Are you guys freaked about the impending apocalypse? Not the religious one, I'm not feeling that one. No, I'm talking more like peak oil stuff, or even just really bad weather. I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but it's hard to sit down and organize my thoughts about this.
So let me just say that I'm a big fan of science fiction. BIG NERD, right here. I've been to (two) conventions and everything - it's true. You know what my favorite subgenre is? I'll tell you: it's utopia/dystopia stories, or stories with a post-apocalyptic setting. And if they're feminist, all the better. The scariest book in the universe, in my opinion, was Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. It's just too damn realistic. You know how it it goes, society is in decline, some uber-conservative whack-job gets elected to office, people live in walled communities to try to remain safe but violent crime is rampant, etc. The narrator is a young woman who sees where this is going and starts to make preparations, even while her family and friends think she is a little out there for doing so. And what do you know, she was right to do it, the shit hits the fan, and more stuff happens, but you're just going to have to read the book. It's good, I promise. And scary!
So anyway, what the fuck does this have to do with being vegan and food? So I try to temper my paranoid tendencies with strong doses of reality. But when the stock markets start to crash and burn, it makes me think that you know, it probably wouldn't be too bad of an idea to have enough food in the house to sustain my family. For at least a month. And with no power available.
You might be thinking, geez, where is her partner in all this and doesn't he think she's crazy? Oh, no no no no no. If anything, he is more paranoid. I won't go into it here, but trust me, he's more paranoid.
So what are we doing right now? We're following this plan. That's right, we're going to stockpile approxiamately 40 lbs of oats, 90 cans of beans, 90 cans of fruit and 90 cans of tomato products. Oh and multivitamins. And lots of water. For my family of three, this is approximately what it would take to sustain us for one month, with no power. The trick is that you can eat all of these things without a heating source and none need to be refrigerated, although of course most would be improved with heating. But you don't have to. You can eat raw oats as muesli, beans and fruit and tomatoes straight out of the can. And you would, if you were hungry.
The trick is, we eat these foods already, all the time. So I'll be using my stockpile constantly, and replacing it as needed. We'll have a system where the oldest gets used first and the replacement food gets put to the back of the shelf. It's just a nice little insurance policy that lets me sleep better at night.
Luckily, we have many quarts of peaches already canned, and lots of tomatoes already (thank you Costco, for carrying organic tomatoes). We stocked up on 20 cans of organic beans from Trader Joe's this weekend (at $0.99 a can, it seemed like the thing to do!). We're hoping to stock up a little more each weekend.
Now if I could just figure out where the hell to buy 40 lbs of oats in Seattle....
Anyway, what about you? Are you storing food? Do you think you should? How are you prepared for an emergency, long or short-term?
Showing posts with label food storage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food storage. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Friday, October 12, 2007
Whoa, and we're back
Next time we have out of town guests in, remind me that I DO NOT cook for them. No matter what I think/want/wish I will do, I just don't. Unless it's breakfast and/or sandwiches. Geez. My Father-in-law doesn't eat any non-breakfast meal without a beef product of some kind, so that was out when they were visiting. I don't care if you make your own beef product at my house, but I'm not cooking it for you, dig? Then there were just so many places we wanted to take my parents, that I barely cooked at all. Plus, I didn't want to "stick" anyone with the baby while I cooked. I felt odd about that, but there it is.
So after three weeks of mostly eating out, we were only too happy to get back to local food and cooking for ourselves!
Some recipes I've tried lately...
Creamy Broccoli Tahini Pasta Bake from Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes Cookbook. It was pretty good the first night all by itself, but it improved a lot when we had it as leftovers and added homemade marinara! It was kind of like super-protein baked ziti. With broccoli. Not particularly local, except for the broccoli and breadcrumbs. But it made a ton and was good for lunch the whole week.
Another night I made sauteed veggies in TJ's spinach simmer sauce over jasmine rice. I used local red pepper, red onion, broccoli, parsnip. I also made asian baked tofu (local tofu!), using a recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. And let me just say that marinating tofu is for suckers. I didn't marinate it at all, just tossed the marinating ingredients into the pan with the tofu, covered with foil and baked it for 15 minutes. Then I removed the foil, baked for another 10 minutes, then broiled it for 3 minutes. The marinade totally bakes into the tofu. No need to press or waste your time marinating.
