And the Month Rolls On; or, Update on the Refrigerator

So for my birthday I made Earl Grey tea. And it was amazing.

This morning I made Earl Grey tea again - reusable cup, local cream, local honey, bulk tea in a strainer - and...left it on the counter when I left. Major disappointment. But I drank it cold when I got home!

I think I need to really work on eating more protein. Meat is so expensive when you buy local grassfed - I need to buy from the Amish instead - that I haven't bought or eaten much of it this month, and I'm not feeling as good as I should for the quality of food I've been eating otherwise.

In brighter news, I have a (reusable) bag full of goodies from Local Roots just waiting to be turned into amazing food again - pumpkin, leeks, sweet potatoes, red and blue potatoes (a bunch of baby ones!), white and orange cauliflower, lettuce, basil, ground beef, Swiss cheese, and the crowning glory - a piece of maple hickory pie!

Local eating is really going well for me. I get frustrated with the lack of easy options, and I snack sometimes on the mixed nuts I have in the cupboard from last month. I take advantage of opportunities to go out to eat. But by and large, it suits the eating style I already have, and the one I aspire to, and it's mostly just hard on my time and grocery budgets.

Socially it's not an issue at all. It barely comes up. I live mostly alone; the people I cook for aren't going to give me a hard time about anything I make for them. My friends don't care what I eat. Anyone else I see in a setting where I sit down and pull out my food and start eating either isn't interested, doesn't know me well enough to talk to me, or is used to seeing me pack my own food around. I always have. I'm used to being just that little bit offbeat so that people who know me for long expect me to do odd hippie things. People who don't know me well get used to it fast, because I don't apologize for it. If you want to give me a compliment, tell me I'm weird.

Shopping Day

Seriously, I should be posting pix, because Local Roots is a lovely, lovely store.

I bought broccoli and cauliflower, garlic, half a chicken, ground beef, a chunk of cheese, and a giant roll of butter that won't fit in my fridge's butter compartment. I also bought grits and a kale-cheddar roll. The latter will be for dinner tonight at the freshman football game, along with an apple and the last of my chestnuts and maybe some cheese.

I don't know what I'm going to pack for breakfast and lunch tomorrow. I'm not up to cooking and I don't have much that's ready to eat. I guess I can hard-boil some eggs and take those, apple, and cheese for lunch, apple and yogurt for breakfast.

I'm eating a lot of apples lately. Hate to say it but they haven't kept the doctor away.

Pumpkin

So I'm back in the saddle of local eating today, and if that's not a dirty mixed metaphor I don't know what is. Sorry.  Happily and unhappily I ate the last of my quiche today - I was getting tired of it, but it was the easiest food I had to pack.

Also I rescued my mixed squash seeds (one pie pumpkin, two acorn squash, and one spaghetti squash) that had been around too long. The surrounding squash flesh was starting to smell, ah, fermented. Well, fermentation never hurt anyone, and besides I'm going after the seeds, right? So I washed 'em off really well (silverware drainer = impromptu colander, FYI) and roasted them in melted butter and salt.

They. Are. Good.

I knew I needed to roast them. Seriously, I should have done this days ago. This is the snack food I've been whining about not having. (Nosh nosh nosh.)

And then, because I want it, I took half the roasted pumpkin and scooped out the flesh, plopped that in the blender (doesn't look good then - stringy and ick), added four eggs, a bunch of half-and-half, and two spoons of honey, whizzed it around and then put that in a pan in the oven. Hopefully it'll taste like the pumpkin custardy thing I'm envisioning.

Speaking of What Doesn't Work

...when they tell you to heat your milk up nearly to boiling in the process of making yogurt, folks, that is an important and beneficial step. And no, it's not because of the germs.

Apparently there is some certain protein in milk that, when not heated to a certain degree before being cultured, doesn't uncoil properly. And when it doesn't uncoil properly, it results in the stringiest yogurt you ever saw.

This is not an appetizing sight, I assure you. It tastes just fine, but I won't mind seeing the last of this batch.

So Far So Good; or, How It's Working So Far

What's working:
Cooking ahead. So far that's worked out really well - I'm still eating my own leftovers - and I'm planning another cooking day later this week.
Not stressing it. I can't afford to NOT roll with the punches here. When I missed Local Roots' hours on Saturday I just went up the street to Buehler's and bought everything I could find that was marked "Smart to buy local" - thanks, Buehler's!

What's...not, or not quite:
Cleaning. When I said, "I don't want to use disposable cleaning products this month," apparently I meant, "I'm not going to clean this month. Um, no. Time for a cleaning binge this weekend or sooner.

