Dark Days Eat Local Challenge - Week 4

This week was even more of a challenge than usual, due to our new puppy, Ivy.

Actually, not just because of the puppy alone, but because of the puppy's urinary tract infection.

Isn't this a nice way to start a post about food?

Anyway, we've spent a good share of the week dashing outside into the cold - or with yesterday's warm-up, into the mud - with sick a dog who's having a hard time, shall we say, controlling her urge to "go."

Thus, I present to you our local meal of the week. A little repast fondly called "Desperation Stew and Tragedy Bread."

The stew was thrown together in record time betwixt pee-stops. Thank goodness my refrigerator and freezer are well-stocked with local veggies and meat. I tossed a grass-fed beef roast from my CSA into the crock pot along with turnips, potatoes and the last of the white carrots , all from my veggie CSA. I added a quart of home-canned tomatoes from our garden and a little salt and pepper, turned the crock to high, and had an easy, delicious meal ready for dinner about 5 hours later.

If only the rest of the day had been so easy!

The "tragedy bread" has a different etiology, but it certainly fit the theme of the meal. I discovered the bread recipe in the latest issue of "Mother Earth News." This fabulous recipe has you mixing up the bread dough ahead of time and keeping it the freezer a la sourdough. Each time you want to make a loaf, you just pull off a hunk of dough, shape, let it rise, and bake. A definite side benefit this time of year is the 40 minutes the oven is on at 450 degrees!

So, you ask, what's the "tragedy?"

Let's just say I won the stupidity award the first time I made the bread. In order to have a crispy crust, a pan is preheated on a lower rack in the oven. When the bread is placed in the oven to bake, a cup of water is quickly poured into said pan to create steam which creates the crispy crust.

I'd like to say I was under undue stress when I placed the pyrex pan on the bottom of the oven. Perhaps I could claim a migraine caused me to pour the cold tap water into the hot pyrex pan, but alas, it wouldn't be true.

No sooner had the first drop of cold water hit the burning hot glass pan than there was an explosion in my oven to rival an IED. The entire pan burst, sending chunks of glass throughout the oven and onto the kitchen floor.

Fortunately, I have a double oven and was able to quickly stick the loaf of unbaked bread into the remaining oven and, despite its need to preheat, the bread suffered no obvious ill effects.

So, after using the shop-vac to clean the glass from the bottom oven, the floor, and nearly every kitchen nook and cranny, we had delicious bread! Unfortunately, it did take a little longer than the recipe indicated.

The authors forgot to take into account baker's stupidity.

Finally that night we had baked apples made with fruit from a local orchard. The raisins, spices and brown sugar obviously weren't local, but the butter and cream in the recipe were.

All in all, a great local meal.

It just had a "tail" to tell...