what i've been doing, what i've learned & how i'll move forward

When I began eating locally, I still had a kitchen stocked with non-local foods: Annie's mac&cheese, brown rice, lentils, dried beans, couscous, canned pumpkin, sugar, all-purpose flour and chocolate. Now that my month-long experiment is over I want to use-up all that non-local food in an effort to move forward and eat as locally as possible. I would never waste food already purchased, just because it traveled serious mileage from farm to plate. That wouldn't make sense. So for the past week or so I have been using old food and eating at a lot of local restaurants -- Old Fashioned, Indie Coffee, Laredo's -- mainly because I am way too busy to look at recipes right now. In order to use-up most of my sugar and flour I made Troy some pumpkin chocolate chip muffins with cream cheese frosting for his birthday. I used the left-over batter for bread and it tastes delightful. I think I really missed all-purpose flour.

I've really learned a lot in this past month and I wanted to write a wrap-up both for myself and for those who have been reading this whole time.

Breakfast: Before eating locally I usually ate toast with peanut butter, oatmeal with fruit and nuts, or yogurt with granola for breakfast. I always had a cup of coffee too. While eating locally, I learned to make bread with honey, maple syrup and local flour. I also became an expert omelete maker. I ate way too many eggs. As I move forward, I plan to compromise. Local yogurt, eggs, and bread made by local bakeries (I never learned to enjoy breadmaking, but I think it was a time constraint issue). I will probably make my own peanut butter on some occasions, but I plan to buy it at the store as well. As for my beloved oatmeal, I went out and bought a huge container of Quaker rolled oats, but will try to purchase oats as locally as possible from now on. I found some in Welcome, Minnesota.

Lunch: Before this project, I ate a lot of beans and rice or lentils and couscous for lunch. I really missed rice and beans while eating locally. I hope to reintroduce these items into my life, but as a more conscious consumer -- as local as possible and organic (if it means a better product and more sustainable farming practices). I will also eat sandwiches (which I can make quickly and transport) with bread from local bakeries and cheese and vegetable from local farms. For as long as possible (until the season/storage-life lasts), I will eat potatoes, soups and stuffed squashes. The vegetables I froze last month will be useful for salads and soups. And I just discovered that Sno Pac Foods is only 166 miles from Madison! Sno Pac sells bags of frozen and organic vegetables that are grown and packaged on-site at their Minnesota farm! Available at Willy Street Co-op and most likely at Copp's.

Dinner: Pretty much the same as lunch. I used to eat local vegetables, sweet potatoes and squash, which I continued to do last month, obviously. I learned to make several soups with local ingredients, and I plan to continue this effort, especially if the soup freezes well. My favorite was the sweet potato and sausage soup with spinach, which I plan to make more of this week. I also learned the joy of homemade pizza and pasta sauce. I plan to keep making homemade pizza and pasta sauce with local ingredients. I plan to support RP's Pasta by purchasing fresh pasta from them instead of dried pasta in the grocery store.

Clearly the summer and fall months are better for eating local and the winter will present a challenge. I plan to get as much as possible at the weekly farmers' market and after that, buy as local as possible (oats from Minnesota, for example) by investigating websites for farms in near-by states. When I cannot bake or make something, I want to support local businesses, such as RP's and Nature's Bakery. When the item is from super-far-off distances, I will also support local businesses and fair trade practices (coffee from Just Coffee, chocolate from Divine). Although I want to improve my cooking experience by exploring other cookbooks like Alice Water's "The Art of Simple Food" and Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" -- I have to recognize that a busy life demands dining out, and I have no qualms about eating at the myriad local restaurants in Madison.

I'm still entrenched in locavore literature. In order to stay sane during midterms, work, and general life chaos, I have been blocking-off half hour time intervals to both knit a new scarf and finish the stacks of books I got from the library this past month.

Thank you, readers. Continue to check back. I will be posting local meals and recipes, as well as new information as I learn more and more. I am excited for the challenge of winter cooking with local ingredients.