Dinner with the locavores

Nothing worse than a convert...and we have found religion. Can we get an amen from the foodies?

What is a locavore...well wikipedia has a useful entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_foodhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_food)
A locavore is someone who eats food grown or produced locally or within a certain radius such as 50, 100, or 150 miles. The locavore movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to produce their own food, with the argument that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locally grown food is an environmentally friendly means of obtaining food, since supermarkets that import their food use more fossil fuels and non-renewable resources.
And according to the wiki gods, locavore was even chosen by New Oxford American Dictionary as the word of the year in 2007.

In Santa Cruz, local food is basically the way it is. You know those strawberries you bought at Kroger - they came from Watsonville. And probably the lettuce too. So when its fresher, easier, and, lets face it for grad students, often cheaper to buy it from the farmer at the market, it's not a hard sell. If the Santa Cruz Farmers Market was our baptism, then our CSA box was our first communion. CSA (Community Support Agriculture) is a concept where you buy a share in a farm ahead of time. Then for the whole growing season, you get a box of fresh produce. We belonged to a wonderful CSA called Two Small Farms (http://www.twosmallfarms.com/). What a great experience; we ate all kinds of things we never dreamed of thanks to the box and helpful recipes. Elena was just a year old and wean onto sauted fava beans and organic strawberries. We learned that the farmer workers were legal and had benefits and healthcare (and weren't migrant because of the long growing season, they were able to live in one place). The only bad thing is that strawberries have been ruined forever. (sort of like the Dutch and cheese...)

We took a little break from the local food movement in Europe (excepting the cheese and tulips, of course). But came back for our confirmation in Blacksburg. We've been lucky to fall into a place where we can get wonderful local foods...we buy local grass feed/pasture raised beef, chicken, eggs, pork, turkey and lamb from Shadowchase Farm and Weathertop Farm. Crowes Nest Farm keeps us in the berries. And the climate is perfect for everything from peaches to apples to blueberries. This year we even put in our first garden since Santa Cruz (more on that later, but the squash have already taken over). It's become very important to us to support our local farmers, help preserve open spaces and farm lands, eat as much 'organic' (what a loaded word these days!), and help elena (and soon dos) know where their food comes from. Jake and I both firmly believe that sustainability is not just a fad, but a responsibility.

Last weekend when Dinny first arrived, we made a Sunday dinner. Almost every in the meal was regional...except the sugar, celery & carrots, and wine. The flour was ground in North Carolina.

We had Herb (our name for all thing poultry) a pasture raised chicken from Weathertop Farm (http://www.weathertopfarm.com/) that we picked up the Shannon Family ourselves. Pop it into a ziplock and they freeze quite nicely. Herb was cooked in Schlemmy (our Schlemmertopf German Clay baker - possibly one of our most used wedding gift from my great Aunt Jeannie). Did you know that you can just put a frozen whole chicken in the thing and two hours later is it falling off the bone and looking like this?

Amazing.

We had salad from the garden and a medley of yellow squash and snap peas. All from our garden.


Dessert was a cherry galette. The cherries were from the next county over - sadly, it was the last weekend of cherry season, and I just figured it out. I will not make that mistake next year. This was our only opportunity for cherry dessert.


I'm in love with the galette. It was made from the Martha Stewart pate sucree recipe, mounded with cherries tossed with toasted almonds and a bit of sugar, then baked up. Wow. I made another one with blueberries two days later. Basically, I could eat just about anything wrapped in pate sucree.

So come on over. We'll feed you up good!

Red, White, and Blue...berries

We started off the 4th with a heavy dose of the blue and headed out to meet Kirsten, Brad, and Xander at Crows Nest U-Pick farm for some recreational blueberry picking followed by a massive gorging of blueberry buttermilk pancakes with maple syrup for brunch.

It was a ton of fun, mostly because the bushes are so laden with fruit, that we picked for an hour and came home with two and a half gallons! That doesn't even count what Kirsten and Brad picked.

The kids had fun, the berries were at their level, although Xander specialized the 'tummy storage method.'

Brad had a hard time leaving, he just felt compelled to 'pick one more.'

Of course, home for pancakes.


Later we met back up for the concert in the park with fireworks. We had a lovely picnic dinner. Followed by an exciting second desert of kettle corn.



The kids were not impressed with the fireworks - way to loud (and it was 10pm!) but the adults were impressed with the town fireworks - they lasted almost 30 minutes.

More grandparents?

