Last night along with our home-made pasta with a sauce of local spring onions, collards, green garlic and tomatoes cooked in white wine, we had strawbery shortcake for dessert. Cream from Maple View Farms and local strawberries.
I’ve been looking for a shortcake recipe that I like for awhile and I finally found one, so here’s a link to the recipe.
Used the left-over strawberries to make strawberry muffins this morning.
Went to the Farmers’ Market this morning and the pickings were bountiful! I actually had to limit what I bought.
I ended getting some collard greens, broccoli, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, spring onions and green garlic. (Not to mention some beautiful Irises and some nasturtiums for our vegetable garden.)
We’re at $122, but $8.00 of that was on alcohol so technically we are still doing ok in terms of the Pennywise Eat Local Challenge!
So far we’ve spent $68.50 of our budget and that includes $8.00 for a 6-pack of Duck-Rabbit beer. This morning we had local cream cheese (quark from Chapel Hill Creamery) & local bagels for breakfast.
Wednesday
It is hard to stay local if you have to eat out with folks which I did last night with some folks from my department– had some (I suspect) non-local veggies in my Chinese food.
But, had I come home for dinner I could have had the awesome all-local Asian food that my partner made:
Stir-fry of: bok-choy, green garlic & spring onions from the farmers market with local mung bean sprouts & sweet potato thrown in. These last 2 were from Weaver Street Market (our local co-op). Threw in some egg for protein. (If you can’t tell from our posts we are mainly vegetarian, occasionally we eat fish & seafood- pescatarian?). Plus he made home-made Asian wheat noodles! I totally missed out. 
But, I’ll have this for lunch– lots of leftovers!
Tuesday
We opted for salad on Tuesday night. It was gorgeous out (81 degrees and no mosquitos yet!).
Fresh produce that I coud find local was: red leaf lettuce & romaine lettuce, hot house tomatoes, and alfalfa sprouts. Bummed that I didn’t buy some of the beautiful spring onions that were at the farmer’s market on Saturday, would have been a perfect addition!
We had this with the remainder of the Elodie Farms Queso Fresco and Celebrity dairy goat cheese, along with a Weaver Street made Ciabatta loaf.
Local treats and delights: strawberries and a 6-pack of some Duck Rabbit Amber Ale!
Some thoughts so far:
1. Eating local (or even non-local) on the cheap is way easier if you are cooking for two, I realize this is easier for us in that regard.
2. Harder to “stay-local” if you want to participate in eating out with folks. . .
PS: I don’t know why the second half of this post is in bold, I can’t seem to un-bold it! (I fixed it - mr.ed)
For anyone who is curious: I found out that all of the white and whole wheat organic flours at Weaver Street’s bulk section are milled locally at Lindley Mills. So is their spelt flour and both of their yellow (not white) corn grits. Since this is the flour we normally use, I’m happy to find this out!
This condescending NYT article talks about the new voting and democracy coming to the small nation of Bhutan. The article mentions that the entry of shows like “Desparate Housewives” & the internet might not be such a good thing, but the World Bank is predicting a 14% growth rate for Bhutan. Hmm. . .
Fleeting mention is made that of the Bhutan’s government’s stance that Gross National Happiness is more important than economic measures like Gross National Product!
I love pics of this protest of UC Berkeley students sitting in on redwood trees on campus to protest the UC’s deal with BP to research biofuels. Way to go! 
Tonight we had: local collards fried up with NC butter from Homeland creamery and NC eggs (but spiced up with non-local soy sauce & white wine). And NC milled cheese grits with goat queso fresca from Elodi farms and buttermilk from Maple View Farms. YUM!
We’re finding that locally milled flours have been trickier: Found out about Midstate Mills in Newton, NC from another friendly blogger. But I can’t tell if they are non-GMO or not. From a friend, I found out about Lindley Mills in Graham– organic, but grown in the Midwest.
Confession: Used very non-local sugar in my coffee this morning and ate granola for breakfast that was already in the house from a bulk-bag bought last week. Moving to NC honey tomorrow for sweetener.
So far we’re on $34 of our budget.
My partner & I are participating in the Pennywise Eat Local Challenge this week. The gist of it is that folks are encouraged to commit to eating local for a week (April 23-29) and to also stay within the budgets of the average American.
So, for a single person household the budget is $62/week and for two people & 1 income it is: $121/week. We’re doing option #2 since my grad stipend doesn’t really come to a full salary.
In any case, you get to set your own parameters for what “local” is for you. Ours are:
1) All fresh foods (dairy, veggies, fruits) have to be produced within North Carolina. (We’re trying to stay within 100 miles.)
2) We recognize that wheat is not (generally) grown in NC nor is coffee (I wish!), so all baked goods have to have been baked/processed within 50 miles and our coffee for the week will have been roasted within 50 miles (and be fair trade).
