Days 2-5

I meant to blog about this challenge more often, really. Here's a couple of things I've made in the past 4 days, in no particular order:

Marinated zucchini salad. Hell yeah. This is ridiculously good. I like zucchini, but I don't usually LOVE it. This salad has thinly sliced zucchini, halved cherry tomatoes, sliced red spring onion, and fresh basil. The dressing is really simple: white wine vinegar, olive oil, a smidge of agave nectar to cut some of the sourness, salt and pepper. The co-op's demo coordinator made this when the farmers from Featherstone came to hand our samples from a recipe from their cookbook and I fell in love with it. I've made it twice in the past 3 days!

Pickles! I had a ton of cucumbers from the garden and up them up in some brine in the crock to ferment for a couple of weeks. I followed a recipe from the Joy of Pickling (big surprise, huh?) for "Lower East Side Full-Sour Dills". It's only been 3 days and they smell amazing already!

These are some beans I picked up at Seedsaver's Exchange a few weeks ago. They're an heirloom bean called Hutterite Soup bean. I pressure cooked them with a ton of last year's sundried tomatoes, fresh basil, garlic, balsamic vinegar, and a bit of maple syrup. Wow. These were rich!

This is what I've eaten for lunch every day this week: Beans with biscuits (Herbed Whole Wheat Drop Biscuits from Vegan Brunch) and some kind of salad.

This is just another picture of cucumbers that I like. I didn't take any pictures (darn!) of the tasty samosas I had this week filled with potatoes and locally grown peas. I made a soy yogurt raita for the side and filled it with hot chiles, cilantro and mint from the garden. Yum!

The challenge is going pretty smoothly so far. We'll see how I'm doing after trying to pack as much local food as possible for a 4-day camping trip!