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Local Food
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Written by Carolyn Goodwin
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Thursday, 28 January 2010 00:02 |
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Three years ago, a Puget Sound food blogger named Laura McCrae (Urban Hennery), came up with an idea. What if she could enlist fellow foodies to join in a  challenge to cook locally at least once a week during the dark days of winter, and share their discoveries with the rest of the online community?
Her concept took root, and now almost 100 cooks from all over the country join her every winter to take the "Dark Days Challenge." The idea is that participants will cook one meal each week using local, organic ingredients and then write about it on their blog. Laura offers themes throughout the winter to keep everyone's creative juices flowing. And then she posts summaries of the results each week, by region. This year's recaps can be found here.
The result? A stream of culinary inspiration from talented cooks. It is a fresh source of recipes for cooking locally at a time of year when freshness is hard to come by.
Two of the participants are Garth and Lauren from Dropstone Farms on Bainbridge Island. Reading through their weekly forays into local cooking is like reading a who's who of Kitsap farming combined with a Nancy Drew search for the right recipe. Lauren offers great ideas for what to cook, wonderful stories about food and the farmers, and links to local food sources I hadn't heard of.
She tells a story (Dark Days Week 6) about one of their hen turkeys who meets an untimely death, but then becomes a source of inspiration that results in Coq (err, Turkey) au vin using homegrown carrots, tomatoes, and herbs, along with home-cured bacon, Laughing Crow garlic and Bainbridge Island wine.
You can read all about Lauren and Garth’s Dark Days adventures on their blog. And then check into Dark Days Central at (not so) Urban Hennery to find out what about 40 other bloggers from the Pacific Northwest, along with another 50 or so from the rest of the country are cooking this week.
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