Tag Archives: eat local

Dinner at Local Harvest and a winery trip

After some house and apartment hunting on Wednesday afternoon, our hungry crew (our little fam + Matthew’s mom and sister) needed a place for an early-bird dinner.  Enter Local Harvest Cafe.

Although I’ve been there many times, this was the first visit that necessitated a high chair.  In reply to my tweet asking if they had high chairs — they do (funny how you don’t notice these things when you don’t have kids), they also said they had wooden veggies for baby entertainment.

Sir enjoyed the real food far too much to need the wood version, and I don’t blame him.  We started with some wonderful vegan meatballs made from sweet potato and eggplant, served with a chimichurri sauce.  This was my favorite dish, but also the one thing we didn’t photograph.  Fortunately, the rest of the meal was well-documented.

Matthew and I split the house made gnocchi in cauliflower-pea soup (above), which was that evening’s green plate special, and the chard-wrapped tamales with mushroom filling, served with a side of purple slaw (below).  I love the colors on the tamale plate.

Pam and Rachel shared the wild mushroom stroganoff.  Matthew tried a bite, and proclaimed it the best stroganoff ever, with lots of mushroom flavor — we plan to return soon and order this dish ourselves.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get any photos of Sir enjoying the delicious offerings, but if you’re hoping for a cute baby picture, don’t despair!

We started the holiday weekend early with a trip to Montelle Winery on Friday afternoon.  Despite buying local wines almost exclusively since I’ve lived in St. Louis, I’ve never actually visited one of the wineries.

Gabriel checked things out from the floor while we tasted wines, and later enjoyed the scenic view from the large deck.

While at the winery, we were in the midst of negotiating a verbal offer on a FSBO house.  Between that and a fussy, refusing-to-nurse baby, it was pretty impossible to focus on the wine or relax and enjoy the beautiful scenery.

I’ll admit that I was longing for some baby-free time to really enjoy the wine and setting, but I guess we’ll just have to make another trip to wine country, sooner, rather than later, I hope!

All photos in the post courtesy of Gabriel’s Aunt Rachel.

Fennel pesto

In last week’s garden post, I mentioned Matthew’s biodiversity micro-grant award to grow celeriac and paw paws. However, he actually proposed growing three items, not two, with fennel being the third item.

Poor little fennel felt a bit left out after my omission, so today he’s getting his very own post.

If you’ve bought fennel at the grocery store, you probably got something that looked like this:

Fenouil
Fennel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mostly bulb, some stalk, and perhaps a spattering of feathery fronds.

Like a lot of supermarket produce, it looks rather different than the straight-from-the-garden version:

Our fennel (June 2011)

See all the featheriness on top?  The fronds do not keep nearly as well as the bulb, hence the missing top half on most grocery store fennel.

Though this year’s crop is nowhere near that size, we harvested a couple of bulbs for early eating (also making room for the remaining plants to grow larger).  After roasting the bulb, we were left with a lot of fronds, which, I’ll admit, sat in the fridge for quite a few days.

They were at the “use it or toss it to make room for other things” stage.  In Stacy’s recent post about CSA membership, the discussion turned to how to use everything that’s part of the weekly produce delivery.

I hate to waste food, so I chopped the fennel fronds and created a twist on the traditional basil pesto.   If you’re lucky enough to pick up a fresh, locally grown fennel bulb at the farmers’ market or receive one as part of a CSA box, you can make use of the flavorful fronds with this recipe.

Fennel pesto

Recipe by Melissa

Ingredients
1-2 c. chopped fennel fronds and stalks
3/4 c. olive oil
2-3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
1/4 t. salt
1/4 c. pistachios (I used roasted & salted)
Opt. 1 T. lemon juice, or to taste*

Directions
Add all ingredients to blender or food processor and process until desired smoothness.

Serving Suggestions

  • Stir into a grain, protein, veggie dish.  I combined cooked couscous, rice, and lentils with chopped raw carrots, summer squash, and kohl rabbi.  Mix in the fennel pesto, adjust salt as needed, and you have a quick, easy meal.
  • Add extra lemon juice (and perhaps a bit of water) to create a tasty salad dressing.  If you still have the fennel bulb, make a salad with a bed of greens, roasted fennel and/or thin slices of raw fennel,
    pistachios, and olives.
  • Use any way that you would use basil pesto, e.g., on top of pasta, as a pizza sauce, etc.
  • Spread onto bread for a simple appetizer or as a sandwich ingredient.

*I didn’t add lemon juice in my original recipe, but  it would be a nice addition.

