Chris Wolf Eat Local Blog
September 1, 2008
Happy September, friends!
In case I haven't told you about it yet, I have challenged myself for the month of September to only buy food that has been grown, raised, or made locally (Whatcom County and surrounding areas). This is both a personal challenge for myself to learn, eat healthier, and make a smaller eco-footprint; and also a bit of a "publicity stunt" to spread the word about eating local to people around me. IF YOU DON'T WANT TO GET WEEKLY EMAIL UPDATES FOR THE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER, JUST LET ME KNOW.
Since I announced this Eating Local challenge, I have received immense support and encouragement! Many of you said that you are already "locavores," and many others are joining me for a day or a week on this challenge. Hooray! A special thank-you to Elizabeth and Carol for donating homegrown apples, Stacey for the locally-caught crab, and Wendy, Marcy, and Mica for the fresh urban eggs.
I kicked off the month with a delicious crab omlette for breakfast today from the aforementioned eggs and crab, along with fresh local tomatoes from Dandelion Organic Delivery and basil from my herb garden. It was so pretty I had to take a picture of it (see attached photo), and more scrumptious than I can put into words!
I have had so much fun exploring and buying local food to have on hand. My favorite finds so far:
Guilette's Busy Bees local honey, sold at the Food Co-op and many other places
Belly Timber bars, made locally and a great healthy snack for on-the-go
Pleasant Valley raw handmade cheese- yum! Available at the Co-op and probably elsewhere
Hazelnuts!! from Holmquist farm in Whatcom County
Grass-fed bison meat from Rockin R Ranch in Skagit
and of course, all the plump, juicy, FREE blackberries I could pack into our freezer (not to mention currants, huckleberries, thimbleberries, blackcap raspberries, selal berries, and oregon grapes while hiking).
I also interviewed Mallard's Ice Cream today-- they source all the fruit in their ice cream creations locally, and many other ingredients like peppermint and basil (yes, we had basil ice cream for dessert tonight-- it is amazing.) The ingredients they can't get locally (ie; coconut) they buy organic and free-trade and all of that-- a really wonderful and community-minded company.
If you live in NW Washington, Sustainable Connections is holding a whole bunch of great activities Sept 7 to 14th for Eat Local Week, including a farm tour, a harvest dinner, and some excellent films.
Information below in this email or at www.SustainableConnections.org.
My favorite eat-local moment so far happened at the Bellingham Farmer's Market. I bought a whole basket of zucchini from this cute old man farmer, partly because I like to make zucchini bread but mostly because he was so adorable. Then I sat and watched a very talented group of jazz musicians: a sax player, bass, and all the percussion was done by a young man tap-dancing on a shiny piece of wood. For a minute it felt like being in New Orleans or something. I only had a dollar and wished I had more to put in their open sax case. So I put in my dollar and a big fat zucchini. The jazz guys were delighted and said they would fry it up that evening (the zucchini, not the dollar).
And finally, the Lemonade-Out-Of-Local-Lemons Award goes to my friend Austin, who writes: "To celebrate eat local week here in the Mississippi Delta, I will eat pickled pigs feet, Cheetoes with cheese on top, deep-fried pickles, Kool-Aid pickles, etc."
Love to you all... more news to come...
--Chris "lettuce rejoice" Wolf
September 7 2008
Howdy friends! I am delighted to say that my first week of eating local has been a complete success. It has been a bit of a learning curve, but that is what I was hoping for.
I started with tours of the two local healthy-food markets, the Community Food Co-op and Terra Organica. (Come to think of it, I should tour a "regular" grocery store too, for comparison.) Employees at these stores told me that they stock "as much local produce and products as we can." Upon closer inspection, this seems to be about 50% of the produce (this time of year), and maybe 3% of the packaged products on the shelves. There were great local salad greens, carrots, zucchini, onions, blueberries, tomatoes, and many other fruits and vegetables. (The other fruits and veggies were from Oregon, California, Texas, Mexico, South America, New Zealand, etc.) Kudos to both stores for labeling all their produce with where they come from and, when local, the name of the exact farm or farmer.
