced and controversial at the time. It really is an impressive sight, especially at dusk.

Because the dam is 285 feet high, it impounds a large quantity of very cold water. This cold water is the perfect temperature for trout. In the 80s, TVA constructed a weir dam that speeds the river back up about two miles from the dam - this adds oxygen to the water and makes it even more habitable for trout.

On a hot summer's night, not many things are more refreshing then walking alongside the tailwaters. Not only is it beautiful but the rushing, cold water kicks up a cool breeze, even on a hot night. During the summer, there's usually fog that begins to form as sunset approaches.

Norris State Park, Cove Creek Wildlife Management Area and Chuck Swan State Forest all preserve areas around the lake. We've seen groundhogs, hawks, osprey, deer, skunks and foxes around here. 

On Friday, Marcus and I went blueberry picking at a farm nearby and stopped by the river so Marcus could fish for a bit. It was one of those days when the fishing alchemy was perfect and in the hour we were there, Marcus quickly caught several brown trout. Two were too small to keep and one was too big so they were quickly let go. Marcus asked me if we should keep the other ones to eat and I told him he could make that decision. It was a cop-out. If he decided to keep them, I wasn't responsible for their death. But even doing that made me feel bad - I could have asked him to let them go and he would have.

I'm a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to facing the cruelty of my cooking head on. Sure, we buy the majority of our meat from local, humane producers and we eat a lot less meat than the average consumer. But I don't feel guilty when I eat that meat. I don't feel like I personally caused that animal to die and it's because I'm so insulated from the process.

I think there's a lot of truth to the saying that if slaughterhouses all had glass walls, we'd be vegetarians. Most of us have insulated ourselves from the cruelty of our choices. We buy pork or beef at our grocery store, sanitized and packed in a neat little package. We don't have to see the horrific conditions those animals were raised under. We don't even have the courage to call it by it's animal name - cow meat or pig meat.

I've had people throw a fit when Marcus has mentioned that he sometimes hunts and fishes quite a bit. These people stand there in their leather shoes, holding a burger from McDonalds and tell us that hunting is cruel and have no idea of the irony of their statements. We've created a world where we don't have to see the consequences of our actions, at least when it comes to the meal on the kitchen table.

There's no getting away from the fact that creatures on this planet will die to produce the food that keeps you alive. You can be a vegan and animals will still have died to produce your food. Even humans will be harmed and possibly die to produce the food you eat. All kinds of animals die during the harvesting process. Merely using the land for the growing of food, rather than animal habitat, causes death. If you don't eat organic produce, farm workers will contract cancer because of the chemicals that are used in the farming of your food. Even if you eat organic foods, farm workers in foreign country will go hungry when the organic peaches they grow to provide for their families are turned down for not being up to standard. Even if you buy local, organic produce, you're still not blameless. An organic farmer I know lost 600 tomato plants in one night to deer. His losses were so great that he had to get a depredation permit in order to get any kind of harvest at all and to control his losses for next year.

I grow a lot of our produce in my suburban garden. Every year we fight off the birds and possums so we can harvest our tomatoes. They don't usually take enough to cause severe losses but I know the frustration of going out to the garden and finding nibbles and pecks in almost all of the not-quite-ripe tomatoes. A few weeks ago, we had a difficult choice to make. The biggest groundhog I had ever seen was in our back yard. They may be cute animals but anyone who's gardened knows that devastation they can cause in a garden in a single night. It disappeared, never to be seen again but what would we have done if it had decided to make its home nearby?

We need to strip off the marketing gloss of our dining choices and come face to face with the cruelty that comes as a result of our choices. That doesn't mean we need to go out and shoot a deer or kill a chicken ourselves, although I greatly admire people who are willing to do that. It does mean that we need to be aware that our food comes with a cost. We need to treat our food with the reverence that it deserves - we need to use it wisely. We need to appreciate the farmers that grew it and the lives that were lost in the production of it.

This life can be an amazing gift - full of beauty and wonder. But none of us can escape the fact that it can be cruel as well. In the gorgeous surroundings of the Clinch River valley, I was responsible for the death of three living creatures. The best thing I could do is to be grateful for the loss of those lives so that I could live.

Trout with Brown Butter-Caper Sauce

1/4 teaspoon olive oil
2 trout fillets - about 4 oz each
Salt and Pepper
2 tablespoons shallots (We used Egyptian Walking Onions from our garden)
1 heaping tablespoon of drained capers
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon butter

First off, if you caught your own fish, you need to clean them and fillet them. 

Chop your shallots and get your capers and lemon ready. Add oil to a non-stick skillet and put over medium heat. Heat for 2 minutes. Salt and pepper both sides of fillets and add to pan. 

