The Dirty Plate Club

Local Is The New Gourmet

2010-09-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

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!

Emotional eating

2010-09-11T15:54:00.000-07:00

A central activity of my family of origin's vacations has always been eating. Not touring five-star establishments, but cramming the week or two full of all the things we would never allow to happen in real life. I guess that's what vacation is, a break from the every-day, but what does it mean that this is the part of every day we most need a break from? We all eat well, mostly organic, veggies representing pretty well, but do we do it out of guilt? I don't think so. I love nothing more than a meal that comes from the farm where Jacob and I live and work, featuring the vegetables that he works so hard to grow. Maybe since we're all food oriented, that's just the first thing we change when we're trying on a different life. But maybe the well-lived life needs no vacation?

Peace and Quiet

2010-08-20T17:25:00.000-07:00

I began the day that way and here at the end it is the same, although the middle hours were anything but!

After a week of late starts in the morning I vowed to go in early this morning. I had nearly an hour to bake in solitude before the crowds poured in (sometimes I work with more people than I actually serve). In dribs and drabs my coworkers showed up wanting directions and answers.

Apparently all of Chester county wanted our grilled cheddar with pesto today, and it takes the longest to get to the table, so lots of jammed traffic behind the counter and hungry and confused people in front of it. I don't know how I thought I was going to be able to work in the garden all afternoon when I didn't leave the cafe until 2 and still had to go back before tonight's coffee house and ice cakes etc!

The coffee house was nice, and I love working with the teenagers, but by 8:00 I was ready to sit my tired old ass down.

Now I am home, Jacob is still out at a goodbye dinner with his crew and I here only the clicking of these keys and the songs of crickets and katydids. Perhaps I'll manage a few pages of a book before slipping away from earthly reality for several hours!

Day of Bounty

2010-08-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

Its been a week and a half since I followed any sort of regular work schedule, with the birth of Fiona and my move, and this morning I just didn't want to get started! I thought up meaningless ways to delay the inevitable, and then I just got down to it!

When I got to the garden, everyone was just starting to harvest eggplant. They are a mystery and no one is too confident of the criteria for harvest-readiness. All I know is that I haven't had a bad-tasting one this summer, so I think we're ok. They say the trick is to sweat them before cooking, and although it is a multi-step process that creates a significant amount of laundry and dishes, I stand by it.

Next there were copious ripe red and yellow peppers, and even more copious tomatoes. We ended the morning digging carrots, which were not so plentiful and who have suffered our our dry summer considerably. You wouldn't assume it, but carrots are drinkers!

I had been storing up food projects for days and this afternoon Ben came over to help me with them. Well actually he started off with some herculean vacuuming while I made a small jar of ginger carrots. I always let fresh ginger go bad while saving it for the perfect occasion, so I decided to make the remainder of this root into lacto-fermented ginger ale: results to follow in a couple of days. I sliced up a dozen or so tomatoes and slapped them in the dehydrator, adding a layer of the mini asian pears that were threatening to dissolve on my windowsill. Next we got out the Cuisinart and made four quarts of free organic cream from our neighbors across the creek into butter. In the middle of that, Anna came by with a crate of corn on the cob, fresh from the field and 2 quarts of honey from our bees.

Not every day is like this, but the days that are make me love life and growth and the variety of ways mother nature has of treating us!