Springfield Locavore

Homemade Pizza!

We've got tomatoes. Lots of tomatoes. We planted 8 Brandywine heirloom tomato plants, and they have been producing plenty of massive, tasty, gorgeous red tomatoes! I like tomatoes, but I can only eat so many straight off the vine! We needed to find a way to use them up in large quantities.

Enter our desire for local pizza!

Recently, when our hankering for pizza has been too strong to ignore, we've been ordering from Fratello's Pizza & More. True, the food isn't local, but the business is 100% local, operated by a couple of brothers (thus the name, since "brother" in Italian is "fratello"). They're very friendly, and I've had some nice conversations when I've stopped in there to pick up a pizza.

However, as I said, the food isn't local. To get a truly local pizza, we'd need to make it ourselves.

Awhile back, when I was shopping in Food Fantasies, I saw in the refrigerated food section that they had bags of pizza dough. Take it home, roll it out, add pizza sauce, cheese, and toppings, then bake. Easy!

We decided to try it. Dawn had experimented with making some tomato soup a couple of days before that, and we still had some of that left. It was a bit thick, so we figured it might work as a pizza sauce. With some cheddar cheese from Ropp Jersey Cheese and some sweet red pepper as a topping, we had a pizza!

Our first attempt was reasonably good, so we decided to try again, with a few changes. First, we wanted to use mozzarella cheese. The cheddar cheese just didn't have the right taste, and it wasn't as "sticky" as mozzarella cheese. Second, we wanted to make a real tomato sauce, rather than just repurposing a thick tomato soup. Third, we wanted to make our own pizza dough. The flour would still be non-local, but at least the dough would be truly homemade.

Getting local mozzarella cheese turned out to be easier than I expected. I knew that Ropp Jersey Cheese was planning to start making mozzarella cheese last winter/spring, but I had never seen any at their booth at the farmers' market. So when I went to the Old Capitol Farmers' Market on Saturday, I asked Jessica whether they had any mozzarella cheese. She got a bit of a sly look on her face and said, "Maybe." :-) It turns out they do make mozzarella cheese, but in very limited quantities, and you have to ask for it. She only had 1 pound that day, and she said they only have it about every third week! Yikes! (And now I've just given away the secret! See how much I do for you, Internet?) Well, in any case, we now had mozzarella cheese!

Dawn found an easy pizza sauce recipe on the Internet, so we made up a batch, using most of our tomatoes (from our garden and from the CSA), as well as basil from our garden. It was easy, but it took far longer than I expected to reduce to the right thickness, so be sure you make your pizza sauce well in advance!

Lastly, there was the pizza dough. Dawn bought some whole wheat flour (from Bob's Red Mill in Oregon, which is only within our 100-mile radius if you measure with very long miles).

On Monday evening, were ready to make homemade pizza! But the dough failed to rise.

Well... crap.

The dough did eventually rise, but by then it was well after dinner time. Actually it was bed time! We put the dough in a bag in the refrigerator and vowed to try again the next day.

So yesterday we rolled out the dough, added the pizza sauce and the mozzarella cheese, then finally popped it in the oven! We decided to go without any toppings, to get a better idea of whether we liked the taste of the crust and the sauce.

About 12 minutes later the pizza was ready! Here's my review:

• Cheese: Great!
• Sauce: Good!
• Crust: Not bad!

Okay, so "not bad" isn't the highest of praise. Still, it was acceptable. Being whole wheat, it was a bit heavy. Plus, we didn't preheat the pizza stone in the oven, so the center of the crust was not as crispy as we would have liked. We'll experiment to see whether we can come up with a better crust, but even if we can't, this still made for a pretty good pizza, even without any toppings!

We've got more mozzarella cheese. And more pizza sauce. And there's a green pepper in the garden that's looking ready to harvest. Would it be wrong to have pizza two nights in a row?

We Have Internet Again! How Exciting!

We finally have working Internet access again! Comcast came out and replaced the line to the house. Bingo! It all works again! I just wish I had called them to start with, rather than wasting time trying to diagnose and correct the problem myself! Oh well, live and learn! I'll be posting something more substantial later, but I wanted to get this posted now. Stay tuned!

