OLS Week 8: Two meals in one day

I had two local meals yesterday for the One Local Summer challenge.

At lunch, I enjoyed Mexican Purslane Stuffing stuffed into half of a giant zucchini from our CSA box. The recipe isn't that great. Am I right to suspect the authenticity of a Mexican dish seasoned with soy sauce? And, it never says when to put the purslane in -- I chopped it and dumped in after the tomatoes. I'm not an experienced enough cook to know how to cook an egg without scrambling it. Since I knew I was going to put it under the broiler after stuffing the zucchini and I trust my source for eggs, I erred on the undercooked side and it seemed to work.

I'll make it again the next time we have a giant zucchini with these changes: sautee the purslane in the skillet with the onions and garlic just before adding the tomato instead of steaming it, skip the soy sauce (the dish was plenty wet from the Cherokee Purple tomato), use the chili pepper as suggested (I didn't have a local -- and safe -- pepper so I just used black pepper yesterday), and put a little cheese on top.

We fixed supper entirely on the grill, which is one of my favorite ways since I do very little of the work. This was our first sweet corn of the season! A lot of seasonal eating is new to us since this is our first year of One Local Summer, but we both have enough of a rural background to know that you only eat sweet corn in season. It was worth the 10 month wait -- especially since we ate it nearly every day during the season last year!

The squash is another Less is More recipe (explained in yesterday's post, hosted by One Hot Stove for the Monthly Blog Patrol originated by The Spice Cafe). Grilled Marinated Summer Squash is easy and the lemon juice is a surprisingly nice touch (if not local -- I'm considering that a spice for this dish). I've made it twice now and both times I started marinating it in the morning to cook in the evening -- overnight seems like overkill. The recipe is from the Kitchen Gardeners International blog, a blog I've been really enjoying even while my kitchen garden this year is mostly failing.

Less is More -- Blackberry Sauce

I bought blackberries at the Farmers Market last week. My single memory of fresh blackberries is picking one off a bush in my Grandma's yard and popping it in my mouth. It tasted like dirt. So, I didn't really no what to expect.

These blackberries are mouth-pucker tart but wonderful -- more of a candy experience than a fruit one. I've been eating them one berry at a time, but I was worried that I wouldn't get through them fast enough.

So, along comes a blackberry sauce recipe from Alanna at Kitchen Parade. In the picture, I'm adding the second half of the blackberries to the macerated mix. Alanna served it over vanilla frozen yogurt. It's delicious over chocolate frozen yogurt, as well.

This qualifies me for the Less is More challenge issued by Nupur (who makes amazing spring rolls) at One Hot Stove to make a dish from another blog that has five or fewer ingredients. "Less is More" is Nupur's theme for the monthly blog event, Monthly Blog Patrol started by The Spice Cafe blog -- the idea being that there's a new reason every month to go look at food blogs.

I may have to buy some more blackberries to try this blackberry sorbet from another food blogger, Kelly at SOUNDING MY BARBARIC GULP!

OLS Week 7: Simple Sandwich Supper

Our One Local Summer challenge meal this week was last night's supper, at the end of a long day that included picking up our CSA box (this week's contents: zucchini, yellow squash, cucumber, broccoli, onions, green beans, green peppers, Oriental eggplant, and carrots).

We marinated the skinned chicken breasts that I de-boned on Wednesday in some oil with garlic and onion--all but the oil from Farmers Markets.

Meanwhile, I made a cabbage salad. The cabbage was from last week's CSA box and the carrots from this week's. The home-made Asian style dressing had no local ingredients, but I've figured out that with that dressing R will eat more than his share of cabbage. I composted part of our first cabbage, so I consider that a good trade if it means we eat more of our cabbage.

R grilled the chicken and I served it on toast made from the Sourdough Honey Whole Wheat Bread that I baked on Wednesday. This was my first 100% whole wheat loaf made with homeground flour and it turned out fine. The sandwich also had heirloom tomato and a "special sauce" made with mayo (lightened with yogurt cheese), mustard, and local honey.

Dessert was my first all-local concoction made in the ice cream machine -- a cantaloupe sorbet that was simply pureed cantaloupe and honey.

Home-Ground Flour and Sourdough

A more prudent person would have separated these into two separate adventures, but home-ground flour and active doubling-itself sourdough arrived in my kitchen on the same day, so what's an excited baker to do? Bake no-yeast bread with home-ground flour, of course.

