Defining "local"

When a person begins to source his or her food more locally, a question comes up: what is local?

People in the Bay Area of California often use a 100-mile circle as their definition of local, tempting others to use a similar definition. You would do pretty well with that definition in St. Louis -- there are several produce farms in Southern Illinois. Farrar Out farm where I get my eggs and chicken just fits inside that circle. But you would miss out on Ozark Forest Mushrooms and Sandhill Farm sorghum. I've found that I'm willing to use the 100-mile circle on the Illinois side, but I prefer to use the entire state of Missouri on this side of the Mississippi River. Among other reasons, that puts me in a kind of partnership with state programs like AgriMissouri.

Farmers Market purchases sound like they would all be local. But, for example, Summit Farms at the Kirkwood Farmers Market is more of a distributor, selling lots of California produce alongside locally grown produce in season. It's generally very good quality produce no matter where it comes from. I learned recently that if it weren't for Summit, the Kirkwood Farmers Market wouldn't be sustainable, so I'm grateful they are there. However, for my One Local Summer meals, I will do more of my shopping at some of the other booths.

I buy grains, including flour, and beans from Kimker Hill Farm at the Tower Grove Market. They don't grow all of the items that they mill or package, but Denise says she sources them as close as she can get. Since she is my only source for locally milled flour, I'm going to consider that close enough. Plus, I love her blog since it lets me know what to expect at her booth each Saturday.

If you're eating local meat, do you care what the animals eat? Do you want them on a 100-mile diet, too? Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food, convinced me that meat and dairy products are healthier for me if the animals are pastured. But, at the moment, I seem to have a choice between buying butter from pastured cows in Wisconsin or from cows who eat grain from who knows where, but do it in Missouri. Which is better? For One Local Summer meals, I'll use the butter from Missouri cows, but for some of my other meals, I'll probably choose the pastured butter.

People who have been buying organic for years sometimes have trouble switching to local foods because they suddenly have to choose between those two values -- do you buy organic apples or do you buy local apples that are not organic? Many small farms use organic practices, but they don't go through the considerable bother and expense to be certified organic. But, of course, that's not true for all local farms, and particularly not apple orchards in this region.

In the end, though, I find it really doesn't matter how I answer these questions. What matters is that I asked them and thought about the answers. That, in itself, has made a huge difference in how I think about my food and who produces it.

One Local Summer posts

The first One Local Summer posts are up at the Farm to Philly blog. The Midwest recap is very inspiring. A lot of folks, like me, relied on eggs and asparagus for our first meal. I think some of the salads may inspire my local meal for this week.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Locavore

Listening to The Splendid Table on my mp3 player during a workout a couple of weeks ago, I learned about their new project: Locavore Nation. They asked 15 people across the country to try to get 80% of their food from local sources in 2008 and to write about their experiences. I've been following the adventures of the Central Region Locavores. It's a struggle for us to get local fresh produce this time of year! But, lots of other things are available.

I went to Local Harvest Grocery yesterday with a couple of friends. It's in St. Louis just south of Tower Grove Park. I bought locally made balsamic herb mustard (used it last night in a sauce for chicken and it was amazing!), honey, and salsa. I also bought agave nectar, which wasn't local but I'd been hearing about it as an alternate sweetener. We really liked it both in hot tea and in that chicken sauce.

As far as local produce, about all they had was dried mushrooms, hydroponic lettuce, and sprouts, which were very expensive. Does anyone have advice about growing your own sprouts? I'd like to try that.

We use a grilled chicken breast recipe from the July & August 2007 Cook's Illustrated magazine. They hide their recipes behind a firewall, which makes them tempting to steal -- I found it here online. I changed the sauce part of the recipe enough to make it my own, I think, and managed to reduce the fat and increase the flavor.

Sauce for Chicken:
1 Tbl olive oil
1 Tbl Terrapin Ridge Balsamic & Herb Mustard
1 Tbl lemon juice
1/4 tsp agave nectar
1 clove minced garlic
2 Tbl minced flat leaf parsley
Salt and pepper

Whisk the liquid ingredients together until well-blended. Add the garlic, parsley, and salt and pepper to taste. Pour over grilled chicken breasts. We usually split one piece, these days, and don't use all the sauce. I mix the leftover sauce with yogurt cheese and a little mayo to make a sandwich spread for the leftover chicken.