Resuming our local eating

Tomorrow we will ease back into local eating after a week-long vacation in New Orleans where we tasted the local foods there - even though much of the local fare surely came from a wider geography than we are accepting during our Washington eating year here at home. One thing I notice as we go through this year is the clear feeling of tradeoffs and compromises as the year wears on. We chose to not carry our local eating to a new location in New Orleans, because we wanted to taste the local cuisine in what could be our only trip to the Big Easy. But that was a conscious choice. We could have chosen to eat simply on the road, even though eating "simply" when you don't have more control over your situation than a typical tourist attending a conference in a new part of the country would be anything other than "simple."

I arrived home late last night, around 12:30 a.m., so by necessity I had to carry on eating outside our local food diet today - since there was no time to ramp back up to our local eating. In a few minutes I will make the "sponge" for the simple no-knead bread that we make and then set it aside to bake tomorrow night. And earlier this evening I took out a package of hamburger from Cheryl the Pig Lady to unthaw for dinner tomorrow night. I pick up Natalie from the airport around 3 p.m., but before I make the trip to pick her up I will visit the Proctor Farmer's Market, quite likely the Puyallup Farmer's Market and then stop by Terry's Berries to get all of our fresh food to start another week of local eating. It's time get back on the wagon!

I sense fresh, local fruit and berries in my very near future. Now, off to make bread!

-- Rob

Local eating, New Orleans style

Last night Natalie and I had a dinner of a lifetime at chef John Besh's restaurant August here in New Orleans, where we are spending a hot week or so while Natalie attends a conference for work. We chose to eat at August because Besh uses this restaurant to feature local food from around the New Orleans area. Some of the featured food can be seen in the PDF of sample menus for dinner, lunch and dessert.

During the meal, which featured our first summer tastes of melons, peaches and local berries, we talked about how our local eating year is going and what the biggest surprises have been so far. Among those surprises, one of my impressions is just how easy it has been to switch to making most of our own food. For me, making my own food is like a step back in time to when I was a child growing up in a family that lived on a farm and had very little money. Back then, we ate local food from our own garden, we raised our own cows for slaughter, we milked a cow every morning and had homemade butter, we raised pigs, chickens, rabbits - in other words, we interacted with our food supply every day.

Since we started our Washington eating year on April Fool's Day, we have been doing an urban equivalent to what I did by necessity when growing up on rural Thurston County, Washington, as a child. Now we have relationships with the farmers who produce our food, rather than raising the food ourselves. We venture out every week to markets to pick up the latest ingredients for our local eating life, as well as to have conversations with Cheryl the Pig Lady, Terry and Dick Carkner from Terry's Berries and Buck from Alvarez Farms.

I will look forward to rejoining our Washington eating year when I return home next week after this week-long sojourn in New Orleans. Until then, I am eating my gumbo, po boys, fried oysters, beignets and other local foods here in the Big Easy. Soaking up the flavors!

-- Rob

Bingeing on berries as summer plenty arrives

For the second Saturday morning in a row, Natalie and I made the most of our morning and early afternoon by first visiting the Proctor Farmers' Market, taking our goodies home, and then driving to the nearby Puyallup Farmers' Market before visiting Terries Berries to pick up our weekly garden share on the way home. That means that combined with Thursday's regular visit to the downtown Tacoma Farmers' Market, we are hitting three markets a week right now.

Why visit so many farmers' markets?

Each market is different. The Proctor market is hyper-local - just over a mile away from our house - and it offers a lot of variety in a very small space. Today's purchases included cheese curds and chevre from River Valley Ranch in Fall City, salmon and halibut caught in Washington waters from Wilson Fish, and another flat (12 pints) of strawberries from Spooner Farms. We also picked up four small artichokes and cauliflower from Zestful Gardens.

