Springfield Locavore

Cooking Tip #1

Spring onion slices roll. That is all.

Day 3 - Back to Work

Today was my first day of eating local on a normal work schedule.

Breakfast

We were a bit late getting up this morning, but I still managed to make cheese omelets, using local eggs (from Bear Creek Farm & Ranch in Palmer) and local colby cheese (from Ropp Jersey Cheese in Normal).

Lunch

For lunch, I had leftover macaroni & cheese and a salad. Again, the macaroni was non-local, but the cheese was local colby cheese (from Ropp Jersey Cheese in Normal). The salad was mesclun mix and waldmans dark green lettuce (both from Oak Tree Organics in Ashland), with non-local dressing. For dessert I had strawberries from our garden, as well as a non-local orange.

Dawn, on the other hand, picked up Lando from preschool and then went on a shopping trip, so they had a very non-local lunch at Target!

Dinner

For dinner we had non-local pasta with our Brandywine pasta sauce from last year's garden, as well as more of the salad of mesclun mix and waldmans dark green lettuce (both from Oak Tree Organics in Ashland), with non-local dressing. I finished up with non-local ice cream. (Hey, it was Ben & Jerry's!)

If you're thinking, "This is sounding awful repetitive", you're right. Early in the season, variety is a bit limited. Don't worry, it gets better!

Day 2 Results - Clear, with Rain in the Evening

How'd we do on Day 2?

Breakfast

For breakfast I made cheese omelets. This time the eggs were all local (from Bear Creek Farm & Ranch in Palmer), as was the colby cheese (from Ropp Jersey Cheese in Normal). We finished things off with a few strawberries from our garden, while our son Lando had a smoothie made with local strawberries (from Livesprings Berries & Produce in Chandlerville), but with non-local bananas, yogurt, and apple juice.

Lunch

For lunch we had macaroni & cheese and a salad. The macaroni was non-local, but the cheese was local colby cheese (from Ropp Jersey Cheese in Normal). The salad was the same as yesterday: mesclun mix, waldmans dark green lettuce, cherry belle radish (all from Oak Tree Organics in Ashland), and colby cheese (from Ropp Jersey Cheese in Normal), with non-local dressing. For dessert we had a bit of non-local kettle corn from yesterday's Highland Games.

Dinner

For dinner... well, for dinner we pretty much struck out in terms of eating local. We'd already had pasta and salad for lunch, and that was about all we had available that was local, given that it's so early in the season. I settled for non-local soup and crackers with a peanut butter & honey sandwich. The only local part of my dinner was the honey, which was in a honey bear from Mackinaw Valley Apiaries (in Mackinaw, IL), but may well have been from a refill from Sasse's Apiary (in Chestnut, IL). Everything else was non-local, even the bread. We do have a little bit of challah bread left, but I'm saving that for tomorrow's lunch!

Desperately Seeking Local Pasta

Finding a source of local pasta is something we weren't able to do last year. There is Oakland Noodle Company (in Oakland, IL), but noodles and pasta aren't exactly the same thing. We're big fans of pasta, so at the moment we're compromising, settling for non-local pasta with local sauces. We'll keep looking for a better solution, however. If you know of any sources, please share!

Day 1 Results. Really!

My dad and step-mom visited us on Thursday and Friday, so Saturday was the real first day of our latest foray into local eating.

Breakfast

For breakfast I made a cheese omelet for Dawn and scrambled eggs for myself. In addition to local eggs (from Bear Creek Farm & Ranch in Palmer), we had 3 non-local eggs to use up, so each dish was a mixture of local and non-local eggs. When I cracked open one of each type of egg, I noticed the significant difference in the two. Take a look:

Can you tell which is which? Here's a hint: The local egg has a much richer yolk and a more clear white. Now can you tell? Yes, the one on the left is the local egg.

That's apparently a common thing: Eggs from chickens that are raised in what we think of as the more "traditional" way (i.e. true free-range chickens, roaming outside in the pasture) tend to have eggs with a darker, more distinct yolk. Eggs from chickens that are raised in what are commonly called "factory farms" (i.e. inside, eating grain) tend to have eggs with a paler yolk that doesn't sit high in the skillet.

That's what I'd heard, but I'd never had one of each for a side-by-side comparison.

Oh, and the local eggs supposedly taste better, too. I mixed everything together, so I didn't have the opportunity to do a blind-folded taste test!

Lunch

We went to the annual Springfield Area Highland Games, which meant bagpipers, Scottish dancers, and fair food -- funnel cakes, brats, potato chips, sodas. Not a local food item in sight!

Just as we did last year, we're allowing ourselves a "social exemption". This means when we're out with friends or attending events, we'll eat what's available. Part of our motivation at eating local is to deepen ties with the local community, so it wouldn't make sense to declare that we can't eat out with friends!

Unfortunately, it was rainy, windy, and cold -- typical Scottish weather, perhaps, but it did put a bit of a damper on our fun!

Dinner

For dinner we had non-local pasta with our Brandywine pasta sauce. Last year's garden yielded lots of Brandywine tomatoes, so we froze quite a bit, which we periodically use for pasta sauce.

Dawn sent me out to the garden to harvest some of our volunteer basil to add to the sauce. I came back with several leaves, which I handed to her. "That's not basil," she said after she had sniffed them. "That's mint!" Sure enough, it turns out the numerous volunteer herbs we saw coming up (where we had planted several varieties of herbs last year) were not basil, as we had thought, but were instead peppermint! Oops! Oh well. Dawn used them to make a quick peppermint tea.

