Eat Local Challenge

The wonderful folks at Hogtown Homegrown have come up with a creative way to encourage people to start eating local foods. For the entire month of May, Ben and I will be participating in the Eat Local Challenge. This will not only help the environment but it will also help the local economy as well as one owns health. If you are in the Gainesville area we encourage you to join us in the Eat Local Challenge. Even if you are not in Gainesville you should try to eat locally wherever that might be. There are several websites that help you find local markets (yay google). We have been preparing all of April and have come up with new ways to make our meals almost entirely local. As always, we will be giving updates and tips on how to eat locally.

Romantic dinner for 2: Rack of Lamb with Fresh Mint relish and Cucumber, Fennel & roasted potato salad

As part of our Eat Local challenge, Shelby and I found out that the University of Florida, through the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, has a butcher program that sells local meat. They actually raise the cows across the street from my apartment. Starting last week, we included the UF butcher in our weekly local shopping trip. Of course, this post has nothing to do with the local meat because it's about lamb chops. But we have partaken of their meat and it's very good.
Anyway, the other weekend, we decided to make lamb chops from one of our recent Rachael Ray magazines. The chops included a pine nut and golden raisin relish and a dill yogurt sauce.
We got our chops from Fresh Market because none of the other grocery stores carry good lamb chops (and UF only butchers cows and pigs). As you can see, they came fairly well frenched (which was apparently how Fresh Market receives them) but if possible, ask the butcher to go easy on the frenching and leave some of the meat on the bone.

Little Bo-peep would not be happy...
The presentation...

Next time, a few more chops in slightly thicker cuts, but delicious nonetheless. A simple yet impressive meal, especially for date night!

Weekend meal: Mexican Pulled Pork (Carnitas)

Last weekend we made Mexican Pulled Pork from Cooks Illustrated. This recipe consisted of slow cooking ~4lbs of pork butt in a dutch oven for 2 hrs. This left the pork nice and tender.We cooked the pork in lime, lemon, and orange juices along with cumin, red onion, bay leaves, oregano and orange halves.
After cooking the pork in the oven for 2 hours we removed it from the juices and then broiled the pork cubes for another 5 min until they were nice and browned on the outside.
By slow cooking the pork it left the meat very tender and the lime, lemon and orange gave it a nice tropical taste. We then put the pork in tortillas with various toppings: sour cream, salsa, pepper jack cheese, etc. This dish made for a very yummy sunday meal!

Strawberry bread: Update!

As some of you may know, I decided to make strawberry bread as a fundraiser for the Relay for Life team (In association with the American Cancer Society) that I am on with a few of my friends. My goal was to to sell at least 10 breads for $5 each. The end result, I sold 26 breads and raised $130!!!! For those of you in the Gainesville area, the Relay for Life event will be April 25-26 (yes we will be walking for 18hrs b/c cancer never sleeps!) and our team will be selling Strawberry bread at the event for $5. We will also be selling other yummy treats! Everyone on the team is GREAT at cooking baked goods so its definitely worth your time to come out and help support the Fight Against Cancer! Thanks to everyone who purchased some strawberry bread and I hope you all enjoyed it as much as Ben and I did!