Local Food Options for the Week

In southern Arizona, there is an abundance of fresh food locally available even in winter. For example, here is the share from the CSA late last week:


As you can see, it includes beets with greens, I’itoi onions (similar to green onions but stronger), red LaSoda potatoes, Hakurei (white) turnips with greens, bok choy, a bag of mixed braising greens, and cilantro. There are lots of potatoes because I traded my mustard greens for another portion of spuds. I also brought home a few extras from the surplus - a beet, a couple more turnips but without the greens, and some wilted cilantro. And someone brought tangerines in from their tree so I picked up one for my sweetie.

Knowing that I was going to try this local eating experiment, I saved some of my share from the previous week: some carrots, black Spanish radish, sweet potatoes, and more red potatoes. These hearty root vegetables keep well so it is not uncommon for my CSA share to be spread over more than the week in which they were received. Oh yeah, I also still have some local apples from the farmer's market.

In fact, because I haven't been eating exclusively local food, I have other things on hand from past CSA shares. These are from weeks, months, or even a year ago. Winter squash keep well in my cold office and give it a nice seasonal feel. I've got an onion or two left from a while back along with dried goods that keep very well such as beans with dried red chiles, wheat, and oat groats (in the freezer).

My sweetie's garden offers additional fresh options:


Peppers and dill


More peppers and Italian parsley


Cabbages - what the pests left for us.


Broccoli raab. There are also some broccoli plants that never produced but the leaves are edible.


Peas


That mint plant I bought at the end of November has recovered from my heavy harvesting. I think I need to prune it back!

The citrus trees in the back yard have a few fruit each so we have ripe grapefruit, lemons, and tangerines available.

The real key to being able to enjoy eating local foods, though, is having plenty of variety available from the harvests throughout the year. I am passionate about preserving foods year-round from my CSA share, extra produce purchased from the CSA farmer or the local farmer's market, my garden or garden goodies shared by friends, and wild harvested food. As you can see from the list I posted over the summer, it's possible to expand the meal possibilities almost endlessly with preserved foods. I don't have everything on that list now by any stretch of the imagination because we, of course, eat them up! And, I like to make small batches of several different kinds of preserved foods rather than enormous batches of the same thing.

Today I am pondering what sort of meals I can put together with the fresh foods, along with the dry and preserved foods. Breakfast possibilities include quick bread, oatmeal, or winter squash breakfast (with water instead of soymilk). My ideas for lunch and dinner are peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, roasted vegetables (maybe curried, to be served with cilantro-mint chutney), oat groat pilaf, sprouted wheat berry pilaf, pumpkin chipotle soup, and Irish garden soup with Irish soda bread. These are just the ones that came to mind as I looked at what I have on hand.

I need to go check now to see if I have enough flour left from the local wheat to bake a loaf of bread for the sandwiches. If not, I'll have to grind some tonight on the exercise bike. And, before making plans for those oat groats, I really should check to make sure they haven't gone rancid. First, though, I better get the root veggies out in the solar oven to start roasting.

Anyone else hungry?!