Pickling talk and back to CSA

After a 2-week hiatus, it's back to our CSA share tomorrow morning. I'm also recovering from being sick this week (flu-bronchitis-upper respiratory crap that caused me to lose my voice and my energy) and decided to attend a pickling talk at the D.C. historical society tomorrow morning, put on by Ed Bruske, past president of D.C. Urban Gardeners.

Saturday, October 18
10 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Urban Gardening Series
Not Your Grandmother's Canning
Historical Society of Washington, DC
801 K St. NW at Mt. Vernon Square
Admission: Free

Here is his blog, The Slow Cook -- if you're curious about pickles (kimchee, Indian cauliflower pickles, eggplant pickle, etc) and can't make his talk, then check out his blog, since he posted many of the recipes that he's been working on in preparation for the talk.

Tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes

On Saturday I bought approximately 8 pounds of heirloom tomatoes at the Mount Pleasant farmer's market for $12. This amounted to 17 tomatoes!

Hooray for tomatoes and their myriad uses! Here's what they've gone into so far:
~sliced and eaten with Gouda cheese and bread
~mixed with diced cucumbers for a quick salad
~gazpacho
~salsa fresca
~enchilada sauce!

That last entry was for a dish that we based on one from Diana Kennedy's Tortilla Book. Made them last night and served with black beans (made in the crockpot from dried beans) on the side. I'd been craving enchiladas since my Friday late night 'snack' at Haydee's. We basically filled corn tortillas with a mixture of sauteed grated zucchini, roasted, diced peppers (sweet and poblano) and mozzerella cheese, and topped them with the aforementioned enchilada sauce, made from tomatoes, garlic, white onion and chipotle chiles in adobo. The sauce was so sweet from the tomatoes, it didn't need any added sugar! We weren't entirely satisfied with the recipe (needs a little tweaking), so I'm not going to post it in its entirety, but I did make a double batch of the enchilada sauce and froze half of it for later when the bounty of tomatoes is no more.

Farmer's market record for this week:
17 tomatoes
5 summer squash of several varieties
3 cucumbers (my mistake; they proved to be old and tough. They looked nice enough!)
2 more young cucumbers from a different vendor
dozen eggs
1 bunch leeks
2 sweet red peppers (so good!)
3 gorgeous poblano chiles
6 peaches from Reid's orchard
1 package (about a pound) ground buffalo from Cibolla farms
1 package (about a pound) ground pork from Cibolla farms
garlic, two varieties: German white and Kazakhstan

Guidelines

So I think like any other goal I've pursued, whether it's meditation or less negativity, the process benefits by having clear guidelines. I'm posting them here as encouragement for myself more than anything else.

Exceptions:
-olive oil, rice, dried beans, spices, citrus fruits (for now), rice stick and other Asian staples, alcohol (wine and beer)
-Eating in restaurants when we travel (I also want to support local businesses even if not everything they serve on the menu is "local" in a simplistic food miles sense)

Try for:
-Only buying produce from the farmer's market until it closes (with rare exceptions)
-Only eating meat that was grass-fed and sustainably raised
-Doing some canning this fall

Personal goals:
-Make own cheese, yoghurt, and bread (and try to source local milk and flour)
-Grow herbs indoors in the winter
-Grow as many veg as possible in the summer
-Subscribe to a CSA (if I find that it works out financially for us)

Absolutely not:
bananas, factory-farmed meat

Work in Progress...

Another take on food miles

This commentary on the New York Times: Food that Travels Well
sheds more light on the complexity of the food miles issue. The question is, where do you draw the line? When does it become obsession/elitism? As eating locally becomes more and more publicized I could see this becoming similar to the organic movement, where most people will label check, toss the item in the cart and call it good. I'm pretty sure that as I explore this (relatively) new way of thinking about what I'm eating, that I will change my opinion numerous times along the way. Meantime, it's kind of fun to have guidelines to eat by (that don't involve counting calories or carbs; this feels more like a treasure hunt, a delicious challenge!). Instead of bok choy from California, we ate red kale from Maryland tonight. And it actually tasted pretty good with soy sauce (although I'm not sure if M agreed...)

A declaration

Well, it's obviously going to affect much of what I've been posting of late, but I've decided to take the Eating Local challenge for September (through the Locavores site, http://www.locavores.com). Details pending...

Heading out of town

We're leaving for North Carolina tomorrow morning, on a 5-day vacation. First time to the Atlantic coast! Since we're driving, I'm looking forward to enjoying a few meals on the road (As always, our well-thumbed Roadfood guide will be along for the ride). I could see where my nascent interest in eating sustainably and supporting sustainable agriculture could eventually clash with my love of diner food, but in some cases it happily intersects, as in the Farmer's Diner in Vermont. (I first heard about this place while reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle).

Now, if only there was one of these types of places in the D.C. area...