Sauteed pea shoots

My husband was making tuna steaks marinated with soy sauce and sesame oil.  I wanted to cook pea shoots (local, hydroponically grown) with complementary but not identical seasonings.  After consulting several recipes for sauteed pea shoots, I came up with the following Asian-inspired flavor profile.

• Put a neutral flavored oil in a cold skillet.  Add 1 clove garlic and a slice of ginger the size of a quarter (both minced).
• Turn heat to medium-high and allow pan to heat until seasonings are sizzling and fragrant but not browned.
• Add 6 oz pea shoots to pan.  Turn heat to high.  Season with salt and pepper.  Toss pea shoots until cooked but still partially crisp.
• Quickly finish by adding a couple teaspoons rice wine to hot skillet and tossing until distributed.  Remove pea shoots from pan so they don't continue cooking.

The one thing I might have done differently is use scissors to cut the shoots into shorter pieces.  At 8" apiece, they were kind of inconvenient to eat.  They tasted good, though, especially with the tuna.

Tasty local dinner: Trout, potatoes, and salad

I had time on Saturday for cooking projects, so I made dinner using a good chunk of my recent local food order.

I had a couple fillets of farm-raised trout.  Since I'm not very experienced cooking fish, I wanted to keep things simple.  Using Joy of Cooking for guidance, I prepared it as follows:

• Preheat broiler and line a baking sheet with foil.
• Put trout fillets (2 of them, about 5.5 oz each) skin side down on baking sheet.  Brush with 1-2 TBS melted unsalted butter.  Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
• Broil until opaque in the thickest part of fillet, starting to check for doneness after 4 minutes.
• Squeeze lemon juice over fillets.  Serve with additional lemon slices for squeezing.

This cooking method was easy and turned out really well.  I would definitely do this again for thin fish fillets.

I also had a half dozen small to medium purple-skinned potatoes.  Amusingly, the skins looked brown before I washed them, and brown again after I cooked them, so I only saw the purple for a short time.  I wanted to make a potato recipe that involved parboiling fingerling potatoes and then finishing them in a skillet with seasonings, but these potatoes were too big.  I modified the idea as follows.

• Put potatoes in a saucepan and cover with water to 1" above top of potatoes.  Bring to a boil.  Boil until mostly cooked through (as determined by poking with a fork), about 20 minutes.  It might be necessary to remove smaller potatoes sooner.
• Slice potatoes into wedges a little thicker than steak fries.
• Saute potato wedges in a skillet with olive oil, 2 garlic cloves (minced), rosemary (leaves from 1 small sprig), and salt and pepper.  Cook until cooked through and starting to crisp in places.

The rosemary was from my garden, so I get bonus points for that.

Finally, I made a salad with hydroponically grown Bibb lettuce and pea shoots, tossed with a simple vinaigrette.  My husband isn't fond of strongly flavored greens, but the Bibb lettuce was mild enough.  I expect that's largely because it's hydroponic.  Even baby spring mix is too strong for him whenever I've grown it myself or bought it from local growers (although he's okay with salad-in-a-bag from the grocery store).  A quick web search turns up a lot of pages claiming that hydroponic gardening is environmentally friendly, so I will call this a success.

January food

There's a handy seasonal food guide that lets you search on what produce is in season in your state during each month of the year.  I search on Virginia and then have to take the intersection of that list, the foods I like, and the foods my husband likes.  That can lead to a few problems.

There aren't many local apples through Relay, the grocery service I'm ordering from monthly, but Virginia apples can sometimes be found in grocery stores if one reads the labels carefully.  I bought a nice bag of Pink Lady apples from Martin's (part of Giant).

I still have carrots in my garden, which I should definitely use in the next month or so.  Some of them will go into soups.  I should also make time to bake yeasted ginger carrot bread (recipe version with my adaptions is posted here).

Various herbs are in season, but I'm unmotivated to purchase them because I grow a lot of herbs myself.  I still have rosemary and possibly sage that the frost hasn't wiped out yet.

Several leafy greens are in season.  Unfortunately my husband doesn't care for strongly flavored greens, especially raw.  We might have found a viable option for lettuce (see subsequent blog posts).  Last month I found that sorrel is really nice in soups with leek and potato.  A salad spinner might be helpful, since it's a pain to dry the greens after washing them.

Winter squash is in season, but I'm not a big fan of it.  I tried hard for the last couple months but am now ready to give it a rest until next winter.  The only winter squash recipe I really like is butternut squash with bourbon, browned butter, and amaretto.

With all that, my Relay order this month contained minimal produce.  Here's what I ended up with:

• Bibb lettuce (hydroponic)
• pea shoots (hydroponic)
• purple skinned potatoes
• grass fed lamb shanks
• grass fed oxtail
• trout (farm raised)
• cheddar cheese
• milk
• pasta

I won't blog about staples like pasta, but see future blog posts for how I use the produce and meats.

Purpose

I would like to eat more local foods from Virginia, both to promote local farmers and to encourage myself to eat more in-season produce.  I have a theory that the ready availability year round of all types of food contributes to America's overeating problem.  If we ate what was in season, we would grow weary of it sooner and be less likely to eat to excess.

Perversely, living in a rural area makes it difficult for me to visit large farmers markets, although I do drive past a farm stand on my daily commute.  I am fortunate to have access to a grocery service called Relay, which carries a lot of local items.  I can limit my search to local items, order them ahead of time, and pick them up easily after work.  My goal for 2016 is to order local food from Relay at least once a month, focusing especially on produce when possible.  I hope this will encourage me to eat more vegetables and make me more aware of what's in season.  Later in the year, I will probably have some produce from my own garden and perhaps seek out other sources of local produce.

I will try blogging about this project, although there might not be a lot of pretty pictures.  The blog title is an overstatement, since I'm not attempting to eat entirely or mostly local this year as in the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  Kingsolver's project is inspiring but not feasible with my current lifestyle.  Still, perhaps I'll learn some things, and perhaps others will gain ideas from my experiences.