Another day I made Pasta with Arugula Pesto. It was good! I was surprised. I've made it in the past and thought it was pretty "eh." But this recipe I found substituted garbanzo beans for nuts, which made it really creamy and bonus, the baby could it eat. I also used TJ's Quattro Formaggio cheese blend instead of straight parmesan, which couldn't have hurt. We had it tossed with red pepper, mushrooms, garlic and onion (all local, plus the arugula was local). The recipe made a ton of pesto, so I think I'll have it on pizza this weekend.
We also have a bumper crop of apples, so I made an apple crisp the other day, which is SO good. We had it with local vanilla ice cream. yum!
And of course we've been enjoying green salads with fresh local lettuces and tomatoes from our garden.
I can't believe how much of the frozen marinara we've blasted through already! Two quarts and one pint, so far. Holy crap.
Food related stuff we need to do:
Dry our italian plums in the dehydrator.
Make applesauce with the apples.
Bake bread (check! Rye Caraway bread is in the breadmaker as we speak!)
Harvest all the backyard basil; make pesto or dry it
Harvest/transplant the thyme
Harvest/transplant the oregano
Harvest the mint
Use up our:
So after three weeks of mostly eating out, we were only too happy to get back to local food and cooking for ourselves!
Some recipes I've tried lately...
Creamy Broccoli Tahini Pasta Bake from Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes Cookbook. It was pretty good the first night all by itself, but it improved a lot when we had it as leftovers and added homemade marinara! It was kind of like super-protein baked ziti. With broccoli. Not particularly local, except for the broccoli and breadcrumbs. But it made a ton and was good for lunch the whole week.
Another night I made sauteed veggies in TJ's spinach simmer sauce over jasmine rice. I used local red pepper, red onion, broccoli, parsnip. I also made asian baked tofu (local tofu!), using a recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. And let me just say that marinating tofu is for suckers. I didn't marinate it at all, just tossed the marinating ingredients into the pan with the tofu, covered with foil and baked it for 15 minutes. Then I removed the foil, baked for another 10 minutes, then broiled it for 3 minutes. The marinade totally bakes into the tofu. No need to press or waste your time marinating.
Another day I made Pasta with Arugula Pesto. It was good! I was surprised. I've made it in the past and thought it was pretty "eh." But this recipe I found substituted garbanzo beans for nuts, which made it really creamy and bonus, the baby could it eat. I also used TJ's Quattro Formaggio cheese blend instead of straight parmesan, which couldn't have hurt. We had it tossed with red pepper, mushrooms, garlic and onion (all local, plus the arugula was local). The recipe made a ton of pesto, so I think I'll have it on pizza this weekend.
We also have a bumper crop of apples, so I made an apple crisp the other day, which is SO good. We had it with local vanilla ice cream. yum!
And of course we've been enjoying green salads with fresh local lettuces and tomatoes from our garden.
I can't believe how much of the frozen marinara we've blasted through already! Two quarts and one pint, so far. Holy crap.
Food related stuff we need to do:
Dry our italian plums in the dehydrator.
Make applesauce with the apples.
Bake bread (check! Rye Caraway bread is in the breadmaker as we speak!)
Harvest all the backyard basil; make pesto or dry it
Harvest/transplant the thyme
Harvest/transplant the oregano
Harvest the mint
Use up our:
- eggplant
- beet greens
- arugula
- peppers
- mushrooms
- broccoli
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Why I need a chest freezer
Attack of the Killer Red Rounds
Hmmm...well, we got an email late last week from our CSA that extra tomatoes would be available for (discounted) purchase at the farmer's market on Saturday. So we planned to get a few.
We ended up with 1/2 a bushel of red round tomatoes (for $13.50).
This may not sound like a lot of tomatoes, but believe me, it really is.
I spent most of Saturday processing tomatoes for freezing. I've never frozen tomatoes before (except as sauce), so it was a learning experience. I followed the directions from Pick Your Own (with illustrations!), so I hope they turn out okay. I kind of liked the process of boiling, ice bathing and then peeling the tomatoes - kind of like peeling a sunburn, but way less gross (but equally satisfying). Then I cored them, quartered 'em, squished all the seeds and liquid into a bowl (which I strained for the juice at the end), and then packed them into bags. I think we got 2 gallons and 2 quarts out of it - not packed full, but kind of flat in the bags so they don't take up lot of room in the freezer.
