To Market, To Market

Friday and Saturday markets in HoCo were fairly busy, but not to the level they could be. I attended both this week, mainly to see what the local vendors have, and to round out my CSA box items.

Friday was better than Saturday, as I see Breezy Willow isn’t coming until June, and South Mountain Creamery isn’t coming at all. At least that is what their web site says. That’s too bad, because I loved their yogurts, mozzarella, ice cream and other goodies, like their butter. Don’t know why they canceled but it was a disappointment.

Friday I went to the Hospital site specifically to see if Love Dove Farms had garlic scapes. And, yes, they did.

Pesto will be on the menu in a few days. I picked up pine nuts at Costco in anticipation of getting scapes. I also found some lovely rhubarb from Falcon Ridge Farm in Westminster, to go with those Larriland strawberries from my morning picking frenzy.

Strawberry rhubarb compote, pesto for the TLV Tree Farm chicken from Miller Library market and I have a great meal planned for tomorrow or Monday.

This is a good warm up for our next challenge. It’s the Southern SOLE Food Challenge. Ten of us who did the winter challenge to eat locally at least once a week have informally decided to have our own summer challenge to showcase south of the Mason Dixon line cooking with market and home grown goodies. Our challenge will run from June to Halloween. Stay around and see what we cook. I will be putting up a sidebar linking to the nine blogs besides mine. All of us enjoyed learning new recipes and commiserating about finding grains and other difficult locally sourced items in the winter. This informal get together will show what we can find to cook during the high seasons here in the Southeast.

SOUTHERN SOLE FOOD CHALLENGERS
AnnieRie Unplugged – me
Backyard Grocery Northern VA
Bumble Lush Garden near DC
Eat. Drink. Nourish. South Carolina
Eating Appalachia Blue Ridge VA
Eating Floyd Southwest VA
Family Foodie Survival Guide Northern VA
Sincerely, Emily Texas
The Soffritto right up the road in Woodstock
Windy City Vegan North Carolina

Victoria from The Soffrito and I met on line here and found out we live less than 10 miles from one another. Today we met face to face for coffee at Casual Gourmet before hitting the Glenwood market. I did get some nice flowers from Greenway, and some beets and radishes from Zahradka. Plus, a buttermilk cake from Stone House, highly recommended by Lewis Orchards to showcase the local strawberries.

The flowers are already in their pots on the deck. Above the mint and with some chives I picked up at Larriland yesterday. The herb garden is done. The veggies, almost. I need to pull out the greens and put in some rainbow chard seed to get chard later this summer.

Tomorrow we are off to Olney to have brunch at their market and see if they have any dairy sources to replace South Mountain. I don’t feel like driving to B’more to get dairy, or to Frederick. We may have to resort to home delivery once a month. I do love their mozzarella, and their yogurts enough to set up a delivery schedule. It is sad we have lost all the dairies except for Bowling Green in HoCo.

Support the markets. Don’t let them lose vendors due to lack of interest. Today is Food Revolution Day, if you follow Jamie Oliver. Cook with real ingredients and enjoy the local summer bounty.

hocofood@@@

Sandy Spring CSA Week Two

Never fails. Buy something at the farmers market and you get it in the box. Strawberries. Weren’t listed in the preview post, but we always know there are substitutions and often additions. This was a pleasant addition.

And yes, we are officially drowning in greens. But, I did swap cilantro for mushrooms. Better to make mushroom pate. We are allowed one swap a week. I swap herbs usually, since I grow so many of them. Cilantro without tomatoes to make salsa, not my thing. I also have more than enough greens to do pesto, which I will make since I stopped at Costco today and got pine nuts and pistachios. I do some interesting pestos. Like the garlic scape pesto in this often posted pic of mushroom pate and garlic scape pesto I took to a party.

Ok, I never knew what vitamin greens were until we got them. Now I know. They are interesting and can be made many ways. Learn something new every week. Don’t have any clue what they would cost if we bought them, but suppose they are as expensive as microgreens.