When the edges of the fillet start to turn white, flip. This will take 1 to 1 1/2 minutes. After flipping, cook for another 1 1/2 or until fish flakes easily with a fork. 

Remove fillets from pan, put on a plate and tent with foil to keep warm.

Add butter to skillet. Watch carefully because in a non-stick skillet it's hard to see when it begins to brown. It usually takes about 2 to 2 1/2 minutes for us. 

When it's beginning to turn brown, add shallots and sautee for two minutes until they begin to soften.

Then add lemon juice and capers, cook for another minute.  

Pour sauce over fish and serve.

For a printable recipe, click here!

This meal is part of my One Local Summer meal for this week.  Admittedly, capers aren't local but I'm hoping that next year, I'll have pickled nasturtium buds to use as a substitute.  The butter was made from Cruze Farm milk and we used some of the caper juice to sub in for the lemon.  Instead of shallots, we used Egyptian Walking Onions from our garden.  We served this fish with roasted Dragon Langerie, Masai and Purple Trionfo Violetto beans from our garden.  Dessert was a blueberry cornmeal cake made with local blueberries and local cornmeal.

My name is Kristina and I am a tomato addict!

I am enamored with Solanum lycopersicum. Those of you who know me in real life already know about my sickness but I figure that I should follow a policy of open disclosure on this blog and let the rest of you know how obsessed I really am.  And if I'm going to be obsessed with a vegetable, what better vegetable to be obsessed with than one that is regularly referred to as a love apple?

My cruel, heartless husband mocks me on a regular basis come seed ordering time.  All I have to do is tell him about how I'm going to cut down on the different varieties I grow that year and barely suppressed laughter can be heard for the next couple of hours.  It's not my fault that when I say I'm cutting down on the number of varieties that he doesn't understand that means I'm not going to add as many varieties as I usually do.  How could I not want to grow them when I see names like Aunt Ruby's German Green, Moonglow, Cherokee Chocolate, Hillbilly, White Queen, Furry Yellow Hog, Depp's Pink Firefly, Bloody Butcher and Thai Red Turtle Egg?

I live in the city but that's never stopped me from gardening.  When I lived in an apartment, people were always amazed by the vegetables I grew on my porch.  Corn, watermelon, sweet potatoes - I don't care what people told me, I was sure that any vegetable could be grown in a container and the only thing that failed to grow was corn but that survived until a fat, unruly raccoon claimed it for his own a few days before harvest.  Except for a barely navigable front porch, I managed to keep my sickness in check until we bought our house.

I was a source of great frustration to our real estate agent.  I knew I wanted an old house and I wanted to stay in the streetcar suburb area where I had always rented.  But it didn't matter how nice the house was or how great a deal it was - if the yard wasn't suitable for gardening, I didn't want any part of it.  The house we ended up with is a beautiful, ramshackle NeoClassic Queen Anne that we lovingly refer to as our money pit  Sure - it's missing walls, is flaking paint all over and has no kitchen to speak of.  But it's sturdy, will be gorgeous when it gets finished (in 50 years) and has a sun-filled yard with gorgeous stone retaining walls on two sides.  And I've wasted very little time filling up my back yard with plants.

I started small with two 4x4 foot beds and only six tomato plants but that restraint quickly flew out the window.  We now have 24 beds in our back yard and more than half of them are filled with tomatoes.  When I realized how expensive buying plants were and how limited I was in my choice of varieties, I decided to learn how to start my own seedlings.  I got a little exuberant in my seed starting my second year and Marcus put his foot down and told me there was no way I was going to have room for 450 tomato plants in my back yard.  So I started selling my extra plants down at the Market Square Farmer's Market.  This past spring we sold over 1000 tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings.  It's been so much fun sharing my love of heirloom tomatoes with people and I LOVE hearing from people how well their plants are doing. I always laugh when people ask me where our farm is and I explain that my "farm" is our sleeping porch in our house.  In fact, we've been asked so many times that we made up a name for our "farm".  That's how Knox Vegas Farms was created and it become official this past Spring when I saw my picture in the paper with the caption referring to me as an owner of Knox Vegas Farms.

There are cold nights during the spring when carrying over 60 flats of plants in from outside gets a bit tedious but I can't imagine not growing them to sell.  I can't imagine not growing heirlooms - even this summer when we've had problems with blight and get eaten alive my mosquitoes every time we spray with an organic fungicide.  I can't imagine ever being reduced to eating the pink styrofoam balls they try to pass off as tomatoes at the grocery store.  I can't imagine not eagerly awaiting the moment in late June when we eat a fresh tomato for the first time since the previous fall.  And I can't ever imagine not being infected with a passion for tomatoes - My name is Kristina and I'm a tomato addict.  And that's a problem, how?