Related post: Monumental fennel (with recipe for roasted fennel)

Since today is Bike to Work Day, here’s my post from BtW Day last year, when I was 32 weeks pregnant: Finally Bike Somewhere Day.

Early May garden tour

Matthew and his mom have been hard at work this spring, putting in time weeding and mulching now to [theoretically] reduce the workload later.  For mulch, Matthew purchased several bales of straw — transporting them to the garden two or three bales at a time on our bike rack — and Pam picked up more coffee bean sacks.

I must admit that I haven’t actually been to the garden in a couple of weeks, and things change quickly in a spring garden.  Fortunately, you can join me on a virtual garden tour.  (Unfortunately, you can’t taste the food virtually.)

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A few things of note:

  • Most of the garden-fresh produce we’ve been eating has come from plants that wintered-over, some inside and some outside the low tunnel — lettuce, kale, carrots, and Swiss chard.
  • After years of struggling to grow spinach, we have a bumper crop this year, and it is delicious!
  • The attempts to winterize the artichokes failed, so Matthew started new plants from seed this year.
  • Our tomato seedlings look WAY better than anything I saw for sale at the farmers’ market on Saturday.  Just sayin’.
  • Some of the potatoes are already blooming, and Matthew cut scapes off of some of the garlic last weekend.
  • A rascally rabbit got inside the fence and dined on tender young pea shoots, so we mat not have much in the way of a spring pea crop.

Also, more exciting garden-related news: Matthew found out yesterday that he is the recipient of a Slow Food St. Louis biodiversity micro-grant!  His application included plans to grow celeriac and paw paws, both items that Slow Food StL identified as being of interest to local chefs.

If there’s anything I’m missing, I’ll let Matthew add it in the comments.

How’s YOUR garden growing?

Market morning

I just returned from a lovely visit to the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market — the first of the season.  Their new eight o’clock opening time made it easy to beat the heat.

I don’t like the heat even in the summer, when it’s supposed to be hot, so you can imagine my feelings about kicking off May with a week of 90ish degree temps.  Since I can’t do anything about the heat, I may as well enjoy the earlier than usual produce that comes with it.

I filled the milk crate on my bike with strawberries, asparagus, and a small head of cabbage.  We have tons of greens (Swiss chard, spinach, lettuce, arugula) from our garden right now, so I didn’t need to buy much else.

Back at home, I enjoyed breakfast number two — pancakes with fresh sliced strawberries.  Delicious!

I’d mostly avoided eating the imposters (i.e., berries trucked in from far, far away) over the last year.  The first strawberries of the year were worth the wait.

I found a farmer selling organic practices, no-spray berries, so I can eat them without wondering what else I’m eating along with them, extra important since Sir will no doubt be enjoying some of these berries.  (Sir would probably be perfectly happy to eat ALL of the strawberries — that kid can put it away!)

Eating through last year’s crops

Spring has sprung, and while we’re already enjoying freshly harvested produce, we’re still eating through the tail end of our 2011 harvest.

The cruciferous plot

We finished the last of the onions at the end of March.  We dug the onions at the end of June, which means we had garden onions nine months out of the year — not bad!  We made it that long even though some of the stored onions went bad, despite our drying and storing efforts.

We already have some Egyptian onions coming in from the garden, but not enough for our everyday needs.  Going to the store to buy a bag of onions the other day felt strange.  I guess if we were hardcore locavores, we would do without onions right now.

The potatoes lasted a similar period of time from harvest to depletion — harvested in late July and finished in early April.  They made their final stand in a delicious potato salad Matthew’s mom made for our Easter gathering.

So what’s left?

Non-processed, root cellar-type items

  • Two HUGE sweet potatoes
  • A few assorted winter squash

Canned

  • A few jars of green beans
  • Tomatoes and tomato sauce
  • Catsup
  • The shelves are not as full as they were here!

Frozen

  • Six one-quart bags of cooked, pureed winter squash
  • Six bags of Swiss chard
  • Maybe some other stuff that I’m not thinking of right now.  We have a very official system for tracking this that I will show you someday.

Matt’s mom also discovered some frozen garden veggies with 2010 dates on them in her deep freeze, so we’re helping take care of those.

Though I often bemoan the amount of Matthew’s time that goes into the garden, and his lack of free weekends during a majority of the year, we DO get quite a bit of food from his efforts.  Since he’s unlikely to give up gardening any time soon, it’s good to focus on the delicious results as much as possible.

Rainbow on my plate