Home-Ground Flour

Alanna Kellogg, of A Veggie Venture and Kitchen Parade, offered me a "real flour experience." That turned out to mean a large tin of wheat and a grinder. We made the exchange over a lovely lunch in downtown Kirkwood yesterday afternoon and I came home with a new toy for the kitchen.

Grinding a cup or so of flour turned out to be easy and quick. The flour texture is varied which makes beautiful flecks in the dough.

Sourdough Starter

For a couple of days, I'd been maintaining some of my starter (also originally from Alanna) using the directions at the Sourdough Home website. By yesterday afternoon, I had gobs of the stuff growing and bubbling in a bowl on the counter. The Sourdough Home site is all about making bread without yeast--all the rise comes from the sourdough starter. That's been my goal since this spring when I started thinking about how one would make an entirely local loaf of bread -- it would have to be sourdough to avoid the use of commercial yeast. The ultimate bread for that purpose would be A 100% Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread, but I used some discretion and didn't go for that as my first no-yeast and first home-ground flour loaf.

Black Canyon Sourdough Bread

Instead, I started with a loaf that would use a high percentage of non-local bread flour and only a little of the home-ground whole wheat flour: Black Canyon Sourdough Bread. I made just half a recipe because of my other challenge. Besides all the new tools and techniques, "fix the oven" has not yet made it to the top of the priority list. So, I needed to do the final rise and bake in the bread machine, which will only bake one loaf at a time. The photo is of the dough going in for its final rise.

It turned out surprisingly well. The bread has a nice texture and that distinguishing sourdough flavor. The only problem was from the bread machine. The loaf was small so only the side and bottom crusts were browned. The top of the loaf is pale. Next time, I might try using a 3/4 recipe instead of a half one to see if that improves the baking.

...and some English Muffins, too

That bread only used a tiny amount of the sourdough starter, so I mixed up some Sourdough English Muffins last night, too. The recipe calls for all white flour, but I snuck in a cup of my home-ground flour. I didn't have an English Muffin cutter so I cut my dough into twelve large squares with a knife. They still look and taste like an English Muffin.

OLS: CSA supper

This week's One Local Summer meal was inspired by and mostly produced from the Community Supported Agriculture box we picked up Thursday night. Our week 2 box contained yellow squash, zucchini, beets, and mixed lettuce like last week and three new items: green beans, baby potatoes, and cucumbers.

The thinking for our OLS meal went something like this: cucumbers - tzatziki sauce; baby potatoes - potato salad; hmmm, how about a potato salad with tzatziki sauce instead of the normal dressing; green beans are good in potato salad; last night's grilled chicken leg quarter would make the whole thing a main dish. That with a green salad could be a good cold supper.

I made a half batch of this tzatziki sauce recipe and still only used about half of it in my dish, leaving plenty to dip and spread and dress other food in the coming week. I took lots of advice from the comments to make the sauce less runny -- used hand tools instead of the food processor, used yogurt cheese instead of the yogurt, and drained the grated cucumber for a few hours. I used rosemary instead of dill because that's what I had available from the garden and because I like rosemary with potatoes.

I blanched the green beans (cut bite size) and boiled the potatoes (whole), using the same hot water and ice bath water for both vegetables. The potatoes and grilled chicken were cut bite-size and all stirred in to the tzatziki sauce. I left the whole thing in the refrigerator for a couple of hours so the flavors could marry.

The salad is the lettuce mix from the CSA box. I grated beets in it. We tried the beets boiled and chilled last week, but didn't really like them. We didn't hate them so we thought there might be some way we could appreciate them. I baked those sliced beets in a 400 degree toaster oven until nearly burned and enjoyed the beet chips but with lots of oil and potentially carcenogenic charring. According to this article about "The 10 Best Foods You Aren't Eating," the best way to get health benefits from beets is to grate them and eat them raw, so that's the way we intend to try this week's beets.

I also put purslane on the salad. Purslane is number 6 on that 10 Best list. I considered buying seeds this winter after learning about the health benefits of purslane. But I was concerned about the weediness and wasn't sure we didn't have some already. We have a garden bed that we haven't really decided what to do with so, of course, it got weedy this spring. It turns out that one of the weeds is purslane. So, I'm gradually pulling the other weeds and this will be my purslane bed this year. Guess what? It grows like a weed! Much better than any of the vegetables I planted are doing.

