Locavore Sunday

In honor of our own slightly watered down version of the Locavore Challenge, we spent the day today making sure that everything we ate contained locally sourced ingredients.  We made it slightly easier on ourselves by waking up too late for breakfast, and going to Farmer's Market to pick up our ingredients for dinner. While at the Farmer's market, we had some lunch:

We've eaten at this particular stand many times before and have had discussions with them about the fact that all of their ingredients each day come from the market itself. Good stuff.

For dinner, we wandered around the market for a while to get inspiration. When we noticed that tomatoes have finally started showing up, we decided we should make a variation of a pasta caprese type dish that my grandmother used to make. We didn't quite stick to the recipe that my dad gave us, but it still came out quite well:

Literally everything in this dish was locally sourced:

Flour for pasta: Emmer flour from Winthrop, WA
Eggs for pasta: Aaron's Grandpa's chicken farm in Mt. Vernon, WA
Tomatoes & basil: from a local farm in Yakima, WA
Mozzarella: a dairy in Bow, WA
Olive oil: Leavenworth, WA
Garlic: our yard

The pasta was a little more gritty than it would be with more refined flour, but it still tasted good and the flavor blended with the rest of the ingredients well. The olive oil we had on hand from Leavenworth is infused with basil, which was slightly overkill and I prefer using regular olive oil. On the whole, I think our take on the family tradition is a good one. The recipe is as follows:

Pasta Caprese

4 tomatoes, peeled and cut into chunks, saving the seeds
1/2 lbs basil counting everything, or 2 cups of leaves torn into medium sized pieces
4 peeled cloves of garlic
1/4 lbs fresh mozzarella, shredded
approx. 1/2 cup olive oil
1 recipe of your favorite pasta

Mix the tomatoes, basil, garlic, olive oil, and mozzarella and let chill for approximately 1 hour in the fridge. Serve over the pasta.

Try not to eat it all, because it's even better on day 2!