It's been pretty hot in Knox Vegas this week so I thought I would celebrate Summerfest by posting my favorite no-cook recipes for tomatoes.  This time of year, a dead-ripe summer tomato needs very little embellishing.  I am going to suggest that you don't head to your local supermarket and buy their heirloom tomatoes.  Part of what makes an heirloom tomato so good is the fact that a local farmer will have grown the tastiest varieties for our area and picked those tomatoes when they're dead ripe.  Knoxville now has a farmers market open every day except for Sunday, so find your way to one of those and stock up.  Don't buy the pretty hybrids like 'Celebrity'.  You want to find the weirdest, ugliest looking tomatoes that are being sold - that's when you know you've got a good one.  

Here are my top three favorite way of using raw tomatoes:

Tomato Toast

This is an easy one but I make a meal out of this several times each summer.  Take a loaf of good quality bread.  Do NOT use sandwich bread, make sure it's a peasant style bread.  I use no knead bread that I bake but VGs Bakery in our area sells a really nice ciabatta. Cut thick slices, brush with a good olive oil and either grill or toast:

Cut a few juicy tomatoes in half and peel a couple of garlic cloves.  Have kosher salt (or even better, sea salt) at the ready.

Take that garlic clove and rub it into the bread.  If you're like me and addicted to garlic, I usually flip the bread over and do the other side just so it's really good and garlicky.  Plus it keeps vampires away.

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Now put your tomato cut-side down on the bread.

Start rubbing that tomato into the bread.

Really mash it in there:

Pop that leftover piece of tomato in your mouth and sprinkle your bread with some salt.  Eat.  That's it.  It sounds so simple and it is but the sum is far greater than it's parts.

Panzanella

This is one of my favorite way to use up leftover, stale bread.  It's a very simple concept and I'm not going to give you an exact recipe, mainly because it's a recipe that I use to use up whatever odds and ends I have lying around.

Take leftover bread, cut into cubes and toast.  You want to use a sturdy bread in this recipe.

Meanwhile, mix olive oil, red wine vinegar, and garlic.  I use equal parts olive oil and vinegar in this recipe and I mince up one or two garlic cloves, depending on size.  Add salt and pepper - make sure to add a little extra salt to this.  You can add any dried or fresh herbs you think would taste good.  I usually use an Italian mix from Penzeys but I've left it out and it's just as good.  Basil, rosemary, oregano and marjoram would be my choices of herbs to add.

Dice a cucumber, a red pepper, and onion.  Cut up tomatoes.  Mix together.  You can add some cubed cheese to this - mozzarella is what I usually add but ricotta salata is nice as well.  Toss the vegetables with the dressing and add the bread cubes.  Serve right away.

PS - make it more a Greek-style vinaigrette(I cheat with a great Greek seasoning mix from Penzeys) and sub in pita chips and you've got a great cheater's fattoush.

Basil, Feta & Tomato Sandwiches

This is one of my favorite summer sandwiches and it's such an easy combination but so good together.

Toast some sandwich bread.

Measure out the following ingredients:
2 Tablespoons crumbled feta
2 tablespoons mayo
1 tablespoon lightly packed chopped basil

Mix together and spread on toasted bread while toast is still hot so that the cheese will melt.  

Slice a tomato and add to sandwich.  

Eat with plenty of paper towels close by. 

This is my entry for week four of Summerfest.  Join in the fun!

One Local Summer - Week Ten

The idea of eating locally being difficult this time of year makes me laugh, especially when I would really have to work to eat a mainly non-local diet.  It's been pretty hot here so most of our meals have been of the non-cooked variety - like salads or sandwiches.  We've had a lot of watermelon and feta salads, scads of BLTs, and I made mayonnaise with local eggs that was so good we made a meal of steamed vegetables just dipped in it.  If you had ever told me that I would enjoy a meal that consisted mainly of mayo, I probably would have laughed at you.  But homemade mayonnaise with a little garlic added is heaven.

When I do cook, I try to cook something that will last us for several meals.  This week, I made a huge pork roast with meat from River Ridge Farms.  I served it with tortillas made with homemade lard rendered from local pork fat and two types of salsa - both from my garden.  We have a bumper crop of tomatillos this year so I made a roasted tomatillo salsa with local onions and garlic and added hot peppers and cilantro from our garden.  The other salsa was a grilled tomato salsa with a bunch of heirloom tomatoes from our garden. 

