Dark Days Eat Local Challenge

This year I am participating in the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge put on by (not so) Urban Hennery. I really enjoyed reading about everyone's food last year and wanted to play this year. Plus I get a lot more of my food locally now, so this should be doable for me. It runs from Nov 15 through March 15 and I am to blog every week, so there will be lots of food related posts coming up.

The Dark Days Challenge is to create, eat, and blog about one meal a week which is made from 90% local ingredients. What is local? We define it for ourselves. My local food is grown within 25 miles of my house.

Today's meal(s) looks like this...


Lunch is butternut and leek soup, homemade mozzarella cheese, mesclun mix salad,
apple (10 miles), and roasted potatoes (15 miles). The soup is made with homemade chicken broth (chicken came from 5 miles away) and local butter (25 miles) along with leeks and butternut squash (15 miles). I made the mozzarella using milk from about 25 miles away. The salad greens (15 miles) and apple (10 miles) What was not local? I used salt, cumin, pumpkin seeds, cranberries, a bit of olive oil for the potatoes, and salad dressing that were not local. There is a piece of homemade bread on my plate described in the dinner picture, but I didn't actually eat it at lunchtime.


Dinner is roasted chicken (5 miles), baked sweet potato (15 miles) with local butter (25 miles), swiss chard (15 miles), persimmon (15 miles), and homemade honey (25 miles) bread with local butter (25 miles). The wheat for the bread was grown in Pittsburgh, so that was not local and neither was the yeast :-) The chard had our magic sauce which is not local (ume plum vinegar, olive oil, agave nectar, and soy sauce).

Ok, so I am learning and will be using even less non-local ingredients in my next Dark Days Challenge Meal.