wishlists

Thursday, February 28, 2008

I need ideas!!

Bob Pierson (the gentleman I work for at Farm to City) is going to a meeting next week on value-added foods made from Pennsylvania farm products, sponsored by Penn State. He wants to bring ideas to this meeting on what people in the Philadelphia area want to have in terms of value-added foods (transformed by cooking, canning, freezing, or special preparation).  So!  What foods would you like to see in local stores, the Winter Harvest buying club, the Fair Food Farmstand in the Reading Terminal Market, etc., that can be made from food produced in PA (from produce, meat, poultry, eggs, dairy products and combinations)?  General categories of ideas include specialty cheese and sausages, minimally-processed food, ready to cook dishes.

You can leave your ideas as comments to this entry, or email them to me (my first name [at] farmtocity.org) with VALUE ADDED in the subject line.

(To clarify, please note this isn’t a wishlist for a particular shopping location like the Farmstand, or produce varieties you wish farmers would grow.  It’s just a general wishlist for value-added products you wish were available in the Philadelphia area.)

Pizza again

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

One of the unfortunate side effects of pregnancy for me is an aversion to most vegetable matter. Ordinarily I cook several vegetable heavy meatless meals a week, but since learning I was pregnant in September we’ve mostly eaten take out pizza, meals involving ground beef, and cheesy pasta dishes. This does not bother my husband at all.  My taste for vegetables eventually returned, but my desire to buy and prepare food other than pizza and cookies has been lackluster at best. I used to go out of my way to shop at the farmer’s market in Ardmore every week. Now I’m feeling ambitious if I manage to stop in to the Marketplace at East Falls on our way to the zoo or Smith Playhouse. Our refrigerator has never been so bare. One week we even forgot to get our Meadow Run Farm monthly meat order from the pick up site and sheepishly found it still on the porch the next day. It’s a good thing it’s cold outside.

Yesterday, after eating a cupcake and Utz (local!) pretzels with Bobbi’s (local!) hummus for lunch I figured it was time to cook something that wouldn’t be found on a school cafeteria menu. I knew I had a butternut squash still in the dark cabinet beneath the pantry and decided to use it. I found a recipe for Butternut Squash, Bacon, Rosemary and Phyllo Pizza on Epicurious and scoured the kitchen and freezer in the garage for the rest of the ingredients.

In the freezer I unearthed some bacon from Meadow Run and my rosemary plant is still thriving out back. I didn’t have scallions or red onion, but I had a regular onion that I sautéed in reserved bacon drippings with a clove of garlic from my CSA I found hiding behind the squash. There was half of a package of phyllo dough in the freezer, and to add some greens to the dish (since I had no intention of making anything other than the pizza for dinner) I pulled out some Swiss Chard I’d frozen early in the fall when I couldn’t bring myself to eat it.

I’m pretty good with phyllo so the whole thing took about an hour from start to finish. I wasn’t sure at first, but after my second slice I decided the pizza was delicious. It could have used a bit more rosemary, and the squash puree needed some seasoning other than salt and pepper, but on the whole it was good. Really, I’m a sucker for just about anything made with phyllo dough. (And it was a lot easier to make than the butternut squash and caramelized onion that filled my house with smoke last month.) I would definitely make it again as party appetizer using phyllo cups instead of sheets.

The local ingredients were bacon from Meadow Run Farm, butternut squash, garlic and Swiss chard from Red Earth Farm CSA and rosemary from my backyard.

Jelly Roll Call

Friday, February 22, 2008

When I moved to an on-campus apartment in college and finally had a kitchen, my parents gave me The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Cookbook, a wonderful basic cookbook that I still use regularly.  It’s got some leftover-from-the-fifties recipes (pickled shrimp in a crystalline ice bowl?!?), but for any ordinary food like pancakes or cream of mushroom soup or lasagna, it’s useful.  One of its best sections is the one on desserts, so when I realized that we were going to have too much jam left over this season, I went looking for a jelly roll recipe.  Jelly roll is sticky, but it is also soft and squishy and what my Dad used to make for us to eat with tea when I was a little girl. 

