Go local out

Rob and I went to Pour at Four last night for a late dinner and to greet the new year with the community that has organized itself around the restaurant. Mark set Howie loose last night so at 9 p.m. the standard menu was replaced by a special small plates New Years Eve menu. The food wasn't local, but it was really good. And, as Rob and I sat there, we talked about how we don't really feel guilty when we go out to places like Pour at Four, The Hub, The Spar, or Primo Grill. We tend to only go to restaurants that are truly locally-owned. Yes, Sea Grill and Matador are owned by Washington-based mini chains, but we still consider that local.

When we decided to eat local this year, the intent to support local farmers was the most important reason. Cutting down on food miles was a significant factor, but there are some arguments that do hold water that can be made for the mass transportation of food and how it could be better for the environment, which we'll explore later because you can poke holes in almost any argument.

Anyway, the discussion we had last night is that we particularly like places like Pour at Four, which we frequent enough to be regulars. For years Rob and I have talked about our urban village. When we worked at home, we rarely ventured south of 6th Ave., east of Oakes, and West of Mildred. The area around Proctor and a few places on 6th, like Shakabrah Java, composed the core of our village. Since we both work downtown now, we have added it to our village. By living within this village, and by cutting down to one car augmented by bus and bike, we use less gas than many people in the area (especially less that the people who live in Gig Harbor and criss-cross the bridge several times a day). But, we have also created a community within this village of people who, while not necessarily friends, definitely add to the fabric of our lives--the clerks at Metro Market, the cobblers at Proctor Shoe Repair, the family members who own and operate Gateway to India, and the servers and other regulars at the restaurants we frequent.

And then there are some, whom we call friends. In fact, last night H&L invited us over for a casual get together this afternoon to recover from New Year's Eve and celebrate together. S, who also works at Pour at Four, commented about how the regulars always seem to know about the things that are going on in the lives of the employees. We do. We also know what's going on in the lives of the other regulars, maybe not the nitty-gritty details, but we know when a loved one is ill, when someone needs a word of cheer, when a fur-child dies and they need a hug or a glass of wine. That's all part of belonging to a community. Churches used to serve this function; small-town diners also served it. For some people they still do. But for us, now, today, we find it in different ways in our urban village.

-- Natalie

Local food holidays

Our Christmas has been an extended one due to this extreme (for us on the West Coast) weather. We celebrated Yule at Hannah & Heidi's Solstice party. It was a small group this year since snow began falling in the afternoon and continued until late into the night. The drive to their place on the East side of Tacoma was not too bad. Rob chose a route without any major hills and the Super Subaru made it with only one wiggle. We had fun at the party, especially when we played Les & Fred's dictionary game. Hannah made three different soups (included local veggies from Terry's Berries), cornbread, and a few pies.

Six inches of snow and frozen, ice-encrusted windshield wipers made the drive home particularly memorable. Rob cleaned them off at Jana & Jason's when we dropped off Jana (Jason rode his bicycle, of course). We made it home safely and watched the dogs play in the snow, which they absolutely love. For Yule I gave Rob a promise on Cliff Mass' book about weather in the Pacific Northwest, which I have on order at King's Books. The book feeds Rob's weather obsession. He gave me the Tazo bamboo tea box, which I mostly wanted for the box.

Rob and I had our first solo Christmas ever, and we really enjoyed it. My parents in Longview were expecting even more snow on top of the knee-deep snow they already had--and the hill to their place is difficult. Plus, Rob and I were planning to drive to Salem to pick my grandparents and Portland roads were still a mess. So we all agreed to postpone our Christmas until the weekend. That left us in something of a lurch with too much food since we had a hame and a smoked turkey from Cheryl's farm. Luckily the turkey was completely cooked and preserved thanks to the smoke. So, we left it and the ham in a cooler on the back porch. With temperatures under or right around freezing, the cooler doubled as a second fridge.

We get a lot of questions about whether eating local costs more. We never sat down to figure out the equivalent of foreign food stuffs to compare. But we did have a few moments of local-food sticker shock on Tuesday when our 16 pound turkey cost us $112.00. We know it's a fair price, though, and it is supporting a local farmer, a local butcher, and a local smoker.

