One Local Summer Week 6 - Pork Chili Verde

I got busy with holiday stuff last weekend and missed out on making a One Local Summer meal, so I'm getting back into the swing of it this week. We have lots of good local food in the house right now - picked up a freezer full of meat from my Polyface Farm dropoff this weekend, bought some nice fruit at the Columbia Pike Farmer's Market today, and I still have a few things leftover from my CSA dropoff last Monday.



This week it seemed like the farmer's market was full of peppers, squash and tomatoes. I already had squash and garlic at home from my CSA, so I went with the peppers today and decided to make some chili verde. I got peppers and onions from Westmoreland Vegetables (couldn't find a website for them) and tomatillos from another farmer's market stand that didn't have a sign and I don't know what the name of the farm was. The lard, pork and chicken stock are all Polyface.


(the squash isn't in the picture, I forgot it in the fridge! it was green and just about the size of my forearm)

PORK CHILI VERDE

ingredients:
2 T lard
1 onion, chopped
2 poblano peppers, chopped
2 cubanelle peppers, chopped
2 Anaheim peppers, chopped
1 jalapeno pepper, minced
6 tomatillos, chopped finely
1 green summer squash, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 lb ground pork
2-4 cups chicken stock (depending on how thick you like it)
1 tsp cumin
2 tsp dried oregano or 2 T fresh oregano
1 tsp sea salt

Heat the lard in a Dutch oven and brown all the vegetables except the squash and garlic until they start to get soft. Add the garlic and cook for a minute until fragrant. Add the pork and cook until no longer pink. Add the chicken stock and seasonings, bring to a boil, lower heat, and simmer for 1 hour.

Some good non local toppings: fresh cilantro, diced avocado, lime juice



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For dessert I cracked open that big ole watermelon you see up top and cubed it up and we went to town. Seeds everywhere. Ugly, but good. :)

One Local Summer - Week Four

One of the nice things about blogging on my own schedule is that I can wait until I have something good to show you before posting about it. Since I'm not posting on my on schedule with this One Local Summer thing, this week you get to see some of my blah food.



I guess it doesn't look too bad, but it was just meh. We had green onion burgers made with ground beef from Smith Meadows Farms, lots of green onions from our CSA and held together with an egg from our CSA. On the side was a little slaw made with kohlrabi and basil from our CSA and a touch of extra virgin olive oil and vinegar. We also had some lovely golden zucchini from Red Rake Farm with some more CSA basil, sauteed up with a little lard that I rendered from Polyface pork fat. Nothing was bad exactly, but there is nothing here I would make again.

The golden zucchini I got from Red Rake Farm were so pretty. The guy told me that the day before they had been about an inch or two long and they literally quadrupled in size overnight!



I hope he has some more next week so that I can find something yummier to do with them. :) In the mean time, check out what other Southern folks are getting up to this summer at last week's roundup.

One Local Summer - Week Three

This week for One Local Summer I had a near miss that turned into a delicious hit! I love making great tasting food that's from local producers and also healthy and paleo - gluten and dairy free.



The star of dinner tonight was a roasted chicken from Polyface Farms. I rinsed and dried the chicken and then generously salted and peppered it inside and out. The outside I wrapped in bacon from EcoFriendly Foods and the inside I stuffed with two of the season's first peaches from Westmoreland Berry Farm. Into the oven at 425 for 30 minutes, then I reduced the heat to 350 and roasted it for an additional hour.

The plan was to end up with delicious bacon-wrapped chicken and some roasty peach chunks. My oven had other plans!

Now, I've made bacon wrapped chicken before and it's always turned out, but this time for some reason the bacon shriveled to itty bitty bacon cinders and became inedible. So not only did I have burned bacon, but I had flabby chicken skin. Erg. I removed the peaches from the chicken and noticed they were not roasty at all either. My plans had been foiled, but I thought there had to be some way to salvage this food. After a moment's pondering I set the bacon cinders aside and carved the chicken into two leg quarters, two breasts, and two wings. I put the chicken pieces on a foil lined baking sheet and put them back in the oven to turn the flabby skin crispy. What to do with the peaches...aha! Gravy!

