ReLocavore: Redefining "local"

Back to Wisconsin, my cheesehead friends

Category Archives: This Week in Veg


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Massaging vegetables: Cucumber Sunomono

Cooks Illustrated suggests massaging kale. “Kneading and squeezing” will break down cell walls. They recommend 5 minutes for standard kale and 1-2 minutes for lacinato and red Russian kale.

Here’s the thing… the Japanese technique of sunomono also uses massage to break down cell walls and make vegetables softer and more tender. The difference is the Japanese method includes salt, which helps break down cell walls and extract moisture, but then rinses the vegetables to remove the excess saltiness.

I think this calls for Sunomono, or Japanese cucumber salad! This dish is great on a hot summer day, served with cold soba noodles and iced dipping sauce.

Sunomono

Serves 2 generously.

  1. Peel, cut in half the long way and seed one cucumber. Cut into thin slices on the mandoline.
  2. Mix cucumber and 1/2 tsp salt in a large bowl. Gently rub the cucumbers with salt until they become tender, but not limp, and give away lots of liquid. Gently squeeze the cucumbers to remove any excess liquid. Save the liquid to make a dressing in step 3.
  3. In a microwave-safe glass measuring cup, measure out the cucumber liquid to get 1/4 cup. If theres too much, pour out excess. If there’s not enough, add water. Mix a pinch of dashi granules, 2 tbsp rice vinegar, 2 tbsp soy sauce and a big pinch of sugar in with the cucumber water. Microwave for 30 seconds and stir to dissolve the dashi and sugar.
  4. Arrange half of cucumber slices in the center of a bowl. Pour over a generous amount of dressing, leaving a puddle in the bottom of the bowl. If time allows, chill to be ice-cold.

 


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Welcome back to Relocavore!

Welcome back to Relocavore! After this past Winter hiatus, I’m eager to update y’all on the fun that we’ve had since this past fall.

New URL… Relocavore.com

Over the next 48 hours the DNS servers will refresh and typing relocavore.com into your web browser will bring you right to the blog. Also in a few weeks,I’ll be rolling out a weekly email digest. Sign up and you’ll get an email on Saturday morning with a summary of the previous week’s posts. In another bit of outreach, I’ll be posting short synopses to the Upper Valley Locavore mailing list. (localvore-localag-discussion@lists.valley.net)

Relocavore goes Hyper-Local

Relocavore House

I always think of the most local eating is the food you grow, forage or hunt yourself. It’s great supporting local ag, but it’s also great to work for your food too. In that vein, the Relocavore family relocated this past December to 1.3 acres in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. There’s a house and garage and plenty of room for garden plots. The hubby and I put in two 6 ‘ x 6 ‘ raised beds, with plans for expansion to 6 beds in the next three years. I’ll talk much more about garden planting in the near future. Those posts will be separately categorized as “gardening” if you want to focus or filter.

Relocavore Guest Bloggers

I’m reaching out to other foodies, locavores, and bloggers to contribute content to Relocavore. You’ll see some guests posts coming out from foreign travelers, home gardeners, cheese makers, and home brewers.

Kanning Klatch

This summer, I will be joined by other members of the Relocavore Kanning Klatch in putting food by for the season. This means more informative canning posts under the heading of CanningU. I’ll introduce the Kanning Klatch members later in the season.

New Videos

I’m focusing more on video production and sharing with the hope of assembling a few cooking videos. If you’re interested in helping with video production reach out and we’ll make it happen. Stay tuned.

This is going to be a great year for local eating. We’re anticipating a robust harvest, warm weather, and lots of new farms, vegetables and adventure!


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This week in Veg: the last delivery of the Summer CSA.

This is the last week of vegetables from Cedar Circle. In the fall, Cedar Circle transitions to a pick up CSA model, where we would have to drive up to their farm every other week to pick up our vegetables. We decided the extra driving lessons so worth it, so we signed up with a different CSA for the fall/winter share.

I’m surprised to see we continue to get corn from the farm. There’s also a tiny little head of butter crisp lettuce, which I love to make into Thai style lettuce wraps.

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This Week in Veg… A lot of veg!

Over the past few weeks, my kitchen has exploded with Veg. I thought it would be funny to do an inventory, instead of taking a picture of the CSA…

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Top shelf: Grapes. Local eggs.
Middle shelf: Growler of beer from Harpoon. Kale, Bok Choi, 6 ears of sweet corn. 3 red heads of cabbage. 1 green head of cabbage. 1 quart homemade Sauerkraut.
Bottom Shelf: Radishes. 3/4 head of red cabbage. Pesto. 5 lbs carrots. 1 lb green beans. Celery. Cheese.
Left Drawer: Romaine lettuce. 3 cucumbers. 2 zucchini. 10 jalapinos.
Right drawer: 3 heads of lettuce. Arugula. Swiss Chard.

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On the Counter:
Peck of local apples. 5 Carmen peppers to be pickled. 4 peaches. 2 sweet potatoes. a seedless watermelon.

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Out on the kitchen table:
Cherry tomatoes. Garlic and onions. An avocado. Bosc Pears. Gala apples.


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This Week in Veg: No Lettuce!

So this week marks an important transition between spring and summer. We didn’t get any lettuce in our CSA box this week. We also didn’t get any tomatoes in our CSA box. This is very disappointing. What it means is there’s no period of time when the tomatoes overlap with the lettuce allowing us to eat BLT sandwiches. I love BLTs. There is no sandwich, save a simple sandwich made with tomato and mayonnaise, that even rivals the BLT in my opinion.

I guess I’m going to have to get up tomorrow and go to the farmers market. Buy some tomatoes, and a head of lettuce, so we can eat BLTs at least once this year.

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This week in veg: cucumbers!

This week we finally got some cucumbers and the CSA box. I am so excited! I’ve been looking forward to eating cold cucumbers and the middle of all of this heat. Something about them really does make me feel cooler.
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1. Cucumbers
2. Yellow beets
3. Fennel
4 zucchini
5. Lettuce
6. Cilantro
7. More lettuce
8. Green onions
9. Carrots


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This week in veg: Fruit!

20130711-151648.jpg This week, we became began receiving our fruit share. In the box this week were:

1. Hass avocados from Carpetina, CA
2. Grapes. Coachella valley, CA
3. peaches (no origin mentioned in the newsletter)
4. White nectarines from Oregon
5. Blueberries from New Jersey

So you’ll scan the list above and ask yourself, “what’s so local about that? Your fruit is coming from all over the country!”

Here’s the way I look at it. We live way up north, and there’s only so many things that are actually able to grow in our climate. The fruit that grows local includes: rhubarb, strawberries, blueberries, apples, and cranberries. How fruit share works is they collaborate with farms across the country, to grow fruit in the way that is most sustainable for that area. When fruit in one geographic area is ripe, it’s shipped to a central location boxed up and then distributed out to fruit share members. Fruit share makes extra effort to offset the carbon cost of growing and harvesting the fruit, and transporting fruit across the country.

I could spend another thousand words trying to explain the cognitive dissonance of describing our fruit box from all over the US, but… Ultimately it boils down to this: our CSA in Wisconsin used to offer us fruit share as part of our delivery, we signed on, and we got really spoiled by having good fruit all summer long. We get extra fruit and put it in the freezer for the winter time. And it’s become a main component of our diet. So we have it again here in New Hampshire.

Fruit hypocrite? You tell me in the comments.