ecoyear

For the SAHM's out there, lunch is simply leftovers, or advance on dinner.  For those who have to venture into the world of work outside the home and cannot re-heat leftovers, or for those poor school children who would otherwise be at the mercy of the school's lunch program, a "local" lunch is not too different than non-local.  Some sort of sandwich or salad can be made with local ingredients.

This brings up the topic of flour.  Here in Boulder, there is wheat flour grown by Farmer John, and even he admits it is a little difficult to bake with.  It apparently has to be soaked in some hot water ahead of time.  I am more likely to use it as sprouts, or to simmer it (2 hours) and dress it up with a little sauteed onion and some vegetables.  There is also flour at King Sooper or Whole Foods called Wheat Land Farms, which is whole wheat and fairly local ("Colorado").  My personal experience is that it also needed to be combined with white flour to make passable bread, but note that I am no expert bread baker.  I do manage to use it in most recipes, substituting it (or Farmer John's) for between 25% and 45% of the total amount of flour indicated in the recipe.

Finally, there is local organic flour at Rocky Mountain Milling.  They sell in 50 lbs bags, and offer 6 different types of flour.  Some are whole wheat, and some apparently not.  Some are high in gluten and may be well-suited for bread baking.  Note that most stores do not appear to carry organic bread flour, so you would be getting something uniquely healthy there.

A legitimate question is whether baking bread is time-consuming.  First let me say that the smell of baking bread is incredible.  It alone probably justifies the effort.  Ways to cut back on the amount of work include the bread machine (caveat: my beloved Zojirushi is evidently not maintaining proper temperature after just a few months of use, thus explaining the fact that my bread had been failing to rise properly in recent months...).  There is also a "no-knead" method one might be able to find (most recently in an issue of Cooks' Illustrated (November? December? 2007 or early 2008).  The "no-knead" method does rely on white flour or at most half whole-wheat. Finally, there is the Kitchen Aid mixer.  Here I need help.  I took advantage of a summer day when my house was at 90 degrees and still my bread did not rise properly.  I'm sure there are folks out there who use the Kitchen Aid to knead their bread with success, but alas, not I.

Finally, you may decide that your sandwich bread is too precious to leave to the whims of the yeast gods (or better still, to sourdough, which I really know nothing about).  You would need to call around and see which bakeries use flour from "not as far away".  In our case, Rustica bakes crackers and breads with Colorado flour, and the Great Harvest Bread Company uses Montana flour.  Other companies (Breadworks for example) use East Coast flour, and Udi's never answered my voice mail.

Since it is preserving season, sandwich eaters may want to freeze a few batches of cilantro pesto, parsley, or broccoli pesto along with the basil pesto.  There's also a host of chutneys and relishes out there.  Happy sandwiching!

Lest I forget, one of my biggest personal 'local food' challenges is turkey slices.  There is just no way I would get a hold of enough local turkey breasts to slice up into the two or three packages we go through in a week.  Also it would require freezing said breasts, which makes the meat tough and tasteless.  This will not be an easy conversion for us.  The kids will eat my imperfect 3/5 whole wheat bread with turkey slices, but they are no fans of cheese, or certainly any "weird" chicken salad type concoctions I might come up with.  There is no local cream cheese, although you could make "yogurt cheese", either from Windsor Dairy yogurt, or your own Organic Valley milk yogurt.  So in fact sandwiches are fairly limited for us, which in turn, has slowed the conversion away from school lunches.

 The next four posts are about rethinking what you eat in light of having fewer unprocessed foods in your kitchen.  Of course, when you eat local foods, eating out becomes more difficult.  Gone is the reliance on breakfast donuts, danishes and coffee cakes, and of course, health-wise, that's all for the better!

So what is there for breakfast?  First question, why is it so difficult to think of anything beyond boxed breakfast cereals? Getting away from those at our house has been so hard I am starting to think of it as an addiction.  Right now, i buy two or three boxes per month.  Around mid-month, when the kids (and husband)  haven't seen a box in a few days, the requests begin, and then the whining, and the statements that "there is nothing to eat!:" - all signs of advanced physiological dependence...

The first consideration is that breakfast is an important meal.  It should have at least 30% of the calories you consume in a day, because that sets up the metabolism in a beneficial way.  Apparently a favorite Sumo wrestler trick is to eat nothing all day, then gorge for dinner, in the hopes of packing on extra pounds. That said, a good breakfast is a challenge to plan for because we rush to get to school or work on time.

