Food stylist? No. Glutton? Check.
One Local Summer: Week Four meal
On Tuesday, I made pasta for our OLS meal. Making it from scratch is a fairly easy thing to do, provided you have a pasta-maker and a willing 3.5-year-old to give it a turn. (Making it from scratch without the maker is fairly easy, too, frankly; it's just a bit more laborious.)
Herbed egg pasta with Broccoli in a garlic/white wine reduction
Guess-The-Squash caramelized with garlic, shallots, and sweet onions
Green beans! Late edition! First batch of the year.
Salad of chard, kale, arugula, cress, and oakleaf lettuce with vinaigrette
Blackberries for dessert
Tabor Hill White Heritage wine
Notes: The flour is some of the last of my local stash. I need to order more, but am hesitating, as it's summer and whole-wheat flour doesn't keep for long, and I am not making nearly the amount of bread I made this winter. The Guess-The-Squash were the products of one planted crookneck squash and three volunteers: one looks like an eight-ball zucchini, one looks like a white pattypan, and one looks like a zephyr. Did I ever plant, or even compost, anything that looks like any of the above? NO. (One's growing in the compost pile, though, so I must have some culpability.) I tossed them with some very non-local EVOO and broiled them on a cookie sheet. With the exception of the flour (90 miles), the wine (19 miles) and the olive oil, everything else was a product of the garden or the chickens.
After two glasses of wine, I thought about the meal and said to myself, geez, this meal is vegan. Then I remembered the three eggs in the pasta (thanks, Bea and Pauline) and scratched that notion. The meal was dairy-free, however. (Oh how I wish I had local butter. My meals would be so guilt-free, local-purchase-wise. But I thought about it, and believe me, olive oil and coffee are something I would definitely trade a few hides for...maybe there's a dairy who needs some architectural work done out there??? Will Work For Butter, her tagline)
Pasta recipe follows in the comments...
12 comments:
Butter, raw milk, cream, cheese - unlike Jack, I would not be trading a cow for beans.
We have local olive oil but my town used to have lots of little dairy farms - sigh! I can't find a local dairy source.
Pasta + summer fare look great. Really enjoying seeing what you all are cooking and eating.
Ha. Will work for Butter. Love it. There has to be local butter somewhere. There just has to. You need to start scouting for cows. Driving around, looking for people with just a few cows. They will have butter. Your meal looks so lovely and I absolutely love your tablecloth! How pretty. Is it old?
Nada: Local olive oil! I swear Australia is the Promised Land. I am glad you're enjoying OLS, even though it is winter where you are...
M, I have a line on a grass-fed animal farmer who trades flesh for cheese and butter with some Amish blokes. Thanks, though, about the tablecloth. It's batik, not too old, and is part of my Indian love affair (from India, natch: love them paisleys)
OKAY enough folks have asked so the pasta recipe is as follows:
2 c flour*
2 big eggs, or 3 if using whole-wheat flour*
2 T water, stock or (sniff) melted butter (I used water)
1/2-1t salt
Big bunch of herbs: blanch in boiling water a minute, rinse, THEN chop. I used parsley, summer savory, and marjoram in this batch.
Pour flour on counter, make well in center, then crack eggs in the well. Add oil/stock, herbs, and salt and break up with a fork, slowly adding more flour as you go. Begin kneading dough, adding as much flour as you can, 3-4 mins. Let rest under plastic, or damp towel, 10-15 mins. Here you can roll it out or divide it and put it through the pasta maker. Makers have the advantage of finishing up the kneading for you, and the pasta is lots thinner. Cut noodles as you like; you can either dry them out or cook them immediately...either way, they won't take long to cook, much less than dried pasta. This makes a lot of pasta: good sized servings for four hungry people, say.
Very impressive. And such a delicious summer meal. Yay, you!
As for the butter, just buy a couple of carbon offsets. All the cool people do.
:-P
I've been following, somewhat, the OLS thing. I'm glad to finally find a meal that I'd recognize as a meal! LOL! Looks great!
And me, you know, I don't find a thing in the world wrong with importing *some* things -- coffee, chocolate, tea. I buy wheat usually about 500# at a time and that's more fuel efficient than a weekly trip to the store even though it is from Montana. Etc. Just lots to think about if one really considers it. I've been collecting photographs of zero miles meals though.
hey El,
it's surprisingly simple to make your own butter - put some cream in jar and shake. drain off the butter milk and shake some more. et voila. gotta be some dairies within a stone's throw to set you up with some cream.
baci, Teem
CC: We've done offsets for our airline travel. Plenary indulgences, you know. I just canNOT get over my love of butter, though!
CG: I'm glad you're following along! I swear, though, a decent grain mill is on my list of must-haves, especially once I learned that wheat berries don't "go bad." Eleu had a post not too long ago about the relative size of salads (and the USDA's puny recommendations for such) and I had to laugh. OUR notion of salad size is also big: each of us refilled our plates with salad after all the pasta was gone. It's just what we do, and can't imagine how people can only eat a cup at a time. But girl, I am envious of your beautiful cow!
Teem: been there! Raw milk dairies vanished long ago here in Chicago Second Home territory, unfortunately. Made butter all last summer, but the seller's run afowl of the the law by selling to people like me. Still looking, though.
Will Work For Butter...
excellent!
I keep meaning to try my hand at homemade pasta. Even have an attachment for my kitchenaid, but the one time I tried, it was a disaster and I just haven't had the guts to get back in there. I really need to.
Like Kelly, I've been wanting to try homemade pasta for a long time--I'm going to use your recipe to psych myself up.
no doubt the oil etc. has been traded forever... and yay for pasta machines manned by little people! better than play dough!
Kelly and Lucette: Stacie brings up an excellent point: Play-doh is the exact consistency that pasta dough should be to put it through the wringer. It can be a tiny bit more dry, though, if you roll it out by hand, as it can stick to the roller. It is a mess. I tend to knead and keep the dough in a bowl the whole time; it makes less of a mess. The yards of pasta you get will take up enough counter space, believe me.
And Stacie: you've figured out the kids can help you weed, so put those boys to work with the pasta crank! I swear they don't get tired of it, as I do.
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