Yum

We are so fortunate to be able to spend money on good, local food. We have a fantastic network of sources in Davis, including our very own community garden plot from which we get the majority of our vegetables. Add to that the Farmer's Market and an expanding, full-service Food Co-op, and I pretty much don't ever set foot in a standard grocery store or have to buy over-processed food from a mega-mart. Trust me, I do count my blessings and consider myself to be very lucky.

Last night, we invited our long-suffering realtor over for dinner and created a mouth-watering feast. I'm so proud of how it turned out, although unfortunately I didn't take pictures. But I thought I'd run down the dishes and the sources of my ingredients, even if it's just so I can remember what a good job Loris and I did.

Bread: I made focaccia and French bread with ingredients from the bulk aisle at the Co-op

Appetizers:

Giardiniera - home-canned pickled vegetables (mostly grown by us, supplemented with local stuff) in tomato sauce

Bruschetta - home-made bread with toppings from our trip to Italy

Prawns - from the Farmer's market served with homemade mayonnaise from my coworker's eggs and lemons from a friend's tree

Stuffed scallops - from the Farmer's Market, stuffed with basil and garlic from our garden (plus local oil, and salt and pepper)

First course:

Home-made tagliatelle pasta with leeks from our garden and butter

Second course:

Local, grass-fed pork from the Farmer's Market cooked in a red wine sauce
Asparagus from the Farmer's Market with butter and Parmesan cheese we brought with us from Italy

Dessert:

Home-made vanilla ice cream, made with local organic milk from Straus Family Creamery
Hazelnut cookies made with a friend's hazelnuts (not sure where they came from), filled with nutella (from my husband's hometown in Italy, although we bought it here) and mascarpone (I should check to see where this comes from)


Things that I'm not sure if they were local or not: Various baking ingredients (like flour, potato starch, and sugar), salt and pepper, butter, vinegar

Things that I know were not local: Some of the olive oil, probably the mascarpone, nutella, wine for the wine sauce

Spring chicken

... or eggs.

I just found out that one of my coworkers lives on 5 acres and has chickens. She sells her eggs to coworkers, and I got to buy one of her first batches last week. They were absolutely beautiful, brown, white and green, and super-fresh.

We made them into a local dinner. Loris cooked up a frittata with parsley from our garden, I made some cole slaw with home-grown cabbage, and we ate them with home-made pretzels. So yummy!

Local dinner

Local dinner

Last night my sweet husband cooked dinner while I was at my mosaic class. He made a sort of fall vegetable ratatouille, which he presented to me saying “The only thing that’s not from the garden are the carrots!”

I thought about that for a second. “Um, and the potatoes? Oh, and the onions.”

“Oh, right” he admitted. Oh well. Actually we usually have carrots from the garden, and next year we’ll certainly have onions. I’m hoping we’ll have potatoes too.

The rest of the dish consisted of (from what I can tell) turnips, bell peppers, the few green beans still hanging out in the fridge, chard, and eggplant. (And garlic?)

We also had some homemade bread (from the freezer), and salad with lettuce from the garden, and tomatoes from the farmer’s market. We’re really sorry to see the tomato season end.

I’m having leftover ratatouille for lunch. Sadly, I’m having it without the leftover bread because I only remembered the bread after I was several minutes from home on my bike. And as they say (or as they should say) trains wait for no one!

P.S. Read the (uncorrected) Italian version of this post here.

Um ... where is fall?

It's still warm! I can tell it's getting closer to winter because the days are getting darker, but still. This is ridiculous.

I have barely been to the garden lately, and barely done much of anything else, either. There just isn't time. I did plant my shallots, finally, on Saturday (or was it Sunday?). I can't even remember how many I planted. Twelve? Something like that.

Thanksgiving is next Thursday. I can barely believe it. I'm going to write, really soon (I hope) about my hopes for a local Thanksgiving, what it represents, why it's not going to happen, and what I think about that. Hopefully I'll have time to write it!

Weekend of local eating

Yesterday was a fantastic day from the food point of view.

For lunch, we made sandwiches with homemade bread, homegrown roasted peppers, homegrown lettuce, homemade ketchup, local balsamic vinegar, and some stuff that wasn't homemade or homegrown (or even local, bah): mayo, mustard, and tuna. They were so delicious.

Dinner was Leek and roasted pepper risotto (leek and peppers from the garden), and a lettuce and pepper salad with homemade bread. Yum yum yum.

I went to the garden, but didn't have time to do much work. I picked eggplant, lettuce, peppers, basil, and parsley. We had something like 12 eggplants (small ones), so I made eggplant parmesan for later in the week, and Loris is supposed to make a caponata/eggplant stew-type dish one night as well.

I also made up a new whole wheat bread recipe, which looked wonderful when I baked it yesterday, but I haven't tried it yet. I'll post a recipe after I've done a taste-test.

Lovely dinner

I didn't take a picture, but we just finished a really delicious dinner of handmade pasta with a sauce of butter, leeks, cream, and scallops, a salad of heirloom tomatoes and peppers, and some cheese. So yummy.

Pasta - homemade
Butter - eh
Leeks - from the garden
Cream - local
Scallops - farmer's market
Tomatoes - farmer's market
Peppers - from the garden
Cheese - we brought it back from Italy

I made the pasta sauce by thinly slicing the leeks and sauteeing them in butter. After about five minutes, I added the chopped scallops and cooked for another 2 or 3 minutes. Added a bit of salt and pepper, mixed it with the pasta, then added some cream.

Local dinner

First course: Roasted butternut squash and garlic soup

- Homegrown butternut squash
- Homegrown garlic
- Onions from the farmer's market in Sacramento
- Local olive oil (from Sacramento)
- Knorr vegetable broth from?

Second course: Roasted pepper and roasted beet salad

- Homegrown bell peppers
- Homegrown beets
- Homegrown shallots
- Local olive oil
- Balsamic vinegar (not local)
- Salt (in bulk from the Davis co-op)

Bread from the Village Bakery
Butter made from local cream (Strauss family creamery)


NOTE: I should start making my own veggie broth; and the same company that makes the olive oil also makes balsamic vinegar. So I do have room to improve.