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.