Dark Days Challenge 2012 - it's over!

It's brighter out, the sun is sticking around for longer periods of time, the trees are beginning to look a little as if they are ready to snap to green attention and that fat robin in my backyard can't get any fatter or he'll explode. He needs to exhaust himself finding words for his newborns and lose some weight.

Many thanks to Steph for doing a guest blog. It has opened my eyes to a few concerns students have around eating local. Another guest blog will come to you in September on making school lunches. It may or may not have a local focus, but it is still relevant to food concerns.

Steve and I (mostly Steve) continue to make as many meals as possible with local ingredients.

This stove top chicken stew was very yummy.

Our green salad is all local, even at this time of year. Thank goodness for Riverview Farms who provide us with green house micro mix. We dried the blueberries and pears in our dehydrator last September, the feta is from some nearby goats, and the dressing uses a pear vinegar that is very mild and friendly to the tongue.

Steve's famous roasted parsnip soup, with roasted red peppers pureed as a garnish, with a mixed green salad, beer bread, beer, and red pepper jelly. I just love the beer bread. It comes from our favourite bakery, Juliens and is a 'new to us' product. Add some smeerkass (cream cheese) from the Dutch cheese maker and dive in. A very nice Saturday night meal just before we headed out to a great movie, The Artist.

Our final offering for the dark days of winter is this lucky find. Talapia fish, with a mayonnaise and dill sauce, brown rice with a brushetta sauce, and, get this, mixed lettuce greens. Riverview Farms greenhouse managed to get their spring greens up and ready for the market about a month early. Man, it was delicious.

It looks like Steve will be going on strike here at Dalhousie University on Monday. We are neither of us happy about it. We have no idea how long it will last but I am so glad that we've stocked the freezer to tide us over for a few weeks of strike pay and the resulting financial disruptions. Steve is under strict orders to not go behind the red line for any goodies. We have a great chocolate applesauce desert hidden from view for when things get really stressful.

I'm writing this just before eating. I'm very, very hungry. We're having asparagus soup (frozen last spring) using the last of the Christmas turkey stock, with that lovely beer bread, cold cuts from the Bavarian butcher, more smeerkaas (dutch for cheese) and gingerbread for desert. Made your stomach growl!