dilly bean potato salad with garlic miso aioli

This is the best potato salad I've had.  There was recently a dilly bean potato salad recipe in Bon Appetit magazine. However, mayonnaise is pretty gross and I can't bring myself to make it. So I used our recipe for miso mayo (vegan) instead, but used olive oil, lemon juice, and lots of garlic; and then I called it aioli to make it sound fancy.

Even though I think of potato salad as a summer picnic food, our canned dilly beans and local potatoes make this a hearty wintertime treat!

(makes 6-8 servings)

Ingredients:
3 lbs potatoes
1 c. dilly beans 
1 T. brown mustard seeds
few dashes paprika
salt and pepper to taste

Garlic Miso Aioli:
1 c. olive oil
10 T. white/yellow miso
2 T. lemon juice
2-5 cloves garlic
2 t. soy sauce

Boil the potatoes and let them cool to room temperature or colder. Make the aioli by adding all ingredients and mixing with a whisk, fork, food processor, or immersion blender. Add aioli to potatoes until salad is desired consistency. Then mix in cut dilly beans and mustard seeds and add paprika, salt, and pepper.

vegan curried vegetable pot pie

For added inspiration, the hosts of Dark Days Challenge are posing smaller themed challenges (one-pot meal, valentine sweets, vegetarian meal, breakfast) within the larger challenge of eating local, sustainable food in the middle of winter.  This week's themed challenge was to create a one-pot meal and because I love my cast iron skillet and I love that you can pan fry with it or bake with it, I decided to do both with it.  I also decided to use coconut milk which is a very non-local choice, but it makes this dish vegan. Who knows, if I did the math, it could possibly have less of an environmental impact than dairy.  Has anyone done the math?

Filling Ingredients:
2 potatoes, diced
1 red onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
4 oz. mushroom
1 c. frozen peas
1 c. frozen corn
black garbanzo beans, boiled
canola oil (not local)
salt (not local)
black pepper (not local)
1 T. sweet curry powder (not local)
1 T. hot curry powder (not local)
dash of apple cider vinegar (not local)
1 (14oz.) can coconut milk (not local)

Dough Ingredients:
whole wheat flour
cold water
canola oil (not local)
ground flax seed (not local)

Unfortunately, I ended up having a few extra dishes to clean up: a small pot and mixing bowl.  The small pot was for boiling the garbanzo beans but that was an easy clean.  I had to use a mixing bowl to mix the dough.  I also used the mixing bowl to pour out the cooked filling while I laid out a bottom crust though you could easily go with just a top crust.

creamy parsnip soup

Local food in the middle of winter while traveling for the holidays?! That's crazy!  That said, while we were in Chicago, we managed to find a few fairly local ingredients at Whole Foods without exerting too much effort. And that my friends is huge because when I attempted a local diet just four years ago while living in Chicago, I could not find any local produce at Whole Foods even during the middle of summer!  So yes, we celebrated by making a rich parsnip soup.

Ingredients:
parsnips (from Wisconsin)
onions (from Wisconsin)
mushrooms (from Illinois)
butter (arguably from Wisconsin)
heavy cream (arguably from Wisconsin)
white wine
lemon juice
water
thyme
garlic
ginger
nutmeg
salt
pepper
radish sprouts for garnish (from Illinois)

Cook the parsnips, onions, etc and blend. Add the cooked mushrooms after everything is blended.  Garnish with radish sprouts.

local cheese and homemade crackers

 We picked up 10 lbs of local wheat flour (Farmer John/Butte Mill) and some cheese (Windsor) at the winter farmers' market last weekend, so I've been working on perfecting cracker making with local ingredients. I've been using a recipe from the New York Times, minus the sesame seeds, as a base recipe:

Ingredients
1 1/4 c. whole-wheat flour
1/2 t. salt (not local)
5 T. olive oil (not local)
4 to 5 T. water, as needed

Directions
Mix the flour and salt in a bowl, mixer, or food processor. Add olive oil and mix. Add water and mix. You should be able to form the dough into a ball. Roll out the dough as thin as you can (I roll out on a flexible cutting board and then transfer to a baking sheet, then I roll out more with a small, maneuverable rolling device). Then perforate the dough into cracker size pieces with a pizza cutter--don't worry about actually separating them, that will happen on its own when baked! Bake 10-15 minutes at 350 F or until crispy.

This is a great base recipe for cracker experimentation. As is, the crackers are great for eating in soup or with cheese, dips, jam, or local mushroom pate. And if you add flavors like dried basil and fresh garlic, the crackers are great on their own too. If you add sesame seeds and sesame oil as in the original recipe, they taste like those sesame sticks found in bulk bins. I'm planning on trying a nut yeast version sometime as well.

And yes, this counts as a meal; we ate cheese and crackers for dinner!

honey glazed carrots and a november salad

We're starting things off easy peasy for the Dark Days Challenge. Though to be honest, my original plan was spoiled - literally. I had planned on making matang, a Korean candied sweet potato, but the sweet potatoes that Eric picked up last weekend from the farmers market did not survive the week. I was pretty bummed so I took myself on a walk.  During said walk I realized that I could just make honey glazed carrots instead.  When I got home I cut up the carrots, steamed them for about 5 minutes, then coated them in honey and cooked for a minute.  Since I steamed instead of fried, I didn't get the crispy matang effect but, hey, it was good anyway.

And as planned, we threw together a simple local salad of tender mixed greens, goat cheese, and homegrown counter-ripened tomatoes.  The only thing not local about this meal was homemade vinaigrette!

boulder, colorado - 150 mile local food radius

For each person "local" can mean a different thing.  For you it could mean a region, a state, a set number of miles from your home, a town, or even your own backyard.  I personally think that it's a worthwhile lifestyle experiment to set a limit and test if you can live within it for a little while (a few years ago we did a month long experiment of local eating with only a few exceptions).  It reveals where your food supply systems might be broken.  Like maybe there are laws getting in the way of local, small dairy farmers.  Maybe you live in a grain growing state but you can't buy any local grain because it makes more sense for agribusinesses to ship everything across the country to be processed, over processed and shipped back to you.  It's interesting to see how the invisible web around you is working.  And on a more positive note, a local eating challenge helps one truly appreciate an occasional orange that's been flown across the country.

Anyway, for the sake of the Dark Days Challenge, the winter time rule-of-thumb definition of local is a 150 mile radius. The image above is what that looks like for us here in Boulder.

dark days challenge!

We signed up for the Dark Days Challenge!  For the next four months, we will be posting once a week about our locally sourced, home cooked meals.  It should be a wintery adventure!