On the shelves of these grocery stores, it was quite a learning experience to try to find where each product was originally grown and then processed before being shipped here. Try this the next time you go grocery shopping-- look at the package of each of your usual purchases and try to tell where it originated. The food items that I have bought for years-- like salsa, or gluten-free cookies, or olive oil, or breakfast cereal-- carried labels with names of companies based in California, Colorado, New York, or even Italy or Spain. Did you know that each food item in an American meal has traveled an average of 1500 miles to get to the eater? What amazed me even more was how hard it was to tell where the food had actually been grown or processed. Just because this salsa company is based in Connecticut, did not give any indication where the tomatoes or onions or cilantro were grown, and where they were shipped to to be smashed and cooked and squirted into this jar before they were shipped here to Bellingham, WA. With any processed food we would be hard-pressed to trace it back to the soil it was grown in. Even when we find it at a health food store.
My grocery store foraging did reveal some local "berries" among the "brambles" of food products:
Greenbank Farms organic cheese, surprisingly affordable
Twin Brook local milk and cream-- in glass bottles that you bring back to the store to reuse! (It makes me nostalgic to drink cream-top milk from a glass bottle, and I'm too young to even remember those days.)
Grace Harbor goat milk and yogurt-- excellent in breakfast smoothies
Fruitabu fruit leathers, portable all-fruit snacks made in Grapeview, WA
Island Spring tofu, made on Vashon Island-- a lot closer than the other tofus made in California
Hempler's pork sausages and Twisted S Ranch buffalo meats
Erin Baker's Peanut Butter granola-- yum!
Bija sunflower seed and pumpkin seed oil, made in Lynden from mostly local seeds,
and HoneyMoon's Ruby Mead-- made from local raspberries, I can't wait to taste it!
Next I made the local shopping easier on myself, and checked out some places to get all-local food and products. The Local Farm Exchange (1314 Railroad Ave) is a great little cooperative store-front that sells fresh veggies and flowers from local farms Monday through Saturday. It has that cute little mom-and-pop atmosphere where you just feel good giving them your money. And the Bellingham Farmer's Market is a huge, amazing department store of local vegetables, fruits, herbs, cheeses, meats, meals, ice cream, clothing, jewelry, soaps, artwork, and even musical instruments. For my non-Bellingham friends, check and see if your area has a farmer's market or produce stand where growers sell their lovingly grown and harvested goods. I'll bet they do, and I'll bet you will have a completely different experience buying a tomato there than at SuperDuper Grocery.
An important part of eating local for me, although not for everyone, is learning to grow some of my own food. More about gardening in my next email. But for now, I will just say that I am very grateful for the chance I had this week to garden and learn from a true master, my friend Matia. The way she caressed chunks of mature compost in her motherly hands and called them "yummy" was a beautiful thing to witness. Although I was forced to take home seven huge zucchinis as the price for her gardening lessons :)
ATTACHED ARE TWO GREAT SEASONALLY APPROPRIATE RECIPIES-- Blackberry Mousse, and Chocolate Zucchini Cake-- I promise this is the yummiest thing you will ever do with a zucchini.
My favorite local moment this week was the Sustainable Connections picnic today, feasting on local super-sweet corn on the cob, listening to great live bluegrass, playing water-balloon volleyball, and watching Mr. Boxx of Boxx Berry Farm give all the kids (and some giggling adults) rides around on his tractor. All under the warm September sun with a glorious view of snow-capped Mt. Baker. This is the really, really good life.
This week the "Best Local Honey" award goes to my own honey, Jason, for surprising me with a big bag of locally-made Chocolate Neccessities dark chocolate bark studded with Whatcom-county Hazelnuts. I could get used to this.
--Chris "can't be beet" Wolf
September 21, 2008
Good morning friends,
I just finished my breakfast of Broadview Farm eggs, sauteed with a zucchini I picked myself, topped with fresh tomatoes I picked myself (and a sprinkle of non-local sea salt). My local eating month is still going strong-- in fact, I have been so busy with local eating, educating myself, and food-growing, that I haven't written y'all for a while!