The Puyallup market is nearly as large and varied in local produce as the well-known Olympia Farmers' Market. We made the trip to this market, about 20 miles from home, mostly to be able to pick up specialty items ordered directly from Buck at Alvarez Farms. Today's major score was a 25-pound bag of rolled oats. Those are going straight into the big freezer in our garage for about 24 hours, to make sure that we don't have any insect eggs in them that are going to hatch and ruin the oats. We also picked up a couple of whole frozen chickens from Cheryl the Pig Lady, a whole box of rhubarb that we need to process and freeze tomorrow from another farm in Buckley - near the foothills of the Cascade Mountains - and three more pounds of cherries for fresh eating that will have to hold us over until we can get more fresh cherries at the Thursday market in downtown Tacoma.

I have to say that local eating is not a sacrifice at all right now. We are adjusting to the additional work involved in thinking ahead and storing up the fruit and other ingredients that we can find fresh right now, but the rewards are clear. Who could complain about local eating when it features goodies like homemade strawberry shortcakes including berries picked less than 24 hours ago from fields less than 20 miles from our house?

RECENT LOCAL MEALS FROM YESTERDAY

Breakfast - Hot cereal made from cracked emmer wheat and other grains from Bluebird Grain Farms in the Methow Valley.

Lunch - Mixed greens salad topped with barbecued chicken and first-of-the-season tomato, accompanied by a handful of Bing and Rainier cherries from Eastern Washington and a handful of plain, in-the-shell peanuts from Alvarez Farms in Mabton, Washington.

Dinner - Had our friends Jana and Jason over for grilled sturgeon coated in a sauce made from yogurt, buttermilk and cayenne (Natalie will have to list the ingredients for this sauce in a future post...) that was joined in a fresh taco salad with lettuce from our weekly garden share from Terries Berries, and taco meat (ground beef from Cheryl the Pig Lady mixed with onion, chili powder, a little cayenne, and salt and pepper). Dessert was fresh Bing and Rainier cherries that we needed to finish eating before they started getting too soft.

THINGS TO DO WHILE WATCHING A MOVIE

We both have sore thumbs from last night as we spent the whole time while watching a movie separating the kernels of dried corn from the cobs so we could bag them up in anticipation of grinding the corn in the near future for polenta and other uses. We processed this 25 pounds of corn from Alvarez Farms in a slightly noisy process, pushing the kernels off the cob with our thumbs and into two huge stainless steel mixing bowls. After we freeze the kernels for at least 24 hours, we will remove the corn from the ziplock bags and remove as much of the chaff as we can before we actually grind the corn for future use.

-- Rob

Cherries and attention span

One of the things I say fairly often is that the average American has the attention span of a gnat. Normally I say this in reference to politics, and when it comes to politics, I have the attention span of an elephant. I’m kind of a junky. Yes, I watch C-Span. But, today, I have decided that I am the gnattiest of Nats. I can’t even read a short article on Exit 133 before I mentally switch gears to thinking about looking up sources of local vinegar. And before I can even enter “Vinegar” and “Washington” in the Google box, I think of how short my attention span is and how I’m trying to teach myself to focus on one thing at a time and how I should write about it, which is what I’m doing now. But, now I’m going to switch back to reading Exit133 and eating my lunch of a grilled salmon (Wilsons from PM) green salad (TB) with dried cranberries and almonds (PS) and a side of cherries (PuyM) and an aprium (TM). Then, I’ll look up vinegar sources before plugging back into work. Hmmmm, maybe I’m losing focus because it’s 3:30, and I’m just now eating lunch…..

Yum, I think I could eat grilled salmon every day. But then I’d have something like mercury poisoning—would I be able to tell the difference? Would anyone else? Besides, the Mad Hatter is one of my all-time favorite literary characters. There’s something to emulate, right?

