Summer to Fall...

My plans to write daily evade me this adventurous summer, 10 days already past since last post. Ah well.

I hate these posts to be so long and, thus, more tedious... but time is valuable as summer wanes and tasks seem to add up rather than get checked off the list. So I find myself having to play catch-up here.

Ready to pick!

This being mid-harvest it is our joy to have to eat all these fresh vegetables. A truly local, sustainable diet in a temperate climate limits the fresh vegetables that are available year-round, and I don't buy things out of season. The result of this is absolute bliss when eating these wonderful foods when they are in their prime. Corn, cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers grace nearly every meal to our unadulterated delight!

Starting where we left off, Thurs 9/13. Starting with my daily Tea with some Humboldt Creamery 1/2 & 1/2, I had a Vege scramble to start the day. Lunch was Shakefork grain toast, with Cypress Grove Fromage Blanc, now one of my new favorites! Snacking on fresh cherry tomatoes and snap peas from the garden while a dinner of local grain fed beef stewed with Warren Creek potatoes and our own celery and carrots in the solar oven for dinner. I am delighted to have grown celery successfully for the first time! This dinner was rounded out with a cuke salad.

I have been home alone for a few days, but our hens refuse to slow down on egg production. This inspired me to boil up a bunch of eggs for quick meals or snacks. Therefore
Friday began with a simple boiled egg and Asian pear. Have I mentioned how lovely Asian Pears are? Pear flavor but always crisp and refreshing. Our young tree had its first real crop this year and we have been enjoying themn as a regular snack.
Lunch was my now favorite fried pepper, chevre, tomato and sliced cuke sandwich, using fresh pesto instead of mayonaisse on the bread. Decadently good.

Asian Pears

Ending this day with more of the wonderful grilled vegetables that are the ultimate harvest dinner.
 
Saturday, September 15 I was going off to the North Country Fair in Arcata. Did the many chores and cleaned up the leftover stew and beet gratin for breakfast. 
Finding local fair food is always a challenge. As in restaurants, the folks running the booth often do not know where the food is from. I didn't want one of the local Humboldt Hot Dogs (Sausages from Premiere meats), but found the Fish Tacos featured Local rock cod. Everything else in them could have been local (cilantro, cabbage, tomato, tortilla), so I went with that. At a friend's we dined on veggies & corn I had brought from home and sauteed local chicken breast.


Sunday in town we started with a toasted Los bagels Whole wheat bagel w/ Zimmerman black raspberry jam. Yum. I will have to make Blackcap jam next year, too!
One of the most reliable places in Arcata to find locally sourced ingredients is Brio Cafe, and there I lunched on a wonderful Chicken Pot Pie and salad.
After arriving home that evening we had a dinner of steamed vegies and poached local rock cod.
Monday breakfast was Egg & toast, lunch a cuke and tomato sandwich, then back to town where I grabbed Wildberries deli chicken kabob, marinated grilled tofu & Vegies. assured these were all from local sources. Went to a fabulous concert at HSU that night - Crosby, Stills & Nash. We are so lucky!
Tuesday I woke up in town & had simply Brio bread toast to start the day, but a filling lunch at Eureka Los Bagels - a toasted bagel w/ Cypress Grove fromage blanc & Fish Brothers smoked salmon. This was the first restaurant I went to where the person behind the counter knew what they had that was locally sourced, but was doing the Eat Local Challenge herself! 

Fresh canned Albacore

One of my tasks in town was going by the Marina and buying some fresh Albacore from the fishermen there. Every few years I get tuna to can. I put it up in 1/2 pints in a variety of 'flavors', some plain, some with Tamari soy sauce, Lemon-infused Olive Oil, jalapeno peppers, or herbs. I am sure the tuna can be caught more than 250 miles from our coast, but the Pacific Ocean is right here and here is where these fishing boats are based and I consider it local eats. 
That said, I had a truly fantastic dinner of grilled vegetables and tuna. I was lucky I remembered to save some before i put it all in jars!

Wednesday started with tea and scrambled egg with Humboldt Creamery cottage cheese, a little chives sprinkled on top and an apple on the side. I lunched on simple toast from my Shakefork grain bread and chevre. Dinner, however, was special. As it was a homecoming mealfor my husband, who had been on a camping trip with our son. In honor of this we had grilled local grass-fed beef steaks along with grilled vegetables and some Elk Prarie Pinot Noir. A festive way to end the day.