The results? We liked the green salad even with two new-to-us vegetables. I grated the beets finely, pretty much liquefied them, and they blended into the homemade russian dressing. Next time I'll try a coarser grater to see if we like them that way as well. We barely noticed the purslane with the other greens.

The potato salad was, well, bland. I guess there's a reason that tzatziki sauce goes with spicy meat in gyros. We doctored it with soy sauce at the table and that helped a bit.

Lowfat Chocolate Frozen Yogurt

Happy Summer! We spent the first weekend of the summer doing Pond-O-Rama, the garden tour of the St. Louis Water Gardening Society. We saw lots of beautiful and inspiring gardens.

When I posted about my strawberry sorbet, two people asked about the ice cream maker I got with my birthday money last month. It's a Cuisinart ICE-20. I bought it at Cornucopia, the kitchen store in Kirkwood, but Bed, Bath, and Beyond carries it as well. The going rate seems to be about $50. Ice cream makers underwent a revolution while I wasn't paying attention. They now involve a gel-filled freezer bowl that you have to remember to put in the freezer a day before you want your frozen dessert. The advantages of these new styles is that they don't require messing with rock salt and they make small amounts suitable for small families.

This recipe doesn't have a single local ingredient. Someone else can do the calculations about the relative carbon footprint of freezing your own dessert versus buying factory-made and freezer-truck-shipped product. The reason I'm making my own frozen desserts is less about being green and more about using ingredients that I'm happy to eat.

I combined this recipe with the one in the booklet that came with my ice cream maker. But I wanted to use nonalkalized cocoa as my flavoring because I read somewere that was the healthier way to consume chocolate (how's that for good library research?). I've been using Chatfield's Premium cocoa from Whole Foods but I'm open to hearing about sources that are Fair Trade, especially if they are produced in the Midwest.

I've had two problems with this recipe. I'll write about my solutions but this is also a plea for more experience cooks to let me know how I should be handling these ingredients.

Problem One is getting the lumps out of the cocoa and cornstarch. I'm sure the correct tool for the job is a sifter (I'm pretty sure that I have my mother's in a box somewhere), but I've been dumping them in the saucepan and using a whisk to break up the lumps. I've yet to find lumps in the final product whether or not I worked to get rid of them, so this may be a problem that is being solved somewhere along the way without my effort.

Problem Two is a sticky substance that develops at the bottom of the sauce pan when I'm heating the evaporated milk and other ingredients. I've started putting the saucepan on very low heat, stirring continuously with a metal spatula, and raising the heat very gradually to boiling. That seems to have solved it. The sticky stuff doesn't re-melt into the mix, but it does taste like a fudgy taffy, so not an unpleasant surprise in chocolate frozen yogurt.

EDIT August 17, 2008: It turns out that the biggest problem I've had with lumpiness in my frozen yogurt this summer was from another source entirely -- the evaporated skim milk. I learned this: don't shake the can and don't scrape the gunk out of the bottom of the can. If you do, you get milky, flavorless lumps in the final product.



Lowfat Chocolate Frozen Yogurt

2 tsp cornstarch
3/8 cup nonalkalized cocoa
1 can evaporated skim milk
1/2 cup agave nectar
1 1/2 cup lowfat vanilla yogurt

1. Whisk the cornstarch and cocoa together in a small saucepan.

2. Whisk in the evaporated milk and the agave nectar.

3. Cook over low heat while continuously stirring with a metal spatula. Gradually increase the heat until the chocolate mix begins to boil. Turn off the heat and continue stirring for a couple of minutes.

4. Allow the chocolate to cool for a few minutes. Stir by spoonfuls into the yogurt.

5. Chill the yogurt mixture in the refrigerator for a couple of hours.

6. Follow the manufacturer's instructions for freezing the yogurt in an ice cream maker.

Strawberry season starts

Farmers Market logo courtesy of A Veggie Venture.

Strawberries are one of the poster children of eating locally and seasonally. In case you've never had a local in-season strawberry, learn this: strawberries are red and tender all the way through. They don't have a crunchy, flavorless, white core.

As I wrote mid-week, I found my first strawberries of the season at the Maplewood Farmers Market. I was correct that the Our Garden booth had them again at the Tower Grove Market on Saturday. I saw them and a long line so I did my other shopping first. By the time I got around to Our Garden again, both the line and the strawberries were gone.

