Continuing Menu of Local Delights...

Oh I am lazy this year!
I confess our breakfasts are virtually all 100% local based (having chickens doesn't hurt), and often, that is the meal I count for my 1-Local-Meal-a-Day.

So, from where we left off:
9/10 - Breakfast: The delectable poached fresh eggs on Brio bread with grated Loleta Cheese

9/11 - Dinner: The wonderful Beet & Beet green Gratin! A solar cooked delight, see the recipe on our earlier blog post: Garden Delights: Don't that Beet All! With this we had a garden green salad with Napa Olive Oil and our homemade herbed red wine vinegar. We love solar cooking, and use the Sun Oven as often as possible, all year round.

9/12 - Breakfast: Leftover Beet Gratin with eggs on the side

9/13 - Breakfast: Our favorite Huevos, Simmons Style. Eggs poached in home canned Zesty Salsa, on Bien Padre tortilla with grated Loleta pepper jack!

9/14 - They had Cod Cheeks in town! We LOVE these local fishery tidbits. Sorta like faux scallops and inexpensive to boot. Dinner: Cod cheeks sauteed with my fish herb seasoning, fresh corn on the cob, and marinated cucumbers from the garden.

9/15 - Lunch: Green salad with home canned local caught Albacore

9/16 - Breakfast: Simmons 'Eggerito' Scrambled eggs in a Bien Padre tortilla with a bit of grated Loleta cheese and homemade hot sauce on top.

9/17 - A lovely picnic lunch on Arcata Plaza in the middle of the North Country Fair! We had Brio bread, Cypress grove chevres and Humboldt Fog, locally made bear/venison/pork salami, BBQ Humboldt Bay oysters from one of the food booths, fruit from the Farmer's Market and some Coates vinyard wine. What's not to like!

9/18 - Home again for a romantic dinner of grilled local beef, fresh corn on the cob and steamed carrots

9/19 -  Dinner: grilled local salmon, zucchini curry (many non-local spices in this - added up to maybe 1 tablespoon - but it had to be!) and Raita made with our cucumbers, cilantro and home made yogurt YUM!!!

Picked more cucmbers today, as well as peppers and squash and tomatoes... & will be canning applesauce and mixed vegetables for soup. This time of year is full-on abundance in the garden.
The Autumnal Equinox is this coming Friday, we need to enjoy what is left of this summer season.

28 down, 2 to go

Monday, work day, paperwork, phone and orders.
I start with Brio toast with a thin slice of Loleta cheddar cheese,a fine butter substitute, to accompany my tea.

We want to make the most of this decidedly cooler (some 30 degrees cooler than yesterday!)  but sunny day. Throw some tarps over things, put others away... batten down the hatches for impending change in the weather.

Break time means a Monday brunch. We make omelets filled with chopped crookneck squash, onion, bell pepper, parsley, burger, & Loleta jack cheese. I season mine with our "Thaibasco" sauce. There is cider to drink and honeydew melon on the side.  The honeydew is perfectly ripe - a sign of more to come. We grow these melons in containers in a greenhouse.
 Before going back to work I put together a dish of solar Spanish Rice (see recipe here) while we still have sun. To make it more local based, I leave out the cumin or Mexican seasoning and add some of my ground chilis (sparingly) and chopped cilantro. This way I'll have a ready made rice dish for some busy evening, rain or shine.
While it cooks I go back to work.
Finally done (work & rice both), we get out to harvest, put away, and cover up anything that needs to stay dry. If the change in temperature wasn't enough to remind us of the season we hear a distant clamor... First Geese! The migration is in progress - two large "V's" high in the sky heading SE. Very cool.

Day done. We dine on local line-caught rock cod, cooked in olive oil with my fish seasoning. With it a pile of steamed crookneck squash and sliced beets w/sour cream. We love beets. I will pull up a bunch of them and steam them ( these were steamed yesterday) and put them in the fridge to use on salads or whenever. This dish, usually made with butter and salt & pepper, was just fine with the beets heated in a tiny bit of olive oil and then steamed with about a Tablespoon of water. Just before serving I stirred in the last of our homemade sour cream. A perfectly local dinner. Except for the olive oil all from Humboldt county - again!
I have my evening tea and put the dried pears into jars to seal. We begin to refill the dehydrator with more tomatoes. It is during weather changes that the dehydrator is most valuable. Might be no more placing the trays outside for a while.

