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?

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!

Day 12 - Local Once Again!

Sunday, May 31, was a day for lazing about the house and recovering from Saturday's trip to the renfair.

One consequence of going to the renfair on Saturday was that we missed the Old Capitol Farmers' Market. Eek! That meant we were running a bit low on some of our local food.

Unfortunately, I forgot to write down what we ate on Sunday and my memory isn't all that great, but I'll give it my best shot.

Breakfast

If I remember correctly, we had eggs and sausage for breakfast. Well, since Dawn's a vegetarian, she just had the eggs. The eggs were from The Lazy T (Dawson, IL, 12 miles NE of Springfield). The sausage patties were from a family farm in Madison County (75 miles south of Springfield).

Lunch

Umm... I don't remember. Salad and tomatoes? Dunno.

Dinner

Mashed potatoes, made with new potatoes from Dyer's Farm (Hillsboro, IL)! Plus local butter from the Vincent Family Farm (Rochester, IL). And of course strawberries from Livesprings Berries & Produce (Chandlerville, IL)

Day 10 - Dinner at McDonald's!

Breakfast

On Friday, May 29, breakfast was rather rushed - cereal with milk from Oberweis Dairy. The last of the milk, by the way, so 3 half-gallon bottles lasted us less than 4 days. Wow!

Lunch

Due to my usual bad planning, I didn't have lunch ready the night before, so I just grabbed a few things on my way out the door - a tomato from Garrett Hydroponics (Chambersburg, IL, 64 miles west of Springfield), bread & butter pickles from Kathy's Kitchen (Virginia, IL), and lots of strawberries from Livesprings Berries & Produce (Chandlerville, IL).

Hydroponics

I have mixed feelings about hydroponics. On the one hand, it's a way to grow food locally when it might otherwise not be possible. On the other hand, I suspect it's fairly energy intensive (although I admit that I haven't researched it at all). More importantly, I find that hydroponic tomatoes just don't seem to match the taste of tomatoes grown in soil. Perhaps it's just psychological, but that's been my experience. Still, a hydroponic tomato for lunch beats going hungry!

Dinner

Dinner was 100% non-local. Actually, it was practically anti-local. McDonald's!

Yes, I know, but we have an excuse. We were traveling. We enjoy going to Renaissance festivals, and this weekend we went to the Greater St. Louis Renaissance Fair in Wentzville, MO. As soon as I got home from work, we finished loading up the car, then headed out. About halfway there, we stopped at a McDonald's in Pittsfield to have dinner.

I was reminded of the opening chapter of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan. The first of the four meals was from McDonald's, eaten in their car as they drove. We at least went into the McDonald's and sat down to eat!

Day 9 - Parkay! Butter! Parkay! Butter! Parkay! Butter!

Breakfast

On Thursday, May 28, for breakfast I had my usual scrambled eggs and toast with honey. The eggs were from Bear Creek Farm & Ranch (Palmer, IL), the semi-local milk was from Oberweis Dairy, the bread mix was from Hodgon Mill (Effingham, IL), and the honey was from Vanderpool Apiary (Arenzville, IL). However, there was one difference....

Parkay! (Not Really)

The butter was local! Whoot! The Vincent Family Farm (Rochester, IL), where I pick up our weekly share from Veenstra & Heck's CSA, actually makes and sells butter! He did warn me that it would only be good for a couple of weeks after we thawed it out, but that's okay. It's local! We had used up the last of the non-local butter, so I was finally able to try it out on my toast. Nice!

One other difference is that, rather than being in quarter-pound sticks, this butter comes in a tub (naturally). That isn't a big deal, but it does mean that if a recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of butter, you won't be able to just cut off the proper length; you'll have to either actually measure 3 tablespoons or make a good guess!

Lunch

Lunch was local green beans (yum!), strawberries from Livesprings (YUM!), and a salad (lettuce and spring onions from the CSA), plus a non-local dressing.

