One Local Summer Week 1: Skirt Steak and Spinach Salad

 Note: I was very busy this weekend so I missed the deadline to be included in this weeks mass posting of One Local Summer submittals over at From Farm To Philly.  Hopefully I’ll post in time for next week.

This year EatWisconsin will participate in the One Local Summer challenge hosted by the From Farm To Philly website.  I was alerted to this cool challenge by a friend who writes the Tennessee Locavore blog. The One Local Summer program is a challenge to make one meal each week using locally grown ingredients. For the One Local Summer Challenge I decided instead of setting some local parameters such as only foods from with 100 miles, I would use the entire State of Wisconsin as my “local” boundary (to fit the whole EatWisconsin theme), so you might find recipes using wild rice from Northern Wisconsin, cranberries from west-central Wisconsin, Honeycrisp Apples from Door County, or the cheeses of southwestern Wisconsin.  The permissible exceptions to the “local” rule are oil, salt and pepper, and spices.  Each Monday you can check here to see what I made or check out From Farm To Philly to see what participants across the nation are making.

Early season in Wisconsin makes it kind of difficult for local produce but for my week 1 entry I managed to score some nice spinach from the Waukesha Farmers’ Market and some great looking spring green onions and garlic. I also purchased a skirt steak from one of my favorite Waukesha Farmers’ Market vendors, Greek Acres Farms.

Grilled Greek Acres Skirt Steak

2 green onions, chopped

1 teaspoon black pepper

2 tablespoons of red wine or sherry vinegar

1 teaspoon of smoked paprika

1 teaspoon of Penzey’s Northwoods Seasoning (a blend of salt, paprika, chipotle pepper, black pepper, thyme, rosemary and garlic)

1/3 cup of extra virgin olive oil

2-3 cloves of garlic, chopped

1tbs Worcestershire sauce.

A couple dashes of Hot Sauce (I use locally grown and made Man’s Best Friend hot sauce varieties)

Mix all ingredients and pour into ziploc bag with skirt steak. I like to cut the skirt steak into smaller 4-5 inch) segments for easier cooking. Marinade for at least 4 hours, overnight is better.  Grill steaks on over high heat until desired temperature. I pull em of at 125-130 degrees Fahrenheit for medium rare. I also drizzled some of the green onions with olive oil and some salt and grilled those alongside the steak.

 Green Onion & Spinach Salad with Wisconsin Goat Cheese

I almost exclusively make my own vinaigrette finding most commercial products too bland or fake tasting. Its super easy and once you see how good they taste and how easy it is to improvise with ingredients you’ll rarely buy the bottled stuff anymore. For the dressing I used 3 parts oil, 1 part fig balsamic vinegar, salt, mustard, and Penzey’s Country French Vinaigrette seasoning blend. I tossed the dressing with the spinach and thinly sliced green onions and The Farmhouse Bakery & Cheese Shop (Granton, WI) Red Pepper Goat Cheese.  I  use a squirt of honey in my vinaigrette but I decided to lightly drizzle the Honey Acres buckwheat honey on the salad after I put the dressing and cheese on. It added a really nice taste to the salad that would have been lost had I just mixed the honey in to the vinaigrette. I am thinking that it might have even been better with a nice blue cheese.

Local products used:

Spinch, Garlic & Green Onions from Waukesha Farmer’s Market

Skirt Steak from Greek Acres Farms(Cambria, WI)

Honey AcresBuckwheat Honey (Ashippun, WI)

Farmhouse Bakery & Cheese Shop Roasted Red Pepper Goat Cheese (Granton, WI)

Penzey’s Spices (not necessarily grown here but their headquarters is here)