Rob and I both had the 24th off, so we took it easy and made a nice local brunch for ourselves before crashing Jana and Jason's early reservations at Sea Grill for Christmas Eve dinner. On Christmas morning we made brunch and set the ham in the crock pot. We weren't sure how it would turn out. In fact, on Wednesday we considered heading to Target to pick up a roaster since our oven is still broken. The ham was a country ham, which means it was not fully-cooked as are most that are sold in grocery stores. I looked online for crock pot recipes, but all of them called for a fully cooked ham or a canned ham. We put the ham in the cooker all by itself and set it for 8 hours to start and later turned it down. By the time the mashed potatoes and squash were ready, the ham had burst its skin, but it tasted perfect. Everything was local.

Friday afternoon we drove down to my parents. Unfortunately Grandpa got sick and ended up in the hospital night, so on Saturday all four of us drove down to visit him and grandma and trade gifts. As soon as we got back to Mom & Dad's around 6:00, we threw the turkey in the oven at 325. It took a couple of hours to reheat, during which we wrapped presents and cooked the sides for dinner: lima beans and rolls from Mom's freezer (not at all local); local squash with chile powder, cinnamon, and nutmeg; mashed local potatoes and gravy. Dinner was pretty late, which meant we opened presents late. Our normal Christmas morning breakfast, which Rob and I always make was replaced by a trip to Burgerville--kind of local.

We didn't know that Mom neglected to plan anything for meals, so even though we cooked, it wasn't all local. If we'd known, we would have taken more food down and had a local Christmas. Next year.

Last night I sliced the meat off the turkey and boiled the carcass with local mirepoix for stock. Tonight I made Rainbow Turkey Soup with turkey (which is kind of pink due to the smoke), two sticks of celery, a yellow carrot, an orange carrot, sweet dumpling squash, and purple kale. It's yummy good. Definitely a comfort food, and it's almost too healthy with all those veggies. We also ate store bought but locally-made bread.

Three quick side notes

1. One of the things I'm proud of this holiday is our gift wrapping. By using things we had on hand like recycled gift boxes and bags and re-useable items like kitchen towels, fabric shopping bags and raffia or real woven ribbon that can be re-used, we avoided using disposable wrapping paper and ribbons with the exception of a few sheets of tissue.

2. If you've never gone to a Burgerville, you should. They blow all the other fast-food joints out of the water, and they source their products locally: meat all comes from Oregon, Washington and Idaho, wild salmon and halibut, Washington and Idaho potatoes for fries, and local dairy products, including Rogue River Bleu and Tillamook cheeses. Part of their menu changes annually.

3. We went tonight to buy a new kitchen range. We got a Kenmore flat-top with a single oven. Rob, aka Baker Boy, is excited because the oven has three racks. We went to the outlet and bought one that was returned and may have some cosmetic damage (all I noticed was a spot in the oven). We both like the idea of buying something that is ultimately used--the discount is a bonus. I'm excited about the turbo-boil element that will make boiling a pot full of water faster. I'll desperately miss the old Westinghouse double oven, but we looked at the double oven options and decided against it. To get a duplicate of what we have would cost around $1,500, and I don't want it that badly. The double ovens that are out now have a shallow oven on top and a larger one below. I imagine that picking up a roasting pan with a 16 lb. turkey and sides from floor level will get more and more difficult as the years go by. We'll report on performance.

--Natalie

A local meal inspired by Hanukkah

Tonight's dinner was the epitome of simple. After hearing a Hanukkah song that mentioned latkes then coming home from a snowy day with a ton of potatoes in the larder, we connected the dots and ended up making an evening meal of latkes, pealed, diced and cooked apples, kefir cheese we are trying from Greek Gods in Seattle, and a squash from Terry's Berries cooked in the microwave.

I still have dishes to do from the meal, but I am reminded that sometimes the simplest meals are the best. The authors of the 100 Mile Diet wrote about how their meals tended toward the simple over time, as they adapted to the new diet. There are nights like tonight when I can see why...

A different recipe for Honey Whole Wheat bread

I decided to experiment with a new bread recipe today, and after eating my first slice of a honey whole wheat bread, I would say this is a winner that is very easy to do with all-local ingredients. Here is the recipe, credited to Linda Larsen from a newsletter called, "Your Guide to Busy Cooks."