The cherries were a perfect foil to salmon oil (like that?). I’m learning to like cherries again. A few years ago, okay, maybe a decade ago, Rob and my grandma and I were driving back to Gold Beach from my aunt & uncle’s house in Myrtle Point. Aunt Vera treated us to cherry pie, frozen but freshly baked. On the curvy road just before Humbug Pass I told Rob to pull over. He did. I got out. I promptly puked cherry chunks over the railing that kept cars from plunging into the Pacific. Ever since then, I haven’t been too fond of cherries, especially the crappy treacley and artificial cherry flavors featured in such things as gum and lollipops and ice cream and frozen pie. Then a few years ago, I discovered Bordeaux cherry ice cream from the Umpqua Dairy. I’m not a big ice cream fan, but the chunks of whole cherry halves sold me on that ice cream and on trying cherries, real ones, again. Slowly I’ve worked my way up to being able to eat a handful of raw, real cherries. Now, my craving for vitamin C-filled fruit has me eating several handfuls at a sitting. So far, so good. Not quite as good as this weekends strawberry orgy, however.

This, from Exit133 regarding a tall ship that ran aground near Shaw Island, made me laugh out loud: “Ironically … it’s 133 feet long. Hmmm … That can’t be a good sign.”

-- Natalie

Feeling the affects of funky local weather

Our local weather this year helped lead to a rare local food failure for Natalie and me tonight. Normally by this time in June we would be able to buy some early local fruit in stores, and tonight Natalie was really in need of some fresh fruit. So I made a suggestion that may have worked in nearly any other year - let's run to Metropolitan Market and suck it up to pay high prices for local cherries. We have already had some cherries from farmer's markets, and yesterday I committed the cardinal sin of eating too many of the cherries that Natalie had purchased at the Proctor market on Saturday. So I know that local cherries are around, but when we went to the store around 10 p.m. there were no local cherries or other local fruit whatsoever, other than Washington pears and apples, which we have been eating for months now.

So we came away empty handed. Soon we should be able to find local strawberries, fresh blueberries, and more plentiful cherries. But in some cases the unseasonable weather may have compromised the crops so much that this will just be a year without many early season fruits. Last week's snow in Eastern Washington had me thinking about this. Fruit trees and other plants are not used to a dusting of snow in June in this part of the country.

The impact is very local in the garden in our front yard, where it took three weeks for carrots to pop out of the soil because soil temperatures have been so cold. Normally the seeds would emerge in 10 days or so.

My fingers are crossed that seasonal weather is here to stay now. It's still not too late to plant a few more seeds for summer crops, and we are just a few weeks away from time to plant another round of peas and other crops for harvest in the fall.

-- Rob

My new favorite bread recipe - No-knead Bread

Yesterday I attended a day-long retreat for board members for the Tahoma Audubon Society, and after doing a 39-mile bike ride at o-dark-thirty in the morning to reach the University of Washington Pack Forest near Mt. Rainier, I was talking with fellow board members about our Washington eating year. One of the example foods I talked about is a simple bread recipe that I have adapted using all Washington ingredients. We found the initial recipe in an April edition of a magazine called The Week.

Here is the recipe:

No-knead Bread

Time: About 1.5 hours, plus 14 to 20 hours for rising time

• 3 cups of all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting

• 1 and 5/8 cups of water

• 1/4 tsp instant yeast (I use a little less than 1 Tbs of regular yeast)

• 1 and 1/4 tsp salt

• Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed

In a large bowl, combine flour, yeast and salt. (If using regular yeast, use warm water (110 - 115 degrees or so) and then add the yeast. Let it sit for 10 minutes or so to "proof" the yeast. It should bubble up and form a foam on the top of the warm water. Then add the other ingredients to the yeasty water.) Stir everything together in a sufficient sized bowl until it is a sticky mass, then cover with plastic wrap and let it sit at room temperature for at least 12 hours. Remember to use a bowl that will leave room for the dough to rise up and bubble. I try to let my bread sit for 20-24 hours, so it gets more of a sourdough taste.