So far I'm happy with the project. I ate sushi last night. I have been eating non-local food with happy gusto when it's offered to me. I took non-local crackers (but local dip!) to a housewarming party, because I didn't have time to cook properly and let's face it, "I'm eating local this month!" isn't being a good guest when it's paired with, say, cold baked squash cut into irregular cubes.

Breakfast is a routine of yogurt, apples, honey, and usually black walnuts. I very much appreciate the chestnuts a friend gave me, because they are the perfect snack food in a fridge that is now very devoid of snack food. It's hard to rummage through my cupboard and pass up the mixed nuts, the jerky, the cookies, the chips (okay, I ate mixed nuts the other day. I did). I should make jerky soon too. It's delicious.

Lunch is quiche or roasted vegetables or free food from school, I don't care where it came from when it's free. Dinner is something I took a little more time to cook/reheat or it's someone else's food.

So that's how things are going. I have potatoes, green beans, eggplant, turnips, and parsnips to cook up, along with a bunch of eggs (hard-boiled eggs are another good snack food). If it wasn't apple season right now I'd be so screwed.

Best-Laid Plans; or, Epic Fail Ahead

I have dinner packed but I'm sleeping over tonight and won't be home until midafternoon tomorrow. Local food, it's been nice eating you!

Oh well, an essential part of surviving the zombies will be the ability to forage for food. I think my foraging will include scoring a large hot cup of coffee, since I'll be working in the coffee shop.

No Impact Man; or, Common Ground With Zombies

By the way, the lamb stew was awesome. I almost scorched it to nothingness, but revived it with some water and simmered all the burnt bits off back into the stew (there's a cooking term for it, but I forget now). It was salty and rich and AMAZING. I actually poured half of it over chopped cabbage for dinner and am very happy knowing that half is still in my fridge.

Free lunch today at the campus - met No Impact Man himself, actually! Very cool. You can tell he's a writer - or at least, he talks the way I think when I've been writing a lot. Slow and recursive. I'm looking forward to his talk tonight.

We went around the table, introduced ourselves, told our major, and shared our passion. Every single person at the table listed people - family and/or friends - as their number one passion (I added food, books, and life in general to my list). Colin Beavin made the point that whether we agree or disagree on what the world needs or how it should be done, we all have common ground in that we care about the same basic things, more often than not. Approaching issues from that viewpoint rather than as an argument is the way he thinks we can accomplish change; I can't disagree.

However, I don't think we'll be able to reason with the zombies.

Dinner

I'm hungry, can you tell?

I was going to walk down to the grocery store for eggs/milk/butter...and then I saw that it's still raining. I still have food in the house, I'm not hungry enough to get cold for more food yet. So I'm going to make yogurt tomorrow, or Thursday, and tonight I'm finishing up the lamb stew I started cooking on Sunday instead.

I had the lamb chunks browned in onions and garlic, so I pulled that out of the fridge, added the wine I saved from last night, and that's simmering until it's reduced by half. Then I'm going to add chicken stock I have left from a half-local meal (foreign chicken, local tomatoes) and simmer that down by half again.

Then I've got two egg yolks to which I will add a dash of lemon juice, temper, and then stir into the whole thing, hoping I don't ruin it. I'm sort of following this recipe...in spirit if not in reality, anyway. Let's hope my version is edible. It sure smells good now.

Things I Could Be Doing If I Were Superhuman; or, Salt is the New Black

Pepper isn't local. Cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, allspice - not local (hello, East Indies trade routes, clipper ships, etc....).

If I were awesome I would grow herbs, though. I would have a garden of 'em so I could make my food taste different than it does.

If I were awesome I could dehydrate garlic and then powder it up and mix it with salt for ready-made garlic salt! I'm not awesome. I have roasted garlic and I have salt.

If I were awesome I would dry chili peppers and make my own chili powder. Guess I'm not eating chili this month.

I could start my own sourdough starter and save heirloom seeds and....be homeless because I can't do everything at once and, until the zombies come, I still need money.

So my seasonings this month are, so far, salt, garlic, onion, and butter. I'm going to pick up a bunch of basil if it's still around this weekend and see what else I can get. Salt/garlic/onion/butter is great, but everything is going to taste like saltgarliconionbutter pretty soon. But I think having a table all to myself at class might be cool.

I'm Hungry NOW!; or, Popcorn

When I got back from class yesterday I was starving and totally grumpy at the thought that I didn't have any snack foods on hand that I wanted to eat. Didn't want apples, didn't want hardboiled egg, didn't really want cheese, and definitely didn't want to spend the time on washing and roasting my squash seeds. Damn this local food thing anyway, right?