The only thing I haven't been able to escape from is canning.  Nothing heats up an un-air conditioned kitchen quicker than canning.  I don't really have a choice though because this is the time of year that everything is ripe.  I made several pints of plum jam and took some frozen sour cherries and made black forest jam and cherry chutney.  I made a deal with a local farmer and he gives me his "ugly" tomatoes and I can them and give him half.  Cracked tomatoes won't keep so yesterday I spent several hours canning them in a 91 degree kitchen.  I also got my hands of some elderberries and made some gorgeous elderberry jelly.

I'm not going to lie.  There are times I wonder why the hell I do this stuff?  When I'm standing over a boiling water canner, it seems so much easier to just buy canned tomatoes or jam. But come winter, there is such a feeling of satisfaction in knowing exactly where my food is coming from.  I also like remembering the farmers I bought from in the summer during a time when it seems like winter will never end. Those little jars remind me that summer abundance will come again, no matter how dark or dreary the days seem.

One Local Summer - Week 8

I don't think we've had a meal this week that hasn't included some kind of local produce.  When the bulk of your grocery bill is spent at the farmer's market, it's difficult to get too esoteric with your cooking.  Sure, I made muhammara that included pomegranate molasses.  But that same dish contained leftover bread from a local baker, roasted peppers from my garden and tomato paste canned last year.  However, I think my favorite meals this week have been the two or three where the majority of the ingredients traveled less than 50 feet.

Salt boiled new potatoes dressed with a little butter made from Cruze farm milk.  Nothing tastes better than the sweet mealiness of new potatoes that 20 minutes earlier were lurking in the dirt of your garden bed.  Sliced Burgundy Traveler tomatoes dressed with a little red wine vinegar and olive oil glisten on the plate.  And I've recently discovered a new passion - roasted green beans.  I type that with some trepidation because I don't want anyone to think that I'm a freaky health nut that would turn down peach cobbler to nibble on some kale.  However, I think I could eat my weight in roasted green beans.  The olive oil caramelizes them and turns them into a crispy snack food with the slightest hint of vegetable flavor.  I would eat these as a snack, at 2am in the morning when I was drunk and have lost whatever compunction I might have about gorging on high calorie snack chips.  That's how much I like them.  Peach Brown Butter Bars have become a favorite new discovery and I've made them several times.  But my favorite meals are simple meals like we had last night.  Eating local is a wonderful thing. Eating out of your back yard?  Even better.

Wordless Wednesday

Ridiculously easy way to slay the zucchini monsters

There are many inexplicable mysteries in gardening.  Why is that one year your potatoes do so poorly even though you've done everything "right" and the next year when you plant them too late, they flourish?  Why is that the birds ignore the delightful array of seeds and various birdbaths you put out for them yet pick at every tomato you have before it's ripe?  Why is that you can spend what seems like an inordinate amount of time picking every single zucchini on your plant, yet go out the next day and find a boat of a zucchini waiting for you?

You can't win against the zucchini monsters and there's only so much zucchini bread one person can eat.  And it's not like most zucchini breads are very healthy to begin with and who wants to bake when it's 90 degrees out?  I also rarely have time to cook anything complicated when I've got 20 pounds of squash to put up for winter.  This is where the following recipe will help you out.  It seems so simple that it must be boring but it's one of my favorite summer meals.  More importantly, it gets rid of monster zucchinis fast.  You can even grate zucchini, throw it in a freezer bag and make this dish in the winter when the scary monster zucchinis are but a haunting summer memory.

Killer Zucchini Orzo

1 cup cooked orzo

2 cups grated zucchini(half of a monster zucchini)

1/2 medium onion

1/2 to 1 tablespoon olive oil

2 tablespoons Pecorino Romano

Kosher salt

1/2 teaspoon combination of herbs to suit you - see note below.

Heat oil in nonstick pan over medium heat. Add zucchini and onion and saute until it begins to brown.  Mix in herbs with a pinch of salt.  Stir in cheese and add cooked orzo.  Stir until heated through and serve.  You can more grated cheese when serving if you like.  You can serve this hot or at room temperature.

Note:  My favorite combination of herbs is a blend from Penzeys called Italian Herb Mix or a mixture of thyme and oregano or marjoram.

This is a very flexible meal.  I've added chopped tomatoes or quartered cherry tomatoes to it and that's a nice variation.  Sometimes I add garlic with the onion and zucchini.  I plan on experimenting with other vegetable this year.  I think grated winter squash sauteed with butter and sage would be fantastic.

There is nothing...I repeat, nothing more awesome than Neil Diamond.

My love for Neil Diamond knows no bounds.  In my younger, much cooler days, I used to be horrified by the musical selections of my father.  He had a deep and abiding love for Irish folk music and James Taylor.  And Dad - seriously, could you turn down the Carly Simon?!!  Now that I fully embrace my dorkdom, I'm free to love whatever music entertains me.  Which is why Neil Diamond's "America" will always have a place on my July 4th playlist, along with The Bruce's "Born in the USA" and 2 Live Crew's "Banned in the USA".