That only used about half the tomatoes.
Then I made another batch of tomato sauce. This time I used half dried herbs and half fresh. We cooked it all night long, and got it in the freezer today - 2 quarts, 2 pints frozen and 1 quart in the fridge.
We still have 16 tomatoes to deal with. AAAGGHH!
No, really, it's ok. A few will become salsa, because we have cilantro to use up from the CSA. I'm thinking of trying this weird tomato pudding recipe out of Passionate Vegetarian, but we'll see if I get around to that tomorrow. The rest? I don't know. Maybe we'll have a lot of caprese salads this week. Maybe we'll be passing them along to friends. Or I might be able to bring myself to freeze another batch on Tuesday. That is, if the fruitflies don't fly away with them first...
Colder Than a Witches What Now?
So as I was checking my email last night, I noticed that my desktop weather channel icon was blinking red in my taskbar, which usually means a thunderstorm watch or some such thing. I clicked on it, but instead of a thunderstorm watch I see that there is a FROST advisory. Yep. I snark about it to Chad, and then promptly pass out in bed with the baby before 8 p.m.
I woke up this morning to find all of the herbs in our basement, and our four tomato plants draped in lots of towels in the backyard.
Everything survived. Best. Husband. Ever. :)
Coming Soon:
Apples. We also bought a big bag of apples this weekend. So I'll be dealing with those soon, too. A few will surely end up as a crisp, and maybe we'll try to dehydrate a few, too. But the rest I think we'll par-blanch and then freeze.
We're seriously running short on freezer space.
Hmmm...well, we got an email late last week from our CSA that extra tomatoes would be available for (discounted) purchase at the farmer's market on Saturday. So we planned to get a few.
We ended up with 1/2 a bushel of red round tomatoes (for $13.50).
This may not sound like a lot of tomatoes, but believe me, it really is.
I spent most of Saturday processing tomatoes for freezing. I've never frozen tomatoes before (except as sauce), so it was a learning experience. I followed the directions from Pick Your Own (with illustrations!), so I hope they turn out okay. I kind of liked the process of boiling, ice bathing and then peeling the tomatoes - kind of like peeling a sunburn, but way less gross (but equally satisfying). Then I cored them, quartered 'em, squished all the seeds and liquid into a bowl (which I strained for the juice at the end), and then packed them into bags. I think we got 2 gallons and 2 quarts out of it - not packed full, but kind of flat in the bags so they don't take up lot of room in the freezer.
That only used about half the tomatoes.
Then I made another batch of tomato sauce. This time I used half dried herbs and half fresh. We cooked it all night long, and got it in the freezer today - 2 quarts, 2 pints frozen and 1 quart in the fridge.
We still have 16 tomatoes to deal with. AAAGGHH!
No, really, it's ok. A few will become salsa, because we have cilantro to use up from the CSA. I'm thinking of trying this weird tomato pudding recipe out of Passionate Vegetarian, but we'll see if I get around to that tomorrow. The rest? I don't know. Maybe we'll have a lot of caprese salads this week. Maybe we'll be passing them along to friends. Or I might be able to bring myself to freeze another batch on Tuesday. That is, if the fruitflies don't fly away with them first...
Colder Than a Witches What Now?
So as I was checking my email last night, I noticed that my desktop weather channel icon was blinking red in my taskbar, which usually means a thunderstorm watch or some such thing. I clicked on it, but instead of a thunderstorm watch I see that there is a FROST advisory. Yep. I snark about it to Chad, and then promptly pass out in bed with the baby before 8 p.m.
I woke up this morning to find all of the herbs in our basement, and our four tomato plants draped in lots of towels in the backyard.
Everything survived. Best. Husband. Ever. :)
Coming Soon:
Apples. We also bought a big bag of apples this weekend. So I'll be dealing with those soon, too. A few will surely end up as a crisp, and maybe we'll try to dehydrate a few, too. But the rest I think we'll par-blanch and then freeze.