I'm Not Dead Yet

I'm not dead, but our Internet connection is. A few weeks ago, we began having intermittent outages. Then frequent outages. Now it's down pretty much all of the time, with occasional brief periods of uptime. After calling Comcast to fix it, then canceling the service call because I thought I had figured out the problem, I've finally reached the conclusion that it really is Comcast's fault area of responsibility. Hopefully they'll be able to fix the problem this weekend.

(Don't worry, I'll be writing a much longer dull post explaining the saga in mind-numbing detail.)

Our Garden is 14 Pounds Lighter

Yesterday's garden harvest was 10 Brandywine tomatoes weighing a total of 9½ pounds (very good!), plus a zucchini weighing 4½ pounds and measuring over 18 inches long (not so good). The largest of the tomatoes weighed 1½ pounds!

After I got home from work and harvested all of that, Dawn decided to make a tomato soup. The recipe called for 5 pounds of tomatoes, so that sounded like a good way to quickly use up some of today's bounty!

Here's a summary of the recipe from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. It's called Summer Tomato Soup:

• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup diced shallots (8-12)
• 5 pounds ripe, red, juicy tomatoes, rinsed and cut into big pieces
• Salt and freshly milled pepper

Over low heat, melt the butter in a soup pot, add the shallots. Prepare the tomatoes. Add the tomatoes, plus 1 teaspoon salt and a ½ cup of water. Cover and cook for 3-4 hours, stirring occasionally. Run through a food mill (to remove the skins). Add salt and pepper to taste. Makes one quart.

We didn't have any shallots, so she substituted an onion. We also don't have a food mill, so Dawn blanched the tomatoes for about 10 seconds, then removed the skins, before cooking began. With 3-4 hours of cook time, obviously this wasn't for that evening's dinner! (Instead, we had corn on the cob from Veenstra & Heck's CSA, plus a salad from the farmers' market and a donut peach for dessert.)

After cooking for about 3 hours, it smelled really good! I plan on having some of it for lunch today, so I'll let you know how it was!

We Interrupt These Farmers Markets to Bring You an Emergency and a Fair

The Illinois State Fair starts this weekend. Since the Illinois Products Farmers' Market held on Thursday evenings is located on the Illinois State Fairgrounds, that means no farmers' market this week or next week.

We still have the Old Capitol Farmers' Market on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, of course. Since I'm at work on Wednesdays, Dawn and Orlando normally go.

Except today.

This morning, while I was at work, Dawn went out to the car, started the air conditioner to cool things off, strapped Lando into his carseat, closed the door -- and then realized that she had just locked herself out of the car!

Lando wasn't in any danger, because the air conditioner was running, so Dawn stayed calm and Lando of course was unworried. However, I was a good 20 minutes away from home. By the time I got there to unlock the door, Lando had grown extremely upset, which made Dawn somewhat frantic. At 4 years old, he couldn't understand why she wouldn't roll down the windows and turn off that annoying classical music! :-)

Everybody was fine, but Dawn was understandably a bit shaken up. In addition, we had a friend who was supposed to drop by for a visit, so there was no time to make a trip to the farmers' market in any case.

So, no blueberries today!

On the plus side, however, when I picked up our CSA share at the Vincent Family Farm on Tuesday, I was able to get eggs and butter from Todd!

Eggs I can get from several farmers; generally we've been buying from Bear Creek because they are convenient, having a booth at the both farmers' markets. (However, this week they won't have a booth -- because they'll be at the Illinois State Fair showing their Belgian draft horses!)

Butter, on the other hand, is difficult to find! So far, Todd Vincent is the only local source I've located. Even then, he has a limited supply, so it's very hit-or-miss as to whether he'll have any. This week, however, I lucked out!

So, a good day at the CSA on Tuesday, but we missed the farmers' market on Wednesday, and there won't be a farmers' market on Thursday!

Come Saturday, I'm hoping for more blueberries, plus some green beans to freeze. Yum!

P.S. Our Internet service is still extremely flaky. Hopefully it doesn't go out entirely!

