Local eating conclusion!

"...accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields."  --Kahlil Gibran

 

Homegrown tomatoes!

I had grand plans to post a whole lot during September.  I read "Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally" by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon with intentions of sharing interesting facts and similarities in their challenges and mine this month.  I've taken so many bad food photos with my phone, it is ridiculous.  I religiously biked to the farmers market every Saturday and, in the supermarket. I scrutinized the labels of food products to see if they fell into my 300-mile radius.  I browsed the internet extensively for groceries and restaurants with local foods.  What can I say?  I've been so busy doing research on local foods and cooking local foods and eating local foods that I feel like spending my limited free time blogging about local food.  

Bad food photography--local beans, tempura @ the Red Cat in NYC.

Dinner at the ballpark

So my friend TI generously gave me a ticket to tonight's Mariners-Royals game.  These are teams with records of .420 and .414 respectively, so the game was pretty low stakes.  At this point in the season of a losing team, going to the game is all about checking out the kids that have just come up from the minors and enjoying the simple rituals of baseball.

Safeco Field on a beautiful sunny day, much like today...

One of my game day rituals has always been to stop at one of the many hot dog vendors along Occidental to nab a brat before going inside Safeco Field. I load that brat up with mustard, ketchup (or catsup, if you prefer), relish and kraut and I chow down on it all the way through security into the park and to my seat.  Soon after, I get a beer to wash down all that processed meat product.  And perhaps after that, I'll partake in some garlic fries.  After nine innings, I can't wait to get the hell out of there and head home to brush my teeth.  I also am typically DYING of thirst.  It's a bizarre dance of ecstasy and torture that I put myself through pretty much every time I head to Safeco for a ballgame.

WAH!  I'm thirsty and my breath stinks and my team sucks.

Now it is possible that one of those Occidental vendors carries hot dog products made from locally raised pigs and cows.  Not likely, but possible.  Upon accepting this ticket, I realized that I'd probably be using one of my freebie non-local meals out, or packing my dinner.  So imagine my surprise when I googled "Safeco Field eating local" tonight and saw that the 'Pen got renovated in the off-season and it now features several new concession stands featuring locally grown and locally produced food!  Of course, I had to explore. 

Local eating = lots of cooking

A few pictures of some of the food I've made so far with locally grown and produced ingredients!

Cooked Rye Berries: grown in Winthrop, WA

Light Oat Bread with NW-grown wheat flour and Tillamook butter

Locally-produced fettuccine, squash, onion, basil, beans, & tomatoes from the farmers market

Loco for Locavore!

A few years ago, I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp (her husband) and Camille Kingsolver (her older daughter). For anyone who is not familiar with the book, Kingsolver describes on the book’s website: ”Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Harper Collins, 2007) is the story of a year in which our family deliberately fed ourselves on products grown close to home, and what we learned from the experience.” I was inspired by the book. Earlier that year, I’d read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I was already going a little bit nuts about the whole Locavore thing. I’d had a Community-Sponsored Agriculture (CSA) share for several summers in a row, and that particular summer (2007), a friend and I were growing a fairly decent sized garden of our own on her property.

A beautiful, exhausting labor of love

After I read Kingsolver and co.’s book, my locavore fanaticism hit a new high. I poured over every freaking label in the grocery store searching for the most local box of cereal/can of beans/carton of milk possible. When I’d come home with one over-priced sack of groceries. My partner at the time would stare at me in amazement and horror when I’d arrive home over an hour later with just one bag of groceries, particularly after he saw the receipt. His expression seemed to be asking, “How is it possible you spent all that time in the grocery store and bought almost nothing to eat for so much money?” I’d ignore his bewildered gaze and calmly unload my local cheeses and apples and hazelnuts.

Organic Broccoli--$4 a pound.  Yikes!