So...I made popcorn! I don't have an air popper and normally like to pop my corn in coconut oil. Uh...that's not local. Butter is my new go-to fat source, so I gave it a try.

Melt the butter, add a layer of popcorn kernels, cover and wait for the first kernel to pop. Take the pan off the heat for a minute (this step isn't crucial to making popcorn, but it IS crucial to maximizing your popcorn-making. It reduces the number of unpopped kernels drastically, and the unpopped kernels that are left are often toasted and chewable as Corn Nuts. Try it sometime). Put it back on the heat and finish popping, shaking the pan so the corn doesn't burn. Salt and eat.

The butter browned but I like browned butter so that wasn't a problem. The heirloom popcorn I got at Local Roots, a bag of tiny multicolored kernels, popped up into the cutest miniature popcorns you ever saw, and it was delicious.

Crisis averted.

What I've Been Eating

After Sunday's cooking marathon, you can bet it's been good! I didn't finish making the lamb stew and I didn't roast the pumpkin seeds, but everything else is in the fridge or already eaten.

My class schedule meant I was away from home from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. This meant packing two meals, because I'm not a 7:00 a.m. breakfast person. Ick.

Breakfast was a slab of quiche, a hardboiled egg, and one of Mitchell's Gala apples. It was amazing. However, I do not recommend wrapping quiche in foil as a means of safe transportation - it leaked quiche juice everywhere and my backpack AND the sock yarn I'm knitting with both smell like quiche. At least it wasn't boiled cabbage, right?

Lunch was breakfast. I mean, what I had intended to eat for breakfast before noticing aforementioned quiche juice and deciding that I needed to eat lunch first. I brought with me a carton of my strained yogurt, a chopped apple, black walnuts, and honey. Yum.

For dinner, I reheated the spaghetti squash and ate that with roasted garlic, butter, and some Burr Oak cheese. I also sliced up and sauteed some cabbage in butter and added black walnuts...that got a sprinkling of cheese too. A glass of Raven Rouge complemented the meal perfectly...okay, it's my favorite wine ever, so I think it would go good with any meal, anytime, anywhere.

So far so good - I'm eating great food and not feeling deprived at all. Non-local ingredients for the day: Leftover roasted chicken that went into the quiche; salt; butter; eggs. I haven't bought local butter, eggs, or chicken yet. Last night I was reminded that there are salt mines under Lake Erie...I'll have to find out if I can get some local salt that way and not have to trade clear out to the coast for salt when the zombies come.

I need to buy milk and make more yogurt today. I might go ahead and make paneer first if I get some buttermilk too.

Cooking; or, How I Will Not Starve

Seeing as how I don't think I will emerge from the haze of school-work-sleep-repeat until Thursday at the earliest, and then only to look around and say, "Wow! There's a world out there still," I've got to make some food this afternoon to get me by.

In the oven now I have acorn squash and spaghetti squash baking. Next in is pumpkin. I'll eat some of the squash as-is (with butter and salt), put some in the quiche, and some in the lamb stew. After those are done, I'm going to roast some cubed potatoes - regular ol' red potatoes and some sweet potatoes from Mitchell's - and roast the garlic at the same time.

Then it's time for quiche - with zucchini, squash, and potatoes - and roasted eggplant. While those are in the oven, I'll cook up the lamb stew (not sure what's going into it just yet, but it will include lots of veggies and some red wine if I can manage to open my bottle without the corkscrew I don't have - yes, planning ahead is a good idea).

And when all that's done with, I'll make my snack: I saved the seeds from all the squashes, and I'm going to roast them with melted butter and salt. Normally I use olive oil and soy sauce, but those aren't local. I bet butter and salt will be just as amazing.

To tide myself over for now, I ate a hardboiled egg and now I'm digging into some yogurt topped with Mitchell's honey and black walnuts. YUM.

Food So Far; or, Why I Miss Snack Food

(And no, just because there's a Frito-Lay plant and an Archway Cookies plant within my radius does NOT make Fritos and cookies into local foods. Yes, I'm sorry too.)

Yogurt with apple and honey is an awesome local breakfast.

Running out the door and seeing a fridge full of raw squash and sweet potatoes is SO not awesome.

I need to do some cooking today so I can have food to eat for the rest of the week. Crustless quiche, roasted potatoes (sweet and white), baked potatoes, baked squash, lamb stew, more yogurt. If I spend a few hours cooking and baking then I can just grab a couple cartons from the fridge for breakfast and lunch when I'm gone all day.

