Valentines Day Dinner for Locavores: Food, Glorious Food!

Valentine's Day Dinner for Locavores:

Food, Glorious Food! 

One of my passions is, “Food, Glorious Food!”(click on the words to hear the song.)  This quote from the musical Oliver says it all. When we can, my family and I try to make healthy, fabulous meals from locally-grown food and people who do this are called locavores (click on the word to get the definition).  This week I found I was able to make a tasty, locally-sourced dinner even for Valentine’s Day in February, when it takes a certain diligence to find local foods. Translation: if you want to try this at home, there are some tricks involved!

The ingredients for the Valentine’s Dinner for Locavores.

I made a test dinner this week and family members, disguised as professional taste-testers, ate it up “locavoraciously.”   You can’t click on this word, because I just made up to mean they ate the local food ravenously and they may even have licked their plates. It’s still a vocabulary word, though, and it’ll be on the quiz on Monday (jk).  The taste testers might have eaten this way because the food was really really good or because they had to wait a long time until after I had finished photographing it before they could eat it. 

Read on to find out how you can make this meal, or one like it, for the hungry locavores on your Valentine’s Day list!

"Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are." (Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin)

Brillat-Savarin  was a lawyer and French epicure  (think “foodie”) who in 1825 wrote, “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are.” This means what you eat tells a lot about you, including your income level, your level of health consciousness and even how much you love your chocolate, which for me, is quite a lot!

 A locavore is aiming to eat healthy, good-tasting food that can be locally grown with a negligible environmental impact for now and for generations to come. If you’re a locavore, then the quote from Brillat-Savarin means you are what you eat and even where you eat.

I live in the Michigan “mitten,” at the base of the thumb. (I modified this from Mastering ArcGIS, Tutorial Data 6e (2013) [DVD-Rom], McGraw-Hill Higher Ed: Dubuque, IA.)

Where I eat is with my family at the dinner table in Ann Arbor, MI, about 42 degrees North of the equator and 84 degrees West of the prime meridian. We have a deep freezer that’s full of fruits and vegetables and main courses we industriously squirreled away last autumn.  Even though there’s a glacier of white-blue snow layered 18 inches up the cherry tree in the back yard, we’re eating fabulous, local, out-of-season items like asparagus, blueberries and pumpkin muffins because they come from our deep freezer.  I therefore decided I had to leave my house to discover what other locavores without our “frozen assets” were eating in Ann Arbor in February!

I was in for a big surprise, though, because what they’re not eating is local root vegetables! I went to several stores in town and spoke with the produce managers.  The definition of “local foods”  varies from “about 100 miles” at People’s Food Co-op to “about 200 miles or adjoining states” at Whole Foods. I had fully expected that all the root vegetables like carrots, potatoes, rutabagas and turnips that I see in the Ann Arbor stores were local. Instead, I learned that Ann Arbor stores run out of root vegetables by February and they are shipped over 2,000 miles from California to Ann Arbor. Holy guacamole! When you buy vegetables in February, they’re probably better traveled than you are!

 

After the food and produce managers at People’s Food Co-op showed me what was locally available for 42N, 84W during the food desert known as February, I can recommend the following Valentine’s Day dinner.  For appetizers, my lucky Valentines and I (and I’ll make dinner for the whole family) will nibble on Colby cheese cubes (Farm Country Cheese House) deviled eggs (Harnois Farms), salsa (Esch Road) and chips (Ann Arbor Tortilla Factory). 

The appetizers for the Valentine's Dinner for Locavores, with the ingredients.

For dinner, we’ll have browned Vietnamese recipe chicken sausages (available in the freezer aisle, from Corridor Sausage Co.) simmered in white wine with purple onions (Tantre Farms) and sauerkraut (The Brinery), steamed purple potatoes (Tantre Farms) with butter and a German-style salad with shredded carrots (Seeley Farm), pea shoots (GardenWorks) and dried Montmorency cherries (Busch’s) and a dressing of mayonnaise, olive oil and lemon juice.  We’ll finish off dinner with a peach and raspberry crisp (frozen fruits from Locavorious and honey from Anne &Paul Elder/Bantle) and chocolate (Grocer’s Daughter and Michigan Mints.).  For our family members who are vegetarian, I’ll make a second dish with non-local smoked apple sage vegetarian sausage (Field Roast, Seattle, WA), local onion and local sauerkraut.  Dinner for three will set you back about $55, not including wine or beer,

What will you do if you live somewhere else?  Why visit your local farmer’s market, co-op or food store, find out what’s local and cook it!  Joke alert!  If you get water from your watershed  and food from your foodshed,  then where did the locavores eat their Valentine’s day dinner?  In their local foodshed, of course!

Below are the recipes and pictures for the main course and dessert. 

The recipe for Sausages, Onions and Sauerkraut was adapted from this recipe  from Epicurious.  For two locavores:

1 medium onion, sliced

2-4 sausages of your choice (we had Vietnamese style chicken sausages, defrosted, with pork casing removed) cut in 3 inch lengths

1 lb of sauerkraut, rinsed and drained

1 cup dry white wine

1 cup chicken stock and water, if needed 

 Sausages, Onions and Sauerkraut, potatoes and salad, Valentine's Dinner for Locavores

On the stovetop, heat a smaller frying pan over medium-high heat.  Add olive oil and sauté the onion until tender but not brown, and remove to a plate.  Add the sausages  and brown on both sides.  Squeeze out liquid from the rinsed and drained sauerkraut and add to the frying pan, along with the sausages and onions.  Add the wine, chicken stock and water if necessary to mostly cover the sausages.  When the liquid begins to simmer, cover, turn down the heat to low and let cook at least 45 minutes, turning the sausages once or twice to make sure they are fully cooked.  Serves 2-3.

The recipe for Peach and Raspberry Crisp is adapted from a family cookbook and was previously published in the Blueberry Hill Cookbook by Elsie Masterton (Down East Books, 1982).  I made a half recipe but here is the full recipe:

1 cup flour

¾ cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

¾ teaspoon salt

1 egg

2 Tablespoons brown sugar (or 1 Tablespoon honey in 1 tablespoon water)

1/3 cup melted butter

1 teaspoon cinnamon-sugar

2 cups frozen raspberries, defrosted

3 cups frozen peaches, defrosted, peeled and chopped

Peach and Raspberry Crisp and Chocolates, Valentine's Dinner for Locavores

With a fork, mix until crumbly the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and unbeaten egg.  Use a chopping motion to make lots of little lumps.  Put the fruits into a buttered casserole dish.  Sprinkle with the brown sugar or honey mix.  Put the flour mix as evenly as you can over the fruit (it will not look uniform).  Dribble melted butter over the topping.  Sprinkle with the cinnamon sugar.  Bake at 375 F for 30 minutes then turn off the oven and let it cook in the warm oven another 20 minutes (until lightly brown).  Serves 6 to 8.

 

"I cook with wine and sometimes I even add it to food." (W.C. Fields)

For readers who are at least 21 and drink alcohol, you like wine or beer with your meal, but you worry about the environmental costs of transporting it, right?  What’s a locavore to do?

A conversation with Mary Campbell, owner of  Everyday Wines in Ann Arbor, revealed her thinking on this issue.  She says that we have many fine wines made in the state of Michigan and one of them would probably work very well from our locavore standpoint. When she buys wine from out of state, Mary considers quality of the wine, the environmental stewardship of the vineyards and the carbon footprint of the shipping.  I was bowled over to learn that Mary often prefers buying from Europe over California because shipping freight by water from Europe to N.J. and then by truck to Ann Arbor has less of an environmental impact than shipping by truck all the way from California to Ann Arbor. 

