Foodbuzz 24, 24, 24 : Eating Local in Orange County

Each month, Foodbuzz hosts an event called 24, 24, 24 featuring 24 different meals, happening in 24 hours, around the world at 24 different blogs. It's a unique way to step inside the kitchens, dining rooms, and Saturday nights of food bloggers around the globe. The posts run the gamut from beer pairings to non-stop dessert tastings; from martini explorations to five-course dinners. We decided to cook a 3-course meal using almost all locally sourced food!



For those of you already familiar with The Bite Me Kitchen, you know we are passionate about buying local and supporting small businesses. It may be convenient to shop at the Corporate Supermarket, but your dollar goes further and buys you better quality food at a mom-and-pop store or a farmer's market. We are fortunate to live in Southern California's mild climate where abundant farmer's markets provide us a seemingly endless supply of fruits and vegetables. Weekend markets also feature artisanal bread makers, cheese-makers, small batch olive oil producers, and dairies, but the biggest surprise of all is that the UCI farmer's market (Saturday mornings in Irvine) is one of the only places you can purchase locally raised beef.


I was up with the sun and set out to be the first market shopper, because if you want the best, you have to be there early! Bright bunches of cut flowers fill rows of white buckets; dirt-covered carrots overflow their crates. Freshly baked baguettes peek from baskets to the sound of vendors hawking their wares. The jovial bustle of the marketplace and the crisp morning air has everyone smiling. My mission: buy locally grown and organic fruits and vegetables, some local honey, a fresh baguette, locally-raised beef, and then off to one more stop to pick up live crabs!

Cowboy Frank Fitzpatrick of 5 Bar Beef can be found in a back corner of the market. He's easy to spot. He's the only cowboy in Irvine, complete with boots, hat, and pickup truck. In the bed of his pickup sits the freezer that contains my first objective: Local, grass-fed beef. Frank raises cattle the way they should be: on open land, grazing real grass, right in nearby Silverado Canyon. Frank's beef is naturally lean because it's not fed the excess fat and grain that 'marbles' commercial beef. His steaks are dark purple, laced with thin sinews of fat, and best cooked slow and low, and eaten rare. We're so used to seeing beef with tons of fat, that upon first inspection 5-Bar steaks don't even look like beef. This is what beef looked like before industrial feed lots. The taste will take you back to the beef you ate as a child. Real, nutritious, full of flavor, with no chemicals, no hormones, and no grain. His steaks, roasts, and short-ribs are frozen immediately after slaughter to seal in the flavor. I bought a handful of New York strip steaks and a couple packages of short-ribs for later.



Pearson's Port is one of my favorite Orange County markets; a tiny second-generation fish shack located at the entrance to Newport Back Bay underneath Pacific Coast Highway. Pearson's is the place to go if you want the real catch of the day. When I asked how fresh their swordfish was, Terese (the co-owner) replied that her husband Tommy speared it earlier that morning. It doesn't get any fresher! Live rock crabs crawl over each other in large tanks, and other tanks alternate between holding live lobster and live spot prawns, depending on the season. These are some of the nicest people you will ever meet, and they sell the best seafood in town, at exceptional prices. Terese and her daughter helped me pick out four good-sized rock crabs and we spent a good while conversing about how they do business and some of the struggles they are subjected to as small commercial fishers. With my bag of angry crabs, I set off for home.




Friends arrived just as the sun slipped over the horizon, and we chatted in the warm evening air with white wine and champagne spritzers. I served a sliced baguette from Picket Lane Bakery alongside a compound butter made of whipped butter with fresh minced garlic and parsley.



We boiled and cleaned our angry crabs, then combined them with a dash of minced celery, onion, and bell pepper to make lump crab cakes. The mango is not local, but I used it to make a mango-habanero jam to compliment the salty-sweet crab. I finished the plate by adding some local organic baby arugula and diced avocados from Irvine's Neff Ranch.



For the main course, I really wanted to showcase the 5 Bar Beef. I'm a little bitter because I had a few too many glasses of wine and completely overcooked the steaks! Ahhh! Grass-fed beef requires very little cooking at an extremely low temperature, and I just kept right on talking and sipping my wine, spacing on the beef in the oven. Fortunately, our company didn't seem to mind, and the beef's flavor still shone through. We plated the beef simply - a serving of local potatoes whipped with the above compound butter and roasted purple carrots.



Last, but never least, dessert! A simple tart of golden puff pastry, topped with a rhubarb compote, pastry cream, and local honey-brushed strawberries. It's absolutely incredible what a week of warm sunshine can do for local strawberries. Ours were deliciously succulent and full of sunny sweetness!



All in all, it was a rousing success. So many items can be bought locally from the farmer, the rancher, the fisherman, the butcher, the baker - maybe even the candlestick maker. For us at the BMK, the satisfaction that comes from buying small and local, and being a part of our community by giving our hard-earned dollars to local businesses is only equaled by the knowledge that we're doing the right thing for our bodies and our planet. Buying local is better for the environment (transport = energy + waste), and it's better for you to eat food that is minimally processed.. Look around your community and ask those who may be in the know (restaurant chefs, your local butcher, your neighbors...) for their recommendations! Thank you to Foodbuzz, for letting us showcase our passion for real food and a big thank you to our wonderful dinner guests who made the night memorable!

ALL RECIPES COMING THIS WEEK!!!!!!