I used our “black and blue” jam—blackberries and blueberries we picked last summer.  The other local ingredients were maple sugar, honey (in the jam), and eggs. 

You can see a peek of the maple sugar and the egg yolks behind the bowl of lovely frothy egg whites.  This jelly roll also has flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla, and confectioners’ sugar, none of which I had local. 

It came out well, not as sweet as you might imagine, given all the different kinds of sugar! 

On the Wagon

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Life has been unusually busy around here lately.  I thought February was supposed to be a sleepy month with plenty of time to study the seed catalogs and whip up late winter dishes.  It’s not happening this month.  Anyway, I’ve found that I’m able to stay on the local foods wagon even when I’m pinched for time and have to shop at one of the huge supermarkets with more produce from Peru than PA by buying mushrooms.  With Kennett Square being the mushroom capital or some such designation, a lot of mushrooms that are at the big supermarket chains are actually grown in-state.  So it was that I was able to make this batch of stuffed mushrooms to take to a party this weekend. (I snapped the photo before we left - we popped them under the broiler for about 8 minutes once we got to our hosts’ house.)  Not perfect locavore cuisine, but not bad either.  Oh, and they’re very tasty and easy. 

Stuffed Mushrooms

1 lb. of mushrooms (button, white, baby bella, etc.) with stems removed and reserved
1/2 - 1 c. swiss cheese
1 c. bread crumbs
1/4 c. butter
2-4 T. minced onion

Mince half of the mushroom stems with the onion. Add the cheese, bread crumbs, butter and seasonings. Stuff mushrooms and broil for 5-8 minutes.

A Simple Gnocchi

Monday, February 11, 2008

Velvet-textured and feather-light, a plate of sauced gnocchi seems, to me, a perfect winter dish.  Whether dressed in a chunky, wintry tomato sauce with carrots, celery and rosemary, coated in melted gorgonzola and vodka, or simply tossed with parmesan, browned butter and sage, gnocchi is beautifully accommodating to an amazing variety of sauces (these are just my three favorites). 

This is not to say that I’ve found gnocchi to be the easiest thing to master.  On the contrary, I failed miserably at least a dozen teams before coming up with something passable.  Through much trial-and-error (mostly error), I did stumble upon a few simple things to improve consistency and hasten the process.  One, despite the possibility of food mills, I steadfastly refuse to use anything other than my ricer.  It may take a little longer, but the result is always airy and dry, not pasty and wet.  Second, as sacriligious as this sounds, I peel the potatoes and cut them into uniform pieces.  This quickens the cooking time and makes it more uniform (it’s also much easier to throw them in the ricer.)  Finally, I don’t bother shaping them against the tines of a fork.  Yes, I know it’s supposed to improve how they cook and “grab” the sauce, but I can’t be bothered.  I roll them out, cut them, and throw them into the boiling water.  If I were to add another step, I think the whole thing would seem to cumbersome.

For years, I followed Mario Batali’s recipe of 3 pounds of russet potatoes, 2 cups of flour, and 1 egg.  However, I recently discovered Marcella Hazan’s version from her seminal Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.  Unlike Batali’s, there are no eggs (which, she insists, creates a heaviness in the gnocchi), a greater ratio of flour-to-potato, and, most importantly, “old” waxy potatoes are used.  I was daunted a protein-less gnocchi.  How would it hold together?  What would the texture be?  Would they dissolve in the boiling water?  Lured by the possibility of even lighter gnocchi, I took one-and-a-half pounds of kennebec potatoes from my recent Winter Harvest delivery, one-and-a-half cups of King Arthur Flour and created this.

