locovore- week 2

I promise I won't post pictures of our fruit/veg bags every week from here to eternity, but the novelty of these bags totally hasn't worn off. Understandable, I suppose, seeing as how it is only week two. Check out the new stash!

 

This week we have rocket, swiss chard, curly parsley, lettuce, spring onions, avo, turnips, bananas, oranges, satsumas, red onions, sweet potatoes and apples (another kg of them...not shown). Tonight there will be a swiss chard and caramelized onion tart for sure. 

This shot also gives a little glimpse at our (ok...let's be honest...my) cookbook collection, both stacked on the shelf and open for perusal on the table. I was planning menus for dinner gatherings last night and this evening, as well as scoping out a recipe for apricot almond muffins that are likely to show up on our breakfast table this weekend. You see the corner of that one called Super Natural Cooking with Heidi Swanson's smiling face on it? I have my lovely friend Mariel to thank for bringing Heidi into my life and kitchen. Her website is inspirational and that cookbook (a wedding pressie from Mariel and her equally lovely nearly-husband Brett) is pure deliciousness and healthy to boot. I am hoping some little birthday fairy might set me up with her new cookbook for my birthday. I have a thing for cookbooks...I'll either need a bigger shelf or a 12 step program soon.

becoming a locavore

I recently read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a book about her family's quest to eat locally and sustainably for a year. It was an enjoyable and thought provoking read that made me reconsider how and what I eat. While I'm not ready to raise chickens or grow most all of my own food, it did get me keen to put a bit more energy into eating seasonally and locally. I want to become a locavore, or at least more of one.

My first step was to sign us up for a weekly local, organic, seasonal food bag from Wild Organic Foods in Woodstock. For R150 (about 20 American bucks) we got a big bag of fruit and veg grown in the greater Cape Town area. This week we got our first bag and I was delighted by the contents.

In addition to the butternut, beets, celery, baby leeks, carrots, sweet potatoes, satsumas, and mushrooms you see above we got a packet of herb salad, 1 kg/2 lbs of apples, a load of green beans and these little babies...

Gooseberries! Cape gooseberries are a real treat to me. I grew up in a place where the native gooseberries are very sour and totally inedible unless a horrific amount of sugar is involved (or at least the ones that grew on the bush in front of our house were like that; my brothers and I used to dare each other to eat them). I'll admit the gooseberries in our bag are a little on the tart side, but I think they will bake up nicely with some of the apples. I smell an apple gooseberry pie in the making.

I ate a satsuma as soon as I got home. They are delicate, sweet, and (best of all) seedless. Fruit with seeds that get in the way is pretty high up on my list of ridiculous things I don't like, along with meat on bones. We are cooking dinner with friends tomorrow night and a beet and satsuma salad is on the menu. Yum. For dinner last night we combined the lettuces, half the beans, half the celery, and a handful of the carrots along with some other veggies lying around to make a salad with prosciutto, goat cheese, and a poached egg on top. We are WAY into poached eggs at the moment, and have declared this our "winter of the poached egg"...but that is a whole other blog post.

Here's my take on all this: Could we have gotten conventional versions of all these fruits and veggies at the grocery store for less? I'm pretty sure of it. And while I'm not an organic food nut, I like that these veggies are organic...it is better for the soil they are grown in and better for our health (mostly in cases where we are eating the skins of things). It also just feels pretty stinkin nice to support local growers. Perhaps most of all, I like the challenge of getting a bag of whatever is in season now and making a plan with that. I love beets, but I never buy them. Now I have them and have to make a plan to eat them. And if I get a repeat veggie, I need to come up with ways to prepare it to make it novel. It's all a really fun, culinary game to me. Next week's bag will include pears, satsumas, bananas, avocados, oranges, salad mix, parsley, spring onion, rocket/arugula, swiss chard, sweet potatoes, red onions and turnips. I'm thinking there will be a roast chicken with turnips, onions, and sweet potatoes, and maybe a savory tart with swiss chard and caramelized onions...I can't wait.

Miya's

As promised, here is the full recap of the deliciousness that is Miya's. If you are in and around the New Haven area, check it out at 68 Howe Street. If you go within the next 12 days, invite me. If not, express mail me something. I'm sure Customs doesn't have any rules about intercontinental transfers of sushi.

One of the things I loved straight away was that it is rated one of the top 10 most sustainable restaurants in America. Sushi is delicious, but I always have a bit of a guilty conscience when eating it as most of the yummies I am partaking in aren't doing the environment any favors. Miya's uses eco-friendly fish options and has many vegetarian rolls. Sushi + no guilt = the best sushi ever.

What else is there to love? This:

We started with their pumpkin miso (!!) and huge green salad. The greens come from the farm associated with the Yale Sustainable Food Project. You get a heap of what's fresh and in season. I think I taste a hint of wasabi in the dressing, which thrills me to no end. 

With that we each had a glass of sake. Their sake selection is highly unusual. Brendan had the spicy Firecracker sake, and I had the gingery Dragon Lady sake. 

For the main event, we forced ourselves to only choose five options from their really extensive menu. This is no small feat as basically everything sounds delicious and you want seven of them. From left to right you'll see the edibaba, hot-headed cowgirl (front), water piglet (back), japafrican queen (back), and your standard spicy tuna (front). The descriptions are part of the fun:

Edibaba- great. Who has hot sushi wrapped in potato?! The sauce is so delicious you'll want to lick the plate. Anything with coconut is fine by me, so the hot-headed cowgirl was also a serious winner. Perhaps what I love the most about the water piglet is that there is, in fact, no pig involved. I don't know why but that really tickles me. The Japafrican queen, however, was hands down our favorite. The flavors are out of this world and it is just so stinkin' innovative. Plus the hilarious description doesn't hurt. 

b&b signing off