After letting the dough rise, lightly flour a work surface and remove the dough from the bowl where it has been rising to the work surface. Sprinkle a little more flour on the surface of the dough and fold the dough over itself once or twice. Leave the dough on the work surface and cover loosely with plastic wrap. Let it rest about 15 minutes.

After letting the dough rest, shape it into a ball and then place it into a bowl that has a light dusting of cornmeal in the bottom. I often spray a little olive oil on the bottom and sides of the bowl, then sprinkle cornmeal, or in my case since I haven't been able to get Washington cornmeal, some substitute like cracked emmer that we buy from Bluebird Grain Farms from the Methow Valley. Then put a damp towel over the top of the bowl and let the bread rise again for 2 hours.

At least a half an hour before the dough is ready to be baked, place a heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, etc.) into a 450 degree oven. When the dough has finished its 2 hours of rising, carefully remove the covered pot from the oven and shift the dough from the rising bowl into the heavy pot by simply pouring it in. I use my fingers to loosen the dough from the sides of the rising bowl, then turn the bowl over and pour it into the hot pot. It may not look pretty at this point, but that won't really matter. Then you place the pot back in the oven and cook the bread for 30 minutes with the lid on the pot and another 15-30 minutes without the lid. The bread will be done when it is browned on the top. Then simply remove the loaf and place it on a cooling rack.

These instructions create one rounded loaf, but last week I experimented using the same dough in loaf pans and that worked out pretty well. So feel free to experiment, and let me know how it turns out for you. What I have found is that because of the long rising time and the nice sourdough taste, this bread has a flavor and texture similar to other breads that we would buy at the store for $3 or $4 per loaf. And because those breads are not made with all-local ingredients, we can't buy them anyway during our Washington eating year. This should be a hit if you like crusty, flavorful bread!

-- Rob

Two months of Washington eating

We're two months into our year-long eating odyssey of limiting our food intake to foods from Washington state. Over those two months we have hit a few milestones and realizations, and now is as good a time as any to offer a quick summary.

First, what we are doing is really not all that different than what a lot of families all across the US and around the world do every day. We used to eat out at restaurants way too much, but with our self-imposed limitation/challenge to eat out only two meals per week, this has meant that we have to pack our lunches every day and cook dinner at home a whole lot more than we ever have before. This is normal behavior, but what takes out challenge to the next level is the commitment to use all Washington ingredients. This has meant no sugar, no beer, and living without tomatoes and fruits unless we already had them in the house when we started our challenge on April 1.

The first month of Washington eating was easier, because we could eat through a number of ingredients that we won't be able to get again until we either find a local source or until our local eating year is done. I ran out of rolled oats in early May, so now I make a Washington-grown cereal mix from Bluebird Grain Farms in the Methow Valley - the same source we use for a variety of flours. We are just about to run out of dried cranberries, which I have been gradually using on daily salads for lunch.

We still have some items to work out, like what to do about butter. We know of a number of local milk producers, including Organic Valley milk that we can pick up and Metropolitan Market. You can check the numbers on the carton of Organic Valley milk and determine if it is from a farm in Washington if it has these numbers: 41-35, 41-34, 41-017 and 53-21. Since most organic milk producers in Washington are part of the Organic Valley cooperative, this is a good option. But we have been told it is harder to guarantee that Organic Valley butter comes from Washington rather than the larger Washington-Oregon region. We can get heavy cream from a dairy in the Dungeness Valley from Marlene's Deli here in Tacoma and then make our own butter. We're just still trying to decide.

The biggest change in two months is the realization that eating local requires constantly keeping your mind on the next meal. If I don't think about what we will have to dinner tomorrow night, we might not have ingredients ready to go in time for the meal. We ran into that exact situation tonight and managed to ad-lib and do baked potatoes with a cheese sauce and left over grilled hamburger from a couple of nights ago. But because I wasn't ready to make lunch today and I was late getting up, I had to get by without breakfast. Planning is everything.