I am not certain if they really are lighter, but they were certainly easier to make.  They also appeal to my sense that a recipe should be as simple and have as few ingredient as possible.  Though, I don’t suppose it’s fair to call that “my” sense: it’s just Italian. 

Tofu Challenge: Tofu Noodle Soup

Saturday, February 09, 2008

I’m an idea-gatherer.  An advance planner.  Flying by the seat of my pants has never appealed to me so much, so it sort of took me a while to get up the nerve to make my first Tofu Challenge meal of the month.  For some unknown reason, there is a real dearth of information available on what exactly to do with tofu noodles (made by Nature Soy here in Philly).  I was forced to wing it.

Soup seemed to be a safe idea.  And I was right - it was easy to make and didn’t require too much tofu know-how.  Plus, as an added bonus, it’s good soup!

I started out with a quick saute of local garlic in olive oil.  Next I added a few jars of my homemade duck stock and a few shots of soy sauce.  I boiled some yellow carrots from Tuscarora Organic Growers Coop and some thinly sliced lacinato kale from Martindale’s in the stock, threw in some local shiitake mushrooms that I had dried, and at the last minute I threw in the locally made tofu noodles.  A little salt, a little pepper.

I really liked the tofu noodles in the soup, but it also occurred to me that the noodles might be really good in a cheesy casserole type of dish.  I would definitely use the tofu noodles again, so I might have to give it a go.

Winter Lasagna

Thursday, February 07, 2008

We made lasagna the other day from mostly local ingredients.  We mixed leftover store-bought lasanga noodles with noodles I made with local eggs.  Then we layered with corn, spaghetti sauce, greens, and shredded pattypan squash, all of which we bought and froze last summer.  I’m lactose-intolerant, so we had a lactose-free cheese (it’s not vegan because it’s real cheese, just without lactose—like Lactaid milk) shredded into okara (what remains of the soy beans after you’ve made soy milk) in place of ricotta.  This lactose alternative may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it gives that nice squashy ricottta feel to the lasagna with only two ingredients (fake cheeses sometimes seem to be high in ingredients).  It was yummy!

The humble storage apple…and a cake in it’s honor.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

I, like so many others out there in the wide world, eagerly anticipate my monthly issue of Gourmet. Every day when I arrive home from work, I do the four-limbed dance of unlocking the door and carrying the bags as I attempt to step into the house and simultaneously prevent the cat from darting out of it. All the while my gloves are clamped between my teeth and I’m craning my neck to see if Gourmet has made it’s lovely, if not glamorous, arrival; unceremoniously folded around the bills and shoved through the letter slot.

Every once in a while, it has. And like so many other SEPTA commuters I use my train time to read and to daydream: “What shall I cook this evening?” “This weekend?” “In springtime?”

The truth is that this is a difficult time of year for the local-foodies. It seems that every dream recipe is calling for a different season from the one we’re in. Though Groundhog Day is yet to come, I’m betting on more than a few more weeks of Winter.

In the February issue of Gourmet, there is yet another example of learning to cook differently, this time from Lyon-born Algerian chef, Farid Zadi. “It’s easy to say, ‘Use ripe produce’...but what to do in February with turnips from storage?” Or apples? Or those carrots sprouting in the crisper? Zadi’s answer is to braise his turnips in butter (and what an answer it is!) and then sprinkle them with garlicky breadcrumbs, parsley and poppy seeds.

The best answer I’ve yet come up with for my storage apples is…cake! Once the novelty of applesauce has run out (usually mid-December), I have found no better way to console those bruised, wrinkling, steadfast apples than to slip them into a soothing cloak of cake batter. It’s a well known fact that butter and sugar can make up for a multitude of shortcomings. Plus, turning on the oven warms up the house!

The following recipe is my own not terribly sweet version of an apple bundt cake. They say that you should use firm apples for baking, but I generally use whatever kind I have hangin’ around and lookin’ sorry. We don’t discriminate in this household. Crispin not so crisp? Get in there! Macoun seen better days? You too! And so forth.

