Hope I am under the wire!

I am hurrying to write this because I don’t want to be at the last week and not have a post! So I need to hurry and write about what I am making right now for dinner tonight. And it was totally an accident.

I about gave up earlier this week. I missed the local Farmer’s Market because I was doing a triathlon on Thursday. I ended up winning this! Yay me!

I am pretty proud of myself. Anyhoo, I had despaired of finding some local ingredients to prepare a meal this week until I saw this in the paper on the way home from the triathlon:

These are produced by our local Hutterite colony and they sell them a few times a year. Score! So I picked up some chickens and made roast chicken, then spent yesterday making broth with the carcass and onions from the garden.

But still, I was worrying about what to actually put in the soup.

We did another triathlon today. It was in Hot Springs, about 30 miles south of us. This one was an Olympic distance. We did it as a relay team. I had the bike leg. A 25 mile bike leg. It was hard. The wind was unstoppable. Sometimes I would be pedaling and not going anywhere. In spite of that we finished 2nd place in open team! That was awesome. Here I am after the bike:

Here we are with our medals:

And on the way home — another score! A Farmer’s Market! I had Mark slam on the brakes and pull in. They had just closed but let me buy what I wanted:

Onions, cukes, carrots, peppers, eggs, bread and fresh goat cheese! Bonus!

So for tonight: fresh chicken soup, and toasted goat cheese sandwiches. Yahoo!

You know what else? My girls were so excited to tell the Farmer’s Market people about our eat local challenge. The people were so impressed they gave the twins a giant bag of carrots. Which they devoured on the way home. That’s my girls!

That’s been the best thing about Eat Local Challenge. I know this has made an impact on my kids. And I hope they carry it with them their whole lives.

OLS Meal in the midst of hail & flood

I’ve been meaning to make this meal for a while. I wanted to have a traditional Swedish dinner made from all local ingredients. I have never made these before, but my grandmother made them quite often. Surprisingly, Mark and the twins both devoured these. There was none left. I must say, they were excellent!

So I present, a traditional Swedish dish: Kåldolmar

Ingredients:

Head of cabbage from the FM
Buffalo meat substituted for ground beef & pork in the recipe
I skipped the rice as I don’t like rice
Added allspice & white pepper.
Milk and 1 egg
make up the meat with milk and eggs and spices like meatballs. Blanch the cabbage head. Tear off the leaves and put a blob of the meat mixture in a leaf and roll it up. Fry these in a skillet, then transfer to a dutch oven with simmering vegetable stock. Simmer for about an hour.

Mmmmm! Delicious!

Sorry no finished pictures as they are gone Johnson!

No More Garden

This is a photo of what happened to my town Friday Night:

You can read an article about it here.

This is now my garden:

And this:

After being hailed on and then flooded.

Needless to say, my OLS challenge has become a lot more difficult. I don’t have anything this week. Not sure if I will next week either. I’ll do my best.

OLS Week 6 – Kid’s Choice

I let my daughter choose tonight’s OLS meal. She had to pick everything out of our garden as I haven’t been able to make it to the FM. (If you read my other blog you know my dad is dying of cancer and I am having a really tough time right now)

First off we had an exciting find — our first egg!! And the next day they layed three more. So we had enough eggs to incorporate into our meal.

So, my daughter “Bean” (as I like to call her) scavenged in the garden and found these monsters:

Along with some onions and cucumbers and the eggs scrambled into the dish we had a very satisfying meal:

Everything here is as local as they come: right out the back door. Scrambled eggs, potatoes and onions with fresh cukes on the side.

Geee-why–rose

Or Gyros if you really want to say it right. I am racking my brain to come up with more countries to make food from! But here ya go, OLS Greek style

I made my own Pita Bread! It was easy! And fun!

whole wheat flour, local honey, applesauce from the FM. I cheated and mixed the dough in my bread machine dough setting.

I rolled them into balls and let them rest. Then I squished them in the tortilla press:

Then you bake them in a really hot oven and they **poof** up. It’s fun to watch them poof. The twins had a ball waiting for them to poof. Then I put them under a moist, clean towel so they soften.

Then I filled them with deer meat sliced thin (I don’t have any lamb, I figured this was close enough) yogurt dressing from my local cow, cucumbers from my very own garden and sprouts. Voila! Really yummy. So good that I didn’t get a pic of the finished project because I forgot and when I remembered they were gone. But at least I got pics of the process.

OLS Week 4 — Ooh La La!

Let’s just keep this ethic theme going shall we? In the spirit of a movie recently released (that I need to take the twins to), and the greatest bicycle event ever going on right now, and because I had all the stuff — I present One Local Summer French Style: Ratatouille!

FM: Eggplant, tomatoes, garlic. My garden: Zucchini. A splash of Prairie Berry wine again. Sauteed and simmered.

Then I had a dilemma. What to serve this with? Well, I had been to a new “grocery store” that opened right in my teensy little town last month. I put “grocery” in quotes because the store is really a clearinghouse for scratch and dent merchandise. They do carry essentials like bread & milk and stuff. Actually the people that own this store built a home right across the street from me. They are my neighbors. We’ve met a few times and they are very nice.

So, I was picking up some items in that store and came across a little end cap with local food. Stuff like fry bread mix and Dakota popcorn and honey. The usual. Then I saw these:

Wow! I was really excited — local noodles! I picked up three bags to try: whole wheat, vegetable, & chicken flavor. We had the chicken flavor ones a few nights ago with — I know you can’t stand the suspense — give up? You got it — chicken! They were pretty good. We tried the vegetable flavor ones with the ratatouille. Truth? I didn’t think they were very good. Maybe I had a stale bag. Another disappointment is that the company, Hosmer Noodles, doesn’t have a website and no nutritional information on their bag. May I offer a tip to anyone who is looking to package their own locally made food? Please, put nutritional info on your product or at least have a website so I can look up and really know about you and your food. A website for these noodles would have made me feel a lot more warm and fuzzy.

