We Be Jammin'

Over the last couple of years as we've been landscaping our property, we've slowly incorporated edible plants. We have a fig tree, blueberry bushes, rhubarb, asparagus and strawberry plants alongside ornamental grasses and native perennials. But my husband's favorites are the two black current bushes in the side garden.

The other day he harvested the berries, macerated them overnight with sugar, and then cooked down a batch of black currant jam. He used this recipe.

He has several avid fans (including me).




"You mean you made all that jelly and you didn't save any for me?!"



Now that's better! (However, Abraham remains sorely disappointed.)

Little Winter Market

If you are a Portlander, I highly recommend you head down to the Little Winter Market today. It's Saturday and Sunday at the Cleaners downtown. Some of my favorite local, and not so local, crafters are selling their goods. And if you stop by Kiki and Polly's booth, make sure you say hi to roommate Cara who is helping out there today.

Go Local: Meal #4

The other day I made the most scrumptious blueberry-peach cobbler. The berries were from our very own yard and the peaches came in our Organics to You box the other week. The recipe was from my never-fails-me Cooks Illustrated cookbook. Yum!

One of the ways we've experimented with local food is by trying our hand at some edible landscaping. When we bought our current house, the previous owner had been a pretty serious gardener but more of the roses and pretty flower type. There were lots of pink and blue flowers in narrow flowerbeds on the perimeter of the property. There was a lot of lawn. Or at least more than the Wise and Bearded One and myself care to tend to. So we've been steadily tearing out lawn and adding beds the last four years. We figure that if we add a few more feet of beds every year, soon the lawn will just disappear.

On our side yard we've tried to plant native plants and/or edible plants. Blueberry bushes grow well here. Apparently they like our rainy winters and acidic soil. There are different varieties that make good landscape plants--some stay small and trim instead of getting all big and scraggly. The leaves turn a nice red in the fall. We also have strawberries for a ground cover. In our planting strip we have several herbs that love it hot and dry--lavendar, sage, rosemary,. oregano. In a new bed that we started this year we have a grape vine, a fig tree, rhubarb, and some black currants. In the back yard in pots we have several different kinds of mint. Next year I'd like to start an asparagus bed too. I don't feel the need to have to raise enough food on our property to sustain us, but I like the idea of having plants that do duel purpose--they look nice AND they give us good food right outside our door.

Go Local: Meal #3

We made mozzarella cheese the other day. Seriously! The Wise and Bearded One had seen these kits at the Urban Farm Store and we both thought they looked like a lot of fun to try so we bought one.

The recipe is calculated to work with one gallon of milk, so with our gallon of milk in hand we proceeded to attempt to make our first intentional batch of cheese. (We won't talk about the nasty curdled, unintentional messes we've made a few times in the past. Yuck!)

The ingredients are simple: citric acid, rennet, cheese salt, and milk. The directions are few. It just requires a thermometer and some attention to detail. Fortunately, the Wise and Bearded One was there to take care of the detailed piece since I'm more a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of girl in the kitchen.

Here's a picture "cutting the cheese" and then seeing the curds separate from the whey. Having never made cheese before I didn't realize what a nasty, greenish liquid whey is. The kit had recommendations for what you could do with the whey, but since it skeeved us out we threw the whey away. (Say that line three times fast!)

After the curds and whey separated, we squished out as much of the whey as possible and then kneaded the curd for a while until--voila!--it turned into cheese. Two balls (or since all I do these days is breastfeed--they look a little more like silicone breast implants to me...sick, I know).

It was good cheese. It tasted just like the fresh mozzarella you can buy at the gourmet grocery store. Next time I think we'll put in a little more salt and some herbs from the garden....dill? rosemary?...just to make it extra special.

We sliced up the cheese and served it with fresh basil from our garden and some tomatoes for a caprese salad when our friends came over for a cook-out. Yum!

If you are intrigued by this, you don't have to live in Portland to buy a cheese making kit. Urban Cheesecraft also sells on Etsy. There's the kit for mozzarella/ricotta that we used, plus kits for paneer/queso blanco and goat cheese/chevre. Yummy! These would also be great gifts for your foodie friends....that brother-in-law that watches Alton Brown religiously, the girlfriend who makes her own bread, perfect gift!

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This post is part of the Go Local Challenge hosted by my blogger-friend, Heather Jane. You can find out more about the challenge here.