Those carrots sprouting in the crisper? We’ll tackle them on tomorrow’s subway ride.

Breakfast Apple Bundt Cake
3-4 apples, peeled, cored and diced
1 Tb. sugar
1 ts. cinnamon
3 Cups white flour, sifted (I’ve used two parts white to one part spelt and found the result to be slightly bitter, but go to town! It’s your cake, after all.)
3 ts. baking powder (or 3/4 ts. baking soda and 1 1/2 ts. cream of tartar if you’d like to make your own baking powder)
1/2 ts. salt
1 1/2 cups sugar (white, maple or brown- whatever combination you like)
1 cup clarified butter (or 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup yogurt)
1/4 cup orange juice (replace with just under 1/4 cup apple cider with a dash of apple cider vinegar)
2 1/2 ts. vanilla extract
4 eggs, gently beaten

1. Preheat oven to 350ºF. Butter and flour your bundt pan if you have one. Or your 9” cake pans if you don’t.
2. Mix the apples with 1 Tb. sugar and 1 ts. cinnamon and set aside.
3. Whisk together dry ingredients in a large bowl and the clarified butter, eggs, juice and vanilla in another, smaller bowl.
4. Fold all ingredients together, gently incorporating wet into dry, followed by apples into batter.
5. Pour into your prepared pan(s) and bake 45-60 minutes turning once to ensure even coloring.
6. Allow to cool for at least an hour in the pan.
7. Place a plate over the pan and invert to release. Sprinkle powdered sugar over top to emulate snow flurries outside.
8. Cut hearty slices and enjoy for breakfast.

Home fries!

Monday, January 28, 2008

This eclectic collection of Blooming Glen Farm potatoes served fabulously as a yummy breakfast treat on a chilly weekend morning.

So often, I get a little panicky at the thought of actually using my preserved food. I’m pretty sure I get this trait from my dad. He recently admitted to buying canned tomatoes from the market. An appalling revelation due to the fact that a quick look in his pantry reveals oh, approximately four hundred quarts of garden tomatoes he jarred this summer.

I know. I don’t understand it, either. I mean, I get it, I know what he’s thinking—because I’m thinking the same thing—but, it’s still completely illogical. I see Nicole mentions the guilt of using frozen veggies in a previous Farm to Philly post. That’s encouraging, because surely we’re not the only ones… right?

Anyway, somehow I managed to let it all go, and use some potatoes I’ve been hoarding from last season’s CSA shares. I even broke out some frozen peppers and greens, too!

Home fries
Serves 4

3 tablespoons olive oil
1 sliced onion
2 cups julienned peppers (use your preferred combination of mild-to-spicy; bell, poblano, jalapeño, et. al.)
1 packed cup sliced or torn-up greens (kale, spinach, collards)
3 cloves chopped garlic
1 tablespoon paprika
Salt and freshly ground pepper
4 cups potatoes, sliced or cut into 1/2-inch cubes

Heat oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add onion and saute until soft. Add peppers and garlic and cook for 1 minute. Add paprika and cook for 1 minute. Add potatoes and season with salt and pepper to taste. Cover and cook until almost cooked through. Remove cover and continue cooking for 5 to 10 minutes until golden brown.

These are great sprinkled with some fresh chopped herbs right before serving, I just didn’t have any on hand.

Note too, especially as we find ourselves merely days before Farm to Philly’s exciting and sure-to-be-thrilling Tofu Challenge Month, that these ‘taters are great served with tofu scrambler. Either side-by-side on a plate, or as companions inside a yummy breakfast burrito

Dark Days: Deep freeze

Thursday, January 24, 2008

I mentioned recently that I’ve felt compelled to really dig in to my freezer to eat up all the fantastic vegetables I froze last year.  There’s a certain amount of guilt attached to wasting things that I either grew myself and/or spent time to preserve.  There’s really only four months or so left until Spring crops come available, and I want to face the season with an empty freezer.

