we're eating local again this month. and i see it took me almost a year to read that last book. i just finished it last night and i'm about to start this one.
i'm definitely fascinated by food – growing, gathering, farmer's market…
we've been a little looser with our 'eating local' rules this year. not a ton – but some. we found flour from montana so i've been baking this year. having muffins has been a huge help!
so the eat local challenge is done. we did pretty well. i think everything we ate in our house over the course of the month was from within about 100 miles of where we live. we enjoyed lots of local wine, cheese and tortillas. items we will definitely keep around. all local veggies, fruit and trout. those fresh items are slowly becoming harder to get as the choice at farmer's market gets smaller every week.
i know as the month progressed it felt like i ate more lunches out. eating out wasn't held to the same standard. in general, i was hungrier without all the bread and pasta in my diet. eating was more fun in some ways – i was more appreciative of interesting flavors and required a lot less sweet to fill that dessert space.
with the month over i was excited to bake – with flour and all. we still went to the trouble of making a homemade pumpkin pie – with an actual sugar pumpkin we roasted and pureed. it was well worth it. i mostly followed the recipe from cook's illustrated. i used their filling ingredients and their crust recipe. i believe it is the best pumpkin pie we've ever had. i made homemade whip cream last night and tonight. so yummy!
tilly and i and a few neighbor kids walked up to the store for hot cocoa tonight. it was beautiful out – although the air was really chill – we could have had some more clothes on.
today was picture day at school. jeremy took the shots this year. i helped. you know – shooting little kids is hard! he did a great job though. tilly is still wearing her photo day sweater (although a different dress). of course, her hair looked cuter all day than it did in the pic. the plight of a mom!
on my usual food note: jeremy made some excellent wax beans and a corn pudding tonight that was outstanding!
the first snow feels a little late…funny thing about a blog is that i can see that we had a couple inches here on our porch last year on september 22. this morning revealed the second snow up high. the first one was last week. jeremy hiked up the mountain this morning and took a bunch of pictures.
Mt. Daly really had a lot of snow.
Winter's coming – and around here everyone is pretty excited.
jeremy made the best all local chile rellnos last night and butternut squash soup. we're on the last week of the 'eat local' challenge. i'm still loving my coffee and wine. (although i noticed i've had a few more lunches out lately…)
this morning was farmer's market – we bought everything of course. we are having some friends over for an all 'local' dinner tomorrow night. jeremy has been cooking on and off today and there's still food in the oven (it's 11:30pm). i'm excited! he even made a tomato dish I like – that's a miracle.
after the market we took tilly and a friend out for a walk. tilly wanted to go on a 'nature hike' with these small journals we made so she could glue stuff in. it's funny to watch the things she looks for vs. the things i look for. i spend time looking for perfect yellow aspen leaves. she finds a half eaten green leaf and can't wait to glue it into her book. they both glued in snail shells too – using a glue stick. we''ll see how well that holds up.
their favorite part of the hike was the caterpillar. we found a black fuzzy caterpillar that ali named gabriella. they carried it all the way out of the woods and to a playground we went to visit. they took continuous turns handing it back and forth. i was really just thrilled that they were excited to play with it (and not grossed out at all by the 'bug').
so one of the hard parts of eating local has been no snacks – no potato chips, pretzels, etc… i like to snack. i've eaten a lot of apples with our peanut-honey smush and thank goodness for tortillas and goat cheese ( i am the only human who won't happen to lose weight during this month). but today i remembered that jeremy had bought a bag of local popcorn a few weeks ago. so i followed the directions at instructables today and made homemade microwave popcorn with southern colorado blue corn, sedalia ghee and utah salt. so good! and in a lot of ways better than actual microwave popcorn – no weird after taste or strange filmy feeling in your mouth. an actual snack – so exciting!
so i almost cooked tonight – which is remarkable with our 'eating local'.
