Veg*n Cooking and Other Random Musings: Weekly Local Booty 10/19-10/25/08

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Weekly Local Booty 10/19-10/25/08

It was a chilly trek to the farmer's market this morning! It looks like it is shaping up to be a beautiful fall day. Perfect for how I plan on spending it - starting kale, chard, and cilantro seeds, and doing a little bit of baking. Wahoo for the weekends and wahoo for the fall!

We didn't get too much booty from our container or community gardens this week, as I've mentioned before, this isn't due to a lack of peppers, but we are letting them ripen so that we can save their seeds. We'll be picking green tomatoes tomorrow as we are expecting three nights of freezing weather early this week. :-( We'll be bringing in our container pepper plants for the duration of the freeze threat. Anyone have a good recipe for fried green tomatoes? If so please link to it, send me an email, or leave the recipe in the comments section. It would be very, very highly appreciated. In fact, any other ideas for what to do with green tomatoes would be welcome, I think there are quite a few down there - maybe a dozen.

Anywho, I'm getting off topic. Check out our (small) load of booty from the container garden this week:















2 ripe "serexican" chiles and a hot banana pepper. These lovelies were turned into a delicious batch of 'Traditional' Refried Beans. Brett usually makes the refried beans and they turned out really well this week. Thanks Brett!

And this is (sniffle) our last CSA share of the year. It has been a wonderful season and we hope to have Danjo Farms as our CSA next year. We got excellent produce and wonderful discussion - we are happy to have been able to call Dan "our farmer". Our first year having a CSA subscription was a very good experience.















Starting from the bottom left: green onions, lots of greens (yay salads!), radishes, and something.















Does anyone have any idea what these are? One of the neat things about subscribing to a CSA is that you never know what you are going to get - as a result, Brett and I have worked with ingredients this season that we probably never would have otherwise, and learned we liked some new vegetables. But these, I mean, what are these?

Finally, onto this week's load of farmer's market booty. This large haul ran us $41.















I didn't really organize the produce very well to list off what is there, but I'll do my best. Starting from the left: a leek (for soup!), a loaf of ciabatta from the local Uprise Bakery (we love their ciabatta - I'm glad they aren't too far out of my way when I am walking to the bus station after work, we'll still be able to have their bread over winter!), a "pie pumpkin", 3 zucchini, 1 yellow squash, bell peppers, a dozen eggs, tomatoes, hot salsa, grass-fed beef (for Brett), onions, lots of carola potatoes, garlic, and jalapenos.

Anyways...

Now for the weekly update on the Eat Local Challenge: Well, as you can see from all the produce above, we aren't starving! We've actually done really well at this challenge and have really enjoyed it. It has forced us to be a little more creative with some of our meals, but I like a challenge - not to mention, we've gotten to try all sorts of new things. This will make eating locally that much easier in the future. Our trips to the "regular" grocery store have been incredibly small - today's trip included cookies for Brett, baking powder, organic fair-trade chocolate chips, and organic brown sugar.

Eating locally is a way of "voting with your dollars" in a very powerful way. Money spent in the community provides more to the community than money spent at a chain. The produce is fresher and relationships are cultivated. We can look at eating locally as a sacrifice, a necessary burden a lower-energy future may have to endure, or we can look at it as a challenge, a wonderful experience of place. Eating locally is a way of really taking in the place you live - eating with the seasons, eating the produce available in your region creates a culture of food, and a culture of place, something that has been very lacking in the past few decades. To everyone out there trying to rekindle or create a new culture of local food - a culture of the places in which we inhabit - keep it up, we are all doing a great, necessary, and powerful thing, and we can see the results every time we make a delicious local meal for our families or we check-in with a local farmer to see how their sweet potatoes are doing. Simple actions compound over time to be something far more important than they may seem to us individually.

'Til next time.

10 comments:

LizNoVeggieGirl said...

Stil looks like a good load of local booty to me! :0)

LizNoVeggieGirl said...

Still*

Debbie said...

Could the mystery items be slices of daikon radish? I got a whole one in my box last week that would have looked like that if it had been cut into chunks.

Anonymous said...

I was thinking the same thing about your "mystery" veggie--daikon radish. I was at the farmers market this morning and there were some sliced ones, and that is what they looked like. Don't you get a list of everything in your box? When I got my CSA, they had a little newsletter telling us what was going on at the farm and listing everything that was in the box. That way, if I didn't know what a few things were, I could at least narrow it down based on the list!

I hope you enjoy it, whatever it is!

Courtney

Daphne Gould said...

My guess is a daikon radish too. Though parsnips are also huge white roots. The skin of daikons are smooth while the parsnips are more rough. Yours looks smoother.

jessy said...

okay - it's go me stumped, too! i have no idea what that is. ahahaha! but i bet it's yummy. sadface indeed on the last of the CSA. that stinks. you make some good points about local yummies, too - dollars spent within the community is a darn good thing, indeed. voting with dollars, for sure! the serexicans look super cute, and that's awesome that you're making zucchini bread (one of my favs!) and glazed nuts for the shower - sounds soooo good & bet they'll both be most glorious!

hope you guys are having an awesome weekend!

DP Nguyen said...

Looks like a great bounty, and great bang for your buck.

I don't know what the mystery item is, but looks like something like a root vegetable.

VEGAN TICKLES said...

Is it mountain yam?

J said...

Veggie Girl - Thanks, we only have a couple of weeks of market left sadly. :-(

Debbie - I think you are right. I went to my CSA farmer's Local Harvest page and daikon radishes are listed on there.

Courtney - I think you and Debbie are right about the mystery veggie.

We used to get lists with farm news and what was (tentatively) going to be in our box, but hadn't gotten one for a few weeks.

Daphne - Parsnips would be an option, though I didn't see that on the list of things are farmer's grow. I think everyone (including you) who have said daikon radish are right. Now if I only knew what to do with them!

Jessy - You have to imagine Brett's reaction when he pulled those out of our bag. He had this confused look on his face. His first guesses were soap or a bone of some sort (ew!).

Yeah, I'm sad about the last CSA box, and there are only 2 (I think) more weeks of market left. :-( But, hey, I have quite a bit of booty preserved or set back and we are going to be shopping at a local grocer and sourcing from only the continental US. I've missed citrus a little bit, so it is nice that we will get to partake in clementine season.

The zucchini bread turned out pretty good. The glazed nuts are fantastic. I hope she enjoys the nuts and I will be posting about them sometime soon.

DP Nguyen - It was, and yes it was. I am always impressed with how much produce we get for so little money!

I agree it is some sort of root - I am in concurrence with the commenters above, I think they are slices of daikon radish.

Vegan Tickles - I need to go google mountain yam because I've never heard of them!

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It won't work in reality, that's exactly what I consider.