Carrboro Market: variety w/ international feel

During my Eat Local July challenge, I've gone to a different market every week to see what's available. The Carrboro Farmers' Market, just west of Chapel Hill, NC, will delight anyone looking for a foodie market, while still having enough stalls with more conventional and even old-timey produce and prices to keep your budget from screaming out of control. I got all the wonderful produce you see below for $27.25, including a dozen free-range eggs not pictured.



What makes the Carrboro Farmers' Market stand out?

• Medicinal herbs heaped around a well-worn copy of The Green Pharmacy, with samples of purslane ("high in Omega 3!"). The purslane was delicious. I would have bought a bag, but the vendor had stepped away.


• Indian food: pour yourself a mango lassi at one booth, then stop by Chicken Bridge Bakery for their popular green-garlic naan.


• Huge variety, with good labeling. Want to try unusual varieties of peppers, potatoes, squash, tomatoes, or nearly anything else in season? Having trouble finding local whole-wheat flour, edamame, honey, and cheese too, all at one market? Come to Carrboro.

I indulged in a pint of figs and a piece of the naan that everyone was asking for. This post-market snack cost about $1.50, less than the cost of a cup of designer coffee, more satisfying, and better for you too.

Southern Biscuit Flour makes fluffy blueberry muffins

I haven't had a breakfast this sweet and fluffy since I found out that Krispy Kreme doughnuts are legally but not actually devoid of trans fats.


My friend Karen introduced me to her (and now my) version of the Jordan Marsh Blueberry Muffins recipe when I rented a room from her during graduate school. There are lots of variations on the web, but we use 1 1/4 cup of sugar, 2 1/2 cups of blueberries, and no vanilla.

For this batch made during Eat Local July, I used Southern Biscuit Flour from Newton, NC. This all-purpose flour has just 3 grams of protein per quarter cup, instead of 4 grams like the flours I usually use 50/50 in this recipe: Whole Foods all-purpose and King Arthur white whole-wheat. Less protein means less gluten means lighter baked goods.

What's local in this breakfast? Flour, blueberries, milk, eggs, peanut butter, plus cantaloupe

What's not? butter (alas!), sugar, baking powder, salt, plus tea

Peak summer season at farmers' market today

What a bounty at the markets today! I started at Western Wake Farmers' Market, where I got organic and spray free tomatoes, peppers, garlic, bitter gourd, green beans, eggs, basil, cantaloupe, cucumbers, and blueberries.

Next stop: State Farmers' Market. Roberts' Family Farm was out of Jackson Dairy Farms' butter, which was the main reason I'd come to the market. But I got an amazing basket of Contender peaches: 24 pounds for $15 for peaches in top condition. I spent my last cash at Wise Family Farms on a pint of pink-eye peas, a half-pint of six-week peas, and 3 onions. I also saw blueberries selling for $15 a flat (18 pints) ... and I think they were spray free.

Putting up peaches. This weekend, I'll make peach ice cream and put up peach ice-cream base for the winter. I was going to make blueberry pie, but will wait until I can get local butter.

Total cost & what stays local. I spent $74.75 total at both markets today, but about $20 worth of that will be going into the freezer for the winter. The usually ratio for how much of your money stays in your community when you shop locally is 42%, compared to 13% if you shop at a chain store or 0% when you shop online. But I bet this is much closer to 100%, since I bought directly from the farmers. Does anybody know of any studies about this?

Tomatoes & garlic from Barbara, chocolate cake with basil frosting

Some lunches really make me glad to be alive. Today's lunch, for example. My friend Barbara brought us a wonderful selection of tomatoes she's growing in her garden just a few blocks away, including the adorable tiny tomatoes and juicy red slicer in the picture below. She also brought some garlic she'd grown, "sharper this year than last." You can't see it, but one spicy clove makes all the difference in those fresh black-eyed peas. Thank, Barbara! While the peas boiled, I sauteed a onion with Barbara's garlic, then added a sliced zucchini. All 100% local, until I added tahini (the new bacon) and salt.


The Irish soda bread contains local milk and flours, both whole wheat and all purpose. I topped it with slices of local Ashe County pepper jack cheese before toasting.

What's not local? A splash of olive oil, a spoonful of tahini for the black-eyed peas, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and vinegar.



Even chocolate cake can be mostly local! This one has local all-purpose flour, eggs, milk, butter, and basil for the center frosting layer. The sugar is the regional Florida Crystals organic sugar, which has a very faint but pleasant caramel taste.

What's not local in the cake? Cocoa, cream cheese, powdered sugar, vanilla, coffee, salt, baking soda, and baking powder.

I'll do the math again for the newsletter on Wednesday, but I suspect that even with indulgences like chocolate cake, we'll do even better than last week's 75% local.

