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Daily Archives: March 9, 2012

Winter CSA Week Eleven, and Dinner from the Box

Posted on March 9, 2012 by AnnieRie

An accidental Eat Local Dinner was made today because the freezer was too full.

Today is CSA delivery day, so this morning my husband went to grab an ice pack to put in the cooler for the CSA delivered meat and eggs. The freezer is pretty full, between sorbets for me while recovering and the accumulation of meat and frozen veggies delivered the past few weeks.

So, I said, take out the chicken and put it in the crockpot. Frozen? Yes, frozen. Frozen chicken in the crockpot is an easy way to make soup. If you try to put a fresh chicken in the pot, it will totally disintegrate before dinner. Chicken mush isn’t appetizing. The beauty of crockpot cooking is the ability to use frozen items like we did.

The makings for dinner. All dumped in the pot, including the butter used later to spread on the chicken, and the turkey stock left in the freezer since Thanksgiving. It is the start of three or four meals, which included chicken tonight with potatoes from the CSA box last week and greens delivered today. The rest will be shredded then the broth pulled out of the pot. Broth will go back in Sunday with a soffrito and the chicken to make the basis for chicken noodle soup. Leftover big pieces of chicken will be used for chicken salad, and there will be enough soup for two dinners. The only safety tip about cooking frozen meat is to let it cook on high, not low, for at least 6 hours, then switch to low if you don’t want it to fall apart.

This is the platter ready to serve. All of this chicken won’t be used for the dinner, but put aside for the salad. All of the rest of the carcass and dark meats are still in the crockpot waiting to be pulled apart and deboned.

As for what came today in the CSA box, there were:

Salad Greens – used for dinner
Collard Greens
Oranges from Florida
Mixed Onions
Carrots
Turnips

The meat this week was JW Treuth’s center cut pork chops.

Also included were my biweekly eggs, all shapes sizes and colors, even a long pointy one.

So, dinner tonight was almost 100% from my winter CSA. The only non-CSA items were the butter from South Mountain, the turkey stock from my Maple Lawn turkey, and the dressing for the greens from Catoctin Mountain. Oh, and salt, pepper and herbs de Provence.

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Eating Locally: Lunches This Week

Posted on March 9, 2012 by AnnieRie

In order to give my husband a break from cooking a completely local meal this week, I decided to concentrate on what I have been eating most days for lunch. I know I get into lunch ruts and this is one of them. The beauty of it is that I have been eating mostly local items for lunch, and for breakfast all week.

The best part of this choice, the last of my canned pickles.

With my CSA delivered eggs, some CSA celery and definitely not local mayo, my husband made a batch of egg salad for me. It has lasted for four days. The color is only from the yolks, no mustard. There is salt and pepper in it as well. Here is all that is left in the bottom of the storage container. Getting down to the dregs of the salad and time to make a new batch.

While talking about eating locally, for the Dark Days Challenge, my breakfast has included a local item most days as well.

My neighbor’s canned concord grape jelly on toast. Wish I had some Atwater’s bread for it, but due to my diet restrictions after the surgery, I need to eat soft breads. Can’t wait to get back to real food.

You can still eat most meals with a major component coming from local vendors and sources, and skip the processed stuff at the store. My mayo is organic, but obviously not made from scratch. That is a bit much to ask my hubby, who is still carrying the brunt of the cooking load since I can’t stand over the counter and cook until the doctor clears me.

Fifteen weeks into this challenge. Eating locally grown or made items at least one meal, and usually more every week. We are lucky to live in a fresh food oasis, instead of a food desert.

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