Farmers' Market

The Illinois Products Farmers' Market was back to its normal location this week - the Commodities Pavilion behind the Grandstand on the Illinois State Fairgrounds. I picked up quite a bit of stuff:

• 2 dozen eggs from Lazy T
• 6 quarts of strawberries from Livesprings Berries & Produce (Chandlerville, IL)
• new potatoes from Dyer's Farm (Hillsboro, IL)
• radishes (German giants) from Split Rail Gardens (Riverton, IL)
• breakfast sausage patties from a farm in Madison County, IL
• spring onions from Odelehr's (Brussels, IL)
• zucchini (!) and snow peas from Buds & Blooms (Decatur, IL)

I got plenty of eggs, because I want to let a dozen of them sit for 2-3 weeks before I hard-boil them. Supposedly, it's easier to remove the shell from old eggs than from fresh eggs. It's a bit of a shame to let farm fresh eggs become old eggs, but I really don't like peeling hard-boiled eggs one tiny shell fragment at a time!

I picked up 6 quarts of strawberries because Dawn keeps wanting to freeze some and I keep eating them before she can! I figure 6 quarts will ensure that she gets to at least some of them before I do!

There seemed to be just a single quart of new potatoes in the entire farmers' market, and I got it! The Dyers said that it was the first quart that they had harvested, dug up the night before just to see whether things were ready. It will be nice to add some starches to my diet! You can only eat so much salad! We haven't yet decided what we'll do with them. Fried? Baked? Hmm...

It was also nice to see some zucchini there. I'm not a huge fan of zucchini, but Dawn likes it quite a bit. I primarily like it breaded and fried. Yum! I just picked up one zucchini, so I'll let Dawn decide what we'll do with it.

I'm on the lookout for ways to add variety to my breakfasts. Eggs are nice, but there can be too much of a good thing! The sign by the booth just said "family farm in Madison County". I was running out of time, so I didn't chat long enough to ask the name of the farm and where exactly they were in Madison County. He did say that he'll be back next week, so I'll ask him then. He had plenty of frozen meat products, but the thing that caught my eye was the breakfast sausage patties! Dawn's a vegetarian, so it adds no variety to her breakfasts, but I'll eat them!

Split Rail Gardens (Riverton, IL)

The radishes (German giants) were from Split Rail Gardens in Riverton. I talked to the owner for quite a few minutes about his garden and how he got into it. He said that back in the 1990s he had a U-pick strawberry operation, but that after several years business dropped off as people lost interest in picking their own strawberries. He got out of the business, but then about 10 years later became interested again. With the upsurge of interest in buying fresh, local food, he figured it was a good time to get back into the business. He now has 4 acres, planted with a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, including (from my memory) strawberries, onions, and radishes.

Dinner

Dawn made lasagna! She used non-local lasagna noodles and Wisconsin mozarella cheese, but everything else was local - spinach, kale, chard, green garlic, spring onions, hydroponic tomatoes, plus one special ingredient...

First Harvest

Basil from our garden! Okay, there's not much yet, but there was enough purple basil for Dawn to harvest a few leaves and immediately add them to the lasagna. It doesn't get much fresher than that!

Day 8 - Yes, We DO Have Strawberries! And Green Beans!

Breakfast

On Wednesday, May 27, I had a cheese omelet for breakfast, using eggs from Bear Creek Farm & Ranch (Palmer, IL) and Wisconsin cheese. (I keep mentioning that it was Wisconsin cheese simple because, although it's not local, it at least didn't travel too far to get here!)

Farmers' Market

Dawn made sure that she left for the Old Capitol Farmers' Market early. On Saturday, Livesprings Berries & Produce was out of strawberries by 7:53 - and the market doesn't officially open until 8:00! She wanted to make sure that we got some this time, both for eating now and to freeze for later. Our 4-year-old son Orlando likes to have smoothies made with strawberries and bananas. Bananas almost certainly can't be found locally, but at least we'll have the strawberries!

In addition to the strawberries, Dawn also found green beans! Hooray!

Lunch

Lunch was a salad of lettuce and green garlic from Veenstra & Heck's CSA (Rochester, IL) with non-local dressing. More importantly, I had broccoli! The broccoli came from Dyer's Farm in Hillsboro. Yum! (If you don't get that excited about broccoli, you're probably not a locavore! Well, at least not a locavore that really likes broccoli.)

Dinner

For dinner, we had more broccoli, as well as local green beans! (Sorry, Dawn doesn't recall the source of the green beans.) We also had salad (local lettuce, etc, from Veenstra & Heck's CSA) and sugared pecans from Voss Pecans (Carlyle, IL). We also had semi-local bread made from a mix from Hodgson Mill (Effingham, IL)

Lastly, throughout the day, we snacked on local strawberries - lots of local strawberries - from Livesprings Berries & Produce (Chandlerville, IL).