Food Gifts

The food gifts that have started coming are amazing. It is like a wedding or a funeral. People want to support you and so they do it with food. It started with a butternut squash from Amy, then a huge bowl of spinach from Lewis's garden, a jar of apple butter with accompanying apples from Liz, Chicken Salad from Eli, Turnips from Tom, more spinach from Lewis, and a huge bag of oranges from Vanessa(yes the oranges were from Florida, but they can count because no extra fuel was expended in their transport - her parents brought them back from vacation - did I mention that they are SOOO juicy and yummy?)
Just like a wedding or funeral I feel very loved and supported - and really this whole thing is much easier than a wedding or funeral (and way way easier than having a baby).

Culinary Explorations

This morning in celebration of Valentine's Day I had a very pink (and delicious) breakfast. Yesterday I cooked grits in a double boiler mixed with raw milk on the woodstove for 5 hours. They turned out creamy and sweet. So this morning I reheated some of the grits (some southerners say this is a sin, but I have had success with reheating grits) with chopped STRAWBERRIES and goat cheese. Wow. That was yummy. Reid tasted them and pronounced good flavor but he couldn't get past the grit texture - grits should always be savory you know. Reid grew up deep in grit-country. Maybe I should have told him it was tapioca?
Last night I got together with some friends to discuss the book "Blood Done Sign my Name" and we all brought southern style food to share. They took on the local challenge for me. We had some wonderful butternut soup, local apple crisp (the very thoughtful cook baked some without the crispy top which was made from non-local ingredients), and salad with local salad greens. My contribution was cornbread toasts topped with jalepeno goat cheese.
Tonight for Valentine's Day I will make cornmeal crepes stuffed with sauted kale, rosemary venison sausage and goat cheese, with roasted yukon gold potatoes on the side.

Local Milk

Today was day six of local food. Today was also my first taste of local raw unpasturized milk. Glory Glory Hallelujah! This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for me. Yogurt! Creme Fresh! Cream sauces! Custards! Not to mention just plain drinking the yummiest milk I have ever tasted in my entire life! The flavor is so complex. Even with the cream skimmed off the top the milk tastes unbeliveably rich. Unpasturized milk is illegal in this state so in order to get it I had to go through a process that could be compared to a drug deal. I told a friend (who I knew was a raw milk drinker) that I was interested. She said she would tell her friend who knew somebody who could get it for me. I saw this friend of hers at a party over the weekend and we spoke about the possbilities. Then I went to the place he worked yesterday and got a phone number from him. I called the number making sure to mention his name when identifying myself. Then I was given directions to a house where I would be able to pick up the milk the following afternoon. There was a cooler on the front porch and I was to leave my money (cash) in an envelope with my name on it in a plastic bucket with the top cut out and I could take my milk out of the cooler. I triumphantly brought home my fresh milk from the next county over in big widemouth glass gallon jars. So why go with the unpasturized? Why not some legal local pasturized milk? My understanding is that most pasturized milk is actually really gross and that's why they have to cook it - to kill all the stuff that would probably kill me. People drank raw milk for eons and didn't get sick from it as long as their animals were healthy. Let's hope those animals in the next county over were healthy this morning when they were milked. I don't normally drink milk, I usually go with almond milk or soy. Unfortunately there aren't any local almonds - or soybeans for that matter. After a taste of this wonderful stuff I may never go back to the aseptic packages of milk substitute. I am at this very moment making yogurt which I will eat for breakfast with some local strawberries that I found while fishing around in my freezer for something I could eat. I froze them in the spring and had sort of forgotten about them. I can't even explain my excitement at finding them!

So today was day five of my experiment. Fat Tueday was almost a week ago. I got off to a rocky start with this locavore thing. I decided on Fat Tuesday that I would give up non-local food for the 40 days of Lent. So I had less than 24 hours to prepare for this craziness. I had a little local cornmeal, grits and sweet potatoes on hand some local eggs, honey and greens from the garden. My husband and I had made about 40 pounds of venison sausage plus we had roasts and ribs from a deer a friend had gotten for us. I knew the co-op had some good local cheeses - what more could I want?
I woke up Wednesday morning feeling kinda funny. I started the first day of my lenten resolution to eat only local food with great excitement and, strangely, no appetite. I made a big pot of grits and a batch of cornmeal only cornbread. I ate a little but for some reason wasn't very hungry. I went to work and started feeling funnier and funnier. I ate some salad greens with hard boiled eggs and roasted sweet potatoes. Then the waves of nausea began. Yep. I had the stomach flu. Thus began my grand experiment.
I'll spare you the details of the first couple of days, but it was not pretty. I wasn't sure if I wanted to ever eat cornbread or sweet potatoes again - but it was just about all I had to eat!!
Needless to say things are much better now. I just made a fabulous dinner - even Reid agreed that it was good. We had rosemary venison sausage links sauted with fried yukon gold potatoes with some farmstead cheese melted over the top, a salad of greens, grated sweet potato and goat cheese, and light moist cornbread. This is the first day that I don't feel like I'm going to bed with a half empty belly.