There's a common expression 'you reap what you sow'. While technically, it's the same as the title of this post - Harvest what you plant - it's connotation is much darker. Almost threateningly so.
I've had enough of cautionary tales.
What I'm looking for now is something to reach for, not something to run away from.
I want more possibilities, not fewer.
We have a large garden here at StarField Farm. Multiple gardens, actually. We have the large plot at the bottom of the driveway, the recently established miniature orchard, a side garden, a terraced garden, and the kitchen garden. We grow all kinds of fruit and vegetables - I like to say from asparagus to zucchini (though we didn't plant any summer squash this year. We get enough from neighbors. And yes, folks here do leave bags of zucchini on front porches). Yesterday, I harvested about half of the 60+ potatoes we planted in early spring.
pinto potatoes from a freshly pulled vine
Yes, that's a lot of potatoes. And tomatoes. And beans. And kale. And peppers. And...
We planted all of this food during still chilly days last spring. You could say gardening is an act of faith and you wouldn't be wrong. So many things need to go exactly right to harvest a crop. The correct amount of sunshine, rain, warmth, nutrient rich soil. And even then, there are pests and animals who can decimate a garden before you get a single floret of broccoli.
This year, squirrels ate every last peach from three carefully tended trees. Hundreds and hundreds of peaches gone.
Here's the thing: when you plant something - a seed, a sapling, an idea - you don't know what will come of it. You hope that there will be juicy peaches in late August, but it's a long time between February pruning and peach pies. So much can happen, mostly out of our control.
But every year, we tend the garden. Feed the soil. Nurture the seedlings. Prune the trees.
Writing stories isn't all that different. It starts underground in the fertile subconscious. The words need to be tended, weeded, protected. Sometimes the garden of ideas is orderly, other times it grows wild like a pumpkin patch. Not every story makes it to harvest and some offer amazing bounty. If gardening is an act of faith, so is creativity.
My garden feeds and sustains my body.
My writing feeds and sustains my soul.
And that is a harvest worth working toward.
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For much of the past week, I've been at StarField Farm with my friend Jayne.
She had a week's vacation and needed a major recharge. I was more than happy to have an excuse to spend time in the quiet of my personal "Rivendell" and recharge as well.
For the first time in a long time, I let myself just be. No deadlines. No writing projects. No to-do lists.
I immersed myself in the quiet and the day to day.
Watched the day lilies and was rewarded by seeing the first bloom.
There has been a little swallow's nest tucked in the beam of the back door porch. The babies had finally fledged and were looking mighty cramped in the nest, but were refusing to leave.
It's hard to see with my cellphone photo, but there are three fully fledged swallows crammed into this nest. The parents spent the better part of several days swooping over the nest and yelling at the babies to get off their asses and fly, damnit. Well, that's my translation of bird anyway.
Our most ambitious endeavor of the week entailed making strawberry rhubarb jam. The strawberries were ones I'd picked last June and frozen, when I knew I wouldn't have the time to deal with them. The rhubarb was fresh picked from just outside the kitchen door.
Until this year, I didn't know rhubarb was something to cook with or eat. It looked like weird celery. It's leaves are poisonous. Who looked at this strange plant and decided it was food?
The jam was fabulous. I adore making jam. For those of you interested, I don't use a recipe, per se, but have honed my methods from these sources:
Speaking of local food, we also ate tons of local asparagus and strawberries. It's hard to pass up local food in season. So we didn't. :)
I also culled the peach tree. (Full disclosure - this is a photo from last year, but the peaches were about the same size this year when I culled them.) This city-mouse has never had fruit trees before, but I have learned that peaches (and many fruit trees) do best if you cull the fruit when it is small to avoid overloading the tree and having it use all its energy to make fruit. Otherwise, you get decent harvests every other year rather than every year.
There is a kind of patience you learn living like this. You can't hurry peaches. They ripen in August, no matter how impatient you are for them.
Most of the nights this week were overcast, and while there wasn't a lot of opportunity to stargaze, we did experience a wonderful consolation prize: fireflies. Jayne and I spent most early evenings on the swing out front watching the dusk deepen, waiting as the birds settled for the evening, spotted the dragonflies dancing, and the first swooping bats. And then the fireflies would rise. I know they're just bugs, but there does seem to be something magical and otherworldly about them.