INGREDIENTS:

• 3-1/2 to 4 cups all purpose flour
• 2-1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 2 pkg. active dry yeast
• 2 tsp. salt
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 cup honey
• 3 Tbsp. oil
• 1 egg

PREPARATION:

In large bowl, combine 2 cups all-purpose flour, 1 cup whole wheat flour, the yeast, and salt and mix well.

In saucepan, heat milk, water, honey, and oil until a thermometer reads 120-130 degrees F (warm). Add liquid mixture to flour mixture along with the egg and stir to combine. Beat this batter for 3 minutes. Then, gradually stir in rest of whole wheat flour and enough remaining all-purpose four to form a firm dough.

Sprinkle work surface with flour and knead dough, adding more flour if necessary, for 5-8 minutes until smooth and satiny. Place dough in a greased bowl, turning the dough in the bowl to grease the top. Cover and let rise in a warm place about 1 hour, until double in bulk.

Punch down dough and divide into 2 pieces. On lightly floured surface, roll or press each piece of dough to a 14x7" rectangle. Starting with shorter side, roll up tightly, pressing dough into roll with each turn. Pinch edges and ends to seal and place dough, seam-side down, into greased 9x5" bread pans, making sure short ends of bread are snugly fitted against the sides of the pans. Cover and let rise in warm place until the dough fills the corners of the pans and is double in bulk, 30-40 minutes.

Bake in preheated 375 degree oven for 35-40 minutes, until bread is golden brown. Remove from pans and cool on wire racks. I like to brush the bread with butter when it's still hot from the oven for a softer crust.

A 100 percent local lunch

I decided to work at home today and just made a really yummy, 100 percent local lunch (I have a picture that I'll post later). We'll call it late summer hamburger succotash. I took a pound of hamburger that we needed to use and cooked it with an onion, garlic, and then a variety of late summer veggies: yellow squash sliced on the bias, poblano pepper cut into strips, a few slices of jalapeno, a chunked tomato, a sunburst squash that I cut into wedges. I also tossed in the bean trimmings leftover from the beans that we pickled last night. Cooked the onion and garlic, pepper, and hamburger together until browned/translucent and then added the rest and steamed until tender-crisp and topped it all with sliced Italian basil.

Yum - even the dogs look jealous. Everything in the lunch with the exception of salt came from no farther than Yakima - and only the peppers are from there. Everything else is from Pierce County. This is starting to make up for the abysmal record of local eating this month.

More canning this weekend - 40 pounds of paste tomatoes for whole, sauce, and salsa; pepper, beans, pickled jalapenos, corn, blackberry and peach jams. And anything else we decide we can make time for. Of course, to do this, we're exempting bottled lemon juice, pectin, and vinegar. But, we're using honey as sweetener.

-- Natalie

With best intentions

Best intentions, right? Everyone knows that St. Theresa said the road to hell is paved with them. If I believed in Hell, I'd say I'm already firmly there, and with an exceedingly smooth road plastered with best intentions such as the best intentions I had of writing a couple times a week - at least - for EatLocalWashington.com. I have written here and there, but much of it - such as the stuff from my trip to NOLA, has not been processed for the site. Someday, maybe; then again, it might be another brick in my Highway to Hell - just like the last two weeks equal 14 days of best intentions.

We have not been able to get back into the swing of local eating since returning from NOLA. However, things have improved considerably this weekend. Oh, and new rule, when one of us is sick, we get much more liberal with the rules.

Even though I was super sick on Tuesday, I forced myself to go to the 6th Avenue farmers' market on my way home. I wanted to pick up some melons from Buck at Alvarez Farms, but he wasn't there. Instead, I ate Indian food because I couldn't resist when I saw Surrinder was cooking and talked with Lisa from Terry's Berries and Cheryl Ouellette, the Pig Lady. Sue from Wilson's Fish just happened to be inside E-9 and came out to chat when she saw me. Wilson's wasn't at the market and they weren't at Proctor last Saturday because the catch hasn't been big enough to justify it. I left the market with feta marinated in olive oil (from Montesano) and two pounds of bacon from the new smoker that Cheryl's using.

On Saturday the City Manager's Office held a potluck picnic at Manitou Park. So in preparation, Rob mixed up two sponges for bread on Thursday night. On Friday he baked two loaves. We also cooked a batch of garbanzo beans (Yakima) and a batch of wheat berries (Methow), which I combined and dressed with boiled garlic (Puyallup), olive oil and balsamic vinegar with salt and pepper (ex).

