Menu Plan Monday 8-3-09 : Eat Local Week

Eat Local Week is being celebrated in many cities through out the U.S. this week and we are going to participate to see just how much of our menu this week can be made from local ingredients. The local stuff is in bold:

Breakfast:

We have 2 dozen farm raised eggs which we will use for breakfast as scrambled eggs and also in French toast. Obviously we will have to supplement that with non-local things such as oatmeal and yogurt, but we'll have local pecans and honey with our oatmeal and local jam (plum, peach, blueberry or fig) in our yogurt.

Lunch:

We can have leftovers of our evening meals for lunch as well as BLT's (local tomatoes and micro-greens if my sprouting experiment works out), and egg drop soup (local eggs).

Snacks:

We have lots of seasonal fruits and veggies that we can have for snacks such as figs from our trees, pears that we will make into pear sauce, frozen blueberries to use in kefir smoothies, watermelon and cantaloupe from the farmer's market, pickles, cucumbers, chips and salsa, and we can make zucchini bread which will have only local zucchini, eggs, pecans and honey in it. I'd also like to try making fig pinwheel cookies with some of our fig preserves. Non local snacks will include popcorn (popped on the stove top in coconut oil), and peanut butter or cashew butter sandwiches.

Supper:

Beef roast (local grass-fed) with rosemary (garden) potatoes (farmer's market) and sauted yellow squash (farmer's market)

French Onion Soup (local onions, local grass-fed beef stock) with Tomato (market) and Basil pesto (garden) Sandwiches

Roasted Veggie Panini (yellow squash, zucchini, egg plant, onions, roasted in the oven with olive oil and sea salt with cheese - probably chicken on dh's, too - on a homemade french bread loaf) , tabbouleh made with cous-cous, local tomatoes and cucumbers, onions and parsley(garden) and what ever fresh fruit we can find at the market.

BBQ Beef and Onion Pizza and tomato and cucumber salad.

Grass Fed Beef Burgers with caramelized onions, on homemade buns, sprouted micro-greens (if the sprouting experiment works out), french fries (farmer's market potatoes) and fresh farmer's market fruit.

DH does not like beef much, so we'll have at least one chicken meal which will not be local unless I find a local source of chicken in the next few days. We will probably have roasted chicken with purple hull peas (from my Dad's garden) and roasted red pepper (my garden) and tomato (market) basil (my garden) soup.

If we have a second chicken meal this week, it will be chicken noodle soup from the freezer which contains lots of local veggies like onions, squash and parsley.

There is a great deal of repeating in this menu since its focus is local, in-season produce. We will probably be tired of all of these things by next week, but I think it will be a fun experiment. And we'll probably make brownies at some point in the week to break up the monotony - chocolate always helps with that :o)

Ok, now I'm excited! :o)

See more menus at Menu Plan Monday, hosted this week by The Happy Housewife.