Tennessee Locavore

Tips and Resources I Use for Local Eating

A few weeks ago, a few of my fellow Knox Vegas residents emailed me to let me know that they were interested in some resources for local eating.  This post contains a few local market reviews but I hope the other information is helpful to the rest of my readers.  Please jump in and post in the comments if you have any other helpful resources.

Marcus and I first started trying to eat local about seven years ago.  At the time, this wasn't an easy thing to do.  Our "official" farmer's market had been turned into a discount food store.  The one actual farmer's market was located out in West Knoxville in a church parking lot where it got so hot that we actually saw people pass out when we were there.  There were very few organic growers and I can remember a farmer screaming at me when I asked him if he grew anything without chemicals.  "Don't you know that you can't grow anything around here without chemicals?" he told me snidely and when I asked him how our grandparents managed to do it, he tried to convince me that farmers everywhere had been using petrochemicals on their crops since this nation was founded. Needless to say, it was quite the experience.  Trying to buy free range beef meant taking out another mortgage on your home so you could afford it.  Fruit and vegetable resellers ran rampant.  There's nothing like seeing a "farmer" selling produce out of a box labled 'Florida Tomatoes'.

Compared to those times, It's a lot easier now.  Knoxville has never really been on the forefront of trends.  I joke around that we're about 15 years behind Seattle but the local foods movement is picking up steam.  We now have a farmer's market every day of the week, except Sunday and Monday.  More and more farmers are growing organically so there's a lot more choices available to consumers.  I now see local chefs at our downtown market on a regular basis and I'm hoping that the Three Rivers Co-op move will give them more space to expand their local offerings.

I'm not a local foods expert.  I think it's such a huge concept that no one person can really consider themselves an expert unless they devote the bulk of their time to it.  But it is a big part of my life and it's gotten to the point where so many of the choices that I had to think about at the beginning, now just come naturally to me.  This isn't a comprehensive post by any stretch of the imagination - it's just a post to help those starting out on the local foods bandwagon.

Tips for Eating Local:

Tip #1 - Just Try
The first tip I can offer is just to try.  Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.  Start by deciding to eat as seasonally as you can.  Start by trying to eat one local meal a week.  Start by taking a food that you often buy and pledge to buy that food locally. Start with one small thing and make that a habit before you do anything else.  That's how we got to the point where we are now.  We started by eating seasonally and buying as much produce as we could at local farmer's markets.  Then we started substituting local beef for one meal a week.  We increased that and started trying to eat mainly local fruit.  Then we searched out local grains and ventured into canning.  Little steps add up.  Making our own bread, canning our produce, dehydrating stuff from our garden, eating seasonally and locally is so second nature that for the most part, it's easy.  

Tip #2 - It's Not a Competition
 A word of warning - don't get caught up in the competitive aspect of it - I'm only saying this because I'm guilty of it. I participate in a blog challenge were everyone agrees to cook one local meal a week.  When I first started, I felt a little embarassed by some of the other participants meals - stuff with local olive oil, flours.  I decided then that I was going to eat the localest local meal that ever localed.  Needless to say, this is completely against the whole idea of the challenge which is to make local eating more of a part of your everyday life. 

Tip #3 - Adjust Your Menus & Shop Your Farmers' Markets
You're going to need to adjust the way you cook as you get more into local eating.  I used to plan out my meals for the week, write a shopping list and go to the store.  Now I head to the market, buy what looks good and then figure out my meals for the week.  That's where cookbooks based around the season and recipe sites that show recipe by vegetable come in really handy.

One of the best ways you can start eating more local foods is by going to one of the local farmers' markets in the area.  It's the best way to get an idea of what's in season.  You'll learn that when local corn is at the market, you buy it.  You can begin to understand that eating locally in Tennessee means that salads in the summer will need to consist of something besides lettuce.  You'll learn that the tomatoes available in late June have nothing on the tomatoes that will arrive later.  You'll learn that fall broccoli is almost always sweeter than spring broccoli and that some kinds of winter squash taste like chestnuts.

