Another in my series of possibly-not-so-appetizing photos of oh-so-delicious food. Local food. Ingredients either grown by me or gotten from those who did. I still find knowing where your food comes from endlessly satisfying, it doesn’t get old. Anyhow, without further ado, on to the one-pot, no-culinary-skills-required Beef and Eggplant Stew.

Here are the ingredients and the method, all in one. Tossed in whole a piece of tough-unless-slow-cooked grass-fed beef (this cut was medallion), added onions, carrots, garlic, a Yukon Gold potato cut up small so it would dissolve and thicken, plus well-water and a little imported salt and fresh-ground pepper. Simmered covered for quite a while, maybe two hours—on the wood stove would’ve been fun, and efficient, but it wasn’t lit—then added the secret ingredient: EGGPLANT. This was purely an experiment, a few baby eggplant had been in the fridge for a while and needed to move along, so why not? I cut ‘em up, skin and all, and in they went. Another fairly long simmer, covered, until the beef was shreddable with a fork, then it was, time to eat.

As you can see from the photo below, then above, the eggplant eventually vanished, but the added texture and subtle flavor I find impossible to adequately describe. It was good. If you try this with supermarket veggies, the taste might not be there, and you might not like eggplant with your beef, any which way. Well, this is not a recipe! For me, though, I have been convinced that eggplant was DESIGNED for simple beef stew! :)

Beef and eggplant stew!

OK, perhaps not the MOST appetizing of food photos, but the point is, that’s how it looked, and it tasted great—more all-local, dead-simple cookery! Here we have my first time with this grass-feed beef honey garlic sausage from a few miles down the road—I could actually taste…honey; unusual and good! Alongside in the cast iron pan, sweet orange pepper (Orange Sun), the very last, slightly green zucchini (Golden Dawn III), and a mess of yellow cooking onion, all from the field. A little imported olive oil, salt and fresh ground black pepper, let braise-simmer for a while—an hour or so, with the zucchini added near the end—and…Bob’s yer uncle! Delicious, nutritious (I’m pretty sure), fun. :)

More local food, cooking!

Yellow Stuffer, a tomato

In the end, this is all about food and eating. Tonight, back to basics: heat applied to simple, locally grown ingredients, no culinary art or even a favorite recipe, just some mellow cooking. In the pot: grass-fed beef from a few miles down the road, plus, from our harvest, onions, carrots, potatoes, garlic, and green beans, well water, and a little store-bought salt and pepper. Simmered, covered for a while, for a couple of hours. The Yukon Gold potatoes, medium starchy, added thickness without melting away to mush. The beans, teaming up with the carrots, contributed a little veg lightness to the…stew. Dinner! (Fall must be in the air…)

Simple stew

Harvested a few tiny (tennis ball to softball-sized, like, orange to grapefruit…little ones!) cauliflower from the last-planted section of brassicas that also has kale and broccoli. It’s still producing in home-consumption quantities, but with the exception of some strap kale, they entirely missed sizing up in time for CSA or the farmers’ market at the end of October. This is the normal. I usually take a chance on a final, extra-late planting—sometimes they make it, sometimes they don’t. Now, growth is so slow, the field is really just convenient live storage.

Not ideal storage, though. These plants are hardy, but the cold—many sub-zero nights—does take its toll on the parts you want to eat. Kale fares the best, broccoli is quickly savaged, and exposed heads of cauliflower get cold-burned to an unappetizing, mushy in spots, brown. BUT, with self-blanching varieties (this one is Minuteman), the leaves curl close to cover the heads, protecting them from sun discoloration (so our white cauliflower can be…snowy white), and this works fine against cold as well.

Then there’s the eating. The summer’s abundance of fresh-picked veggies has been over for a while, and every little taste of what remains becomes more of a treat as winter approaches, supplies dwindle, memories fade. The wheel keeps on turning…! :)

Tiny fall cauliflower tastes good

A week after arrival, the 25 Shaver Red Sex Link ready-to-lay layers are starting to lay. That’s good. We’re up to 7-8 eggs a day, and most are just shy of Small (on the official egg scale), but the numbers are improving daily. Much watching and counting…you can easily get kinda obsessed by it all. Getting up to speed!