Unlike the merry band of corporate shills at The Center For "Consumer Freedom", I celebrated my freedom by eating my way through a day where as many foods as possible were produced by local food producers.  We kicked off the day by heading to our local farmer's market where we stuffed ourselves with locally produced baked goods.  I even convinced myself that the carrot cake I had for breakfast had to be healthy because it lacked cream cheese icing.  

For lunch, we had leftovers from the day before - grilled local lamb and onions, flatbread made with my sourdough and tomato salad made from tomatoes and herbs in our back yard.

For a snack, we had grilled local corn.  It was the first corn of the season.  I think the splotches on the porch floor made by butter dripping off our elbows might wear off by summer's end.

We managed to make it to about 3pm before imbibing any booze and when I got a taste of the Basil Peach White Wine Sangria made with local peaches, I wish we had started drinking earlier.  The basil we picked from our garden made this drink - it kept it from being too sweet and cloying.

For a late dinner, we made our traditional 4th meal - smoked turkey legs.  For some medieval reason, I really love turkey legs.  They really bring out the T-Rex in me.  We served it with homemade baked beans made with local honey, local tomato sauce, frozen local shelley beans and local bacon.  We served it with one of the best potato salads I've ever had(made with local potatoes and herbs from our garden of course!).  

I don't hate potato salad but the majority of them are too heavy for me and I always feel like the potatoes in those salads are just the excuse for mainlining as much mayonnaise as possible.  Smitten Kitchen's Horseradish Potato Salad is just what I've been looking for.   The focus is on the potatoes but the sour cream dressing makes this dish sing.  I've always been a fan of the sinus tingling properties of horseradish and when you combine it with the chives, dill and onion in this dish, well - I'm just glad no one but my husband saw me scraping the plate with my finger.

Horseradish Potato Salad (adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

3 pounds small (2-inch) potatoes
1/4 cup red onion, chopped
1 tablespoon white-wine vinegar
1 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons fresh dill, finely chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh chives
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
3 tablespoons prepared horseradish
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Boil potatoes until they're fork tender.  Cool them room temperature and quarter. Mix remaining ingredients and fold the potatoes into this mixture.

After we finished eating, we waddled upstairs onto our upper porch where we had one of the best views in Knoxville of the downtown fireworks.  There are times where I wonder why we bought this ramshackle old house but every time we get to relax, away from crowds and get such a great view of the fireworks, my faith in our decision is restored.

I hope you all had a great 4th and you all got down with your bad old selves!  Let Freedom (and 2 Live Crew) Reign!

One Local Summer - Week Four

This week has been full of OLS meals!  On Monday, I made a delicious frittata with local eggs, ham, zucchini, potatoes and onions.  In fact, even the mozzarella we subbed in for the cheddar was local because we made it from Cruze Farm milk!  Tuesday, we made tortillas using local lard and filled them with local chicken and onions.  Only the cheese wasn't local.  We served them with homemade salsa made from local ingredients.  Wednesday was tomato toast made with homemade bread, local garlic and tomatoes from our back yard.  On Thursday, we made one of my favorite grilled meals, Vietnamese Chicken, made with local chicken and grilled local zucchini and onions.  We finished the night off with a cherry crisp made from frozen local cherries. We made a simple pasta sauce out of local zucchini, tomatoes and garlic on Friday and served that with a grated beet salad made from beets from our friends' yard.  On Saturday, we started the day off with local raspberries, blueberries and blackberries and had that with a scone from VG's Bakery.  We had a wonderful sandwich for dinner made with our homemade local milk mozzarella, leftover grilled zucchini and onions, homemade basil mayo and ciabatta rolls from VG's bakery.

However, today was our "official" OLS meal and everything we ate today was local, except for some feta cheese and flour.  We started the morning out with local eggs scrambled with feta and local garlic scapes.  For lunch we had local beet greens and swiss chard sauteed with local bacon and served that with steamed local new potatoes with local butter and dill.  Tonight for dinner, we had a pizza with local potatoes and leeks and local goat cheese.  I even made a sourdough crust so we didn't have to use yeast in our pizza crust!  For dessert, we had homemade peach granita we made from local peaches.  I had wanted to make sorbet but all the recipes I found contained lemon juice.  Instead, we made peach granita from David Lebovitz's book, Perfect Scoop. I do have an ice cream maker but the beauty of this dish is that you don't need one to make this.  I had never had granita and I had visions of it being an icy mess.  I'm an idiot because this is good stuff.  I love that it doesn't have a lot of sugar and it was perfect for the 93 degree day we had today.

