Bowing to peer pressure from her fans, Laura has graciously decided to continue her Dark Days Eat Local Challenge through March. Wahoo!
There is still room for more to join, so if you missed it before, go for it - try it out!
New Rules.
Since this is sort of a new beginning, I’m going to change our rules slightly. Laura’s rules require one meal a week to be composed of 90% local ingredients.
1. 90% local for every meal, an average of 50% from the garden.
Matt and my rule for ourselves is more strict: we will eat 90% local for each and every meal. And, we will do our best to use at least 50% of our ingredients from our own garden. However, since breakfasts are pretty tough on that score, we will allow that 50% to be an average over all of our meals for the week.
The reason for this change is that I found myself feeling guilty for eating local oatmeal in the mornings, and I don’t think I need to feel guilty. As long as my dinner that night comes largely from the garden.
2. Flexibility when Traveling.
Our other more lax rule is for traveling. We will do our best to eat locally while traveling. However, my documentary work is going to take me to some pretty exotic places in the next few months, and I need to feel like I can be a good guest in others’ houses without feeling guilty about it. It’s already going to be a bit difficult because I’m a vegetarian.
So, if we’re traveling, any meal that we eat on our own (ie that we have the most control over) will be from as many local ingredients as possible. And if we have a choice, we will always pick the local vegetarian option.
Sampling.
I’ll try not to bore you by talking about meals you’ve seen over and over. Matt and I are working on broadening our repertoire of meals, so hopefully you’ll start to see some new things!
1. Sunday morning’s breakfast: Local grapefruit topped with a bit of organic fair trade sugar, local homemade jam, local butter, and Matt’s famous biscuits made with local flour and butter. Served with fair trade, organic, shade grown, locally roasted coffee (pic).
2. Saturday Night’s Dinner: Here we broke down. This is something we almost never do, but thought I’d be totally honest and share! We had an amazing salad from the garden, with arugula, mustard greens, four types of carrots, scallions, and broccoli. And... we had frozen pizza. California Pizza Kitchen. The company is local technically, but... yeah. We were out running errands and just got too hungry (pic).
3. Friday Night’s Dinner: Grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches made from homemade bread, local cheese, and tomatoes from the garden (ripened in the garage). And raw veggies from the garden: 6 types of carrots, english breakfast radishes, and broccoli di chicco.
4. Thursday Night’s Dinner: Local whole wheat pasta with tomato sauce made from garden tomatoes, seared kale and scallions from the garden, and a side of carrots.
And before Thursday, I was quite ill and eating soft food that wasn’t worth posting about!
