Dark Days 11/12: Week 1

The Dark Days Challenge is underway!  We decided our first meal of local food for the challenge would be Monday, which we've been observing as Meatless Monday  Not too much of a stretch for us as we are vegetable growers!  Looking around, we decided on baked beans, from our stash of 'Jacob's Cattle' which we harvested this year.  Also had a 'Small Wonder' spaghetti squash on the counter, very ripe, so thought we'd use a recipe for a squash pancake that we haven't used in a while.  We usually do a bean recipe with rice and although we do have some local wild rice, we decided to use 'Cavena Nuda', a rice substitute that is actually a type of hulless oat or naked oat!

There is a lot of conflicting information out there on using fresh, dried beans.  We harvested ours late in September, it took us a few weeks to get them cleaned and ready for storage.  Some info says you shouldn't have to soak fresh beans at all and they should cook quickly.  Other sources say you should still soak them for a short period, if nothing else but to remove the sugars that can cause the 'musical' effect.  We did soak them for a couple of hours, changing the water a couple of times.  They plumped up nicely but lost most of their lovely cranberry/ivory color!  We then chose to use our home canned marinara sauce for baking the beans..  This is a multi-purpose tomato sauce from Sherri Brooks Vinton's excellent 'Put 'em Up!'.  All tomato sauce ingredients were from the farm.  We sauteed a bit of our onion and garlic and then mixed beans, sauce and sauteed veg in a baking dish and into the oven!  The mixture was done in about an hour and a half - so very quickly for baked beans!

We roasted our little spaghetti squash (and roasted some butternut, too, for a nice soup tonight!).  We used Molly Katzen's recipe for the squash pancake, from here.  We didn't get the full amount of cooked squash called for in the recipe and adjusted the ingredients on the fly.  Our chicken coop supplied the eggs, our flour is local and organic: De Ruyck's that we get from Two Farm Kids, and we just skipped the salt and pepper.  When I cracked one of the eggs it was a double yoker, and may have made the pancakes a little too 'eggy', but they were good nonetheless.  Alongside were our nude oats, which are an excellent rice substitute!  They are chewier than rice, but a lovely wheaty flavor - and good for you!  A tasty, hearty dinner for one of our coldest nights so far this year!  Have you cooked a totally local meal  recently?  Even if you're not blogging, feel free to join in  The Dark Days Challenge by telling us about it in the comments section!

Dinner Rustica!

We could say that we were practicing for The Dark Days Challenge, coming up.  We could say it was because we were organizing and cleaning the freezers.  Nonetheless, we ended up having a largely local meal, from disparate parts.  I made tomato sauce for the first time this summer.  I used a marinara recipe from Sherri Brooks Vinton's excellent 'Put 'em Up!'.  It's a multi-purpose sauce that, with tweaking, can become almost anything: pizza sauce, pasta sauce, bruschetta base.  I had some cooked, cubed butternut left from making this delicious pilaf with quinoa, cranberries and nuts for Meatless Monday.  In tidying the freezers, we found one small package of a gift from our neighbors Mike and Naomi of homemade deer/pork sausage.  There is a good chance the deer was harvested from our farm, and the pig was raised by a friend of Mike's.  The sausage was delightful with a smokey flavor and coarse texture.  After cooking the sausage, everything went into a skillet to warm.  We boiled some spaghetti, store bought admittedly.  We'll get back to making pasta from scratch, now that things are almost closed up on the farm.  We accompanied the meal with home made bread from the much-used 'Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day' by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois.  The pasta was topped with some grated parmesan, also store bought.  This time next year we hope to be having homemade goat's milk parmesan.  Dinner was followed by a cup of tea from homegrown spearmint, hung to dry in the back room! Now, that's not bad for eating local without really trying!  Are you still eating local food?

The Dark Days Are Here Again - Yeah!

It may sound like a bad thing: The Dark Days.  And it's true: winter is closing in, we've already got a persistent dusting of snow on the ground and it's snowing a bit right now as I type.  Daytime highs are just barely getting above freezing and night time temperatures are four or five degrees (at least) below freezing.  It's dark 'til late in the morning and it gets dark again before we've had our evening meal.  But what I'm talking about here is The Dark Days Challenge!  Organized for a number of years now by the great blog The Urban Hennery, The Dark Days Challenge is about eating local through the winter.  It's one thing eating local when your garden is growing and the Farmers Market are in full swing, but what about in the dead of winter?  That's why it's a challenge: can you find local food all winter long?

The Dark Days Challenge is a great community of bloggers from all over, with varying climates offering varying access to fresh, local food.  The challenge encourages us all to cook one SOLE meal a week and write about it.  SOLE stands for sustainable, organic, local or ethical food so if you can't find it local at least make it organic or Fair Trade or sustainably grown.  The blog posts will present you with a dizzying array of awesome recipes and some great stories of finding ingredients or amending recipes.  All the information you need to get involved is here; anybody can join in the fun!  If you don't blog, you can still join in by posting about your meal in the comments section here on The Vine!  Recaps of all the blogs are posted for perusal and I'll keep you updated with links!  Hope you'll join in!