Dark Days Meal # 1: Spinach Fettuccine & Homemade Sauce

The Dark Days Challenge has begun! Running until March 31, 2012, over 100 participants will be doing our best to cook and blog/write about one meal per week featuring SOLE (sustainable , organic, local, ethical) ingredients. Recaps will be hosted by the blog collective Not Dabbling In Normal. I will post links to the recaps when they are up so you can follow along with the other participants!

For the first dark days meal Gail and I started the week having reached our limit of thanksgiving leftovers. We wanted something else for dinner! It was also Monday and we were back to work and in no mood to cook something elaborate. We turned to a staple of our diet: Pasta with red sauce and veggies! In this particular incarnation we enjoyed a very delicious & fresh spinach fettuccine with a homemade pasta sauce with romanesco broccoli, carrots, and onions. I added some sweet Italian sausage to my portion, while Gail kept it vegetarian.  No fancy recipes for this meal. Saute a few cloves of minced garlic and a diced whole onion. Add broccoli and carrots, and continue to sauté. Once warmed add sauce and mix well. The pasta cooked in about 3 minutes. It is amazes me how satisfied and delighted both of us were with such an easy and simple dinner! 

All of the ingredients except the salt, pepper, and olive oil were sourced locally: 

Spinach Fettuccine- Valicenti Organico Hollis, NH 

Sweet Italian Sausage- Stillman's Farm Hardwick, MA      Pasta Sauce - all ingredients from our garden & Kimball Fruit Farm - Pepperell, MA  

Romanesco Broccoli - Heron Pond Farm - South Hampton, MA

Carrots - NorthStar Farm - Westport, MA

Even the butter I melted on top of the fettuccine was local, as it was Kate's Homemade of Old Orchard Beach, ME!

I simple, but extremely satisfying start to what I know will be a real challenge. I look forward to sharing more meals throughout the dark days! Though the challenge is to share 1 meal per week, many of our meals, or components of many meals come from local sources throughout the year thanks to the increase in the producers and availability of locally sourced ingredients and prepared foods.