Saturday, June 30, 2007

One Local Summer: Meal 1

Okay, so I'm participating in an online group called One Local Summer. You make at least one meal a week from local ingredients and post the results on your blog. Since we live in farm country, it's not too hard to eat locally, and it's something I've wanted to do more of. I like the idea of supporting my local farm stands and grocers.

Our first meal was as local as I could make it, but it certainly wasn't organic. We had burgers from the Masonic Home farmer's market (Elizabethtown) on Martin's potato rolls and chips, both from Chambersburg. We also bought lettuce at the Masonic Home farmer's market for the salad (no local salad dressing, we didn't get that in time). Other things that we had that weren't entirely local was Hatfield sausage (Hatfield PA), A Treat root beer (from Allentown), and corn on the cob from Delaware. I kind of got all of this together on short notice -- hopefully I'll be able to do better next week.

4 comments:

meresy_g said...

You did great! So how did you like those burgers? I was at the farm market on Saturday with my two neices. And we had the Delaware corn on Sunday evening. How did you like that farm market? Your meal looks great and I don't think using things like Martins and Atreat or Hatfield is bad. They are local companies providing jobs and not being shipped all over the country!

Faith said...

Thanks! I felt like I didn't do a particularly good job, but I kept telling myself that it was my first meal.

We liked the farm market a lot. We also got some sugar snap peas, bacon, blueberry jam and huckleberry jam while we were there. It's a neat place, and we'll probably go back again even though it's kind of far for us. We thought the burgers were really great. When I told Onil that we were going to get grass-fed beef burgers he was pretty excited, and when we ate them we couldn't get over how delicious they were. He said the same thing your husband did -- this is the way burgers used to taste. We'll definitely go back and get more, and you'll probably see them for another one of our local summer meals.

As you saw, we got the corn from Delaware, too. Did you like it? We thought it was horrible. It had zero taste. It wasn't sweet or corny or anything. Bleagh. I'm looking forward to real local corn -- from the farm just down the road.

We're going to Roots tomorrow, so I'm going to pick up more produce there.

meresy_g said...

We got the white Delaware corn and I thought it was pretty sweet. Maybe we got different corn. But still not as good as right down the road. They should have local corn. The guy down the road from us started selling it yesterday. Have fun at Roots and maybe while you are off, check out the Eastern farm market in Lancaster City. Apparently there are a lot of unusual ethnic vegetables and fruits grown by small farmers in addition to the regular stuff. I'm not sure where it is other than somewhere in the eastern part of the city. I'm sure you could find it online.

Faith said...

I thought the corn we picked up was the Delaware corn, but maybe I got the signs mixed up. It sure wouldn't be the first time that happened. Today was the first day the stand down the road started selling corn so I picked up a half dozen ears. We also went to Roots and bought lots of local produce. The meats looked awesome but we only had enough money for a pound of turkey sausage.

I've been to Central Market in Lancaster city but I hadn't heard of Eastern market. I don't know if I'll be able to get there this week but I'll put it on my list of places to check out.