Tuesday, June 17, 2008

OLS: Grilled Chicken and Salads

Our One Local Summer meal this week was a supper of two summery salads and grilled chicken.

Potato Salad with Kohlrabi
Biver Farms (which I learned during a chat with Alanna of A Veggie Venture at the Kirkwood Farmers Market on Saturday is pronounced "beaver") at the Tower Grove Farmers Market had tiny potatoes on Saturday. I boiled those in their jackets until they were fork tender, then sliced them in half for the salad. On the advice of CJ at the Kirkwood Farmers Market, I diced my kohlrabi and soaked it for several minutes. Then I sauteed it until carmelized -- it developed a nice touch of sweetness as well as a more tender texture. I tossed the potatoes and kohlrabi with thyme from my deck. For the dressing, I used local honey and Blue Heron Orchard habanero apple cider vinegar with nonlocal mayo, mustard, salt, and pepper. After chilling for a couple of hours, this was the highlight of the meal.

Green salad
The green salad was simply two kinds of lettuce from recent trips to farmers markets and sunflower shoots from the Claverach Farm booth at the Maplewood Farmers Market. The dressing has no local ingredients, but it is homemade which makes it locally produced! I don't measure salad dressing ingredients -- just toss things together until they taste good. In this case, it was mayo lightened with yogurt cheese, ketchup, apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper, and agave nectar.


Grilled chicken
R grilled the leg quarters from two Farrar Out Farms chickens (one bought at the Kirkwood Farmers Market, as usual, and the other at the Maplewood Farmers Market where Farrar Out started appearing last week). I wanted leftover chicken for chicken salad sandwiches later this week when our nephew will be here to help with yard work. R still gets a bit of a thrill out of the fact that our chicken legs match up. He remembers the six-packs of leg quarters I used to buy at the supermarket that would have five right legs and one left leg. As he was grilling those he'd find himself wondering about the odd chickens they raise at commercial operations.

This is the first One Local Summer meal that I shared with someone else. The verdict: "we should do this every night!"

1 comment:

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