First off, I missed last week. I’m not quite sure how that happened, but time flew by, meals passed, and I didn’t cook an entire local meal for week four. Looking back, though, I did eat a lot of local food that week. I’m starting to pay a lot more attention when I shop, and am doing a better job of gravitating to the local ingredients. So, I enjoyed local milk and yogurt, as well as some frozen strawberries and huckleberries. I also used the flour from Fairhaven several times, and it will go into more baked goods this week.
Anyways, enough about that. How about a description of this week’s meal?
This week I’ve managed to catch a little cold. That meant nothing sounded good except for comfort food. For me, that’s pasta. Preferably with a nice red sauce.
I was thrilled to find everything I needed in the house.
Everything came together with surprisingly little fuss. The pasta noodles were nice, wide egg noodles from La Pasta in Seattle. I picked up a frozen batch of them at the UW Farmer’s Market while I was visiting a friend in Seattle. As a side note, it’s a shame that market is so far from my Everett home, because it’s really fun.
The meat was ground beef from Cascade Range Beef Co. in Monroe, a nice company that cares about their cows and the environment. We’ve been enjoying this beef since we bought a quarter cow in January. We’re down to just a bit of ground beef, so we’ll need to refresh our stash before too long. (My husband and I are daydreaming about a chest freezer. Oooh, aaahh.)
The tomatoes for the sauce were the very last of the 20 pounds I canned with Laura and Brittney. I was very sad to see the last jar of that go. Not so sad I didn’t plop it in the sauce pan of course. I was also sad to see I had miscalculated the beef/tomato ration. I had to supplement with some decidely non-local canned tomatoes. Next year I’m canning as many tomatoes as I possibly can, pun intended. (I found out later my housemate had a whole bunch of canned tomatoes, a gift from a friend on Vashon Island. Drat. Ah well, we’ll enjoy them later, I’m sure.)
The onion was organic and from Skagit County (can’t remember exactly where.) The spices were all from far away. The recipe, as per my usual method, involved me throwing things in the pot until it looked and tasted good.
We enjoyed the whole thing with some nice rosemary bread from Bellingham, and more of the tasty butter from Bow.
In the interest of a thorough report, we drank water to complement our local meal. I’m sure Spada Lake counts as local.
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