That's right. It hardly seems possible that there could be more grandparent visits - but it's true. Elena's daycare was closed for holiday the first week of July, so Dinny came down to help. Then Richard came for a long weekend. It was really great to have them here. A huge number of to-do's on the list got marked off. Elena's room has curtains. We decided on a bed for our room (although Jake has become partial to the mattress on the floor). Our dryer is no longer a fire hazard. There are bookshelves in the basement. Dinny even packed the Ironing Fairy and the huge pile of long sleeved (read not summer time, so we don't have to iron them) shirts was much diminished. Elena's baby doll got new duds. We had dinner in Floyd and celebrated the 4th of July.

Here's to you Utrecht

A year ago we left Utrecht. We had dinner at Chez Willy's on the Oudegracht and dessert at Venecia.

For this toast, we are proud to announce that we have perfect the Bitter Lemon Recipe, this was one of our favorite drinks in Utrecht:

Bitter Lemon
Lemon Syrup
1 part sugar
1 part water
dissolve in sauce pan over medium heat. When sugar is completely dissolved add
1 part lemon juice
chill completely

Mix
1 part lemon syrup
3 parts chilled tonic water

Serve over ice (with Scottish whiskey is also a nice touch and an Utrecht favorite)

So it was one year ago today that we wrote our last post in our old blog, wegodutch.blogspot.com. I cried when I wrote that entry. It's been a hard year. Harder than we thought to come back. We miss a great deal about Utrecht. We miss walking and biking everywhere. We miss our apartment along the canal. We miss our trips all over Europe. We miss the pace of life. Of course, there are good things about being back in the US....we are closer to family. We are in the same time zone for phone calls. We have a real oven again. But something about that year and a half in Utrecht has really seeped into our souls. Do you know that we still listen to the CD of the Dom bells on Sunday mornings?



So...Here's to you Utrecht. The rattle of bikes over the cobblestones, the voices echoing down the narrow alleys, the coffee's in the sun, the beers by oudegracht, the cows along the train lines, the windmills watching silently over everything, the evening walks for roomijs, the morning walks for fresh appelflappen, the little stores that had plenty to buy, the flowers in the park, the bouquets that filled our rooms every day, the wonderful cheese, and the cathedral bells echoing over the canals.
Cheers.

chris cross applesauce

You know what I love about 4 year olds - they discover that their velcro shoes can do this:

And are just so pleased with themselves.

(and Jake calls these her 'calvin and hobbes shoes' because they look the like little sneakers Calvin always wore).

A great and grand visit

This past week we've had some very special guests...my grandparents, Elena's great-grandparents: Grammy and Grandpa. They flew in from Oregon on Wednesday and we had a wonderful week of sharing our lives with them. We ate tapas outside, grilled, went to the Friday night concert, hiked, painted with the new art kit, went to the park, visited school, ate tasty dinners out.
Basically we had a great time. Elena really enjoyed her great-grandparent play time.

Holiday

Elena has taken to wanting dancing music. So Jake, always looking for an excuse to highlight his 80's music collection, has her started on Madonna. So it's Madonna's 'Holiday' that was the driving music for this trip.

We took off on a short as close to Euro-style holiday as we could get. We went some place that looked interesting with a moderate amount of internet research, stayed in the most interesting place we could find, and were within striking distance of the beach. We headed to the Albermarle region of North Carolina - just below the Virginia boarder. Now, we were a big worried that our vacation was also planned within striking distance of the Great Dismal Swamp - but we've always known how to have a good time.

We stayed in the Beechwood Inn - which is a collection of little restored houses from the pre Civil War. They also make reproduction furniture - so they are furnished authentically. Kids were welcome (they even put a tub of legos in the house!) and it was a nice choice.

We spent three full days exploring the region. The first day we just drove to the Outerbanks to go to the beach. Elena demanded it and when you see how happy she is covered in sunscreen and sand by the ocean, we'll you'd drive there too. I swear, the child will either live or work or both by the ocean because she never seems happier or more at peace and joyful than when she is playing on the beach. One our drive back we swung through a little town on Roanoke Island and found some great icecream. The next day we headed up to a state park, rented a canoe and went in search of turtles, birds, alligators (elena was extremely disappointed not to see one), and other wild life. It was really wonderful to canoe among the cyprus trees. We had lunch in the canoe and stopped for icecream in a drug store soda fountain on the way home. The next morning it was back to Roanoke Island to visit the interpretive museum and boat then back to the beach for a little more sunning. That night we stopped for pizza and ice cream on the way home. Basically, the theme of the trip was icecream!

We really enjoyed the country and thought the area was beautiful.