September 15th, 2006 - One local summer: last meal

I haven’t had this meal yet, but wanted to be sure to write it up before the challenge ended! Tonight, Bryony (our houseguest) and I will be making soup including homemade vegetable stock 100% from the garden plus bay leaves from work (<1m from home) and vegetables from the garden including all the usuals (tomatoes, onions, beans, carrots, potatoes).

I love the idea of homemade stock so much that I want to buy a bunch of thigns at the farmer’s market to make more. Is it worth it? Or should I just buy stock in the winter if we keep up with eating soup? I don’t know…. I’d rather have homemade, but is it worth the extra veggie cost right now? I’m worried about making too much and not actually eating it. Fresh veggies will decrease soon and I’ll be using dried and frozen ones instead. Will they make as good soup? I’ll probably start making bean soups then, so will probably still be a nice addition.

Speaking of potatoes, since this was for soup, I dug up one of the Yukon Gold plants. (Putting cool-colored blue potatoes in soup kind of defeats the coolness factor.) The potatoes are softball sized! And shaped! I’ve never seen such potatoes! Neither has Bryony nor Eric (nor Maggie for that matter but how many has she seen?). They are at least 2x as big as the potatoes we dug up last summer. I think I have a new process for planting these (if I save any): I planted leftover potatoes that had been forgotten all winter. I didn’t cut them up and they started with foot-long eye roots. I hope the second plant is just as big! And then I will have to decide whether to eat them all (8 potatoes probably) or save a couple for next year. I hadn’t planned to save any but a handful of Blues…but it would be really cool to have giant potatoes next fall again.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 12:20 pm EDT and is filed under Garden, Eat Locally. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “One local summer: last meal”

  1. Utopian Says:
    September 17th, 2006 at 7:31 pm EDT

    I had never seen blue potatoes before. They were very tasty. I wonder if I will find them back in England.

    Bry.

  2. Liz Says:
    September 18th, 2006 at 11:08 am EDT

    I love making my own stock… your soup sounds great! Thanks for participating in my challenge!

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