Filed under: Dark Days Challenge, EatLocalChallenge, Oregon, Washington, food, restaurant
Over the river and thru the wood to grandfather’s house we go … (full lyrics)
Not really, we’re actually headed down to Portland for a friend’s 50th birthday celebration this weekend. Does this mean that eating local is out the window while we’re on the road? Absolutely not! Portland is a wonderful food town with many restaurants that source locally. Won’t be a problem. See Foodshed PDX for some suggestions when headed that way.
Meanwhile there’s a lot of highway between Concrete and Portland. We’re likely to get a little hungry between here and there, but since we’re heading out on a Friday we’re already dealing with a lot of logistics just getting through Everett-Olympia without using I-5 as a parking lot. What to do? Pit-stopping in Seattle might be delicious, but it would take too much time since I have a long shopping list for Bob’s Red Mill to take care of before the party. This means we’ll need some ’short duration’ food.
No MickeyD’s or BK scary meat for us, we have BurgerVille! Perhaps you haven’t heard of this small chain, but next time you’re in southwest Washington or northwest Oregon, give them a visit. They have delicious Oregon Country Beef burgers with Tillamook cheddar. Can you beat that? Maybe with a Wild Coho Smoked Salmon & Hazelnut Salad for $5.29? 
While you’re waiting to go there in person, click through to BV’s News & Events page and watch the online version of Nightline. There’s a short piece on fast food in general and an interview with Eric Schlosser who authored Fast Food Nation. If BurgerVille is good enough for Eric Schlosser, it’s good enough for me! The Walla Walla onion rings and blackberry shakes are to die for, but you have to wait until summer. Meanwhile it’s sweet potato fries season and I just got a free coupon. Time to hit the road!
Most of the leftovers have been eaten and another Thanksgiving is behind us. This year we hosted so we participated in the 2nd annual 100-mile Thanksgiving. We didn’t manage to get everything within 100 miles, but we did fairly well.
Since our main ingredient was a 25 lb. turkey organically free-ranged in Snohomish County and we ended up only totaling to 5 people this year, we opted for the smaller organic free-range Diestel turkey raised in California. Turkamungus is still in the freezer waiting for a debut later in the season.
Other menu items were smashed potatoes (garden), green beans (CSA) with a chanterelle sauce (foraged), BreadFarm bread stuffing with bacon (Silvana), chestnuts (Loomis) and onions (Hedlin), cranberry sauce (BC), bacon (Hempler’s) cornbread (corn - CSA), miche and Tonasket rye bread (BreadFarm), and nibbles of multigrain crackerbread (Haggen) and an assortment of local cheeses (Golden Glen, Mount Townsend, Samish Bay, Pleasant Valley and Beecher’s), smoked salmon (Blaine), cervelat salami (Silvana), and fresh walnuts (Loomis). Drinks were kir royales (Chateau Ste. Michelle sparkling wine and Samson winery cassis), 2003 Lost River Cabernet (Mazama), 2004 Glacier Peak syrah and eggnog (Golden Glen). Desserts were squash tart (garden) with a walnut crust (Loomis) and an apple crisp with apples from Blaine.
I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!
(Sorry for being so late, Laura!)
This week hasn’t been our best for eating locally since I’ve been working on getting the fridge emptied out in preparation for Local Thanksgiving 2007 on Thursday! To make up for that, I decided to do some “carbon offsetting” instead. No, I didn’t go and buy any credits, I made use of an alternate heat source - the wood stove.
We normally use the wood stove during power outages and last year I had thought that we should use it more often. It’s good practice and, since it’s hot anyway, an easy low impact way to heat food. It’s best for slow cooking, but it’s possible to sauté and even bake!
This meal was wholly cooked on the woodstove, well, some was reheated. Hemlock Highlands burger on a Costco bagel bun with sides of sautéed parsnips and ranch beans from the freezer. The beef and the parsnips were local to the valley. The relish, leftover from a camping trip purchase, claims to be from the Portland area so it wasn’t even that far away. The bagels were baked in the Burlington store. The drink was our own explosive ginger ale. The ketchup?