Wild blackberry snacks!

Thursday was simpler fare, Bacon, egg and toast for breakfast, a fried pepper, tomato and chever sandwich for lunch. Dinner was the sage-seasoned Tuscan beans with Shakefork corn polenta, chopped fresh tomato, and fresh pesto. Another glass of the Pinot made it elegant.

Friday was tea Bacon and egg with polenta on the side and some of our own apple cider. Another classic fried pepper, chevre and tomato sandwich for lunch, and a company dinner of grilled local salmon, cuke salad, and corn on the cob.

Saturday, Sept. 22 began with a 'boogaloo' of solar cooked Lundberg rice (grown within 250 miles, but their office is out of the area), vegetables and egg, cider and an Asian pear.
Our company brought a loaf of Loleta bakery Tyrolean 9-grain bread, so our fried pepper sandwich featured that, along with garden fresh cucumber and tomato and Loleta Cheese roasted Garlic jack. MMMmmmm...
Another company dinner of a grilled locally raised pork roast, corn on the cob and the grilled summer squash, eggplant, peppers and onion, that I just cannot seem to get enough of.
This brings us to today!
Along with my daily tea we had a late Sunday breakfast of an egg and fried pepper sandwich on the Loleta bakery bread. A light lunch of corn fritters using the leftover corn cut from the cob, our eggs and a bit of Shakefork flour, salt and baking powder.
One more night with company and I will be making Chile Rellenos with Loleta Cheese Jack, Ancho peppers from our garden and eggs from our hencoop. With this is solar cooked Spanish rice, fresh salsa and corn on the cob (Which we will be having every night for a while!)


Ah yes, it is easy to celebrate the delicious abundance of local foods in our area, especially when you garden. Bon appetit!

It has begun...

Humboldt Abundance

 And so it begins, a month of a strictly local foods based diet.
I consider this more of a celebration than a challenge. I can't imagine many places having a more diverse variety of good food grown and produced in such a small area.

Being right in the middle of our garden harvest season, we are surrounded by wonderful choices from fruit to squash, onions to herbs.
My plan this year is to make all the main foods be locally grown or produced, but allowing myself my tea (locally roasted coffee fits the bill, but no one produces black tea), salt spices & things like baking powder, yeast.

To get in the spirit of things and prepare I baked a loaf of bread using grains from Shakefork Community farm in Carlotta. I now use a bread machine, as I only need one loaf at a time, and came up with a whole wheat, rye & buckwheat flour bread. Other ingredients are local honey, sea salt, yeast & gluten.

Yummy combo - mmmm...

After starting the challenge with a favorite breakfast of Shakefork cracked (not rolled) oat cereal with honey and some of the first fruit from our young Asian Pear tree, we devoted the whole Labor Day weekend to food, canning beans, pickles, tomatillos, & mixed vegetables with barley for soup.

We eat a lot of soup in the winter, and I love to have a lot in the pantry. It's a great way to put by food when you don't have a lot of any one thing & the best use of extra summer squash I know. Tossing a tablespoon of raw barley in the bottom of the jar before adding the vegetables & processing it adds a lot to the finished soup in flavor and texture.

Menu Sept 1 - Tea, Humboldt Creamery 1/2+1/2, Shakefork Cracked Oats with Humboldt butter, honey & our Asian Pear
Baked whole wheat/rye/buckwheat bread from Shakefork grain (recipe)
Dinner was fried pepper, cucumber & tomato sandwich, cucumber salad
treat - blackberries, peaches & cream

Menu Sept 2 - Tea, egg & mixed vegie scramble with Loleta Cheese's pepper jack
Snack - gravenstein apple, hard boiled egg
Dinner, steamed green beans & Crooknecks & fresh corn on the cob, toast with Humboldt Fog from Cypress Grove.

Menu Sept 3 - Tea, Local and locally cured bacon from Hatfield's Meats in Mad River, egg and toast.

Making fresh linguini!

Lunch was homemade pasta with fresh pesto and chopped heirloom tomatoes. The pasta was made with Lundberg flour from the central valley, I'm not sure if it's grown quite within our 250 mile radius, but it could be. But my daughter and granddaughter were here making pesto with me and there was no way we were NOT going to have some noodles to try it out!
Snacking on Asian Pears
Dinner - Oh my! Tuscan beans made with my favorite Yellow Eye beans from Warren Creek Farm in the Arcata Bottoms, soft polenta from Shakefork corn, with a dollop of fresh pesto and chopped fresh tomato. I cannot tell you how delicious this was. Hooray for leftovers!