We're seriously running short on freezer space.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
ELC 9/07, Day 4
Breakfast
Ok, not so local, but we're using stuff up!
Organic Yogurt (from TJ's - package says MA)
Organic Banana
Local blueberries (purchased at RO Farmer's Market)
Homemade granola (local sunflower seeds; everything else non-local that we know of)
BUT! I now have oats, sunflower seeds and honey to make more granola, now that we used up that last batch. I think I'll still add the non-local pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds, although I'm not 100% on this yet; it would be really cool to have 100% local granola....except for the cinnamon anyway.
Lunch
I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver right now (so good!) and I was reading the tomato chapter while nursing the baby down for his nap and starting to think about lunch. We had 3 plum tomatoes left from our Farmer's Market bargain box purchase, so I made the same marinated deal as the pizza last night (local garlic and basil, non local EVOO, S&P). We cut a baguette in half (from 11 miles away) and spooned this over the baguette and topped it with the TJ's cheese again. AAAGH! It was the most delicious thing ever. And even though my husband did set off the smoke alarm while broiling (something to do with a bamboo skewer being used to prop the bread up), it didn't wake the sleeping child, so all was right with the world.
Dinner
I braved a new recipe from the Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes Cookbook, Chicken Fried Tofu. It was a big hit! We served with "Good Gravy" from the same book, and it was delicious. Super simple ingredients (local tofu, plus a little flour, baking powder, oil, and s&p), the trick was freezing the tofu, thawing it, and then refreezing the whole mixture for another 1/2 hour before you can fry it. So just a little planning.
We also had some garlic toast with local sundried tomato bread, and a simple tomato salad that I read about at cooking vintage. Delicious!
Silas stuck with dried apricots, local apple, local cheese and some tomatoes. He's a good eater, that kid.
Preserving the Harvest
So we finished up the homemade tomato sauce yesterday, and it is sooooo good! After letting the sauce simmer for most of the day, I added 3 6-oz cans of tomato paste to thicken it up and blended it alllll together with my handy dandy immersion blender (how I love that thing!!!!). Oh, wow. The sauce is a light orange-y color, almost like vodka sauce, creamy and beautiful. After letting it cool down for several more hours, I bagged 2 quarts for the freezer, jarred another quart for the fridge and jarred another 3 or so cups to send home with Magnifico. Yay!
I can't tell you how wonderful it was to look lovingly on my beautiful crockpot of tomato sauce last night. My husband and I were positively mooning over it. We did some rough calculations and figured that although the tomatoes themselves were a deal, with all the other ingredients and electricity that went into it, it wasn't "cheap" sauce. But hey, that fancy Rao tomato sauce is like $10 per jar, so I think the effort, time and money are worth it. To see gorgeous heirloom tomatoes that are about to be chucked into the compost bin magically transform into a ton of delicious sauce that will feed my family (and our friends) for several meals? Priceless.
Random Musings
I'm on the desperate hunt for local dairy items. I have a source for (non-organic) butter, milk (which we don't drink), and ice cream, but not so much for cheese, yogurt and kefir. After having read A, V, M and about how easy it is to make homemade mozzerella and other soft cheeses, we defnintely want to give this a try. I know one can make their own yogurt and kefir, but I have no idea how complicated this is, and I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. But it would be pretty cool to make all this stuff myself. After the high of making tomato sauce, I'm anxious to find my next fix...
Garden Notes
We're growing 4 different types of tomatoes this year (Yellow Pear, one called Sunbeam, a Beefsteak variety, and a patio variety). They are all doing really well. The Yellow Pear is absolutely crazy! We're growing everything in containers, because we weren't sure about the trustworthiness of our soil (we rent, and we heard that it has a high mercury content). The pear is in a small garbage can, like the kind you'd use in the bathroom (with holes cut in the bottom for drainage). The sunbeam and beefsteak are in half of a barrel, and the patio is in a 12 " planter. There are 10 or so tomatoes on the patio plant, one is just starting to get ripe. There is one red tomato on the beefsteak plant, with about 3 green ones still growing. Nothing's turning on the sunbeam plant, but there must be 6 or 7 good sized green tomatoes ready to ripen. And I can't even tell you how many cute little pear tomatoes there are! About 4-5 that are just about ready to pick, and about a gazillion green ones (ok, maybe like 30?)
