The Place Where We Live

My sister-in-law sent me an MSNBC article on Friday entitled,”There’s No Food Like Home”. I’ve been joking with her that every time we’ve gotten together over the past couple of weeks,  we end up talking about our local food challenge. I figured she was probably sick of hearing me talk about it. But getting this article from her made me realize that perhaps through our conversations with friends and family about what we’re doing, we’re really making other people start to think about eating local. 

I thought this article was great at summarizing alot of the discussions Kevin and I have been having about eating locally, better than I ever could.  You can click here to read the entire article. However, below I will highlight the main reasons that the article offers about why it is good to eat local and will offer my own take based on our experiences with the challenge so far:

Seven Reasons to Eat Local

1. A Taste Treat - “A juicy tomato from a farm down the road is much sweeter than one grown thousands of miles away, picked when green, and practically dead to the taste buds by the time it reaches your cart at the supermarket…”

We have found this to be true - especially with strawberries. Most strawberries you find at the supermarket throughout the year are gigantic, crunchy, flavorless (if not just plain sour) and usually need sugar to make them palatable. The strawberries we’ve been buying from the Farmers Market and Parrans Greenhouse are much smaller, softer, jucier and naturally sweeter. Some are so ripe that if you don’t eat them within a matter of a day they will spoil. This week I made a strawberry rhubarb crunch for my boss’ birthday. I served it with some Independent Dairy French Vanilla Ice-cream. People seemed to really like it. Kevin was disappointed because he didn’t get any leftovers.

2. Health Boost - “…Another health benefit of eating local is that you’ll tend to eat more whole foods, and more fruits and vegetables, rather than processed foods.”

One of the questions my sister-in-law asked me last weekend was, “What do you guys do when you eat fast food?” Our answer was, “We don’t.” Fast food pretty much is the antithesis of local in so many ways that there’s no way you could ever incorporate it into a diet like this. In addition to giving up fast food, we’ve realized we’ve given up most convenient snack foods and also realized that we’re eating more fruits and vegetables and less meat in general than we ever did before. Because lettuce is so plentiful this time of year, we’re finding ourselves eating salads several times a week (and sometimes several times a day if we have leftovers to eat for lunch the next day.) Okay…we do have the occaisonal Vince’s or Monroes original hot-dog… but that’s still a locall made product sold by a small locally  owned buisiness. And also, it’s good not to be too fanatical. More about that later.

3. Earth Benefits - “Apples flown in from New Zealand…The amount of oil used for that is crazy…You use a lot less energy buying local.”  

During our first week of the food challenge we were shopping and saw a sign for Michigan Apples. “Michigan apples in June?” we thought. “How can this be?” Upon closer inspection of the sticker affixed to the apple we found that the apple was actually grown in New Zealand. I haven’t been able to find anything out about that yet but my guess is that it’s a apple variety that’s native to Michigan but grown in New Zealand during the off season. This was an eye-opener for Kevin. As someone who rides his bike to work every day to save gas and he never realized how much fuel is used for things like shipping Michigan apples back to Michigan from New Zealand. With all the talk of CAFE standards it makes you wonder why more people aren’t talking about how much energy we use shipping food.

(more…)

My apologies to everyone out there who may be wondering where I’ve been for almost a week. It was a  busy week for us with something going on practically every night and I just couldn’t get myself to sit down and post during my free time

I wanted to just give a few highlights of the past week of our local eating adventures.

Last Sunday’s Monroe Bloggers Picnic - Last Sunday was a gorgeous day for a picnic and we spent part of it at the first annual (I’m assuming there will be at least one a year from now on) Monroe Bloggers meet-up and picnic. We met many of the great Monroe bloggers and even got to share some locally made cookout foods including: Dearborn bratwursts, Bettermade potato chips, and a salad made from all local greens from the St. Mary’s Organic Farm, fresh strawberries, walnuts and a vinaigrette dressing made from olive oil, local honey, and Eden Foods apple-cider vinager. We also brought some of our most recent batch of homemade beer to share. Thanks to Dave (Luna Pier Cook) for trying it out for us.