Peach Granita:

6 ripe peaches, peeled
1 1/3 cup water
1/2 cup sugar

Slice peaches and cut into small chunks.  Cook with 1 cup water in a medium saucepan over medium heat.  Cook until cooked through which is about ten minutes.  Remove from heat and stir in sugar and let cool.  When cool, place in blender with remaining 1/3 cup water and blend until smooth.  

Pour the mixture into a shallow non-reactive pan in the freezer. Check after 30 minutes. As the mixture begins to freeze, use a fork to scrape the frozen puree that froze around the edges into the center. Return to freezer.

Check every 30 minutes, scraping each time.  David says it usually takes 2 hours but when we went to bed last night, it still wasn't frozen enough and it had been 3.5 hours.  So we some for breakfast!  If it gets too hard, just leave it out for a bit.

One Local Summer - week two

I don't usually comment too much on political issues or current events (unless it's food or farming policy).  It just seems so surreal to me to be sitting here on my couch composing my One Local Summer post while in Iran, people are risking and/or losing their lives to gain a modicum of the freedoms that many Americans take for granted every day.  If you're interested in following the events there, here are the best three sites I've found besides Twitter.

Andrew Sullivan
Huffington Post's Live Blog
National Iranian American Council

This week has been a week of easy local eating.  Lots of salads still and the first summer squash of the season have arrived at the farmer's market.  I still have tons of swiss chard left that my parent's gave me and it was starting to look a little bedraggled.  I cut the leaves off the roots and washed them in my OXO Salad Spinner.  I'm not big on kitchen gadgets but this is one of the best purchases we've made.  It makes cleaning greens so much easier.  That perked them up enough to keep through the weekend.  I've made this quiche recipe before so I just subbed in chard for the spinach.  I also made a wonderful swiss chard and artichoke dip for a party last night.  I'll be posting that later this week.  Another winner was the Potato LeeK Soup we made earlier this week. 

Tonight I made a recipe from Italian Vegetarian Cookbook by Jack Bishop.  I have several of his cookbooks and they really can't be beat for simple, wonderful meals.  I made Polenta with Garlicky Greens but I had to make a few substitutions.  I'm out of spinach from the garden and it seemed silly to buy some at the market when I had so much chard and other vegetables to use up.  I had some broccoli left over from last week so I used that in place of the spinach.  I diced it pretty finely.  I also used the chard stems.  I added both of these to the pan after the garlic and cooked them a bit before I added the chard leaves.  Everything (even the cornmeal) was local except for the olive oil and salt.  Now dessert was not even remotely local but when you have leftover chocolate birthday cake, that's really not the time to be zealot. 

Polenta with Garlicky Greens
Servings: 4 to 6

Ingredients:
2 cups cornmeal
Salt and pepper
1 ½ lb. chard
1 ½ lb. spinach
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
6 garlic cloves, slivered
2 tbsp unsalted butter

Directions:
To prepare Polenta: Pour 8 cups of water into a saucepan and bring to boil. Add 2 tsp of salt and lower the heat to medium. Whisk in the cornmeal in a slow, steady stream. This should take almost 1 min. Make sure to whisk the cornmeal continuously to prevent lumps from forming. Continue whisking as the cornmeal comes back to a boil. Simmer, whisking constantly, until the polenta starts to thicken, 1 to 2 mins. Reduce the heat until the polenta is at the barest simmer. Cover the pot and cook very slowly, stirring with a wooden spoon every 10 mins or so, until the cornmeal loses its raw flavor, 35-40 mins.

To prepare the Greens: While the polenta is cooking, remove and discard the stems from the chard and spinach. Tear leaves into small pieces. Wash the leaves in a large bowl of cold water to get rid of any dirt. Shake the leaves to remove excess water, but do not dry them. Set aside.

Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the onions and saute over medium heat until translucent, 5 mins. Stir in the garlic and cook until golden, about 2 mins. Add the greens to the pain. Stir to coat the leaves with oil. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Cover and cook, stirring 2 or 3 times, until the greens are tender, 5-7 mins. Remove the cover and simmer until some of the liquid evaporates, 2-3 mins. The greens should be moist, but not swimming in liquid. When the polenta has finished cooking, stir in the butter and add more salt if needed.

One Local Summer - week two

I love this time of the year.  Eating locally is so easy and we often find that we've eaten a meal that's entirely local without even thinking about it.  We had an abundance of shelling peas in our garden as well as more radishes.  Most of our spring crops are done so we've spent most of the time this week planting more tomatoes, hot and sweet peppers.