I made it myself with tomatoes grown by Jones Creek Farm! The label will be familiar to NPR listeners. 
Since I’ve been in the process of refreshing all my sourdough starters, I made some sourdough English muffins too. These (and naan) are the perfect breads to cook on the woodstove. We had the remaining two burgers on these the next day.
Besides cast iron pans, crock pot innards, and Dutch ovens, an inexpensive Chinese claypot is a great tool for woodstove cookery. This one cost $6 at 99 Ranch in Lynnwood. This one happens to contain a beef dhansak that I fetched out of the freezer. The beef was our fuzzy cow, of course. Try the search feature at Mahanandi for some recipe suggestions for dhansak and other curries.
This week’s confession: I ate a pomegranate last night. At least it was from CA and not further afield.
Back to cleaning the house!
For everyone’s convenience I’ll be putting all my DDELC successes into one post. Probably just in time to slip under the wire of Kim’s or Laura’s roundup for the week.
So let’s do lunch!
First we have a chanterelle chowder that I made with my own Ozette spuds, chanterelles from BC (could have been wild-harvested locally, but these were fresh in the fridge, the others are dried in the cupboard), and whole milk from Golden Glen Creamery. There is some ham of dubious parentage in there, but we’ll just overlook that minor detail. On the plate there are a pluot from “Western Washington” according to the co-op label, a carrot from our last CSA basket, pickles made from either my own or CSA cucumbers, and a piece of pumpernickel from Germany slathered with Straus Family Creamery cultured butter from California. Yeah, well. Anyway, Kettle Salt & Pepper chips (Eugene, Oregon but still in the Salmon Nation) and our homebrew ginger ale made of well water, sugar, and lemons, raisins and ginger from California. (Recipe to be posted once it’s refined.)
Since lunch was so large, we had a small dinner.
I picked up some frozen spot prawns at Skagit’s Own Fish Market (on SR 20 near Burlington, prawns caught by a fisher from Anacortes) and sauteed them in garlic and Chateau Ste. Michelle Gewürztraminer. The greens are the last of my chard and miscellaneous greens from my garden. The lime garnish is from California.
We went to a little shindig so I brought some blueberry pie.
I know well enough to not try a new recipe before serving it to other people, but I did it anyway. Luckily, it turned out great! I used Dorie Greenspan’s pie crust recipe with Washington-grown whole wheat pastry flour and the fresh filling recipe from Sustainable Table’s Solstice Blueberry pie recipe. I can report that it works quite well with frozen organic blueberries that we picked a few months ago just up in Rockport. The lime zest is, again, from California.
I’ve been on a soup/stew kick lately and I tried something completely different.
The only Brussel’s sprouts that I’ve seen this year were all the way from Oregon, but we had to have them at least once. At least Oregon is in the Salmon Nation! I made Saxe-Coburg Soup which was quite delicious. The bread was a barley sesame bread that I baked of ingredients from afar for the most part.
Finally, the meal where I had my greatest success. It was actually my first meal of the week, but I haven’t posted these in any order so I’ll feature it lastly here. Theme ingredient: Pear!
Quite accidentally, since I don’t usually give myself Iron Chef -type challenges, I ended up with a pear theme for this meal. I had a lovely Orcas pear from Jones Creek Farm and some pear vinegar from Sokol Blosser winery in Dundee, Oregon. What the heck! Shook potatoes (Ozettes from the garden), pork steak from Tenneson Family Farm, chanterelles (BC) and cipollino onions (Hedlin Family Farm, LaConner) carmelized with a bit of pear vinegar, home-pickled beets (CSA - the last - eek!) and pickles (homemade). The salad was the last of some CSA lettuce and carrots I found in the back of the crisper with a few slices of pear and vinaigrette made of pear vinegar and California walnut oil (repackaged under Trader Joe’s label). The Washington Gewürztraminer was a good choice as it even had hints of pear in its flavor.
Almost forgot dessert!
