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.

I will say September tasted awfully good.  I can't complain much.  It was, however, an EXPENSIVE!  It is easy to burn through $50 at the farmers market alone every week, and I only have a household of one.  I didn't even buy the big $$ items at the market, like meat, oysters, hazelnuts, or bottled pickles/wine/cider/jam. This is all money spent on berries and peaches and kale and turnips.  Some of these things never get cheap at the market, no matter how in season they are.  Maybe if I bought a flat of berries, or three flats, but that wouldn't travel well on the bike, now would it?

Beautiful, but expensive cauliflower at the market

September also allowed me to get experimental in the kitchen.  I tried to make a firm polenta that I could slice up and grill, like you can with the packaged tubes of polenta from the grocery store.  I made  beet pancakes, similar to potato pancakes.  I attempt to make mozzarella, which is something I've done successfully many times in years past, but which I failed miserably at this month--I made something more akin to ricotta in the end, but it was still kind of weird.... 

Failed mozz-ricotta project.

Homemade pizza!

I ate out a few times, including two lunches at Homegrown, which unsurprisingly features locally-grown produce and meats and locally produced cheese and bread and soda and so on.

 I also attempted to eat local in Manhattan this week.  The other night, while dining with JC and KTG at the Red Cat in Chelsea, I felt just like one of the characters in the "Is It Local" sketch on Portlandia, as I questioned our waiter to the third degree about where everything came from.  I drank wine from Long Island.

I like eating local.  I think it can continue to figure heavily into my diet.  But like I said in this post at the beginning of September, there are limits to how much time, energy, and money a thrifty, busy gal can put into eating and shopping and cooking.  I'm not converted to all local, all the time, but I just may be eating a little more local food that before from now on!

Yummy local rutabaga, broccoli, onion, peppers, and turnip greens

October is my month of no TV, Netflix, Hulu, etc. consumption!  Stay tuned for that post later today!