One of my favorite spring treats is from a recipe in Local Flavors.  Combine unsalted butter with diced radishes.  Spread on bread and sprinkle with sea salt.  This is so good!  We've had several of these sandwiches this past week.  We've also made Peas with pasta and cream a couple of times.  One night we made a ground pork stir fry with snowpeas, side shoots of broccoli and garlic scapes, all from our garden.  I made goat cheese from local goat milk and some butter from the cream we skimmed off the top of our Cruze Farm milk.

Today was one of those days where we realized we had eaten completely local without even trying.  We split a white chocolate and cherry scone from VG's Bakery.  We ate this with a smoothie made from homegrown frozen strawberries, yogurt and honey.  Only the yogurt wasn't local.  I plan to try my hand  making yogurt later this summer.

Lunch was sauteed spinach from A Place from the Heart Farm with a hamburger patty.  The ground beef was from Laurel Creek Farm.  It was pretty hot out today so we had a snack of homemade cherry sorbet.  Supper tonight was a grilled sirloin steak from Laurel Creek Farm and grilled marinated summer squash from A Place from the Heart Farm.  The only nonlocal ingredients were the olive oil and red wine vinegar in the marinade - the herbs and garlic were from our garden.  An hour ago, we split the first ripe peach of the year from The Fruit and Berry Patch.

Tomorrow we're on our way to check out our reception area for our wedding.  Instead of fast food, we're taking sandwiches, cherries and a peach.  The first sandwich will be made with bread from VG's Bakery, leftover grilled squash and my homemade goat cheese.  The other sandwich will be store bought cream cheese mixed with chives and green garlic and topped with local cucumbers.  Mickey D's cant touch that!

Garlic Scape Pesto

This is wonderful tossed with pasta.  You can also use it in place of garlic butter to make some yummy garlic bread.  Thin it out with sour cream and it makes a great salad dressing or dip.  Use it as a base for pizza.  I freeze pesto to use all year for my version of "fast food".  Boil some pasta, add pesto and sundried tomatoes.  Mix in any leftover vegetables.

Garlic Scape Pesto:

½ lb. scapes (chopped into 1" pieces)

1½ cups olive oil

2 cups grated parmesan cheese

In a blender, combine the scapes and olive oil. Pour mixture into bowl and blend the cheese in by hand. I freeze this in ice cube trays - the cubes get put in a freezer bag.

One Local Summer - week ???

I started a week too early so I'm going to start labeling them as they should be.  That's why this one has a ???

This morning, Mark and I had local eggs scrambled with homemade goat cheese and swiss chard from our garden.  We also had a smoothie with local milk, frozen homegrown strawberries and a little bit of oatmeal blended in(not local).  I know the oatmeal sounds weird but it's very tasty.

It's been miserably hot here - we hit 95 yesterday!  We had to get a couple of garden beds set up because I've got some more heirloom tomato plants that need a home.  Because it was so hot, we weren't very hungry so we had homemade garlic scape pesto(recipe coming soon) on bread from a local bakery.  We ate local cherries as a snack and drank gallons of water.

Dinner tonight wasn't completely local but it was frugal.  I've got penne pasta that needs to be used up so we made Pasta with Peas and Cream again.  The peas were from my garden(I used Waverex petite pois and Wando shelling peas) and the cream was from Cruze Farms.  Dessert was homemade cherry sorbet we made from local sweet cherries.

I'm planning on picking pie cherries Tuesday (tomorrow is my birthday and I will be drinking very nonlocal margaritas) so I hope to have some recipes for preserving them that I can post.  This friday will also be the start of our traditional summer pizza nights so I plant on making some mozerella before then.

One Local Summer Report - week one

I'm going to start updating my daily menu postings blog again - this helps keep me inspired and gives me ideas for future meals.  But these posts will be just for meals I'm reporting to OLS 2008.

First - a big thank you to Joyce for taking on the task of our regional coordinator!  You're awesome Joyce!

Second - I apologize for the lack of pictures.  I've misplaced our camera!  Hopefully, we'll find it soon. 

This weekend was a local food-a-thon here in the TNLocavore household!  We started out Saturday with a picnic breakfast.  We brought along hard boiled local eggs, homegrown sliced strawberries with vanilla sugar and we picked up green garlic/rosemary focaccia and biscotti from our farmer's market.  We got a whole bunch of veggies while we were there as well.  Then we headed down to the University of Tennessee trial gardens for a picnic!  Lunch was decidedly unlocal - we did some hardcore gardening so we split a fast food chicken sandwich.  Dinner was much tastier.  We had roast chicken from Laurel Creek Farms and roast asparagus from another local farmer.  I don't think anything could taste more like spring to me than asparagus!  The only nonlocal ingredients used were salt, pepper and olive oil. 

