I just found a couple more containers of non-local food on the floor next to my comfy chair. Both are convenience/snack foods. I've been noticing that we're eating fewer snacks -- and more fruits & veggies when we do snack -- now that most of our easy off-the-shelf options are now off limits. We're also getting fewer calories with our snacks.
Here's what we've been eating the past three days:
9/2 Menu
breakfast: buckwheat (Birkett Mills) flapjacks, topped with black currant/blackcap/maple syrup, prune plums (farm stand), and frozen blueberries (u-pick from Farmer's Choice)
lunch: sweet pepper (garden), celery (garden) with peanut butter (exception) and frozen grapes (arbor), biscuits (leftover) with honey (Greenstar bulk) and red currant/raspberry jelly (homemade from Kestrel Perch berries and honey), prune plums (farm stand)
snack: celery, biscuits, dried melons (garden)
dinner: leftover baked beans, rainbow chard (garden), red wine (Lucas Vineyards) for us and ginger beer (*sigh*) for Sophia.
dessert: bicolor corn bread with raspberries (garden) and applesauce (canned last year from Littletree u-pick)
9/3 Menu
breakfast: bacon (Kingbird) and eggs (back yard) with leftover corn bread and melon (garden)
lunch: green salad (Blue Heron lettuce, a friend's surplus cucumbers, peppers & scallions from the garden); fruit salad (raspberries, melon, prune plums), more corn bread
dinner: chicken sausage (Bilinski's), in a tomato sauce with summer squash, scallions, and herbs (all from the garden); shallots (garden) with shiitake (garden) and purple laccaria (Kingbird) mushrooms, sauteed in butter with red wine; red wine for us and cider (Littletree) for Sophia.
snack: Finger Lakes popcorn.
9/4 Menu
breakfast: waffles (flour mix: 1/3 barley, 1/3 corn, 1/3 almond-flax meal) with leftover fruit salad, frozen blueberries, and red currant/maple syrup (currants from Kestrel Perch); cider
lunch: cucumbers, celery w/peanut butter & frozen grapes, melons, corn bread
snack: more melon, last of the biscuits with jelly
dinner: roast chicken (Kingbird) with garlic & herbs (garden), roasted beets and onions (garden), fried green delicata (garden) with squash oil (Stony Brook) and salt.
Waffles are one of our standard weekend breakfasts; our usual flour mix is oat/millet/almond. I was pleased to learn that barley/corn/almond works just as well. The corn gives the waffles a distinctive flavor and texture, and the batter still behaves properly in the waffle iron.
Partner Perspective
ReplyDeleteI got to partake of most of that, but had rice (with cinnamon, an allowed "spice" I gather) and honey for 9/2 breakfast, and I missed 9/4 dinner because I am stuck working on something that took far longer than predicted. As a result, my dinner was pretty pathetic -- rice crackers (exemption, plus they were stale and not getting any better if they sat around for a month so I volunteered to eat them), with home-grown chocolate habanero hot sauce; NY state cheddar; and a Dundee (Rochester, NY) porter.
I also did my first conscious "cheat" and had a couple of chocolate-covered malt balls for desert. (I think I was feeling sorry for myself being stuck working on the computer all afternoon. Or celebratory that I tracked down the passport that had been missing for several weeks hidden behind a desk.) The malt balls are distributed by Wegmans (Rochester, NY) but made who-knows-where and obviously from non-local ingredients.
On the plus side, I am remembering to mention that I took Sophia out looking for a birthday present for Marty, and she picked out a chutney from Wild Thymes Farm (http://www.wildthymes.com) in Medusa, NY (~150 miles). I didn't at first realize that it was "locally produced" and was thinking we would have to "sequester" it with the other non-local foods for the month, but then I read where it came from.
This is a nice coincidence, because Marty had been (independently) contemplating one of the Indian rice/lentil dishes that we sometimes make, and was thinking that it wouldn't be quite the same without any chutneys to eat with it.
Another purchase this weekend -- Marty (at my request) tracked down local shampoo! 17th Century Suds (http://www.17thcenturysuds.com/) sells at the Ithaca Farmers Market, and we had been buying their hand soap, but I didn't realize that they also had shampoo. So this is a good step toward branching out from just food for the month.
I was also thinking about this while cleaning the bathroom this morning. The products I was using (a cedar toilet-bowl cleaner, maybe Earth Friendly Products but I'm not certain; and Dr Bronners) are not very local. It's possible to make vinegar pretty easily, but it's not clear to me whether cider vinegar is as effective for cleaning as white vinegar is. I could probably have used the 17th Century Suds product in place of Dr Bronner's, but I was concerned that we were running low. So what can we use for this sort of cleaning that is locally produced? I'm not sure yet.
I've been saving ashes from our wood stove to make lye. When combined with fats it makes soap. I'm not sire I want to use it on my hair, but it might due foe clothes. The recipes I've seem for laundry include borax and/or washing soda, and I suspect they aren't local and may not be sustainably produced.
ReplyDeleteI made a really nice hand soap a few years ago from store-bought lye, with goat milk and coconut oil. (Lye is available in the form of drain cleaner, but you have to make sure it's not adulterated with metal filings. Red Devil brand is straight-up lye, but Drano is not.) Seems to me the critical thing was to age it long enough; when I first started using it the soap was still a bit harsh, but the older it got the better it got. The fumes are a little scary, when you first mix it up. I felt like a storybook witch, stirring my brew with the caustic fumes coming off it. Except for the plastic bucket. That kind of ruined the effect.
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