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I couldn’t let strawberry season pass us by without the obligatory sink-full-of-berry photo, er, recipes, right?

After being told one local farm was out of strawberries, I rushed to our neighborhood farmers market first thing last Saturday to grab half a flat from Black Rock Orchard. I made a small batch of freezer jam and a pint of strawberries in vanilla syrup, a la Simple Bites, to stash in the freezer for next winter. And the remainder were set aside for Sunday evening strawberry shortcakes.

Growing up, I spent just about every Father’s Day weekend at the local grange strawberry festival — consuming and later serving massive amounts of fresh strawberry shortcake. While I’ve yet to find a berry here that rivals those from Oregon, with a little sugar, vanilla and cream a homemade shortcake is just about as satisfying. I macerate the berries with a touch of balsamic vinegar to help round out the flavor.

Recipe: Strawberry Shortcake

Berries:

• 3 cups sliced strawberries
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

Instructions: Combine berries, sugar and vinegar in a bowl and let stand at room temperature at least 30 minutes.

Biscuits adapted from Alice Waters via Ezra Pound Cake

Ingredients:

• 1 cup unbleached flour
• 1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 6 tablespoons cold butter
• 3/4 cup heavy cream

Instructions: Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix together flours, salt, sugar and baking powder in medium mixing bowl. Cut butter into small cubes, and use pastry blender or hands to work butter into the flour mixture until crumbly. Add cream and mix until just combined. Shape dough into a disc and roll out on lightly floured surface to about 3/4-inch thickness. Cut out 2-inch circles and place on parchment paper lined baking sheet. Bake for 15-17 minutes, until just slightly golden. (Makes 6 biscuits.)

To make shortcakes: Beat 1/2 cup whipping cream with 1 teaspoon vanilla paste or extract until soft peaks form. Split biscuits in half and place bottom half on serving plate. Top with 1/2 cup of strawberries, including a good sized drizzle of the syrup that has formed in the bowl. Place top half of biscuit on top, add a generous spoonful of whipped cream and a few more berries on top for good measure. Enjoy!

Thanks so much to our first Local Potluck Tuesday participants last week — . Please join in and share what local foods you’ve enjoyed this past week!

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.

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.

Thus far my gardening education has largely been in tidbits picked up via Twitter or around the gardening blogs. I did pick up two books to read, Grow Great Grub and The Gardener’s A to Z Guide to Growing Organic Food. Another Twitter friend also recommended The Garden Primer, which I may turn to next. So I’ve gleaned little bits about companion planting, like that basil and tomatoes grow well together — so I stuck a basil plant next to my cherry tomatoes. And that marigolds help repel pests — so we threw a couple of those in as well.

And, I’ve heard before about how helpful ladybugs can be, so when Tiffany mentioned that she found some at our local garden center, we rushed over to pick some up this past weekend.

I’m pretty sure that all the ladybugs quickly fled for cooler climates (in typical DC fashion we went from frost advisory to 90s and humid in the span of about a week), but it was a fun experience for the boy. He bonded quickly with the little critters, even giving one a kiss… (above right).

They did seem to set in quickly on whatever was eating my basil, so hopefully a few of them will linger around for a while!

And now, 5 links for Friday:

1. FoodieTots around the web: our “Local Potluck Tuesday” was mentioned on the Washington Post; and our kitchen garden experiment was mentioned in “Mom’s Guide to Gardening with Toddlers and Preschoolers” at SheKnows.com.

2. Let’s Move! Some of my favorite chefs (and foodie moms) participated in today’s “Chefs Move to Schools” launch at the White House; read about it in Jane Black’s article at the Post.

3. Farm-to-School: While chefs talk at the White House, DC’s Farm-to-School Network hosted a city-wide “Stawberries and Salad Greens” event in DC’s public and charter schools this week. Erin of Sustainable in the City made my strawberry agua fresca for 160 elementary school kids!

4. Back in the garden, check out this beautiful post on “Here’s What Could Happen if You Grow Tomatoes” over at Raising Foodies. (I’ll settle for the boy *eating* a tomato from our garden, asking for it for dessert would be icing on the cake!)

5. And be sure to visit goodLife{eats} for this week’s Grow Cook Eat round-up, featuring a call for chard recipes. Our CSA starts next week, so we’ll be looking for new chard recipes, too!

What comes after asparagus and strawberries? Fresh peas! I bought both English peas (for shelling) and sugar snap peas this past weekend at the Falls Church Farmers Market. The English peas joined some Black Rock Orchard asparagus in a cold soup for a hot and steamy evening.

While the boy’s favorite vegetable is actually peas, he generally prefers them frozen. And though I couldn’t coax him into helping me shell, he did snatch a handful of fresh shelled peas out of my bowl. (He even tried a sugar snap pea with its pod last night, rather than slurping out the peas as though it was edamame in his usual manner.)

Recipe: Chilled Asparagus Pea Soup

Ingredients:

• 1 pound asparagus, cut into 1-inch pieces
• 1 cup shelled fresh peas (or frozen if that’s all you have)
• 1 small yellow onion
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 cups chicken or vegetable broth
• 6 leaves fresh mint
• 1/2 cup half and half (or cream)
• salt and pepper

Instructions: Warm olive oil in a soup pot over medium heat. Add onion and cook until it becomes translucent, about 5 minutes. Add asparagus, a pinch of salt and pepper, and broth. Increase heat to high and bring to a boil; then reduce to a simmer and cook for 7 minutes. Add peas and cook for an additional 3 minutes. Asparagus should be just tender when pricked with a fork. Remove from heat and let cool a little. Add mint (torn into small pieces).  Process in small batches in a blender until smooth. Stir in half and half.  Pour into a bowl and chill in the refrigerator for at least one hour. (You can also accelerate the cooling by setting the bowl into a larger bowl with ice and water.) Garnish with additional mint leaves. Serves 4. Enjoy!

Note: Make this with vegetable broth for Meatless Monday.

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.