One Local Summer: Week 11

Sadly, the Internets failed me last Sunday. We were on Vancouver Island with family, staying at Fairburn Farm and eating wonderful local food… and when I sat down to write the week’s post for One Local Summer, I couldn’t connect to the Web. Truth be told, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time while on vacation writing, but I was sorry to miss the weekly check-in, especially as most of the food we were eating was produced within just a few kilometers of where we were staying. Our trip to Fairburn Farm and the Cowichan Valley deserves its own post, and there will be one soon.

Since we arrived home on Tuesday night, I’ve been eating mostly locally, but haven’t had much time for documentation, until today. And this weekend, it’s been hot in Seattle. At dinnertime this evening, it was 80 degrees in our house. I had no interest in cooking. I opened the fridge, and, I’ll admit, enjoyed the chill while I gathered the ingredients for a big height of summer salad: spicy salad mix, purlane and red tomatoes from this week’s CSA share, carrots and fennel from last week’s, yellow bell pepper, black forest ham, yellow tomatoes from our front yard (I’ve harvested six so far!), and my usual salad dressing of local cider vinegar, honey, mustard, and hazelnut oil. Crisp, crunchy, juicy, sweet, tart, savory and COLD; it was delicious.

This morning, before it got hot, I baked up my first ever batch of sourdough English muffins, using this recipe from Wild Yeast. They don’t have quite the craggy texture of the Thomas’ muffins on which I grew up, but they are delicious — they crisp beautifully in the toaster, and have a chewy, slightly sour crumb. And they’re surprisingly simple to make; while the process takes about 12 hours start to finish, most of that is time that the sourdough starter is doing its thing (and you’re doing something else… like sleeping). My one heat-producing activity for tonight’s dinner was toasting this muffin to go with my salad. It was worth the added heat. Yum.

Friday evening, I made syrup from most of a half flat of raspberries that had gotten a bit smushed. After heating the raspberries in a double boiler until the juices ran (but not until thoroughly cooked), I strained the berries through a sieve; the result was about 2 cups of raspberry juice/puree. To the juice, I added 3/4 cup of blackberry honey, brought the mixture to a boil, and simmered for a few minutes to thicken slightly. I put half of the syrup in a couple of small freezer containers for future sourdough pancake breakfasts, and the rest in a jar in the fridge. We ate some on this morning’s pancakes (cooked while the English muffins were proofing), and we’ve also used the syrup this weekend to flavor some of the massive quantities of homemade fizzy water that we’ve been drinking in an effort to beat the heat. (Have I mentioned that it has been hot here?) Just a tablespoon or so of syrup makes a lightly flavored “soda”… and isn’t it a pretty color?

For dessert, we had homemade mixed berry (rasp-, black- and logan-) sorbet. While the berries were local, the sugar was not… nor was the glug of cherry brandy, the remains of a jar of brandied cherries we received as a gift a while back, that I mixed into the fruit in an effort to keep the sorbet soft. It did the job well, so that, by the time the mixture was frozen hard enough the eat, it was too late in the evening to get a good picture.

Where’d it all come from?
Alvarez Organic Farm: yellow pepper
Bluebird Grain Farms: whole wheat flour
Golden Glen Creamery: cream
Holmquist Hazelnut Orchards: hazelnut oil
Jessie’s Berries: raspberries, blackberries, loganberries
Local Roots Farm: spicy salad mix, purslane, tomatoes, carrots, fennel
McPhail’s Berry Farm: strawberries
Rockridge Orchards: vinegar, honey
Skagit River Ranch: ham
Smith Brothers’ Farm: milk
Stone Buhr / Shepherd’s Grain: all-purpose flour
Washington: alder-smoked Walla Walla onion mustard
California: olive oil
Even less local: sugar, baking soda
Far, far away: pepper