The first half of this month for me was about exploring where our food comes from (most of it FAR away and very processed) and where I can buy food that is actually grown around here (Farmer's markets, health food stores, and even some mainstream grocery stores like Haggen). The second half of the month is developing into two themes: 1) Exploring the actual growing process, talking with farmers and gardeners, and getting my hands dirty as much as possible... 2) Experimenting with methods to preserve some of the bounteous harvest of our region, so that my household can continue to "eat local" through the winter.
This year was the first year I made any real attempt at gardening in my own yard, and given how much I DIDN'T know when I planted last June, we got surprisingly mixed results! We have actually eaten many of our own decent radishes, carrots, pole beans, romaine lettuce, basil, oregano, sage, cilantro, and rosemary-- and tons of yummy sugar snap peas! Oh, and one and a half ears of corn! Even though the slugs and bugs got all the cucumbers, watermelon, pumpkin, and spinach plants. Now that I am studying about gardening (from books, friends, websites), I am convinced that next year will be a bigger success. Next year I will do fancy things like fertilize the soil with compost and weed my garden beds.
We have had chickens in the past, and there is nothing like gathering super-fresh eggs in the morning from your own yard to make breakfast. We are working on a new chicken coop now so we can have hens again. Some of you may be intimidated by growing vegetables or raising chickens, but it is amazingly easy. As others of you already know-- with a little information (or not, as with my first garden) and the willingness to try, anyone can raise some of their own healthy, satisfying food! It can be as simple as doing a Google search for "how to grow rasperries," getting a used book on "Raising Chickens for Fun and Profit," or just buying some seeds or plant starts and following the tiny directions on the package.
I have had some wonderful garden-guides help educate me this month. Matia, who runs the Outback garden at Fairhaven College, let Callista and me come and help one sunny day, and taught us about compost and answered our many questions from her depth of gardening knowledge. My mom took me to meet Donna and Sam, and their son John who run Bellingham Country Gardens out on the Kelly road. This sweet farming family gave me a tour of the small, sustainable farm they have run for 38 years, and let me pull my own onions, carrots, and beets out of the ground. U-pick vegetables! What a great idea! From from being protective about "trade secrets," they generously answered all my questions about plants and agriculture.
And for the past few weeks I have been volunteering with Amaris on the Food Bank Farm. Ponder for a moment the beauty of this: a grant-supported, all organic farm that grows fresh vegetables and berries, all of which are harvested by volunteers who want to help out and learn about gardening/farming, and then immediately delivered to the Bellingham Food Bank where they are given for free to anyone who needs food. Fresh, local, healthy, organic produce (500 lbs of it my first day there) is available for every member of our community, while keeping the farmland healthy and not-concrete-covered and educating people at the same time. Talk about a cause you can believe in! It has been so fun and satisfying to get my hands and knees all dirty while transplanting cabbage seedlings, and pick box after box of ripe red tomatoes and crisp green peppers in the greenhouses (imagine the delicious smells!)
Hmmm... this email is already quite long, and I haven't even talked about food preserving. You will have to sit on the edge of your seats waiting for that next episode of my dramatic local-eating reality show. Until then, there are two GREAT movies that I want to recommend:
• Good Food, an insightful and touching documentary on NW Washington farming and farmers, available at www.goodfoodthemovie.com or borrow the copy that I bought. and...
• The Real Dirt on Farmer John, which follows the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a family farmer, a delightful movie, available at most video stores.
--Chris "you-say-tomato-I-say-yum" Wolf
September 28, 2008
Ah, the trees are turning brilliant colors, sunshine alternates hourly with rain and wind... Autumn is unmistakably settling onto the Pacific Northwest. It's the time of year when a young local eater's fancy turns toward... "Holy crap! How am I going eat local fruits and vegetables through the long, dark winter??"
I know that I only officially set out to eat locally for the month of September, but I must say, I am quite hooked. It has been so delicious, so fun, and so important, that I want to keep doing it even after the glorious harvest season. Therefore my partner Jason and I have been giving ourselves a crash course in the Art and Science of Food Preserving-- mostly Canning, Freezing, and Dehydrating.