So Jayne and I spent a lot of time watching the world go by. Over the course of the week, we saw birds and hawks. The aforementioned dragonflies, bats, and fireflies. A deer came to visit on two occasions and I lost count of the rabbits. (The dogs, I'm sure, did not.) Jayne thinks she saw a bobcat slink by one morning. There is a deep silence here and it sinks into your bones.
And then there was one clear night. I had fallen asleep with the dogs in the living room. When I woke up is was well past midnight. I took some time to stand out on the front stoop and watch the stars shine overhead.
It's easy to forget the stars. It's easy to forget to look up. It's easy to forget to breathe.
Halve peaches and remove pit. Don't worry about removing the peel. It will dissolve in the crock pot during the long cooking time.
Load up your crock pot with chopped peaches. Add 3/4 to 1 cup of white or brown sugar and a few TB of lemon juice.
Squish with a potato masher until you have a nice amount of liquid in the pot. You don't want these beauties to scorch! Cook on high for an hour or so. Then cook on low for 6-10 hours. Keep the lid cracked so steam can escape and the peach slurry can thicken. Time really depends on the juiciness of the peaches and the ambient humidity.
Blend
with an immersion blender. (Yes, with the skins. They disappear. If you
wanted, you could peel the peaches first, but that's too much work for
me!)
Cook on high until it thickens, stirring occasionally. (If you put a scoop of the peach butter on a spoon, it should hold its shape and not release water.)
Add sugar to taste and other flavors as you desire. I usually pour in a few ounces of bourbon. It gives it a nice 'zing'.
Can 1/2 pints or 4 oz jars in waterbath for 20 minutes. Or freeze in suitable containers.
Use as a spread on toast, as a filling in crêpes, or swirled in plain yogurt.
(Note: this works with any stone fruit or apples, though I would peel the apples. Mix fruits for different flavor profiles.)
Photo by my husband, stolen with permission and attribution. :)
This is our annual quiet week.
My in-laws live on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, on a sleepy little peninsula where there are as many osprey as there are cars driving down the street.
We have photos, exactly like this one, taken every August during our retreat here. (That's the royal 'we'; actually, all the photos, at least the best ones, are taken by my husband. I am not any kind of photographer.)
While my in-laws have wireless, it's slow and cranky, so by necessity and by choice, I haven't spent a lot of time on the computer. In the mornings, after coffee, I stand by the back deck and practice yoga. There is something about doing sun salutations to the morning sun shining on the Bay.
We alternate between long times of daydreaming and bursts of chaos, as the dogs--our two and my in-laws' two rescued dachshunds--decide it's time to play. Or roll around on dead fish the osprey have left behind on the back lawn. (Apparently, they only like to eat the heads.)
Yeah, another of hubby's photos. You can usually tell mine--they're taking from my ipod and often cut people's heads off. . .
One of the sounds I associate with our time here, is the peep-peep-peep of the juvenile osprey. Their parents leave for their migration, while the youngsters linger, complaining that they have to hunt on their own. It takes them a week or so of plaintive crying, before they finally decide no one's going to feed them anymore and they take their own path.
Our eldest returns to college in less than a week. Our youngest starts his senior year in High School. If I were to anthropomorphize, I would imagine how ambivalent the parent birds feel when they wing away, knowing their offspring need to learn to survive.
While we don't kick our spawn from the nest (or abandon them) quite so abruptly, still, our job is to prepare them for their long flight into the world.
With long stretches of quiet time, I also do a bit of canning the local bounty. Their neighbors have some fig trees that conveniently ripen just in time for our annual visit. I had never seen a fig tree before coming here to Maryland in the summer. I had never eaten figs, either, outside of Fig Newtons. This is fig jam, flavored with balsamic vinegar and ginger. About 8 cups of ripe figs yielded 10 4-oz jars of preserves. They are wonderful on crackers with cheese. For some reason, I get this crazy satisfaction from doing this every year. The figs would otherwise rot on the ground, the trees are so prolific. Instead, I have this amazing bounty, and a memory of our holiday every time I open a jar.
I make them a bit differently each year. This is this year's batch:
8 cups of fresh figs, washed and coarsely chopped
1 1/2 cups of sugar
juice and zest of 1 lemon
3-5 TBS of balsamic vinegar (to taste)
Grated fresh ginger to taste
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
Mix the sugar with the chopped figs and let macerate overnight in the fridge.
Heat mixture in a non-reactive pot.
Add lemon and other flavors to taste
Bring to gelling point Can in a water bath, at rolling boil for 5 minutes.