I think we're off to a good start.

The Last Weekend

Wow, the month is coming to a close. It has been an interesting culinary journey.

After a tea, pear and melon breakfast a leisurely Saturday begins.
We are having a heat wave. 100+ yesterday, definitely today is headed there as well. We watered and did some harvesting earlier and are staying in the cooler house.

I checked the dehydrator and all but 1 tray's worth of the pears are done. We pack these in canning jars and vacuum pack them, using the seal a meal (FoodSaver) jar attachment. This is one of the neater gizmos we have ever bought. I use it to vacuum pack jars of dried fruit, dried tomatoes, almonds, tea, coffee, even bulk vegetable oil. We initially got the machine for packing meat to freeze, but make much more use of it for glass jars of dry goods.
At any rate, I core and slice the remaining pears to dry - leaving only 7 pears to eat. The end of the Bartlett pears! This makes me very happy. Our winter pears won't be ripe for a few more weeks.

Yesterday I baked bread for the first time this month. Ordinarily we bake most of our bread. We have a bread machine - as I am generally lazy to knead and do all the work for only one loaf of bread. Since there has only been the two of us at home we have gotten a bread machine which lets me control the ingredients without doing the work. But we did not go to town last week and what bread we did not eat became chicken food due to dehydration or mold.
At any rate, the bread allows us to have our favorite carnivorous sandwich - a mock Reuben. With Premiere Meats pastrami, Loleta Cheese Monterey Jack, home made mayonnaise, Fred's Horseradish mustard and our home canned sauerkraut (last year's, the new batch is not ready yet) a local delectable deli style lunch. This with the last of the now lightly alcoholic cider and last of the exploded melon.

We have our oldest daughter, 2 granddaughter's, and a friend coming for the weekend and will probably be breaking the Challenge temporarily for dinner. We are attending a spaghetti dinner benefit for the Two Rivers Community Care Group, a wonderful organization which got a write up in Thursdays Times Standard. The importance of supporting Lauri Rose and the other volunteers' efforts in our community trumps the Eat Local Challenge for this one meal.
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(As it turns out, several of the sauces and a side dish of mixed garden vegetables and bowl of cherry tomatoes are completely local.)
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Sunday is a family girl's day on the farm (Dennis stays in the background). We share local food all day, on the plate, in the canner and to take home.
Our daughter brought up another (cold!) gallon of Clendenen's cider, a couple loaves of Brio bread and Humboldt Creamery 1/2 & 1/2 (hooray!), some Loleta Cheddar as well as potatoes and cauliflower from a friend's farm in Ferndale. We packed it all away last night.

We start the day with a Sunday brunch of poached farm fresh eggs (the little girls LOVE getting the eggs) on our home baked bread with grated Loleta cheese. A poor man's Eggs Benedict. On the side we have the cider and the first of our intact melons. A Galia honeydew/muskmelon cross - yum!

Amber brings Lila over to spend the day with her cousins (and get a break) and we big girls can a vegetable medley of onions, garlic, summer squash, peppers, green beans, cabbage, herbs and tomatoes for soup. Vegetable medleys are a handy way to put away small amounts of several varieties of vegies at once. Requiring pressure canning, you process for  the longest time of the individual vegetables included. In this case, summer squash. I always throw in some of my herbed vinegar to bring up the acidity (and flavor) as well.

We snacked on pears, peaches, plums and peppers as well as the leftover rice pudding.
An early dinner so the gang can drive home to the coast - an all-American localvore burger on Brio bread with Loleta Cheese, homemade mayo and catsup, lettuce and tomato from the garden. With corn on the cob and potato salad made with homemade mayo, farm eggs, onion, parsley, homemade sweet pickles and vinegar and apple cider on the side it is the perfect end of the warm weather feast.
We send the girls back home with summer squash and tomatoes as well as jars of vegetables for the pantry.

And we mean end of the warm weather. Although in the 100's today, we hear a cold snap will be here in the next couple of days - time to put out the cold frame over the winter squash and batten down the hatches.

Ah well. So I end this day with a glass of Riverbend Cellars Cabernet downloading tomorrow's orders and updating this blog. And toast to the last few days of the challenge.

