Wednesday, August 7: Day 7

It has been one week since we began eating within 100 miles of our home. We have learned that the high humidity of our area does not make for good bread wheat but there are other ways to use it, we have learned that people are excited about the project (we are getting hits from all over the place and are being contacted by a variety of media outlets), we have learned that our friends are excited and generous, we have learned that the small farmers in this area are diverse, amazingly talented and generous and wonderful.

Today we visited Wollersheim Winery. We learned that they only have four types of wine made from grapes grown on the property, other juice and grapes come from Washington and New York. We took a wonderful tour and tasted a purchased the Prairie Blush, one of the local ones of course!

Today we also had pizza! It is a family staple and a family favorite, we always use homemade tomato sauce and tonight everything from the crust up was local--thank you Willow Creek Farm for amazing sausage, thank you Brantmeier Family Farm for providing delicious wheat that we are learning to use in new ways, and thank you Farmer John for the cheese.

It has been a long day, check back tomorrow for some info on eating out and on outreach into the community.

Breakfast: Eggs, fresh salsa and cheese
Lunch: HEAVENLY corn on the cob and yellow doll melon
Dinner: Pizza

Tuesday, August 7—Day 7

A quickie. Menu:

Breakfast: Yogurt with maple syrup, english muffins with butter and/or peanut butter. Need to get more apple cider but it's a bit early still.

Lunch: Hamburgers (beef from Northwood Farm), watermelon, carrots from Harmony Valley Farm.

Dinner: the whole shebang. Roast JenEhr chicken with garlic and rosemary, roasted potatoes (in bacon fat--yum), broccoli, and popovers that tasted great and were better than I feared they would be, though they were not as popped as their out-of-state cousins. The chicken was particularly succulent. I am not a master chicken carver so it comes of in bits and pieces.



On the philosophical side, one thing I have noticed is how many people who, upon hearing about what we are doing, find it strikes a chord in them that they had not been able to quite articulate without a bit of stimulus. To me, this seems to suggest that this whole eat local business is on the verge of going one step closer to mainstream. Come on, all of you local food junkies, you know you're not mainstream, right?

Monday, August 6, Day 6 - Fast Food?

Today was a blur. What I am noticing is that because all of our food is fresh and basically ready to go "as is" we are tending to plop it on a plate and call it dinner. We are not spending as much time preparing meals and I am missing the complex favors. We are certainly spending TONS of time getting out a few grain-based basics. Crackers happened today and we are all grateful. It takes a long time to mill and then sift the wheat flour, it gives me a new appreciation for what the Ingalls family went through in The Long Winter !

Breakfast was english muffins with peanut butter and cider.

Lunch was whatever we could pull out of the fridge, including more tortillas with fresh salsa.

Dinner was a mad dash out the door with cornbread, sauteed green beans and salad.

Appendix by Scott:
After dinner we went to a minor league baseball game with our hometown team the Madison Mallards. Great fun was had by all. We also had a bit of ballpark refreshment. Jen had a beer (which I think was made in Pennsylvania from ingredients obtained from who knows where, Evie had processed ice cream that may have been made in a lab somewhere, and I had a soft drink, made of our friend High Fructose Corn Syrup, a product that is probably the most commoditized agricultural product on the planet). So what gives? Did we fall off the wagon after less than a week?

I would say we did not. This is, for us, an exercise in making conscious choices, not in doing penance or keeping kosher. When we go to Rome, we intend to eat like Romans. I don't think we would have gone to an evening ballgame expecting to eat our whole dinner there, but on a steamy summer night everyone needs to cool off a bit. If friends invite us over for dinner this month, we'll be thrilled if they embrace our project (as many have done), but if not, we'll make no mention of it and enjoy ourselves in the company of friends.

That's the easy part. I have a morning meeting at a coffee house tommorrow. To hot chocolate or not to hot chocolate?

Sunday, August 5: Day 5

Okay, today some of the novelty wore off. Scott is sick with a nasty flu and all of a sudden I realized how much time we've been spending on food procurement and preparation (it took 2 1/2 hours today to roast, shell and then make the peanut butter).

Necessity is the mother of invention, however, and two new things were made today that may prove very important over the course of the month.