I think I want to can some whole figs in cider vinegar, with cinnamon and cloves. I imagine they would be amazing over vanilla ice cream. :)
Tonight, I'll make a peach crisp. Simpler than a pie and I can delude myself that it's healthy, too.
At the end of the week, it'll be time to step back into our busy lives, deadlines, and commotion, but for now, I'm soaking in the peacefulness.
The legendary Bob Marley: The music for my morning!
So a bunch of folks wanted to know my process for making blueberry jam. I posted some of the following photos on G+, but I thought I'd take you through the whole process from berry to jam in the jar. Enjoy!
First off, I do a lot of experimenting with small batch jams. As long as you understand the basics of the process and don't shortcut the important stuff (high quality not over-ripe fruit and good sterilization of your canning supplies), you can definitely play with sugar content and flavors.
Second, I almost NEVER use added pectin in my jams and preserves. That allows me to use less sugar and let the fruit shine and gives a softer-set jam, which I prefer anyway. Most just-ripe fruit will have enough pectin in it to set and using a little bit of under-ripe fruit or adding a grated apple to your jam will give you a firmer set if you like that better.
Third, small batch is the way to go. Just enough fruit to fill the jars that will fit in one canner load will allow you to get the set just right.
Here's the recipe. Step by step with photos below:
Lisa's Blueberry Basil Preserves
3 pounds washed blueberries, stems and over-ripe berries discarded
1 to 1 1/2 pound sugar
1-3 TB lemon juice (can use lime juice and zest instead for a different flavor profile)
Lemon zest
Fresh basil (optional)
1-3 TB Balsamic vinegar (optional)
Yield--6-7 half-pint jelly jars
Let berries and sugar macerate overnight.
Drain sugar/water slurry into a non-reactive, thick bottomed pot
Add lemon juice and zest, balsamic if desired.
Set berries aside
Bring sugar mixture to a boil for about 10 min, stirring well
Skim foam, if desired (a TB of non-salted butter added to the pot reduces foaming)
When the sugar mixture nears the jelling point (see this link for spoon test), fold in the berries and any remaining liquid.
Check taste and add add'l lemon/zest/balsamic to your preference
Bring to a boil again.
In 5-10 minutes, it should reach the jelling point.
Can and process 10 min in a water bath.
Step one: Drag your family to pick blueberries. :)
Here's a truism about canning--the food in the jar will be no fresher than the source material you start out with. If you're going to go through the work to make your own preserves, get the best, freshest berries you can.
Make sure to stay away from ones that are over-ripe. The riper the fruit, the less pectin it contains. Firm berries that come off easily from the bush are what you want.
It takes about 3 pounds of berries to make 6 half-pint jars of preserves, so plan accordingly.
Step Two: Weigh out 3 pounds. (A kitchen scale is really your friend when you can. Volume measurements are really inaccurate) Wash the berries, discarding sticks and stems and any mushy ones. Place in a bowl with 1 to 1 1/2 pounds of sugar. (Most commercial jams are 1:1 by weight fruit to sugar. Too sweet, by far, for me.)
Mix the sugar with the fruit and cover. Let sit a few hours or place in the refrigerator overnight. This step is called maceration and is the secret to a very fresh-tasting jam. This will pull the water from the fruit and leave you with the berries floating in a sugar/water slurry.
Optional step: Pick some basil from your garden.
Wash it and toss it whole in your sugar/berry mix. A great flavor combo!
Step three: A few hours later, or the next day, put the berry mix in a colander and let the water/sugar mixture drain into a large non-reactive pot. (I love my enameled cast-iron pot--the thick walls means no scorching! ) You need a large pot because when you cook your jam, it will boil up a lot.
Set the berries aside. If you used basil, pick it out now.
Step four: Fill a large pot (large enough to fit your canning jars with at least an inch of space between the top of the jar and the top of the pot) with hot water, line with a silicone mat or trivet of some kind and place on the stove. Bring the water to near boiling.
Wash your jars and supplies (wide mouth funnel, jar tongs, and lid lifter) in hot, soapy water.
Prepare a few more jars than you think you'll need, and make sure you have enough lids and bands to go with them. **Bands you can re-use over and over. Lids are single use only!**
Rinse the jars well and place them in the canning pot. The boiling water will keep them sterile until you're ready to use them.
Place bands and lids in a smaller pot filled with water, bring to a simmer and let sit.
