Dinner in a flash

I'm not very good at making dinner quickly. Somehow I always end up choosing recipes that take a long time to complete. Considering that I don't get home until almost 7PM, it often means it's closer to 8:30 or sometimes even 9PM by the time we sit down to eat. Lately, I've been trying to make meals that are simpler (and thus faster) to make. For this meal, which is also this week's Dark Days Challenge, I made Welsh rarebit with spinach and roasted asparagus, served with creamy butternut squash soup (which I had made earlier in the week).

The rarebit is insanely easy: After sauteing some Bloomsdale spinach from Tomatero Farms (40 mi), I mixed it with some white cheddar from Spring Hill Jersey Cheese (90 mi) and a little whole grain mustard (not local — it's a Polish brand I really like, and it's the only mustard I've got in my fridge) and a splash of Strauss (90 mi) milk. Then I spread it over a slice of bread from Beckmann's (30 mi) and broiled the whole thing until the cheese was brown and bubbly. Meanwhile, I sprinkled some asparagus (from a vendor whose name I just realized I don't know, even though I've been buying my asparagus from them for the past three years) with some olive oil from Frog Hollow Farm (70 mi) and some thyme from my yard, then I roasted the lot at 450°F for about ten minutes.

The soup included butternut squash from Happy Boy Farms (35 mi), leeks from Catalán Farms (40 mi), milk from Strauss, and cream from Clover (90 mi).

Having dinner on the table in under half an hour is practically unheard of around here. I have to say I was pretty proud of myself.

A vegetarian Lenten challenge

Lent began yesterday with Ash Wednesday. Even though I'm no longer a practicing Catholic, nine years of Catholic school have instilled in me a need to give up something for the forty days before Easter. This year, as I do most years, I've given up meat. (I've also given up eating out, unless someone else is paying. Besides being sacrifices, both are actually ways for me to try and save money.) It just so happens that this first week of Lent coincides with a challenge-within-a-challenge from the Dark Days Challenge, which is to make a SOLE (seasonal, organic, local, ethical) vegetarian meal.

To be honest, cooking vegetarian is sort of a normal occurrence around here. Because it's important for me to eat locally- and ethically-raised meat, which happens to be expensive, I don't often cook a lot of meat. Lately, though, I've been exploring my SOLE meat options and have been buying more meat (and thus increasing my food bill!). Coming back to meatless cooking allows me to fall back on old favorites, as well as to discover new vegetarian options.

Finding new vegetarian recipes can be somewhat of a challenge for me and my tastes. I don't typically like to cook with soy-based meat alternatives — too processed and don't always taste very good. I also think that most vegetarian dishes one finds in magazines or cookbooks are too focused on beans, soy, or other proteins, as if the main point of the meal is to replace the meat that is "missing." For me, eating without meat is an opportunity to put more vegetables in my diet. I'd rather eat a plate of greens over a brick of tempeh any day.

Trail food

The Anthropologist and I went on a 12-mile hike today with the Sierra Club. We were the youngest of the group by at least twenty years -- and we got our asses kicked by nearly all of them. We were left in the dust while the rest of the 22-person group sped off up the steep hills of the county park. I huffed and puffed, my legs and feet protesting as we came down the inclines toward the end of the hike. By the end, I was so sore I could barely walk up and down the stairs in my apartment.

Despite all of that, it was a good time. We stopped for lunch at some picnic tables overlooking the hills, watching a red-tailed hawk swooping over the trees. I had packed more than enough food, just in case we needed to immediately replenish all the calories we were going to burn: bacon sandwiches with arugula and slow-roasted tomatoes (from the freezer), tortilla chips, Pink Lady apples, oatmeal raisin cookies, toasted nuts and dried cherries, and Mojo snack bars. The sandwiches are this week's entry into the Dark Days Challenge, as all the components happened to come from local sources. The bread is a California black from Beckmann's Bakery (30 mi), the bacon is from Range Bros. (120 mi), the arugula is from Heirloom Organics (40 mi), and the tomatoes were from a U-pick at Full Circle Farm (20 mi), which I had slow-roasted back in September and had stashed in the freezer for mid-winter occasions such as these.