I thought I had lost my chance at more strawberries, but when I swung by the Kirkwood Farmers Market for my chicken and eggs from Farrar Out Farm, I found that two vendors were selling strawberries by the quart. They weren't nearly as pretty as the ones from Our Garden, but the price was more attractive -- 2 quarts for $9 compared to 1 pint for $3.

Two quarts is enough to experiment with. I'm trying to decide if I want to freeze berry puree to eat later in the year. If I do that, it will be with berries that I pick myself at a very low price. The first experiment is strawberry sorbet, following the recipe that came with the ice cream machine I got for my birthday. Definitely a success.

Post submitted to the Farmers Market Fare carnival at Eat. Drink. Better.

A Good Wednesday

We had a perfect weather day in the St. Louis area yesterday--the first time in awhile that the weather story was how gorgeous the day was.




Our nephew, P, came to help with yard work. Now that we've decided that the yellowwood tree is rather special, we wanted to clean up the trees around it to give it some room. The evergreen that was planted too close to that ash is now gone, made into a separate pile of chips to provide an acidic mulch for the azaleas. One of the ashes was trimmed up and the next will be soon. We're going to put a bed around the two ashes and yellowwood -- probably just pansies for the fall and spring, but eventually a variety of shade perennials. We're concerned about the long term health of these two ashes and several more on our property because of the imminent threat of the emerald ash borer, but for now we're going to assume that they will be in the landscape for some time to come. R was thrilled with how much work he got done with a helper.




I discovered our first local strawberries of the season last night at the Maplewood Farmers Market. They were from Our Garden -- I assume she'll have them at the Tower Grove Market on Saturday, too. Biver Farms also had strawberries and will likely have them at one or more of their Saturday market locations, Tower Grove, Clayton, and Goshen Market in Edwardsville. I've been collecting strawberry recipes, but it looks like these won't last long enough to go in a recipe! The first strawberries are such a treat all on their own.

Lucy at the Claverach booth was selling small white Japanese turnips with the advice to try them in salads because they're so tender in the spring. I did and they add a nice mild bite, much less harsh than the flavor I normally associate with turnips. The turnips were also good at breakfast this morning, sauteed with some potato and fresh rosemary and topped with finely grated Parmesan.

OLS: Asparagus Scramble

Breakfast seemed like the appropriate choice for my very first One Local Summer challenge meal. The One Local Summer challenge is to blog about one meal a week made from local ingredients. The posts will be compiled by region at the Farm to Philly blog on Tuesdays, starting in just over a week. I'll link to the first Midwest Region report when it's up on the blog.

This is a one-egg breakfast with toast spread with soft goat cheese. Here's a diet tip I picked up from somewhere. I want cheese with my egg and I want something spread on my toast. By spreading cheese on my toast, I kill two desires with one serving of fat.




Asparagus Scramble with toast
Sunflower oil
5 spears of asparagus, sliced into rounds (Our Garden Farm, Maplewood Farmers Market)
1 tablespoon sliced chives (Silent Oak Farm, Clayton Farmers Market)
3 sprigs of thyme, stems removed (pot on my deck)
1 egg, lightly beaten (Farrar Out Farm, Kirkwood Farmers Market)
1 slice of 97% Local Bread
2 teaspoons of Ste. Genevieve cheese (Baetje Farms, Clayton Farmers Market)

1. Saute the asparagus in the sunflower oil over medium high heat until caramelized.

2. Meanwhile, toast the bread and spread with the cheese.

3. Turn the heat to low and add chives and thyme, cooking until fragrant.

4. When the pan is cooled somewhat, push the vegetable mix to one side and pour the egg into the other side. Gently push the edges of the egg in as it cooks, letting the uncooked egg flow to the pan's surface. When most of the egg is set, spoon the vegetables into the portion that is still runny and flip to cook the last of the egg around the vegetables.

Three Market Day

Farmers Market logo courtesy of A Veggie Venture.