Finding key ingredients for local week 3

Had a great time at the State Farmers' Market in Raleigh yesterday. It was Peach Day, so Lumpy's Ice Cream was there giving out free samples of delicious peach ice cream. I also found two hard-to-get items: butter and peanut butter.

Butter
The tub of salted butter comes from Jackson Dairy Farm in Dunn, available at the Roberts Family Farm stand in the Market Shoppes building. Jackson Dairy Farm follows the balanced philosophy I love to see in modern, sustainable farms. Their website describes how they use the best of the old and the new:

Jackson's Dairy is a modern, state of the art production facility. However, due to our belief in the all natural concept, we choose not to use hormones on our dairy cattle or herbicides on the crops that we feed them. We employ more natural production methods.

Our label stating milk from non rBST treated cows is the first and only label registered with the NCDA and DEHNR making this claim. In the event sickness or injury should occur and medication is recommended by a trained veterinarian, the cow is isolated from the rest of the herd and milk is discarded twice as long as the FDA recommended discard time to be sure you have the purest product available. Unlike most of the competition, all milk produced for PURE FRESH dairy products is from cows owned, fed, cared for and milked daily on the Jackson family farm.

The Roberts Family Farm stand also carries excellent, hormone-free Ashe County Cheese. I got another block of their Super Sharp Cheddar to see how local I can take my pimento-cheese recipe.

Peanut Butter
I got the only tub of plain peanut butter at The Berry Patch stand, also in the Market Shoppes building. They also had a tub or two of hot peanut butter and honey-roasted peanut butter, a relative bonanza after being out of stock all last week. The peanut butter is tasty, but I don't know anything about the way the peanuts were raised. It's certainly easier to spread than the slightly bitter and sandy peanut butter I made last week. I left the skins on the peanuts, which must have soaked up the oils. On the other hand, peanut skins have high levels of anti-oxidants, according to NCSU researcher Wanida Lewis.

Lessons So Far
In two weeks, I've been able to find local sources for the vast majority of ingredients. Cooking from scratch lets me use these ingredients to make meals that largely from my local food shed.

• Pro: going local just takes the desire and some initial label checking. Once you've found a good local source, you don't have to check every time.


• Con: supplies can be limited. And while some local ingredients meet my "green" menu criteria, like the milk and cheese in this post, other ingredients either don't or don't say, like the peanut butter.

All the more reason to support whatever sustainable practices you can find in your community, to help encourage producers and vendors to provide a stable stock at good prices.

75% local, with the help of Blueberry Clafoutis

My Taster and I are taking the Cook for Good plan local in July to see what percentage of our food dollars are spent locally, without going to the extremes that Barbara Kingsolver described so delightfully in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. So far, I've spent $294 on food we intend to eat this month, with 84% of that on local ingredients. If you add the costs of eating at two local restaurants, we've spent $331, with 75% on local ingredients. So surely it's possible for most people to go 10% Local!


I'd hoped to go over 50%, but we've done much better, even though the total includes some indulgences. Our local gourmet superstore, A Southern Season, is having its summer sale now, so the total includes a splurge on their chocolate-dipped cherries.

And we enjoyed a meal for one person at the Neomonde and meals for two at Vimala's Curryblossom Cafe. Fun and tasty, but also a reminder that cooking at home saves so much. Three modest restaurant meals account for 11% of our expenses.

I made the featured recipe this week, Blueberry Clafoutis, with nearly all local ingredients.

The fantastic eggs and blueberries from Little Tree Farm, where every hand-picked berry is perfectly ripe, unlike berries that have been mechanically stripped from the bushes. I replaced the lemon zest with lemon-balm leaves from my garden. The sugar is the regional and organic Florida Gold, available at Whole Foods and some local groceries. The flour is all-purpose Southern Biscuit Flour from Newton, North Carolina. Alas, that flour is bleached, so I'm still looking for local source of unbleached all-purpose flour. With milk from May View Farms, only the salt and butter came from far away. In your area, you may have a different mix of what is local and what isn't, but you can see how easy it is to make a recipe largely local.

Simple Summer Delight: Toasted Tomato & Cheese Sandwich

Sometimes you just want something fast and tasty for lunch. One of my favorites this time of year is a toasted tomato and cheese sandwich on homemade, 100% whole-wheat bread.

The trick is to spread mustard on the bread, then top one slice with tomatoes and the other with cheese. Toast in a toaster oven, then flip the cheese side over on top of the tomato side. Yummm ... crisp bread, melted cheese, and hot tomato! This bread is from a new recipe and turned out a little short, so I'm having a sandwich and a half.