My personal favorite breakfast is fruit with cheese.  Apples, melons, pears, peaches, grapes all seem to go well with sharp cheese, maybe an ounce or so.  It has a low glycemic index, which is convenient in that I don't get too hungry later in the day.  It doesn't meet the 30% guideline, however.

For the kids, we have the following favorites:

- yogurt with granola +/- fruit (note granola is processed food - you have to put together the ingredients and cook it - it has lot of sweetener and oil or butter)

- oatmeal - we always make it with milk at our house, because our kids don't drink that much the rest of the day

- stewed fruit (from the stuff you have been dehydraing, for example)

- fruit smoothies with milk or mint tea.  You can use frozen, canned or rehydrated fruit in winter.  Some people can juice.

- baked goods (I put together the ingredients for quick breads the night before (without mixing dry and wet), mix and bake in the morning).  Another possibility is reheating frozen muffins, zucchini bread or waffles.

- bread with jam, or butter

- eggs, either previously hard-boiled, or any way you like them

- why not category: unconventional items like popcorn, salad, any leftovers, salsa and chips - why don't we like savory tastes for breakfast and what is it you would enjoy?

More ideas please comment below!

I have read several lists of what to preserve for winter.  I have hesitated to adapt them to my situation because we are such a work in progress with the kids slowly acquiring a taste for a greater diversity of foods.  Also, my overriding goal is to re-localize the food supply, so it makes sense to try to get a rough estimate of our staples to source locally, and not to worry so much about being complete or perfectly diverse.

So this is how I did it:

1. The first step was to make a decision that I would try to cover 30 weeks, or roughly 7 months form November through May.  I calculated that I would store food for roughly 5 days out of 7.  The rest will come from leftovers, eating out, and winter share, which will have some things that appeal to our kids (potatoes, carrots, greens). Guests will cause us to use stores faster.

2. The second step was to make a list of what produce I think I can get at least some of the kids to eat: tomato sauce, corn, broccoli, peas, pesto, tomato soup.  I also included some items I could not resist having for myself, such as edamame. roasted eggplant dip and a few prepared summer dishes (ratatouille, moussaka).

3. Then I made a guess as to how much of each of these we might eat each time we defrost some, and how often I think we would want to have that item.  I figured a quart of tomato sauce per week (between pasta sauce, pizza sauce, and some to enhance the flavor of soups or other dishes).  If I'm wrong, tomato season only begins in late July anyway, so Ill have sauce left over for early summer.  I figured we might eat a quart of corn kernels every other week, a half-pint jar of pesto, one tomato or other summer soup, a serving of broccoli, or a pint of either peas, carrots or bell peppers.  Finally, once a month, a pint of snap peas or green beans, a half-pint of eggplant dip, a pint of edamame, a prepared dish.

4. The fruit I have been stockpiling whenever I come across a surplus of it.  We will likely end up with a half-pint of jam for each week, and 15 quarts of frozen fruit, at best, as well as 8 quarts of canned peaches and apricots.  We also have 5 quarts of peach puree, which will make popsicles in June when they are extremely popular, as hot weather is a novelty, and an as yet unknown quantity of applesauce, as it looks like a bumper crop year for Boulder apples.

5. I have not planned for breakfasts, beyond the frozen fruit.  Snacks will likely be either popcorn, or bread with butter and jam, yogurt with granola, apples with peanut butter.  The kids get most lunches at school, still, and I might need a whole grocery store of well-traveled food options to slowly change that.  My husband just began getting lunch from home, so this may cause me to run out of food sooner.

6. I have a dozen or so frozen egg whites, but have not planned seriously for having farm-raised eggs all winter.  I'll just deal with the Longmont "free range" eggs and maybe keep track so I know what I need next year.  Defrosting eggs will be another component of the learning curve.

So in order, the questions to answer are:

- How many "dark day" weeks do you have where you live?

- Which seasonal foods do you want access to in the "dark day" weeks?

- How much of each food would you eat at one time (freeze or can in those quantities)?

- How many times per month would you enjoy eating that food?