Back on the computer I find a message in my e mail - Arcata did not make the Top 20 Best Farmer's Markets in the US!! As good as that market is, and as computer savvy as Arcatans are, I really thought they might get out the vote.
Sponsored by  American Farmland Trust , "...committed to protecting the nation's best farm and ranch land and improving the economic viability of agriculture." They held an online contest to find the most liked farmer's markets in 3 size categories.
Maybe next year...

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.

Friday: Home Sweet Home

Nice to be home where the food is mostly garden fresh and we know where it is all coming from.
A work day - we have to get the orders out and a lot of shop work done. We start the day walking the puppy and dine on a pear breakfast.

Lunch is that summer favorite again, a tomato, cuke & pepper sandwich on Brio Bakery Olive Bread with some of our home made mayo.

I have defrosted a small beef roast for dinner and brown it using Tehama Gold olive oil seasoned with some of my Meat Treat herb mix. I saute and add onions, garlic, carrots, chopped summer squash and some of the Vinatura Table Red to the Dutch oven and cook it in the solar oven. I love the solar oven for this. Like a non-electric crock pot, it slow cooks our dinner while we work elsewhere.

When we are done working I steam some potatoes and corn on the cob to round out the meal, with a glass of the red wine on the side.

We are eating much more red meat than we usually do, during this challenge. Comes of having a freezer with a lot of local beef in it, which comes of having rancher neighbors from whom we can buy a quarter of an organic, range-fed beef. We can get local fish of several varieties, but locally grown chicken is not readily available. We ordered meat birds when we got chicks this spring, but due to a shipping mishap all but one perished en route. Very sad. And we ate the lone meat bird last month, before we decided to take the challenge. A 7 pound bird, it lasted several meals! I miss it now. Ah well.

Fall is in the air...

Boy, you can definitely feel the seasons changing. Suddenly leaves are turning, not just drying up, there is a chill in the occasional breeze that is not just the fog sitting over the ridge. I'm chilly this 40º morning and I want Hot Cereal!
I see a problem here. No local oats, I haven't found local wheat or cornmeal. I could grind rice and toast it and make rice cereal... Naw. We will just have a brunch boogaloo full of rice, onions, summer squash, and eggs. Chopped tomato and Loleta Jalapeno Jack cheese on top, seasoned with herbs and "Ha-basco" Clendenen's cider on the side. However, I am getting tired of eggs & vegies. I will have to find time to make some yogurt soon. I'll pencil it in - Hah!

We are glad it is the Labor Day holiday,' we're moving rather slow and want to play catch - up today. Watering, tending critters, and checking messages, mail and garden. We stack more wood in the woodshed and then pick pears.
The ravens have been knocking our Red Bartletts out of the tree, and the green Bartletts are starting to fall on their own. Closer inspection shows them ready to pick and there are lots of them. And how!
After harvesting, sharing, eating, and throwing raven punctured pears to the chickens, we still have 4 lugs and 3 baskets of pears. Soon to be on the menu, I think!

All afternoon there's been stew cooking in the solar oven. When work is done, so is dinner! I pick a few ears of corn and some blackberries and we have an early supper of local range-fed beef, carrot, onion, pepper, garlic & summer squash stew, with a slice of Brio olive bread and corn on the cob. I use no butter or salt on any of this. Olive oil and herbs are the seasoning components, my Meat Treat blend in particular, as well as a shot of the red table wine as the liquid. To drink we have water and some of the Elk Prairie Pinot. Not bad.

And the blackberries? I take the last of our crop of small but delicious peaches, slice them, and cook them slightly with the blackberries and a bit of local honey to make a fine dessert with a bit of Humboldt Creamery cream or 1/2 & 1/2.

Delectable end to the day. Now I have to start thinking about pear recipes. Hmmmmmmmm...