Working it through the week

Thursday and Friday - trying to balance work and harvest. It is beginning to feel like over-abundance!

Thursday begins with pears & tea and off to work. Today Dennis makes soap while I ship orders. We have a late lunch of vegie boogaloo with sausage, with fizzy apple cider. Our gift of Clendenen's cider was unrefrigerated the day before we got it, all it takes to accelerate the fermentation process!
I break to water the greenhouses and pick the few peaches in the top of our cling peach tree... A surprise! Hidden in the leaves were a whole basket of lovely ripe peaches! Wahoo!! Fruit that is SO not pears!
We celebrate later with a snack of a peach strawberry smoothie using the yogurt I made and the handful of berries that was in the strawberry bed. Bliss.

Dinner is local tortellini I got at Eureka Co-op. The label does not give the origin, but it is the fresh pasta you see at both co-ops. There was a sign by it saying it was locally made, but I did not write down the producer. At any rate it is delicious with the pesto we made, a cucumber & tomato salad with basil and Tehama olive oil & our homemade red wine vinegar dressing, and a glass of the Elk Prairie Pinot. As a very special treat I heat some peach slices with honey until soft and hot and we drizzle some Humboldt Creamery cream over it for dessert. Now, THAT is delicious.

My last effort of the day is to fill our dehydrator with pear slices to dry. This leaves only a very full single layer in a lug box. The end of the pears is in sight at last.

Friday this time of year is a minimal business and maximum food preservation day. Really, when the harvest season is full on, if I am not putting away food one way or the other every day it will rot, explode into zillions of fruit flies - and I will miss the opportunity.
This Friday is salsa and corn. My favorite canning partners, Amber and Lila are coming over to can this morning.
We start the day with tea and pear and grazing on cherry tomatoes and peppers and some melon (our first this year) from a honeydew that actually exploded open. I guess that one's ripe!
When the girls get here we go out and harvest ingredients for salsa before the day gets too hot. After, I play with Lila while Amber preps to make Zesty Salsa (Blue Book again). After which she and Lila lay down for a nap.
I lunch on a vegie scramble and some melon, then pick the remainder of our 3rd batch of corn (we plant corn to ripen at 65, 75, 85 and 100 days to extend our season). By then the girls are up and had their lunch. Amber resumes the salsa making and Lila and I husk corn.
There are quite a few corn earworms this year and Lila is very excited about this. She took this picture of a green worm all by herself!

Speaking about excited. I am still very excited about the peaches. During this Challenge I have been wanting to make an egg custard - eggs and milk being two great local products and eggs in abundance right now. But the flavoring aspect, sans vanilla, was baffling me. But I can see that peaches could be the perfect sweet-tart note to add, with some sort of base.
Using the Lundberg Rice loophole and some solar cooked rice from the other day I made a peach rice pudding with 1 c. milk, 2 eggs, about 1/3 c. honey beaten together mixed with a few chopped peaches and maybe 3 c. cooked rice. This cooked up lovely in the solar oven.

Salsa done, and after eating some grapes from a friend in Trinity county, Lila and her mom went home.
Time to can the corn...
I wanted a more serious beverage to end a long, busy day, but felt guilty about my gin & tonic last Monday. So as an apertif, while cutting the kernels off the ears of corn, I had a cocktail of a dash of homemade Limoncello and a shot of sour cherry liqueur over ice - with several of the cherries in it.
A friend in Arcata make the Limoncello, a lemon flavored liqueur. I make the cherry. When our sour (pie) cherry tree has been robbed by the birds, leaving too few cherries for pie, I layer the cherries with organic sugar in a glass jar about 2/3 full and fill the jar with vodka. Wait at least 3 months, stirring occasionally, and the cherries turn pale and the liquid rose and the flavor - quite nice. A dessert, really. Not bad over fruit, ice cream or, in this case, ice. Be warned - the vodka soaked cherries are potent!
While the pints of corn were in the pressure canner, Dennis and I dined on grilled local beef steak, corn on the cob, and a salad with lettuce, cabbage, radishes, and steamed beets from the garden. Our condiments included Fred's Horseradish with our home made sour cream and the buttermilk salad dressing. Of course some Elk Prairie Pinot to accompany this. No salt, no pepper and no butter - but all good. And made all the more locally wonderful by our peachy rice pudding dessert!