Sheetar.com

OLS: Week 9

DSC_3943

One Local Summer is already at Week 9.   Nine whole weeks of making one meal with local ingredients per week.   I can’t believe I’ve made it this far!   So, this week I went for simple, since I was doing a whole week of zucchini recipes.   The simple though paid off with an incredible taste, and something I really hadn’t thought of doing – making pancakes from scratch.   Easier than I ever would’ve thought!   One egg,  one cup of flour, about 1.5 cups of yogurt, and the non local ingredients (2 tsp sugar, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp baking soda, a touch of salt).   Whisk together, throw in some blackberries, and VOILA!   Fluffy, delicious pancakes.   Optionally, add some chocolate chips for a just-one-more dessert pancake.   The eggs came from Mt. View Organics at the Phoenixville Farmer’s Market, the flour from the Mill at Anselma, the yogurt from Shellbark Hollow Farm, and the blackberries were hand-picked from a patch of blackberry bushes overflowing with ripe berries at Willow Creek.   The whole thing was topped off with maple syrup from Miller’s Maple.   The best thing about this is that the whole house smelled like fresh pancakes for the rest of the day!

Zucchini Week: Day 6

DSC_3946
All this zucchini and today is day six. One more to go! Today I tried a big experiment – Zucchini Pickles. I’ve never made pickles and have never canned or preserved anything in jars before, so this was all new territory for me. I actually used a recipe and advice from the Ball Canning Book, but the PickYourOwn.org website had pretty much the same recipe with onions added in, so that’s what I’m sharing with you. The recipe used up three mega-zucchini and filled seven wide-mouth pint jars. The process was much easier than I thought it would be, but does require some odd canning-specific equipment that the average cook won’t have around the house. The pickling solution smelled really good, but I haven’t tried them yet. I think I’ll wait a week to let them soak up more of the pickling juices in the jars first! Zucchini Pickles – Recipe on PickYourOwn.org
Ingredients Used:
*Zucchini – my garden

Zucchini Week: Day 5

DSC_3940
Day five of zucchini week already. I had other plans for today, but the crazy storms that rolled through right around dinner time spoiled the outdoor cooking idea, so I switched days up a little. Today was this neat polenta zucchini tart. I became a big fan of polenta the first time my study abroad Italian host mother made polenta lasagna. MMmmm Cornmeal. So, I’ve been searching for neat recipes that use polenta and came across this one.   Sadly, the recipe didn’t include instructions on how to make  polenta  from scratch, so I borrowed Alton Brown’s savory polenta recipe with a few changes.  The ingredients are ALL local this time (well okay, the olive oil isn’t, but who’s really counting that anyway). The feta cheese added something I think the parmesan wouldn’t quite do in the same way, plus, I didn’t have parmesan cheese on hand. This is absolutely delicious and will probably be made again as tomato season rolls around, using tomatoes in place of zucchini. Zucchini Polenta Tart – Recipe on ChocolateandZucchini.com
Ingredients Used:
*Zucchini – my garden
*Cornmeal – Mill at Anselma
*Feta – Amazing Acres
*Onion – North Star Orchard
*Garlic – Willow Creek

Zucchini Week: Day 4

DSC_3938
We move into day four of Zucchini Week with a heavily modified version of our recipe. My mandoline didn’t have a plate that would slice wide but thin slices of zucchini for proper pappardelle noodles (think wide fettuccine), so i went with the square-spaghetti-sized slicer instead. This gave me these awesome zucchini spaghetti noodles and I was just in total awe. Why hadn’t I thought of this before! Ingenius. Michael Chiarello uses a whole bunch of spices and ingredients that I just didn’t have and was not going to go out and buy just for this recipe, so I improvised. A LOT. Sweet smoked Spanish paprika? Grey Salt?! Yeah. I had regular old paprika and  table salt, and those worked out just fine. Instead of arugula, I happened to have some red leaf lettuce in the fridge and went with that. The feta is a goat’s milk feta that I’ve been layering on sandwiches all week. I still had two heirloom tomatoes from last week’s farmer’s market run and used those in place of the cherry tomatoes, sliced thin. I didn’t have olives, so they didn’t make it into this dish. Overall though, I think this worked out well and the idea of the recipe is still there. The warm tomatoes and zucchini noodles over lettuce made for a really great, refreshing and light lunch. Zucchini Pappardelle Salad – Recipe on FoodNetwork.com
Ingredients Used:
*Zucchini – my garden
*Lettuce – Kimberton Whole Foods locally grown
*Tomatoes – North Star Orchard
*Feta – Amazing Acres

