One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2016 – Week 13

By Sheetar 1 September 2016 31 August 2016

It may not be the world’s most exciting meal, but it’s classic Chez Sheetar comfort food – meat and potatoes. It was a quick and easy meal to make in the oven in one pan, and I get to show off the peach jam I made! Our single little peach tree yielded quite the harvest this year, so I was able to do two batches of jam, a run of canned peaches, and even froze two bags of skinned and pitted peaches for pies over the winter. Of course, the squirrels got a fair share of the peaches too, but it’s no big deal since there were SO many. Anyway, the meal is kielbasa with potatoes plus a small salad and some cheese and jam. The cheese is Birchrun Hills’ Red Cat that was washed in Tired Hands beer and it was OH SO DELICIOUS with the jam. It actually made for a nice little dessert!

Ingredients:
Kielbasa – M&M Creek Valley Farm
Potatoes – Jack’s Farm
Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Lettuce – North Star Orchard
Tomatoes – Our Garden
Peach Jam – Our Honey, our Peach tree
Non Local – Salt, Olive Oil, pectin (for jam), Salad Dressing

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2016 – Week 12

By Sheetar 19 August 2016 19 August 2016

Yep, still playing catch-up. It should be week 15 as I’m posting this, so I’m still behind. Life just keeps getting away from me and the first thing to go when things get to be too much is cooking. But hey, I’m still here making the effort, and I have to wonder if I’d even bother cooking at all if it weren’t for this challenge! So, this meal was a ham steak with grilled onions and eggplant and a cucumber and tomato salad on the side. Everything was cooked on the grill, so it was great to not have to heat up the house on a day that was already too hot to begin with! I may have ever so slightly overcooked the ham steak, but it was still delicious since it was given a little rub down with our own honey before it was introduced to the grill. I need to remind myself that I don’t have to be fancy, and it’s okay to slap meat and veggies on the grill and thats good enough (and better than a microwaved boxed dinner).

Ingredients:
Ham Steak – M&M Creek Valley Farm
Tomato – Kimberton CSA
Eggplant – Kimberton CSA
Cucumber – Jack’s Farm
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Peach – Our Tree
Honey – Our beehives
Non Local – Olive Oil

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2016 – Week 11

By Sheetar 9 August 2016 7 August 2016

Well, still playing catch-up and I really haven’t made much progress I guess! This week was a bit of a wash on the catching-up game, but at least I cooked one meal this week! I had found a pack of stir fry beef at the Wednesday farmers market at the Mill at Anselma and decided to run with it. So, Saturday, I grabbed peppers and mushrooms, found an onion in the fridge, and decided to give this recipe a try. I omitted the oyster sauce (because EEW GROSS OYSTERS), and ended up only using honey, soy sauce, pepper, and wine for the sauce which worked out just fine. I suppose most folks would’ve served the beef over rice, but since rice isn’t local, I stir fried the crimini mushrooms, onions, and peppers separately which made a nice base for the beef. Now, I’m not a terribly huge fan of beef, but in a stir fry, this was honestly really good, and the sauce came out just perfectly – sweet and a little salty. This may be something I have to add into regular rotation in the kitchen!

Ingredients:
Beef – Gauker Farms
Onion – Charlestown Farm
Peppers – Charlestown Farm
Garlic – Charlestown Farm
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Honey – Our Beehives
Wine – Paradocx “Barn Red”
Non Local – Soy Sauce, Salt, Pepper, Olive Oil

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2016 – Week 10

By Sheetar 26 July 2016 25 July 2016

Still playing catch-up, but here’s One Local Summer week 10! I had originally looked up recipes for Polenta Pizza, and came up with a recipe that had that name, but it much more resembles cornbread pizza than polenta pizza. I figure once you add anything other than water and butter/oil to cornmeal, especially when the extra ingredients are flour and baking powder, it ends up being cornbread and not polenta. Still, for cornbread pizza done in the cast iron skillet, this was pretty decent! I think the blue cheese and chorizo actually worked out well with the cornbread base so it wasn’t a traditional pizza on top of cornbread. The quick jolt near the end of cooking under the broiler was really key to really bubble the cheese on top, and the crust ended up with a nice, crunchy bottom (not burnt, just nicely well-baked). The leftovers are even good!

The recipe came from here (http://www.simplehealthykitchen.com/skillet-margarita-polenta-pizza/) and let’s forgive them for the misspelling of Margherita because even though the recipe was a little misleading, it was still good and cooked up as specified!