We hit the Puyallup farmers' market Saturday morning after pancakes with eggs and bacon (the bacon is good, I'd like a little more smoke or sweet) for breakfast. Buck from Alvarez Farms was not there, but some of his relatives were staffing the van. We bought a case of green beans to preserve as well as watermelon, cantaloupe, and a variety of eggplant (thinking of making caponata to can or just eat fresh). At McDonald's Farm - yeah, really - I bought basil, cabbage, and artichokes. We got crumbled feta and chevre rolled in Dill from River Valley and tomatoes and corn from a Yakima farm. We looked for some chiles to buy and freeze, but I didn't want to deal with the crowd at the only place that had good-looking poblanos. In the pavilion I bought two pints of cherry tomatoes from Westover Farms and clams from Brady's Oysters (Gray's Harbor). We also bought a full flat of blueberries from a Puyallup valley farmer who sets up across from the pavilion; they threw in a third half-flat for free. That was a great bonus and the berries are really sweet - perfect sweet.

On our way home we picked up our share from Terry's Berries, which included the first apples of the year, two cups of raspberries, potatoes, greens, cucumber, lettuce, summer squash, Napa cabbage, and broccoli. Of course, we also got our salad and eggs share.

At home I added chopped fennel and oregano from our garden with some basil, one container of cherry tomatoes, some green onions, and the crumbled feta to the garbanzo-wheat berry salad. It tasted pretty good when it was all mixed up and was well-received at the potluck. So was Rob's bread.

Last night we had a comforting and satisfying local dinner. We sauteed an onion and a tomato in butter then added the steamer clams. Covered it all just until the clams opened and served it soup style in bowls. A sweet Maryhill Rose (sangiovese) and slices of Rob's bread completed the quick, simple, and delicious dinner.

Recipes

Garbanzo & Wheat Berry Salad

1 C dried garbanzo beans, soaked

1 C wheat berries

1/4 C olive oil

2 T balsamic vinegar

2 T red wine vinegar

1 t mustard powder

1/4 C chopped fresh herbs (mint, oregano, basil, fennel)

3/4 C crumbled feta

1 tomato, chopped or 1 pt. cherry tomatoes, quartered

2 scallions, chopped

Salt & pepper to taste

Bring garbanzo beans and enough water to cover by two inches (3 C) to a boil. Turn heat down to a simmer 60 minutes or until tender.

Bring wheat berries and three cups water to boil. Turn heat down and simmer 45 to 60 minutes.

Mix vinegars, oil, mustard, and salt and pepper to form dressing. Drain and combine wheat berries & garbanzo beans. Dress while still warm. Let cool and add herbs. Refrigerate overnight. Just before serving, add chopped tomato, scallions, and feta. Drizzle with more olive oil or vinegar if needed.

Alternatives: change the herbs depending on what is available; or add any other seasonal vegetables: seeded & sliced cucumber; chopped zucchini; chopped carrots; corn kernels.

Steamed Clams

2 lbs. steamer clams in shell, rinsed

1 T butter

1 med. onion, chopped

1 large tomato, chopped

In a large skillet with a lid, saute onion in butter until translucent. Add tomato and cook until warm and liquid is released and boiling. Add water or wine if more liquid is needed. Nestle clams into mixture. Put lid on and steam until clams open, about 8 minutes. Ladle into bowls and serve with crusty bread to soak up sauce. We took clams out of shells, dropped them back into broth and ate it like a soup.

Options: Add coarsely-chopped basil or parsley, hot red pepper flakes, and minced garlic before adding clams.

-- Natalie

Resuming our local eating

Tomorrow we will ease back into local eating after a week-long vacation in New Orleans where we tasted the local foods there - even though much of the local fare surely came from a wider geography than we are accepting during our Washington eating year here at home. One thing I notice as we go through this year is the clear feeling of tradeoffs and compromises as the year wears on. We chose to not carry our local eating to a new location in New Orleans, because we wanted to taste the local cuisine in what could be our only trip to the Big Easy. But that was a conscious choice. We could have chosen to eat simply on the road, even though eating "simply" when you don't have more control over your situation than a typical tourist attending a conference in a new part of the country would be anything other than "simple."