There was a Delmonico steak from Natural Acres in my fridge, so I dug around in the freezer to see what I could find.  As it turns out, I had a big bag of Delicata squash from my CSA share that I roasted with local honey and then froze, as well as some really lovely Swiss chard from my garden.  I even remember the day that I froze the bag of Swiss chard - it was in September and the Swiss chard patch was going crazy!

A little deeper in the freezer was a small bag of red bell peppers from the CSA share that were roasted on the grill.  I froze them instead of preserving in oil because I wasn’t sure how long the peppers would last in oil.

I grilled the steak (just barely - I like my beef to moo), heated up the squash in the oven, and sauteed the chard with some chopped local garlic and a bit of olive oil, and at the last minute seared the roasted peppers.  Along with a slice of the bread and a little bit of the butter I made on Tuesday, it was a really great Winter meal and a good use of my frozen vegetables.

Dark Days: Bangers and Mash…sort of

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

The last couple of potatoes in my kitchen were on their last legs.  I grabbed the mandoline and sliced them up real thin, planning a potato galette.  I love the look of a galette, the potatoes all spiraling from the center.  It’s pretty.  I’ve never had much luck doing a skillet galette, but I continue to try.  This time was no exception - I melted a little local butter in the bottom of a skillet, layered in some potatoes followed by a sprinkling of dried parsley from last year’s garden and little chunks of butter and a bit of salt, and kept layering until I ran out of potatoes.  45 minutes later (on low heat), the potatoes on the bottom were nice and brown.

And this is where it always goes wrong: the flip.

I seem to be incapable of flipping a galette without completely destroying it.  No longer pretty, I did manage to brown the bottom of the flipped galette…and it still tasted good.  But it wasn’t perfect.  I guess I’d rather have a good tasting galette than a pretty galette.

Pretty or not, it was the perfect accompaniment to the fantastic chicken sausage with white wine and herbs from Griggstown Quail Farm in Princeton, NJ.  Even my husband loved them, and he usually turns his nose up at anything other than pork sausage.

Do the butter churn

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Did you ever notice that when you read a recipe that involves whipping cream, the instructions always say to make sure you don’t beat the cream too much?  The reason for that is simple: too much beating the cream turns into butter.

If you’ve never made butter before, this probably sounds a little oversimplified.  However, it really is just that easy.  You just need maybe a pint of cream at room temperature.  There are plenty of local dairies that produce cream, so finding the only ingredient you need is super simple.

There’s a low tech way to do this and a slightly higher tech way - and neither involves a milkmaid and a butter churn.  You’ll either need a jar with a tight lid or an electric mixer with a whisk attachment.  I guess you could even use a wire whisk if you’re especially strong in the wrist, although I’m not sure how well that would work.

OK, ready?

Pour room temperature cream into the jar and screw the lid on tightly or pour the cream into the mixer bowl.  Shake the jar for all you’re worth for 30 minutes to an hour, or you can mix it for maybe 15 minutes or so in the electric mixer.  I’ve made butter by jar before, but it’s pretty tiring.  I prefer the mixer.  The cream will go from very liquidy to forming soft peaks.  And then the soft peaks will go to hard peaks.  And then, magically, it’ll turn yellow and get chunky.  Here’s where your common sense comes in - you have to keep tasting it at this stage until it’s got the right taste.

The perfect stage is the middle photo (click the photo for a bigger look) - chunky with buttermilk being released.  When that happens, wash the butter.  To do this, dump the buttermilk out that has already been released (obviously, you can save this for baking or something) and throw in maybe 1/4 cup of really cold water - mix the water into the butter.  You can do this a couple of times - you want the water to be clear instead of cloudy or milky looking.  Sometimes I wash the butter by kneading the butter while I run cold water over it.  This is crucial: any buttermilk left in the butter will give it a rancid flavor.  And who wants that?

