Music and Cats

This was the week when it felt like summer really might come to Seattle this year. Several days of sunshine, and temperatures close to normal, brought smiles to people’s faces — or perhaps the ripe, fragrant strawberries at the farmers’ markets were the cause of those grins. Goodbye, Juneuary! And welcome, Summer, with all of your delicious pleasures.

I celebrated the arrival of the summer solstice by eating locally the entire day. Well, there were small non-local exceptions: a few spices, a little olive oil, the all-important morning latte (made and delivered to my bedside table by my sweetheart), and a bit of sugar and cornstarch. The flour I used was milled in Washington from wheat grown in the Pacific Northwest. All of the produce, meat and dairy I ate was grown/raised/produced within 150 miles of our home. (The Google Maps Distance Calculator will calculate fairly precise as-the-crow-flies distances between two locations. I can locate the town - or even the road - where a particular farm is located, then locate our house, and the calculator provides the distance to the 100th of a mile. This delights the nerd in me no end.)

For breakfast, I had the last of the egg custard. All of the ingredients for custard (eggs and milk, honey and vanilla) are common ingredients of traditional breakfast foods, so why not enjoy custard for breakfast? Did I mention that custard is lovely with coffee? Of course our coffee isn’t locally grown, but we drink Stumptown Coffee’s Holler Mountain blend, which is made from organic, fair trade Indonesian and Latin American beans, roasted locally.

Lunch was a big salad. I’m struggling to eat all of the beautiful salad greens that have been in our CSA box the past two weeks. (My husband Paul is not a salad eater.) The frisee and mystery lettuces, which Local Roots‘ farmer Siri has since identified as Italienischer and Flashy Trout’s Back (love that name), formed a leafy nest for the tiniest, sweetest carrots, sugar snap peas, juicy greenhouse-grown tomato, and Black Forest-style nugget ham. (Oh, this ham! I don’t generally care for ham, but this was love at first bite.) I whisked together an all-local dressing of apple cider and Asian pear vinegars, wildflower honey, minced garlic scapes and hazelnut oil.

Mid-afternoon, I snacked on crisp, sweet Chelan cherries, dunked in quark, a smooth, tangy fresh cheese.

The wild salmon runs are seasonal, so during the summer, we do like bears do, and feast on it. (Halibut, too, though I don’t think it’s bear food.) The fish we buy from Wilson Fish at our farmers’ markets is only a couple of days out of the water, and it’s the best I’ve ever eaten. We’ll freeze some fish at the end of the season, so that we can have an occasional taste during the winter, but now’s the time to enjoy it at its best. To go with the salmon (slow-roasted with olive oil and pepper), I mashed Yukon gold and russet potatoes with garlic scape-infused milk, butter, quark and pepper, and sauteed sugar snap peas in a bit of olive oil just long enough to warm them through.

For dessert, I baked strawberry rhubarb cobbler, adapted from Elise’s cobbler at Simply Recipes. I could have made a compote with purely local ingredients, but I really wanted some sort of topping, and I could make a cobbler topping with more local ingredients than a I could a crisp. In the filling, I used honey in place of sugar, and subbed cornstarch for tapioca. (The cornstarch sub had nothing to do with eating locally; we just didn’t have any tapioca.) When it came time for make the topping, I realized that I’d run out of honey (would it have worked in a biscuit-like topping?), so I used sugar. Sadly, I didn’t get a good photo of the cobbler before we ate it (but it looked a lot like the cobbler in Elise’s photo).

Where’d it all come from?
Alvarez Organic Farm: sugar snap peas
Anselmo’s Organics: potatoes
Appel Farms: quark
Golden Glen Creamery: cream
Holmquist Hazelnut Orchards: hazelnut oil
Kittitas Valley Greenhouse: tomato
Local Roots Farm: lettuces, frisee, garlic scapes
McPhail’s Berry Farm: strawberries
Nash’s Organic Produce: carrots, rhubarb
Rockridge Orchards: vinegars, honey
Sea Breeze Farm: milk
Skagit River Ranch: eggs
Stone Buhr / Shepherd’s Grain: all-purpose flour
Wilson Fish: salmon
California: olive oil
Even less local: sugar, cornstarch, baking powder
Far, far away: coffee, vanilla, nutmeg, pepper
Whew! The list for a full day is much longer than for just one meal!

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