Small success in eating local

I wanted to share my success in working toward my goal of feeding my family with local, sustainable raised food. I am not a purist in this endeavor. I am trying to achieve a balance of making choices to buy, produce and prepare food from local sources if and when possible and taking into account economics. I live on a budget.

Every little choice we make to eat local helps us decrease our ecological footprint and the ramifications on our planet’s finite sources and support local farmers. Hence, even little steps are big successes. I try to stress to my students that everyone working on the smallest change is part of a huge snowball effect.

There are two constants in our life, milk and eggs. The milk comes from a small dairy just up the road from my house. I walk there to get my milk. No trucks are needed to transport the milk and burn fossil fuels. Just me, my backpack and a good pair of shoes. The eggs are produced by my ducks. I have five females and I normally get five eggs a day. My family drinks a lot of milk because we like it and we regularly eat eggs, hence we decided to raise ducks. Even though I have not indicated here, we often eat eggs for breakfast or sometimes lunch.

Friday night pizza, a success we have been celebrating the last month or so. I just started making mozzarella cheese with the milk from my neighbor’s cows. I make the pizza crust with King Arthur’s flour. The company is out of Vermont and I’ve seen local’vore type places tout King Arthur’s flour but I do not know if the flour itself is raised in Vermont or elsewhere. The flour has another perk besides being from a somewhat local company, it is not bleached. Bleaching flour has ramifications on the ecosystem and potential on us humans. No thank you to bleached flour. Pizza crust is amazingly simple to make. 1/2c water, 2 c flour, 2 tsp yeast, a dash of sugar to get that yeast going and a drizzle of olive oil. Adjust adding water or flour as needed to get a nice dough. Plus you can always spice up your dough depending on how you feel with garlic, oregano or other seasonings.

Saturday and Sunday night we enjoyed strawberry rhubarb ice cream made from local milk and rhubarb from my garden. I had to cheat on the strawberry which was not local. I ran out of local, frozen strawberries in my freezer a few months ago. All in all, it was mostly local.

Sunday morning waffles were made with local eggs and milk, and King Arthur flour. Unfortunately I am feeling a bit too poor to buy real maple syrup. Home repairs must come first prior to indulging in such luxury. Besides, kids use a lot and don’t realize how expensive it is. It saves me from being an ogre or would that be an ogress?

Monday came and we celebrated Memorial Day with supper from our garden. The lettuce and radishes are ready to eat. I pulled a few new onions and picked some of the smallest leaves from the swiss chard I could find. I’ve discovered the smaller leaves are more palatable. Protein was from hard boiled duck eggs, although since they were fresh they were a bit tricky to peel. From the nether regions of the world, I supplemented with just a few cherry tomatoes which are not yet in season here and some olives. There was also fresh bread.

I confess to being most excited about being able to eat from our garden almost exclusively for supper Monday night. It was a wonderful feeling knowing that I was responsible for growing and raising the majority of what we ate and it tasted infinitely better than those prepared salads you buy at the store in a plastic bag.

I have more salads planned for this week to either serve as the main course or to supplement. I will need to start a new row of lettuce and radishes elsewhere in the garden in order to prolong my supply.

I hope you are able to make small changes either by deciding to purchase local milk or eggs or start to plan more local food into your menu. As the gardens mature I am sure our selection of local food will continue to expand.

Happy Gardening and Eating.

- Susan