Welcome to the first Local Potluck Tuesday! With farmers market season officially underway across the U.S., I hope you’ll stop in each week to share what you’re cooking from your local food sources — the farmers market, a CSA, or your own backyard.

This week at the FoodieTots household, we had a spring pea and asparagus soup, pork chops and grassfed burgers on the grill, sugar snap peas atop green salads, and this fun farmers market discovery: lemon cucumbers.

These little yellow cukes somewhat resemble a lemon on the outside, and have a slightly sweet, mild flavor. When shopping the Mt. Olympus Farm booth at the McLean Farmers Market last Friday, a mom was feeding samples of these cucumbers to her toddler, who was first skeptical and then quickly requested more. For kids who resist green vegetables on principle, this is a great way to introduce cucumbers. While the boy enjoyed these last summer, he decided this weekend he was “allergic” to cucumbers. Oh well. Hopefully this is a more temporary situation than his “allergy” to tomatoes. Or maybe we’ll just have to add lemon cucumbers to our garden next year!

Recipe: Lemon Cucumber Salad

Ingredients:

• 6 lemon cucumbers, diced
• 4 leaves fresh mint, chopped
• 1 teaspoon sea salt
• 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

Instructions: Sprinkle cucumbers with salt and mint. Toss with the vinegar and chill in the refrigerator for 20 minutes before serving. Makes 4 servings. Enjoy!

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Your turn! Please share links to a local dish you’ve enjoyed recently, or share in the comments.

Local Potluck Tuesday — a few guidelines:
1. Share a relevant post — a recipe, menu or pictures of a meal featuring local foods, from the farmers market, CSA, farm stand or your own garden — using the MckLinky widget below. In the link title field, enter both your post title and your name &/or blog name, e.g., “Lemon Cucumber Salad — Colleen @ FoodieTots.”
2. Bonus points if you included your kids in picking, growing, purchasing or cooking the ingredients for the meal! (And by bonus points, I mean increased likelihood of seeing your post featured in the following week’s post.)
3. In your post, please link back to this post here at FoodieTots, so your readers can find the potluck and be encouraged to join in as well.

That’s it! I hope you’ll join in and share what you’re cooking up to celebrate our local farms and the wonderful food they provide to nourish our families.

This past weekend was the unofficial kick-off of summer, and by now, farmers markets have opened in most areas of the country. Summer is the perfect time to experiment with eating locally, as the coming weeks will see the tables at markets and farm stands laden with berries, squash, melons, corn, and the locavore’s ultimate prize: field-ripened tomatoes. After two years of participating in the “One Local Summer” challenge, we’ve become pretty accustomed to eating locally as often as possible throughout the year. But it’s been such fun to meet others, whether committed locavores or those just beginning to explore a real food lifestyle, through various eating local challenges.

To continue the fun, while sharing recipes and resources, I’d like to introduce a new weekly feature here at FoodieTots: Local Potluck Tuesday. Unlike some of the other challenges out there, this is not a “how local can you go” competition. In fact, while local ingredients should be featured in your recipe or meal, there are no firm rules. You decide whether “local” to you is 100 miles, 125, or within your state. No one will judge if you dress your local greens in Spanish olive oil or if you don’t harvest your own salt for seasoning your local grass-fed beef kabobs. Just show us something local you’ve enjoyed this week with your family — that’s it!

The weekly round-ups start next week, Tuesday, June 8. To keep it as simple as possible, we’ll be using MckLinky — so just check here for a post, add your link, and take a moment to hop around to enjoy the feast from other participants. (If you don’t have a blog, you’re welcome to share in the comments.)

Local Potluck Tuesday — a few guidelines:

1. Share a relevant post — a recipe, menu or pictures of a meal featuring local foods, from the farmers market, CSA, farm stand or your own garden — using the MckLinky widget. In the link title field, enter both your post title and your name &/or blog name, e.g., “Local Burger Bbq — Colleen @ FoodieTots.”

2. Bonus points if you included your kids in picking, growing, purchasing or cooking the ingredients for the meal! (And by bonus points, I mean increased likelihood of seeing your post featured in the following week’s post.)

3. In your post, please link back to that week’s round-up post here at FoodieTots, so your readers can find the potluck and be encouraged to join in as well.

That’s it! I hope you’ll join in and share what you’re cooking up to celebrate our local farms and the wonderful food they provide to nourish our families.