We also had a salad: mesclun mix, waldmans dark green lettuce, cherry belle radish (all from Oak Tree Farm in Ashland), and colby cheese (from Ropp Jersey Cheese in Bloomington), with non-local dressing.

Challah bread (from Central Illinois Event Catering in Elkhart) and strawberries (from Livesprings Berries & Produce in Chandlerville) completed the meal.

So that was day 1. Not 100% local, of course, but a pretty good start!

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?

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!

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.)

Today's Meals

Life is good!

Breakfast - Cheese omelet

• Eggs from Bear Creek Farm & Ranch (Palmer, IL)
• Cheese from Ropp Jersey Cheese (Bloomington, IL)
• Milk from Kilgus Farmstead (Fairbury, IL)
• Butter from Vincent Family Farm (Rochester, IL)

Lunch - Sweetcorn, with ice cream & blueberries for dessert

• Sweetcorn from the Old Capitol Farmers' Market
• Butter from the Vincent Family Farm (Rochester)
• Homemade ice cream made from non-homogenized milk from Kilgus Farmstead (Fairbury, IL)
• Blueberries from the Old Capitol Farmer's Market
• Non-local vanilla extract

Dinner - Potatoes and broccoli, with bread

• Potatoes from Veenstra & Heck's CSA (Rochester, IL)
• Broccoli from Veenstra & Heck's CSA (Rochester, IL)
• Homemade bread made from Hodgson Mills semi-local bread mix (Effingham, IL)
• Butter from the Vincent Family Farm (Rochester, IL)

Snacks - Nectarines and donut peaches

• Nectarines from the Old Capitol Farmers' Market
• Donut peaches from the Old Capitol Farmers' Market

Oh, and a Coke.

Today's Lunch

Peaches and the first sweetcorn of the season! Yum!

Incidentally, a good way to cook sweetcorn quickly is to leave it in the husk and microwave it for 2-3 minutes. The husk keeps it moist and (I think) adds additional flavor.

Days 13 through 29 - Getting Caught Up

I'm back! It's been a ridiculously long time since I've posted here. I'm sorry! (Stupid Sims 3!)

My last post was about May 31, the 12th day of going locavore. Today is the 29th day. So what have we been doing for the last 17 days?

Local Foods

Well, we've been eating plenty of local food, including:

• Breakfast
  • Eggs (scrambled or omelets)
  • Sausage patties
• Lunch and Dinner
  • New potatoes
  • Yukon gold potatoes
    
  • Broccoli
  • Peppers
  • Garlic
  • Snow peas
  • Sugar snap peas
    
  • Butter
    
  • Garlic chives
  • Cheese
  • Carrots
  • Lettuce
  • Basil
  • Tomatoes
  • Green beans
  • Radishes
  • Turnips
  • Spring onions
  • Kohlrabi
  • Zucchini
  • Squash
• Dessert
  
  • Strawberries
  • Blueberries
  • Rhubarb

We've also been buying "semi-local" milk (from Oberweis Dairy) and bread mix (from Hodgson Mill).

Cooking

We've been doing quite a bit of cooking. (Actually, most of the cooking is being done by Dawn, but I help!) Meals have included:

• Veggie lasagna (non-local noodles, but local garlic, spinach, kale, chard, onions, peppers, zucchini, and squash) -- Yum!
• Strawberry rhubarb crisp (non-local crust, but local strawberries and rhubarb) -- Delicious!
• Potato soup -- Good, although a bit thick
• Turnip soup -- Frankly, not so great

Our garden is growing fairly well. We even had our first harvest -- some basil, which we used in the lasagna!

Non-Local Moments

Of course, we've also had some very non-local moments. Most notably, we went to a potluck picnic. Actually, to be more precise, we organized a potluck picnic for a club, of which I'm the chairman. In addition to all of the non-local food we ate there (bratwurst or hotdogs, anyone?), we also wound up being the ones to take home whatever unclaimed food was left over (e.g. potato chips, hotdogs, brats). That means we've had a recent influx of junk food into the house. Since Dawn is a vegetarian and Lando is a picky eater (he's 4), that means the brats and hotdogs have been my responsibility to finish up.

We also had an ice cream truck moment. There we were, minding our own business, when suddenly we heard it. "Hello!" If you live in Springfield, you know that sound. Lando immediately declared that he wanted ice cream. We dithered for a few moments -- long enough for the ice cream truck to pass our house and head around the corner -- before (semi-)reluctantly agreeing. Now I just needed to catch up with the ice cream truck! It was probably 3 blocks away before I caught up to it. When I turned around, there was Lando, a block away and running full tilt! I doubt there's anything faster than a 4-year-old chasing an ice cream truck!

I think we also went out to eat a couple of times. Dawn insisted from the beginning that we allow ourselves to eat out twice a week, although we haven't been doing so.

Onward!

So not too bad over the last 17 days. The variety of food we're getting from the CSA on Tuesday evenings and the farmers' markets on Wednesday mornings, Thursday evenings, and Saturday mornings have been keeping things interesting.

Finding a local source of butter was quite helpful, and I think we'll soon be getting some local wheat for grinding into flour. Once we get local flour, we'll be able to make truly local bread, as well as local pasta!

Now that I've given a brief summary to get things caught up, I'll try to avoid falling behind again. One problem I had was, the farther behind I fell, the more effort would be required to get caught up, so I put off posting, falling even farther behind!

I've got photos from the CSA, a tour of Veenstra & Heck's garden, farmers' market stuff, and more! Stay tuned!