A few weeks ago, my wonderful Nana (grandma) invited me to come help her can peaches. She does this every year, but this year I had the honor of learning this tradition from my own Nana. She patiently showed me how to blanch, peel, and slice the peaches, heat the jars and lids, fill them, seal them correctly, and boil them. I took each scalding hot jar out of the boiling water with tongs, and listened for that exhilarating "ping!" sound each lid makes as it sucks down and tells you that you did it right. When we finished, we had a very satisfying row of beautiful pink-yellow peaches in pint jars, each containing exactly one peach pit, as is my Nana's custom. (As if to say "This is no can of peaches you bought in a store, these were lovingly canned by human hands.") And more importantly, at the end of the day, my Nana and I had hearts full of the time spent together, stories and jokes shared, and a food tradition passed down from woman to woman, the way it has always been done.
As soon as I learned proper canning technique, I wanted to can everything in sight! Jason and I made applesauce and blackberry jam from apples and blackberries gathered at friends' houses (thank you Elizabeth, Carol, Ginger, and Paul!) and made amazing marinara sauce from fresh tomatoes! I felt like such an Italian grandma for a little while there, tasting and adding another clove of garlic, tasting and adding another HEAD of garlic, until it started to taste right. It was only after we canned a whole batch of this delightful marinara that we read a recipe for it (people have done this before!) and discovered that since we had not added extra acid like lemon juice, our sauce was not safe in the jars. And no amount of fresh garden-grown basil, oregano, and sage is worth getting botulism. So we had to open all our perfectly pinged jars of sauce, pour it into tupperwares, and freeze it. *sigh* Some recipes just seem to work better if you read them before cooking, I guess.
Freezing has been a blast though! We bought a big chest freezer that was posted on craigslist, and our friend Bobbie lent us one of these suck-all-the-air-out-and-seal-it machines. If you have never used one, they are so fun! (Yes, I am the biggest food geek ever.) We have been vacuum sealing and freezing peaches, grated zucchini, blueberries, blackberries, corn on the cob, and Lummi tribe-caught salmon. When the Hard Winter hits, or Peak Oil, or any other disaster, our family will eat like kings for like... two whole weeks!
OK, my last little food-geeky thing, and then I will leave you all alone for now. Dehydrating! Sucking all the water out of things until they shrivel up is just about as fun as vacuum sealing things, except it takes a lot longer. Jason and I have been slicing up apples, plums, and peaches to make dried fruit, and the best thing yet... sun-dried tomatoes!! (OK, there is no actual "sun" involved, but "dried tomatoes" just sounds gross.) I had no idea that anything could taste as yummy as a fresh tomato right off the vine, sliced and dried. I will probably have eaten all of them before Halloween; it's like trying to keep chocolate in the house.
I know we will come nowhere close to feeding ourselves all winter on the food we have stored this month. But still, there is something that feels really neat about doing things for ourselves. I have learned that just about anything I buy in the store (spaghetti sauce, jam, butter, salad dressing, anything) I can make at home. I have also learned that ANYTHING you want to learn how to make requires just one instruction book: the internet. By Google-searching "how to freeze zucchini" or "apple butter recipes" or "cheese making" or even "homemade biodiesel" you can find detailed instructions for whatever you want to do. Although I have to say, if you can learn it in a steamy kichen from your grandma, that's even better.
The "You're A Peach" award goes to my Nana. With lots of love.
An unbelievably scrumptious crumble recipe is attached, full of seasonal goodies.
--Chris-Cross Applesauce Wolf
October 14, 2008
Well my friends, September is over, and with it my official Eating Local Month. For the last two weeks, I have been trying to compose a "wrap-up" email to send out to y'all about how it all went, and I am finding it pretty difficult to put this whole experience into words. Maybe I will just try to summarize a few things I have learned, knowing that the learnings are still coming and will be for some time...
1) It feels deeply satisfying to choose something that is important to us, and devote ourselves to it for a period of time. It doesn't really matter what it is, or for how long, but as long as it is something we believe in, then it will have profound rewards. In our culture, many actions have monetary or material rewards (ie: working for money), and it is rewarding on a whole different level when we engage in something simply because it is meaningful.