To close out tonight's rambling entry, here is a link to a related article about which is better - eating organic or eating local from The Daily Score blog: Food and Climate Change.

-- Rob

A sucky week

This week has totally and completely sucked for me on trying to eat only Washington foods. BUT, it's not the Washington thing that's getting me/us. No, instead, what's getting us is our inability to plan so that we have leftovers and things set up for easy-to-throw-together meals that we both find palatable. We have enough Washington food, we just don't have the discipline and time that others seem to have that allows them to cook all of their meals at home. Although, as I write this, I also realize that their "cooking" depends largely on processed and semi-prepared foods like packaged mixes, boxed cold cereal, and quick hot cereals. We aren't using those, which adds to our challenge.

Our awful little kitchen with (have I mentioned this?) six square feet of counter space IF the counter is completely clear, a one-bowl sink, no dishwasher, very little cupboard space doesn't help make any of this easier. All of that is further compounded by abysmal design. On one side of the kitchen we have a dog-legged "breakfast nook" currently stuffed with an under-used microwave, an overflowing desk with a chair that's too big. On the other side a doorway between the refrigerator and the range that opens to a bedroom that served as our office when we worked at home and that is currently overflowing with clutter and books and books and more books with books on top of all of it. In order to get from our front room to anywhere else in the house, you have to walk through the kitchen, passing between the sink/breakfast nook and the range/refrigerator. I hate to have people in the kitchen when I'm cooking. I really, really, really do not like it. The kitchen is difficult enough with just Rob and me--and we know how to move around each other and find a square inch of counter space to set a cup. But, put some other body in there just to talk, or gods forbid, to try to help cook, and things become truly untenable. It's not the size of the kitchen. Fantastic food can come out of boat galleys and apartment kitchens--it's really the design that gets in the way--and the fact that the counters always have something on them.

At any rate, I've sucked at local this week because I've turned to Starbucks for breakfast all week and ended up going out to lunch today. I didn't eat lunch yesterday until I whipped up and scarfed some tuna salad when I came home for a few minutes before heading to hear Joel Salatin. Cheryl Ouellette and some local farmers have created a co-op with the intention of opening a mobile abbottoire and processing plant so that animals raised locally can also be slaughtered and processed locally. Palatin was here to advise and inspire. The talk was not what I was expecting: I expected him to talk more about what he's done on his farm and about the connection between farming and what we eat. Instead he focused solely on recommendations and cautions for the co-op that is raising money and planning to open a mobile abbotoire. More later on his talk, but one thing he said really made me laugh, "Most farmers just aren't good at marketing." That is a text-book example of a truism.

Nobody said this would be easy. We certainly didn't.

Friday Dinner: Party at my boss' house. We took a dish of Cheryl's sausage mixed with garbanzo beans from Alverez farm and kale, onions, and garlic from Terry's Berries and herbs from our yard.

Saturday Dinner: Went to market in the morning (curds, feta, goat cheese, pears, asparagus, salmon, plants) and had Starbucks with Linda and then gardened all day. Can't remember lunch and had barbecued salmon and curds from the market and salad for dinner.

Sunday Dinner: Blueberry waffles made on our new wafflemaker/griddle for brunch; barbecued mini-burgers on homemade buns and homemade refried beans.

Monday Dinner: breakfast was frozen waffles heated in the toaster; lunch was leftover & frozen barbecued chicken on salad with chopped almonds and dried cranberries, which we're running out of, along with refried beans topped with curds. Leftover salmon on salad for dinner.

Tuesday Dinner: Rob had waffle for breakfast, I had Starbucks; I didn't eat lunch until after 6 p.m. (that's still lunch) and then had some tuna salad; after meeting went to Pour at Four (at least the delicious illicit oysters we were gifted came from Washington).