We've also got 5 basil plants (2 genovese, 1 opal, 1 ruffly opal, and 1 pesto - little green leaves with white edges). The ruffly opal almost died earlier in the season because it was too shaded by the tomato plant, but I transplanted it and now it's trying its darndest to make a comeback. The other varieties are all delicious and doing well, as long as I remember to water enough. ;)
We are also growing thyme, oregano and rosemary successfully. Cilantro was not such a success. That thing bolted straightaway and then just stopped. Lame!
We're also growing 4 types of mint: Peppermint and chocolate mint are growing well in a bucket together, 2 pineapple mint plants are growing successfully in another bucket, and the orange mint is in a cheap plastic planter off in the shade by itself (it's the only variety that wants more shade than sun).
It has been so fun to have a garden this summer. We also had several sugar snap pea plants that we grew from seed, and they produced really well for the first half of the summer. We planted them in a half barrel with petunias, and holy moly, the petunias were out of control crazy about them! I think they add nitrogen back to the soil and the flowers were diggin' it.
Other than the peas, nothing else was grown from seed, but next year, that's going to change! Watch out, seed catalogs. I'm comin' for ya.
Ok, not so local, but we're using stuff up!
Organic Yogurt (from TJ's - package says MA)
Organic Banana
Local blueberries (purchased at RO Farmer's Market)
Homemade granola (local sunflower seeds; everything else non-local that we know of)
BUT! I now have oats, sunflower seeds and honey to make more granola, now that we used up that last batch. I think I'll still add the non-local pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds, although I'm not 100% on this yet; it would be really cool to have 100% local granola....except for the cinnamon anyway.
Lunch
I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver right now (so good!) and I was reading the tomato chapter while nursing the baby down for his nap and starting to think about lunch. We had 3 plum tomatoes left from our Farmer's Market bargain box purchase, so I made the same marinated deal as the pizza last night (local garlic and basil, non local EVOO, S&P). We cut a baguette in half (from 11 miles away) and spooned this over the baguette and topped it with the TJ's cheese again. AAAGH! It was the most delicious thing ever. And even though my husband did set off the smoke alarm while broiling (something to do with a bamboo skewer being used to prop the bread up), it didn't wake the sleeping child, so all was right with the world.
Dinner
I braved a new recipe from the Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes Cookbook, Chicken Fried Tofu. It was a big hit! We served with "Good Gravy" from the same book, and it was delicious. Super simple ingredients (local tofu, plus a little flour, baking powder, oil, and s&p), the trick was freezing the tofu, thawing it, and then refreezing the whole mixture for another 1/2 hour before you can fry it. So just a little planning.
We also had some garlic toast with local sundried tomato bread, and a simple tomato salad that I read about at cooking vintage. Delicious!
Silas stuck with dried apricots, local apple, local cheese and some tomatoes. He's a good eater, that kid.
Preserving the Harvest
So we finished up the homemade tomato sauce yesterday, and it is sooooo good! After letting the sauce simmer for most of the day, I added 3 6-oz cans of tomato paste to thicken it up and blended it alllll together with my handy dandy immersion blender (how I love that thing!!!!). Oh, wow. The sauce is a light orange-y color, almost like vodka sauce, creamy and beautiful. After letting it cool down for several more hours, I bagged 2 quarts for the freezer, jarred another quart for the fridge and jarred another 3 or so cups to send home with Magnifico. Yay!
I can't tell you how wonderful it was to look lovingly on my beautiful crockpot of tomato sauce last night. My husband and I were positively mooning over it. We did some rough calculations and figured that although the tomatoes themselves were a deal, with all the other ingredients and electricity that went into it, it wasn't "cheap" sauce. But hey, that fancy Rao tomato sauce is like $10 per jar, so I think the effort, time and money are worth it. To see gorgeous heirloom tomatoes that are about to be chucked into the compost bin magically transform into a ton of delicious sauce that will feed my family (and our friends) for several meals? Priceless.