Take Us Out the Ball Game! - We attended two baseball games this past week. The first was the Mudhens game last Saturday and the second was a Tiger game on Tuesday.  Needless to say, baseball games were a major test for us in our local eating and drinking challenge. Although I did find out from Paula Wethington at the Monroe Evening News that I could have eaten Tofts ice-cream (which is made in Sandusky). We also could have eaten Germack peanuts at the Tiger game put we were full from dinner. I think the thing I missed most at the baseball game was beer. It reminded  me of the Homer Simpson quote “I never knew how boring this game is without beer.” Lucky for us we didn’t need it at the Tiger game, since that was the night Verlander pitched the no-hitter.  

One issue raised for us was the question: Is it okay to break our local eating/drinking rule in order to not be rude when you’re with friends or people you don’t know very well? Before the Mudhens game we had planned to go to dinner at Maumee Bay Brewing Company in Toledo. We were meeting people at the game (they were the one’s who had given us the tickets) and invited them to join us at the Brewery. However, when we got down to Toledo we found out that they had already arrived at The Dirty Bird and wanted us to join them there…and then wanted to stay there for dinner…and then wanted to order one of those large beer tubes full of Bud-light and share it with us.  What does one do in this situation? Decline their courtesy and say thanks for the free glass of beer but we’ll only drink it if it’s made in Michigan (or this case Ohio). We decided to be polite to our new aquaintance and drink some of the the free beer tube Bud Light. Kevin says he would have died if anyone he knew had actually seen him drinking it. :-)

Fresh Dill - One good thing about this diet is that it makes us try new things. I’ve never been a big fan of dill. It’s probably not an herb that, up until now, I would have bought and used on my own. However, we have dill growing at the St. Mary Organic Farm so I picked some fresh this week and we decided to cook some salmon steaks we had in our freezer with a dill cream-sauce and a side of local asparagus in garlic and butter. Kevin got the recipe of the (Lake Michigan  Angler website) The cream-sauce didn’t turn out too bad for our first try and I am now a dill convert.

Bettermade - I know i mentioned Bettermade potato chips earlier in this post but I’m really starting to appreciate this company that I knew virtually nothing about a few weeks ago.  Their chip bag brags that they are a union company that still hires many local employees and that they use Michigan potatoes 10 months out of the year. You can check out their website here. 

AND FINALLY

“The Grandmother Clause” - I was a vegetarian for about three years while I was in college. During this time, I always had a rule that  I would eat meat if it was part of a special meal that a loved-one had made for me rather than being rude and not eating. We decided to ressurect this rule this week for a Father’s Day dinner that my mom made on Friday Night for my grandparents and us. However, I am pleased that it wasn’t a total loss. I gave my mom some mixed greens from the St. Mary’s Organic Farm to use for the salad and my dad (who remembered our local diet) found some potatoes at Meijer that were grown and packaged in Kalkaska, Michigan which we baked and ate with our delicious non-local steaks. Oh yes and my mom made a delicious non-local chocolate pie. Okay…so we really took advantage of the grandmother clause!

Haven’t had time to post recently about my local food challenge lately but wanted to share the following piece with you about eating locally as a revolutionary act by Michael Pollen author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

Beyond the Bar Code: The Local Food Revolution

An excerpt:

“Local food economies are our best hope for checking the drift toward the total global economy. A revolt is underway across this country—a revolt of small producers and consumers. Some of the most important politics today are happening at the farmer’s market…”

Things we have learned so far on our journey of heating local:

1. Local meat and dairy are hard to find in Monroe. - For the first few days of this challenge we didn’t even realize how dependent we were on the fish and chicken we already had stocked in our freezer. Now that our supply is dwindling (we have two frozen salmon steaks) we are realizing that it is nearly impossible to find locally produced meat in Monroe. I am going to place an order through the co-op out of Vadalia  that I mentioned in my earlier post but I’ve learned from Maurine the owner of Health Matters that there are some minor hurdles to get through before I can actually order and recieve the meat. It’s looking like it will take a week or two. Today, to make due, we bought some amish farm raised all natural chicken from Indiana to incorporate into a recipe (more on that later).