1) English muffins. We are regular english muffin bakers but had never tried it with wheat we had milled ourselves (see last week's entries about our flour woes). Scott ground the wheat very, very fine and I sifted it today. The english muffins came out gloriously--we have all eaten about 5 apiece today. They have to be kept in the fridge because, of course, the mold and griddle were greased with lard!

2) I really wanted a decadent dessert--chocolate would have been perfect. Instead I made some popcorn and drizzled it with melted butter and honey--WOW! It doesn't replace chocolate but it did curb my dessert tooth until we can make ice cream later in the week.

We haven't gotten ahead of our snacking needs yet so I am often feeling at odds when I just want to grab a quick something. Crackers are to come this week and of course, melon, melon, melon.

For breakfast we had muskmelon and blueberries and bran hot cereal.

Lunch was english muffins and peanut butter, veggies and fruit.

Dinner was eggs with onions and jalepenos on a tortilla with melted cheese, topped with tomatoes from our driveway.

Where are you from?

The average American meal has traveled 1500 miles by the time it reaches your table. Where are you from? Where do you buy food? How did you hear about our project? Please, leave a comment!

Saturday, August 4, Day 4: What we ate

Breakfast was Rhode Island Johnnycakes with bacon (heavenly, heavenly bacon--this from a vegetarian of 15 years), and cider.







Lunch was straight from the fridge, muskmelon, blueberries, a Cherokee Purple tomato with onions and cheese curds.



Dinner was an experiment in corn. We soaked some field corn in cal last night and ran it through the food mill to make masa. Then we made tortillas! Yummy! We had that with shredded pork, salsa verde, sauteed green beans (sauteed in delicious bacon fat) and cucumbers thinly sliced and soaked in the apple cider vinegar we made--still not that "vinegary" but a nice taste difference.





Fresh, early, new apples for dessert!

Saturday, August 4: Day 4 - What we bought

Oh the bounty! This picture brings such a smile to my face--it is most of what we will eat this week. We had some meat in the freezer and we will buy fresh sweet corn and melons this week from Old Stage Vegetable Garden. Our monetary outlay for the week is $120 (adding in the meat we already had). Twenty-two dollars of that was for 20 lbs. of wheat, that will take us through more than one week. We also traded with a farmer for a 5 gallon bucket each of corn and oats.

We all vote with our dollars every time we make a food purchase. Assuming you are willing to leave conventional factory food behind, what do you replace it with? Local? Organic? Sometimes you can get both, but what if you can't? Which is "better"? Anyone who is a committed Certified Organic shopper should read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. This fascinating book will help you understand what you are actually getting (as opposed to what you think you are getting) for the premium you pay on Certified Organic.

Organically grown food has fewer chemical inputs, which we consider to be a good thing. But is that offset by the diesel fuel consumed in trucking food from California, or the jet fuel from South America? And we are starting to hear that China wants to be a player in the US organic food market. Do you get to keep the frequent flier miles if you eat the food?

There is no one right answer. But you have the power (we would say the responsibility) to make decisions that support what you value. But do us all (yourself included) a favor and don't go into this blind. Think about what you care about, and figure out how your consumption habits relate to this.

So what do we choose? For us, local trumps everything. Organic and local earns bonus points. Why is local so important to us? We feel it's fresher and tastes better. There are varieties of things like tomatoes and apples that just can't survive travel. We keep our money close to home. Many national brand Organic labels are owned by huge multinational conglomerates. My neighbors need my money more than Unilever does (not that I'm giving up Ben and Jerry's once September rolls around). And we get accountability. Have you thought about food safety in the last few years? Let's see. . . Mad Cow, tainted spinach, beef, chicken, peanut butter, etc. Most of this contamination is a result of factory farming practices, and the only way to protect yourself from that is to know the farmer. And for those of you who have not yet done the homework, I am sorry to break it to you that Certified Organic absolutely does not guarantee that factory methods were not used, and in the case of animal products, it does not guarantee humane living conditions.

Educate yourself. Read some of the books we've mentioned here, and
listen to this NPR story about grocery stores selling local food.

Vote with your dollars!