Sat, Jun 21, 2008 · Filed under Cooking & Eating, CSA, Grow your own, Local food, Market & Stand, Summer
Roasted a White Rock chicken last night, today, got a Spicy Cheese Loaf from Fran, the baker beside me at the farmers’ market. (The market day went well, it was the first day of CSA shares: mesclun, spinach, radishes, garlic scapes, beet greens—it’s still early.) The chicken and the bread naturally organized themselves into a late afternoon simple sandwich… Looking at it before the first bite, I realized that I’ve been thinking about FOOD a lot more recently. Not exactly my own diet, but on a more personal level than as a local veggie grower, probably something to do with the Endless Salad, more communal cooking and eating lately… Part of the running stream of thought has to do with nutrition, what I know about it, how much I want to and need to explore further. I mean, do I really have any sort of basic IDEA of what to eat, beyond “lots of veggies, little meat, drink lots of water,” vague general guidelines like that? Do I NEED a plan? Should I RESEARCH? Consult with a nutritionist or a naturopathic doctor (I’ve been considering visiting an ND for an initial workup)? Sheesh, more RULES! All that is really clear is that most people around here (a “developed nation”) don’t know much practical stuff about the food they eat, me included. The other part is about food quality, and local food. The one thing I’m quite sure of is that it feels way better to eat fresh food that you’ve grown, and to know where the rest comes from and what’s in it, and that wasn’t at all painful to discover. So, I examined this pretty local sandwich. The cheese bread listed the ingredients: flour, water, cheese, sugar, milk, vegetable oil, butter, yeast, dried chili peppers, salt. The chicken was raised here on the farm from two weeks old, fed mainly Purina (Cargill) starter and grower feed (nutritional content in percentages, contact the manufacturer for the actual INGREDIENTS), with some greens from the garden. The lettuce is from the garden. I poured on home-made vinaigrette dressing: extra virgin olive oil from Italy, pink salt from the Himalayas, fresh-ground black pepper, vinegar, Tabasco pepper sauce from…the store. The mayonnaise is from Kraft, it was in the fridge, the bottle says it’s “real.” It’s all ingredients within ingredients… I’m planning to make my own mayo, with eggs from the farm and oil from…Italy. Should I care where the flour in the bread came from? The cheese? The chili peppers? And what about the “vegetable oil,” what’s up with that? Should I make my own cheese and bake my own bread? When do I start looking around for organic chicken feed, how IMPORTANT is that, what’s the priority, how much can I afford to PAY? I don’t have any neat point to sum up with here, I’m just being a literalist and looking at what I eat. When you start to question your basic eating habits in a very primitive way, they may not hold up to much scrutiny, and that’s unsettling. I’m curious. The story unfolds…
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Thu, Dec 20, 2007 · Filed under Autumn, Cooking & Eating, Local food
My local toast: this morning’s breakfast slice of whole wheat from local baker Barb, along with a tall glass of supermarket-orange-juice-not-from-concentrate-with-pulp, and all-from-the-store orange pekoe tea with cream and sugar. The toast is spread with industrial peanut butter (smooth!), Gloria-Jean’s Sundae in a Jar (strawberries, raspberries, sugar, pectin, from the farmers’ market…mmmm!), and expensive transfat-free margarine. Altogether not so local, and nothing from this farm, but the bread is delicious… Some things I’m compelled to plan, like changes to the market garden. But when it comes to eating local, there is NO WAY I’m going to sit around with lists and notes, calculating food miles, looking up arcane food processing ingredients, interrogating local producers and the like. “Planning” my diet and, uh, FOOD STRATEGY to be Local would reduce the pleasure of eating to a chore, and that’s not fun! My personal preference for local food seems to be emerging as a natural extension of tiny farming and eating what I grow, which is cool. My instinctive approach to local food is…laid-back, figure it out as I go. Let’s see what happens!
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Sat, Dec 15, 2007 · Filed under Autumn, Cooking & Eating, Local food, Storage
Today was the farmers’ market’s annual winter market, held indoors in town. It’s supposed to be local produce and locally made crafts, no reselling of manufactured stuff, and for the most part it is. I go to hand out CSA flyers. On the food side, there are storage veggies, like potatoes and carrots, and lots of baking, condiments and preserves. So I did some shopping. Every Saturday during the market season, I buy from other vendors, but winters I’ve trailed off. This year, with the small but purposeful start on the way to a CSA root cellar, my mind’s more on personal, year-round “eating local”, and I’m doing something about it. One way is to stock up when you can. I bought half a dozen bottles of a really fine maple garlic mustard that I’d tried before, and a variety of preserves (we’ve been eating local jams and jellies almost exclusively for a while). I’m also trying a Scotch bonnet hot pepper sauce (it has a slow, steady burn, gonna get a six-pack!). There’s two liters of pure maple syrup (I’ll check out the farm it comes from, down the road, when the sap is running this spring!). I also picked up several loaves of whole wheat, multigrain and Ezekiel bread, which I’ll slice and freeze (and I can order a minimum of four or five loaves from Barb, custom baked, for pick-up when I’m in town). With the stored veggies in the basement and in the freezer (like the simple, tastes-like-summer tomato sauce), it’s a pretty good start. And local food feels excellent. I absolutely look forward to the taste of everything or I wouldn’t be eating it! From reading and from watching the garden grow, I really do believe in the superior nutritional quality of non-industrially raised food, even if it’s something you mightn’t SEE on the day-to-day. And the satisfaction of knowing my food right to the people who make it and the raw ingredients they make it from is deep and really fun. This to me feels like luxury, and it’s only getting started!
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