Eat Local Challenge Update III

The eating locally situation has been a fairly straight-forward venture for me since I subsist on very little from the big-box stores in the first place - I don't have any dependents, roommates, husbands - and I'm naturally a low-on-the-food-chain type of eater in the first place. I eat fruit for breakfast with coffee, maybe have a carb of some sort mid-morning, I bring a tupperware of some sort of composed salad each day for lunch (a combination of any of the following: cabbage, radicchio, lettuces, red onion, cheese, tuna, beans, nuts, grated carrots and beets, diced tomatoes) and my dinners while home are typically seasonal - I'll cook new potatoes, cobs of corn, fresh beans and side it with local pork sausages, or I'll make a stir fry with carrots, tofu, broccoli, rapini, bok choy (the latter being a new introduction to an Ontario grown produce). In the fall, I'll switch over to stews and soups that include sweet potatoes, squashes, pumpkins, the last of the tomato season, curries, harvest meals.

Mushrooms are at their peak right now. I was fortunate when I cooked at the Art Retreat Centre years ago to have a very local mushroom producer who dropped off boxes of the most gorgeous oyster mushrooms.

And while I don't typically like mushrooms, I've found various recipes that I adore them in - fried in butter with garlic and tossed with fresh pasta and homemade pesto made with both cilantro and basil; and, cooked in a broth into a delightfully earthy risotto dish with sage from the garden. My sister, who receives a bi-weekly drop off of food from Spring Arbour Farms got a delicious looking bundle of mushrooms in her last delivery.

Another vegetable that is on the way to over taking gardens all over Ontario is the squash. Luckily my mother learned years ago that planting vegetable marrow, which she thought was squash, was a simple way of having something basically bully everything else out of the garden beds. We were stuck with these enormous 11 pound monstrosities of tasteless mush. The only way to use them was to cook the crap out of them in ginger and garlic or to put them as a puree into some sort of baked good like a zucchini bread and use them not for their flavour but simply for their moistening effect.

My parents grow pattypans. We love the colour of them added to roasted vegetables and we covet the sweet daintiness of their size and shape. They are a cheerful addition to any garden and produce like mad.

Comments

[Chocoholic]

THose are the most beautiful looking squash. Thanks so much for the post.

[Mary]

Yummy mushrooms!