I arrived home late last night, around 12:30 a.m., so by necessity I had to carry on eating outside our local food diet today - since there was no time to ramp back up to our local eating. In a few minutes I will make the "sponge" for the simple no-knead bread that we make and then set it aside to bake tomorrow night. And earlier this evening I took out a package of hamburger from Cheryl the Pig Lady to unthaw for dinner tomorrow night. I pick up Natalie from the airport around 3 p.m., but before I make the trip to pick her up I will visit the Proctor Farmer's Market, quite likely the Puyallup Farmer's Market and then stop by Terry's Berries to get all of our fresh food to start another week of local eating. It's time get back on the wagon!

I sense fresh, local fruit and berries in my very near future. Now, off to make bread!

-- Rob

Local eating, New Orleans style

Last night Natalie and I had a dinner of a lifetime at chef John Besh's restaurant August here in New Orleans, where we are spending a hot week or so while Natalie attends a conference for work. We chose to eat at August because Besh uses this restaurant to feature local food from around the New Orleans area. Some of the featured food can be seen in the PDF of sample menus for dinner, lunch and dessert.

During the meal, which featured our first summer tastes of melons, peaches and local berries, we talked about how our local eating year is going and what the biggest surprises have been so far. Among those surprises, one of my impressions is just how easy it has been to switch to making most of our own food. For me, making my own food is like a step back in time to when I was a child growing up in a family that lived on a farm and had very little money. Back then, we ate local food from our own garden, we raised our own cows for slaughter, we milked a cow every morning and had homemade butter, we raised pigs, chickens, rabbits - in other words, we interacted with our food supply every day.

Since we started our Washington eating year on April Fool's Day, we have been doing an urban equivalent to what I did by necessity when growing up on rural Thurston County, Washington, as a child. Now we have relationships with the farmers who produce our food, rather than raising the food ourselves. We venture out every week to markets to pick up the latest ingredients for our local eating life, as well as to have conversations with Cheryl the Pig Lady, Terry and Dick Carkner from Terry's Berries and Buck from Alvarez Farms.

I will look forward to rejoining our Washington eating year when I return home next week after this week-long sojourn in New Orleans. Until then, I am eating my gumbo, po boys, fried oysters, beignets and other local foods here in the Big Easy. Soaking up the flavors!

-- Rob

Bingeing on berries as summer plenty arrives

For the second Saturday morning in a row, Natalie and I made the most of our morning and early afternoon by first visiting the Proctor Farmers' Market, taking our goodies home, and then driving to the nearby Puyallup Farmers' Market before visiting Terries Berries to pick up our weekly garden share on the way home. That means that combined with Thursday's regular visit to the downtown Tacoma Farmers' Market, we are hitting three markets a week right now.

Why visit so many farmers' markets?

Each market is different. The Proctor market is hyper-local - just over a mile away from our house - and it offers a lot of variety in a very small space. Today's purchases included cheese curds and chevre from River Valley Ranch in Fall City, salmon and halibut caught in Washington waters from Wilson Fish, and another flat (12 pints) of strawberries from Spooner Farms. We also picked up four small artichokes and cauliflower from Zestful Gardens.

The Puyallup market is nearly as large and varied in local produce as the well-known Olympia Farmers' Market. We made the trip to this market, about 20 miles from home, mostly to be able to pick up specialty items ordered directly from Buck at Alvarez Farms. Today's major score was a 25-pound bag of rolled oats. Those are going straight into the big freezer in our garage for about 24 hours, to make sure that we don't have any insect eggs in them that are going to hatch and ruin the oats. We also picked up a couple of whole frozen chickens from Cheryl the Pig Lady, a whole box of rhubarb that we need to process and freeze tomorrow from another farm in Buckley - near the foothills of the Cascade Mountains - and three more pounds of cherries for fresh eating that will have to hold us over until we can get more fresh cherries at the Thursday market in downtown Tacoma.

I have to say that local eating is not a sacrifice at all right now. We are adjusting to the additional work involved in thinking ahead and storing up the fruit and other ingredients that we can find fresh right now, but the rewards are clear. Who could complain about local eating when it features goodies like homemade strawberry shortcakes including berries picked less than 24 hours ago from fields less than 20 miles from our house?