This week we got:
14 ounces vitamin greens
one bunch red scallions
one head green romaine
one head red leaf lettuce
one box cremini
one box white mushrooms
one bunch cilantro (I swapped this to get another box of white mushrooms)
one large bunch of green kale
one pint strawberries

All organic. The estimated cost came to somewhere between $32-$35 depending on where you source it. Finding all this is difficult as a source for vitamin greens means a trip to DC to a market there.

After two weeks, paying $29.75 a week for our CSA we have $38 and $34, which means we are up $12.50 for cost. If I used the cheaper cost for the mushrooms, which can be found at Frank’s Produce in Waterloo behind Costco for $1.99 for the white mushrooms, it would have been $2 less. But, the gas mileage to get there just for mushrooms would have negated the savings.

What am I going to make?

Kale Chips. I love them and make them once every spring.
Mushroom Pate
Lots and lots of salads.
Strawberries with ice cream from South Mountain, or buttermilk cake from Stone House Bakery (I will be buying both this Saturday at the Glenwood market.)

Two weeks in. Loving the surprises, and the quality of the veggies.

hocofood@@@

The Miller Library and Market after a Morning at the Conservancy

Wow! Today was the first time I went to Miller Library. I went for the farmer’s market after having fun leading first graders around looking for nature, like strawberries and frogs. First graders learn “I Spy Nature” in places like the herb garden, honors garden, farm house front yard, and the apple orchard at the Howard County Conservancy, my favorite place to be on a lovely spring morning.

Wild berries to be found in the clover.

Can you find the two frogs in the picture? The children were looking for colors, shapes, sights, sounds, smells, textures but not tasting. We focus on the senses and use them to discover the natural world around them.

As for the Conservancy, we will be doing Wine in the Garden next Thursday the 24th, and the garden is really lovely right now. The peonies are blooming. I believe these are aurora sunrise. They line the paths down to the Honors Garden where caterers will be feeding us, while volunteers pour wines from local vendors and distributors. A great evening, one I look forward to attending.

After leaving the children behind, for them to enjoy lunch at the picnic tables, I headed off to grab a snowball at the Woodstock Snowball Stand. Today’s flavor of the day was Red Wine Cooler (non alcoholic of course).

It was time to drive down to hit the market and find strawberries to put in the wine cooler I will be making when we grill this weekend. I had never been to the new library. I like Glenwood, my local library, but now I have library envy. Miller is just stunning. I went in to check out the Historical Society, then came out for the start of the market.

The first thing I saw was the new pull behind display trailer that our favorite bakery bought to use at the markets. Stone House Bakery has been at Glenwood a long time, and at the other markets as well. Love the display case.

I picked up some dinner rolls to have with leftover black bean soup, and with the chicken I will be grilling to go with that wine cooler this weekend.

I got the chicken from TLV Tree Farm, they were doing a brisk business in strawberries and asparagus. I also got a dozen eggs from them, and half a chicken. The chicken is fresh, “processed” just yesterday. No frozen birds anymore, we can get fresh free range chickens and know that they don’t have all those antibiotics or hormones.

Talked to John Dove, from Love Dove Farms, to find out garlic scapes will be here next week. I wasn’t the first to ask either, so we may be competing for one of the coolest veggies to use to make pesto. We did pick up some spring onions and some turnips, since I won’t be getting turnips in the CSA box tomorrow.

In order to support more of the farmers there, I did pick up my strawberries from Lewis Orchards, as I had bought chicken, eggs and asparagus from TLV. We always buy fruit from Lewis in the summer at Glenwood. I love getting her bruised peach specials and bringing them home to slice and freeze. Ugly fruit tastes better!

I was pleased to see all the people there at 2 pm. It was a bustling site in the middle of the afternoon.

Great Harvest and the Breadery are both there as well as The Cosmic Bean, and Penn Farm. It was not the week for Bowling Green Farms to bring cheese. They come every other week.