It was the sort of lunch that was nice to eat outdoors, even though it was suddenly gray and chilly (and the Anthropologist hadn't brought a sweatshirt or rain jacket). It felt appropriate to be in nature, enjoying the scenery, and eating foods that had come from relatively close by.

Sweets for the sweet

The double challenge for this week's Dark Days Challenge is to create a sweet treat suitable for Valentine's Day using only SOLE ingredients. Since I've got to stick to local and seasonal, this eliminated chocolate, sugar, and any "romantic" fruits, like berries or mango. I toyed with the idea of doing poached fruit, perhaps serving it with a blood orange sorbet. However, the most obvious contender, pears, were no longer available at the farmers' market. Apples were aplenty, though, and in lots of different varieties.

My favorite apple vendor, Prevedelli Farms, sells a dazzling array of expected and heirloom varieties of apples. They've got Fuji, Red Delicious, and Granny Smith, but they also have Pink Lady, Sundowner, Gravenstein, Mutsu, and Hauer Pippin, a variety originating in the Santa Cruz mountains (can't get any more local than that). My favorites are Pink Lady and Sundowner, which are actually rather similar to one another and have a complexity of flavor that I don't find in the run-of-the-mill Fuji. I often buy from the "not-so-pretty" box — because what's a few bumps when they're only a dollar a pound? And particularly when you're going to turn the apples into sorbet.

I found my inspiration while Googling apple recipes, which pointed me in the direction of the baked apple sorbet from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home — a book I happen to own. It's a pretty straight-forward recipe: bake apples with apple cider and sweetener (in my case, Pink Ladies from Prevedelli [40 mi], with honey from Small Bees [10 mi] and local cider [I forget from where]) until soft, then blitz with an immersion blender before freezing in an ice cream machine. The original recipe calls for vanilla and cinnamon, neither of which are local, so I went with Meyer lemon zest (from my tree) instead. The result is a sweet-tart dessert with a hint of floral from the honey. Jeni recommends serving it with whipped cream (Clover, 90 mi) and a glass of whiskey.

To be honest, this really just tasted like frozen applesauce. Not to say that it wasn't delicious — it just didn't fulfill my idea of an ideal, decadent Valentine's Day dessert. The whipped cream helped a bit, and when not eating for the challenge, I did find that a drizzle of Rebel Yell whiskey over the top boosted the flavor. While it's not what I actually want to make for Valentine's Day dessert, the sorbet is pretty nice for what I could do with what's available locally right now.

And what did my Valentine think? The Anthropologist liked it okay, as I did, but was expecting something creamier. I made up for it later in the week when I made ginger-black sesame ice cream for the Lunar New Year.

Roots take center stage

As I work my way through the second week of my detox, I can see the end in sight. This is mainly because I'm ending it earlier than as instructed by Whole Living magazine. I'm no longer interested in starving myself in the interest of "getting healthy," and anyway, I've learned the lessons that needed to be learned: I'll be packing the fruits and veggies into every meal with smoothies, salads, soups, and side dishes. And this will get easier as the year goes on and we come into spring and summer — bringing with them, all the amazing produce (asparagus! peas! corn!).

Meanwhile, I made this simple dish of roasted root vegetables, inspired by Whole Living's Roasted Winter Vegetables with Canellini Beans. It's also my next installment of the Dark Days Challenge, since it happens to be made up of farmers' market veggies served over relatively-locally-grown brown rice. It's dead easy: I chopped up carrots and fennel from Capay Farms and celery root from Catalan Farms, sprinkled them with thyme from my garden (as well as a little salt and pepper), and roasted them at 425°F for about 25 minutes. The original recipe calls for garlic, leeks, sweet potato, and brussels sprouts, which I would have thrown into mix if I'd had any. Oh, and beans. I don't know a source for local beans (anyone in the Bay Area who does, please let me know!), and since I hadn't soaked any of the dried beans I do have, I left them out.