Ingredients:
Flour – Mill at Anselma
Cornmeal – Mill at Anselma
Smoked Chorizo – Countrytime Farm
Tomatoes – Jack’s Farm
Basil – My Garden
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Egg – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Non Local – Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper, Baking Powder

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2016 – Week 9

By Sheetar 22 July 2016 20 July 2016

Well, now I’m really behind, but hey, I’m catching up. I didn’t realize quite how tedious it would be to make dinner for just myself and I’ll admit that most days, the idea of putting all that effort into a meal just for me is just not thrilling at all. I either end up with so much leftover that I’m eating the same meal all week, or it feels like a waste of time to go through all those steps for one or two servings. And to think, I have 3 or 4 more months of this! Time to put on my big girl pants and woman-up I guess, but man.. I’m just suddenly not feeling this at all. And, I’m out of ideas, so if you have a super awesome recipe that incorporates locally grown, seasonal food? I’m open to suggestion! The simpler, the better too.

So, anyway, now that I’ve got my little bitch-fest out of the way, this is Week 9’s dinner. Simple, really, but still good. That’s smoked chorizo with some cheese, grilled zucchini, and pickled (fermented) beets. The beets are white because they were white beets, so no worry about staining everything when I inevitably drip the beet juice everywhere. On the top right is a simple salad with greens, cucumbers, and the first tomato from the garden. Yet again this year, I didn’t get the garden off the ground, having been crazed with everything going on this spring, but I did manage to get three little tomato plants in the ground that the rabbits didn’t completely destroy, so that’s something!

Ingredients:
Smoked Chorizo – Countrytime Farm
Zucchini – Jack’s Farm
Beets – Jack’s Farm
Cucumbers – Jack’s Farm
Lettuce – Charlestown Farm
Tomato – My Garden
Cheese – Birchrun Hills, “Red Cat” cheese
Non Local – olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, olive oil

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2016 – Week 8

By Sheetar 6 July 2016 5 July 2016

More than 5 ingredients this week for One Local Summer! I decided to get a little more ambitious after having seen dill at the farmers market and decided to go for chicken pitas (pita recipe) with a tzatzki-ish sauce. Unfortunately, I neglected to run back and grab a cucumber, but managed to cobble something together that worked well enough. The pitas were done on the grill using our pizzaque – they seem to work best this way since the stone gets really hot and a quick open and close of the grill keeps the internal temperature high enough for them to puff up perfectly. After the pitas were done, on went the mushrooms and fennel with the zucchini sliced right beside it and then the chicken with a healthy spring of dill on top. Then on the side is a simple salad with some cheese and more of the tzatzki-ish sauce as dressing. The sauce is a goat’s milk yogurt base with garlic scapes and dill added to the yogurt. It was a really nice meal for a warm summer week, and being able to cook everything outside on the grill made everything easier since I didn’t heat up the house!

Ingredients:
Chicken – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Zucchini – Jack’s Farm
Fennel – Jack’s Farm
Garlic Scapes – North Star Orchard
Dill – North Star Orchard
Cheese – “Pepito” from Yellow Springs Farm
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Lettuce – Charlestown Farm
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Flour – Mill at Anselma
Honey – Our Hives
Non Local – Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper, Yeast

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2016 – Week 7

By Sheetar 28 June 2016 28 June 2016

Another week of One Local Summer! Still a little behind, but this was honestly cooked and consumed during week 7, I’m just a lazyass blogger. Oops. So anyway, we’re beekeepers, and this past week I robbed the hives and extracted about 30 lbs of honey from one hive which is pretty damn awesome for our first actual honey ‘harvest’ from the hives! I was trying to figure out a way to incorporate that into the meal since honey from the beehives in your backyard is about as local as it can get when I stumbled across some recipes for honey ginger chicken. Ginger falls under the allowable-spice-exemption clause to One Local Summer since it was used sparingly and isn’t a main feature of the meal. The chicken was cooked with garlic scapes and set next to some roasted broccoli. Then there’s a well overfilled bowl of salad greens, splashed with a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Not bad! I think next time, instead of cooking the chicken in a pan, I may toss that in the oven whole, then coat with the sauce and set under the broiler for a few minutes to allow the honey to caramelize a little. The flavor didn’t come out quite as much as I had hoped, but it was still delicious!

Ingredients:
Garlic Scapes North Star Orchard
Broccoli – North Star Orchard
Chicken – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Lettuce – Charlestown Farm
Honey – Our Beehives
Non Local – Salt, Pepper, Ginger, Olive oil, Balsamic vinegar

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2016 – Week 6

By Sheetar 23 June 2016 23 June 2016

My lazy self, alone at home, tends to keep things pretty simple when it comes to One Local Summer meals. This is a super easy meal featuring Farro with sautÃ©ed garlic scapes and mushrooms and a little pork sausage. Nothing fancy, but sometimes keeping the ingredient list short means the individual ingredients really get to shine, plus it’s much easier in the heat of the summer to cook something that isn’t so complicated. Short and sweet for week 6, even a little late, but I swear I’ll be caught up as of tomorrow!

Ingredients:
Farro – North Star Orchard
Garlic Scapes – North Star Orchard
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms
Pork sausage – Countrytime Farm
Non Local – Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper