Still More Pumpkin--100-ft. Diet Challenge Meal #4

My 100-ft. diet challenge is currently suffering from both a lack of time and a lack of home-grown ingredients. Apparently, my standing over the teeny-tiny little green shoots in my backyard yelling "Grow!" has no effect whatsoever.

So without anything green to work with, I'm still trying to find creative ways to use the pumpkin puree I still have. This time I opted for pumpkin-banana bread. The only home-grown ingredient is the pumpkin. Everything else was store-bought, although the banana was organic.

I'm beginning to see the real challenge of local eating: if you don't plan ahead, you can't do it. And I don't mean planning in the sense of planning menus for the week. I mean that if you aren't planting, harvesting and preserving months ahead of time, you should be planning on losing lots and lots of weight during the winter. Even in a climate as mild as the San Francisco Bay Area, it's not easy growing food during the winter.

Read about the previous week's meal here.

Pumpkin Again--100-ft. Diet Challenge Meal #3

There still isn't too much growing in the backyard that's edible, so I'm continuing to explore the wonders of homegrown pumpkins.

This has been a busy week, so I kept it simple: pumpkin pancakes. Basically, I adapted a multigrain pancake recipe by leaving out the oil and adding in about 3/4 of a cup of pumpkin puree. With the addition of some pumpkin pie spice and some organic maple syrup, it made for a pretty tasty breakfast.

I'm looking forward to the time that I can start harvesting something else from the garden. I planted swiss chard seeds several weeks ago, but they are still very small seedlings. I've never grown swiss chard before, but it seems to me that they should be growing faster than that. I've tried giving them fish fertilizer, but it doesn't seem to have helped. Any advice on how to speed them up? Maybe I should dig them up and keep them in the mini-greenhouse until they're bigger?

As soon as we get a break in the rain, I'm going to head to the nursery and see what's available in six-packs. I'm not sure I want to wait for all my seeds to grow up before I add anything else to the 100-ft. diet menu!

Read about last week's meal here.

100-Ft. Diet Challenge--Meal #2

This is week 2 of the 100-ft. diet challenge and meal #2 was Pumpkin-Kale Soup with Mushrooms. I usually hesitate to make soup because, whether I follow a recipe or totally wing it, I never seem to get it right. But for the next few weeks, I'm going to be depending heavily on my reserve of homegrown pumpkins, and pumpkin soup seemed like an obvious thing to try. I looked through a lot of pumpkin soup recipes, but in the end I decided to adlib it. It came out with a rich, thick (but not too thick) broth that was really delicious. Here's the recipe:

Pumpkin-Kale Soup with Mushrooms

Homegrown ingredients:
1 small pumpkin (approx. 2 lbs.), peeled, seed and cut in chunks.
1 1/2 cups chopped kale
4 small cloves garlic, minced

Purchased ingredients:
Butter
White wine (local)
1 c. crimini mushrooms, chopped (organic)
Olive oil (local)
1/2 small yellow onion, chopped (organic)
2 14.4-oz. cans chicken broth
1/4 tsp. thyme
sea salt
ground pepper

Melt butter in large saucepan, add chopped mushrooms and a splash of wine and saute a few minutes. Remove mushrooms and set aside. Add olive oil and saute onion and garlic. Add chopped kale and saute a couple minutes more. Add broth and bring to a boil. Add pumpkin and cook until tender. Add seasonings, then puree. Return to pan and add mushrooms and any liquid from the mushrooms. Simmer a couple more minutes and serve.

Read about last week's meal here.

The 100-Foot Diet Challenge

The good folks at Path to Freedom have launched a fun challenge to anyone who wants to participate. They are calling it the 100-Foot Diet Challenge and the premise is pretty simple: the challenge is to eat at least one meal a week from your own garden.

There has been a lot of talk in the media about the 100-mile diet concept and I've read two books recently about the experiences of some intrepid locavores (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and Plenty by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon). The 100-foot diet seems to me both simpler and more complex. Simpler because the minimum challenge is just one meal a week. More complex because, in my garden at least, the pickin's are currently slim.

I thought at first that I wouldn't be able to start this challenge for at least a few weeks, until I could get a crop of salad greens going. Then I remembered that I had at least one ingredient already harvested: six small pumpkins that I picked in November and early December were still sitting on my buffet in the dining room. And a walk around the garden this afternoon in between rainstorms brought up another few options, although none of them were looking particularly yummy. I planted some broccoli rabe this fall, but the plants came out spindly and they bolted quickly. I'd be lucky to get a handful out of it that was edible. There was also some kale and some nasturtium leaves that could be used for a salad. I also remembered that I'd harvested a small amount of garlic a few months ago and still had some on hand. Giving my weedy garden one last scan, I realized there was plenty of another edible that I hadn't actually planted--dandelions. Not a feast, to be sure, but enough.

So here was Meal #1 for my 100-Foot Diet Challenge: roasted pumpkin, and rabe and dandelion greens sauteed in garlic and olive oil, followed by roasted pumpkin seeds for a snack. The only purchased ingredients were salt, pepper, and olive oil, and the olive oil was locally produced in the Livermore Valley. The meal was actually pretty tasty, although I wish the broccoli rabe had been a more successful crop--it was delicious but there was only a little bit of it.

I'm feeling inspired now to get more cool vegetable crops going. I have a couple packs of mesclun and spinach seeds to sow, and I may have another go at rabe. I'll have to figure out what else I can start this early.

Whether or not you want to participate in the 100-Foot Diet Challenge, check out the Path to Freedom website. I think they're very inspiring.