I halved a pear, drizzled it with a bit of melted butter, wine and brown sugar which I spiked with vanilla. Roasted at 400F until finished. Served with homemade brown sugar vanilla ice cream made from Golden Glen whole milk. This one I could have improved by using local honey instead of brown sugar, but I realized that just a moment after I had already dumped it on. Also I used Kirkland’s Madagascar vanilla when I could have used Tahitian vanilla made by Vanilla King in Richland. Tahiti is slightly closer than Madagascar and it would have been made by a small Washington state producer. Naturally I didn’t want to open a new bottle when another was already open.
All in all, not too bad, although I wish I’d had less work and more time to note what I actually did besides relying on memory.
What I could have done better:
I’m using up some Aurora Dairy butter that I have in my freezer so that is not local (or even ethically palatable). I should have used Golden Glen Creamery or Wilcox butter to be local.
I confess that I succumbed to buying a Kirkland spiral ham at Costco (the dubious parentage ham mentioned above). Ideally, I should have bought a ham roast from Tenneson and brined and smoked it myself. This is not beyond my normal operating parameters, but it would have meant ham next week instead of this week. In my defense (?), I didn’t buy it because I was lazy, I bought it because the stuff is delicious. We ate the ham itself in various ways and I tossed the bone into the crockpot and came up with 3 quarts of hearty gelatinous stock that I’ve been using on my soup/stew kick. I promise that I cringe a little each time I see it because I can’t get the visions of factory-farmed pigs out of my head. It’s one of my last failings. Is there a Porker’s Anonymous?
The chanterelles from BC should have been locally harvested, but I fail to walk past the cheap chanterelles at Costco if they have them despite the fact that they’re in the freaking cooler instead of out on the floor as they should be. Since they’re a living thing, I like to think that I’m saving them from the cold. BC is in Cascadia, however! I do know that the company that packages these, cultivates many of their ‘wild’ mushrooms in China. As far as I know, chanterelles haven’t been successfully cultivated yet. These certainly have duff on them, hopefully from an actual PNW forest.
The German pumpernickel? What can I say. Good rye bread is hard to find around here (even in my own kitchen) and rye bread is hard-wired. At least I know that it’s good bread. I think it fits into the Slow Food concept at least.
Since I’ve used up the dribs and drabs left from my CSA, next week will be more challenging. Breakfast is certainly a topic to think about since we’ve fallen into the habit of having various rolled grains each morning. I can make a similar breakfast local (and I will next week, once), but my stash is too limited for a daily menu. I could eat local eggs until the cows come home, but that’s not to my palate.
Now that I’ve caught up with myself, I look forward to catching up with all of you DDELCers!
Edited to add pear dessert 11.04.2007
Although I take 1000mg Vitamin C supplement every morning, I prefer to get my vitamins from food sources. In winter this can be a bit trickier since our local fresh fruits tend to be limited to apples. This is one good reason for squirreling away summer’s berries and rose hips. Broccoli, carrots and kale are other fresh sources during Skagit’s winters.
One of my favorite tools for processing large amounts of fruit relatively easily is a contraption called a steam-juicer. They’re simple to use and indispensable if you want to make large quantities of juice concentrate or like to make jellies without cranking your arm off with a food mill. I love using them for apples since I don’t yet have a cider press. I just chunk the apples leaving cores, peels and stems on and in about an hour or so, I have freshly steamed apple juice and a mass of pulp for the compost.
I always process all my juices without sugar so I can sweeten them for jelly, juice or wine as required later. My favorite bottles are saline irrigation continers from the hospital since they freeze well and are nicely square. Since they’re only lightly used and made of polypropylene, I get a bit of feel-good recycling out of the deal. I have also juiced into quart jars and then canned the results.
This batch was ~25 lbs. of blue elderberries that we picked on our way home from Eastern Washington. I hope to get an opportunity to pick rose hips sometime soon. The steam-juicer makes processing of those much easier since you don’t have to work so hard to remove the hairy choke. Maybe I can even beg some grapes off one of our wonderful local wineries …
