Eat too much and it'll turn you orange!

With all this homemade yoghurt on our hands, we've been looking for innovative uses for the stuff. Try shaking things up by putting a dollop in a bowl of yummy carrot soup; it's perfect for those early autumn evenings in front of the TV or for warming you up after a nice long hike at Sleeping Giant State Park.

Spiced Carrot Soup

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons quatre epices
2 tablespoons chopped fresh ginger
2 cloves chopped garlic
1 lb carrots, thickly sliced
1 small potato, peeled and diced

8 cups water

3/4 cup heavy cream
Juice of 1 lemon
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Plain yoghurt for topping

Heat olive oil in large soup pot over medium-low heat. Add onions and celery, quatre epices and salt and pepper, and saute until soft, about 10 minutes. Add ginger and garlic and saute for another three minutes. Add carrots and saute another few minutes. Add potato.

Add water; cover and bring to a boil, then let simmer until all vegetables are soft, about 40 minutes. Blend thoroughly in the pot with an immersion blender. Mix in cream and lemon juice; correct seasonings.

Serve topped with a dollop of yoghurt.

Serves 8; keeps and freezes well.

Pictures of our exciting adventures at Sleeping Giant are available here:

The (second) best way to start the day

Since returning to the States, and especially since resettling in back in our tiny New Haven apartment, we've been making every effort - and with some success! - to stick to our resolutions and eat as much as we can from local sources. In going forward, we've found that there's a lot to consider, options to weigh, choices to make, and tests to pass. As New Englanders, how many (or how few) avocados are we willing to let slip (accidentally) into our shopping basket at the supermarket? Does it make sense to spend an entire afternoon driving to three different counties to stock our pantry with local ingredients? Does local provenance trump organic farming methods or minimal recycled / recyclable packaging? If everyone in the US stopped eating bananas, what would happen to the economy of Costa Rica? Is this all we'll ever have time to do?

In the coming weeks and months, we'll hope to use our humble blog to explore a few of these issues. Some choices are easy: with the help of our lovely little farmer's market, we've already made a shift away from buying almost no produce at the supermarket; our local organic milk comes in the cutest glass bottles (and tastes great).

Though we don't buy much, we've found that determining the provenance of processed food is especially hard. What does it mean when our vinegar is "distributed" by a company in Brookfield, Connecticut? Surely it's best for the distributor to be close by (presumably your food won't have travelled two major distances), but from whence doth the ingredients come? How do we find out? Shall we call the distributor? Pop in for a chat? What if their ingredients come from further away than those used by a distributor who's only marginally further from us? Seriously, is this all we'll ever have time to do?

One solution is to do the "processing" at home. Last week, we made (and froze) a few quarts of tomato sauce with local ingredients from our lovely little farmer's market (aside from peeling a couple dozen tomatoes, it was really easy and made our whole place smell great).

Breakfast is among the most important meals of the day, and since we're already making concessions on the beverage side (our coffee, tea and orange juice are not from Connecticut), we wanna get the food part right. We've stopped eating breakfast cereals, not just because they're from afar, but also because most contain high fructose corn syrup or some other peculiar product made from maize. Instead, we've been breaking our fast most mornings with homemade granola in homemade yoghurt, sweetened with local organic honey from our little farmer's market. Making granola is quick, easy and rewarding (cos it tastes great); making yoghurt isn't quick, but it's even easier and may be even more rewarding (cos it's an amazing science project for your kitchen). The resulting combination is better than anything you can by at the supermarket, plus you know where the ingredients come from and that the processing was done with as much care as you might use if you were doing the processing yourself.

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For granola:

5 cups oats
1 cup walnuts

1 cup dried cherries
1/2 cup (packed) brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup honey
4 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.

Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl.

Combine honey, oil and sugar in a small saucepan; bring to a simmer over medium heat. Remove from heat; stir in vanilla. Pour hot liquid over oat mixture; stir well. Using hands, toss until thoroughly mixed.

Spread granola on baking sheet. (If you like chunky granola, press it down a little; you can break it into chunks when it cools.) Bake until golden brown, stirring occasionally, about 30 minutes. Transfer sheet to rack; let cool completely.

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For yoghurt:

1 quart fresh whole milk (we've been using local organic milk from our lovely little farmer's market, more on that some other time...)

1/3 cup powdered milk

1/2 cup plain whole milk yoghurt (this will be your starter)

Stir powdered milk into milk in saucepan. Heat over low heat until milk reaches 170 degrees F, then allow milk to cool to 110 degrees F. In a small bowl, mix a cup or so of the milk into the yoghurt starter. Combine yoghurt starter with the remaining milk in the saucepan and pour mixture into jars. Remove jars to incubator* for 6 to 8 hours.

Refrigerate before serving. Makes about 1 quart.

*We have a gas stove with a pilot light that allows us to incubate our yoghurt in the oven. There are lots of ways to go, but the goal is to keep your yoghurt at 110 degrees F so the cultures can do their thing.

We've also read that some makers of yoghurt at home find their results to be too thin and that the accepted solution is to strain the yoghurt through a coffee filter to remove some of the excess liquid. We've found our few batches to be plenty (maybe even too) thick and haven't needed to strain.

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For breakfast:

In the morning, oversleep. After hitting the snooze button on your alarm clock at least twice, stumble blindly to the kitchen. Feel around in the cupboard for a bowl. Combine yoghurt, granola and honey (preferrably from a squeezable plastic bear) in desired quantities. Stir and consume.

Lobster, anyone?

No sooner did we arrive back in the Northeast than we were confronted with a food lover's existential dilemma: if hot dogs are the signature food of baseball, what is the ideal snack for a tennis match? At the US Open, where jeans and baseball caps are less prevalent than Armani suits and YSL bucket bags, the repast de rigueur is the famous Fulton fish market lobster roll. Retailing for a whopping $17 (but Heineken - served in souvenir cups - was only $9), it comes with a little plastic container of terrible coleslaw and features the claw meat of several lobsters, seasoned with mayonnaise and celery seed. We hear all that protein really improves Djokovic's serve, and are hoping the magic will rub off on us soon. Watch for a Robson-Rankin final in 2008!

More pictures of our exciting adventure as tennis fans are available here:

The last hoorah

Here in Delaware, we've been working to squeeze every drop from the last days of summer: daily trips to the beach, nightly barbecues, tennis, fresh local sweet corn, local rock fish. Last night, we found ourselves up to our elbows in steamed blue crabs, thickly coated in Old Bay seasoning, served with steamed littleneck clams and washed down with pitchers of lager from the oldest brewery in the United States.

From bronzed figureheads at the US Naval Academy to plastic tikis at the miniature golf course, we've seen a surprising number of totems in Maryland and Delaware:



More pictures of our exciting summertime adventures in the Midatlantic are available here:

Honor, courage, commitment & crabs

Another recent trip from Delaware to Maryland found us in Annapolis, capital of the Old Line State and home of the United States Naval Academy. We mingled among the midshipmen along the picturesque harbor and continued our commitment to local food ... in this case, by dining on crab cakes, cream of crab soup and roasted summer squash.

The old ball game

After a grueling 17 hour drive to coastal Delaware (and a long summer's nap), we turned around and split for Charm City to watch our own Baltimore Orioles get schoolled by the Minnesota Twins after a two hour rain delay. It was Laura's first major league game and, as such, her first ballpark frank. We also had some Boog's Barbecue (named for Orioles great, John "Boog" Powell) and some peanuts (but no Cracker Jacks) ... okay, and a few crabcakes.

Dinner with Mario Batali

A recent puff piece in the New York Times on Mario Batali's vacation home in northern Michigan failed to mention the name of the idyllic small town at the tip of the Leelanau Peninsula to which the celebrity chef retreats. We are pleased to confirm that Mr Batali does indeed have a house in NORTHPORT, Michigan and that - like us - he is known to sup at the Eat Spot, where owner Bruce Vijay and friends prepare and serve delicious soups, sandwiches, salads and calzones ... oh, the calzones. In fact, here we all are:

Special thanks to our very own paparazzi photog Auntie Janet for snapping this brilliant shot of the (kinda grumpy) celebrity chef with the little-known bloggers.

More pictures of our exciting adventures in an undisclosed location in a certain state shaped like a mitten (including some early photos of the totem-pole-to-be) are available here: