The Beet goes on!

On the 4th of September & I woke up thinking about how good last night's dinner was! Obviously I had to redo it for breakfast. Preceded by my morning tea.

Beans in the solar oven

The Tuscan Beans, Polenta, tomatoes & pesto were just as heavenly as they were last night. If you have never made Tuscan Beans, it is the easiest recipe ever:

Tuscan Beans
2 c. Dry beans (Pinto, Yellow Eye, Cannellini, Calico...)
water
20 leaves fresh sage
lots of sliced garlic (to taste, but not less than 3 big cloves!)
Olive oil
salt & freshly ground pepper

Soak the beans overnite. Next day add garlic, about 1 Tblsp. Olive oil and the garlic and bring to boil. Simmer until just tender, then add salt & pepper. Cook another 1/2 hour or so. Serve drizzled with a bit more olive oil.

We cook them here in the solar oven.


The Beet & beet green gratin is another surprisingly delectable recipe. Chard can be substituted for beet greens.
Find the recipe here: Don't that Beet All...

With Cypress Grove, Loleta Cheese Company & Rumiano cheeses, countless amazing beers & wines, grass fed local beef, Humboldt Creamery, Clendenen's Cider, the Tofu Shop, Shakefork Farm and all the other amazing farmers of the local Farmers' Markets it's simple to eat locally produced food. Add to this wild Blackberries, one's own garden produce and eggs, homemade vinegar, yogurt and other condiments, and I find we eat very, very well.

The Last Weekend of Summer

The weather is heating up as the season ends. I am missing the North Country Fair in Arcata for the first time in many years as I am on call. It really was the only weekend I could do it.
Ah well, it is nice to be home for a change.

Saturday I start the day with tea and a pear. The pears are all smelling delicious and ripe - uh-oh! I have to get to them pronto. This holds me until our official late Saturday breakfast accompanied by "Wait, Wait - Don't Tell Me" on KHSU.
We have a Premier chicken apple sausage enhanced vegie boogaloo. I should re-clarify - "Boogaloo" is whatever we have mixed with leftover rice and scrambled eggs.  A vegie scramble is more or less the same - without the rice. Right now vegies consist of any of the following: Summer squash (zukes, patty pan or crookneck), onions, cabbage, tomatoes, chard, kale, cukes, green beans, garlic, corn, lettuce, radishes, carrots, broccoli (side shoots), beets. This is what is available right now in our garden. Only things we are still waiting for is melons, of which there are several not quite ripe, and winter squash.

Lunch is a simple green salad with a sliced boiled egg.
Yesterday I cooked some Warren Creek dry beans in our solar oven and today we solar cooked the Chili con Carne recipe in the Eat Local Resources Packet. With some alterations, that is. I tamper with everything. My changes were olive oil rather than butter, a couple roasted ancho peppers leftover from canning last week along with various bell and jalapeno peppers. In addition to oregano I added some dried basil and mixed ground (well, more like pepper flakes, really) chili peppers I made last year.
This came out really hot! Hmmmmm... I wonder what chiles I put in that dried pepper mix? I know the jalapenos are not that hot. SO now we have a LOT of HOT Chili con Carne.
To temper it we serve it with grated Loleta Cheddar and the homemade sour cream. Now that is truly delicious. Corn on the cob on the side and pears for dessert. Water to put out any residual fire from the chili.

On Sunday we repeat the Huevos Rancheros using the chili instead of refritos. Good this way, too, if a tad warmer. We are not adding and salsa to this meal!
Much of the afternoon is taken up by a STAR call, but we manage a berry peach smoothie made with our fruit and the home made yogurt for lunch. Luckily I had put dinner in the solar oven before the call came in and we have a Solar Buffalo Stew using some of the meat we got in Lake County. It had onions, garlic, carrots and some chopped zucchini in it and the last of our Warren Creek potaoes on the side.

The only project that got done was drying some more cherry and Principe Borghese tomatoes. I learned about the Principe Borghese reading "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral" by Barbara Kingsolver. They are like tiny paste tomatoes and dry marvelously. We do not buy tomatoes at the store. Ever. So we dry and can tomatoes for winter and spring use and only get to eat fresh tomatoes now. The result of this is we almost never cook them fresh. For many meals we have a bowl of chopped or sliced fresh tomatoes on the table to add to our food.
Being on call meant we never got around to canning pears. Uh-oh. We will see if they are stiull good to can or if all 5 lugs are overripe by the time I get to them.

Thursday - my "Friday"- night

I do volunteer Emergency Medical Dispatching for Southern Trinity Area Rescue (S.T.A.R.) one weekend a month and will be on call starting tomorrow at 5pm. So we tend to make pre-call Thursday our "Friday" night for R&R.
The day starts with the now common tea, pears, and Brio toast with chevre. I am jealous of you coffee drinkers as I have no loophole, only an exception, that lets me have my morning brew!

It's a work day, of course, but we get the orders out and shop work done by 1pm. So we get to work outdoors after trying out the Premiere chicken apple sausage for lunch, split and fried and in a sandwich w/ fried pepper Casa Lindah mustard. Yum.

We water and harvest and do remedial repair (literally baling twine and duct tape) on the broken branches of an apple tree. Hopefully the fruit will ripen, then we can prune the branches as properly needs to be done. Too many apples and too much wind is a bad combination for a young tree.
I also whip up another batch of mayonnaise. I am still amazed how quick that is! I may never go back to buying it.

Dinner is a local (Hydesville) lamb chop that we got from Eureka natural Foods. We grill it and serve it with w/ peach salsa made with a slightly under ripe peach from one of our trees, grilled vegies (see photo) and Brio bread. We toast to life with Elk Prairie Pinot.

Grilled vegetables are another of our favorites of summer. We serve them in big slices, as we did tonight, or cubed on skewers over rice or couscous. I marinate them sliced, in oil and vinegar (our home made red wine vinegar), minced garlic and rosemary, basil and oregano. Usually I add salt & black pepper, but I am still trying to stay away from non-local salt as much as possible, and black pepper altogether, for the month. There is nothing as wonderful as grilled eggplant. Absolutely the best way to eat it.

The peach salsa was peach, onion, garlic and green pepper, chopped small. To this I added 1 minced jalapeno, chopped parsley and a splash of my vinegar (where I would have used lime juice). Came out just fine.

Even without restricting it intentionally, most of what we have been eating has come from within Humboldt County only. We are blessed with a rich variety of local foodstuffs.