Tag: <span>corn meal</span>

One Local Summer 2012 – Week 11

DSC_8534

Sometimes, I impress myself.  I’m not one to really enjoy cooking, which is partly what this whole thing has been about.  I force myself to do this personal challenge of cooking locally all summer long, and it makes me actually cook.  Every once in a while, I really enjoy making the meal because it’s something new and different, and that’s what I’ve got here.  The garden has been giving me ZUCCHINI (all caps, on purpose, because they seem to think they’re watermelons and not zucchini).  Anyone who has grown them before knows that if you neglect the plant for two hours, you end up with baseball bats and that I’m really not exaggerating.  Ours, instead of growing in length, grew in width, spectacularly, and seemingly overnight.  For scale’s sake, that’s a 9″ plate.  The zucchini were really seedy inside, but I sliced them up anyway and once I pulled the seeds out, I had enormous zucchini rings.  Then inspiration hit.  Take zucchini rings, grill, add freshly made polenta (1 cup cornmeal, 3 cup water, boil while stirring until it pulls away from the pan) to the center, bake, flip, top as a pizza and bake until the cheese melts.  And that’s exactly what’s on my plate above – I used blue cheese and caramelized onions for the topping, and the sauce was even made from local tomatoes, courtesy of Jack’s Farm who was selling a big big bag of tomatoes for $6 (there’s another whole pint of sauce in the freezer too!).  I really don’t have a recipe to give you for this, because it’s the kind of thing that is very basic and I’d rather give you the idea and let you go create.

Zucchini Polenta Pizza:
Monster Overgrown Zucchini – My garden
Onion – Brogue Hydroponics
Cornmeal – Mill at Anselma
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Tomato Sauce – via tomatoes from Jack’s Farm
Non Local – Salt, Pepper, Olive Oil

OLS: Week 10

DSC_3973

Week ten of one local summer is cooked and consumed already. The husband is home again and decided to try something different – tacos! I was in charge of the taco shells and toppings while  he did the filling. I found a good shell recipe here which used both cornmeal and flour.   I went with whole wheat flour instead of regular old all-purpose flour and it didn’t seem to make a difference.   They were surprisingly easy to make and then form inside of a napkin holder lined with some tin foil.   It looked a little funny, but it worked out well!   The husband improvised a taco spice recipe (sadly, none of those are local, but it tasted great!) which he added to some ground bison and onions. I also found these curious little mexican gherkin cucumbers at the farmer’s market on saturday and just had to bring them home after Jack let me taste one.   They’re sweet, with a little sour and just perfectly bite sized.   It’s really amazing me, week by week, the different things we can make using local ingredients that I never even thought of doing (making taco shells from scratch?!).   This is totally spoiling my ideas of store-bought and semi-homemade that I had been used to cooking  (and mostly microwaving), but all in a good way.   I’ve recently been doing some canning and preserving and I should do a post on that too – it’s another new thing this year that I’m trying and is again, surprisingly easy – much easier than I had thought!

There were a few non-local ingredients in this week’s meal which included salt, canola oil, and the taco spices.   Here are the local ingredients:
Ground Bison – Backyard Bison
Onions – North Star Orchard
Tomatoes – Our Backyard Garden
Peppers – Cressley’s Greenhouse
Mexican Gherkins – Jack’s Farm
Fat Cat Cheese – Birchrun Hills Farm
Lettuce – Willow Creek
Corn Meal – Mill at Anselma
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma