Dark Days Challenge - Leftover Style

I served this Dark Days dinner Leftover Style - self-serve on the counter. I made mine into turkey sandwiches. The bread was from a local bakery, but not the Miracle Whip. I am not sure Miracle Whip is even an organic substance, but I am deeply addicted to it on turkey sandwiches. Yummm!

For the third year, we went to DH's godparents in Philadelphia. They have 40-50 people and everyone brings food. I am slowly finding my niche at the buffet table.


My Cornbread Pudding went over well. I used leftover Sweet Potato Cornbread, broken into chunks to get stale for a day or two - otherwise it just dissolves in the custard. I didn't find it necessary to tell our hosts that everything in it was local - even the Brinser's Best Roasted Yellow Corn Meal from the Echo Hill Country Store in Fleetwood @ $1.40 for a 2-lb bag produced in Manheim by Haldeman Mills (37 miles). The sweet potatoes were from Two Gander Farm in Oley, eggs from a Lancaster farm that has a stand at the Fairgrounds Market, milk and half & half from Clover Farms. Not local: vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, cane sugar, salt.


After dinner, we played games - word games, charades, poker. The younger kids got turns, even if they are not good players yet. People watch football, nap, and dandle babies. They hire help for the clean-up, so no one is trapped in the kitchen. We look through old photo albums, which include pix of DH's late parents, and DH as a child. There's a fire, and a pot of mulled cider. I like it.

But, we don't get leftovers. I like leftovers. This year, I planned ahead for that. Today, I roasted 4 large thighs and a quarter-breast of turkey. The meat was from Wegman's at the Fairground Market - local and affordable, but not organic. I made gravy with the pan drippings. Not local: salt, pepper, garlic powder, flour.

I also made my own cranberry sauce. Cranberries don't grow around here, so no way to make that local, but at least it was homemade. A cup each sugar and water brought to a boil, then toss in a bag of fresh cranberries and let it simmer until all the berries burst and get mushy. I poured it into a canning jar to gel up for use on the leftover turkey-in-progress. I still have three thighs worth of roasted turkey to use in recipes this week!


DH didn't make his sweet potato pie for the actual holiday, but I still wanted some, so I made one sweet potato and one egg custard pie. The major ingredients were local - sweet potatoes, eggs, and milk. But the crust was a localness FAIL - I used frozen pie crusts. I just don't have room on my 2-foot-square countertop to make pastry. The "secret" ingredient is Cream of Coconut, obviously not local.


Custard is really easy way to use up the second crust in the frozen 2-pack. As long as you don't accidentally slosh it when you slide in the stupid oven rack! I'll be scrubbing that tray for days.

It's not difficult to make holiday feast food from local ingredients - but it can be hard to give up the favorite recipes that call for a few exotic ingredients.

Dark Days Challenge - Bangers & Mash

Our version of Bangers & Mash.

I decided to try the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge this winter. I tried the One Local Summer Challenge, but quickly dropped out when I couldn't regularly find enough local ingredients. I was obsessing over getting everything just right, and meticulously calculating mileage for each ingredient.

But now, I have had a summer and fall of gardening, cooking, canning, drying, storing, freezing, and root cellaring. And I'm going to be more relaxed about it. It's the effort that matters, and the things I learn from it, not whether I get it exactly right every time.

Fresh pork sausage from Jack Leininger Meats - $2.99/lb.

What do I consider local? Certainly, everything I grew myself, or foraged. And everything I bought directly from a Berks County grower at a farmstand, auction, or market stall. Anything I know came from a local producer, like a butcher, dairy, or bakery, even if every input was not locally sourced. We don't produce bread flour in this region, for instance, but if the bakery is local, or I made the bread, I am going to consider it local. The counties that surround Berks - Lancaster, Chester, Lebanon, Schuylkill, Montgomery - they are all less than an hour away by car. I'll think of them as local, and some of their farmers have market stalls closer to me than their farms.

Potatoes from Burkholder's and cabbage from my own garden.

As the Challenge progresses, I will give more thought to what "local" means, and post an evolving list of my local foodshed sources. I've actually drawn a map the divides the county into quarters, and I have sources grouped by quarter, so I can make my shopping trips as fuel efficient as possible.

Cooking cabbage in the sausage drippings with a little water to deglaze.

My first Challenge meal was a dinner of Bangers & Mash, a simple sausage and mashed potato meal often served in British pubs. The sausage was made by a local butcher at the Fairgrounds market, fresh pork sausage that I had in the freezer. The potatoes were from the Burkholder farmstand near Fleetwood. The gravy was the peppery milk gravy that DD15 makes. We used local Clover Farms milk.

My vintage potato ricer.

With it, I made Sauteed Cabbage and Apples, which gave the meal a more German motif. I used a small head of cabbage I grew in our garden, and threw in a handful of apple slices from a #10 apple from the Stoudt's Orchard stand at the West Reading market. DH is made happy with cabbage, but suggested a little onion for next time, and slightly less apple.

I like those #10 apples from Stoudt's. Never had 'em before.

What wasn't local? Maybe the little bit of bacon fat I added when the cabbage started to stick. Not sure if that particular blob of fat came from local bacon. In the gravy, the butter was local, but not the superfine flour for the roux, nor the salt and pepper.


I'm happy with this first Challenge effort. I had everything on hand in the pantry or freezer.