Eating Locally

I just finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  It is a really interesting account of how the family challenged themselves to eat locally for a year, mostly with what they grew themselves.  She is the author of The Bean Trees and Pigs In Heaven, some of my favorite novels, and has a gift for expressing herself.  The chapters are broken up in months and each includes recipes with seasonal ingredients and information about the social impacts of eating locally vs buying food that had been transported thousands of miles.  It starts in April, with the first asparagus, which is just what time it was when I started reading it. At first, I thought it would be fun to read each section throughout the year, but I couldn't wait to find out what happened.  It really made me think about local and seasonal food in a different way.

I have a garden, visit my farmer's market and have organic produce delivered every other week.  I don't use a lot of convienece food in my cooking and we don't eat out much, especially not for fast food. Still, I buy bananas for my boys (flown from around the Equator), buy Italian olive oil, coffee (which grows nowhere near Oregon) and tons of produce from California.  I haven't really stopped to think about my carbon footprint, from that traveling alone.  Plus, I would like my money to stay here, in my community. I like to think about buying something directly from the farmer. And fruits and veggies have to be fresher if they were grown here.

When I was in college, I saw a video about the tomato harvest and how they pick them green and then spray them with a chemical to turn them red.  Red, not ripe.  I have always preferred homegrown tomatoes and grow them every summer, with varying results. Last year, I could barely keep up with the tomatoes before they got mushy, especially the cherry tomatoes.  Animal, Vegetable, Mineral has some good instructions for preserving tomatoes by canning them and drying them.  I'm going to try both ways and see if I can use all my Classico jars that I have resisted recycling to good use.

Another thing I might try to preserve is berries. You get these beautiful baskets of berries at the Farmers Market, they are better than candy.  But we always seem to overbuy and then can't use them up in time.  I'm going to try freezing some and drying some.  We have a cherry tree that is covered with blossoms, a peach tree which is doing better than last year and an apple tree that suggests applesauce is in my future.

I love the spring, everything is full of potential.

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