My intent was to start the all local cooking week yesterday, but I ran into a couple of snags.

1)  Sophie had an early morning doctor's appointment, so I was not able to make our first local meal for breakfast.
2)  Our crock pot appears to have largely expired.  When set on high it seems to heat to low, and when set to low it doesn't really heat at ( Read more... )

mechanteanemone  says that my two greatest flaws as a human being are that I like MAR Barker's world of Tekumel, and I don't particularly like soup.  I am not really prepared to address the former here (hell, I can't get anyone else to play in a campaign, so it doesn't seem to have caused too much marital disruption so far), but as part of my local food week, I ( Read more... )

Next week I am going to get into local foods again, but this time with a twist I have so far feared to take.

Starting next Monday, for an entire week, EVERYTHING I serve for the entire week will be locally made.  That's right, everything.

This has a few implications

1)  No coffee.  Probably no tea either unless we want to drink that stuff that ( Read more... )

As the owner of several energy-efficient light bulbs and a recycled umbrella, I'm familiar with the critiques of "ethical consumption." In some cases, it's not clear that ostensibly green products are better for the environment. There's also the risk that these lifestyle choices will make us complacent, sapping the drive to call senators and chain ( Read more... )

For dinner we had locally caught albacore tuna, baked with locally produced mango-jalapeño glaze, sauteed local parsnips, garlic bread (made with locally made bread and locally grown garlic), and an apple crisp (made with locally grown apples and local honey ( Read more... )

My original plan was for a pretty standard skillet fry, using ground beef instead of sausage and tossing in some spinach. Local conditions forced me to somewhat modify things, however, as the local chickens are molting at the moment (and hence not producing eggs) and there was no local spinach - or onions for that matter ( Read more... )

I decided that for this year's Thanksgiving I was going to try to put together an entire day's menu that was entirely local (or as close to it as I could manage). Today I went to the co-op to see what I could find in terms of local ingredients ( Read more... )

Local apples are in at the co-op!  Time to dive into that cookbook that Liminaut's wife gave me last year.  Yes, I know I could have gotten into it at any time, but it felt wrong to use non-local apples when the cookbook was given to me so that I could make use of the apples on our trees.

In any event, we have a couple of brands of apples to make ( Read more... )

Things have not gone perfectly this week in terms of meal planning.  Owing to some necessary schedule shifting at lunch so we could make some phone calls, we have not been eating home as much as I would have liked.  I also managed to bollux up the oyster po' boys by keeping the oysters for a bit too long before preparing them, and I will have to ( Read more... )

I spent today canning peaches, which I believe I have mentioned we have access to in some quantity.  I made 3 quarts of peaches with raspberries (which we also have in abundance) and am in the process of making a ginger/peach/pear compote at the moment.

I have yet to be attacked by ninja