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.)

back from the novel: One Local Summer

All this time, I've been revising, and then polishing, and then dithering, and so on. But I'm done with it for a while now, so I'm ready to turn to food. Or rather to writing about it, since I've certainly eaten plenty since May, and cooked some, too.

Liz at Pocket Farm has brought One Local Summer to us for a 2nd year, and I'm planning to localize our food as much as possible, between our garden and D's father's garden and the farmers market.

Above, some of the strawberries D's father and I picked last weekend. He's 87, but he picked more than I did. Also, he didn't complain about how his back was hurting afterward. The woman in the next row and I agreed that picking your food should be mandated as part of serious diets: work your food off before you eat it.

I thought I was going to make jam, but I froze some and we've just been eating the rest, on ice cream, on cereal, on cottage cheese and yogurt, and by themselves. Maybe next time, if my back will stand it (I did complain).