Step five: Once it reaches the jelling point, turn heat to simmer and ladle hot mixture into your half-pint jelly jars. Make sure you leave 1/4 inch space between the jam and the top of the jar ('head space').
Wipe outside of rim with a damp cloth.
Using the lid lifter (it has a magnet) lift out one lid and place it on the filled jar. Repeat with band, tighten band gently--finger tight only. Pick up filled jar with jar lifter (the funny looking tongs) and place in hot water bath. Repeat with next jar until you run out of jam.
Bring water in the canner to a full rolling boil. Set a timer for 10 minutes. When it's done, CAREFULLY lift the jars from the hot water bath and place on a cutting board to cool. Do NOT fiddle with the jars. The jelly may seem loose-set for several days.
Voila! Blueberry preserves cooling on the counter!
Last week, we packed up family (including the 2 dogs) for our annual trek to the in-laws on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay.
It's a place of rare and ever-changing natural beauty and we always look forward to our time there. One of my traditions is to can the fresh and abundant produce that grows there. My in-laws' neighbors have an enormous, somewhat 'feral' fig tree and I make fig jam for my in-laws to give as gifts during the holidays.
This year, two of their neighbors were talking about canning tomatoes, but had never done it before and I offered to run a 'master class' for them. :) Which entailed spending a delightful day in Jolene's kitchen with Andy and Jolene as my eager students.
Andy coring tomatoes. Photo by N. Halin, used with permission
We got an assembly line going, with Andy in charge of coring the tomatoes that were then dropped in a pot of boiling water for a minute, then plunged into cold in order to slip the skins off. (Me and Jolene in the background.)
Jolene and I getting to tomatoes ready to hot pack. Photo by N. Halin, used with permission
They were so excited to be canning! Jolene had listened to a food preservation podcast and Andy had spent the morning watching youtube canning videos. It was helpful that they had a background already for when I showed them what to do and we were able to discuss why certain things had to be done in certain ways. (Andy learned by experience the importance of head space when some tomato juice he canned had too little and splashed under the lid during the processing time, preventing the seal.)
Detail: tomatoes, skins slipped off, cored. Photo by N. Halin, used with permission
We formed a well-coordinated canning machine. :) And in one afternoon, two boxes of fresh, local tomatoes ended up chopped and preserved.
Quart jars, processing. Photo by N. Halin, used with permission
I found it more than a little ironic that this former city girl (me!), who at one point in her life could burn water, ended up teaching her in-laws' friends and peers how to rediscover a tradition that used to be utterly routine and commonplace.In addition to being taught from one generation down to another. Part of what I truly enjoyed about the day was the sense of community. Canning on your own feels like work. Canning with friends is a lovely way to spend an afternoon.
Nearly a week later, I hear they are still talking about how much fun they had putting up tomatoes. I think I've created a monster.
Interested in learning to can? Some wonderful resources can be found on the net:
Oooh, this diner is going to be soooo cool! It has a steampunk vibe that I know is going to be a great place to write. Besides, there is something about old train station buildings that I love.
I'll be in the kitchen over the next few days, cooking favorites with family. I find it pretty funny, in the ironic sense of the word, that cooking and food have become so much a part of our family life.
Honest to goodness--I used to be able to burn water.
So one of the things I'm grateful for is for the shared love of cooking, family dinner time and the conversations I've had with my lovely husband of 22 years, and my now teen age sons.
There is an awful lot of laughter at our table, along with local food, fresh bread, and the occasional glass of good wine.
The culmination of the year's food and companionship is the Thanksgiving meal. It's the day I look forward to all year long.
My wish for you, whoever and where ever you are, is that you can be with loved ones for a shared meal and that you have a joyous table. In the US, Thanksgiving is a time for taking stock and acknowledging what one is grateful for.
I am grateful for the love that surrounds me.
I am grateful for the joy I receive in reading a good book, or poem, in listening to glorious music, in thrilling to a piece of art. The ability to be moved is a gift.
I am grateful for the support of my friends, family, and writing community as I continue to work at becoming a published novelist.
I am grateful for the support and hard work of my agent, Nephele Tempest.
I am grateful for the happy house I live in, the dog who curls at my feet, the laughter and general silliness that abounds in our family's life.
I am grateful for the chance to help my parents as they face the challenges of their illnesses.
I am grateful for the trust my children have in me.