Check out the local markets. They are reasonable in price for the quality you receive, and you can’t get much fresher.

hocofood@@@

Summer is Coming! Think Pink!

Summer is Rosé season around here. This is one of the best around, only surpassed by Linden. This one is very much in the style of a good Provence Rosé.

Monday night I poured out a couple of glasses to have with a frittata made with local ingredients, and realized just how often we turn to the local wineries to find a crisp refreshing dry Rosé to serve in the hotter months. I even found a new term for me to use to describe what we drink often. We are locapours, drinking locally crafted beers, wines, ciders, and ales.

The frittata, by the way, is one of my locavore specialties, made with whatever I found locally in the markets. It was made with the last of the winter CSA eggs, smoked salmon from the Catonsville market, pesto stuffed tomatoes (the tomatoes were from David’s and not local), greens from the spring CSA box. Almost all locally sourced. The pesto was big, with some cress and with the last of my black walnuts. Started on the stovetop and finished under the broiler.

Easy dinner. Good, too.

Today it’s off to the Miller Library farmer’s market to get eggs and some berries, if they have berries. Otherwise Larriland this weekend, I believe is ready.

hocofood@@@

The Garden Is In!

Done. Finished. Well almost. I still have to mulch tomorrow. But all the plants are in. In Howard County, the rule of thumb is don’t plant tomatoes until Mother’s Day. No frosts in the county and hopefully temps that will stay above fifty degrees.

I am experimenting this year. Part will be heavily mulched, and part has black fabric with light mulch. Mulch tomorrow and a light input of food, and I am done. The rain the next few days should establish the plants.

As for my herb garden, it is going gangbusters. The sage is huge and is flowering.

The English thyme that overwintered came back with a vengeance.

All the other plants are doing well. I put in 32 tomato plants today. I may be selling tomatoes on street corners in August, but who cares. If they all don’t make it, at least what does, will keep me happy through the summer, fall and winter. I will be freezing and canning.

As for current goodies, tonight we had plum tomatoes from David’s stuffed with homemade pesto. A hearty, killer pesto made with greens from the CSA, walnuts, parmesan and olive oil. Not that pretty, but so tasty.

I low temp roasted some wild ahi and served it with the tomatoes and some cremini stuffed with this pesto. The greens in the pesto included Persian cress, turnip greens and curly parsley from my CSA delivery.

We opened an old local wine.

Breaux is about an hour away, just south of Harper’s Ferry. This 1999 Cabernet was still doing very well for its age. It had the berry taste that the back label described, even after 13 years. The smoky oak was still there. DH swore he picked up the anise that the label described, but I didn’t. All in all, a softer version of a young cab, perfect to compliment big, tomatoey tuna with a pesto that stood up and said, look at me.

Walnuts in pesto will do that.

hocofood@@@

What’s In The Box?

I now love Thursdays because they are CSA delivery days, my weekly Christmas on Thursday. We got our first box today for the Sandy Spring CSA. My new pickup point is an outparcel of Columbia off Cedar Lane. The list at the site had the confirmed contents of what was harvested and packed for the 40 or so members of this drop off point. We get to go to the web site and see in advance what they hope to pick and box.

CSA contents Week One

The collards were the only thing not included in the final tally. That’s OK because eleven items, mostly greens, is more than enough. I barely fit them all in a picture.

The hubby and I did a quick calculation of what we would pay at farmers’ markets and Roots for organic veggies like this. Since I had to stop at Roots to get organic chicken and shiitake mushrooms and ginger to make chicken chow mein with the bok choy, I got some of their prices. The tally here:

We got a pound of lettuce mix. At Silver Spring Market, for organic lettuce mix, it is $14 a pound. At Roots,$9.

We got a large bok choy weighing 12 ounces. At Roots, $3.69 a pound. Cost approximately $3.

Leaf lettuce, $2.49 each. We got two. So, $5.

