Rhode Island 100 mile

…Sunday night, Ingrid and I were at Fenway for the Sox-Yankees showdown. Miraculously, after a day a of drenching rains the skies cleared and they got the game going at 9PM. Since the game was so late, we decided to eat at home instead of searching for local foods around the Fenway area…which turned out to be a good choice! There’s not much one can get for food in the area…most restaurants are out because we can’t verify where the food comes from and inside the park is pretty much the same scenario. Of course, the hot dog vendor kept stopping in front of our seats to dole out their tasty little morsels which got the stomach churning more than once! The smoke raining down from the right field rooftop grill didn’t help matter much either. More than once, I thought Ingrid was going to intercept some unlucky kid’s ice cream cone…Luckily our friend Chris was generous and offered us some of the peanuts he had (since we didn’t buy them we thought we weren’t breaking the rules!). On the bright side, it was probably one of the few times that we will go to Fenway and not spend any money…

….sorry for the lack of posting over the past couple of days…Friday we were prepping for the big dinner and had company…Saturday was the dinner and yesterday we slept and headed up to the Sox-Yankees game (probably will be it’s own post tomorrow- there were many non-local temptations!)…so we ended up pumping out a 13 course dinner for Ingrid’s parents and their friends…since they are adventurous with food, we were able to serve all kinds of foods – and since this dinner was planned before the 100 mile diet, we could use anything we liked. We tried to keep most of it local, though…here’s what we came up with:

…it was torrential rain pretty much all day in RI from what I gather…Ingrid and I were up in Massachusetts today, but what I can tell from the radar and what has fallen in the roads, it has been pretty rainy…it looks like the garden has remained intact, so we’ll see what happens when the sun comes back out.
It’s been pretty quiet on the 100-mile front this week, mostly due to a dinner we are hosting this Saturday for Ingrid’s parents and their friends…we’ve got nine people coming for a commissioned meal…since this was booked way before the 100 mile diet was started, this dinner is exempt- but we are going to try to do our best to get everything that we possibly can within our 100 mile boundary…so we won’t be flying in foie gras, truffles and caviar for this one…I can’t divulge too much about the dinner for fear that someone might find their way to this blog and find out the menu beforehand, but we’ll be sure to post on Sunday regarding the feast. Tomorrow we’ll be off to market to get the last of that meal’s ingredients and to shop for ourselves…there should be a host of new selections for us to write about tomorrow!

…after about a month of 90 degree temps and little rain, the skies opened up today and we got a huge thunderstorm with wind, lightning and torrential downpours…we’ve been lugging out the hose to water all the plants in our garden, so it was nice not to have to do that today…I pulled all the potted plants next to the house and picked all our ripe cherry tomatoes in fear that the forecasted hail would ruin our plants…

So I have a new obsession – it’s taking the place of chocolate! I think we’ve mentioned Narragansett Creamery before – we get our yogurt, feta, and other cheese from them. We’ve also had their ricotta cheese in many forms – lasagna, dip, plain, with strawberries, etc. My most recent experiment was to mix a little sugar (that we already had- honey works great as well) into the ricotta and then add the fresh blueberries Josh and I picked this past weekend…now I’m addicted. It has a smooth consistency, the right amount of sweetness, and the blueberries add a really nice taste. It’s a better mix than the ricotta with the strawberries we tried earlier in the month, the strawberries were too juicy and made the mixture too watery…could peaches be up next?

Today was a vey big day on the local food front…we got up early this morning and picked 12 pounds of blueberries down at Shartner’s Farms in Exeter, RI…we came back home, showered and then headed off to the Hope Street Farmer’s Market up in Providence. Ingrid and I split up- she shopped for food for us and I shopped for a dinner that we’re doing for Ingrid’s parents (and friends) next Saturday…there was a lot to choose from this weekend…corn is out, cantalope, tomatoes, onion, cheese, peaches, apples and yogurt all were found at the market. Our selection of available foods now has doubled and possibly tripled in the past week…tonight’s dinner found us cooking up a dozen ears of corn along with some lamb riblets we bought back in the spring as a 1/4 lamb package (known as #61) from an acquiantence at URI. After the market, we headed down to Sakonnet Vineyards in Little Compton, RI. We joined the 12 o’clock tour and then hit the tasting room afterwards. All the wines that they sell at the winery are grown and pressed on-site, so we brought home some wines for next weekend’s dinner along with a couple of selections for ourselves…

Blueberry fields.

Blueberry close-up.

Ingrid’s bucket.

Our Sakonnet purchases- their Port was surprisingly good!

End of the day dinner…featuring a Sakonnet white…

There was a sign outside a bar/restaurant in Alma, Colorado that read “Friday Night Fish Fry”. I (Josh) used to live out in Colorado Springs and sometimes on Fridays after work we would head for the mountains…on our way out to the Collegiate Peaks, we would pass through Alma, Colorado…population very small and at an altitude of just about 10,000′. There was a very small “downtown” with a couple of drinking and eating establishments of which, one always advertised a “Friday Night Fish Fry”. Now, I don’t know what they were serving at the fry because we never stopped to check it out, but that sign definitely has stuck in my mind ever since I first saw it…tonight we tried our own fish fry…my intentions were to put our cast iron griddle on the grill, fire it up and fry the fish out there…I had to abruptly change plans, however because our grill decided to run out of gas just when the griddle reached the right temperature. I brought everything inside and fired up the conventional oven…what you see is sauteed fennel and zucchini (from our own garden) and fried cod coated in a cornmeal and dill batter along with a nice glass of my own 2006 hard cider…

One big question mark that we had in our minds regarding the RI 100 mile was how much it was going to cost us. I (Josh) thought that it could go either way…we already had a food budget in place and that we’d either fall above or below that each week…after our full two weeks into this experiment, we have now honed it down so we are actually hitting our pre-set budget. The first week we came in a little high- more than likely from the trip to Whole Foods where they do sell limited local food, but at a slightly higher cost than you would see at the farmer’s markets. The majority of the weekly budget goes towards protein- fish, chicken, pork and eggs…probably almost 1/3 to 1/2 our weekly amount. About 1/8 goes towards dairy and the rest goes towards fruits and vegetables. All that picking that Ingrid has been doing can get expensive up front, but seeing we’re freezing some for winter, that will average out over the long run. I can see how this can get a little expensive, though- we’ve been buying the cheaper cuts of meat and whole chicken…some of the more “luxurious” cuts of pork and meat would take up the majority of our weekly budget! So in summary- we’re eating local for the same budget that we had before we started.