This post is part of the week long Eat Carolina Food Challenge where participants are asked to submit a blog post every day of the challenge. Posts from all the other participants are aggregated on the Carolina Farm Stewardship website.

I am not a food separatist; I often find myself staring at piles of food wondering how they all could fit together in one dish. I am fond of soups and casseroles, and I would really like to get more into creating variations of bibimbap. One pile of food in a bowl is perfect for me.

Last August I wrote about a spaghetti squash garbage plate meal that I prepared from a bunch of summer vegetables. For my first dinner with the Eat Carolina Challenge, I figured I would revisit the premise and get all the ingredients into a pile and into a bowl (and into my mouth). The idea is pretty basic - just throw a bunch of stuff together that you think would taste good together. Throwing together things that don’t taste good together is bad news. Don’t do that.

For tonight’s dinner, I started with a pound of ground beef from Nooherooka Natural. To that I added some new potatoes, lavender bell pepper and garlic from Black River Organic Farm. To that mixture I added a handful of grape tomatoes from the same farm as well as a couple of spoonfuls of Pepper Dog Medium salsa.

Lastly I threw in a box of “expired” organic mac and cheese (I am known around here as a food scavenger) made with Maple View milk and butter. I topped it all off with some chipotle goat cheese from Nature’s Way, and I had a concoction that looked a bit like dog food but tasted a whole lot better.

This will also be my lunch at work tomorrow, making the challenge just a little bit easier…

Robb has been including a fair amount of beets in the CSA boxes, so I have been saving them up to make one big dish instead of using them up individually. After a lifetime of turning up her nose at beets (it isn’t hard to do when your parents only serve gross canned grocery store beets), Kristin ate some pickled beets while she was on the road. She really liked them, so I decided to do a quick pickled version. She liked these as well…

Baby beets work great for this recipe.

1 - Remove the tops from the beets. You can use the beet tops in juices, soups or stocks if you want. I haven’t gotten that far with them yet.

2 - Wash the beets and boil for 20 to 30 minutes or until they are tender.

3 - Rinse with cold water and hand peel the skins. The skins will come right off just using your fingers.

4 - Mix up a marinade consisting of a pinch of finely crushed garlic, a pinch of dried oregano, a pinch of dried basil, one tablespoon of oil, one tablespoon of honey, 1/2 teaspoon of dried mustard (if you have it) and 1/4 cup of fruit scrap vinegar of whatever vinegar you happen to have.

5 - Slice the beets and add them to the marinade.

6 - Let the beets marinate for an hour, stirring occasionally.

7 - Enjoy the beets as a side or add to a salad of local lettuces, goat feta and radishes…

Back in November, I had some Shepherd’s (Shepard’s) Pie off the hot bar at Chatham Marketplace. It was pretty much the most amazing thing I have ever eaten…that contained meat. I emailed their chef to get the recipe, but he never got back to me. I ended up making my own seasonal version with some local lamb, veggies and scavenged potatoes.

1 - I started with a bunch of rainbow carrots from Black River Organic Farm (45 miles).

2 - I sautéed the carrots in goat butter with some leeks and kale from Robb’s CSA along with some wild garlic that I picked last summer.

3 - To the sauté I added some ground lamb from Rainbow Meadow Farms (103 miles). This stuff is good, but rather expensive. Good for a once in while meal, which is why I only bought a few pounds of the stuff. I will probably use ground beef for this dish in the future, thus changing its name to Cottage Pie.

4 - Brown the lamb with the vegetables. Add some salt if the butter you use is unsalted.

5 - Add a bit of beef stock or do like I did and add some leftover beef stew.

6 - Simmer with the beef stock until the mixture gets somewhat thick. While that is going on, boil two pounds or so of potatoes and mash them when they get soft.

7 - Place the lamb and vegetable mixture in a baking dish.

8 - Cover the mixture with mashed potatoes. Bake at 400 degrees for thirty minutes.

9 - Serve with mixed salad, steamed kale, bread and goat cheese.

I used to make the best vegan seitan stew, modified from several recipes I used to use for regular beef stew.

Now that I am back to being an omnivore, I was looking to make a more seasonal stew using local meat. The store started carrying stew beef from Nooherooka Natural farm (90 miles) and I have a bunch of carrots, leeks and cabbage from Robb’s fall CSA. I have never used cabbage in the stew before.

1 - Brown one pound of stew beef in a little oil or bacon grease.

2 - Add several leeks, a few cloves of garlic, two teaspoons of salt, 1/2 teaspoon of paprika (if you have it), 1/4 teaspoon pepper (again, if you have it), four cups of water and a bay leaf.

3 - Bring the mixture just to boiling, reduce the heat and simmer, covered, for thirty minutes.

4 - Stir in lots of carrots, potatoes, green beans and a few cups of shredded cabbage. You can add pretty much any vegetable that is in season or anything you have frozen including corn, celery and peas.

5 - Add a quarter cup of rice, return to a boil.

6 - Reduce heat and simmer for another thirty minutes or so or until all the vegetables are tender.

7 - Remove the bay leaf.

8 - In a jar, combine a half cup of water with a quarter cup of flour. Shake the mixture until it is combined.

9 - Add the flour and water mixture to the stew. Cook and stir until thickened.

10 - Season to taste with salt, pepper, cayenne pepper or whatever you like. Enjoy with a few slices of hot no knead sourdough bread.