The First Supper

Today was the day my friends. We at here at the Manor (not really, but it's fun to call your house and yard with gardens a manor) had our first local side dish made with cukes from our own garden. It's a wonderfully easy dish to make and goes perfect on a hot summer day.

Cucumber Salad

two medium cukes (from garden 0 miles)
1/3 c cider or white vinegar
1/3 c water
2 T sugar
1/2 t salt
1/8 t pepper
dash of dillweed

Slice the cucumbers thin. Add all ingredients except dill. Chill for 3 hours. Drain and serve with a sprinkling of dill.

You can also leave the cuke slices in the syrup (sauce?) if you don't eat them all at once, but it's pretty hard not to gobble them all down at once. This dish is so good even the meat and potato eating Husband approves. It's only my first local dish, so it's relatively simple, but I am pleased as punch about it. Hopefully, this will be the start of healthier and more aware family.

One of the added benefits to OLS I haven't seen written about yet is that it gets lots of veggies into you and your family. Farm fresh veggies are so much tastier than store bought fresh veggies and certainly better than canned veggies. You can trust me on this one, because I am the worlds pickiest eater. My mother tells story of taking me to visit some of her relatives in Tennessee when I was about two. These relative happened to live on several acres and kept a large "hobby garden" about two acres big. While staying with them, my mother noticed that I would eat four times the amount of vegetables that I normally ate. "Huge, heaping platefuls," which makes a very happy mother, especially when her child's diet is more bird-like. "She just picks at her food." Ecstatic at this revolutionary development in my diet, when we returned home my mother bought tons and tons of vegetables from the grocery store, only to discover that I would turn my nose up at anything she served. Thankfully, my mother is brilliant (don't you dare tell her I said that) and quickly realized that it was the fresh picked produce which got me eating so much. Unfortunately, we did not have a garden at that time.

See the moral? Farm fresh veggies are so much tastier than store bought fresh veggies and certainly better than canned veggies.

We also had meat, which may or may not have been local. We went to the "farmer's market" on the square which happens every Saturday and bought some pork from a butcher's shop which advertised as "fresh from the farm." Though, when I asked if any of the meat was local the reply came that the beef came from Kansas City, the poultry from Mississippi and the pork was just "local." It was very tasty, but I think I will be buying from there again for my OLS challenge.

Pork chops with a Caribbean rub