The South, week 5

Ever forget to take a picture of your OLS meal until after you’ve eaten a bunch of it? Yeah, I do it all the time. And so did our non-blogger Molly:



But no matter. There's big news at Molly’s place: her young hens are laying their first little pullet eggs! She served the eggs fried alongside a potato, onion, and corn hash; green beans from her garden; and sliced tomatoes. Everything came from a 1.5-mile radius of her house, except for a little bit of cheese her parents brought back from Ontario.

The Purloined Letter had the same fabulous tomato-using idea that I did: gazpacho! But there the similarity ends. Whereas I paired mine with turkey in mole sauce, she served hers with homemade pumpernickel and blueberry-peach crisp.

Pattie’s special superpower is her ability to incorporate lamb’s quarters into anything. Watch: this week it was pizza! The other toppings included local goat cheese and heirloom tomatoes.

Laurie loves Green Zebra tomatoes as much as I do. No surprise there--they are the best-kept secret in tomatodom. But the tomatoes didn’t appear in her dinner--just in her photo. Apparently her OLS meal of baked chicken breasts, wax and green beans, and braised carrots with honey and parsley wasn’t as photogenic as the stripey veg.

Another Green Zebra lover is Lastewie, who had a friend over for dinner this week. She served three varieties of toms, fresh mozzarella, potato salad, mixed greens, cucumber and red pepper salad, caramelized summer squash, and locally baked bread with local butter. She also made a fruit salad, but she and her dinner guest nipped out to Locopops (a nearby Mexican fruit-pop stand that uses lots of local ingredients) after dinner instead of eating it. I can identify--when I visited Stew in April, we went there three times.

Jeff and Joyce had not one, but two local meals this week. The first was an “easy and tasty” pork tenderloin with roasted potatoes and corn, and the second was corn and potato chowder with bread homemade from locally milled flour.

Paulette sourced her Week 5 meal from a 60-mile radius. The steak strips were from her own cattle, while the baked potatoes and speckled butter beans were grown within an hour’s drive.

Amy has been on blogging hiatus because of an especially taxing move. But now she’s back, and she promises to tell us about her recent local cooking efforts: an entirely local peach pie (local flour and honey), a scallop pasta, a blackberry cobbler, and shrimp quesadillas. Stay tuned...