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.

Food, Glorious Food...

Today, Friday, I have set aside to work with food all day! My daughter and granddaughter will be coming over to make pesto, using up the copious amount of basil we have growing in our greenhouse. This is 2 year old Lila helping to "cut" basil.

I start early, with yogurt & berries and pear for breakfast. I picked some "exploding" cabbage yesterday evening and want to get them taken care of before the girls get here. Once the heads have cracked several layers deep they won't keep, so I am making sauerkraut. This first step is relatively quick and easy. Then it sits and ferments for several weeks before I have to can it.
This requires bowls, a crock, a cabbage shredder or mandolin (not the musical kind) and knife. I think some people use a food processor, but I have never had one, so don't know.
I trim the outer leaves off the cabbage. The chickens will enjoy these - and the bugs that come with them.Here is the process:

Shred the cabbage fine. The trick to sauerkraut is fairly uniform size pieces, so everything will ferment uniformly as well. I take any larger chunks and cut them smaller with a knife.
Weigh the cabbage. To every 5 pounds of shredded cabbage, mix in 3 Tblsp. salt. I use sea salt. I am probably one of the few people who buys salt in 50 lb. bags. It keeps forever and takes me several years to use up.

Now press the salted, shredded cabbage into the clean crock as firmly as possible. I scald the crock with boiling water right before I do this.
Press it as hard as you can. I use my fists with my entire weight behind it. It will begin to get juicy almost immediately. Add more cabbage in layers until you are done (up to within 3 or 4 inches of top of crock maximum), pressing until the liquid covers the surface. Cover the top with a layer of cheesecloth and weigh it down. This time I am using a plate over the cheesecloth with a gallon jar of water as a weight. The point is to keep the cabbage submerged. You can use a plastic bag filled with water (placed inside another bag) to be a weight that also entirely seals the surface preventing contact with air, yeasts or molds.

Now you let it set for 5 to 6 weeks, until it is the desired "sourness". You can add a bit of water if the liquid evaporates below the level of the cabbage. When done you skim off the top layer, which may be soft. Place the kraut in a stock pot and heat to a simmer. Pack hot into hot clean jars, cover with the hot juice to within 1/2 inch of top, seal and process in a boiling water bath, 15 minutes for pints and 20 minutes for quarts.

There are also recipes that let you make sauerkraut directly into wide mouth quart jars. This has never worked for me, but I have friends who have great success with it.

This done, we lunch on a egg and vegie scramble with some of the Premiere Meats chicken apple sausage chopped into it.
By now Amber and Lila are here and we go pick 3 big baskets of basil. I have a lot of sweet basil (Genoa, Ruffled, Mammoth, and Globe), plus purple and Thai basil that we will be using. We set some aside on the stems to hand to dry, and pick the leaves off of the stems of the rest, keeping the different type separate. We then peel a lot of garlic. The prep takes all the time. Once that is done and we line up all the other ingredients it goes very quickly.

Basil Pesto:
olive oil
nuts (pine nuts, walnuts, or almonds)
garlic
basil
In a blender, to each 1 c. olive oil, add 1/4 c. garlic cloves and 1/2 c. nuts. Blend thoroughly. Now add basil until you cannot convince the mixture to take any more. Pack into 1/2 pint jars or those plastic deli containers you could not bring yourself to throw away (who, me?), label and date and freeze. I used to put parmesean cheese in the pesto when I made it, but now just add it to the food at the time we eat it.
We make a couple special pestos - one with the purple basil (more black when done) and 2 with the Thai basil, one the same as regular, and one a sort of Asian paste with peanut oil, Thai chili, garlic and the basil. That will be interesting, I bet!
In the middle of this we go off to a short but sweet surprise baby shower for a friend. Snacks there include piles of Sungold Cherry tomatoes and sliced garden vegies with a homemade yogurt dip. Apple cake and carrot cake and tofu filled empanadas. I think I will cheat and drink some pomegranate Italian soda - but I manage to spill it all over myself instead! It is my subconscious protecting me from this non-local, non-tea beverage!!
Most of this time we have been drinking only water, but that is our main beverage here anyway. We have a very good spring and our tap water is delicious.

In the past I have also made pesto with lemon basil and dried tomatoes and other variations.

Once all is done, kitchen cleaned up, and Amber and Lila headed for home with containers of pesto, garden produce and eggs, we settle in for dinner. Pesto, of course - with local raviolis, garden green salad with the buttermilk dressing (recipe in the "Take the Challenge" handout from the Co-op), garlic bread (Brio with olive oil, garlic, chopped basil and parmesan cheese).

A good food day, all in all.