I'm looking forward to continuing to eat healthy, while experimenting with new and exciting recipes. One of my new years' resolutions was to actually cook from the food magazines I subscribe to — because it's high time I put Food & Wine, Sunset, and Cook's Illustrated to use. (I also get Cooking Light and Real Simple, but I'm letting those subscriptions lapse, as their recipes don't inspire me and use too many convenience and out-of-season foods.) I also recently discovered the food "community" Food52, which I recommend you check out for the food photography alone. How can you not want to eat every recipe you see when the food looks that gorgeous?

All in one pot

This week for the Dark Days Challenge, we have been challenged further to create a soup or one-pot meal using SOLE ingredients. I find this funny (funny-interesting, not funny-ha ha) because I started this challenge making soups and stews and felt that I was cheating for not doing a meal that was comprised of many dishes. Since I'm detoxing for the next couple weeks, my next entry in the challenge is a very austere beet and roasted garlic soup from Whole Living. It is, to put it simply, a pot of pureed beets with some seasonings thrown in. But it's still mostly beets. After eating this soup two days in a row (for dinner, then lunch the following day) plus a smoothie on the third day which involved beets (as well as apple and berries), I think I've had enough of beets for a little while. At least enough of the ruby-red-stain-everything-it-touches variety. I still want to make some pickled golden beets.

The beets came from Happy Boy Farms, the onions from Borba Farms, the garlic from Catalán Farms (all 40 mi), the thyme from my garden, the bay leaf from one of my families' yards (30 mi), and the Meyer lemon from a friend's yard (11 mi). I roasted the beets in foil for an hour the day before. The next day, I rubbed off the peels (thus dyeing my hands pink) and cut them in quarters. I "sauteed" sliced onions in a little water, then added the herbs and beets to the pot along with more water. Meanwhile, I roasted the garlic cloves, but I neglected to wrap them in foil so they turned out rather crunchy instead of soft. After the soup had been simmering for about ten minutes, I added the garlic and lemon and attempted to use my immersion blender, only to find the beet chunks were too big for the machine to manage. So I had to fish out the beets and cut them smaller. Once blended, I had a vivid magenta soup that would really well as a first course for a slightly heartier main dish (I'm imagining something like this). But I ate it as an entree with a salad and felt virtuous — albiet still a little hungry.

Thai-style green curry

Once again, I've almost entirely failed at producing a SOLE (seasonal, organic, local, ethical) meal for this week's Dark Days Challenge. I blame it entirely on the absence of my usual farmers' market. I haven't had access to the variety of foods that I normally would be purchasing for the week's meals. I've been relying on Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, and I've been planning my meals around recipes from The Splendid Table, for which I bought entirely non-local ingredients, like pasta, ricotta cheese, and pizza dough.

Okay, and I blame it on post-holiday laziness.

This week, I made a vegetable curry, which used all local ingredients except for the curry sauce itself. I used pumpkin from Capay Farms (120 mi), red bell pepper from Borba Farms (40 mi), and baby bok choy from A. Nagamine Nursery (40 mi), and served the curry over brown rice from Lundberg Farms (195 mi). The curry sauce included Thai green curry paste (a gift from a Thai friend — I fully intend to learn to make my own curry paste one of these days), fish sauce, brown sugar, and coconut milk, all non-local.

I wasn't sure how much curry paste to use. The container called for 50 grams for the cup of coconut milk needed to make the sauce. After looking at a couple recipes in the Thai cookbooks I have, I used three tablespoons and a can of coconut milk — resulting in a curry so white hot that I could barely eat it, even when I mixed in some Strauss plain yogurt (the way they do with Indian curries) to cut the spice. I ended up going out to get another can of coconut milk the next day and mixing that into the leftovers. That helped tremendously, leaving enough heat to get my sinuses going. Next time, I'll use just one tablespoon.

The curry also was originally rather yellow, as you can see in the photo. I think the pumpkin contributed to that. When I added the extra coconut milk, it took on more of a greenish hue.