Not a Good Day

Our lawn desperately needed to be mowed. The grass hasn't been growing very quickly recently -- although the weeds seem to grow at the same pace regardless of the weather. However, it had been long enough that it really needed to be mowed. Actually, it should have been mowed the previous weekend, but events dictated otherwise.

I knew it was going to be hot today (mid-90s), so I planned to start at 9:00 AM. (People who mow their grass before 9 AM should be shot. Well, they should at least be secretly glared at with resentment!)

I fired up the riding mower, cut the first lap of the lawn (enough to make it clear to everyone how badly the lawn needed to be mowed), and then the mower stopped.

By "stopped", I don't mean that the engine quit. The engine ran fine. The blades didn't stop either. They kept turning fine. It was the wheels that stopped.

I could have mowed the grass that was directly under the mower all day, but that was it.

Forward? Nope. Reverse? Nope. Could I push it? Yep.

Long story short: A stick got in a place where sticks don't belong and knocked a belt off.

The good news is, it's something I can probably fix. The bad news is, now I have to fix it.

All I have to do is figure out how to do so. One obstacle is that I have no service ramp to roll the mower on, so that I can more easily get at things from below. I went to Lowe's, but they didn't have what I want. I guess I'll try auto service supply stores tomorrow.

To add to the fun, our Internet service has been very erratic for the last week or two. It will be working fine, then it will stop working for a few minutes, then it will work for a few minutes, then it will be out for several minutes, then it will work for an hour, then it will be out, etc. On, off, on, off. It's very annoying! I'll be calling Comcast in the morning.

Freezing Sweetcorn

We went to the Old Capitol Farmers' Market this morning and bought 24 ears of sweetcorn (cost: $9), which we then processed to freeze for the winter.

Aw, Shucks! 24 ears of sweetcorn, ready to be shucked.

Naked Corn! Ready to be blanched.

24 ears of sweetcorn made about 4½ quarts for freezing. We'll need plenty more for this winter!

I did a quick "back of the envelope" calculation. Let's suppose that for a typical lunch or dinner, we would use about 2/3 of a quart bag (e.g. 1/3 of a bag of corn, plus 1/3 of a bag of green beans, plus some bread). That means that 3 meals would use up 2 bags. That means that over the course of 3 days (6 meals total, not counting breakfasts), we would use up 4 bags. Over the course of a month, we would use 40 bags. Over the course of 6 months (the months when there are no farmers' markets), we would use about 240 quart bags of food.

Yikes!

Of course, this is very much an approximation. In addition to ignoring breakfasts (which generally involve eggs, cheese, and/or fruit), I also haven't taken into account things like potatoes (which don't need to be frozen or canned). I also haven't accounted for frozen chicken, beef, pork, etc (which I eat, but Dawn doesn't). Bread? Milk? Butter? Cheese? Occasional dinners out or trips out of town?

There's plenty of variables to consider, but the message is still the same: We need to preserve more food!

Frozen Blueberries Sound Like Marbles

I bought 8 pints of blueberries (cost: $28) at the farmers' market on Thursday, with the idea of freezing them for this winter. (It's coming! December 21 is just 143 days away!)

To "flash freeze" them, you gently wash them, gently dry them, then lay them out in a single layer on a cookie sheet in the freezer. Given space limitations, I am only able to flash freeze 3 pints at a time.

I did 3 pints last night, then this evening I put those into freezer bags and started another 3 pints.

I noticed the same thing when we were flash freezing strawberries earlier: Frozen berries are surprising. They're hard; they roll; they "clink". In short, they are marbles.

Don't tell our 4-year-old son, however. He'll want to play with them!

On Saturday, we'll flash freeze more blueberries, but our main project will be blanching and freezing sweetcorn! (Oh, and it's Dawn's birthday, too. I guess I should treat her nicely, huh?) ;-)

What's Cooking? Not Us!

One of the interesting tidbits that I picked up while reading locavore-related books was the inverse relationship between cooking and obesity: More cooking leads to less obesity; less cooking leads to more obesity. As you might have noticed, there's not much cooking going on these days. (No, throwing a frozen pizza into the oven or a frozen dinner into the microwave does not count as cooking.)

