thankful: indoor market, paoli local foods and a new cookbook to explore

I am thankful for: morning after Thanksgiving baking -- pumpkin oat muffins. They turned out perfectly.

The indoor farmers' market on Saturday had what you might expect: squash, potatoes, bread and flour. But it also had the unexpected: spinach (lots of it), mushrooms, and tomatoes. There were so many people, which was great to see.

After the market and on the way to Illinois, Troy and I stopped at Paoli Local Foods, which is a nice bike ride away from Madison. Upon entering the small store you are offered tea or coffee and samples of spinach and goat cheese. The shopping experience is pleasant, offering a wide variety of local food items and hand-crafted items such as the soy candle I bought. I left with a cinnamon-scented candle in a mason jar and a bag of whole wheat flour. I hope to return soon though, when I have a way to keep food cold for the car ride (or maybe bike ride).

Thanks to everyone who commented or e-mailed me about what cookbook I should try cooking from locally next. I decided on The Joy of Cooking (thanks, Lexy) and upon first glances, it looks incredible. Tomorrow I'll update my first recipe using local ingredients endeavor.

polling the nations

Dear Reader,

It's time to start anew (after Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, of course). Any votes for which cookbook I should explore next?

Happy Thanksgiving,

Amanda

oh yeah, and this.

Did you hear that Oxford University Press just declared "locavore" the Word of the Year?

current fave food read

I'm still eating a bizarre concoction of food as I attempt to finish-off old pantry and freezer items. It's strange lumping ingredients together rather than following a recipe that tastes so much better. I got used to planning, prepping etc, that now it feels wrong to be able to throw canned beans over rice, add some vegetables, and call it a meal. I actually can't wait to start fresh with local winter farmers' market ingredients and explore other cookbooks.

When I actually find the time, I sit in my rocking chair and read a good book with some coffee or hot cocoa. Right now I am really enjoying The United States of Arugula which details the culinary history of American food. I highly recommend it.

Just checking-in, waiting for Saturday's indoor farmers' market. Will report back. I love the indoor farmers' market -- less crowded and always full of surprises (like spinach in December).

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.

developing a wrap-up session & a good read

To everyone who has asked, I am still here and still intending to continue with this project. I am still gathering the main points I want to wrap-up the month's experiment with and I will report back soon.

For now, I will tell you about this amazing book I am reading called "The Real Food Revival." I wish I had found this earlier, but I have been inundated with locavore literature, so perhaps I wouldn't have had the time to read it before now anyways. It's all about the different foods humans consume and the ways we can do better. I am not too far into it, and will provide a more substantial review later. So far I highly recommend it.

day 27: eating locally on special diets, a farmers' market breakfast, and another farmers' market

After finishing up the amazing sweet potato soup, I made a few more large recipes with tons of portable leftovers: pasta and roasted acorn squash with mushrooms and garlic. The pasta was from RP's again, and it was gluten free, which actually tasted super good. I also made Martha's recipe for roasted acorn squash with mushrooms and chicken breast. This did not go as planned. I couldn't find local cuts of chicken breast sold separately so I decided to buy a half chicken and just roast it with the vegetables anyways. There is a local market in Spring Green that actually does sell individual chicken breasts, but with my schedule, I wasn't able to get there this week. So a half chicken it was.

I thawed the chicken all day and by dinner time I was ready to cut it apart and roast it. I started cutting into it and couldn't handle it. The Lynch family commented that when you buy meat locally it is impossible to ignore the fact that the meat is coming from real animals. So true. I'm not sure which half of the chicken I bought, but there was definitely some sort of liver or heart or who-knows-what in it. I tried so hard but ended up not cooking the chicken at all. I seriously have never been pushed so close to vegetarianism. I simply cannot handle raw meat on my own. I guess I have to stick to fish fillets, sausages, or anything pre-portioned and neat and tidy. Or eat prepared meat at restaurants, like I always used to do.

These two meals got me thinking more about eating locally on special diets. A gluten allergy could have some benefits, as you wouldn't have to worry about mediocre local wheat. But you would have to eat some rice for sure, and Minnesota might be the closest you could get wild rice, but I'm not sure about anything else. You might be forced to rely on potatoes and corn for your carb-intake. Likewise, being a vegetarian and eating locally in Madison might be impossible. No beans. No tofu products. Unless you wanted to eat a lot of eggs and other dairy products, you might have to eat locally with a looser definition of what that means.

Anyways, today I had breakfast at the Local Tavern. If you live in Madison and have never had the Saturday Farmers' Market Breakfast here, you really need to try it. I love breakfast and I love eating breakfast at local restaurants. This might be the best breakfast in Madison; seriously. The menu is really unique and I had eggs, sweet potato hashbrowns, and the most amazingly rich cornbread. Ever. Wow.

The farmers' market was less crowded and there were signs declaring things like "last week for salad mix." I bought salad mix. I also bought more sweet potatoes at Harmony Valley. I learned that they cure their sweet potatoes, which doubles the sugar and makes them taste better. Apparently they don't taste great right from the ground, which explains why the ones I got a few weeks ago were really bland and acorn-squash-tasting. Also got some bok choy and green onions for a recipe I saw on a food blog. It was funny because I was commenting about how long (like 4 feet long) some of the green onions were this week, and then the farmer at the stand totally gave me the longest ones ever. They were sorta scary and stuck three feet out of my market bag.

Okay - well expect a bigger wrap-up post in a few days. But I don't see this project as ending at all. So it won't be the last post, by any means.