Dinner tonight: Rob skipped breakfast and I had Starbucks; I ended up meeting a friend for lunch at Matador. Dinner after evening meetings was baked potatoes topped with crumbled hamburger and cheese sauce with fudge for dessert. I worked on organizing the kitchen to clear off the counters and clean the fridge. Have some new ideas for re-arranging it to make it more useable.

Road food sucks - When it's processed

I was in Topeka, Kansas last week. I have no clue where my food came from. And, there are some "foods" for which one just should not look at the ingredient list unless one is prepared, mid-mouthful, to be completely turned off. I got to Kansas City late on Monday and spent the night in a Homewood Suites (which I like for a standard chain hotel). Thankfully the suites have full kitchens and their lobbies contain a mini-store where you can buy processed foods to prepare on the stoves and microwaves in the rooms. I bought a beef and bean burrito. Based on the taste(lessness) of it, I wasn't too surprised at the ingredient list. I wonder though why processed food have to be, well, so processed. If I made myself a beef and bean burrito, it would contain a tortilla (wheat flour, shortening); shredded beef cooked with some chiles and spices, maybe some vinegar; beans, likewise cooked with spices like garlic and onion and coriander and cumin; some cheese (milk, rennet, culture); salsa (tomatoes, onions, garlic, jalapenos, cilantro, salt, pepper, dash of cayenne cause I like it HOT); and perhaps some yogurt or sour creme, maybe some lettuce and tomatoes and jalapenoes. It wouldn't contain all of the things in this sample product. I know that all of those ingredients are not evil, but I do think they are unnecessary. I also think that the processed food items are made with the dregs and are barely a step up from cat and dog food and canned corned beef hash.

Of course, compared to what we would make here, and to any other really homemade burrito I've ever had, this thing completely sucked. If I hadn't been so tired and so hungry with still a lot of work to do, I would have thrown it out, hopped back in the car, and asked Garmin (my GPS) to find the nearest fast-food joint - not that the food would have been any better. Breakfast was a strip of disgusting beef jerky and a granola bar, as I picked up a co-worker and drove the hour-plus to Topeka. Road food sucks (road food being defined as the grab-it-fast fast-food variety versus finding a real restaurant and making an effort - which unfortunately can also still suck, but one's chances for finding food are better).

One thing I discovered after leaving the land of processed food: Kansas is not a foodie's state. Kansas City may be, but the heart of the state - Topeka - has a tame, American palate. Breakfasts were strange affairs of steam scrambled eggs mixed with strips of pre-seasoned and maybe pre-cooked chicken one morning and with deli-sliced roast beast the next morning. Luckily the little cinnamon wheels and the spiced pears were good enough to make up for the eggs.

Lunch in Topeka was far from exciting. We went to a little cafe near the inn where we had our meetings. I ordered taco salad and iced tea. It was disappointing - iceberg lettuce mix with unseasoned ground beef, shredded processed cheese, a plop of sour cream, and a plop of commercial salsa, all served with some over-watered Lipton powdered iced tea. Dinner salvaged the day's meals - at least the actual food part of it did. We had 12 people at dinner. We went to a well-established bar and barbecue joint that looks like it must get hopping and must be used to large groups. Our group was served six at a time even though we were all sitting at the same table. Side one got their food fairly quickly. Side two, the side I was on, got its food by the time side one was mopping the sauce off of their plates with slices of soft, white bread. However, the food was good. I am willing to guess, that the beef and pork in my barbecue dinner came from nearer than beef normally comes from here: baby back ribs (which I consented to eat with my fingers) and burnt tips. They also make this chocolate cobbler with cinnamon ice cream - three of us split a dish of it. Yum.

