One Local Summer :: Week #2

This is my second post for the One Local Summer Challenge. The premise is to make one meal per week out of entirely local ingredients, except for salt, pepper, spices and oil.

Oh Alice Waters, you make my life and my kitchen better every day!

My entry for week two of the One Local Summer Challenge is from the pages of Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food. My husband bought me this cookbook for Christmas, and I absolutely love it. Within the next few days I'll be modifying a recipe from the book to make (local) sausage and pak choi over (non-local) fusilli pasta. YUM! On today's menu we have Turnip and Turnip Greens Soup:



Local ingredients:

Turnips and greens from Wake Robin Farm
Kate's butter
Onion...hmm don't remember!
My own thyme
Home-made chicken broth from a Lasting Legacy Farm chicken

Non-local ingredients:

Bay Leaf
Salt

In Ze Kitchen du Cost - Local-Ish Recipes

I've been cooking up a few new local-ish recipes that I thought I would share with you here.

beet greens, shallots, sun dried tomatoes and garlic waiting to go in the pan...


The first has become a delicious new favorite in our kitchen Beet Greens over Polenta by Matt Armendariz via Design Sponge. I substituted the pancetta with bacon, which I could probably seek out locally, but I didn't in this case. I bought the beet greens, garlic and shallots at my farmer's market from Wake Robin Farm. I highly recommend this recipe if you're looking to add a little more leafy greens to your diet. It is simple and tasty.

sip this with a straw and it will be gone, lickety split!


This recipe for Rhubarb Citrus Soda is from my newly acquired copy of Cooking with Shelburne Farms. (If you click on that link, it's currently available new and used from $2.95 - I got my copy a few weeks ago for .99 cents!) This is definitely one of my new favorite cookbooks. Not only does it contain recipes, but it's interspersed with stories of local people who work in and around the Vermont farm. The format of the book is interesting as well. It's broken up into sections by nine ingredients that are indigenous to Vermont; milk and cheese, maple, greens, lamb, mushrooms, game and fish, pork, root-cellar vegetables and apples. These sections make the recipes very applicable here in New Hampshire, as our local food economy depends on many of the same products. The tasty looking recipes combined with the insightful stories really make me want to go visit Shelburne Farms! I don't want to infringe on any copyrights by posting the full recipe here, but if you've made natural sodas before, you could the ingredients are rhubarb, water, orange juice, lemon juice, honey and seltzer, plus I garnished the finished tonic with my orange mint and the first strawberries of the season!

Tonight is Stitch n' Bitch and tomorrow I'm going rock climbing at Pawtuckaway with the hubby and best bud, Allison. Cheers everyone!

Saturday Scores - All About the Farmer's Market

This week's bounty:

* Seen above: Starter lemon verbena, thyme, lemon basil (from another farm, I can't remember the name!), rosemary, greek oregano and orange mint respectively, plus a bar of beeswax calendula soap from Ragged Robin Herb Farm

* A delicious Indian bean(?), pea(?), (can't remember I ate it too fast), dish prepared with spices and coconut with saffron flavored rice, on the side, from Divine Cuisines from Kittery. Matt and I devoured this for lunch today - so good! Apparently they're opening a restaurant in Kittery very soon. This will be a must to revisit for the future!

* Another visit to Sugar Momma for a maple candy, my beloved maple cream and this week, something new, maple coated walnuts to go into my salad. Sugar Momma told me that I'm going to need a 12-step program by the end of the year. Umm, I think she's right. I have a slight maple problem.

* A medicinal buy from Blueberry Hill. Little known fact here on the bloggy, I've suffered from mild psoriasis my whole life. I'm running out of my store bought cream that I've used for years, that doesn't really do anything except moisturize, and I'm looking for an herbal alternative. I bought a tincture made from burdock, red clover and yellow dock that you take with a little water everyday. It's supposed to be good for any skin ailments, so I'm interested to see if there are any marked improvements!

* Italian Sausage from Kellie Brook Farm

I love shopping at the market, because you always run into people that you know. I saw a few of my dance students, and I bumped into Sara Zoe from the Seacoast Eat Local blog.

That's it for me today! Tomorrow I'm going to the Sheep to Shawl NH Fiber Festival. Whoo-hoo! I'm sure I'll come back with lots to share!

Maple Weekend

I did get a brief reprieve from work this past weekend by have a little local eating adventure at Sugar Momma's in Northwood.



This big piece of machinery boils the sap down into syrup. It takes an enormous amount of sap to make syrup. I might be remembering this incorrectly, but I think that Sugar Momma said that it goes in 2% sugar content and comes out 68% sugar content! Sugar Momma was so cute with the little wee kids, who she called her "sugar buddies." She sang them a little maple syrup song that went something like "First you take the tree and you tap it, you tap it, then you take the sap and you boil it, you boil it, then you take the syrup and you eat it, you eat it!"



Sugar Momma uses this little tool to tell what grade the syrup is. The first and last two jars are permanent fixtures to this little tool. When a new batch of syrup is ready, she places it into the center slot and hold it up to the sunlight to determine the grade. Pretty nifty!

Outside the sugar shack they had samples of all sorts of maple products. Maple cobbler with ice cream and syrup on top, maple cream with doughnuts, little cups of maple syrup to try, and maple cotton candy!!! I brought home a fifteen piece box of maple candy and a container of maple cream and I'm slightly ashamed to say that it is all GONE! I think I have a slight weakness...

Wendy, (who I buy most of my local meat from), of Lasting Legacy Farms was there with little baby animals. There was a calf and two little piglets there. The calf was sleeping, so I didn't want to disturb it, but these little piglets where lovin' the camera.





They were so cute and friendly and would butt their noses up against your hand to see if you were holding anything good to eat! All in all, it was a fun little adventure.

If you would like more information about Sugar Momma's products - she does not have a website as far as I can tell. Her contact information is:

Sugarmomma's Maple Farm
213 Ridge Road Northwood, NH 03261
603-942-7005