I am grateful for the folks like you who stop by and read what I leave here.
May you enjoy many blessings, in the days and months to come.
I am in one of those lulls in my writing life. If I was in a different mindset, I might label it 'writer's block', since from all external markers, that's what it looks like.
I have about 10K in on a new novel, and an idea on the back burner for another story, but have not sat down to write much of anything other than some morning pages over the past month.
But rather than berating myself for any lack of discipline or falling into a place of fear or anxiety, I am looking at this time for what it is: a necessary breath, a pause, a fallow time. Part of the reason I'm not panicking is that I've been here before and I know I have the discipline to finish what I begin, having worked through this process 6 times already.
Right now, I'm enjoying the process of canning the harvest bounty for winter. Today I'm making hot pepper apple jelly and letting my mind drift as I work.
The words will flow again, and another story will possess me all too soon.
In the mean while, I'll have all this lovely food to sustain me.
My in-laws said that the weather was just turning bad in Maryland, in advance of Hurricane Earl. The path of the storm may or may not strike us here in Massachusetts. I hope that it does not hit them on the Chesapeake Bay.
It's hard to believe in such a ferocious storm given the past several days here have been so hot, dry, and still.
***
We're still in full-on harvest mode. Today was about raspberry jam. I picked the berries this morning. By evening, they were cooling as jam in glass jars. How cool is that?
Next up: more tomato sauce, and then apples! Dried, sliced, and apple sauce, and perhaps eggplants and zucchini to dry.
I like to go downstairs and visit the jars in the pantry. Yeah, I know that's weird. :) But it makes me happy to see all the colorful food we can eat all winter long.
All that lovely abundance--sunshine and water transmuted to delicious food with a little work.
***
School starts for my kids in a few days. While it's been a looooong time since I've started a new school year, I still look at September as a time for new beginnings.
I'm looking forward to finding my work-a-day groove again with my writing. Now that I've set up my keyboard tray and the office is more ergonomically kind, I hope to be back to 1K/day writing.
A few 'passes' on the newest WIP out to editors. Disappointing, yes, but that's the way this process goes. I remain optimistic. My agent, the lovely and gracious Nephele Tempest remains optimistic. I have no control over how the editors regard my work. I can only write the strongest story I know how to write.
***
The Redsox are winning tonight--always a good thing in our family's life. Hubby poured me a lovely glass of red wine. He and I will celebrate our 22nd wedding anniversary this weekend.
10 quarts of sauce, 6 quarts of chopped tomatoes. Another flat of tomatoes to process.
This is the time I ask myself why. Why do I bother to put up/can/freeze/dehydrate? It's not like our winter survival depends on it. (Hello. . . grocery stores!)
But then I walk downstairs into our basement pantry and see all those jars.
They make me smile.
They are summer, stored in glass.
I can't imagine not standing for hours chopping tomatoes until my fingers ache.
And there's something else too.
Canning in my suburban/modern/computerized world makes me feel a little subversive. As if I am just a little bit of a rebel. All those jars mean I'm sticking it to the (agribusiness) man.
Counter/culture. (Get it? Counter as in kitchen counter?)
If you've read this blog for any length of time, you'll know that one of my (minor) obsessions is local food. We have a produce share, a meat share, a fruit share, and a winter root vegetable share all through various local CSA's (community supported agriculture). In fact, many of our meals, particularly in the summer, are almost 100% locally sourced.
Not only am I convinced that the food tastes better, I also feel as if it is healthier. Remember a few years back when salmonella was found in California greens? How about the recent egg recall? Unfortunately, this is a result of factory farming pressures and I don't see the problem going away anytime soon.
Well, it's easy to eat locally this time of year. Even without belonging to a CSA, farmers markets are practically in every town brimming with ripe, locally grown, and competitively priced produce.
But we're in the frozen North of New England, and eating locally is a lot harder in the winter. Which brings me to harvest season and the reason my blog posts are rather more infrequent than normal. It's tomato canning time. Right now, I have 3 pots of tomato sauce simmering on the stove, waiting to be thick enough to can.
The farmer who operates our CSA has made a barter deal with me. He'll give me as much produce as I can handle if I'll share the preserved food with him. I find it terribly ironic that he has all this farm fresh bounty around him and no time to put it by for winter. I can every fall anyway, so having access to free produce in return for my sweat equity is a great bargain.