2. You take for granted how many products you can’t ever get locally but buy all the time. Olive oil, parmesan cheese, balsamic vinigar. Have you ever seen old movies or read books about Victorian times when kids would get oranges in their stockings for Christmas and get all excited? I used to think this was the dumbest thing in the world…until recently…when I realized what an extravegant treat an orange must have been for a kid growing up in New England who had probably never seen an orange, let alone in the dead of winter. Hmmm… maybe that’s why fruit baskets became so popular. I now realize what a luxury a lot of the foods that we eat really are.

3. Just because it’s local doesn’t mean it’s the best choice. Sarah over at Home Life has been blogging about meat and dairy and where it comes from. It raises the question: Even if you can eat local but it’s meat from a factory farm in Michigan where they use antibiotics and growth hormones, would it be better if it’s bought out of state but raised humanely and naturally?

4. For the most part, eating locally means eating healthier. Over the past few days its amazing how much we’ve reduced the amount of highly processed food and increased the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables we eat (or at least incorporate into our cooking). I’ve also learned a tremendous amount (thanks to the St. Mary Organic Garden) about what foods are in season. If you had asked me a week or two ago what the first crops are I never would have told you asparagus, radishes, arugala, rhubarb and lettuces.

5. Eating locally means cooking more creatively (or just cooking more - period)When you have an abundance of the aforementioned veggies, you’ve got to figure out what to do with them. Tonight Kevin decided to try out a rhubarb recipe from one of the sites Luna Pier Cook mentioned. The recipe was for a pork with a rhubarb stuffing. Since we couldn’t find local pork he settled for the Amish farm-raised chicken from Indiana. Baked chicken with rhubarb stuffyin. Would we have ever dared to try this if not for this local food thing? Most likely…no.

6. You realize that eating locally means not wasting food. It’s funny how before I started this challenge I would have been more likely to get tired of something, buy something else and then let the leftovers expire in the fridge. It’s the mentality…If I don’t like what I have in my fridge I’ll just go out and buy something different. Who cares where its from! Not so on this diet. When your food choices are limited you make a better attempt to use up every last bit of what you’ve got.

Finally…it’s okay to eat pizza. Yes. we had one of those nights. Everyone has them.  You don’t want to cook and you just want to order pizza.  Instead of going to Pizza Hut, Tiffany’s, or Cottage Inn we opted for Detroit Beach Pizzeria. Granted, Tiffanys is local but Detroit Beach just seemed more “family owned” maybe they even make their own dough there still too?

Hopefully Kevin will find potatoes soon…I think he’s going into withdrawal…besides he’s found a lot of potato rhubard and potato arugula recipes. He can’t wait to try them out.

We’ve officially completed days two and three of our “Local Food Challege.” It hasn’t been too difficult, however, we’ve gotten lucky because we can still rely on using up  food that we’ve already purchased that’s sitting in our pantry or fridge.

Monday morning began for me with a breakfast of a small cup of cottage cheese from Bareman’s Dairy. Not bad. I eat cottage cheese pretty regularly except it’s usually packaged in those single serving containers. Kevin started his day with a bowl of corn flakes which is still technically distributed out of Battle Creek but the whole Kellogg thing raises an ethical dillemma. Is Kellogg truly local anymore? While it’s distributed out of Battle Creek is it still actually produced there? 

For lunch we both had tuna salad sandwiches (the tuna was from a can of Starkist which we had on hand in our pantry and it was mixed with Miracle Whip salad dressing we had in our fridge) on Zingermann’s honey whole wheat bread mixed with dried Michigan cherries and chopped green onions from the Monroe Farmers market. I was amazed at how full I was after eating a sandwich made from dense Zingermann’s bread compared with your typical storebought fluff. I had a snack in the mid afternoon of chopped local strawberries. Kevin ate some local radishes. He also confessed  that he was still hungry after this meal that he stopped and got a Monroe’s Original hot-dog in the afternoon. It’s still local and they do buy their hot dog’s from Dearborn Sausages out of Detroit….We’ll count it.

To my luck, Monday was also our first harvest day for the St. Mary’s Organic Farm. So I was able to bring home some fresh arugala, dill, cilantro, oregano and another bundle of radishes. I’m so lucky I’m married to a guy who loves to eat raw radishes!

