The finish line of the 100 mile diet

Throughout August my husband I pledged to eat 75% local foods, all from within 100 miles of our home in Seattle. Above you see some of our recent loot from local farms, yes including Indian bitter gourd or "karela" as we call it, grown by Sidhu Farms. I've written posts all this month about local foods. It's not only more sustainable environmentally but in Seattle, it's less expensive to shop in farmers' markets, too!

Is this the finish line of the 100 mile diet? It was great eating *mostly* local but I also love what other parts of the world have to offer, and we can't grow it all here in Seattle -- coffee, for example. I will support my local farmers and producers for most of my needs but I won't stop eating mangoes either ... you get the point :)

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Millions of Peaches, Bellinis for Me!

Thanks to my 75% pledge to eat a 100 mile diet, we have peach Bellinis with all local fruit & just a bit of prosecco! It started after hearing The Peaches Song live at the Pike Place Market's 100th birthday party; I could not get peaches out of my head, so thank you also to The Presidents ;)

Bellinis were invented by the famous Harry's Bar in Venice where Hemingway and other hip folks of that time used to hang out in the 1940s. They were named after the genius local painter Giovanni Bellini.

The original Bellinis were made with white peaches. I've made them both with white peaches & with the regular, well peach peaches and it tastes just as good! The best Bellini I've had in Seattle (that was not made by me :) was at Cafe Amore.

I like to mix things up. The Bellini is a flexible drink I have made with other fruits like raspberries for example ... sorry Harry, I don't like rules!

Here is my favorite Peach and Raspberry Bellini:

I used:
2 chopped, medium-sized, sweet and ripe peaches
3 tbspns of sugar (I adjust the sugar quantity based on the sweetness of the peaches)
5-6 raspberries for more color :)
1 bottle of a favorite prosecco or a sweet sparkling wine

My method:
I pureed the non-liquids. Once I had some fine pulp, I equally divided it into 3-4 white wine glasses, added prosecco to fill the rest, & topped it with fresh raspberries.

Noonhat: Taking lunch to the next level

For all of human history, great conversations, meetings, and celebrations have happened over food & drink. Your daily lunch is probably not often historic, but while wedged into our working lives, lunch done right is a small slice of greater humanity. It can be refreshing, even inspiring, but only if you use lunch to step out of your routine.

Try Noonhat to take lunch to the next level. Noonhat matches you with people near enough to you who are available for lunch on a date you select. Except for your shared availability, matches are random. This is not a dating service; Noonhat is purely about tossing the social salad.

It is a liberating way to meet new people. In a time of increasing professional specialization, narrowing and shrinking social networks, and pick-your-perspective media sources, this is social networking turned inside out and with no strings attached. If you'd hesitate to meet someone new alone, just bring a friend or two along to guarantee a good time, but with a twist.

For people like us who have been transplanted to a new city and haven't built much of a social network, Noonhat is a constructive way to meet people we otherwise would not. It's easy enough to join clubs or attend events based on our hobbies. We do want to meet others who share our interests, some of the time, but we don't ONLY want to meet people who share our interests, all of the time. Lunch the Noonhat way helps you find new friends with new ideas.

Noonhat was founded by Seattle's Brian Dorsey, so for us and other locals especially, it's a well run service. Dorsey told us that some early users in other major cities have sometimes not been matched for lunch, but the service is growing quickly, so give it a try. Pick your location, date, and cheers!

We recently met Dorsey at a Seattle Net Tuesday, just a day before seeing Noonhat on the local Seattle TV news. Dorsey and Noonhat had been voted from an Ignite Seattle into presenting at Gnomedex 2007, also in Seattle. This is a truly creative, open concept built with free, open source software and on otherwise inexpensive hardware and services. Noonhat has gone from nonexistent to local to national and beyond, all in Dorsey's spare time, in a matter of weeks.

We can't wait for our first Noonhat lunch, and we'll report back afterwards. Hey, it's time for lunch!

This post was co-written by Brian Glanz.

A backyard fruit mystery

Since I am focusing on a 100 Mile theme this month, I thought it would be interesting to highlight my own backyard!

I have a puzzle -- what do I do with these:


This summer we moved into a home with a beautiful yard. The original owner of the home had put real care and detail into the landscape and flora. We've seen at least one unusual plant blooming every week. One of them is a humongous pacific dogwood tree that was blooming white around the time we arrived.

By now it's a slightly different shade & story. This pacific dogwood tree is bearing the gorgeous red fruit you see above! The fruit went from green, to yellowish orange, to an almost coral red. It has a pretty crazy texture but still looks like a berry, making it hard not to taste! Just today they started falling from the tree.

