Sundays are for BBQing

This past Sunday we did the BBQ thing. Red peppers and zucchini tossed in olive oil and salt and charred on the grill. Grilled white onion. And homemade beef burgers, mixed with spices and blue cheese. Almost everything on our dishes was local (except for the cheese and sauces). The sourdough bread we used as buns is from a local bakery an hour or so from our house.

Everything tastes better when it comes from somewhere close and is made in small batches. Less processing, less ingredients, more flavor, more nutrients.

I love a good burger BBQ day.

Meat and Taters

Sometimes you just need something hardy. That stick to your ribs meals. We’d been eating super clean. Strict fish and veggies for about two weeks. We broke it with this banger of a meal.

Homemade blue cheese burger patties

Thin sliced roasted potatoes with garlic, onion, and walnuts

Bacon from our local rancher

Man was that good.

Breakfast: Salmon Egg Scramble, Lentils, Local Mushrooms

I finally got more than 6 hours of sleep last night and I woke up extra hungry as a result. So I put together this heavy, hearty bowl.

I got my hands on some locally grown shiitake mushrooms from a small market that opened recently near my house, Littleton Meats. They’d been sitting in my refrigerator for a couple of days so decided to cook them this morning.

My bowl consists of, by layer: lentils, tofu, broccoli, and mushrooms, with a salmon, egg, and avocado scramble on top. I finished the dish with chopped raw garlic, olive oil, red wine vinegar, and fig balsamic vinegar.

I’ll probably be full until dinner.

Breakfast: Turkey Chili

I got my hands on local ground turkey recently from Littleton Meats, and in keeping with my theme of cooking in the crock pot, I thought it’d be nice to make a turkey chili.

But all the recipes I found called for a long ingredient list, most of which I didn’t have, and a long cook time, time I also didn’t have. So I did the next best thing.

I cooked the ground turkey in a pan and then added it to vegetable soup I made a couple of days earlier. I also added some brussels sprouts cooked the night before.

Yes, this isn’t chili, but it’s the next best thing and it’s hits the same spots. In some ways I think it’s better. I have three different ingredients, soup, turkey, brussels, that I can mix and match with anything else in my kitchen.

I realized this morning that it’s not really meal prep we’re after. It’s food prep to be used to create different meals.

Eventually you get used to it

For good and for bad your body adapts

Every summer when vegetables are at their peak and all my favorite produce (tomatoes, onions, spinach) is in abundance, I wonder how I’m ever going to go back to the supermarket for my groceries.

I can’t stand the lack of taste and character that I’ve grown to associate with apples flown in from Chile, or tomatoes grown in a greenhouse.

At the end of every summer I wonder what I’ll eat all winter.

But slowly necessity (nutrition) outweighs wants (local produce) and I find myself walking along the wall of produce picking out what to make.

The lack of taste and texture eventually fades, and by summer I’m surprised all over again at the difference between local and imported food.