What have you cooked recently based on ingredients that are available fresh
at the moment and not imported from another part of the country or world? 
For instance, root vegetables in the winter, zucchini in the summer.

24 responses total.

Carrots. The refrigerator is overflowing with carrots. I'm serving them
tonight with gado gado sauce, spicy peanut sauce, which doesn't count as local
or in season, but I like it anyway. Also try it with almonds instead of
peanuts. And apples. I hate to admit my simple tastes but I put peanut butter
(or gado gado) on them, too. Sindi, you've got to have better ideas for winter
foods!

Her rules are explicit: fresh, today, in Ann Arbor.  Not imported from another
part of the US.  She draws some pretty tight circles to stand in.

Not fresh today, we also froze a lot of local fruits and vegetables, as well
as filling the fridge with cabbage, kohlrabi, rutabaga, pink and white and
black radishes, and apples.  We microwaved apples last night with some
imported carob powder and lemon juice.  We saved our black walnuts but forgot
to add some.  We are willing to add small amounts of imported almonds, dried
seaweed and mushroom, etc., for flavor.  A friend gives us his organic potatoe
seconds and lots of garlic.  And I bought some non-local organic celery
because the frozen stuff is all mushy.  Made zucchini and red peppers with
seaweed and pickled radish for flavoring.  I guess frozen does not count as
seasonal, but it was seasonal when we bought it and froze it.  There was
nothing at the market last time because of hte cold, except apples.  A fresh
cabbage would be nice.

Re #1:
        Mmm... I love spicy peanut sauce, too.  You don't happen to have a
recipe for it that you could post around here somewhere, do you?

We're getting a long, long way from Sindi's original question, but nobody else
seems to have come up with a decent diet under her constraints, so let's talk
about gado-gado sauce, from the Moosewood Cookbook. 1 cup chopped onion, 2
medium cloves garlic, 1 cup real peanut butter, 1 Tbs honey, 1/4 tsp. cayenne,
juice of 1 lemon, 1-2 tsp. grated ginger root, 1 bay leaf, 1 Tbs. cider
vinegar, 2 or 3 cups water, 1/2 tsp salt, dash tamari, 2 Tbs butter (except
I use peanut oil). Saute onions and garlic until tender, then add the rest
and simmer for half an hour. Some one at a co-op made this with almond butter,
and it was great that way on tofu. Try veggies or crackers or whatever. 

Thanks.  I'll put that with the stack of other recipes that I really want to
try but never have the time to.  :)

Re resp: #5 ... I think I'm in love!  ;)  I think I'll try that tonight.

Our potatoes are sprouting already, they must be seasonal.

A Slovak dish I like to make is called haluski.  Basically, it's spaetzle
noodles (made with potato, though) and cabbage fried in butter. When you fry
the cabbage in the butter, the natural sweetness is released. It's a real
winter food and very good.

By releasing natural sweetness, maybe you mean that the slow cooking (needed
to prevent butter from burning) breaks down the carbohydrates into sugar? 
Or could it be that frying breaks down the carbohydrates better than does
boiling because it is higher temperature?  How do you make the noodles?

I have no idea how it works chemically, but it works nicely.

To make the noodles or dumplings, you throw a medium potato and a little water
(1/4 cup) into a food processor or blender and blend well.  Mix in some flour
and an egg to make a dough.  Dump small spoonfuls of the dough into boiling
water or use a spaetzle maker, which does basically the same thing.

We had a spaetzle maker once and gave up on it because it did not make good
flour noodles, had no idea you were supposed to do potato noodles, they would
have gone through the holes much better.  
I had potato dumplings in Trieste, made around a plum.

  All you need is a colonder, and a pot of boiling water.

Jim wonders how people without electric gadgets make spaetzle.

  As I learned it, you make the batter which can be made by hand, then you
put the colander on top of the pot of boilking water. Add the batter.
Force it through. Boil til the spaetzel rises to the top. Serve hot.

The spaetzle maker I use isn't electric.

But the food processor probably is.  Would a potato masher do?

The potato should be raw.  You could chop it up with a knife.

How about a grater?  I have one that you turn by hand.  You can put in
different cones for different grinds.

I suppose that would work.  Never tried it, though.

A couple of weeks ago I picked our chives, garlic greens and violet leaves.
No sign of the asparagus yet, transplanting last fall may have killed it. 
I read that you can eat skunk cabbage, anyone ever try it?

Anyone know when you're supposed to harvest oregano?  I've got a ton of it in
my yard.

Whenever you can see green leaves, I think.  Better early in the morning
before the essential oils vaporize.  Our oregano does not have much taste,
the Greeks must grow something different.

Seasonal soup:  tomatoes (trim off the bad spots, half-ripe are okay), onions,
leftover rice with lentils (in the same pot they were cooked in), garlic,
shell beans, a pepper, some yellow squash from Kiwanis (it keeps appearing
there in a basket), and a dollop of cassava grits, which Jim finds has a
similar sour taste and texture to sour cream.  We have frozen most of these
ingredients and can duplicate this in the winter.  With Zing's bread ends.
Olive oil for extra calories.

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