Prime and Wine*

I've been looking for two years. I found it .. and it's the wrong end of the season. My favorite produce stand has been closed since 2008. Aichholz: You can still find the name on the web, but the tent is gone and the family sold the land they used to grow the Silver Queen corn. The farmer was tired, so he drove off into the sunset in a red Corvette and, well - what do we do now?

We grow our own basil. That's one answer. But where can we go for good corn? My Local Grocer sells it of course, but it's not just worthy of the name. It is not even as good as my grandfather used to grow (he was a doctor, retired when I knew him, and grew a lot of vegetables for my grandmother).

After an errand downtown that lasted past noon, I drove east from Milford about five miles to visit two of my favorite places for locally grown stuff. Rouster's Apple House has been in the orchard business for around 70 years. In the summertime they give city folks who make the drive a chance at pick-your-own blueberries and such. In the fall Rouster's becomes the Apple Capital of Ohio, with as many kinds of apple as there are ways to eat them. A mile and a half closer to home, Shaw Farms, a family owned and operated farm for over 200 years. They still have great corn this late in the season - they think Silver Queen is outdated, but what they sell looks and tastes a fair treat.

I really love locally grown produce, but I scarcely think this makes me a locavore, any more than it makes me a vegetarian. If really good things are grown close by I'm certainly willing to make a trip to find them, but nobody within driving distance grows artichokes like they do in Watsonville. My goal is flavor. I confess it.

hot off the grill

Anyway .. dinner tonight turned into one of those it-doesn't-get-any-better-than meals. A couple of the little $5 pre-packaged, 4-ounce, bacon-wrapped beef tenderloins (marked down for less by My Local Grocer as a Manager's Special); two ears of corn and a tomato from Shaw Farms; a small bunch of that really thin asparagus from My Local Grocer, grilled - and later, a baked apple from Rouster's with a small bit of fat-free ice cream on top. Altogether (including a perfectly elegant foundation of sauteed mushrooms, onion and basil together with a glass of the House Red) a total of under 900 calories and just over 100 grams of carbohydrate.

The preparation and cooking was so simple as almost not to bear writing down:
I seared the tenderloins on each side for 5 minutes then put them in a 450º oven for half an hour. While the meat was in the oven, the sliced mushrooms and chopped onion simmered in the pan dripping with ¼ cup of red wine and ¼ cup of fresh basil leaves. While the mushrooms cooked, the water for the corn boiled and the corn itself was shucked. I trimmed the asparagus and laid it on a cold grill, then melted butter in the microwave for dipping. I set a timer and went off to read a book...

With seven minutes to go, I:
Turned the grill on high,
Put the mushrooms in a dish and laid two slices of beefsteak tomato on them,
Placed the corn in the water,
Microwaved the mushrooms for a minute,
Placed the tenderloins on the tomato slices,
Took out the corn,
Scooped the asparagus from the grill, and
Served it all up.

Did I leave anything still cooking?
No, and I remembered to turn off all the burners, too...

worth every penny...

Later, I baked apples:
Ingredients:
2 apples
2t raisins
2t honey
2T apple cider
cinnamon

Method:
Preheat the oven to 350º
Core the apples (NOT all the way through)
Drizzle the honey into the cavity and add the cinnamon and raisins
Set the apples in individual baking dishes with the cider
Bake for 40 minutes
Serve them with a small scoop of fat-free ice cream

A couple of notes:
- I learned about grilled asparagus from the Dilly Deli in Mariemont. It's not hard.
- "Each stalk of asparagus knows where it should break," and this is perfectly true. But I've come to take a couple of representative stalks from a bunch and break them, then cut them all at about that length.
- I melted far more butter than we ate (with a smashed clove of garlic, some oregano and some pepper). After dinner the dish with the butter was almost as full as in the picture.
- I never said the corn shucked itself.

And for those nay-sayers - Job's friends who say, "Rick, you're kidding yourself:"
- The cost for the ingredients was under $12 - not counting gas.
- The calories and carbohydrates for everything in this post total less than half of my 2000 cal/225 gram daily target.
- At 2AM (when I wrote this) I checked my blood glucose, and it was 103, a great number.  And this is the proof of the pudding.

Web resources:
http://sites.google.com/site/roustersapplehouse/home-2
http://www.shawfarms.com/index.html
http://www.dillycafe.com/

* for those who don't remember, "Prime and Wine" was a Cincinnati restaurant chain, a subsidiary of Frisch's with locations at Northgate and Kenwood.