Go Local: Meal #2

We've been cooking with local food every week. Really! I just can't seem to keep up the blogging of the local meals for the Go Local Challenge. So here's a meal from the other week. Maybe I'll blog two Go Local Meals this week in an attempt to catch up with Heather's challenge.

One of the ways we've attempted to eat healthier and more locally the past two years is subscribe to Organics to You. Organics to You is a little like a CSA crossed with the old-time milkman delivery. Every other Tuesday a "small bin" of produce is delivered to our front door. Organics to You contracts with thirteen local farmers to buy their produce. During the off-season they purchase organically-grown foods from a local distributor. Usually these off-season foods come from California or Mexico. But even in the winter time we get some local food---onions, apples, chard, mushrooms, squash.

We like Organics to You because it forces us to eat our vegetables---they're here, we already paid for them so we'd better eat 'em before they go bad. We've also learned to eat and appreciate vegetables that weren't on our usual grocery store shopping list---kale, swiss chard, winter squash, among others. Sometimes I have to call up my vegetarian friend, Amy, and ask for help identifying or figuring out how to cook an u.f.v. (unidentified flying veggie). We've learned that pretty much any vegetable can be sauteed in butter with a little garlic and everyone is happy. I've also been using the Simply in Season cookbook because it is organized seasonally and has cooking suggestions for all kinds of vegetables. I just discovered that their website also has the handy-dandy fruit and vegetable guide. Check it out!

The other week we made the Spring Celebration Soup in an attempt to use up a LOT of vegetables in one fell swoop. It's on page 36 for those of you who care. It is veggies in chicken stock with a shot of lemon juice to zing it up. It's the kind of food you couldn't have forced me to eat before the age of 21 but now I find fresh and appealing. I thought the lemon was a cheerful, Greek-inspired addition. The Wise and Bearded One wasn't such a fan. However, he cooked up some lovely steaks--also locally-grown, grassfed--so the meal worked for him too.

Cooking meat is really his job since I'm not fond of handling raw chunks of flesh. He did the work last summer of tracking down local beef and pork farmers by walking around the farmer's market and talked to various vendors until he found farmers who were willing to work with him to purchase a 1/4 beef and 1/2 a pig. So now we have a freezer half-full of meat to be eaten whenever we remember to thaw some of it.

What do you do to get your family to "eat your vegetables"? Have you found other ways to "shake the hand that feeds you" as Michael Pollan recommends? We're always looking for new ideas so please comment below. Or take on the challenge yourself and tell us about YOUR local meal.

Go Local: Meal #1

Whoosh! The last four weeks of the school year went by in a flash! I had to go back to work to keep our health insurance for the summer so the Wise and Bearded One stayed home with the Sprout for the four weeks and I worked my tail off back in the Very Litigious School District. (For those of you who are newer blog readers, I work for the director of special education coordinating programs in two high schools in a district-that-will-not-be-named.)

But now it is summer, summer, summer! And I can't wait to enjoy the sunshine, fabulous food, and time to be creative that summer brings. I'm taking up Heather's challenge (see post below) to make at least one meal every week with local ingredients. I feel a little sheepish doing this since I must confess that the Wise and Bearded One does most of the cooking around here. Maybe having to blog about it will get me to cook a little more.

Anyhow, here's our first Go Local meal. We decided to Go Local Extreme Style and make our first meal grown entirely on our property.















Eggs from our Urban Hens
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One Square Foot Mesclun Mix
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Radishes
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Yummy Extremely Local Salad









Yummy Extremely Local Salad
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Bacon Bits
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Salad Dressing
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Local Salad with Benefits

Go Local 2009 Challenge

My blogger-friend, Heather, has challenged us to Go Local.

The Rules:

Who: Anyone who wants to challenge themselves to buy local, eat local, or grow local food/handmade items
What: A challenge to eat one meal per week consisting of locally(within 250 miles from where you are) produced ingredients. You get salt, pepper, spices and oil for free. (I also take liberties with basic baking necessities like soda, sugar, flour, etc.)
When: Every Monday from June through August Mr. Linky will appear on Heather's blog. You can post a link back to your blog once, or every week throughout the summer any day of the week.
Where: You post about the foods you are eating locally, the conversation you had with a local grower/farmer, the pictures you took of your very own garden, the dinner you made from scratch using foods grown by someone who loves growing food, the local food potluck party you threw on Market Saturday...Bring it all right back to Heather's blog and we'll come see what you've been up to.
Why: To inspire and be inspired to eat healthy, local foods. It's good for you. It's good for the environment. It's good for the economy.