Saturday, November 03, 2007

Dark Days Eat Local Challenge: Week 3

This week was a blur, with a visit from my in-laws, a Halloween party on Tuesday, and Halloween on Wednesday, so I have to beg, borrow, and steal my zero mile meals from breakfasts this week.

Here's a photo of a mostly zero mile meal but for the baby swiss, which was store bought. We enjoyed a caramelized onion and herb frittata, baked with grated baby swiss cheese and our own bread, eggs, onion, herbs, and garlic. It's paired with a delicious salad of black seeded simpson and red salad bowl lettuces, onion, and a balsamic vinaigrette.


Although it would seem that I was slacking on the zero mile front this week, I was busy preparing for a Halloween Harvest Farm Day we hosted for our homeschool group. I made mini pumpkin muffins from our own Little Pam pie pumpkins, carrot cupcakes from our own red core chantenay and oxheart heirloom carrots, and our very own deviled eggs. The pumpkin muffins were delicious, but would be very much improved with nuts, which I'd left out to keep them available for those with nut allergies. The deviled eggs go without saying, and I'm embarrassed to admit how many I ate! Of course we also had the requisite homemade chocolate chip cookies and brownies.


Also on tap this week was picking and processing our green tomatoes, as we had our first killing frost Sunday night. That evening, I harvested the last of our basil, zucchini, peppers, and tomatoes in time to preserve them all. I washed
and froze the basil, put the zucchini in the fridge, and processed an entire bushel of green tomatoes and a half bushel of peppers over the week, resulting in 14 pints of green tomato salsa, 13 pints of pickled green tomatoes using Ed's recipe over at The Slow Cook, and 7 pints of green tomato chutney, seen coming to a boil above. My one regret was that our onion crop did so poorly in this year's drought that I didn't get to use all homegrown ingredients in my salsa and pickles. But there's always next year, and next year, we'll have hard irrigation lines in the market garden.

2 comments:

Madeline Rains said...

Wow. Your party with so many handmade muffins and other delicious desserts sounds so wonderful.

You're inspiring me again to want to put up food. I need all the inspiration I can get this year. I think I just burned out on it after years of it.

Plus, I need to get my house looking less shabby and feeling much warmer before cool friends come a'calling. : )

Danielle said...

I'm glad you find my canning energy inspiring—that gives us newbies something to offer those of you who've been doing this for a while. Nothing like fresh enthusiasm...

I can't imagine your home with all the warmth and exuberance you and your family offer ever feeling cold! (I'll be sure to bring sweaters just in case. ;)

We can't wait to see you all.I'm still fishing for ideas for a special little something for your birthday. Ooooh, never mind, I know what I could do, presuming the store's still there and I can sneak out to the city between now and then. Hmmmm...she said, rubbing her hands together and scheming.