2) There is so much more to Whatcom County than I ever realized. I have always been on the "city" side of the City/County split that is prevalent all across our country, not understanding or having proper respect for the agriculture that supports all of us. Meeting many local farmers, getting down and dirty on a local farm, and learning how much knowledge and hard work it takes to grow nice food, have helped me feel like more of a part of this cycle of sustenance, instead of just one of the tenderfooted city folk who scarf up the produce without ever knowing whose loving care was involved in growing it. (No offense meant to all the tenderfooted city folk reading this.)
3) You get a lot of fruit flies when your kitchen is jam-packed with fresh produce and you have an indoor worm-bin. We have had to learn a lot of fruit-fly execution methods, such as a bowl of vinegar with dish soap in it, and sucking them in the backside of a hairdryer.
4) Death is necessary for life. And I'm not just talking about fruit flies. It's all part of the same united cycle. Tearing up my garden and placing it on the compost pile, to decompose and become fertilizer for next year's garden, taught me this in a powerful way. I stood there staring at this pile of limp plants for quite some time when I had this realization, with a tear in my eye and a little smile on my face. It put a lot of things into a "big picture" for me. Being more closely involved in the process of growing and harvesting, life and death, soil, weeds, and earthworms, held a lot of these spiritual kind of revelations for me. Nature holds all the answers for our human dramas and dilemmas.
5) Despite all my great classes in Feminism at Whitman College, there is a little part of me whose sole desire in life is to be a good farm wife. It fills my heart in an indescribable way to spend the afternoon chopping and cooking and stirring and baking, to set a hearty meal before my family when they get home. I never thought I would be so Donna Reedish, or succumb to the oppressive life of "slaving over a hot stove all day," but I do love it. I am lucky to live in this age, where I can grow a kitchen garden and make homemade pesto, and also vote!
6) The local diet is by far the best "diet" I have been on. I have been on one diet or another pretty constantly since age 10. The Food Exchanges diet when I was diagnosed with Type I Diabetes, then later a low-fat/low-calorie diet for competitive high school gymnastics, a vegetarian/vegan diet for environmental and animal rights reasons, gluten-free diet and strict elimination diets to treat my food allergies (including eating nothing but lamb and sweet potatoes!), a low-carb diet in a desperate attempt to control blood sugars, and a raw-food diet. Interestingly, eating local means that my food is comprised of fresh fruits and vegetables and humanely-raised meat and dairy, creating a very healthy diet for my body and for the planet and its other residents-- really covering all the things I was trying for with previous diets. Plus, I get to saute my mushrooms in REAL butter and pour REAL honey in my smoothies and pour CREAM over my raspberries-- how many other "diets" let you do that??
So I guess this has been a month of me asking the big question "What should I EAT?" I have a great deal of respect for the writings of Michael Pollan, whose mantra is to "eat food (not edible food-like substances), not too much, mostly plants..." and Carlo Petrini, who recommends that we eat food that is "good (fresh and delicious), clean (environmentally sound), and fair (to the workers who grew it)." I highly recommend their books-- respectively-- In Defense of Food and Slow Food Nation.
And in an even bigger picture, this month has been about me asking myself, "How do I want to LIVE?" The more intimately I am involved in my own existence (ie: growing and cooking my own food, walking and biking for transportation, composting my trash into fertilizer), the more WHOLE I feel. More in touch with the Creation, with my community, with my family, with the generations before me and after me, and with my own body and spirit. More mindful. More patient. More aware of abundance and less aware of lack. More joyous, even about the small things.
I feel pretty undisturbed by this huge "financial crisis" our country is in. My wealth is not in a bunch of numbers in farway computers that represent the concept of money which represents the reality of food. My wealth is in the rich soil, rain water, and sunshine, and knowing that everything we need can come out of that. If (or when) the economy as we know it crashes completely, my family and friends will be well-fed. With plenty left over.
With much love and gratitude to all of you,
--Chris "you are what you eat" Wolf