To make the gravy, I took the peaches from the chicken cavity and heated them in a small saucepan with a good spoonful of drippings from the roasting pan and 1/4 cup sweet white wine from Rose Bank Winery along with a pinch of salt and about 1 inch of cinnamon stick. I put the heat to low, covered it, and let it simmer while I went to work on the veggie sides. I don't know if Rose Bank Winery can be considered local to northern Virginia, but we used to live about 3 minutes away from this winery and we bought a whole case of the wine that we're still working on! So it was local to us at one point. :)

To get our leafy greens in for the day I made some braised kale from Pleasant Fields Farm. First I sauteed some baby onions from our CSA in the chicken/bacon drippings, then added the kale and a little water, covered, and let it braise for about 15 minutes.

To add some freshness to the meal, I made a quick cucumber salad using crispy little Persian cucumbers from Toigo Orchards. They are so snappy and delicious! I tossed them with some chopped orange mint from Red Rake Farm, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, and a splash of rice vinegar. Red Rake Farm is one of my favorite stands at the Arlington Farmer's Market. It's all organic and their produce looks more "real" to me than some of the other places for some reason. And the owner, Peter, is always ready with a smile and story. Much nicer than shopping at a grocery store!



Once the veggies were ready, the chicken skin was crispy and the peaches were nice and broken down for the gravy, and dinner was served! I think everything tied together very nicely - the crispy chicken skin with the sweet warm peach gravy, the tender kale, and the cool fresh cucumbers. My husband even ate the bacon cinders and said they kind of tasted like pork rinds. Success!

One Local Summer - Week Two

I kind of slacked on One Local Summer this week. I was expecting an abundance of veggies from my CSA, which just started this past Monday, but instead all I got was a handful of salad greens, some garlic scapes, and a head of Chinese cabbage. It's been a rough, wet spring here in Virginia. So I headed to the farmer's market on Saturday (yesterday) morning to get some goodies for this week's local meal.



My planned meal included spicy chipotle chorizo made from free range buffalo and pork from Cibola Farms. I also picked up some red potatoes and curly kale from Pleasant Fields Farm. I was going to cut the potatoes and sausage into chunks and roast them together and serve them on a bed of braised kale. Alas, my meal was not to be. My husband and I decided to go to The National Zoo today and ogle the cute animals, which delayed lunch until 3:30 p.m. - a time falling squarely into what we refer to as "the black hole of eating." Neither of us was hungry for dinner in the slightest, so our local feast will just have to wait until tomorrow. Too bad the post can't wait for tomorrow, but OLS has a deadline. ;)

To see what other people in my region (Southern) have been up to, check out last week's roundup!

One Local Summer - Week One

Back in April I signed up for the One Local Summer event over at Farm to Philly. I thought it would be a neat way to challenge myself to really use more local and seasonal ingredients in my cooking. I'm excited to see what northern Virginia has in store for me this summer! We were pretty busy this weekend, so my first local meal was a pretty basic brunch we had on Saturday morning before heading off for the day.



We had bacon, eggs, and fruit salad with whipped cream.

The bacon I picked up at the farmer's market from a kind of local farm aggregate called EcoFriendly Foods. It comes from pastured pigs and is cured with just salt and sugar. It was definitely the best local bacon I've had so far, but not quite as good as the local bacon we used to get when we lived in New Jersey from Cherry Grove Farm.

The eggs were from Joel Salatin's famous and fabulous Polyface Farm. I joined their buying club a few months ago. Every month I place an order with them and pick it up from one of their northern Virginia drop off spots. I cooked the delicious dark yolked eggs in some of the fat left over from cooking the bacon.

The fruit salad was strawberries from Toigo Orchards and some not-so-local peaches (they came from Georgia via Whole Foods). I would have left the peaches out happily, but they were in my fruit basket and going bad, so into the salad they went. To top our fruit I whipped a little heavy cream from J-Wen Farm. Selling raw milk is illegal in Virginia unless you go through a cow sharing program, but the stuff from J-Wen is not homogenized and is just pasteurized rather than ultrapasteurized. The fruit was so naturally sweet that the whipped cream didn't require any sugar. I don't eat very much dairy at all, but I just had a hankering this weekend so I picked the cream up at the farmer's market.

And there you have it!