local eating

This isn't the 1st time we've eaten a local or mostly local dinner, but it's the 1st of the One Local Summer dinners (cleverly instituted by Pocket Farm, for the 2nd year), and a good one, too.

Le Menu

Deer burgers (courtesy of D, from SE Ohio)

topped with raw milk cheddar and sauteed onions (both from the farmers mkt)

on locally made bread

Salad of several lettuces and greens (from my and D's father's gardens)

Strawberry ice cream (made by me from the u-pick strawberries and Hartzler's milk; so I guess it's really ice milk)

Everything excellent. The salad had, besides lettuce, tiny carrots thinned from the garden (not even as thick as a pencil), dill, mustard flowers, and mustard leaves. The ice cream was the star-- luridly pink--who needs food coloring when you have strawberries?--and intensely flavored. I sort of threw it together, so no recipe, but I plan to do some more experimenting.

The failure of the dinner: the hamburger buns, which raised half-heartedly, but then fell in the oven, so that they looked like large cookies. Actually, they didn't taste bad, and if I'd called them flatbread, they might have passed. But they were certainly not buns.

I've been reading Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, which is a history of the restaurant as well as of the woman--I like to think that Alice wouldn't have disdained our dinner, showing off our terroir as it did. (Maybe she'd have had some advice about those flattened buns.)