Local meal, with a mime

A few of Gillen's poults encouraging one another that he will be back from camp soon:
They'd be glad to know that last night's dinner was meatless. It was also all local, even the wine. My cousin Lake was here, having worked all day at the farm. He helped cook the stir-fry, with lots of summer squash and zucchini, garlic, torpedo onions, turnips and eggs, all from the farm (all but the rice and soy sauce). We also ate our first green beans of the season and had our cucumbers in a salad.

Also visiting was this sweet mime:

And his darker twin:

One Local Summer

I'm afraid that I am posting some pictures of the same meal as last week, hopefully better ones. We did have several local-only meals - eggs, gazpacho (this time spicy), and last night , it felt like fall, so I brought home an African Squash, onions and garlic for our favorite warm soup. I am bravely posting a picture of myself, holding this newest member (this season) of our farm vegetable family, because I think it shows how much I needed a bit of warm soup. And isn't it big? This just shows one third of it. I was on the phone with my mother in law who was giving me healing advice. Thanks Helen:Red and green mixed okra (it all turns green after cooking it):Roasted purple and yukon gold potatoes, onions, garlic, red peppers, Delicata squash and beets:
A close up of the small Delicata squash:We just can't get enough fried okra right now. A woman who is volunteering at the farm and is a former chef from Woodfire Grill in Atlanta gave me a hint about the okra. She said to soak it for an hour in buttermilk and then drain well. Coat it in corn meal (with a bit of flour) and with grits, to add more crunch. I can't say I did this the other night as I wanted to wait until I could buy the locally produced grits and buttermilk but I will definitely try it in the future.

Gazpacho:We'll be out of town for a few weeks. I hope that I'll be able to post some local meals from north Georgia and N.C., if we are able to create any local meals.

One Local Summer

Inspired by my cousin coming to dinner, I made gazpacho, I roasted potatoes and beets, and I fried up some okra, with local corn meal. My cousin, Lake, brought wine from a vineyard down the street (it was a super nice thought, but really not something we think we'll do regularly having tried it)and thankfully, we had locally produced Athens, GA Tarrapin beer too.I got lots of yellow tomatoes for the gazpacho as they are less acidic and I thought the color would be interesting. Mixed in with the red tomatoes from the kids' farm, the red peppers, red onions, garlic and cucumbers, when blended the soup turned a rich shade of orange.

I included a few farm shots to make up for the lack of Monday farm photos this week.

Watermelon:The intellectual farmer:The farm and the farmers are all tired. Pictures of the rows would be filled with weeds, the edges of some vegetables even singed from the sun. But there are lots of them and we are so grateful for the abundance.

One Local Summer

This week I put up green beans and pesto.I used the kids' tomatoes to make salsa. Notice the sultry darker tomato? That is one of the heirlooms - Black Krim.
The salsa is just red onions from the farm, a mixture of different tomatoes and some cilantro (which was not local - mine died).
Below, Jesse is separating out the lipstick jalapenos from the others (all from his backyard farm) to sell them at the market.

One Local Summer

I took advantage of being on my own this week and put up lots of food - not as much as I'd hoped, but plenty.

Tomato sauce is not quick, for me anyway. There's the de-coring, the dunking in hot water, the peeling, the seeding...only to find out that I was too zealous in my de-seeding, or that the heirloom tomatoes are just very juicy (some combination therein) and that what I had actually made was a very flavorful tomato soup. So, a few days later I did this all over again and added more tomato pulp to turn part of my soup into sauce. I kept envisioning winter nights in this cold house with visiting family and friends eating cream of tomato soup. There were five of these boxes of tomatoes.
I froze two flats of blueberries (about six of what you see here) from a friend's blueberry farm.
I started another batch of kosher dill pickles (the recipe is at the end of the last local food post), this time with our smaller pickling cucumbers. They'll be gone by the end of the week.
Basil is still waiting on the counter for me to make pesto. Then there are peppers and green beans. That may be it for this year. We are lucky to have year round vegetables on our farm and we just gorge on them seasonally and don't do a huge amount of freezing.

I did cook one good farm meal for Nicolas and I - a stir fry with lots of squash, peppers, onion and garlic. The brown rice, of course, wasn't local.

