After two weeks of motel rooms and eating out, it is good to be home and back in the eating local fold.
My one local meal for the week started with two chicken breasts from Farm Direct Meat, a yellow squash and knob onion from my morning trip to the Chesterton European Market, and some odds and ends from my garden.
I wanted comfort food so I used a bit of non-local Red Mill baking mix (maybe a 1/2 cup left in a container that I wanted to empty), an egg from Creighton Brothers and Crystal Lake eggs (Atwood, Indiana) and milk from Fair Oaks Dairy (Fair Oaks, Indiana) to bread the chicken after I cut it into chunks. I fried those in a bit of olive oil (non-local). One of the things I most want to find is a source of local grain products (e.g., flour, pasta, whole grains, something).
To accompany the chicken, I sliced the onion and chopped one of my final three heads of garlic from last summer’s market into a bit of olive oil. I sliced the squash and added it. To this I added a couple handfuls of green beans, the quarter cup or so of peas that my vines produced, and the two side shoots of broccoli that I salvaged when I returned home earlier this week. I heated until just warm but still very crunchy. Just before I turned off the heat, I added some rosemary leaves I had picked while the vegetables cooked. Once on the plate I drizzled some non-local balsamic vinegar on top. The veggies would have been even better with some halved grape tomatoes but sadly no tomatoes were ready to be picked today.
The meal did not seem complete when it was on the plate so I quickly washed a handful of blueberries and cherries from Lehman’s Orchards) (Niles, MI) and added those. To add some more color to the photo, I garnished the plate with some basil and a nasturtium blossom from the containers on my deck.
This is the end result with plenty of leftovers for tomorrow.
3 Comments
July 13, 2008 at 12:41 am
It’s so pretty!
July 13, 2008 at 1:07 pm
[...] The woman behind this blog It is good to be home – OLS Week 6 [...]
July 13, 2008 at 2:19 pm
That looks so yummy and delicious! My husband made a quick run to the farmers’ market this morning, because we had limited time. It was a blueberry binge! I’m off to make blueberry yummies for breakfast!