Weekly Local Booty 10/19-10/25/08

It was a chilly trek to the farmer's market this morning! It looks like it is shaping up to be a beautiful fall day. Perfect for how I plan on spending it - starting kale, chard, and cilantro seeds, and doing a little bit of baking. Wahoo for the weekends and wahoo for the fall!

We didn't get too much booty from our container or community gardens this week, as I've mentioned before, this isn't due to a lack of peppers, but we are letting them ripen so that we can save their seeds. We'll be picking green tomatoes tomorrow as we are expecting three nights of freezing weather early this week. :-( We'll be bringing in our container pepper plants for the duration of the freeze threat. Anyone have a good recipe for fried green tomatoes? If so please link to it, send me an email, or leave the recipe in the comments section. It would be very, very highly appreciated. In fact, any other ideas for what to do with green tomatoes would be welcome, I think there are quite a few down there - maybe a dozen.

Anywho, I'm getting off topic. Check out our (small) load of booty from the container garden this week:















2 ripe "serexican" chiles and a hot banana pepper. These lovelies were turned into a delicious batch of 'Traditional' Refried Beans. Brett usually makes the refried beans and they turned out really well this week. Thanks Brett!

And this is (sniffle) our last CSA share of the year. It has been a wonderful season and we hope to have Danjo Farms as our CSA next year. We got excellent produce and wonderful discussion - we are happy to have been able to call Dan "our farmer". Our first year having a CSA subscription was a very good experience.















Starting from the bottom left: green onions, lots of greens (yay salads!), radishes, and something.















Does anyone have any idea what these are? One of the neat things about subscribing to a CSA is that you never know what you are going to get - as a result, Brett and I have worked with ingredients this season that we probably never would have otherwise, and learned we liked some new vegetables. But these, I mean, what are these?

Finally, onto this week's load of farmer's market booty. This large haul ran us $41.















I didn't really organize the produce very well to list off what is there, but I'll do my best. Starting from the left: a leek (for soup!), a loaf of ciabatta from the local Uprise Bakery (we love their ciabatta - I'm glad they aren't too far out of my way when I am walking to the bus station after work, we'll still be able to have their bread over winter!), a "pie pumpkin", 3 zucchini, 1 yellow squash, bell peppers, a dozen eggs, tomatoes, hot salsa, grass-fed beef (for Brett), onions, lots of carola potatoes, garlic, and jalapenos.

Anyways...

Now for the weekly update on the Eat Local Challenge: Well, as you can see from all the produce above, we aren't starving! We've actually done really well at this challenge and have really enjoyed it. It has forced us to be a little more creative with some of our meals, but I like a challenge - not to mention, we've gotten to try all sorts of new things. This will make eating locally that much easier in the future. Our trips to the "regular" grocery store have been incredibly small - today's trip included cookies for Brett, baking powder, organic fair-trade chocolate chips, and organic brown sugar.

Eating locally is a way of "voting with your dollars" in a very powerful way. Money spent in the community provides more to the community than money spent at a chain. The produce is fresher and relationships are cultivated. We can look at eating locally as a sacrifice, a necessary burden a lower-energy future may have to endure, or we can look at it as a challenge, a wonderful experience of place. Eating locally is a way of really taking in the place you live - eating with the seasons, eating the produce available in your region creates a culture of food, and a culture of place, something that has been very lacking in the past few decades. To everyone out there trying to rekindle or create a new culture of local food - a culture of the places in which we inhabit - keep it up, we are all doing a great, necessary, and powerful thing, and we can see the results every time we make a delicious local meal for our families or we check-in with a local farmer to see how their sweet potatoes are doing. Simple actions compound over time to be something far more important than they may seem to us individually.

'Til next time.