For Christmas, I received three cookbooks: The Elements of Life: A Contemporary Guide to Thai Recipes, Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking, and Beyond the Great Wall: Travel and Recipes in the Other China. I have a lot of Chinese and southeast Asian cooking in my future. Maybe I'll finally get the hang of this green curry.

Looking back at the solstice

Well, this week's Dark Days Challenge was a wash. Between visiting friends and rushing around and eating out, I didn't do very much cooking. With my favorite farmers' market closed for the holidays (two Sundays in a row!), I have gone out of my way to visit other markets, but even then, there were less vendors and therefore less variety. So for the fifth installment, I'm looking back at last week, to the meal I made to celebrate Yule, also known as the winter solstice.

There are eight neo-pagan festival days, called sabbats, which happen throughout the year. I especially love celebrating these days because they mark the changing of the seasons, which allows me to truly appreciate what is happening right now (in nature, with the weather, and with local produce) and gets me excited about what's soon to come. When I cook on these days, I typically turn to a cookbook called Cooking by Moonlight (out of print, unfortunately). Because neo-paganism emphasizes seasonality and taking cues from our natural surroundings, this book really speaks to the way that I like to cook, using seasonal, organic ingredients and putting together ingredients in a mindful way. For the solstice, I decided to make Orange-Marinated Rockfish over Warmed Spinach with Walnuts with Thyme Smashed Potatoes.

The original recipe called for salmon, but H&H Fish at the market was selling Monterey Bay-caught (60 mi) rockfish, also known as rock cod, at a reasonable price. I brought the ziptop bag home and marinated the fish in a mixture of juice from oranges from Rojas Family Farms (190 mi, just outside my foodshed — d'oh!), Meyer lemon juice from a friend's tree (11 mi), and a little sage honey from the Golden Comb (110 mi). Then I baked it in the oven and served it on top of some sauteed spinach from Tomatero Farms (40 mi) with walnuts from a vendor whose name I forget (so I can't look them up right now), with a little more of the citrus sauce drizzled on top. On the side, I made smashed Yukon Gold potatoes from Happy Boy Farm (40 mi), seasoned with Strauss (90 mi) milk and butter and thyme from my garden. The original recipe called for dill, but I don't grow that particular herb and didn't have any locally-grown on hand.

The meal was a really nice way to celebrate the return of the sun and to welcome the longer days ahead. The full recipes are after the jump.

It's a monochromatic German Christmas!

Inspired by a German Christmas Menu on Saveur's site, I had planned to make this meal for Christmas Eve dinner, but it turns out we'll be going to my mom's for dinner tonight. Instead, I made this for Christmas Eve Eve dinner. It also happens to be my fourth installment of the Dark Days Challenge, since it was made entirely of locally-sourced, organic, ethically-grown, and seasonal ingredients.

Saveur's Turkey with Sauerkraut, Riesling, and Pork Sausage became a one-pot dish of sauerkraut, bockwurst, and boiled potatoes. I started by slicing some onions from Borba Farms (40 mi) and sauteing them briefly before adding chopped pasture-raised bacon from Range Brothers Buckin' Pork (120 mi). After a quick stir, I added fermented, organic sauerkraut from Farmhouse Culture Kraut (30 mi) and diced Pink Lady apples from Prevedelli Farms (40 mi). I made a little cheesecloth bag and filled it with thyme from my garden, parsley from Happy Boy Farms (40 mi), and a bay leaf from a house in Portola Valley (26 mi), then added that to the pot. I poured over a little water and left the pot to cook for a while. After about five minutes, I added several small, unpeeled German Butterball potatoes from Happy Boy Farms, rotating them in the sauerkraut mixture occasionally until they were soft, which took about twenty minutes. Then I added two bockwurst sausages from Range Brothers, which were fully cooked and just needed to be reheated. The result was delicious, though lacking in color.