3) Items that we prep with (oil, spices, etc.) and which we already have in our cupboards we are going to go ahead and use even though these aren’t “local”…
I don’t think the budget will be hard for us to stick to since our regular weekly food budget s $100/week (yes, we have actually calculated this inthe past!). I think the bigger part will be recognizing those sorts of things, like bananas or yoghurt, that make up part of our weekly diet that we don’t usually buy form local sources.
Hopefully it will be a good sustainability-provoking exercise to see how much we get from afar! Also, hopefully this will help challenge some of the myths that “eating local” is necessarily outside of the average person’s budget. . .
For information as to why eating local is important and to learn more about the food miles concept (and why they are one of the biggest contributors to petroleum usage), go to:
Wikipedia definition of food miles
Also since we can’t get everything local we are following the Locavore pledge:
If not LOCALLY PRODUCED, then Organic.
If not ORGANIC, then Family farm.
If not FAMILY FARM, then Local business.
If not a LOCAL BUSINESS, then Fair Trade.
(which I grabbed from the Pennywise Local Food Challenge site).
We were setting up our garden this morning and Tom moved one of the cinder blocks surrounding it, and we found a bunch of baby snakes in it. A snake must have laid some eggs in it last year! Below is not-so-great photo of one of the little guys (they quickly burrowed back into the dirt once we unearthed them).
We just heard last night that a friend’s husband was one of the victims of the shooting at Virginia Tech. It is really hard to believe and hard for me to imagine her losing someone that special to her. I know they had a really special relationship.
It is maddening to think that all of this happened through a string of events that could have been prevented– had there been a lock-down at the university, had his class been an hour later, etc.
In any case, I am sending out prayerful thoughts and ask that others do the same. . .
Yay! Finally feeling like our plans our firmed up and under way. We sent out our invitations last Friday and set up our web-page this weekend. We picked up our custom-made rings last weekend and my (red not white) dress is arriving in early May. . . So now, we can relax until the week before the wedding!
Everything has been stepped up a scale or two from what we originally planned, but . . . from what we hear that’s how wedding planning goes. Its hard to fight the tide and we really did want to have a celebration. We’re going pretty simple compared to what it could have turned into, but it was still a pretty big project.
In any case, I am very proud of the wedding site that Mr. Ed set up. Check it out!
We had been having days in the 70s and 80s until Thursday evening when it dropped into the 30s! Our Easter weekend has been in the 30s and 40s. What a tease for a three-day weekend after a bunch of balmy, spring days! When I went out Saturday morning to get some milk there were a several frozen caterpillars around the house– good thing we hadn’t planted our garden yet . . . I’m hoping
for a return to spring this week.
Good news is that we completed our wedding invitations today! We decided to print them and assemble them ourselves– a time-consuming process. I had no idea how long it would take. But we’re done and they look great! (I was a bit worried they’d look like crap.) We hope to send them out this week, after I get to addressing and stamping the envelopes. . . ooo la la!
Now back to grading student papers for me. . .
I’ve intended to write about a project I have been involved in since last fall for some time now. One of the faculty in my department (with the help of several grad students) organized a research collaboration called CIRA (the Center for Integrating Research and Action). In particular, I’ve been attending meetings on a project in NC on addressing issues of poverty reduction in 12 of the counties identified as having the most “persistent poverty” in NC.
Last weekend I went up to Boone (in the Appalachian mountains) and stayed at the farm of another grad student, Maverick Farms. She is a PhD student while at the same time running an organic farm in the mountains with her partner & sister! Pretty amazing!
The CIRA project met all day in Cove Creek (a neighboring community to Boone) and we disussed the creation of local food systems as a way to keep money within communities. The project is planning on doing Community Food Asssessments in all of the communties in order to address how much money is spent on food in these communties and to find ways to tap into this spending and keep the money local.
It was a very exciting day! With visits to the Appalachian State Sustainable Ag program and to Maverick Farms and lively discussions about racism, class and food. Some of the partner groups in the project are:
- The Concerned Citizens of Tillery (CCT): located in an African-American New Deal Settlement community this group has been working for years on issues of environmental racism (the latest of whichis horrendous hog farms & their waste lagoons) and land loss of black farmers in the community. The numbers of African American farmers in the US and in NC have been declining over the years– surprise, surprise.
-Center for Community Action in Lumberton, NC A grassroots group dealing with community organizing and poverty issues in Southeastern, NC. (Hog farms are also an issue here. . .)
-Appalachian State Sustainable Ag Program & Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture. Will write more later on this!
Very exciting stuff! Will write more in this post when I get the chance! (I’m supposed to be dissertation writing right now!) Needless to say, I’m excited about the project, especially because we are finally starting to see it really take off.