Zucchini Week: Day 3

DSC_3934
Day three! Are you sick of zucchini yet? I’m not! In fact, it’s pretty fun using up zucchini left and right in all these different recipes with the whole meal coming out pretty different every time. Today was a Zucchini Breakfast Casserole, another recipe from Elise’s vast collection. This is the last one from her for the week, I promise! I’ve come to love casseroles because they’re just so easy – put all the ingredients in one dish, bake, refrigerate leftovers to enjoy all week. And, I’m willing to bet that this is just as good the next day as it is fresh. I used a fresh goat’s milk ricotta cheese, basil from my back deck herb planter, and substituted fresh heriloom tomatoes from the farmer’s market. The bread was a “rustic wheat” that was really delicious in sandwiches, but I happened to have just one slice leftover for this recipe. I also added a lump of that spicy chipotle chevre again. There aren’t a lot of ingredients in this one, but the simplicity is what makes it so attractive and delicious. It’s easy and quick to make and goes a long way. Zucchini Breakfast Casserole – Recipe on SimplyRecipes.com
Ingredients Used:
*Zucchini – my garden
*Basil – my herb garden
*Egg – Mt. View Organics
*Tomatoes – North Star Orchard
*Cheese – Shellbark Hollow Farms
*Bread – Oley Baker
*Chevre – Amazing Acres

Zucchini Week: Day 2

DSC_3933
Day two of zucchini week brings us to Stuffed Zucchini. As usual, I used the recipe as a guideline and substituted a few things using ingredients found locally. For the ground turkey, I used hot italian turkey sausage. Instead of Parmesan Cheese, I threw in Sharp II Chevre. Tomatoes were both from a local source and even last year’s garden in the form of sun-dried roma tomatoes. Mushrooms are also local mushrooms of the Crimini variety, bought from my favorite farmer’s market. The zucchini used here is a monster zucchini, probably a little past its prime, and a result of a neglectful gardener who didn’t want to go out picking through her garden during the heat, humidity, and thunderstorms we’ve been having lately. However, those three things have given me quite the harvest, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much. Now if only I could find a way to combine both zucchini and cucumbers into one dish! Stuffed Zucchini – Recipe on SimplyRecipes.com
Ingredients Used:
*Zucchini – my garden
*Basil – my herb garden
*Egg – Mt. View Organics
*Sausage – Mt. View Organics
*Onion – North Star Orchard
*Tomatoes – North Star Orchard
*Cheese – Shellbark Hollow Farms
*Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms

Zucchini Week: Day 1

DSC_3929
For day one of zucchini week, I decided to try something new and different. I just love Elise’s website for recipes and this one jumped right out at me as being something relatively easy and delicious and above all, different from the normal uses for zucchini. The Zucchini Fritters were all of those things and this is definitely going see many repeat performances! I switched out the scallions for a locally grown onion, and used goat’s milk yogurt and cheese, both from local farms. The cheese in little lumps at the back of the plate is a spicy chipotle chevre and since I like a bit of tabasco sauce with anything involving egg, this pleased my palate to no end. This may not be a whole meal, but it’s a great use for at least one of those zucchini! Zucchini Fritters – Recipe on SimplyRecipes.com
Ingredients Used:
*Zucchini – my own garden
*Egg – Mt. View Organics
*Onion – North Star Orchard
*Flour – Mill at Anselma
*Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farms
*Cheese – Amazing Acres

Introducing the Lemon Cucumber

I’ve taken to growing this peculiar little vegetable in the garden every year after finding a packet of seeds in Target (Thank you Martha Stewart).   I thought, Wow, that’s different, let’s give it a shot.   Well they grew like weeds the first year, but our soil wasn’t quite ready to support them, so I got a few, but the vines died off.    We tilled in  a little compost this year and they’ve all but taken over the garden.

DSC_3924 DSC_3927

They’re somewhere between baseball and softball sized usually and, when ripe, have a yellow skin that ranges from a very pale yellow to nearly orange. All the information I can find online says that they’re less bitter than traditional cucumbers and have more seeds.   Today, one little cucumber was destined to be a part of my sandwich, paired with some bison bologna, lettuce, goat’s milk feta cheese, and some rustic wheat bread.   DELICIOUS!  This upcoming week, we’re going to review the Zucchini, all week.  If you’ve ever grown zucchini, you understand the agony of finding new things to do with zucchini after you’ve already steamed it, fried it, and grilled it.  I’m going to try and do all the recipes using only local ingredients to go along with my One Local Summer challenge.

DSC_3928