Local summer - week six

After seeing Pinnochio in an eggplant, I can't stop seeing faces everywhere. You need to look at this one sideways:Jesse created some of his own.Of course, when I look at piles of vegetables on my counters waiting to be turned into sauce and salsa:
or dill pickles (these will be ready in only two days!):
or lemon cucumber...(anyone feel like filling in the blank on what to do with these?), I don't see faces, I see abundance.

Earlier in the week, I made greek salad with our peppers, tomatoes, onions and cucumbers. The feta was not local. For this second greek salad, Nicolas bought locally produced feta cheese, much to the kids' disappointment. Too goaty for them? But I loved it.
I will make gazpacho this week as well. It is the season of the tomato, when our mouths start rebelling from how much of it we are eating, but it still tastes way too good to be moderate.

Here is the quick pickle recipe - they are delicious, just like the ones from NY delis, that I miss.

From the book How to Cook Everything, by Mark Bittman:

Kosher Pickles

time:1 to 2 days

1/3 cup kosher salt
1 cup boiling water
2 pounds small (Kirby) cucumbers, washed (I used what we had - many more, and much bigger)
At least 5 cloves garlic, smashed
1 large bunch dill, preferably fresh and with flowers, or substitute 2 tbls. dried dill and 1 tsp. dill seed or 1 tbls. coriander seeds

-combine the salt and boiling water in a large bowl, stir to dissolve the salt. Add a handful of ice cubes to cool down the mixture, then add all of the remaining ingredients.

-Add cold water to cover. Use a plate that is slightly smaller than the diameter of the bowl and a small weight to hold down the cucumbers under the water. Keep at room temperature.

-Begin sampling the cucumbers after 4 hours if you've quartered them, eight hours if you've halved them or even 48 hours for that really "pickle-y" taste.

-When they are ready, refrigerate them, still in the brine. The pickles will continue to ferment as they sit, more quickly at room temperature, more slowly in the fridge. They will keep well up to a week.

One Local Summer - week five

A summer wreath:
We had vegetables and eggs from our farm tonight for our local only dinner. The corn, basil and tomatoes were from Gillen's portion of the back yard farm and the cherry tomatoes, green beans and eggs were from our big farm. We used butter from a farm in Moultrie, GA. We also did use cheddar cheese in the omellette and mozzarella cheese with the tomatoes, basil and olive oil. Both cheeses were organic, but not at all local. I drool when I look at Danielle's cheeses (this post of hers has great info. about cheese making) that she is creating with the milk from her new cow.

Earlier this afternoon, Gillen used blackberries that he and Nicolas picked this morning to make a blackberry cobbler. It didn't last long. We definitely need more of that in our life.
Nicolas saw my pictures and felt that the green beans were not represented enough. They are so hard to pick that they need to be appreciated fully. They truly were delicious. Small, tender, steamed fillet beans with a dab of butter melting over them. Mmmmm. What I need is a picture of the main farmer leaning over picking them, sweat on his brow, a burning ache in his back. They are almost as much of a pain to pick as okra, but just as good to eat.

"One Local Summer" challenge - week four

Our local only meal included mashed potatoes with Yukon Golds from our farm and local milk and butter. There was salad and sliced onion from the farm - the onion was so sweet we could eat it raw. The best part of the dinner were the grilled pork spare ribs from Riverview Farms in north Georgia. The Terrapin Golden Ale was from an Athens brewery, an hour away.
We have eaten lots of zero-miles food this week, as more of our summer vegetables ripen. We snacked on heirloom tomatoes and cucumbers, eaten fresh off the farm with a bit of salt. The Crimson Sweet Watermelon was not ready yet, but that didn't stop Gillen from eating one - it was juicy but almost completely white! He thought it tasted great. The rest of us are going to wait a few more weeks.

We also had some of the last lettuce that we'll have until the fall. There will be a bit of salad mix still for customers at the market but no more salads at home for a while.