1. Clayton Farmers Market. This was opening day -- a good enough excuse in itself to make the trip in spite of the inconvenient lack of Highway 40 to get there. Clayton Road was a breeze early on Saturday morning so that didn't pose a big problem. But, I had another reason to go -- I wanted to sample the cheeses of Baetje Farms since Chris Freeland of Countrypolitan Cooking has written about them twice in recent weeks: Baetje Farms' "Coeur de la Creme" Tart with Kimker Hill Farm flour crust and Fresh Radish Sandwiches with Sunflower Sprouts and Goat Cheese. Baetje Farms sells at the Soulard Farmers Market, but I rarely make it that far into the city. Their presence at the Clayton Farmers Market was a definite enticement.


The parking lot west of Straub's was hopping with activity. Besides cheese, I bought salad and cooking greens, radishes, a big bunch of chives, peanut butter from Mound City, and a tub of shea butter for my skin. It looked like L'Ecole Culinaire was setting up to serve something but they weren't yet when I left. So, I decided to head over to the Tower Grove Market where I knew I could get a crepe for breakfast.


2. Tower Grove Farmers Market. This really has the nicest energy of any farmers market I've been to with a dozen people doing yoga in the grass and a band playing on the pavilion. Pretty much everyone will catch your eye and smile on the path to and from the market stalls. I filled out my needs for greens, got some flour from Kimker Hill Farm, and had a crepe with asparagus, spinach, sour cream and maybe some other things. One booth was promising "Strawberries Soon."


3. Kirkwood Farmers Market. Last stop was my home market for chicken and eggs. Farrar Out Farm did have radishes and some greens this week. CJ's has a few more items to go with the local asparagus, now, and Summit Produce had local spinach. Next week, I may try Kirkwood first.



With the Claverach sunflower shoots I bought at the Maplewood Farmers Market on Wednesday (where I had a nice chat with Alanna Kellogg, of A Veggie Venture, recognizing her from her blog and newspaper picture), I was able to re-create Chris Freeland's radish sandwich. The only differences in my version were that I used my own bread and I sliced my long radishes the long-ways. A wonderful post-market snack, locally-grown and locally-inspired! Now, I have the energy to go wash and spin all of those greens.

Post submitted to the Farmers Market Fare carnival at Eat. Drink. Better.

Planting Day

It feels late, but it's been a cold wet spring here and today was the first that all the conditions were right to plant things.

This morning, the pots. Sage. Winter thyme -- I was disappointed in the lack of thymeness flavor in my lemon thyme last year so I asked the guy at Biver Farm what I should plant and he said winter thyme (it smells great!). Apple mint and pepper mint in the galvanized tubs. I'll be treating the sage and thyme as if they were annuals so I planted them in soil-less potting mix. I'm hoping the mints will come back next year in those tubs so I used Fafard 52 Mix. I have it on good authority that the Missouri Botanical Garden uses that for perennials in containers. We get it at Hummert's in Earth City.

This afternoon, the kitchen garden. This is the only bed that existed when we bought the house and it doesn't have the best soil yet. Last year, we planted it in July with Madagascar vinca and mums just to get something in it and have an excuse to work the soil a bit. It was beautiful in October! This year, we're going with annuals again, but edible ones: one zucchini (Spineless Beauty), four eggplants (Fairy Tale, with lavendar and white stripes), and three basil.

What you can't see in the picture is that I also sowed New Zealand spinach seeds. That's not really spinach but is supposed to taste remarkably similar and to grow better in our hot summers.

Also invisible, because I haven't planted them yet, are the seedlings of bell and jalapeno peppers. I'm going to let them get a little bigger and more hardened before planting them, probably around June 1.

Future garden

This is probably the first of several posts I'll make this growing season. I have ideas about what produce that I want in my garden based on the relative ease and cost of buying it from other local growers.

Asparagus, for instance, is easily found right now and sold at a reasonable cost. So, asparagus is not high on my list of things to go in the garden. This is a good thing because asparagus is a perennial and I'm nowhere near to being ready to commit to a spot for asparagus for the next 20 years.

Greens, both salad and cooking, are surprisingly expensive at the farmers markets and not as readily available as I expected. It's been taking trips to two or three different farmers markets to get all the greens we're eating -- salads every day and cooking greens a couple of times a week. Plus, I understand that many of them are easy to grow. I might even be able to get an early start on the season by growing greens in a cold frame.

The jury is still out on rhubarb. It's been scarce and expensive so far, but I'm not sure how much we'll eat it. Since rhubarb is generally made into desserts, we may eat it just two or three times in the spring -- just enough to honor the fact that my grandmother was somewhat famous for her rhubarb crunch. For that, I'm willing to buy a bunch or two from a local farmer rather than grow my own.

