Eating locally challenge, night 1

Last night was our first real night of the challenge (the night before we went to Red's Savoy Inn, our most excellent local pizza joint, with our nephews Tiger and Atticus, more on them later).

Here's what I made:
1. Salad (with backyard heirloom tomatoes, CSA heirloom cucumbers, CSA carrots, CSA lettuce and a little non-local lettuce to add to the tiny head of CSA lettuce)-


Here's a (blurryish) shot of the cute heirloom cukes, they are yellow!


2. 'Melting' zucchini (this is just zucchini- from our backyard, local garlic, and local butter, some salt and pepper)


3. Roasted green beans (CSA green beans, CSA and other local garlic cloves [over 15 of them, some were quite small!], CSA red onions, non-local balsamic vinegar)


4. Eric drank Surly CynicAle. Surly is brewed in Brooklyn Center, which is a suburb of Minneapolis. Their beer is very, very good, available on tap at local bars, in growlers direct from the microbrewery, and in 16-oz. cans. CynicAle is a saison-style beer which is available in the summer. Jenny and Daniela drank water. We also had, with dessert, some decidedly non-local port, Quinta do Noval 10 year tawny. However, Daniela bought this bottle in Portugal, so it was kind of like buying it local, just last year when she was local to Portugal...and at least it consumed no extra fossil-fuels getting here, since Daniela was already flying home and what not. I'm not entirely sure this isn't cheating....oh well, it was damn tasty! :)


5. For dessert Jenny and Eric had some of the fabulous Chocolate Brownie with Door County Cherries, from local (South Minneapolis) ice cream maker, Pumphouse Creamery. This is a very fine ice cream place, the owner, Barb Zapzalka, makes the ice cream herself and is very committed to using local and/or organic ingredients- so local, organic milk and cream, local honey, maple sugar, apples, and beer, and berries. She also can be found scooping the ice cream herself. As she was when we stopped by recently to sample some of her Surly Furious (which is IPA in style) ice cream and she told us she will be making a Surly Bender (porter-style) ice cream soon, which made Daniela quite happy as this is her favorite of the Surly beers. There are A LOT of local ice cream places... Grand Ole Creamery, Izzy's (both in St Paul), Sonny's, Pumphouse, and Sebastian Joe's (all Minneapolis) that it's hard to pick our favorite. We've not been to Sonny's yet (it's in NE Mpls; but we have had their sorbets that are packaged and sold at our co-op) or Sebastian Joe's (not sure why we haven't been to this one as it's in my mom's neighborhood!) but we loooovve Izzy's and the Pumphouse. But they are ALL very very good, and it's a sure fire way to get in an argument with other locals, to say which one is best!

Anyway-- that was our first blog post about eating locally! (got a little side-tracked about ice cream there, sorry)...