Breakfast today was local eggs and bacon from Laurel Creek Farms, hash browns from local potatoes and bagels from a local bakery with our own homemade strawberry freezer jam.  You can't get much more local than 25 feet from your front door!  Lunch was leftovers from yesterday.  Dinner was stir-fry.  I pulled up the mizuna, spinach and tatsoi plants today so we used the last few leaves.  We also picked snow peas in our garden and the last few side shoots of broccoli.  We stir-fried green garlic in some organic grape seed oil.  We added ground pork from River Ridge Farm and then added in the snow peas and broccoli. When they were almost finished cooking, we added in the greens.  We swirled in some pepper paste we made last summer, some soy sauce and a little brown sugar.  Dessert was strawberries topped with homemade lemon curd.  Now I know lemons aren't local but I like to think we made up for that by using local eggs, and butter we made ourselves from local milk.  The sugar also wasn't local but we did substitute in some local honey for some of it.

Tomorrow we're making homemade goat cheese and pesto from some of our garlic scapes combined with some we found at the farmer's market!  Then we meet with a possible caterer for our wedding in November!  I hope he's as excited about using local produce as we are.  Otherwise the search continues!

Quick catch up!

Things have been a bit crazy with my job so no updates lately but I'll try to be better.

The Habanero Gold is AMAZING!  Our jelly is a little too 'jelled' but the flavor is amazing so we'll definitely be making more.  Since the red bell peppers are getting a little scarce, I think I'll make it with some of the red Aji Dulce peppers and use a combo of the Lemon Drop peppers with the Habaneros.  We used some in some mango salsa we made and it worked great.  The mangos weren't the greatest and not juicy at all so I mixed in some of the HG and it worked really well.  And it's heaven on toast with cream cheese!

Last night we roasted a couple of pans of red bell peppers, peeled them and stuck them in small bags for the freezer.  I've got some cucumbers sitting in some salt tonight so we can make Curry Pickle Slices tomorrow.  And today we sorted through our garlic to see how much we'd have to plant and culled out the smallest bulbs to make pickled garlic with.  We put up 4 half cup jars today.

I've got several quart bags of hot peppers in the fridge so I'll need to put some of them up tomorrow.  Plus I've got more cukes to pickle and some zucchini to blanch!  Thank god there's no football game!  :-P

Dinner - Pizza with tomatoes, basil & homemade mozzarella

I spent part of this afternoon making mozzarella because Friday is pizza night here at McPhelps Manor! The milk we get is either from Cruze Farms or from River Ridge Farms. The Cruze milk is purchased from Three Rivers Market, our local food co-op. It's not homogenized and is lightly pasteurized. It's around $5.60 a gallon. It is some of the most wonderful milk I've ever had. We let it sit in the fridge for a day or two and skim the cream off unless we're making cheese. The cream is used for coffee or we stick it in the food processor and make butter with it. I don't think I'll ever be able to drink supermarket milk ever again! The milk from River Ridge Farms is raw milk and is for our pets only. {wink} They say it's some of the most amazing milk they've ever had. It's a bit pricier at $10 a gallon so we can only get a half gallon a week. I want to support them because they offer raw milk but we can only afford so much.

The recipe and supplies I use to make mozzarella are from New England Cheesemaking Supply. I never knew making mozzarella would be this easy. I was inspired to do this when I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. This is one of the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time. I'll write a review of it at some later date but I'm so glad I got impatient and bought a copy instead of waiting for one from the library. Anyway, I bought the Starter Special which comes with a book, DVD and 30 minute mozzarella kit. I've made mozzarella twice now and it's AMAZING! So easy to do and so yummy. Plus I can use local milk so I know my cheese is local! When I'm done making the mozzarella, I use the whey to make "Ricotta from heaven". Last time I did this, it worked really well. Tonight....not so much. I got a little bit of ricotta but I'm going to have to try it again. After doing all that, I used the whey to make pizza dough. I'll post all of these recipes at a later date but they're all amazing.

So....tonight's local meal was pizza with tomatoes, basil and mozzarella. I doubled the pizza dough recipe so I could freeze some for later. The flour I use is a mix of unbleached all purpose and King Authur's White Whole Wheat - so not local at all. The olive oil isn't local nor is the salt or yeast. The two things that were local were the whey and the corn meal I sprinkled on the pan! I'd love to find local flour or even local wheat I could grind on my own. The mozzarella was local except for the citric acid, rennet tabs and cheese salt. The tomatoes were an Ananas Noire and a Burgundy Traveler from the garden. The basil was from the garden. The vino and salt and pepper weren't local but you have to have wine or beer with pizza!

I'm planning my strategy for tomorrow's farmer's market. We've got something eating some of our tomatoes so I don't know if I'll have enough to last us all winter. I think I'm going to buy some poundage to preserve tomorrow.