Just Food's Winter Eat Local Challenge

Northfield's Just Foods Co-op is again sponsoring a week-long eat local food challenge.  I'm again joining with a group of Northfield bloggers during the Winter Eat Local Challenge to write about it.  It's fun to think about local food in Minnesota during the winter!  I hope you visit their website and get some good ideas for your own kitchen.  Here's a post I just wrote for the challenge:
Blueberries and planning

Pannukakku

My friend and neighbor Doug shared this wonderful Pannukakku recipe because he, too, raises chickens and has an abundance of eggs; our family is quickly adopting his family's tradition of eating it weekly! Pannukakku is, besides being a wonderful word, a Finnish pancake that is more popover than pancake. The simple batter rests for a half hour before being baked, and the pan is coated with ½ stick butter. What I like so much about it is that it tastes so buttery; I think it’s because no butter is added to the batter, and the butter in the pan eventually pools on the top of the pannukakku, bubbling right on the surface and making it taste more buttery than it actually is. We still have many pounds of blueberries in the freezer, so lightly whipped cream is a great accompaniment to blueberries heated in a pan for a few minutes – it takes the chill out of them. A few years ago we went through a “Waffle Friday” faze, eating a wide assortment of waffles and toppings for Friday night dinner, so it’s nice to circle back with a new variant. I’ve seen pictures where the edges of pannukakku rise dramatically, like the wings of a spotted eagle ray gliding through the Caribbean.

Ingredients:
1-1/2 C flour (I use 1/2 C whole wheat)
1-1/2 C milk
6 eggs
1 T sugar
1 t salt
1/4 C butter for the baking pan

heavy cream for whipping

Directions:
In a bowl, whisk together first 5 ingredients until no lumps remain. Let stand 30 minutes. Preheat over to 450. Melt butter in a 9x13 pan by placing it in the preheating oven. (Remove pan when butter is melted to avoid scorching.) Brush entire pan with melted butter before pouring in the pancake batter. Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until edges are puffed high and golden. Top with whipped cream and fresh fruit (or thawed frozen blueberries.) Can also be served with a squeeze of lemon and powdered sugar. Serves 4 - 6.

Rabbit dividends

The advantage of butchering my own animals is that I have the whole animal to use. Unlike a plastic-wrapped boneless, skinless chicken breast or a single grass-fed organic bison patty, a whole animal has lots of delicious parts (which many people have never eaten - except probably in hot dogs.)
The first thing we ate after butchering our rabbits were the hearts and kidneys, sautéed in a little grapeseed oil and flavored with fresh tarragon and a dab of heavy cream. My wife protested, while still managing to spear the last stray heart with her fork,"Why didn't you cook them the way you always do?" disappointed that I used cream with organ meats. We eat them often enough to have preparations we prefer. I sometimes have difficulty make pâté, but I made a pretty good country-style one with all the livers I had. We've been eating it for lunch this week -- a thick slice with a good pickle and a glob of mustard; after that and a piece of fruit I'm ready to return to work.
Last night I made stock with the bones; a slow-cooked, peat-stained stock that looks like a lake in northern Minnesota: tea-brown but perfectly clear. That's the result of a long, slow simmer throughout the night. And for tonight's dinner I used the stock to make my first corn chowder of the season, a real treat with fresh bread and a glass of wine. And marinating in the icebox is a big batch of hasenfeffer, a sour rabbit stew we'll eat on Friday.
Without a whole animal I'd be limited in what I could make. And for the majority of people who rely only on supermarkets for their meat, these stores are reducing the varieties of meats they sell, not increasing them. If you go into a typical supermarket in Minnesota, most of the pork is from Hormel and most of it has added tenderizers and flavor "enhancers" to keep it artificially juicy. And ask in the meat department for pig feet or hocks or pork belly and they probably won't have them. You get the boneless, plastic-wrapped meat and they include a microwave recipe on the label. Additionally, when the pig that gives up its pork chops is killed, the belly and hocks and liver are in the pig. In the old days a real meat market would carry many different cuts and varieties of meat and there were recipes and traditions and budgets for every part of every animal. What happens to all of that now? Does it go into the can of dinner your cat will eat? I like eating kidneys and livers and extracting marrow from bones. I like the bony carcass as much as the meaty legs and I use all the parts in ways that maximize their flavor and value. I want to make food that tastes good and I want to use the entire animal, not just the parts that look like they don't come from one.

Lent and Local or Catholics and Co-ops

As we approach the season of want, the season of hunger, we're reminded of our common agricultural roots, and the closeness of Christianity to the rhythms of time and the seasons. Embedded in the spiritual exercise of fasting is an even older condition: hunger. Whether physical or spiritual, hunger reshapes our sense of normalcy; it sometimes sharpens our awareness and heightens our senses, but left unchecked, it corrodes and can kill. Some religious traditions have made a spiritual discipline out of what used to be a common, shared reality. And while the Church has wandered and strayed as much as any one person, its roots are deep, profoundly deep, and we can still be nourished by its beliefs and traditions that reflect an older understanding of the world.

One thousand years ago, one hundred years ago, all food was local food. And March was difficult. Depleted winter stores collided with cold earth, food not yet grown. For Christians, Lent was the fast before the feast of Easter, with the physical and spiritual reflecting each other, synchronized. A spiritual voyage launched by a seasonal necessity. Today, in our non-seasonal, global appetite for whatever-we-want-we-want-it-now, Cub and the Co-op re-stock their shelves daily, and we expect our desires to be satisfied immediately. Instead of seeing our excess for what it is, we turn our obesity epidemic and fast-food or fancy-food fixation on its head, calling this overgrown appetite our right, our destiny, our blessing.

Are we entitled to eat whatever it is we crave? I don't have an answer for that question, but Lent and Eating Local are both compelling reasons to think deliberately about food and its place in the seasons of growing and eating. If we think about eating local we have to think about what it is we want to eat. Especially at this time of year, eating local is an exercise in long range planning about what we plant, grow, and harvest in the warmer months of the year. What remains of September's abundance that we can now draw upon? The doom of March leads me to think I should be growing and preserving much more food of my own. And that leads to a conversation about gardening and how we use our landscape – particularly us non-rural, grass-growing homeowners.

Even as I begin to think about eating local, I'm not sure I like all the implications. Take oranges, for instance. I can't imagine winter without oranges. The spray of a just-peeled orange in the cold air of winter is an unmatched fragrance. When I eat oranges in the winter I feel as alive and healthy and the first non-scurvied sailing crews! And what would happen to the Florida citrus industry if everyone in the north stopped eating oranges because they weren't local? On the other hand, what if Minnesota farmers were met by crowds of people wanting fresh, locally grown spinach in May? And what if consumers wanted four bushels of apples in September instead of three pecks?

Imposing disciplines on ourselves reminds us that although we are surrounded by an abundance of riches, our needs are few. The rest is manufactured. Eating local and fasting shouldn't be looked at as opportunities to assign blame or assume guilt. Eating local helps us think about our individual habits in relation to larger issues of food production, while fasting is a way to clarify our own needs by experiencing what some people feel each day – hunger.