Tip #4 - Challenge Yourself
Challenge yourself by doing something fun and/or weird!  Last year I made cheese.  Seriously - I was so pleased with myself that it was ridiculous.  I got major bragging credo on that accomplishment alone.  I was able to serve a roasted vegetable sandwich with homemade bread, homemade cheese and vegetables from our garden.  I was so proud of that.  Another example - I've never been a big baker but about a year ago, when the bakery that made our favorite peasant bread shut down, we tried making no-knead bread.  It was so easy and so good that we've never gone back to buying bread.  I've also developed a newfound interest in baking that I might never have had without the satisfaction that I got from baking that first loaf.  Buy a vegetable that you've never seen before.  Just do something different and see what happens 

Tip #5 - Enlist the Help of Your Family & Friends
Talk to your friends and family about local options.  One of our neighbors had a sourdough starter that she's had for years.  She was nice enough to let me have some.  I posted on the blog about a search for local flour and someone emailed me with information that might help me track some down.  I grow lots of different tomato varieites each year and I share how they do with my farmer friends.  Get your friends and family together for a local potluck once a month - encourage one another.

Tip #6 - Sometime There Will Be Setbacks
A few years later, Marcus and I decided to only eat local fruit that year.  That was the year that we had one of the warmest springs on record, followed by several nights in the high teens.  We managed to save our strawberries by covering them with plastic and putting lights under there with them, but farmers in the area were hit hard - some of them went out of business because of it.  All the tree fruits lost their blossoms that yea,r along with all the berries that needed to flower on the previous year's wood.  We ate a lot of melon that year.  This year, farmers all over the Northeast lost their entire tomato crop to late blight.  Farming is hard, uncertain work and if you pledge to support your local farmers, you'll have to find workarounds when they encounter setbacks.

Market Reviews:

There are three local farmer's markets that I know of in Knoxville.  I've been to the one in Oak Ridge some time ago and enjoyed it but since I live close to downtown, I don't go to many of the markets in the surrounding area.

Market Square - this is the market that I'm at every Saturday morning. This is the market where Marcus and I sell heirloom tomatoes every spring.  I'm very biased towards this market because I've been a part of its community since the day it started.  I've felt like a proud parent as I've watched it grow over the years.  I trust the farmer's here to tell me how they grow their food. I've watched their kids grow up and we've shared recipes and garden tips.  Saturdays from 9-2, Wednesdays from 11-2

Knoxville Farmers' Market in Sequoyah Hills - This is a very nice market and they tend to have a little more choice than the market downtown.  However, you're going to pay for that choice. I hesitate to say this because I may make a few people angry but there a few reasons why I don't like this market better.  I don't like that they market themselves as the REAL farmer's market.  I've been turned off because a few times I've gone and I've seen hybrid tomatoes marketed as heirlooms, probably to get a premium price.  I've dealt with line jumping and pushing here as well.  However, some of the same farmer's that sell at Market Square sell here.  I also visit here at least once a month to buy beef or chicken from Laurel Creek Farms and they're good people. Tuesdays & Fridays 3-6pm

New Harvest Park Farmers' Market - I'm ashamed to say I've never been to this market.  With our garden pumping out produce and my visits to my main stay market, I just haven't gone.  I hope to get there before the season ends and when I do, I'll post an update. Thursday 3-6pm

Cookbooks I use:

One of the best helps for me has been to make sure that my cookbook collection contains as many cookbooks in it that make local, seasonal eating easier. These are all cookbooks I either own or check out from the library all the time.  I'm sure there are other helpful books - please let me know in the comments below!

These cookbooks are arranged around seasons:
Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets 
A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen: Easy Seasonal Dishes for Family and Friends 
Fresh Food Fast: Delicious, Seasonal Vegetarian Meals in Under an Hour

These are all-purpose cookbooks but I find them all very helpful:
Passionate Vegetarian
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food

If you want to try preserving, here are some great books:
The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving: Over 300 Recipes to Use Year-Round 
Ball Blue Book of Preserving
Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving 
The Joy of Pickling

These are the books that have inspired me to eat locally:
This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader - this is the book that first got me interested in local eating.  It's a fun read and makes you think without being preachy.
Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet 
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life 
Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food

Recipe Sites Online:

There are tons of recipe sites online that I love but these sites in particular are very helpful when you're trying to figure out how to cook the strange vegetable you bought at the market.

Mariquita Farm
Live Earth Farms
Nobel Foods Farm
Green Earth Institute

The list of blogs that I read that talk about local foods is really too extensive for this post.  I'll try to feature some of them over the next few months because they've helped me a lot.