To remedy that, on the side I served a dandelion greens salad with hot bacon dressing. Saveur calls for a spinach salad, but they included a note that "[d]uring the 19th century (and perhaps before), German-Americans used the flavorful dressing to coat dandelion greens." So I picked up some dandelion from Tomatero Farms (40 mi) and coated them with a dressing made from crisped bacon from Range Brothers and sauteed shallots from Borba Farms, mixed with sherry vinegar, dijion mustard, and sugar (none of which were local — because, again, I wasn't thinking). The greens weren't as bitter as I was expecting them to be, which is good because bitter is not my favorite flavor, but the dressing was way too tart next too the tang of the sauerkraut. Next time I'll reduce the amount of vinegar.

Savuer's menu called for mulled wine to drink with the meal. Instead, we had a delicious Mourvedre from Bonny Doon Vineyards, made with grapes from Contra Costa County (60 mi). This was paired with Christmas cookies made by families in my classroom (which, while probably not made with local ingredients, were cooked locally and made with love).

Merry Christmas, everyone, and happy eating!

Tapping my German roots

For the third installment of the Dark Days Challenge, I figured it was time to get serious and take the time to plan and make a full SOLE (seasonal, organic, local, ethical) meal. Inspired while looking at some other blogs, I decided to try my hand at German food. My father's maternal grandparents were from Germany, and I liked the idea of getting in touch with my German roots. The meal ended up being of German-Jewish origin (and we're Catholic), but I imagine my forebears ate foods that were similar — I mean, doesn't everyone in Germany eat cabbage and potatoes?

Dinner was spinach latkes with applesauce and cabbage stuffed with mushrooms. I bought nearly all the ingredients at the farmers' market: Bloomsdale spinach and savoy cabbage from Tomatero Farms (40 mi), Yukon Gold potatoes and parsley from Happy Boy Farms (45 mi), shallots and tomatoes from Borba Farms (40 mi), and mushrooms from J&M Ibarra Farms (167 mi — I didn't realize they were outside my foodshed and will avoid using them for a Dark Days Challenge in the future!). The apples for the applesauce came from my aunt's backyard (30 mi), Meyer lemon juice was from a friend's yard (11 mi), and thyme came from my container garden.

Doing this challenge has made me think about the sources of my food even more so than before. Eating locally has always seemed like a breeze, because I do go to the farmers' market every weekend and buy many of my groceries there. Still, there are so many ingredients I use that I knowingly can't get locally but that I don't think twice about buying: spices, oils, and grains, for example. Xan of Not Dabbling in Normal wrote a post about eating locally, in which she points out that the Dark Days Challenge is meant to be an intellectual challenge, not a practical one. That is, it is supposed to make us stop and think when it comes to things like salt, cinnamon, and bananas. It does seem a little silly (though you can try if you like) to give up all non-local foods forever, because we happen to live in a world where goods from other parts of the state, country, and world are available at our very fingertips without a moment's notice — so if you want a fair-trade, organic bar of chocolate, why not? If I love ginger and put it in everything during the wintertime, from soups to stir-fries to cookies, why give it up just because it's imported (even though that's the only way I'll get it)? For the challenges, I know why we have to do that: to get us to understand how to get by with what we have within our foodshed. It brings both an appreciation for the local food we have, as well as foods that we must get from further away.

The bumpy road to local

With all the gloating I do about being so lucky to be living in California, it was only a matter of time before I was forced to admit that it's not always easy to come up with entirely SOLE (seasonal, organic, local, and ethical) meals. While I do get nearly all my produce and eggs from the farmers market, there are many other foods that I don't go the full nine yards to make sure they're local. Organic, yes, Sustainable... as much as possible. Local? Well, I try. My second entry into the Dark Days Challenge is a cream of greens soup. It was inspired by Tyler Florence's corn chowder recipe, which I use all the time during the summer, and the cream of spinach soup from Simply Recipes. It also has no cream to speak of — because I had no local cream in my fridge.