Last night I attended a blogger event* at the Silver Diner here in Arlington, part of a chain of 18 diners in Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey. I have to admit I was a little skeptical when I got the invitation announcing their new “fresh and local” menu, but I couldn’t resist seeing what they were up to. Company founder Bob Gaiamo explained that past attempts to change menu items in response to diet trends received poor feedback, but that they now felt confident that diners are interested in healthy, local food — so much so, that they’re now willing to pay 50 cents more for an omelette made from better eggs.

Among the improvements: hormone-free dairy products, hormone- and antibiotic-free beef from partially grassfed cows (in New Jersey), local in-season produce (today, strawberries and asparagus from Delaware), reducing high fructose corn syrup products, breads delivered daily from local bakeries, local wine and beer, and more lower-calorie and gluten-free menu options. They also have an extensive children’s menu which now includes whole wheat spaghetti, organic grilled cheese, and teriyaki salmon with brown rice. Now, when we go to a diner it’s usually to satisfy a grilled-cheese-and-milkshake craving, so it’s nice to know these items are improved, too.

The food may not be perfect — they use soybean oil for frying — but I applaud their effort to provide cleaner, healthier food. The dishes we sampled — from salads to salmon sliders, burgers and pasta — were quite flavorful, and a far cry from your typical greasy diner foods. And more changes are in store: they’ll be getting nitrate-free bacon in a few months, looking to host farmers markets in front of their restaurants, and trying to improve other ingredients over time.

Now on to our regularly scheduled links for the weekend…

1. We’ll be exploring our new neighborhood’s many dining options at the Taste of Arlington on Sunday.

2. It’s also the Loudoun County Farm Tour weekend — and many u-pick strawberry fields are open for business!

3. Nancy, the local mama behind Learning As I Go, is also writing about nature finds over at The Magnifying Glass. This week, she tips us off to a place to go fossil hunting in Maryland — this is definitely going on our summer adventure to do list!

4. My favorite tweet-of-the-week:

@JoshViertel: Kraft asks us to “join the home farming movement.” http://bit.ly/9hrMl5 Sorta like me asking them to “join the cheese wiz movement”

5. And last, should you wind up with an abundance of strawberries after the weekend, try Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Strawberry Preserves with Mint and Black Pepper. Yum!

* Disclosure: I received a free meal at the Silver Diner to learn about the new menu. The thoughts and opinions expressed in this post are entirely my own.

We may live in (Northern) Virginia, but aside from my occasional, tongue-in-cheek “y’all,” we haven’t adopted too many Southern mannerisms. But every once in a while, you just get a craving for something artery-clogging, particularly on a cold, snowy January day. Rather than channeling Paula Deen and deep-frying something at home, we opted to head out to one of our neighborhood restaurants, Evening Star Cafe. I was eager to try their new Saturday breakfast dishes — the fried chicken and waffle, to be precise. Though I will admit it was a tough decision between that and the biscuits and gravy, something I learned to love when visiting my grandparents in Florida many years ago. (The trip that ended my vegetarian phase, coincidentally … just couldn’t resist Grandmom’s daily bacon.)

Despite its casual neighborhood restaurant vibe in the kid-filled neighborhood of Del Ray, Alexandria, Evening Star doesn’t have a kids’ menu. On past brunch/lunch visits, we’ve been offered choices like chicken tenders and pasta off the secret menu, and I’ve even seen patio patrons order hot dogs for their dogs. (It was one of the pooches’ birthday, their owner explained. I can only assume they topped off their meal with puppy pops from the Dairy Godmother.) Anyway, I was able to order a plain waffle and scrambled egg for the boy today, which worked out perfectly. The husband had the huevos rancheros, a colorful and flavorful dish, artfully arranged and kicked up with another Southern nod, Andouille sausage.

Back to my meal, I never really understood the appeal of fried chicken and waffles — chicken for breakfast? — but I have to say I get it now. A touch of sweet honey butter on succulent, savory chicken wrapped in the warm carb embrace of a waffle, it really is perfection.  When I was pregnant with the boy, I had a freak KFC craving one night. I regretted indulging the craving for days after… now that I’m pregnant again, it’s nice to have such a delightful alternative should the fried chicken craving strike again. (And to assuage any guilt over the calorie-heavy meal, Evening Star uses local and organic ingredients “whenever possible,” according to their website.)

Evening Star is open for brunch from 10am-3pm on Saturday and Sunday. The fried chicken and waffle is only available on Saturday, while Sunday has the more traditional eggs benedict, French toast, etc.
2000 Mt Vernon Avenue
Alexandria, VA 22301-1310
703.549.5051