Local eating is the way I support my local businesses and neighbors.  It's the way I show that I honor the hard work that farmers have to do to stay afloat.  It's the way I It's also the way I show the food companies that I don't like the way they do business and I won't support them.  The less money I spend on their food, the less money they have to fund campaigns that try to convince us that Froot Loops are healthy.

Last but not least, let me know if any of you would be interested in a local foods potluck every couple of months. I'd be more than happy to host it at my house as long as you promise to ignore the never ending cycle of renovations that would surround us.  My kitchen is a disaster (those of you who live here with me in ONK will appreciate how difficult cooking in old kitchens can be) but I'd love to plan a canning get together next year if any of you want help getting started canning.

PS - Thanks for the help from the Twitter community.   Marsula, KitchenMage, EatLocalChall & SweetSavoryLife all weighed in with helpful tips.  Please check out their blogs.  I enjoy all of them.

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 One

I apologize for the lack of posting - one of our furbabies died a couple of weeks ago after a short but serious illness.  Between running around to our local and university vet, keeping his meds and six feeding times straight, sleepless nights and getting all the furbaby love we could pack in, it's been a long six weeks.  Little Man was one of two kittens that Marcus and I hand raised and we've always joked that we'll always consider them our first born kids - just slightly furrier.  He was our baby and a huge part of our lives and his time on this earth was just too short. 

While at the Market Square Farmer's Market Saturday morning, Marcus and I were reminded that local eating can sometimes be a disappointment.  We tend to get a lot of our fruit from the Fruit and Berry Patch.  They're not organic producers but they try to limit the amount of chemicals they use, especially since they're a Pick Your Own kind of place.  Last summer, we discovered the wonders of their cherries - both sweet and sour pie cherries.  I dried a decent amount of sweet cherries last year because I'm not a fan of raisins and these are a great substitute.  I also fell in love with pie cherries.  They're not quite as much fun to pick because they're not as tasty straight off the tree but they're amazing to cook with.  We managed to make the pitting more enjoyable once we found a really good cherry pitter and we concocted the Cherry Pitter Cocktail which involves sour cherry juice, limeade and vodka.  The weather this year has not been kind to the early fruits.  We had a lack of rain and then got all of our rain all at once which has caused a lot of farmer's strawberries and cherries to rot.  So after falling in love with cherries last year, I'll have to try to get by on the few bags we have left in our freezer.  Cherries from the grocery store don't hold a candle to them and you can't find fresh pie cherries in the store because they're so delicate.  We did make several cherry crisps this week - I'll post the recipe for the crisp later on this month.  It's easy to make a large batch of crisp topping and keep it in the freezer so you can make fruit crisps whenever you want.  We also made up some cherry sorbet that we also made last year.  Another dessert that we've made a lot of is Strawberry Shortcake.  Just mix up a batch of biscuits (I'll have to get Marcus to post a tutorial - the boy can make a biscuit to rival anyone's family recipe), slice some strawberries and top with whipped cream.  Thanks goodness we haven't had a late frost so the other fruits look to be doing ok - just pray for enough rain at the right time!

We've been eating a lot of breakfasts involving swiss chard.  My brother brought back eight pounds of it from my parents and we're trying to eat as much as we can before freezing it.  We usually add it to scrambled eggs that are topped with Locust Grove cheese.  Bacon is from Laurel Creek farms and bread is made from non-local flour but local sourdough and topped with local, homemade butter and jam made from local cherries or homegrown strawberries.  Lunch is usually leftovers or a salad made from local lettuce and greens, local hard-boiled eggs and local bacon.  One meal we've made several times is Pasta with Peas and Cream.  The pasta and cheese isn't local but everything else is and it is heavenly.  Fridays are pizza nights here so we made crust using our sourdough starter, homemade frozen pizza sauce made with our own tomatoes and topped with our favorite toppings this time of year, garlic scapes and caramelized onions.  We also made up a stir-fry using local ground pork, local broccoli, local bok choy and the first garlic of the season.

Our entirely local meal tonight was broiled pork neck-bones from River Ridge Farms, salt boiled new potatoes from Good Earth Farms and steamed snap peas from our garden.  Butter to top the veggies was made from Cruze Farm Milk.  Dessert is sliced strawberries.

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!