RECENT LOCAL MEALS FROM YESTERDAY

Breakfast - Hot cereal made from cracked emmer wheat and other grains from Bluebird Grain Farms in the Methow Valley.

Lunch - Mixed greens salad topped with barbecued chicken and first-of-the-season tomato, accompanied by a handful of Bing and Rainier cherries from Eastern Washington and a handful of plain, in-the-shell peanuts from Alvarez Farms in Mabton, Washington.

Dinner - Had our friends Jana and Jason over for grilled sturgeon coated in a sauce made from yogurt, buttermilk and cayenne (Natalie will have to list the ingredients for this sauce in a future post...) that was joined in a fresh taco salad with lettuce from our weekly garden share from Terries Berries, and taco meat (ground beef from Cheryl the Pig Lady mixed with onion, chili powder, a little cayenne, and salt and pepper). Dessert was fresh Bing and Rainier cherries that we needed to finish eating before they started getting too soft.

THINGS TO DO WHILE WATCHING A MOVIE

We both have sore thumbs from last night as we spent the whole time while watching a movie separating the kernels of dried corn from the cobs so we could bag them up in anticipation of grinding the corn in the near future for polenta and other uses. We processed this 25 pounds of corn from Alvarez Farms in a slightly noisy process, pushing the kernels off the cob with our thumbs and into two huge stainless steel mixing bowls. After we freeze the kernels for at least 24 hours, we will remove the corn from the ziplock bags and remove as much of the chaff as we can before we actually grind the corn for future use.

-- Rob

Cherries and attention span

One of the things I say fairly often is that the average American has the attention span of a gnat. Normally I say this in reference to politics, and when it comes to politics, I have the attention span of an elephant. I’m kind of a junky. Yes, I watch C-Span. But, today, I have decided that I am the gnattiest of Nats. I can’t even read a short article on Exit 133 before I mentally switch gears to thinking about looking up sources of local vinegar. And before I can even enter “Vinegar” and “Washington” in the Google box, I think of how short my attention span is and how I’m trying to teach myself to focus on one thing at a time and how I should write about it, which is what I’m doing now. But, now I’m going to switch back to reading Exit133 and eating my lunch of a grilled salmon (Wilsons from PM) green salad (TB) with dried cranberries and almonds (PS) and a side of cherries (PuyM) and an aprium (TM). Then, I’ll look up vinegar sources before plugging back into work. Hmmmm, maybe I’m losing focus because it’s 3:30, and I’m just now eating lunch…..

Yum, I think I could eat grilled salmon every day. But then I’d have something like mercury poisoning—would I be able to tell the difference? Would anyone else? Besides, the Mad Hatter is one of my all-time favorite literary characters. There’s something to emulate, right?

The cherries were a perfect foil to salmon oil (like that?). I’m learning to like cherries again. A few years ago, okay, maybe a decade ago, Rob and my grandma and I were driving back to Gold Beach from my aunt & uncle’s house in Myrtle Point. Aunt Vera treated us to cherry pie, frozen but freshly baked. On the curvy road just before Humbug Pass I told Rob to pull over. He did. I got out. I promptly puked cherry chunks over the railing that kept cars from plunging into the Pacific. Ever since then, I haven’t been too fond of cherries, especially the crappy treacley and artificial cherry flavors featured in such things as gum and lollipops and ice cream and frozen pie. Then a few years ago, I discovered Bordeaux cherry ice cream from the Umpqua Dairy. I’m not a big ice cream fan, but the chunks of whole cherry halves sold me on that ice cream and on trying cherries, real ones, again. Slowly I’ve worked my way up to being able to eat a handful of raw, real cherries. Now, my craving for vitamin C-filled fruit has me eating several handfuls at a sitting. So far, so good. Not quite as good as this weekends strawberry orgy, however.

This, from Exit133 regarding a tall ship that ran aground near Shaw Island, made me laugh out loud: “Ironically … it’s 133 feet long. Hmmm … That can’t be a good sign.”

