Post-Yoga Dinner — Salad and Involtini di Melanzana

I’ve had some long days lately, specifically Wednesdays. Each Wednesday, I work from 8-5 then have yoga class from 5:30-7, meaning I leave the house around 7:30 a.m. and get home close to 7:30 p.m. It makes for a long day.

To help me out, sweet Husband has been cooking dinner while I’m at yoga and serving me when I get home. It’s been heavenly!

This week, he prepared a delicious meal mostly with veggies from our local market.

We had a simple salad of romaine lettuce, purple onion, banana peppers, and cherry tomatoes with a lemon, capers, and olive oil vinaigrette (I made the dressing because I like to help).

To accompany the salad, Edmond prepared Involtini di Melanzana (eggplant rollups is my loose translation). He used this recipe from his hero, Mario Batali. It was delicious and ever so sweet of him to think of me. A perfect post-yoga, vegetarian meal full of local ingredients.

Local Ingredients Used:

• onion
• banana peppers
• cherry tomatoes
• eggplant
• eggs
• rosemary (Edmond added this to the frittata because it’s my favorite–see, so sweet)

Dinner is served

If you’re an eggplant fan, give it a whirl.

Or, try my vinaigrette:

Juice of one lemon

1 tbsp capers, chopped

olive oil to taste (less for tart dressing, more for not-so-tart dressing)

salt and pepper to taste

Whisk all ingredients together and toss with salad. Easy peasy.

Eating Local in the Summer Is Easy

Despite the sweltering, miserable, suffocating heat of Mississippi in the summer, I still adore this time of year because I am able to grow a lot of my own food, watch hummingbirds (from a distance though because they’re a little too much like big bees for my taste), and have daylight until after 8pm.  I also enjoy buying vegetables from an old man on the side of the road and going to the farmers’ market.  Side note: This year, my husband and I are even running a booth at the market.  We bake and sell fresh bread.  It’s tasty.  Read about it here.  End side note.

My most favorite thing about summer, though, is the amount of fresh and local produce I am able to eat.  Case and point, this meal, in which nearly everything was either locally made or locally grown.  For dinner, we had hamburgers and grilled corn.  I shall take you through the ingredients, so you can see just how easy it is to eat locally, especially in summer.  I like to use the word “shall”; it’s far too under-used.

First, the ingredients: bread, mustard, tomato, lettuce, onion, pickles, cheese, burger, smoked jalapenos, corn, olive oil, salt, pepper.

Now, the local ingredients:

Bread–fresh rolls/buns made by the husband (they were awesome, by the way.  Best yet, I think.)

Tomato, onion, corn–bought from local farmers at the local market

Burger–made of venison; from a deer killed by our friend this spring

Jalapenos–grown in a friend’s container garden, smoked on our grill

Pickles–cucumbers grown in my garden and pickled myself

And the non-local ingredients:

Mustard, cheese, lettuce, salt, and pepper–from Kroger

Olive oil–from Whole Foods

Quite frankly, I’m pretty proud of our home-grown, home-made meal.  I would love to declare the whole thing local, but can anyone really live without olive oil, mustard, salt, and pepper?  I can’t.  I also cannot live without cheese.  At least not for now.  I could have lived without the lettuce this time, though.  Although a burger with lettuce is better than one without, I could have lived without it.  Lesson learned there.

I encourge you to seek out your local farmers’ market (or road-side stand).  I think you’ll be surprised just how much you can find there and how tasty and ripe it is.  It might just get you out of a food rut and force you to try new foods and recipes–reason enough for me.

Check out how awesome that bun looks.  It tasted even better.  Yay for spouses who bake.

Look how pretty corn is when the husk is still there.

Boardtown Organics: My Solution for Local, Free-range Chicken and Eggs

As you all know, I have sworn off non-local meat, and, although Sanderson Farms is a Mississippi company, that’s not quite what I was going for with “local.”  So far this year, my meals have been mostly meatless until recently when I got a deer, just about as local as you can get.  But I was looking around on Local Harvest and discovered a family farm just outside my door.  Boardtown Organics (Boardtown, by the way, is what Starkville was before it was Starkville) is a small operation just outside the city limits, but I don’t even have to go there to pick up the food.  I just order a day ahead and go to Main Street and pick up my order.  How easy is that?

Living in the city limits, I cannot raise my own chickens, so this place is perfect for that.  I ordered one whole chicken and a dozen eggs.  Both were fantastic!  If you haven’t had farm-fresh eggs, then you simply must find the nearest person who has laying hens and ask for some.  They are wonderful.  Or contact Boardtown Organics if you’re in the area, only $2.50/dozen.  That’s a good dollar cheaper than “free-range” varieties at Kroger.  And so much better, I might add.  Orangey center that doesn’t run all over the place when you break the egg in the skillet.