Community-building at farmers markets

Farmers Market logo courtesy of A Veggie Venture.

The Gratitude post on the Locavore Nation - Central blog prompted me to write about an experience I had at Kirkwood Farmers Market this week. I ran out of asparagus so I went on Thursday to see if one of the two places open mostly to sell plants happened to have local asparagus. It was raining, so I ran to CJ's in the front of the market where there was Wood River, Illinois asparagus standing upright in a tub of water.

The woman behind the counter asked me how I was going to cook the asparagus and I said that I was going to try it on a salad because I'd heard you could eat it raw (from Alanna Kellogg's A Veggie Venture). She said "Sure you can!" and handed me a spear. She took one herself and we stood there chatting in the rain and eating asparagus Bugs Bunny style. That's just not an experience you can get at the supermarket!

97% Local Bread

I'm not sure I could have made this bread in my old bread machine, but my new one (Zojirushi's Home Bakery Supreme Breadmaker) handles an all whole wheat bread just fine (although, it doesn't always make a perfectly formed dome). Since there's no local source of white bread flour that I know of, the ability to make whole wheat bread increases the percentage by volume of local ingredients in my bread.

I've yet to find a local source for butter but I'm happy with the Organic Valley Pastured Butter from Wisconsin that I bought at Whole Foods.

97% Local Bread
1 3/4 c skim milk (Oberweis)

4 c whole wheat flour (Kimker Hill Farm)

1 c Denise's 10 grain flour (Kimker Hill Farm)

2 Tbl butter

3 Tbl sorghum (Sandhill Farm)

1 tsp sea salt

2 tsp active dry yeast

Warm the milk in the microwave to about room temperature or a little warmer. Meanwhile, stir the flours and butter (cut into pieces) in a medium bowl. Stir the sorghum and salt into the milk and pour the liquid ingredients in the bread pan. Dump the dry ingredients on top of the liquid ingredients. Make a shallow well in the center of the dry ingredients and spoon in the dry yeast. Set the bread machine on whole wheat. Check the bread after it's been kneading for 5 to 10 minutes to see if it needs more flour (add by tablespoons) or more water (add by teaspoons or less).

Tower Grove Market Pasta Primavera

Farmers Market logo courtesy of A Veggie Venture.

Today was opening day of the Tower Grove Farmers' Market. And, my first time visit to that market. I went for the flour from Kimker Hill Farm and any greens I could find. I came away with all that and more, including eucalyptus scented soap. There was asparagus, fresh pasta, spinach, and goat cheese feta.

In honor of the first market day, I made a pasta primavera for lunch. While the fettucini was cooking (fresh pasta cooks fast!), I sauteed the sliced stems of asparagus. At the last moment, I added the asparagus tops and a few leaves of sliced spinach to the asparagus stems. No sauce -- just the feta plus salt and pepper and the olive oil on the vegetables. A spring treat!



Post submitted to the Farmers Market Fare carnival at Eat. Drink. Better.

Chicken and dumplings

This is really Loving Whole Chickens, part two. The other new problem that a whole chicken user encounters, besides cutting them up, is what to do with all the parts that one doesn't eat -- parts we never see when buying chicken pieces at the grocery store.

The traditional solution is to make chicken stock. For me, that's the easy part. We went through a chicken and dumplings (the biscuit kind) phase several years ago and I learned to make stock then. At that time, I used the fancy recipe in Jane Brody's cookbook, a method that, as I recall, includes studding an onion with cloves. But, more in the green spirit, I now make scrap stock.

It takes two chickens to get enough chicken parts for stock. The back, neck, wings, and any bones (cooked or uncooked) that I manage to remember to rescue go into a bag in the freezer. Usually, I make about half an effort to remove the skin before freezing, but I don't go crazy about it. During the week and a half or two weeks that it takes us to go through two chickens, I save vegetable scraps, also in the freezer in a container -- this week it was onion skins, carrot ends, asparagus ends, tops of peppers (bell and jalapeno), zucchini ends, and probably a few things I've forgotten. About the only thing I don't put in the scrap box are cruciferous vegetable bits (cabbage and broccoli) because they can overpower everything else.

