May Dinner

           

    Eating locally in early May has its challenges, especially when you are also functioning on a pretty tight schedule.  There are lots of greens right now, but substantive veg is hard to come by.  Onions and potatoes are growing soft; the last squash is waiting to be chopped this weekend; carrots and zucchini are a month or so away.

                A few days ago, I was wandering home from a meeting, dreaming about flatbread cooked in the cast iron skillet. So easy. So yummy. And we could have it with that jar of dal that I had seen this morning… and maybe the salad greens from Sunbow….I had a plan. I made the flatbread dough, went outside to trim out a garden bed, came in to heat up the dal only to  discover that we had eaten it already. The jar was some rhubarb compote I had made a few days ago. Tasty, but not dinner.  I headed to the basement to recover a jar of Sweetcreek tuna, which we added to the plate of salad greens.  Fresh salad, tuna, flatbread, with rhubarb cake for desert—a save, Mark observed.  A spring feast.

                This evening, I made a pan of cornbread using the corn we had grown in the backyard last summer. It was red and gold, so the cornbread is rather pink, but so lovely and fresh corn tasting. I had dumped a couple of cups of Hutterite soup beans from Sunbow into the crockpot with three bay leaves and a local onion right after lunch, and they were soft and rich.  I Filled a bowl  with salad   from the backyard—kale, mustard, lettuce, sorrel, arugula, peppermint, garlic chives—and placed it in the middle of the table. We spread home made apple butter on the second chunks of cornbread and sighed.  We are so spoiled, I observed.

                And it is true. We eat what is in season in abundance for a few weeks or months and, just when we grow tired of it, it fades out of the rotation and something else takes its place. Right now it is tender salad greens. Soon, it will be zucchini and tomatoes right off the vine.

Flatbread

1 cup of water

1 t of yeast

1 t sugar

1T olive oil

¾ t salt

2 ¼ cups flour (1 ww)

Proof the yeast in water with the sugar. Add the flour, salt, and oil, and stir. Knead a few times on the counter if needed. Let rest for an hour or so in the bowl, then divide into 8 pieces, roll out in circles, and cook, quickly, on a cast iron skillet. I use high heat and watch them closely. The dough can sit in the fridge for a few days if you only use half of it. Serve warm with olive oil, zatar, and salt.