For dinner we made a blackened chicken salad (using Meijer brand “all natural” chicken breast we had on hand in the freezer) on a bed of fresh mixed greens we picked up at the Farmers market along with some of the fresh dill,the green onions, and arugala. We topped it off with more Michigan cherries and the walnuts I bought at the FM from Woelmer’s farm. I made a dressing out of balsamic vinager, honey and olive oil. Yep…you guessed it…the balsamic vinager and EVOO (as Rachel Ray would put it) already bought and in the pantry. It was a great salad although I think in the tossing process Kevin got a little too much of the dill and it wasn’t one of his favorite additons to the salad.

I won’t bore you with the nitty gritty details of today… more of the cornflake moral quandry for Kevin. Plain Zingermann’s toast and Calder’s butter for me for breakfast. Leftover salad for lunch. Although a highlight of my morning was half a donut from Monica’s Baker boy thanks to a co-worker!

Kevin did buy some  meat and cheese for sandwiches from Danny’s that’s produced by a local company called Dairy Fresh but the jury’s still out on how local it acutally is. However, it’s not Butterball or Kraft…so we’re heading in the right direction. 

We finished off today with a nice meal of the Al Dente spinach linguini topped with Eden’s Organic pasta sauce (I sauteed some garlic and we added some fresh locally grown basil and mild banana peppers…YES THEY WERE ALREADY IN MY FRIDGE. I’m telling you… eating locally is a good way to clean out your kitchen. You’ll never look at parmesan cheese in the same way again!)

Now I am sitting here writing to you drinking an India Pale Ale that we homebrewed ourselves. Okay… brewing our own beer… that makes up for the other areas where we cut  corners…right? RIGHT?!

:-) 

We started off the day with a breakfast of scrambled eggs that we bought at the Monroe Farmers market last week and fresh cut local strawberries. When I scrambled the eggs I added a little chopped green onions from this week’s trip to the farmers market and some garlic and fried it in a tablespoon of Calder’s Dairy butter. After using cooking spray for so long now, I forgot how good things taste after being cooked in butter. The garlic I used was what was left in the fridge. Unfortunately I didn’t realize that the garlic I had bought at Health Matters yesterday had already gone bad, but when I cracked it open this morning I realized that it had shriveled and begun to rot so I pitched it.

It was a nice light and fresh breakfast. To my coffee (Leftover coffee I bought at Zingermann’s - they roast it there - a couple weeks back)  I added a little bit of the Guernsey farms half and half instead of the flavored Coffeemate that I usually drink with it.  Drinking coffee with just half and half reminded me of being at a late night truck stop and, as with the butter, I realized how nice it was to be able to taste the flavor of coffee again rather than having it be over-powered by the artificial sweetness of the flavored cream.

As for lunch, Kevin’s cousin’s ran the Dexter-Ann Arbor run today and we went up this morning to watch them finish and to hang out at the “Taste of Ann Arbor” the town’s annual festival featuring local restuarants. We figured that since we were eating food from local establishments, we could count that as eating local and we did stay away from the booths that belonged to chain restaurants (like Buffalo Wild Wings). What do you think? Is that fair?  

After the festival we stopped in at Grizzly Peak had a locally brewed beer and decided to head down to Kerrytown for a trip to Zingermann’s. We knew that picking up some Zingermann’s bread was a must and also knew that they made their own cheese, so naturally we thought that Zingermann’s would be a great place to go to stock up on some more local food. It turns out that, that’s not necessarily the case. First we realized that the only cheeses that they actually make at the Zingermann’s creamery are a small selection of artisianal cheeses everything else is from out of state or imported. Second, we are completely igonorant when it comes to  artisan cheese. After sampling a few different cheese we finally settled on one softer cows-milk cheese with peppercorns which ended up costing us $6.99. It was one of those situations where, after eating all those samples, we felt obligated to buy some rather than saying : “Umm…do you have any regular cheese? You know, the kind that you can put on sandwiches?”

We also realized that 1.) Almost everything else in the store that isn’t specifically made by Zingermann’s is imported and 2.) Everything in the store is pretty expensive. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great for the occaisonal gourmet indulgence but when your looking to do more substantial food shopping, it’s not your best bet. We did buy a few loaves of bread (one for this week and one to freeze) a couple of other items and a deli sandwich with a side of homemade mac and cheese to split for dinner. I will say that Luna Pier Chef was right in one of his earlier posts. The mac and cheese was definitely worth the price.