I typically buy my milk, butter, and cream from Strauss, which is carried by Whole Foods. They are about 100 miles away, so they fall within my local foodshed. But sometimes Strauss cream and butter, while delicious, are too expensive. In which case, I buy Clover, which is also located about 100 miles away, and I don't always get the organic cream and butter. Sometimes I'll get the Trader Joe's brand of organic cream or butter, and who knows where that comes from? Either way, though, I feel like I'm cheating when I buy from the grocery store, instead of from the vendor directly, like I do at the farmers' market. I don't necessarily feel like I'm buying locally when I go through the middle man that is a non-local chain grocery store. The market I go to does have a raw milk vendor, but it is far too out of my price range to buy on a regular basis. In fact, I've never purchased raw milk simply because it's too expensive. I could get four times as much Strauss whole milk for the price of a quart of locally-produced (at 146 miles, it's just inside my foodshed) Organic Pastures raw milk.

And this is a problem. It should not cost so much to get good, honest milk and dairy products — or any food that is produced locally, organically, and sustainably. It's not right that only the well-off can eat ethical, organic meat and dairy. Someday, I will have a goat, and then my milk (as well as my eggs, fruits, and veggies) will only come as far as my back yard. In the meantime, though, I would like to be able to eat a "normal" American diet from SOLE ingredients that don't break the bank. I want to be able to show non-believers that it is possible to eat delicious whole foods and not have to give up your whole paycheck. I struggle with this, though, because sometimes it's not possible to avoid the cost. This doesn't mean I'll go back to conventional foods, because I'm enough of a snob about it now that it seems gross to purchase and eat cheaply-grown, cheaply-made foodstuffs. I do give up eating meat if it's too expensive. How do I convince others to do this, too?

Moving slowly away from the light

My first entry into the Dark Days Challenge is my locally-inspired take on pinakbet. It's a Filipino vegetable stew that has been compared to ratatouille (which I think is an erroneous comparison — because they're nothing alike, apart from being a mix of several vegetables). Typically, it contains winter squash, bitter melon, long beans, okra, eggplant, and onions, as well as some pork or shrimp. I based mine entirely on the local produce I had available in my kitchen this past weekend: tomatoes, onions, Fairy Tale eggplant, and chayote.

As I noted in a previous post, I'm pretty lucky to be living in California, where there are still tomatoes and eggplants being sold at the farmers' market. So to be honest, I'm not feeling the "dark days" quite yet. I probably won't really feel it until January, when it's just citrus and apples, root veggies and greens at the market. Meanwhile, I'm taking advantage of the dwindling supply of summer's bounty. The eggplant came from Route 1 Farms (45 mi), the tomatoes and onions from Happy Boy Farms (45 mi), and the chayote from the garden of my mother's neighbor (30 mi).

For the actual dish itself, I drew from a recipe in the December 2008 issue of Saveur (which soothed my homesickness when I visited the Anthropologist during his field work in New Delhi), as well as from a post by the blogger Burnt Lumpia. Pinakbet calls for bagoong, a fermented fish paste, which I don't keep in stock (and wouldn't use for a Dark Days meal anyhow). In keeping with the "authentic" flavor of this dish, though, I did use patis, or fish sauce, which I considered to be a kind of salt — one of my non-local exceptions. Okay, fine, I cheated a little. But I didn't think plain salt would do the trick.

To make this pinakbet, cut the vegetables into large chunks and place into a pot that is just large enough to hold everything. Add about a quarter cup of water and a tablespoon or two of patis. Simmer until the vegetables have gone soft, stirring occasionally and gently so as not to break down the veggies.

In the end, the pinakbet was just okay. It didn't have a lot of flavor — and I like things to really have a big punch of flavor. It was a quiet, mild vegetable stew, the sort of thing I could see myself eating if I were feeling flu-ish. I'd like to try this again and include long beans, okra, and kabocha squash, which should improve the flavor of the broth and which I can get from a vendor at the market that sells Asian vegetables.

A final note: The brown rice is another of my non-local exceptions (because I eat so much rice). I buy it from the bulk bins at Whole Foods, where it stocks rice from Lundberg Family Farms. This farm is located 195 miles from where I live, so it's definitely outside my locavore foodshed. Relatively speaking, though, it's not terribly far away. I mean, I could be living in Idaho and getting my rice trucked in from Louisiana, where it might not even be organically- or sustainably-grown. So my rice isn't perfect, but it's a pretty darn good choice for rice.