Last week Michael Pollan wrote a very good article in the New York Times, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch. It discusses the decline in recent years of cooking, which ironically corresponded to a simultaneous increase in the popularity of food-related TV shows. Here's an excerpt:

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.

What is wrong with this picture?

A few months ago, I saw the documentary Food Fight at Liberty Brew & View. (Not to be confused with the new documentary, Food, Inc., which I haven't seen yet.) Frankly, I was disappointed. The movie spent far too much time discussing celebrity chefs and expensive restaurants, which very little time spent on actually buying and cooking food yourself. If eating local food meant spending $30 (or more) per person on dinner at a fancy restaurant, how often would you actually do it?

Part of the catalyst for the appearance of Pollan's New York Times article is the new movie Julie & Julia, which deals with Julia Child, the original television cook, and Julie Powell, who decided to cook -- and blog -- all of the recipes in Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It looks like it could be an interesting movie! Here's the trailer:

Here's another excerpt from Michael Pollan's article:

It’s generally assumed that the entrance of women into the work force is responsible for the collapse of home cooking, but that turns out to be only part of the story. Yes, women with jobs outside the home spend less time cooking — but so do women without jobs. The amount of time spent on food preparation in America has fallen at the same precipitous rate among women who don’t work outside the home as it has among women who do: in both cases, a decline of about 40 percent since 1965. (Though for married women who don’t have jobs, the amount of time spent cooking remains greater: 58 minutes a day, as compared with 36 for married women who do have jobs.) In general, spending on restaurants or takeout food rises with income. Women with jobs have more money to pay corporations to do their cooking, yet all American women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can.

Those corporations have been trying to persuade Americans to let them do the cooking since long before large numbers of women entered the work force. After World War II, the food industry labored mightily to sell American women on all the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant everything. As Laura Shapiro recounts in “Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America,” the food industry strived to “persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations.” The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating.

Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care. It took years of clever, dedicated marketing to break down this resistance and persuade Americans that opening a can or cooking from a mix really was cooking. Honest. In the 1950s, just-add-water cake mixes languished in the supermarket until the marketers figured out that if you left at least something for the “baker” to do — specifically, crack open an egg — she could take ownership of the cake. Over the years, the food scientists have gotten better and better at simulating real food, keeping it looking attractive and seemingly fresh, and the rapid acceptance of microwave ovens — which went from being in only 8 percent of American households in 1978 to 90 percent today — opened up vast new horizons of home-meal replacement.

Anyway, after you watch the trailer for Julie & Julia, go read Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch. It's a lengthy article, but Pollan makes very good points throughout. And it just might inspire you to learn to cook!

(And after you're done reading the article, you can listen to Michael Pollan on Cooking as Spectator Sport, a  20-minute radio segment from NPR's Fresh Air.)

Taking 'Local' Back

This article at Good Times, Taking 'Local' Back, discusses another aspect of the topic of my earlier post about corporations abusing the term "local". It's not just local foods, but "buy local" campaigns in general that are finding very non-local corporations attempting to horn in on the action. Here's an excerpt:

Carrying local produce in their stores may promote environmental sustainability and even help local producers' pocketbooks, Heiman says, but it is still detrimental to a town's overall economic sustainability, since much of the profits generated are siphoned by Whole Foods' corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas. Furthermore, he says, with retailers like Wal-Mart using the word "local" as a promotional tool, and the London-based international bank, HSBC, touting itself as "the world's local bank," the Whole Foods campaign is only the tip of the iceberg.

The Wal-Mart in Gilroy—the nearest location with a produce department—does carry locally grown produce. However, the local growers, according to a representative from the produce department who asked not to be named, are a Dole location in Salinas and an Earthbound Farm location in San Juan Bautista. Dole's official website proclaims that it is "the world's largest producer and marketer of fresh fruit and vegetables," while Earthbound's site says it is "the nation's largest grower and shipper of organic produce."

"They're really trying to leverage the word, 'local,'" Heiman says. After all, he says, if a company claims to be "the world's largest" or "the nation's largest," how local can it really be?

Wal-Mart is local now? Wal-Mart?! Yeesh!