i am really excited to be participating in the dark days challenge for the first time! the goal of the challenge is to eat at least one meal a week that is SOLE (sustainable, organic, local, ethical) and grown not further than 100 miles away. at first i thought it would be really easy, but then i really started thinking about every ingredient that goes into our food. for example, i thought that flour and grains would be easy because the wonderful Bob's Red Mill is really close, but after doing a little research i realized that they get their grains from all over the country, not right here. i'll be visiting my little local farmer's market tomorrow to see if anyone has any ideas about locally grown wheat.
so for our first meal i went with simple ingredients: T-bone steaks from Kookoolan Farms, baked potatoes and bok choi from our CSA at Groundwork Organics, and mushrooms from an unspecified farm in oregon.
the butter and sour cream are Tillamook and the beer is the seasonal Ebenezer from Bridgeport Brewing. the bok choi and mushrooms have a sauce on them comprised of sesame oil, peanut oil, chicken broth (homemade from Kookoolan chickens) and soy sauce that wasn't local at all. it was delicious and made even more so knowing that nothing traveled too far to get to our plates.
Hello! Thanks for coming to visit my blog! Your dinner looks yummy! I'm guessing you are in a different range than I am so my source for wheat won't work for you, but I'm guessing if it's being grown here it has to be able to be grown where you are at. There's been a lot of interest in wheat products over the last couple years here though.
ReplyDeleteThe hardest one for me (and this is kind of funny I think) is chicken. Local chicken is available but only as a whole chicken. I don't eat dark meat so that doesn't really work for me...
Hey, I am also doing the Dark Days challenge from the NW and assumed the same thing about Bob's Red Mill. Are you in the Portland area? If so, I often see a lot of milled flours and meals at the Hillsdale Farmer's Market (is that perhaps the "little local farmer's market" you're talking about??) and I got some really nice cornmeal there from Ayers Creek today. Good luck in the challenge!
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