Meals the next day sent us back to fast-food hell: Jersey Subs for lunch where I had a philly cheese steak (authentically gooey) and pizza for dinner. I do not like pizza. I just don't. I don't like how much sauce or cheese pizza joints glob on and I don't like the sub-par toppings like flavorless pepperoni and greasy sausage. I like authentic Napolitan pizzas with thin crusts and light toppings; I like "gourmet" pizzas made one at a time in wood-fired ovens like those that Charlie McManus makes at Primo; and I like the pizzas we make here at home with Rob's cornmeal dough (we now substitute cracked emmer for the cornmeal) and homemade pesto with real toppings like the sausage we get from Cheryl the Pig Lady or the things we buy at the farmers markets: tomatoes, spinach, greens, mozzarella we buy at the Proctor Farmers market from River Valley Cheese, and smoked salmon from Wilson's Fish Market.

I was glad to get home to real food again. Although, Rob picked me up and took me from the airport straight to Pour at Four. I needed food fast. The trip was awful, and I was feeling sick from a three-day headache and from not eating enough on Thursday. I ate a little at breakfast - but not enough - and then, due to some poor timing on my part and the fact the Kansas City airport is lacking several services such as restaurants. I bought a couple snack bags on the plane from Denver to Seattle, but by then I was feeling so poorly that eating wasn't much of an option. Still, I forced down a handful of toffee nuts and four granola chunks. By the way, Frontier Airlines has the best snacks of any airlines even though they are all pre-packaged. The nuts and granola chunks contained more than peanuts and real sugar - no corn syrup or fillers.

One of our rules is that we can eat it if one of us or someone we know travels some place and buys something that is grown in the state they travel to and brings it back with them - but it must be carried back in their luggage, it cannot be shipped back separately. I wanted to try to buy some sunflower seeds while I was there, but my meetings were really all-day affairs, which left little time to look and shop.

- Natalie

Beans!!!

We found beans at the Tacoma Farmers Market today. Kidney beans, pinto beans, and garbanzo beans--which, you must know, are the best beans ever. Alvarez Farms, from Mabton in the Yakima Valley and supplier of some of our vegetables through their exchange with Terry's Berries, is coming to the market this year. We knew we'd eventually find beans, but I haven't taken the time yet to call and try to order any from the sources we've found that may sell them direct. I have actually been hoarding the last two cans of garbanzos in our pantry in case it took us too long to get to eastern Washington to buy some. But now, I don't need to because we have one pound of garbanzo beans. We also bought a couple of pounds of peanuts--we can make our own chunky peanut butter. I was so happy to find beans that I wanted to cry--and next week he's bringing us 10 more pounds of garbanzos and 10 pounds of black beans. The peanuts? A great bonus. I'm not normally a peanut butter fan, but every once in a while I want some on toast or with an apple--and strangely, over the last couple of weeks I've wanted some. Later in the summer, I know we'll order cases of tomatoes and peppers to preserve, plus Alvarez grows melons and potatoes and onions and cucumbers and a lot of other delectable green things.

We also picked up a chicken, two pounds of Italian sausage, and four packages of smoked sausage from Cheryl Ouelette, (a.k.a. Cheryl the Pig Lady). I also asked whether she still has any hams left. In her last newsletter she mentioned that several people had not picked up their hams. Rob especially likes ham, and unless we get another one in the freezer, we won't have any until next spring. We still haven't cooked our spring ham, but I think when we thaw and cook it, I'll repackage and freeze some so it doesn't spoil before we can use it all.

Other things we saw at the market: oysters, crab, shellfish; spring onions, spring greens, herbs, green young garlic; pepper and tomato starts (and other plants); honey. We didn't buy any in part because I'll be out of town next week in Topeka, Kansas. Plus, all the stuff we can't buy: popcorn, pretzels, bread--all looked good, all produced locally and worthy of purchase, but not grown locally, so out of bounds for us. Of course, we did cheat for lunch at the market and had Mexican food. As Ed Murietta pointed out however, none of the food vendors seem to use locally grown foodstuffs: blogs.thenewstribune.com/edsdiner.

Dinner tonight: Mozarella & Ham Sausage from Cheryl's and baked fries made with potatoes from Terry's Berries.