To make the stock, I put the chicken parts directly from the freezer into a large pot and cover with 8 to 10 cups of water depending on how much chicken there is. I bring that to a boil, skimming the scum that rises just before it boils. Then I lower the heat and let it simmer, uncovered, occasionally pushing the bones down with a potato masher to break things up a bit. After two or three hours, I add the vegetables, again directly from the freezer, bring it back to simmer and let it go another 30 minutes to an hour. When it's cool enough to handle, I remove most of the stuff with tongs to a bowl. Then I ladle the stock out, pouring it through a strainer into a fat separator. I pour the stock from the fat separator into a large container that goes into the refrigerator. Later, I sometimes put some of the cooled stock into ice cube trays to freeze the small portions that Asian recipes often require. The stock cubes can be stored in the freezer in plastic bags or other containers once they are frozen.

That's all well and good. But now, what to do with all this stock? I'm not much of a soup eater, and especially not when there's no snow on the ground. I had hoped that risotto would be the answer, but after cooking enough risotto to get good at it, we decided that it's too rich and too white-grained to be a normal part of our repertoire -- strictly a special occasion and company dish.

Ever since the Greentree Festival last fall when he had a couple of bowls at one of the Folk Life booths, R has been wanting to try chicken and dumplings with noodle-style dumplings. So, that was our first attempt at using stock. I used this recipe from Emeril, with a few changes. Instead of four thighs, I used two drumsticks and two thighs ('cuz, ya know, that's how chickens come) and I skinned them before I started. I skipped all the vegetables that went in the first step and later get discarded since I was using good homemade chicken stock that was made with vegetables. Next time, I'll make the dumplings a little earlier -- he only allows ten minutes while the vegetables are cooking to both make the dumplings and remove the meat from the bones. It took me longer and my carrots were overcooked as a result. Otherwise, this was quite tasty and even satisfied me, the non-soup eater, for supper.

One Local Summer

The "One Local Summer" challenge is to blog about one meal each week made from entirely local ingredients. I've found last summer's entries inspiring as I've been exploring how to eat more locally.

The 2008 One Local Summer challenge will be hosted by Nicole at the Farm to Philly blog. I signed up by leaving a comment on that post. It starts June 1, about the same time that I will be getting my first box of produce from the Yellow Wood Farms CSA. This should be quite an adventure!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Whole Chickens

Farmers Market logo courtesy of A Veggie Venture.

All the things I've read encouraging me to eat local, pastured chickens, make it sound like an easy no-brainer thing to do. Factory-produced chickens are fed cheap food in unnatural conditions and thus are missing nutrients and flavor. Farm-raised chickens lead happier, healthier lives resulting in flavorful meat with more nutrients, including those important omega-3 fatty acids. But, if you're like me and used to buying boneless, skinless chicken breasts for stir-fries and leg quarters for grilling, the fact that local chickens are sold whole is more than a little intimidating.

When the Kirkwood Farmers Market opened at the beginning of April, I decided that now was the time to make the switch. It's the end of April and I can proudly say that I'm no longer intimidated by the whole chickens I buy from Farrar Out Farm.

Here's how the transformation happened.

Chicken 1. I thought maybe the fact that I have carved lots of whole roasted birds might mean that I could just wing it. But things are different when the bird isn't cooked and when you're looking for pieces more than slices, so it all got rather mangled around the ribs and back bone. I wanted instructions for next time.

Chicken 2. The Cooking for Engineers website has a very helpful, illustrated method for Cutting Up Chicken. I did much better getting my second chicken into parts with those instructions although I needed some practice finding the leg and wing joints -- they are much closer to the main body than I seem to think they are. Cutting up the whole chicken into parts was proving to be fairly easy, but it was about this time that I realized the real challenge -- deboning the chicken breast to make those skinless, boneless chicken breasts that we're using in stir-fries 2 or 3 times a week right now.

Chicken 3. Cooking for Engineers had a page on Boning Chicken Breast, but when I finished those instructions, there were still bones in my chicken! Next time, I'll try a different set of instructions.

Chicken 4. R cut up this chicken and deboned the breast while I read the instructions from the new (2006) Joy of Cooking. It went better--this time we ran out of bones before we ran out of instructions. But I still felt like I didn't have a real understanding, a method that I could use over and over again to quickly prepare whole chickens.