So there you have it. OLS week 4, French style.

OLS week 3 — All American Meat & Potatoes

I have been getting to our Farmer’s Market one day a week. This is a bit of a challenge as I live 25 miles outside of “town”, but right now this is my best source for local food. My garden is still pretty lame as we have had zero rain.

The market is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays. If you don’t get there right at 10am, the pickings can be slim. Stuff gets snatched up pretty quickly. I guess that is good, it means there is a healthy market for what is available. But it isn’t helping me any!

Here is the market (some people are shaded so I don’t get in trouble for posting all over the internets) :

See how dry the grass is? I envy those of you that have ample moisture.

Okay, I’ll stop whining. Here is my meal — I promised Mark a real meat & potatoes dinner. I rooted around in my freezer and found buffalo steaks I had hidden from him earlier in the year. Mark grilled them on our outdoor fireplace. (which he built himself with stone from Hill City, SD — but now that I think if it the stone came from Colorado I think. Scratch that )

I fried some of those delicious little red potatoes and an onion from the FM with some fresh garlic.

I also picked up some fresh green beans at the FM and steamed them (we ate half of them raw while preparing the meal — oops!).

The result? Plate-licken’ good!

Sprouts!

How do I make sprouts? I must say, I was intimidated by this at first. I have made bread, made cheese from scratch — heck we built a whole house from scratch! But sprouts had me nervously researching all over the net. Finally at the coop I found one of those green plastic screw-on caps that you put on a mason jar to make sprouts. I tried it. It was a flop. The seeds blocked the water from coming out of the little green holes. Not to be out-done I invented my own cap. Wide-mouth mason jar, cheesecloth and a screw band. This seems to work really well.

First you will need sprouting seeds. There are tons of varieties out there. Alfalfa, radish, mung bean, sunflower — you name it. I started with some from the coop called “salad mix”. It had alfalfa, radish and broccoli I think. First you put enough seeds in your jar to cover the bottom, fill about halfway with water so the seeds are covered, and let sit overnight.

Then you fill and drain the water, twice a day. You want to make sure the water is drained completely out, so I put the jars upside down in my farmer’s sink on a drainboard.

After about two days you will start to see sprouts:

Here they are starting to sprout:

Keep rinsing and draining and after about 4 days the sprouts will fill the jar:

Put on a sandwich and enjoy!

I would recommend changing the cheesecloth now and then. I had a batch that went bad because the cheesecloth didn’t dry. But other than that, they have all worked great. I am trying bean sprouts now and plain alfalfa as the coop was out of the sandwich mix I liked last time I went.

I often wonder, especially as I read Laura Ingalls “The Long Winter” to my girls, why the early settlers didn’t use sprouts. Or did they? Or the sailors who got scurvy on those overseas voyages — wouldn’t sprouts have helped that problem? I guess sprouts must be a relatively ‘new’ invention.

OLS week 2 — Italian Nite!

I have a few challenges of my own with the One Local Summer project. If you have read my other blog, you will see that I lost about 80 lbs. last year. So eating low fat/calorie meals is important to me. Granted, I now workout a lot — I am running a 10K tomorrow and working towards my first triathlon, however I am still very conscious of everything I eat.

I also have two 9-year olds and a really large husband to feed with these meals. The twins can get very picky with their food. Mark is adamant that he has meat with every meal. I would prefer to not eat much meat at all.

Right now our Farmer’s Market pickings are a little slim. I picked up another flat of greenhouse tomatoes from Newell (actually my mom did for me as we were out of town on Saturday). My garden is starting to produce some useable items. And I have a new hobby — growing sprouts! I am really enjoying this and I love sprouts. The twins like them too.

To top things off, my refrigerator has stopped working since yesterday. This is really making me mad — its only 5 years old and was a really expensive stainless steel model that was at the top of the list 5 years ago. So right now I have to make sure the meals will be eaten in their entirety as I have no way to refrigerate leftovers.

So, presenting Italian Night — One Local Summer style!

Buffalo meatballs: local grass-fed buffalo from our neighbor ranch, eggs from my cleaning lady, garlic from the FM.

Sauce: FM tomatoes, onions from my garden, garlic from the FM, and the real taste enhancer: “Into the West” Red Wine from local winery Prairie Berry simmered into the sauce.

Salad: Lettuce from the garden, cucumbers again from the FM and my own sprouts. The sprouts are delish! So good in fact that I didn’t even want to use dressing. So I didn’t.

So there you have it! One Local Summer Black Hills style.

Weeding

Of course a big part of OLS is to have a garden. We don’t get much rain here. In fact, there is a forest fire burning about 20 miles south of our house. It is very dry and has been hot. The garden suffers. But we keep trucking along. Here is Lulu, one of my twin daughters, weeding the carrots. She is very precise in her weeding. I think she will make a great gardener when she grows up. She is already very “mother earthy”

Extra good news is that I found a source for local produce, so we won’t have to rely so much on the mediocre garden. They are about 40 miles south in good soil with a creek. They usually deliver to the coop, but will also deliver to my store downtown and will call on Mondays to get my order. That was a bonus! They had a flyer up at the coop.

This means I won’t have to make an extra trip to town on Saturday to go to the Farmer’s Market. Some days it is a real hassle to get there by 10am to get the good produce.

I still love my garden. But with two jobs and two kids its hard to keep up with it.