It is edible but not very palatable, as aptly described by its Wikipedia entry. The skin is slightly bitter. The pulp is like a ripe pear, but with an almost bitter after-taste. My problem is: what do I do with these?

I've brought up the issue of unharvested fruit trees in our neighborhood on my Flickr, and now this. It bothers me to not do something with it. I've heard this fruit is valued for it's medicinal properties in the Chinese and other Asian cultures. I could make a jam/preserve out of it, but is it worth it when the flavor isn't all that great? It's going to take a lot to make something like this taste good.

I could use it as a decor item, or try to mash 'em into a preserve. Any suggestions? I would love to hear from anyone who has experience with this fruit or who knows someone who has used it. I'll post a follow-up if I ever figure out what to do with these pacific dogwood fruits!

Here are the photos of the pacific dogwood bracts, which looked like a treeful of blooming white flowers when we moved in:

These are of the recent ripening of the fruit:

Summer gold - the orange tomato!

I have seen these orange gold tomatoes everywhere around Seattle this month, and I bought some at our Sunday farmers' market. Let me tell you, when you eat these, you really think of the tomato as a fruit! These are the juiciest, sweetest, and highest in antioxidants of all tomatoes.

Even though red tomatoes have more lycopene, a disease-fighting antioxidant, most of the reds' lycopene cannot be absorbed by our bodies. Per a recent study, orange tomatoes contain a lycopene that is more readily absorbed.

I've seen my Uncle A, who is one of the best chefs in our family, just toss them in basil pesto, olive oil, & serve them up. I took it one step further. I had some basil pesto ready that I had made recently. I sliced my golden tomatoes and added the pesto, extra virgin olive oil, and some shaved parmesan cheese, then tossed it all well.

I next took pre-baked, hollowed American biscuits and stacked up the pesto'ed slices of tomato. I topped them with some more parm & broiled for few minutes.

Holy tomato! it was yummy! I am not a biscuit fan truthfully, I find them too sweet for a bread, but the basil pesto, garlic, cheese, and my fruity tomato took these biscuits to the next level :)

These tomatoes are great raw in any salads, wraps, etc. granted that tomatoes are a food I love both raw & cooked. I am going to eat as many of these orange guys as I can find this season!

Here are more photos of what I've done with them so far:

We're eating a 100 mile diet!

photo by Brian Glanz

My husband & I opted in to our local 100 Mile Diet from Sustainable Ballard. For the month of August, 2007 we have pledged that 75% of our diet will be locally produced foods. We know we can't do 100% because of things like tea, coffee, rice, and spices, but so far we are doing well with 75%.

I didn't think we would have any problem with this for two reasons: first, we're vegetarians and our diet is already primarily dependent on foods which are much better when they're local and fresh. Second, since we've been married we've made a good effort to support local farmers; the Ithaca Farmers' Market started it all. We started out together in Ithaca where we had that home grown awareness all around us, and it has gotten even easier since moving to Seattle. We love this city with so many neighborhood farmers' markets, some of them running year-round.

To support this pledge, everything I blog in the rest of this month will be locally focused! These Lobster Mushrooms that my husband photographed are just one great example of some amazing ingredients available when you're eating local. You just have to look right under your nose. I can't wait till I can buy them next time at the Ballard Sunday Farmers' Market!

Savor Seattle Food Tours

I can't wait to take this food tour of the market. I bet they can add almost every neighborhood of Seattle to this list.

I'll document more of course when I take one, but for now I wanted to keep record of watching more about this on the Seattle Channel.

To my favorite market in the world

I love shopping at Pike Place, I can spend hours at this market. I love how one minute I'm smelling the foods, and the next I'm enjoying cooking the ingredients I brought home ... Most of all, I admire the farmers/vendors who work their butts off to produce such high quality fruits and vegetables at such great prices.

Pike Place Market turns 100 today, and I pay my homage to the market with this shot from the market; the shot itself hit its 100th view on Flickr today :) Cheers to a community that kept this amazing market alive through the years, supporting it every day. I look forward to many more years ... Happy 100th Pike Place!

More of my shots from the market!

If I was a squirrel I'd find my way to the Pacific Northwest...

...because they have the best hazelnuts! It's a good thing I'm already in the NW :) We recently tried two varieties from Holmquist Orchards @ the Phinney Farmer's Market, and we liked these unusually longer-than-normal ones. I was saving them to use for an occasion but they were so good that I could not resist the temptation of just chopping a few for my chocolate ice cream tonight. They are perfectly toasted and almost sweet tasting hazelnuts, like none I've tried before. So delicious, that now I really want to go visit one of these farms in Washington or Oregon, one of the world's major hazelnut producing regions ... just like how I always wanted to visit where cashews come from! ... for now I'll be forgetting the Nutella!



And, no I haven't forgotten mangoes ;)