Scallions, two bunches. Ours were a bit bigger than Roots. They were $1.69 a bunch. So, $3.50.

Parsley. $1.69.

Cress. $1.69, but ours was Persian cress and way more of it than the bunch at Roots. We had 10 ounces of cress. Estimate around $3 for ours.

Spinach $2.49 a bunch. Our 5 small bunches were about the equivalent of twice the size of their bunch. So, $5.

French breakfast radishes. No real comparison, but their radishes were $2.49 a bunch. Say our specialty radishes, like those we find only at Dupont Circle and cost $4 a bunch.

Baby Hakurei turnips. Last time I bought them at Dupont they cost me $4.

Total:

Conservatively — $38. If I got fresh organic lettuce mix instead of Roots in a plastic container, add $5.

The $29.72 a week we pay for this CSA is well worth the price, considering I don’t have to run to organic markets and far away farmer’s markets to get some amazingly fresh veggies. We like the surprises, and the exotic items are interesting to experiment.

It takes about 30-40 minutes to clean and put away the veggies.

I have already been menu planning, and chow mein is a big item. So is a colcannon with turnips, potatoes from Boarman’s, the turnip greens, radish greens and some of the cress and spinach.

A pesto or two is also in the running.

Salads for lunch with some tuna or chicken.

I love opening that box and seeing what goodness is within it.

hocofood@@@

Foraging, Cultivating, Harvesting and Shopping

Busy series of days. Don’t forget the Howard County Farmer’s Markets are open this week. Wednesday through Sunday.

I don’t know which one(s) I will get to visit, as I have to see what is in the CSA Box tomorrow. We got our tentative list. Twelve items!! At least, unless there is a typo and we aren’t getting scallions twice. We have gotten duplicates in the past, when items are plentiful from multiple sources. Since there are more than sixty farms in our CSA coop, we get similar items from individual sources.

As for the foraging, slowly I am finding single spears of asparagus out under the crepe myrtle. I now have four. By the weekend, two more and then maybe asparagus risotto will find its way on the menu.

The pole beans are in. The cukes go in later today, as they were all getting really leggy hanging around inside with the tomato plants. The tomatoes I will plant Saturday or Sunday. We may get one or two cool evenings and I want them to wait a few more days.

As for harvesting, the lettuces and greens are still going nuts. Dinner tonight will include arugula and microgreens from the boxes I have outside in a bunny resistant arrangement.

Arugula – spicy, peppery and so good in salads.

Greens by the back door, protected from strong sun will go all summer this way.

As for the markets, pick up some herbs and put in a pot or two. Great to snip fresh herbs on your grilled dinners.

Going full bore, and so good to use. Notice the cover in the background protecting the basil overnight. It is doing well, even though planted a little early. Sage, rosemary, lavender, tarragon, marjoram, thyme and mint. Really easy to grow.

hocofood@@@

My Husband is Ranting Again

Tonight again the same rant. Why do we ever go to restaurants? Because of this.

Sockeye, couscous and roasted tomatoes

This is the second night we had really good dinners. Yesterday I did soft shell crabs for him.

Grilled soft shells with mustard butter

Served with this.

One stop shopping at Boarman’s for the crabs. Live when you see them, and cleaned for you as you wait. Oh, and vodka for your cosmos. Where else can you get liquor and dinner to take home?

Both nights featured Linden wines as well. With the crabs, a 2009 Hardscrabble, big, rich and luscious to cut through the richness of the crabs. Tonight a 2009 Avenius, completely different due to the flintiness of her soil. This chardonnay was citrusy, with just a hint of malolactic fermentation. It perfectly complimented the oiliness of the salmon.

At the moment, I think the Avenius is drinking better than the Hardscrabble. The Hardscrabble, though, is a huge wine which will need cellaring. Might not peak for 7-10 years. Linden’s big chards are Burgundian in style, and take years to develop. I may not have the patience to wait that long.