When the water is running clear, you’ll need to press the water out of the butter.  Use your hands or a spatula to squish all the water out.

At this point, your butter is ready to go.  Salt it, mix in herbs, shape it…whatever.  You can freeze homemade butter for about three months, or it’ll keep in the fridge for a week or two.

Now true, people look at me kind of funny when I say that I make my own butter.  But the taste of homemade butter is far superior to the stuff you can get at the store, and I know exactly what goes into it.

Making bread the easy way

I’m probably the only person left on the planet who has not tried the No Knead Bread recipe that appeared in the New York Times in November of 2006.  Even though I had read hundreds of blog entries about how the recipe works and how the bread is really good, I didn’t quite believe it.  I scoffed at the idea of good bread without kneading.  And I admit it - I’m suspicious of short cuts.

But my husband got it in his head that he wanted to try the bread recipe recently.  He researched the best vessel in which to cook the bread [some cast iron pot available at Target, apparently] and went out and bought yeast.  And then everything sat around for two weeks.  I secretly think that he had no intention of mixing the bread - he wanted me to do it and thought that if all the stuff was sitting right in front of me, I’d break down and bake it myself.  As a testament to how well my husband knows me, I did that very thing yesterday.

And, as luck would have it, I had local flour in the house.  Daisy Flour only has pastry flour [whole wheat and regular white, plus spelt].  Typically, you wouldn’t use pastry flour for bread - pastry flour is made from low protein wheat and has very little gluten, which generally does not make for a good, chewy bread.  But hey, that’s what I had on hand and I used it.  As it turns out, it didn’t make a difference: the bread is fantastic - chewy with a good crisp crust!

For my first go, I didn’t go too crazy - I replaced half of the flour with whole wheat flour.  That’s it.  But there are a gazillion variations on this bread - from the type of flour to multi-grain to various add-ins.  I have yet to see someone have a disaster with the recipe, no matter what they did.  Later today I plan to mix up a batch with oats and sunflower seeds.  And I’m looking forward to the garlic harvest this year, so I can make roasted garlic and rosemary loaves.

Stock dividends by water bath

Monday, January 21, 2008

Like Kevin, I also routinely make my own stock.  Anytime I have bones leftover from something, I automatically save them and cook up a pot.  Right now in my freezer I’ve got a few quarts of rabbit stock, although I generally don’t freeze my stock - I prefer to can it.

I really don’t think the way stock is preserved impacts the flavor - at least as far as I can tell.  However, there are two reasons I like to can stock instead of freeze it.

1. Freezing stock takes up freezer space.  I have a chest freezer that isn’t full, so it’s not the worst thing in the world - but I do like to clear up as much freezer space as possible in case I get a big haul of meat or vegetables that I plan to freeze.  You could also make the case that you use electricity to keep stock frozen, although if your freezer is running anyway…well, what’s the difference?
2. I’m sort of an immediate gratification kind of girl.  When I want to make risotto or soup or something, I don’t want to take the time to defrost stock.  It seems much easier to me to can it and have it ready to use.

And it really is easy to can stock, and doesn’t require a lot of equipment. Aside from the stock and the soup pot you made your stock in, you need canning jars that you can buy at nearly any grocery store.  That’s it.  Now granted, nearly all canning sites will say you should use a pressure canner to can stock - but I’ve been canning stock with the water bath method for a decade and nothing bad has ever happened to me. 

Have I cheated death and sickness for a decade on sheer luck?  Maybe.  My grandmother canned her stock this way, and so did my mother.  So even though I know I should use my pressure canner for stock, I continue to use a water bath.  Perhaps one day my luck will run out.  Just keep this in mind before attempting my method - my method is not recommended by food safety experts.