Meanwhile, after three months without, fresh-daily eggs are back on our farm menu! Today, my first taste: 4-5 small eggs, scrambled with olive oil and salt, topped up with chunks of semi-dry Hungarian hot sausage from the farmers’ market. Pretty good!

Farm eggs with hot sausage

A cool change with the much bigger farmers’ market we’re at this year is the easy access to lots more local food from other market vendors. We’re there every Saturday, and so are they! (Nothing better for really appreciating a farmers’ market than being both a seller and a buyer…).

The biggest change for me is, suddenly, there’s all sorts of LOCAL MEAT. There’s beef, bison, chicken, emu, rhea (ostrich-like), plus a cured-meat-and-sausage vendor, a butcher, and more (venison and elk, I think, and there must be pork in there as well). Still haven’t gone through it all, but I have started to taste my way through the beef. This week, I’m on to a second beef farm.

My sampling approach is simple: buy a steak cut (I prefer rib) and some ground, expensive and…less so. In the first taste test, the beef was certified organic and 100% grass-fed. Today’s, also certified, is fed a combination of grass (pasture in summer, hay in winter, of course) and corn silage, all grown on their farm.

The meal is pretty local: rib steak, grilled to medium-rare and lightly salted, topped with grilled garlic scapes, tossed in a salt, pepper and olive oil, and our all-lettuce mesclun, just cut, with a drizzle of olive oil and a splash of apple cider vinegar.

The scapes are from our market stand neighbors (it’s so sad not having our own fall-planted garlic in the garden this year!), happen to be organic, gotten on a trade for mesclun. The beef was purchased for full price (vendors give each other a 10% discount here, but I didn’t bother to identify myself just for the savings, I’m sure we’ll get to know each other over the summer…!).

All in all, totally tasty, and even easier to buy and cook than to write about! :)

Local beef

If you love beet greens, you can practically taste this photo! Fresh-picked, sauteed just to wilting in olive oil and butter, with a smashed and chopped clove or two of garlic, salt and freshly ground black pepper. Heaped on a plate. Topped with a couple of poached farm eggs. It’s hard to imagine anything easier to cook and more perfect to eat.

The greens from the first planting of beets—Kestrel (above) and candy-striped Chioggia—are just sizing up. They can be harvested at any size, from quite tiny for eating raw in salads, to huge, for cooking. I’ve never grown beets just for the greens, they come from thinning the plants, which usually happens when the leaves are 4-6″ (10-15cm).

On Friday, we’ll thin the beets for Saturday’s market. For the beet greens with poached egg, our new 20-week-old hens arrive on Monday, ready to lay. Life makes sense. :)

Beet greens!

Sprouts—the tinier tiny farming! After two Saturdays of buying them by the bag at the farmers’ market, I’m totally hooked! I want to grow sprouts, the nutritional claims are quite amazing, most of all, I really love the taste and crunch of EATING them (mostly, by the handful).

Until our first harvest, we’re dropping by our market to stroll around, chat, and buy food. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but I already have a routine with favorite stops, including one to get salad greens (first time in a few years that in-season salads aren’t homegrown), and one for SPROUTS!

I get the megamix, with a little of everything. Can’t even remember the whole list, but there’s something spicy, tastes like mustard, pea, kale, broccoli, I think, lots more.

Sprouts aren’t new to me. As a kid, I remember my mother growing a jar of bean sprouts for a regular Asian-style stir fry-type dish she made, and I’ve bought usually alfalfa sprouts for sandwiches, but I never really NOTICED sprouts till now. They’re great. So, it’s figuring out the simplest way to grow a wide variety for a steady personal supply…

Sprouts!

It’s a start. Whenever they reach 3-4″ (7.5-10cm), I trim back the onions to about 1″ (2.5cm), and now they’re thick enough to collect and EAT! I don’t have the greenhouse up yet, so didn’t start lettuce REALLY early, so it’s not a whole seedling trimmings salad like last year… But these baby greens are great: tender, with a delicate onion flavor and just a bit of bite. Taste-wise, they’re easily over-powered by stronger, heavier foods. We tried them on burgers and in a salad, but they’re best more on their own. My favorite: quite finely snipped and sprinkled on a boiled (farm) egg, with only salt and pepper. Tastes like the garden!

Fresh at last!