What's local: the Ashe County pepper-jack cheese, tomato, whole-wheat flour, and honey in the sandwich, plus arugula for the salad with garlic in the dressing. The cheese comes from the Roberts Family Farm stand at the State Farmers' Market in Raleigh, where they also sell an amazing extra-sharp cheddar. Don't be put off by the cheeses in the display counter, which seem to have been there for a long time. Just ask for what you want and you'll be offered a good-looking block from the cooler.

What's not local: yeast, salt, butter, molasses, mustard, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and pepper.

Starting the day right with a healthy, local breakfast

It took me about 15 minutes to make breakfast this morning and it will take my Taster about 5 minutes to do the dishes. Seems like a big time investment in this rushed world. But while cutting up the pepper and onion for the eggs, I wondered how many parents will do "anything" for their kids, but not make them a breakfast that will keep them awake in school. Or how many adults doze at work, or spend money on diet shakes, medicine, and doctors, when the answer may lie simply in cooking a few minute a day.

What's local on that plate: eggs, yellow pepper, onion, basil, stone-ground corn meal, asiago cheese, tomato. I forgot to put in the garlic, so it wound up in the stoup.

What's not local: olive oil, salt, pepper.

Excellent pizza with fresh mozz & asiago

Easy and delicious, that's how my eat-local experiment is going. Today for lunch, I made one of the best and most local pizzas I've ever had, with most of the ingredients from the Durham Farmers' Market. Here's how:

• Made Speedy Grilled Pizza dough, replacing the cup of white whole-wheat flour with Brinkley Farms' whole-wheat flour, which is very fresh and flavorful. For the initial kneading of the dough, I put it in the food processor which still had traces of pesto in it.
  


• Chopped up a clove of crisp, juicy garlic from Cornucopia Farm and heated it with a splash of olive oil. Rolled out the dough and topped it with the garlic olive oil and kosher salt. Baked it at 500 degrees until nearly done. (The grill ran out of gas last night, alas!)


• Topped the pizza with chopped ripe tomato from Maple Spring Gardens and two cheeses from the Chapel Hill Creamery: an aged asiago and fresh mozzarella. Baked that until the cheese melted, then garnished with fresh basil ribbons, also from Maple Springs Gardens.

The crust was as thin and crispy as any I've made, with the pesto and whole wheat adding flavor. The light yet complex toppings celebrated summer. See Cook for Good Year-Round for the Speedy Grilled Pizza dough.

What wasn't local? 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, olive oil, salt, and yeast. And even the olive oil was my local gourmet store's house brand: Southern Season's Signature olive oil, which is 40% off this month. I don't count that as local, but it sure is good timing during pesto season.

Eat local in July: where's the butter?

I have to confess, when I said lunch was 100% local, I stretched the "local" a bit. I used Organic Valley butter, which has several NC dairy farms as members, but evidently makes its butter all from Wisconsin milk. I had planned to get Maple View Farm butter at the NC State Farmers' Market that afternoon. But alas, my dairy supplier there had quit carrying butter. No local butter at another health-food store or at Whole Foods, although Whole Foods did have the Maple View milk.

So let's take a moment to praise grocery stores, middlemen, and middlewomen. I prefer to buy direct from the farmer when I can, but I love the convenience and wide selection of a real grocery or co-op. These stores allow farmers to focus on farming, not running a store. Groceries also make shopping super convenient: with one place to go and one financial transaction, you can be done for the week. Many grocery stores are open early and late, even 24/7, which lets people who work on market days still buy local food.

Whole Foods improved its labeling of sources a few years ago, now differentiating between local, regional, U.S., and other. The NC grocery chain Harris Teeter has finally followed Whole Foods' lead by emphasizing local and regional food. My HT put a farm-stand display at the front of its produce section, heaped with local foods. They both still carry California melons when NC melons are abundant, but they are moving in the right direction.

I'm having trouble getting local peanut butter, too, but that's a topic for another post.

Eat Local in July: Day 1

This month, I'm going to see how local I can go using the basic Cook for Good approach with a few changes and new recipes. In a March newsletter, I wrote that going 10%, 20%, and even 30% local seems low to me and that 44% could easily be local in the summer, even without using local butter or cheese. When you cook from scratch, part of nearly every dish can be local.

Can I make it to 44% local? More? Follow the daily reports on my blog, which starts today with a nearly 100% local breakfast. It should be easy to have all my produce, flour, and dairy come from NC. If you know where I can get local pantry items (peanut butter, oil, rice, baking powder, pasta, rice, tea, etc.), please drop me an email.

So far, it's going great. Breakfast was all local except for a family-sized bag of tea: scrambled eggs with peppers, onions, and basil, skillet potatoes, and melon. Lunch was 100% local: Summering Succotash, tomato, blueberries, and water. All so delicious!