Local Is The New Gourmet

It used to be cause for boasting when the ingredients on your menu were from far-off and exotic places, but these days everybody and their brother has got local field greens in their salad. As the significant other of a vegetable gardener it is rare that a meal in our house doesn't include something from the property we live on. Even so I get a thrill putting together a dish that is exclusively home-grown.
Tonight we had a sublime chicken soup, two days in the making. Jacob has a terrible cough, so yesterday I popped one of our soup hens (a layer that stopped "putting out") into a nice boiling bath with an onion, a carrot, a stalk of celery and a bay leaf (ok, we didn't grow the bay leaf). We had some of the broth with lily bean thread noodles for supper that night. This morning before work I wrenched the meat off the carcass (that was one tough bird!) and strained the broth. This evening I sauteed some scallions in butter that I made from our neighbor's cream with some rosemary I picked on my way home from work. I chopped half a celeriac, a kohlrabi, a carrot and two potatoes into perfect tiny cubes and thinly sliced a few leaves of chinese cabbage. All went into the pot with some broth and the meat and some tamari and red pepper flakes (both not local). And it was the prettiest chicken soup I've ever made! It tasted even better because my beloved grew the veggies and we ate it together!