- Natalie

Recovering from a week away from local eating

This week I am settling back into local eating after a forced week off while I was at a disaster training exercise on the other side of the country in Emmitsburg, Maryland last week. I went from spending more than a month eating little other than local food to spend a week eating like I was back in college - institutional food, all you can eat. This meant that I fell back into old habits, without the possibility of eating any local food. And how did it feel going back? Not that good. I felt more sluggish with the return to eating food full of sugar, corn syrup, and other ingredients that are off limits in our Washington eating.

After returning home last weekend, I broke back into local eating by branching out and baking homemade hamburger buns to make barbecue sliders on Sunday. But tonight's meal was even better - barbecued lamb chops with a mint sauce that Natalie made from mint in our yard, served alongside chunky apple sauce from Washington and local potatoes made into baked fries with a dusting of ancho chili powder. With a meal like that, there is no need to think that eating local food is a sacrifice of some kind!

- Rob

Eating local (or not) alone

I intended to do so much this week. I even wrote it down: get the dishes done--every piece of cutlery was dirty; plan all my meals; clean the bathroom; clean the bedroom; get the kitchen nook/office cleaned up; clean the living room; write for the blog; clean the freezer and the refrigerator; buy and preserve asparagus; do laundry; buy bins for the pet food and clear out the pantry area; take donation bags to the second hand store; finish weeding the bottom of the terrace. I'm not sure how I imagined I'd have the time and energy to do that. I got quite a lot done on Sunday even though after I dropped Rob off at the airport I came home and slept the rest of the morning. Still, I got the rest of the terrace weeded, I did most of the dishes (including a fine, obsessive cleaning of the decorative grooves on every piece of cutlery), and I cleaned out the freezer. I even made sausage and pancakes for dinner, which I also had on Monday for breakfast. I took leftover chicken breast and salad and a hunk of cheese to work for lunch, and then came home and made a Northwest Waldorf salad for dinner with more chicken breast, Greek Gods yogurt, a crisp apple, walnuts, and a little mayo.

Tuesday I ate every meal away from home--and thus, none of it likely from Washington. I had a conference in SeaTac and had eggs and a mini-bagel for breakfast. Lunch was a green salad, salmon, and a good vegetable medley with snap peas and thick-julienned carrots, rutabaga, and turnip. Then I came home exhausted, fell asleep on the couch, woke hungry and went to Pour at Four for dinner.

I woke up Wednesday morning with a migraine, took some codeine, called my boss, and then promptly went back to bed for a couple of hours. I ate some toast and cheese for breakfast late on my way into work so that I got there in time for our shareholders meeting. In the afternoon I came home to spend an hour with the dogs before heading back to work for the board and leadership boat cruise. The served something on the boat that they said was salmon. I'm sure it was, but wow, did they ever ruin that poor farm-raised salmon. That fish had no freedom in life and no justice in death. Mushy, flavorless, overcooked, dreck. It tasted like a spawned-out dog fish (Chum). The steak they served was only slightly better.

That brings me to today. I had great intentions this morning of boiling an egg and taking it and an apple and some bread to work. Unfortunately our dog Ada derailed my plans when she found a way out of the fence. Instead of spending time making breakfast, I spent time panicking and looking for her. I then resorted to a total cheat and went to Starbucks on my way into town to get a sausage muffin and an iced tea--with simple syrup. Let me say now that I miss the simple syrup in my iced teas--and it's just not the same with honey. Honey always has an added flavor that I really don't like in my iced tea. I had a lunch meeting at Matador with our new paralegal at work, so that was not native. But, I just took out more sausage and will have that and salad for dinner. I think I'll also cook up some wheat berries to take for breakfast with milk and cinnamon in the morning. Maybe the other sausage for lunch tomorrow, but dinner will be out with Jana before the Oprah.

Okay, so my week alone hasn't gone as well as planned, but I still have tonight to get all those things done that I wanted to do--yeah, right!

- Natalie