Local-voire

The last couple years I have become more concerned with our food sources. I have read several of Michael Pollian’s books plus Barbara Kingslover. Last year, one of our young friends was the farm manager for a local organic farm and we jumped off into the organic local product with him. Now that our Farmer’s Market is open again I am trying to buy as much as I can from there for our weekly meals.

Tonight for example we had some Salmon (from the great market in Seattle hand carried back to Indiana), all the rest is local: new potatoes (just boiled with butter), zucchini, yellow squash, red onions, and eggplant roasted with some olive oil and garlic and for dessert an apricot-plum “tart”. I perused many tart recipes and finally winged it. It was beautiful to look at and to taste. Even my customers (male) could appreciate its beauty and taste.

The orchard that grew the plums (very small, sweet and lovely tasting) will have several other types of plums maturing in the next few weeks. They also have many types of apples. The very first of which we bought a week ago: Lodi. They will have apples now until late in the fall.

I have a source for locally raised/grass only bison-which makes the most wonderful guilt free hamburgers. I have a source for grass-fed: turkey (in the fall) and chicken and eggs.

Our garden is starting to put out cukes, yellow squash and scallions. The first corn has tasseled and the 2nd is about ready to be hilled.

It's that time of year again!

Today we started our annual "putting away the harvest." The cucumber plants have been toying with us; lots of blossoms, lots of small baby cucumbers, but none large enough to "do up." However for the last couple days we have been picking a small amount that finally added up to enough to pickle. Yesterday we cleaned them all up and put them down in the lime. This morning Kent scrubbed them down again while the oatmeal cooked. After our morning walk, I picked dill and grape leaves. The jars were washed and ready to assemble. I recovered the peeled garlic from the freezer(left over from the last pickle party of 08), and stuffed 7 jars with dill, garlic and grape leaves. Then comes the cukes. I learned how to be an efficient jar stuffer from my dearly departed mother-in-law. Putting the pickles in the jars was one of the first things I learned from her back in 1985. She had worked at Vlasics once upon a time and talked about the foreman who would tell the ladies on the line, "one more pickle in that jar!" We did 7 quart jars of pickles and used less than 2 quarts of brine; that's a pretty good pickle to brine ratio!

The jars were processed and are now sitting on the island cooling off. There is few things as satisfying as hearing the pinging of the jars sealing.