As for desserts lately, we have a few. How about Shoofly Pie from the Amish vendor at the Briggs Chaney market?

I picked up a couple small shoofly pies from the Amish vendors along with some homemade egg noodles. Nice market. Not big, but with a few really good vendors. If you live in South HoCo, not far away at all. These pies will be dessert later tonight with some High’s vanilla ice cream.

I am doing a good job of avoiding chain groceries, and certainly not eating badly. I think this is working out well. Shopping at markets and local businesses. Works for me.

hocofood@@@

Dining Al Fresco … West County Style

One thing I learned moving out here. We don’t run out for dinner or order carryout like we did in Columbia. Not as many choices without driving. My neighbors and friends out here have more meals outside, in the quiet countryside, with family and friends. Friday night al fresco dining is this for us.

The view is way better from my chair than parking lots or storm water management ponds.

We can spend lots of money to go out for dinner, but honestly, dinner on the patio is so much more relaxed, and a fraction of the cost. Everything at dinner tonight was bought without setting foot in a chain grocery store. The entire meal, minus wine, cost about twelve bucks.

The soup: cauliflower leek

I made using CSA veggies with organic almond milk and vegetable broth. Indian spices. The sausage that finished the soup. Homemade hot Italian from Boarman’s.

The salads: CSA oranges and beets from the Lancaster market. Tomato and goat cheese mozzarella, also from Lancaster. The basil from my garden. The oil from Casual Gourmet.

The bread: Atwater’s rosemary Italian. The wine: Linden chardonnay. I figure the dinner cost me $12 in supplies. The wine $20. What would I pay for a meal this good in a restaurant? Two times? Three? The wine alone is the equivalent of a decent Burgundy, that would cost me $40-$50 in a restaurant. I suppose I could order a $10 wine marked up to $30 which is the usual markup.

I know I am unique in loving to cook. I know I now have the time to do so. But, I used to “pee” away how much time with a beeper at restaurants waiting for a table. I think I prefer spending that time cooking, and not roaming around being bored and paying ridiculous prices for a beer or glass of wine while waiting for a table in the chain restaurants in Columbia.

My cocktails are better, too. Meyer lemon basil fizz, anyone?

Have a great weekend everyone!

hocofood@@@

Spargel Season

OK, being German, I know spargel season is generally referring to white asparagus in Germany but it is the generic name for asparagus over there.

The first time we experienced the season was in 1989, when we went to visit neighbors who had relocated to a suburb of Munich. Everywhere you went, spargel was on the menu. Asparagus and springtime are a match to me. Tonight was a German night.

Asparagus, grilled. Weisswurst, grilled. Two of my favorite spring ingredients. Simply prepared. To me, wurst is one of those childhood memory foods. We had all kinds of wurst in the house. Leberwurst. Bratwurst. Knockwurst. Weisswurst. Bierwurst. Blutwurst. You name it. We had it on the dinner table, or on sandwiches for lunch.

I fired up the grill tonight and indulged in a trip down memory lane. Most of what was served came from farmer’s markets or local sources.

The spargel. From my local CSA. Along with spring onions from the Catonsville farmer’s market. Grilled dry and then finished with lemon olive oil, salt and pepper.

The wurst. Bought in Lancaster at the Central Market. These wurst are some of the best I have found.

The salad on the side. Tomatoes from Lancaster, served with goat cheese mozzarella, and lemon basil from my garden, bought at Sharp’s Farm. Ariston olive oil from Casual Gourmet drizzled over the top.

The mustard. Lowensenf, bought in Lancaster. First bought by me in Germany. The taste of German mustard. Something I remember from childhood.

The wine to accompany it. A sauvignon blanc from Glen Manor. That citrusy New Zealand style that will cut through the richness of the veal and the mustard, and compliment the meal.

Hmmm, other than the salt and pepper, to make this meal, we never set foot in a grocery store. Eating fresh real food, made from scratch. Evoking memories of my childhood. Can it get any better?

hocofood@@@