Yesterday I hard-boiled some eggs, and I see many more of those in my future. I packed a lunch of an apple, some nuts (not my local black walnuts, but some leftover imports), a couple hard-boiled eggs, and the slab of Canal Junction Burr Oak cheese, a parmesan-style cheese that isn't within my zombie radius BUT would keep well enough to easily be traded for. Hopefully these guys have decent fortifications and will be able to keep making cheese post-apocalypse, because in my cheese-making days my cheese was fail. Made some decent cheese curds, though (mmm, squeaky cheese!). It was a good lunch.

Yogurt

I made yogurt Wednesday night. Haven't made it in years and I'm quite proud of myself to see that yogurt, after all these centuries, hasn't forgotten how to culture milk just because I quit using it to do so.

It's easy. I got a little carton of vanilla yogurt from the grocery store (NOT local, because apparently there is no local yogurt available for sale here, but I think I'll be able to score some yogurt from the grocery store at the first sign of zombies rising) and a gallon of milk (Smith's Dairy is nearby. So is Hartzler's, which is non-homogenized and better for you to boot, but costs twice as much).

Then I poured half the milk into a saucepan, stirred it occasionally while it heated nearly to boiling, and then turned off the burner and let it cool to about 120 degrees (okay, too hot to keep my hand in but not hot enough to burn me. I don't have a thermometer handy). Then I dumped the yogurt into the milk (I should have stirred up the yogurt first) and stirred it in. You can make yogurt with just a tablespoon of starter, but sometimes it comes out a little thin. And I didn't need the rest of the vanilla yogurt anyway, so I just dumped it all in.

Then I put the lid on the pan, wrapped the whole thing in a big towel, and left it on top of my fridge (warm location) for the night. Next morning - yogurt! I took a cup's worth out of the pot and put that in my fridge to make the next batch with.

To make it even better, though, I strained it. This entailed spreading a clean bandana out over a bowl, pouring the yogurt into the bandana, and tying the corners of the bandana together around the yogurt and hanging that from my cupboard knob over the bowl for about an hour. I wish I had something better to do with the yogurt-whey than pour it down the drain, but have no ideas yet. Once I scraped the yogurt from the bandana into a carton, it was finished...and amazing.

Next up, I'm going to brave the zombies and get some buttermilk. Apparently that's what you need to make paneer, and I think paneer will be an important food to have during the apocalypse, at least until we can procure a calf's stomach for the rennet. If I remember correctly I can keep buttermilk going off its culture just like yogurt.

Local Shopping; or, Why I Need A Digital Camera

(Why I think I need to specify a digital camera when I'm obviously posting an electronic record, I have no idea.)

Friday I went out on a shopping expedition. First stop was Mitchell's Orchard. They have an orchard (duh) but also a lot of vegetables during the growing season, as well as being the only place in  Ashland that I know of that sells beer- and wine-making supplies, AND having some pretty fabulous, friendly, and helpful owners (they're hunting moose up in Newfoundland this fall. I wish that meant they would sell moose meat to me).

I got apples (duh) and also some little pears, a pie pumpkin (not for pie purposes, but because it's a humanly consumable size), sweet potatoes, garlic, honey, and quite possibly something else that I've forgotten. I also learned that they make and sell their own cider, preservative-free, which I intend to use to make some hard cider one of these days.

My other stop was at Local Roots - it's actually the first time I've been shopping there since they officially opened, I'm sad to say. The place is visually delightful if you're anything like me and like to see fresh food all around you.

Purchases here included black walnuts (splurge), lamb meat for stew (ditto), peppers, zucchini, cabbage, and eggplant (apologies to any forgotten vegetables), as well as some tea that, although not explicitly labeled as such, certainly *could* be made from locally grown ingredients.

If only I could show you this bounty...

Defining Local; or, How Far Can I Travel When the Zombies Come?

Being that this project is all about learning to find and eat local, fresh food so that I'll be prepared when the zombie apocalypse arises, one of the first things I need to determine is what my radius for food sourcing is. The 100 mile diet, as the name implies, uses a hundred-mile radius as the line. No Impact Man used a 250-mile radius. But they weren't preparing for the zombies.


My zombie consultants inform me that 20 or 30 miles is a realistic radius for most food. Some foods, such as salt, would (in my speculations) become trade goods and therefore I don't need to worry about sourcing that locally. Unfortunately caffeine would disappear from my menu, and so would most spices. 


Luckily, I live in the great Midwest and there is quite a variety of food grown here. I'm not going to restrict myself to a range of 25 miles right now, though - seems like that would work better if I had my own garden and the time to tend it, or the time to search out everyone in my neighborhood that grows food. For now I'll go for the hundred-mile radius and buy closer when possible.