-- Natalie

Feeling the affects of funky local weather

Our local weather this year helped lead to a rare local food failure for Natalie and me tonight. Normally by this time in June we would be able to buy some early local fruit in stores, and tonight Natalie was really in need of some fresh fruit. So I made a suggestion that may have worked in nearly any other year - let's run to Metropolitan Market and suck it up to pay high prices for local cherries. We have already had some cherries from farmer's markets, and yesterday I committed the cardinal sin of eating too many of the cherries that Natalie had purchased at the Proctor market on Saturday. So I know that local cherries are around, but when we went to the store around 10 p.m. there were no local cherries or other local fruit whatsoever, other than Washington pears and apples, which we have been eating for months now.

So we came away empty handed. Soon we should be able to find local strawberries, fresh blueberries, and more plentiful cherries. But in some cases the unseasonable weather may have compromised the crops so much that this will just be a year without many early season fruits. Last week's snow in Eastern Washington had me thinking about this. Fruit trees and other plants are not used to a dusting of snow in June in this part of the country.

The impact is very local in the garden in our front yard, where it took three weeks for carrots to pop out of the soil because soil temperatures have been so cold. Normally the seeds would emerge in 10 days or so.

My fingers are crossed that seasonal weather is here to stay now. It's still not too late to plant a few more seeds for summer crops, and we are just a few weeks away from time to plant another round of peas and other crops for harvest in the fall.

-- Rob

My new favorite bread recipe - No-knead Bread

Yesterday I attended a day-long retreat for board members for the Tahoma Audubon Society, and after doing a 39-mile bike ride at o-dark-thirty in the morning to reach the University of Washington Pack Forest near Mt. Rainier, I was talking with fellow board members about our Washington eating year. One of the example foods I talked about is a simple bread recipe that I have adapted using all Washington ingredients. We found the initial recipe in an April edition of a magazine called The Week.

Here is the recipe:

No-knead Bread

Time: About 1.5 hours, plus 14 to 20 hours for rising time

• 3 cups of all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting

• 1 and 5/8 cups of water

• 1/4 tsp instant yeast (I use a little less than 1 Tbs of regular yeast)

• 1 and 1/4 tsp salt

• Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed

In a large bowl, combine flour, yeast and salt. (If using regular yeast, use warm water (110 - 115 degrees or so) and then add the yeast. Let it sit for 10 minutes or so to "proof" the yeast. It should bubble up and form a foam on the top of the warm water. Then add the other ingredients to the yeasty water.) Stir everything together in a sufficient sized bowl until it is a sticky mass, then cover with plastic wrap and let it sit at room temperature for at least 12 hours. Remember to use a bowl that will leave room for the dough to rise up and bubble. I try to let my bread sit for 20-24 hours, so it gets more of a sourdough taste.

After letting the dough rise, lightly flour a work surface and remove the dough from the bowl where it has been rising to the work surface. Sprinkle a little more flour on the surface of the dough and fold the dough over itself once or twice. Leave the dough on the work surface and cover loosely with plastic wrap. Let it rest about 15 minutes.

After letting the dough rest, shape it into a ball and then place it into a bowl that has a light dusting of cornmeal in the bottom. I often spray a little olive oil on the bottom and sides of the bowl, then sprinkle cornmeal, or in my case since I haven't been able to get Washington cornmeal, some substitute like cracked emmer that we buy from Bluebird Grain Farms from the Methow Valley. Then put a damp towel over the top of the bowl and let the bread rise again for 2 hours.

At least a half an hour before the dough is ready to be baked, place a heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, etc.) into a 450 degree oven. When the dough has finished its 2 hours of rising, carefully remove the covered pot from the oven and shift the dough from the rising bowl into the heavy pot by simply pouring it in. I use my fingers to loosen the dough from the sides of the rising bowl, then turn the bowl over and pour it into the hot pot. It may not look pretty at this point, but that won't really matter. Then you place the pot back in the oven and cook the bread for 30 minutes with the lid on the pot and another 15-30 minutes without the lid. The bread will be done when it is browned on the top. Then simply remove the loaf and place it on a cooling rack.

These instructions create one rounded loaf, but last week I experimented using the same dough in loaf pans and that worked out pretty well. So feel free to experiment, and let me know how it turns out for you. What I have found is that because of the long rising time and the nice sourdough taste, this bread has a flavor and texture similar to other breads that we would buy at the store for $3 or $4 per loaf. And because those breads are not made with all-local ingredients, we can't buy them anyway during our Washington eating year. This should be a hit if you like crusty, flavorful bread!

-- Rob