Random Musings
I'm on the desperate hunt for local dairy items. I have a source for (non-organic) butter, milk (which we don't drink), and ice cream, but not so much for cheese, yogurt and kefir. After having read A, V, M and about how easy it is to make homemade mozzerella and other soft cheeses, we defnintely want to give this a try. I know one can make their own yogurt and kefir, but I have no idea how complicated this is, and I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. But it would be pretty cool to make all this stuff myself. After the high of making tomato sauce, I'm anxious to find my next fix...
Garden Notes
We're growing 4 different types of tomatoes this year (Yellow Pear, one called Sunbeam, a Beefsteak variety, and a patio variety). They are all doing really well. The Yellow Pear is absolutely crazy! We're growing everything in containers, because we weren't sure about the trustworthiness of our soil (we rent, and we heard that it has a high mercury content). The pear is in a small garbage can, like the kind you'd use in the bathroom (with holes cut in the bottom for drainage). The sunbeam and beefsteak are in half of a barrel, and the patio is in a 12 " planter. There are 10 or so tomatoes on the patio plant, one is just starting to get ripe. There is one red tomato on the beefsteak plant, with about 3 green ones still growing. Nothing's turning on the sunbeam plant, but there must be 6 or 7 good sized green tomatoes ready to ripen. And I can't even tell you how many cute little pear tomatoes there are! About 4-5 that are just about ready to pick, and about a gazillion green ones (ok, maybe like 30?)
We've also got 5 basil plants (2 genovese, 1 opal, 1 ruffly opal, and 1 pesto - little green leaves with white edges). The ruffly opal almost died earlier in the season because it was too shaded by the tomato plant, but I transplanted it and now it's trying its darndest to make a comeback. The other varieties are all delicious and doing well, as long as I remember to water enough. ;)
We are also growing thyme, oregano and rosemary successfully. Cilantro was not such a success. That thing bolted straightaway and then just stopped. Lame!
We're also growing 4 types of mint: Peppermint and chocolate mint are growing well in a bucket together, 2 pineapple mint plants are growing successfully in another bucket, and the orange mint is in a cheap plastic planter off in the shade by itself (it's the only variety that wants more shade than sun).
It has been so fun to have a garden this summer. We also had several sugar snap pea plants that we grew from seed, and they produced really well for the first half of the summer. We planted them in a half barrel with petunias, and holy moly, the petunias were out of control crazy about them! I think they add nitrogen back to the soil and the flowers were diggin' it.
Other than the peas, nothing else was grown from seed, but next year, that's going to change! Watch out, seed catalogs. I'm comin' for ya.
Monday, September 03, 2007
ELC 9/07, Day 2
What did we eat? Well, I'll tell ya.
Breakfast:
Fried egg sandwich (eggs: 61.7 mi, garlic rolls: 11 miles - both purchased at the Royal Oak Farmer's Market)
Lunch:
Open-faced burrito (tostada?)
Eden black beans (20 miles*)
fresh heirloom tomato salsa (tomatoes, onion, garlic, jalepeno, cilantro - local; unlocal: lime juice, salt)
shredded raw milk cheese (40 mi)
TJ's whole wheat tortillas (non-local, but perishable in fridge)
TJ'sVeggie & Flax tortilla chips (non-local)
*We are suuuuper lucky that there is an organic source for convenient food like canned beans, canned tomatoes, pasta and lots of other things located here in Michigan. Read more about why Eden is a good company here. We know for sure that the tomatoes are grown within 100 miles of here, but other sources are at least on U.S. family farms. And they're organic. So a good choice for the cook in a hurry.
Dinner:
We had dinner at a friend's house, which was super fun. We brought Marinated Veggies and Tofu and an Apple-Raspberry Crisp, and they provided some Veggie Italian Sausage (Whole Foods Field Roast brand, Apple Sage Potato flavor - OUTSTANDING!!) and an edamame wild rice salad, also very yummy. I have no idea how local their contributions were, but here's how ours broke down:
Marinated Veggies and Tofu
Eggplant, summer squash and garlic from our CSA share (65 mi)
Tofu (3 mi)
EVOO, Balsamic vinegar, white wine, lemon juice, Braggs, dried basil, oregano and marjoram (non-local)
Crisp
Apples and Raspberries (purchased from Farmer's market, 3 miles away; not sure where the farms are, but probably well within 100 miles)
Butter (3 miles)
Oats, flour, cinnamon, salt (non-local)
In Other Local Eating News
This is just another dinner we had last week that featured mostly local ingredients.
