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One Local Summer: Seared Steak with Cilantro Butter

5 June 2009 6 Comments

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Our premarket CSA began just this week – perfect timing for One Local Summer. It seems now, more and more, all of our meals are local. If not entirely local, they’re substantially local. What a blessing it is to celebrate real food this way! This week we enjoyed local milk, eggs, bacon, quinoa, lettuce,ham, arugula, collards, spinach, herbs, cheese, butter, onions, shallots, honey, cream, steak, strawberries and loads of other delicious, remarkable foods. There’s another box headed our direction tomorrow along with 10 pints of strawberries to freeze for next winter. What luscious beauty.

One of the best meals we prepared this week was seared steak served with cilantro butter over quinoa. A lettuce salad accompanied it and of course cinnamon honey ice cream with wild apricot sauce. Granted the cinnamon wasn’t local, but the apricot sauce certainly was. We put it up last winter where it’s lingered in our stocked pantry since last July. Have you seen wild apricots? They’re beautiful and tiny. They make a cultivated apricot look gargantuan.

The steak was easy: I heated some pastured bacon grease in a cast iron skillet and seared the steak ever so slightly and topped it with compound butter made from fresh raw cream, shallots and garlic from last year’s market as well as some super-fresh cilantro. We served that with a simple salad and topped it off with that fresh, delicious dessert. The quinoa was presoaked and then cooked in bone broth for a delicious richness.

Animal Foods

Grass-finished Steak (45 miles)
Grass-finished Beef Bones (45 miles)
Pastured Bacon Fat (45 miles)
Fresh, Raw Butter (45 miles)
Pastured Egg Yolk (45 miles)
Fresh, Raw Cream (45 miles)
Fresh, Raw Milk (45 miles)
Raw Wildflower Honey (250 miles)

Plant Foods

Lettuce (50 miles)
Cilantro (50 miles)
Last Season’s Shallots (45 miles)
Last Season’s Garlic (8 miles)
Last Season’s Apricots (50 miles)
Quinoa (150 miles)

Where did your food come from this week? Any special goodies? Still supping on late spring’s bounty of strawberries and greens?

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6 Comments »

lickedspoon said:

This looks so delicious! I love the cilantro butter. I’m afraid this week I’ve been feasting on Alphonse mangoes (4,000 miles), but the rest of the time 80% of what we eat comes from within 100 miles of our house and I do all of my shopping on foot, so I tell myself I’ve earned this little seasonal indulgence.

# 5 June 2009 at 11:23 pm

lo said:

The past few years have certainly been a journey toward local eating for us. We’ve not mastered the art, but we’re certainly eating far more local food than ever before. For the past month or two, not much fresh produce was available locally, so we’ve found ourselves using up the bounty we froze last year (and, to some extent, the year before) — tomatoes, pasta sauces, chili, and the like.

However, there was much rejoicing when our favorite farms returned to the farmer’s market last weekend. We supped on a variety of frilly mustard greens, fresh sorrel, asparagus, spinach, and rhubarb. And this week, we’re looking forward to more of the same.

Check out loâ€™s last post: Milwaukee Creole: Barbequed Shrimp.

# 6 June 2009 at 7:16 am

maybelles mom said:

This looks delicious. I love quinoa though I hadn’t thought to pair it with beef.

Check out maybelles momâ€™s last post: Pimenton Potatoes, Spicy Kidney Beans and a Runny Egg for One Local Summer.

# 7 June 2009 at 7:10 am

Bernadine said:

Oh Jenny – this looks amazing. I also had not thought of quinoa with red meat. YUMMY!!!

# 7 June 2009 at 8:45 am

Jenn AKA The Leftover Queen said:

This is so inspiring! I feel fortunate to have what local foods we do have – we now have local dairy products, citrus, veggies, and some meats. It has been difficult here, and for the past 2 years, I have not had the room to start canning or freezing. But I want to start this year with that.

Check out Jenn AKA The Leftover Queenâ€™s last post: Finest Foodies Friday â€“ June 5, 2009.

# 8 June 2009 at 7:19 am

Jenny (author) said:

We are very lucky where we are. It’s hard to grow your local foodshed. When we first started you could get some local meat, some local peaches and a few veggies like potatoes and garlic. But after working at it for a while, we’ve seen the local foods community blossom. It’s such a blessing.

# 9 June 2009 at 6:11 pm