Using local Riverview Farms grown and milled corn meal (we also ate their grits this week) we had corn bread and fried okra, cooked the way Alton Brown and the NY Times taught me - in a cast iron skillet. Here is the recipe for the okra from a few years ago. I just skipped the flour part and I used coconut oil. The picture I took of it this year doesn't do it justice. But here is one of the corn bread and tomatoes:Last night we ate four to five inch ears of corn from Gillen's section of the backyard farm. It didn't get enough sun to grow to full size so Nicolas also brought some corn home from another farmer at the market. Honestly, Gillen's really were sweeter. Mmmmm. Tonight, we are using Gillen's basil to make pesto and his first eggplant in a medley of roasted vegetables.

"One Local Summer" Challenge

Jesse was responsible for the most innovative contribution to this week's all local meal. He has been wanting to cook lately, but rarely from a cookbook, usually only from his head. This time his idea turned out to be delicious. He talked all week about stuffing burgers with vegetables. On Friday, I helped him do it. He searched through the fridge for every vegetable he could find, all of which came from the farm, so it worked out well for the challenge. He found parsley, chives, English peas (which he shelled), and carrots. There were big, beautiful sweet onions but he wanted nothing to do with those. So I chopped those up and mixed them with leftover farm potatoes and broccoli into something like hash browns. These onions, cooked, make even the oldest leftovers taste good.

We used ground pork for the burgers. It was from Riverview Farms.

We also had a strawberry smoothie this week made with local frozen strawberries and local milk and we had our first blackberries of the year.The most exciting new farm vegetable (ok, fruit) that ripened in time to appear at our local-only dinner was the Heirloom Black Krim Tomato!

"One Local Summer" Challenge

Purple potatoes:



Last night we had grilled local pork chops, with broccoli and potatoes from the farm. We missed butter. Gillen missed barbecue sauce. But not so much. It was all so fresh and flavorful.

On Tues., there is a local GA Organics event happening at Restaurant Eugene. It is a five course local meal with wine pairings and a meet and greet with farmers - so Nicolas and I will get to be there. Five courses at Restaurant Eugene. yum!

One Local Summer

Every Sunday, all summer long, I will be posting about a meal that we eat that consists of all locally produced food. Everything in the meal, but for oil and seasonings, has to be produced within a 100 mile radius of home. This link will bring you to all of the One Local Summer participants' blog posts, which will be posted there by Tuesday.

Our first meal consisted of hamburgers, salad and roasted vegetables. The grass-fed beef came from our friends at Riverview Farms in Ranger, GA. The salad lettuces and the boiled beets that were cooled and then mixed into the salad came from our farm. The roasted beets, garlic, carrots and onions were from our farm. The turnips (so sweet when roasted), and the radishes in the salad came from Gillen and Jesse's backyard farm. The potatoes were from a friend down the street.
Everyone contributed to the preparation. Gillen and Jesse collected their vegetables. Nicolas drove to the farm, five minutes away, to collect the rest of the vegetables. Once we realized that we couldn't use any of our condiments on the burgers, I thought of a cheese-free pesto that we could make with our basil and garlic. I thought of it, but didn't make it. (I was busy starting a novel. : ) Gillen and Nicolas generously made it, with a cheese version put aside for later in the week.

For dessert we had plums from our farm and strawberries from another local farmer. Gillen ate his strawberries dipped in organic, raw milk that was produced by a local dairy.

We included Tuki in our local feast. She got her own burger.But not enough.


While I did the dishes, I listened to last year's annual "poultry slam" episode of "This American Life", about the tiny bird that is described as representing the soul of France. It is illegal to eat it anymore. Mitterand ate it as part of a huge last meal feast, thinking he was going to die, and when he didn't die he refused to eat again for the next eight days, until he finally did die. The narrator of the NPR story described eating it himself and how conscious and silent he had to be in order to eat it. It is Act Two of the episode. It made me think about how unconscious we all are so much of the time when we eat. We talk a lot about this as a family and as members of Slow Food. Tonight, we were made more conscious of what local really means. We missed our condiments and thought about how much work will go into making them all ourselves. And we talked about what a luxury it is to have this farm and our honey bees and to know local farmers who raise meat.

Later, the farmers hoed, staked the tomatoes and spread fertilizer in the backyard farm, and we talked about what they'll have grown by the end of the summer.
Anyone in the Atlanta area who is interested in getting more local produce, we are part of a large group of organic farmers who sell our produce every Sat. morning at the Morningside Farmers Market. Here is a national web site that can help you to find the local resources near you.