The first nearby farmers market opens tomorrow! Our experimental year of eating only local produce is at an end. The experiment was a success! We’ve made a lifestyle change. It’s a change that was building for a while, and we took it to a higher level over the past year. Next year, I hope that my planning ahead pays off well enough that we don’t feel the need to join a winter CSA, or buy the occasional grocery store tomato sauce or potatoes. (Flashback to my first post shows what I thought we were getting ourselves into.)
In this last week of the year, we’ve eaten more generously of the vegetables we’d been hoarding. Green beans, frozen spread out on a cookie sheet to stay separate, then transferred to a pint yogurt container, really did stay separate and were easy to cook with. They joined frozen stewed diced tomatoes and grocery store raisins and chickpeas in a Tunisian stew based on a Moosewood Cooks at Home recipe. It gets coriander, some cinnamon, turmeric, and cayenne; salt of course; and at the very end a generous splash of lemon juice. The recipe as written involves a few vegetables, none of which are green beans. It also, as written, involves measuring out the spices.
My husband more closely followed another recipe from Moosewood Cooks at Home, this one for Vegetable Stifado. He tossed in potato, eggplant, green pepper, kale, carrots, and more stewed diced tomato, a list which overlaps the vegetables called for in the recipe. There were a lot of colors, shapes, and textures, making it an attractive meal. It’s spiced with dill, rosemary, garlic, salt, pepper, and lemon juice, and was excellent with leftover red wine added in, too.
As the first harvests of spring become available to us, we’ll be eating the sorts of season-blending meals that have come to feel so unnatural. Butternut squash stored on a kitchen shelf since November can join corn frozen mid-summer and fresh new spring radish greens in a single year-spanning meal. Fittingly, the Jewish holiday Shavuos is later this week. It celebrates the first produce of the year. That’s truly something worth celebrating.
Tags: carrot, eggplant, green beans, kale, pepper, potato, tomato
May 27, 2009 at 5:05 am |
Congrats on the 1 year! I feel the same way about “blended meals” as I try to eat down my stores, both freezer and cool storage. Last night was acorn squash (cool storage) with cranberries (frozen) and cranberry jam (canned). Alongside was a fresh salad with lettuce (garden this year!) and early asparagus. Very satisfying. Are you going to keep up the blog for another year?