This is how I can chicken stock:

• Sterilize your canning jars.  The easiest way to do this is to put the jars and the two piece lids (not screwed onto the jars) into a dishwasher and run them through a cycle.  If you don’t have a dishwasher, place the jars and lids on a cookie sheet in a 250 degree oven for 10 minutes or so.  Honestly, though, you can skip this step - if you’re going to be processing jars for more than 10 minutes, which I do.  Of course, I’d rather be safe than sorry (which is ironic, all things considered) so, unless I’m in a big hurry, I sterilize the jars first.
• Pour soup stock into canning jars, being sure you don’t fill the jar above the lid threads.  If you’re concerned about fat, refrigerate the stock first and skim the fat off the top before pouring into jars.  I also like to strain the stock through a fine sieve and then into the jars.
• Place the lid on the jar and then screw the rings on - make sure the rings are on very tightly.
• Bring a big soup pot full of water to a boil, and place jars into the pot.  I generally use pint jars (four at a time) to make sure the jars can be completely submerged in the water bath.
• Boil jars for 20 minutes and remove from the water bath.  Turn the jars upside down so that they are sitting on the lid.
• Let the jars cool and then press on the lid to check for a seal - if you press the lid down and it stays down, that’s OK…but if you press the lid down and it flexes back up, that’s not OK.

I do have some things that makes canning easier - tongs, a funnel, a silicon mitt.  But you really don’t need any of that stuff to can.

Keep in mind that not all food can be canned in this manner.  I can most foods in a pressure canner, as recommended, and I suggest you do the same to avoid botulism.  As I said, perhaps I’ve just been lucky but nothing has ever gone awry for me when canning stock in a water bath.

Stock Dividends

Saturday, January 19, 2008

I suspect that cooking locally has made me thrifty.  Or, quite possibly, thrift has made me cook locally.  I can’t be sure which came first, to be honest.  In fact, it’s most likely, a third explanation - that of a symbiotic relationship (to make myself sound ecologically-minded).  When I first joined a CSA, I’m ashamed to admit that I was rather wasteful.  Each week, there was something (or, sadly, things) in my box that I simply did not (or would not) use. This was particularly true in the early and late weeks of the season when I was inundated with greens in more variations than I knew possible. 

Six CSA seasons later, though, I think I’ve got the hang of it.  It’s more than stockpiling recipes for, and stamina for large amounts of, chard and kale.  When I shopped at a supermarket, my consumer preferences were paramount.  I bought what I wanted regardless of season - or possibly even quality.  Wasting is less of an issue when you’ve purchased everything you want.  As I moved to CSA’s and Farmers’ Markets, though, that changed.  My consumer preferences took a back seat to seasonality and quality.  Instead of just buying what I wanted, I bought what I wanted from the best of what was available according to the season.  Gradually, I think, this made it’s way into my cooking.  I stopped thinking of what I wanted to make and what I needed to get and started thinking of what I could make. 

The best barometer of this change is in my approach to chicken stock.  In the beginning, it was bouillon, and then it was canned stock.  Eventually, I made my own, going to the Reading Terminal for Godshal’s turkey legs (a tip I got from Lynne Rossetto Kasper) and vegetables from Iovine’s.  Now, the idea of actually buying ingredients specifically seems absurd.  It’s liquid trash - and I mean that in the best sense.

First, I always purchase whole chickens from Meadow Run Farm and quarter them myself.  This way, I have a steady supply of chicken backs in my freezer.  Oh, I also save the any bones leftover from dinner (once I pick them clean for the cat, of course).  As for vegetables, I now have a bin for the scraps - broccoli stems, carrot tops and tips, the bits of onion I cut off before dicing, celery bulbs, shavings from celeraic, etc.  Not to mention cheese rinds, which I always keep a steady supply of in my freezer.  Every couple chickens, which is how I measure it -  like phases of the moon or something - I’ll make more stock. 

I’ll even use old take-out containers to store it.  That, however, I wouldn’t necessarily attribute to thrift or interest in conserving resources: it’s really so I don’t have to feel guilty about ordering so much takeout from Tiffin.