We had sauteed summer squash, corn and peppers (sweet and hot) with dill (all local except EVOO and s&p) and pasta with seared veggie kielbasa, green bell peppers, onions and jalepeno (veggies local) with tomato sauce.
Preserving the Harvest
On Thursday I spent most of the morning de-seeding jalepeno and serrano peppers from several weeks of CSA shares for freezing. Don't worry - I wore gloves. :) It was a lot of work, but now we have "fresh" peppers every time we need them for salsa, soups, sauces, etc.
Right now in the crockpot we are simmering a ton of cheap local heirloom tomatoes, some onions (150 miles away - oops, an oversight. Should have bought more at the FM, but we've never done this before, so you live and learn. We bought them at our local health food store, so it is a local business.), local peppers and garlic from the CSA, and non-local EVOO, sugar, salt and spices (and tomato paste will be added at the end). But soon we will have transformed tomatoes that were not pretty enough for market into something delicious that will see us through several meals of pasta, pizza and other delicious italian things. We're planning on freezing at least 2 quarts and eating the rest. I can't wait!
Breakfast:
Fried egg sandwich (eggs: 61.7 mi, garlic rolls: 11 miles - both purchased at the Royal Oak Farmer's Market)
Lunch:
Open-faced burrito (tostada?)
Eden black beans (20 miles*)
fresh heirloom tomato salsa (tomatoes, onion, garlic, jalepeno, cilantro - local; unlocal: lime juice, salt)
shredded raw milk cheese (40 mi)
TJ's whole wheat tortillas (non-local, but perishable in fridge)
TJ'sVeggie & Flax tortilla chips (non-local)
*We are suuuuper lucky that there is an organic source for convenient food like canned beans, canned tomatoes, pasta and lots of other things located here in Michigan. Read more about why Eden is a good company here. We know for sure that the tomatoes are grown within 100 miles of here, but other sources are at least on U.S. family farms. And they're organic. So a good choice for the cook in a hurry.Dinner:
We had dinner at a friend's house, which was super fun. We brought Marinated Veggies and Tofu and an Apple-Raspberry Crisp, and they provided some Veggie Italian Sausage (Whole Foods Field Roast brand, Apple Sage Potato flavor - OUTSTANDING!!) and an edamame wild rice salad, also very yummy. I have no idea how local their contributions were, but here's how ours broke down:
Marinated Veggies and Tofu
Eggplant, summer squash and garlic from our CSA share (65 mi)
Tofu (3 mi)
EVOO, Balsamic vinegar, white wine, lemon juice, Braggs, dried basil, oregano and marjoram (non-local)
Crisp
Apples and Raspberries (purchased from Farmer's market, 3 miles away; not sure where the farms are, but probably well within 100 miles)
Butter (3 miles)
Oats, flour, cinnamon, salt (non-local)
In Other Local Eating News
This is just another dinner we had last week that featured mostly local ingredients.
We had sauteed summer squash, corn and peppers (sweet and hot) with dill (all local except EVOO and s&p) and pasta with seared veggie kielbasa, green bell peppers, onions and jalepeno (veggies local) with tomato sauce.Preserving the Harvest
On Thursday I spent most of the morning de-seeding jalepeno and serrano peppers from several weeks of CSA shares for freezing. Don't worry - I wore gloves. :) It was a lot of work, but now we have "fresh" peppers every time we need them for salsa, soups, sauces, etc.
Right now in the crockpot we are simmering a ton of cheap local heirloom tomatoes, some onions (150 miles away - oops, an oversight. Should have bought more at the FM, but we've never done this before, so you live and learn. We bought them at our local health food store, so it is a local business.), local peppers and garlic from the CSA, and non-local EVOO, sugar, salt and spices (and tomato paste will be added at the end). But soon we will have transformed tomatoes that were not pretty enough for market into something delicious that will see us through several meals of pasta, pizza and other delicious italian things. We're planning on freezing at least 2 quarts and eating the rest. I can't wait!
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