Rhode Island 100 mile

…today was the last day for our Friday market over at Goddard State Park. It will be missed this winter, but there is always the Hope Village and South County markets to get our supplies for the upcoming months. We did get a few things of note today…we bought our 50 pound bag of winter potatoes (time to dust off the PSD!), a gallon of honey for brewing purposes and the purple cauliflower pictured above…

                           -Josh

I picked up my allotment of apple cider today from Phantom Farms in Cumberland, RI which will be fermented to try to retain my title  for the third year in a row…

                                     -Josh

 Cream, apple, sugar, eggs and a touch of calvados…that’s it. I took a recipe from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon to test out…even though it’s getting a little cold, I thought it would be nice to try to make something seasonal for dessert. The apple was diced and simmered in a sugar syrup to keep the apples from freezing solid…the rest was simple ice cream…an egg, cream and sugar custard which was turned in our little ice cream maker…we have yet to have the results, but based on the “clean up” of the ice cream maker, it  should come out pretty good!

                   -Josh

Sorry for the unintentional hiatus…not that nothing has been going on, but we just haven’t been giving the blog the attention that it needs! We promise to be more attentive in the upcoming weeks! Our latest news is that we’ve signed up for a poultry CSA with Pat’s Pastured. We’ll be getting a nice delivery of his poultry once a month throughout the winter which will be a welcome addition to our local staples.  He is also having a new indoor wintertime market in South County this year, so we’ll now have two markets to attend over the winter months…very exciting indeed. He is also offering a meat CSA as well which includes pork and ground beef, so if you’re interested, you can catch him on Saturdays here and this coming Monday here …which leads us into a nice segue for today’s post. At the Saturday morning Coastal Grower’s market, there is a vendor from Watson Farm that produces incredible beef products. We’ve bought a bunch of stuff from them before, but we decided that we should try some of their short ribs this time around. I used a recipe from the Fearless Chef  by Andy Husbands who owns Tremont 647 (which is excellent !) in Boston. The recipe is pretty easy and is not too time consuming…you just brown the meat in a pan, construct the braising liquid and  let it simmer away in the oven for a couple of hours…

Here are the ribs in package form…

…a shot of the raw product.

…browning in the pan.

…the finished product, on a bed of wild rice.

…we’ve done short ribs in the past…but nothing have turned out like these. They were firm, yet falling off the bone…just enough fat to make them succulent but still lean and the taste was unbelievable…nice and earthy but without that “gamey” taste that tends to discourage some people. This one was definitely a “keeper”!

                                     -Josh

Josh was feeling awfully ambitious tonight.  When I came home, he was doing the final coat of paint in the living room (it’s no longer soft pumpkin but ylang ylang – who comes up with these color names?) and then he started making gnocchi.  We made (yes, I actually helped out with dinner tonight) fresh potato gnocchi.  After making the gnocchi, Josh made a browned butter sage sauce and added the gnocchi.  We used local potatoes, but our flour and white truffle oil was not local.  The sage and parsley was right from the backyard – the butter was not.  It was a good thing that we only cooked up some of the gnocchi – I could have eaten two more servings!

…it’s nice to be able to revisit some of our standby recipes that we couldn’t make while doing the 100 mile challenge…one of our favorites is buying a loaf of bread at the farmer’s market and pairing it up with some mussels steamed in a white wine/dijon mustard/saffron sauce like we did last night. We bought four pounds of mussels to ensure that we would have leftovers to add to pasta for a quick meal over the weekend. Although we could probably track down some local mussels , bread from within our 100 mile radius is pretty much non-existent, so it’s nice to be able to pick up a loaf when we want it…and we’ll try to get our bread from the local bakers- even if their ingredients fall outside of our challenge range…

                                        -Josh

How these…

Became these…

…it took a little time and effort, but our trotters turned into decadent little morsels! I’ve been interested in trying to do something with pig’s feet for a while, so last weekend I dove in head first and pulled out a recipe from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon cookbook. Getting the actual meat off the trotters took the longest- after three hours of simmering and few changes of water, the meat was ready to come off and the skin was soft enough to work with. The meat was shredded and mixed with the skin, along with some shallots, parsley, thyme and dijon mustard. This mixture was rolled into a log using some tin foil and then refrigerated for up to five days. To finish, the “log” was sliced into medallions and coated with flour, more dijon mustard and panko…which was then fried for a bit and finished in the oven. We served them with the recommended gribiche sauce, greens and roasted cauliflower. The result? I was a little skeeved out by the texture and some inedible particles ended up in the final product, but they were so rich that we couldn’t finish the whole preparation…was it worth the time? I think so, but this won’t be a “go to” recipe in the near future.

                                -Josh

It’s back – or I should say, they’re back!  This morning on our way back from Boston and a great breakfast at the Cambridge site of The Friendly Toast (the original is in Portsmouth NH in all its tattoo’ed glory) with Chris and Grace, we stopped at the Lippett Park Farmers Market.  I ran right to the Narragansett Creamery table and got a tub of ricotta cheese – I can’t wait to break into it!  I had hoped to get some yogurt as well – I want to start using those strawberries in the freezer for smoothies – but they had sold out.  But low and behold – we stopped Farmstead to check out their remodeling  job (it’s beautiful) – and they had some of the Creamery’s yogurt.  Thanks goodness!  If you are in the Wayland Square area, you should check out Farmstead and if possible, eat at La Laiterie at Farmstead.  They have a cheese cave – really a temperature controlled cheese room that you can peer into from the retail space.  There are so many cheeses sitting there,waiting to be tasted!  I’d love to get locked in sometime for a few hours!  While at Farmstead we got some cornichons for tonight’s dinner – maybe to go with the trotters?  Whatever they are for, I’m glad to have them back!  And to have some of Louella’s wonderful cheese and yogurt back in the house is truly a wonderful thing!  And Josh was a happy boy as we stopped at one of our favorite bars, Track 84, after hitting the market and Farmstead.  Josh had Stone Vertical Epic and Brooklyn Chocolate Stout - it was a dark beer kind of day.  And I was a happy girl filling up on Diet Coke and peanuts.  Granted some of the items we had today were not local but we did hit many of our favorite local businesses - it’s been a good day so far!

…it’s things like these that are sorely missed while on the 100 mile challenge. Our tenure for 2009 ended with a whimper yesterday…we had tickets to the Red Sox game and it is nearly impossible to go to the game and grab dinner without breaking the 100 mile rules. So we broke them. We ended the challenge around 5 last night by eating out at Audubon Circle before the game…we took time to savor some foods we missed…I had a corned beef panini and Ingrid had potstickers and some chevre cheesecake with oreo crust. It was nice to not have to think about where each ingredient had come from which leads me to this post. Now that the 100 mile challenge is over, we are able to buy whatever we want…but we want to keep this within reason. We’re going to continue to frequent the Farmer’s Markets, but we can now augment our purchases with items that were “banned” over the last couple of weeks. For example, tonight I enjoyed some whole wheat pasta with local summer squash and tomatoes, parsley and chives right from our backyard! Yes, I could’ve made some pasta with our local flour, but sometimes it is just out of reach to make the things that we sometimes take for granted. So while we’ve enjoyed our time on the challenge, it will be nice to let our guard down a little bit and be able to purchase some items we’ve been missing…we’ll be hitting the Goddard Park and Providence markets this week and we’ll be sure to post about our post- 100 mile experience(s). Oh yeah, 100 mile challenge February 2010?

                                                      -Josh