Chicken 5. The break-through came, for me, with a video on You Tube: No Feathers "How to Debone a Chicken". He's working with a cooked chicken, but the process for getting the bones out of the breast worked just the same on my raw chicken. I wasn't as fast or as smooth, but I got it done and, even more, feel like I could do it again. He uses shears for all the cutting, I used a knife for parts of it, but the shears really made the difference in the deboning.

So, it took 5 chickens for me to get comfortable. But, even the first four chickens tasted good! The flavor and texture is definitely an improvement over supermarket chicken.

Post submitted to the Farmers Market Fare carnival at Eat. Drink. Better.

Is it spring yet?

Farmers Market logo courtesy of A Veggie Venture.

We had a cloudy, cool day. There's a prediction for flurries in the morning and a hard frost tomorrow night. Fortunately, it's been such a wet spring that no one has been able to get anything into the ground, so the freeze will hopefully not have much effect on gardeners or farmers.

In spite of the gloomy weather, I went to a Farmers Market this morning, the St. Louis Community Farmers' Market. It's a monthly winter market near Tower Grove Park. I didn't know about this one until Denise posted on the Kimker Hill Farm blog that she would be selling her flour there.

Among other things, I bought a cheese-herb focaccia from 4 Seasons Bakery, red lettuce from ShowMe Fresh Farm (a hydroponic farm near Cape Girardeau), and baba ghanoush sold as a fundraiser by the church hosting the market. Putting that all together, I had a fast food lunch -- Farmers Market style.

Post submitted to the Farmers Market Fare carnival at Eat. Drink. Better.

Spring greens with chicken in peanut sauce

A friend and I went to the last Winter Pantry at Schlafly Bottleworks today. It's their continuation of their summer Wednesday night Farmers Market.


As I hoped, I brought home a big bag of spring greens -- chard, baby kale, and beet tops. We've been practicing a dish for a couple of weeks using spinach that we wanted to try with greens.



There were four kinds of leaves, I'm not really sure which is which. Numbering from the left, I think 1 and 2 are the chard because of the deeply colored veins. 3 is the most bitter of the greens. But I don't know whether that's the kale or the beet top. [Edit 7/06/08: now that I've had a whole spring's eating of greens, I'm pretty sure that left to right is chard, beet green, collard green, and kale].

We learned recently that chard and beets are the same species, Beta vulgaris. Varieties cultivated for leaves are called chard, varieties cultivated for roots are called beets.

The recipe originated with the booklet, Stir-Fry Recipes: Light and Easy Recipes, that came with R's new wok. But we've now modified it beyond all recognition and we're still thinking that it could use more greens and fewer peanuts. Here's the version we made tonight.

Spring greens with chicken in peanut sauce
Greens
5 cups baby greens, washed, spun dry, and put in the refrigerator for awhile to dry further, coarsely chopped

Chicken & marinade
1 boneless, skinless chicken breast, sliced into thin pieces about 1 inch long
1 Tbl chicken stock
2 tsp hoisin sauce

Peanut Sauce
2 Tbl reduced-sodium soy sauce
2 Tbl chicken broth
2 Tbl peanut butter
1 Tbl hoisin sauce
2 tsp honey

Stir-fry
2 oz dried Asian noodles (broken angel hair pasta works, too)
1/4 large onion, chopped
scant 1/2 cup of unsalted roasted peanuts
sunflower oil as needed for stir-frying (we don't measure this)

Prepare the greens so that they have time to dry in the refrigerator for awhile before cooking (dry ingredients work much better in stir-fries).

Marinate the chicken for 10 minutes to an hour in the broth and hoisin sauce.

Whisk the sauce ingredients together and set aside.

Cook the noodles in boiling water, uncovered, until just tender. Drain, then toss with oil in the cooking pot. Put the lid on to keep them a little warm and set aside.

Stir-fry the chicken for a minute. Add the onions and continue stir-frying until the chicken is opaque. Add the greens and stir-fry until they wilt, about a minute or two more. Stir in the peanuts, noodles, and sauce. Stir until everything is combined and hot.



We used angel hair pasta the first few times we made this until we found Asian noodles at Global Foods Market. We use one and a half of the bird's nests of noodles. They untangle themselves in the boiling water. We found that the Asian noodles have a fuller flavor than the angel hair pasta. We like the Asian noodles better in this dish.


If we're both hungry, this is two servings (yep, that means we eat 2 1/2 cups of greens each!). This time we have a snack-sized portion leftover for tomorrow.