i kind of figured with all of the actual cooking it was taking to pull off eating local that i wouldn't cook this month (which wouldn't be that different than a normal month).
but jeremy was out shooting late so i baked acorn squash and made a corn bread/pudding thing. it was pretty good.
what i loved was that i found it the recipe at allrecipes.com. they have a great search feature where you can put in some ingredients you would like to find in a recipe and ingredients you wouldn't. so i could put in cornmeal and eggs, but no flour. with our limited choices this month this search feature is perfect!
so the pie…tilly had three pieces, i had two, jeremy's been eating out of the tine – we gave a piece to our friend kara – it's a really good pie! jeremy thinks it may be the best apple pie he's ever had (no offense taken of course).
it was interesting too, that some are really making wine and some are making novelty fruity stuff.
tonight we had spaghetti squash gratin, anasazi beans, and blue cornmeal pancakes. dinner was excellent!
so in my food update (as if the details of what I eat are important) – on friday jeremy found local smoked trout – so exciting! so we had goat cheese and trout quesadillas – they were fabulous! tilly loved them too.
on saturday afternoon we drove to Grand Junction (GJ). Palisade, GJ, Fruita – the area is piled high
with homegrown fruits, vegetables and wine. we spent most of sunday driving from farmstand to orchard to vineyard – tasting and talking and buying things. it was so fun! we bought tons of fruits and veggies (so cheap compared to here of course).
we picked out this homemade apple pie – i assume the flour isn't local, but the pie looked too good to ask.
i bought a whole box of pears – hoping that i'll can them.
and today we found salt from utah – also very exciting!
we ate non-local food while away…fudge never tasted so good…
i should note that we allowed ourselves a few things – the first thing being coffee. we've cut out diet coke so keeping the coffee seemed necessary. we are drinking locally roasted coffee – like steaming bean from telluride.so this morning i drank a lot of coffee with the new local milk.
for lunch jeremy turned the corn and potato soup into a cream soup with some milk and goat cheese – so good!
we both continue to snack on our new favorite corn tortillas with honey, cheese, apples or peanut smush.
for dinner we had eggs and hash browns. pretty typical but all local – the hash browns were outstanding. whatever jeremy did was awesome!
this morning i made some version of homemade peanut butter with honey and we had that on apples. it was pretty good. tilly loved the 'peanut honey smush' as we're calling it. (we aren't limiting her food to the local thing – i'm not that prepared)
for lunch we had thinly sliced potatoes sauteed with goat cheese on top. that was delish!
and for dinner jeremy made 10 bean soup (we bought the bag of beans at farmer's market the other week) with tomatoes. the soup was excellent. i love soup with a lot of beans.
so the day was good especially with the perks from clark's. i snacked on a corn tortilla toasted with goat cheese and honey. with so little bread it's easy to snack on this kind of food all day.
jeremy set up a little photo studio in the garage to take some pictures of the food. this is his shot of the tomatoes as he was setting up his lights today. so – most of the photos will be his, and of course, the cooking too!
Olathe corn tortillas, Broomfield eggs, Sedalia ghee and Eaton goat's milk, New Castle basil, Longmont goat cheese, Colorado Spring's regular milk, Wellington onions, Brighton potatoes, Alamosa mushrooms and Hotchkiss apple juice – all from Colorado.
Even the cat was interested.
this local bit isn't usually a part of the fall but Jeremy was so intrigued by this book, and September is the 'Eat Local Challenge' for a bunch of different groups – so we're trying
today was our first day (we had company over the weekend and we decided not to subject other people to our plans when we weren't sure how it was going to go yet)
i ate lots of little food all day today – local applesauce, blood plums, apples, ground local peanuts, goat cheese from the farmer's market.
for dinner Jeremy made corn and potato soup and we had sliced pears and cheese. next time we're downvalley we'll be able to pick-up local eggs, butter and milk.
it's been a day but i am keenly aware that i had no bread products.
it's been interesting to be so aware of my food.