We should have weighed it, but we didn’t.  Suffice to say that the chicken was huge.  It fed my husband and me for over a week.  We grilled the legs, wings, and thighs.  Pan fried one-half of the breast (which fed us both) and topped it with olives.  Halved the other half of the breast and used one half to top a salad and the other half to make chicken fried rice.  Of course we had leftovers, and those were mostly mixed together for sandwiches, salad, etc.  We also made chicken stock for the first time by using the bones and meat that clings to the bones.  Considering the entire chicken only cost $10, we ate some pretty cheap meals, and all were absolutely delicious.  I have read that truly free-range, happy chickens (I think this makes them happy) that are allowed to roam about and eat bugs taste more “chickenier,” and I can now say that I agree.  May sound crazy, but, somehow, I could taste the chicken more.  It didn’t just taste like whatever I seasoned it with.  It tasted like chicken.

Their Web site advertises a CSA (community supported agriculture) effort this year, but I plan to grow pretty much all I’ll need on my own.  As for chicken, they are almost out of the last batch processed, but I’m told they should have more ready in May.

This is in the biggest bowl we own.

Lessons learned:

1.  Local, responsibly-raised food tastes better.

2.  Local, responsibly-raised food, despite all expectations, is cheaper than factory food from somewhere else.

3.  Owners of local, family farms are kind and honest.

Take a look at that half a breast. Huge. I know.

Deer Meal #1: The Deerburger Steak

I know you’re all anxiously awaiting a venison update, and I’ve now got one to share.  About two weeks ago, we got our deer.  I bet she was pretty, but, when she arrived to us (and by arrived, I mean that I picked her up under an overpass in nowhere Mississippi around 7PM—I think this makes the experience so much better), she had already been processed and came in vacuum-packed packages of ground meat, steak, roast, and cured sausage.  I quickly thawed out one package of the ground meat (probably about 1.5 lbs. or so) and proceeded to make “hamburger” steak with mushroom gravy, mashed potatoes, and roasted broccoli, some of my all-time favorites for home cooking.

It was awesome.  In fact, all who fear venison for its “gamey” flavor should give this meal a try.  I could tell a difference, which is of course good because it is in fact a different animal than the cow, but, overall, it was like eating hamburger steak.

Deer steak:

Mix 1-1.5 lbs. of ground deer with ½ onion, chopped, and 2-3 chopped garlic cloves.  Add a couple tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce (the best stuff ever), some salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes.  Add a teaspoon or so of soy sauce.  Once mixed, divide into patties that are reasonable in size, my batch made eight.  Put about 2-3 tbsp. olive oil in the bottom of a cast-iron skillet and proceed to pan fry.

My first meat meal of the year sure was delicious.  And I felt good about myself for eating local, too.  Score.  Double score.  Here are some leftovers:

We're cookin' with gas now, baby.

New Year’s Resolutions and Deer

I usually make a resolution or two each year, and just like everyone else, I fall off the wagon at some point on some of them, but others stick.  For instance, last year, I made these resolutions:

•  Eat fish twice a week
• Cook food from a different country each month
• Eat a mono-unsaturated fat (MUFA) with each meal
• Drink no more than two cokes a week

 I failed pretty miserably at the second one.  I bought two cookbooks about food from Spain, the country chosen for January, and promptly stopped there.  The others I did fairly well at for most of the year.  I ordered fish more at restaurants and cooked it at home fairly regularly.  I ate a lot of olives, although not at every meal, for the third.  The coke one was the easiest.  I didn’t drink it much to begin with, so making sure to only have one or two a week was a piece of cake most weeks. 

 This year, I made these resolutions:

•  Quit being fat
• Only eat meat that is local and hormone-free
• Walk the dogs at least four times a week

 You’ll notice, I hope, that my resolutions are more like commands to myself.  Instead of the softy way of phrasing (i.e., I will try to lose weight), I opt for commands (i.e., Quit being fat).  I should say that the only one of these that is actually a resolution is the second.  The first is more of a goal; obviously, I can’t quit being fat all at once.  And the last one is my attempt at being a better pet owner.

 So, I’ll focus on #2.  About seven or so months ago, I quit eating beef that wasn’t free range and hormone-free, which means I quit eating it altogether because neither is available in my local grocery stores.  This was pretty easy to give up.  I rarely ate beef anyway, and I almost never cooked with it.  We’re more of pork family.  I did enjoy a good hamburger now and then, but I didn’t eat one regularly enough for me to really miss it.