On our way back to the car, we stopped at the People’s Food Co-op which we were happy to see had more reasonable prices and a good variety of locally made products. One of the things we were excited to find at both Zingermann’s and PFC was pasta from a company called Al Dente out of Whitmore Lake. We ended up buying a bag of spinach linquini from Zingermann’s and then saw that they had a wider variety at PFC and bought a black peppercorn fettucini there. We also found jarred spaghetti sauce from Eden Organics.  We also saw that they sell bread from Avalon bakery in Detroit which we would have bought if we hadn’t already made the trip to Zingermann’s.

We still haven’t had much luck with “regular cheese” as I said but I’ve gotten some great leads from other Monroe blogspot folks. Thanks you guys! 

It’s funny… as a kid, I remember laughing at my grandparents who would go from store to store to find the best sale on meat or bread or eggs. I would always think to myself, “Why don’t they just buy all their food from the same store, it’d be so much easier that way.” It’s interesting how your attitude and behavior change when you realize there’s more to life than convenience.

Kevin and I rode our bikes to the Monroe Farmers Market this morning in our first serious attempt to stock up on some basics for our “local food challenge” which we have decided will officially kick off tomorrow.

I’ll have to admit that I was a little nervous after last week’s sorry attempt at buying local food (when we arrived at the market a half an hour before closing time). Although we ate the wonderful fresh asparagus we bought last week along with some blackened tuna steaks we had in the freezer I was concerned that asparagus would be the only fresh produce we’d be able to find this time of year. I was relieved when we found that there was enough of a variety at least to get us started.  Here’s what we bought:

• A bag of salad greens.
• A bag of swiss chard.
• A bundle of radishes
• A half a bundle of green onions (we decided that a whole bundle was probably more than we’d be able to use up and split a bundle with another couple that was there.)
• A bundle of rhubarb (I’m curious to find a recipe for rhubarb that’s not a dessert. Luna Pier Cook, if you’re reading this, any suggestions?)
• A quart of strawberries (I have to say  that I forget how good locally grown strawberries are. For some reason they’re much smaller and sweeter than those gargantuan ones with no taste that prolferate in the produce section at most grocery stores.
• A bag of walnuts
• A container of honey
• And yes…we did buy more asparagus. I’m going to look for a more interesting way of cooking it.

Later on in the morning we stopped at Health Matters (the natural foods store in Monroe that I blogged about a while back.) There we bought:

• A half a pound of Michigan dried cherries.
• A pound and a half of raw milk butter from Calder Dairy
• A container of cottage cheese from Baremands Family Farm (Holland)
• A pint of half and half for coffee for Guernsey farms (from Northville)
• A can of Eden Organic pizza/slash spaghetti sauce (which we found out is made in Clinton Michigan)
• Two bulbs of locally grown garlic
• And a bag of Germack chocolate covered pretzels (from Detroit)

Health Matters also takes orders for meat and dairy from Family Farms Coop in Vadalia Michigan. I hope to place an order from them this week, although Kevin wants to do a little more research into where Danny’s meat come from (specifically their chicken and beef). I know they have locally raised meat after the fair but I’m not sure about other times during the year. (Does anyone else know?)

So far the toughest things to find are bread, pasta, and cheese which we would be very difficult (in my book) do without. However, we may be making a trip to Ann Arbor tomorrow. If we do, a trip to Zingermann’s (at least for the bread) is a must.

We did start our morning with toast made from the loaf of bread we still had in our fridge and some plain old margerine. However, we topped it off with organic raspberry preserves from Food for Thought, a brand we’ve been buying for a while but never realized was from Michigan (a town called Honor).

The funny thing is, we haven’t even really begun this experiment, yet it’s already started to change the way I think about every food item I come across. We were at a gas station earlier today and I couldn’t get over the fact that there wasn’t a single item in their convenience store that was locally made.  

Of course I guess that’s the way any diet is. The minute you start making deliberate choices about the food you eat (instead of just buying and eating things impulsively) the more you start to think about food in general.

We’ll see how it goes…