That gives  you a certain number of "family portions" of each food that you can now target.  Keep track of what you finally end up with on Day 1 or "dark days".  Cross off each time you have an item, and mark the date you had it.  This should help with planning the following year.  Families with kids of course add a certain percentage to account for the kids getting older and needing more food (and no longer turning up their nose at your favorite vegetable - will you  need to freeze okra? Brussels sprouts?),

Good luck!

The question arises, especially when you come down to these later steps, about what it means to make exceptions and exemptions.

The way I see it right now, it is better to do as much something as possible than to throw in the towel because you can't stay away from oranges, for example. It is kind of like dieting - so OK, you had ice cream today, but you don't give up on your diet entirely! You dust yourself off and pick up again tomorrow where you left off.

The difference between a 100-mile diet and a weight-loss diet is that unless you sustain your weight loss choices daily and for many weeks, the pounds won't come off. In contrast, each 100-mile choice you make, such as reaching for local potatoes at Whole Foods, for exammple, instead of the cheaper Idaho potatoes, has several repercussions: you vote for the item that has emitted less carbon, you support the local economy, you influence the buying patterns of Whole Foods, and you may even get a fresher product with more nutrition.

We don't know, at this time, what level of carbon emission would save the Earth. It is probably less than we think. We do all have to do more than we are doing. And we have to talk to each other about it, because there is nothing worse than that sense of futility that comes from depriving yourself for nothing.

So which exceptions should you choose?

I have a sense that (just as for health or weight loss) making stepwise changes in the right direction that you can sustain "forever" is the right way to go. Sure you could eat 100% local for a week. You'd get hungry, you'd think "this is for the birds!", you'd eat too much beef, and if you picked your month right, you wouldn't really miss anything crucial.

But if you make changes this month, such as eating only market vegetables, then keep it up next month because it was fun and delicious, and the month after that because you know the farmers depend on you, etc... then eventually the food system will change. And if then next month, you find a source of local oats, barley, millet and buckwheat, and cut back on rice by 80%, again you have changed Big Agriculture, and you have impacted the forces that would have us all eat genetically modified corn and soy in three hundred different forms.

This is what I am doing: I am using as exceptions the foods that allow me to drastically cut down on processed foods, out-of-season foods, and non-local foods. For example, peanut butter is how my picky 6 year old deals with the fact that he can't/won't fill up on asparagus, or quiche, or onion tart... The California-fruit-of-the-month (strawberries in May, cherries in June) is how we deal with the fact that I have cut back on boxed breakfast cereals drastically (75% or so). Then there are a host of non-local products I still buy because I don't have my act together (cooking oil, bread, sliced turkey, California leeks, yogurt, popsicles...). These are things I could learn to do without, get better at baking myself, spend more time cooking and slicing, grow myself, and make myself - it makes me dizzy just to think about it! Nevertheless, it is happening little by little.

But most importantly is what I do - each summer week, I give $50 to Cure Farm in vegetable and fruit shares, plus eggs, and another $50 to market vendors on Saturdays. That's easily the majority of our food dollars spent in Boulder County. This is so powerful that if everyone in Boulder made the same decision, we would simply run out of food. Hah! If that doesn't preserve farmland and help the local economy, I don't know what would!

There comes a time in August and September where it may be all you can do to freeze vegetables before they spoil. One trick, for example, is to freeze tomatoes whole until you can get to canning tomato sauce.

Another trick is to take some vacation one day per week - if you work outside the home - or otherwise planning to spend a good part of one day each week preserving food for the winter. The main advantage of this, other than preserving the tastes and memories of summer, and keeping your food local, is that you do "cook ahead", in a sense, canning or freezing foods in a way that will simplify your life in winter - pesto, tomato sauce, and in some cases whole dinners.

One disadvantage of spending time in the kitchen in August and September is that it gets really hot in there... I have heard of folks canning using an outdoor setup, and also people using a solar food dehydrator. I'm afraid this is a topic where I am getting ahead of myself, because I really haven't tried it. I still find it daunting, trying to get dinner on the table and actually trying to fit in food preservation simultaneously. However, I can see that it would get easier with practice - for example, I could can a small batch aa I am sauteing vegetables for dinner - it's just that canning is so new it requires my full attention at thie time. Meanwhile, the strawberry-rhubarb jam I did make sits in the refrigerator where it withstands daily assaults from the kids.