I got the beer and wine recommendations from the wine steward, aka my husband, and my extensive research on this subject involved going to see what he had down in the cellar.  I can make the romantic recommendation of the Bell’s Brewery  “Venus” beer and the pinot gris white wine from Chateau Fontaine.  I kind of misled you on the beer recommendation, though, because I don’t think you can buy it anymore.  The beer was limited edition from the brewery’s “Planets” series.  You can always buy the beer your sweetie likes, though, and make a “Venus” label and glue it on.  Or you can hope the brewery makes the “Jupiter” beer, slated to come out in February, 2015, in time for Valentine’s Day and you can make a corny joke, like, “I love you, by Jove.” Hopefully, your valentine will laugh, either because they think you’re nuts and they’re humoring you or because they get that Jove and Jupiter are two names for the same god.

   

“Love is all you need but a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt." (Charles Shultz)

Chocolate is a problem for locavores in my area. On the one hand, what would Valentine’s Day Dinner be without chocolate?  On the other hand, can a locavore buy chocolate when it’s locally produced but not locally grown?

In her book, Animal, Vegetable,Miracle,  Barbara Kingsolver describes a year of “locivery”  (as the habit of eating locally must be called; btw I just made this up and it will be on the quiz) and how her family allowed each family member one exemption to the rule to eat locally. I’d probably choose chocolate as my “get out of jail free” card and then being a locavore wouldn’t be so very very hard.  Do get your hands on a copy of this book to learn more about being a locavore and make sure to read the last few chapters as they are quite a hoot!

The types of chocolate local to my area that I chose for Valentines Day gifts this year include some chocolate bars from Grocer’s Daughter and Michigan Mints from Hanover, Inc. To get some Grocer’s Daughter chocolate, you might want to visit the store in Empire, MI and maybe go to the fabled Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore as a side trip!  I’m only kind of kidding.

 

"If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one." (Mother Theresa; click on the underlined words to go to the site)

This Valentine’s Day, consider helping the hungry in your area with a food or monetary donation.    Food insecurity is occasional lack of enough food for a healthy, active life while hunger is chronic lack of enough food for a healthy, active life.  One in seven people in Washtenaw County where I live have food insecurity or hunger with a whopping 92% of families with children having this problem.  Parents say they skip meals or eat smaller portions to make food last. 

US food insecurity rates, Source: Feeding America

My students in Environmental Science 101 at Washtenaw Community College did a survey to try to measure food insecurity and hunger at the college in the fall of 2014 as part of the college’s “Year of Sustainable Food” theme. They found that 30% of the 125 respondents had had food insecurity or hunger at some time in their lives.  This adds to published data that food insecurity for Michigan right now is 17.9% and for the U.S. is 16.4%, according to Food Gatherers.  That a lot of hungry people in my community college, state and country! 

If you need help getting food in the U.S, you probably need to apply for food stamps, now administered by a program called SNAP.  If you are a qualifying pregnant or breast-feeding woman and have infants or children up to age 5 who meet certain qualifications, you might also be eligible for WIC benefits. If you need immediate food assistance, you can try food pantries, by state  and food banks, by zip code.

If you need help getting food in Michigan, there are additional places to look besides the ones, above.  If you're eligible, you can get the Michigan Bridge Card  for food and housing subsidies.  If you have a bridge card in Michigan, you at can then use Double Up FoodBucks  to get more (extra) fruits and vegetables when you use your Bridge Card in certain months of the year at participating farmers markets and CSAs. For additional help in Michigan, try the Food Gatherers website for food pantries, free meals, and more.  

  

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone, eat local and Bon Appetite!

 

Resources (click on the link to go to the site):

1) Informal interviews with managers Angie, Katie and Ben at People’s Food Co-Op on 2/8/2015.

2) Informal interviews with managers at Whole Foods and the Produce Station and a visit to Buschs on 2/8/2015.

3) Informal interview with Mary Campbell, owner of Everyday Wines on 2/7/2015.

4) Unpublished survey results from: Survey to Assess Hunger and Food Insecurity at Washtenaw Community College, ENV101 Fall 2014, by Emily Thompson, Ph.D. and Students.

This blogpost was written for the benefit of students at Washtenaw Community College and the community as part of my sabbatical activities for winter 2015.  I am solely responsible for the content and hold the copyright for the work. Feel free to use the information in this blog; just credit me with a link back to my blog! -Emily Thompson, Ph.D.