Well, friday, he sent me home with close to 60 lbs of tomatoes. Yikes! That's on top of the 8 quarts of cherry tomatoes he gave me a few days earlier. Those are now dried, put away in quart ziploc bags. Half in my pantry, half in his. Later this week, he'll have maybe 5 or 6 quarts of sauce and 3 quarts of chopped tomatoes to join them.
I have chopped, cored, and skinned so many tomatoes, I'm dreaming about them. Yes, I'll swear and fume about never wanting to see another tomato again, until December, when I go down to the basement pantry and open a jar of August sunshine and rain in the form of tomato sauce. Then I'll be overjoyed that I did this yet again.
So for the next few weeks, if you need me, I'll be in the kitchen dealing with tomatoes. At least until the local apples come in.
When life gets stressful, I retreat to the kitchen and cook. It's one of those rare tasks that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, is not ambiguous, does not rely on other people, and rewards me with something wonderful when I am finished.
Today I finished canning 3 pints of strawberry preserves, made from strawberries I picked yesterday morning at a local farm, and using this recipe.
It seems to be similar to the wonderful fruit preserves we ate last summer all throughout Kyrgyzstan.
For the most part, Kyrgyzstan is why I have retreated to the kitchen. I feel so overwhelmed and so heartsick about the violence there, so I am putting up spring's bounty. My hope and prayer is that day to day life stabilizes in Osh, where our friends are, and that they can return to the normal tasks like making strawberry preserves to spread on borsok.
Please consider making a donation to the Red Cross Kyrgyzstan initiative. Details here: Kyrgyz Uzbek Peace Initiative. One of the founders is someone I know. Her parents put us up and took care of us when we were in Osh a year ago.
I'm back in Boston after a trip out of town to help my parents move. It's a gloomy, rainy, raw day here in New England and I'm planning on comfort food for dinner.
Tuna casserole.
It's not quite the organic, free range, local food I am pretty much obsessed with, but sometimes you just have to go with the thing from your past that you associate with being taken care of. And since making a chocolate cake and eating the whole darned thing isn't on the agenda for tonight, tuna casserole it is.
It's the culinary equivalent of flannel pants and fuzzy slippers. Comfortable, easy, casual.
Dinner in about an hour. There will be plenty to share. Bring a bottle of wine. And a chocolate cake would be good.
A few years ago, I read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." We had already started to get a weekly seasonal vegetable share from a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm and it was the start of a journey that found us this year with a winter root vegetable and local meat share.
One of the fun aspects to a farm share is that it forces you to be creative and explore new foods. B.C. (Before CSA), I'd never, ever had a parsnip, kale, or rutabega. I also had never cooked anything with fresh butternut squash or done anything with a pumpkin save carve one for halloween.
People debate endlessly as to whether organic is better for you/better for the world/tastes better than conventional. I'm not going to get into that argument. But I can tell you there's a difference when you eat food that has been freshly harvested within minutes to hours of when you get it versus food that has to be shipped and processed on its way to the store.
Our seasonal farm share is even more 'local' because my teenage son volunteers on the farm all summer long, so we were eating food he'd planted, weeded, and harvested.
This year, I also joined a winter share. A consortium of several local farms worked to bring members fall greens, apples, onions, winter squash, potatoes, carrots, and other root crops. We're almost though the last of the parsnips and radishes. There are still a few sweet potatoes, but most of the rest has already made its way into our meals and into our hungry bodies. Some of our bounty has been preserved, either through freezing, canning, or dehydrating, so we can enjoy some of our local food through the winter.
The past few weeks, I've actually been a little sad to have to go to the grocery store to buy things like onions and potatoes.
We also belong to a local meat share. Once a month, we pick up a cooler full of flash frozen freshly processed, locally and humanely grown beef, chicken, lamb, and pork.
It's been a joy to create meals that are almost entirely based on food from a 50 mile radius of where I live. It feels like a more sensible way to live and eat, though I have to admit to several non-local vices: coffee, chocolate, and bananas.
Really, I'm a city mouse, not a country mouse, but I've taught myself country mouse tricks for the sake of good food. Next year, I want an honest to goodness root cellar.
Has eating local changed my life? In a way, yes. It's made me more mindful of what I eat, what I buy, and how I see my place in the larger world. I feel better, especially as we eat almost no processed food anymore, or at least things with few and recognizable ingredients. In the long run, I think that's a healthier way to approach eating.
If you are interested in the CSA movement, you can find a local farm here.
