Day 4 - Fall is for Lovers

It feels like fall (at least for a while) and I have fully submerged myself in it.

Instead of debating local food and where to get it, I'm going to relish in a traditional fall meal with an easily local-grown vegetable.

Two butternut squash have come in the past few CSA boxes.  Butternut squash is great because it's delicious and it can keep for a looooooooooooong time unrefrigerated and uncooked.  It also makes me feel like so many things fall.  Endearingly (or not) termed 'butt nut' squash by a friend, I took the two I have saved over the past weeks and cooked 'em up.

Starting the love affair can be hard (it involves time and patience and excitement), but like all good affairs, it is worth the effort.  The first portion of my butternut squash affair involves the cutting and peeling.

1.  Cut the butternut squash at the top and bottom so it sits on it's end, then slice in half the long way.  Take out the yucky sticky insides with a spoon, much like coring out a jack-o-lantern, and then peel.  I have used very little words here to describe a VERY long and tedious process.  You can really spare your neighbors some curse words by using a quality peeler.  At this point you can preheat the oven to 450 degrees.  Here's what they should look like:


Naked Butt Nut

2.  Once your butt nut is naked, chop into 1/2" pieces and toss in a bowl with olive oil, salt, and pepper - enough to coat.  Your concoction should look like this:

One important thing to note here is the glass of wine.  It is important because it not only keeps you a happy locavore and your food tasting good, but also aids the stinging pain on  your hand. 

Excitement about the finished product can sometimes leave you too excited to remember general safety.  I, in a squash-crazed love transe, grabbed a cookie sheet that was sitting in the broiler drawer of my oven (which was preheating at 450) with bare hands.  Yowza.

Sometimes love hurts.  Here is a song dedicated to my favorite gourd.  Enjoy while cooking.

3.  Bake in the oven for 45 minutes at 450 degrees.  I personally like it a little crispy on the outside so I leaved it a little longer.  Even burnt, the squash can come out sweet and savory - just like a well cooked lover.

4.  While the squash is baking, chop up some sage (I happened to be growing some) and toss in a bowl with more salt and olive oil.

5.  Pull out the finished squash and spatula into the bowl, toss, and viola!

Apart from the peeling and cutting, this dish is hands-down one of my favorites of all time. 

Another little tip for cooking - listen to a great Patsy Cline mix.  She always makes my food taste more delicious.

What I ate today:

• Squash from CSA (10)
• Backyard Sage (0)
• Olive Oil from FM (counted in previous days)
• Salad greens and tomato from CSA (10)
• Backyard avocado (0)
• Leftover reheated omlette from the day before (0)

Today's total: 10
Grand Total: 493

Sidenote

It feels like fall today, and I'm devastated that no one locally makes this.  Fall is going to be strange without pumpkin ale.

I'm salivating a little...

Day 3 - The Kitten or the Egg?

While I've been waiting patiently for my order of wheat to come in from Huasana Valley Farms (see order form here if you're interested) apart from produce I have had little.  I roasted a whole chicken for dinner the other night in some local olive oil, lemon, rosemary, and honey and I also had oysters and mussels harvested just off shore for another feast.  While delicious, not exactly on the budget for an every day type of meal. 

For the next 28 days protein is going to be cheapest in the form of farm fresh eggs, and I've eaten a lot of these already.  My aunt and uncle have a few backyard chickens at their home in Santa Maria, and have more than enough to share - and they generously do so.  These are a score because a) they're free! and b) they're 0 miles of transport since my aunt travels (with eggs) down to Santa Barbara twice a week for work and delivers them to me when she does.

We'd like to get some chickens of our own soon.  Eggs can go a long way for different recipes and as far as pets go, I don't think chickens are too bad.  Our cat Kitty, however, doesn't lay anything but around the house.  I've discussed this with her and she doesn't seem to care.


This is Kitty not caring.

After thinking long and hard on other non-produce dishes I could use eggs with (besides making bread), I've decided on trying to make mayonnaise.  Mayo is simple because it only requires a few ingredients (all of which I can source locally), and will be great for making veggie sandwiches once I have my bread completed.

I found this great posting on About.com on making mayo.  I like this recipe in particular because it tells and shows you how to make single-egg mayo, for people not wanting large batches.  When making homemade mayonnaise you are not using the preservatives that mass-manufactured mayonnaise does, so it can go bad rather quickly (keeps for a few days).  Because of this, small batches will work best for me.

I also like this recipe because it shows you how to make mayonnaise without a KitchenAid and I like recipes that don't require expensive cooking equipment (see more of my frustration on this when I write about baking bread).

I noticed in this article, however, that they mentioned something about using pasteurized eggs, which mine will not be.  The author writes, "...an important thing to remember is that since these egg yolks aren't being cooked, for safety reasons you should always use pasteurized eggs when making mayonnaise at home". 

This got me thinking.... what, exactly, do large egg producers do to eggs to get them pasteurized?  The sum of it is that pateurization means heating the egg to 140 degrees in order to kill bacteria such as salmonella, in mass production this means a series of hot water baths that don't end up cooking the egg.  If you enjoy being thoroughly confused Here is a wikipedia article about the process.  I also found an article on how to home-pasteurize your eggs in the microwave, which seemed extremely complicated.

Conpiracy theorist at heart, I'm wondering if this is totally necessary, and how the safety of eating eggs from our own backyard actually matches up to the safety of eating eggs all produced in one large facility (think recent egg snafu this summer with 1,600 illnesses).  I'll take the risk.

What I ate:

• Egg (0) Omelette with backyard avocado (0) and backyard tomato (0), cilantro from CSA (10), and olive oil (34 - counted yesterday)
• Pistachios (64 - counted yesterday)
• Peach from Lompoc (54 - counted yesterday)
• SYV Wine (45)

Todays Total Miles: 207
Grand Total: 538

Day 2 - The Benjamins

Eating within a 100 mile radius is expensive.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the events I attended yesterday, I also blew a lot of money on food – and only enough to last one person about a week. If I am going to continue eating locally and not give my husband a massive coronary I will need to be picky about prices, too.

Economies of scale allow the food industry to mark down prices on food that's not so good for us, and hidden costs in non-local, processed, and non-organic foods (diabetes, autism, environmental effects, unstable economic conditions, unfair labor practices) far outweigh the increased prices of local and organic foods. The hope is that with more demand on the local food system and the organic food system, we can change this. Here is a great article on the costs of organics if you’re interested.

For about $130 I was able to purchase:
1 medium chicken, 4 peaches, 1 head of lettuce, a basket of baby artichokes, a small bag of pistachios, a basket of yellow cherry tomatoes, 4 beets, a dozen eggs, a bottle of olive oil, apple cider vinegar, 2 small jars of apple cider, ½ lb. cheese., a dozen oysters, 1 lb mussels, and some honey.

Now I realize that I was also purchasing mostly non-produce, which is why the tab ran me so high, but we receive a Community Sponsored Ag (CSA) box weekly from John Given’s Farm, and I needed things to supplement the produce we’re already getting. These produce boxes give us more than we can even eat on a given week (that should change with this challenge), and it is affordable and fresh. If you’re interested in joining a CSA, you can check for one in your local area here.

Something I won’t be buying local again, to my great dismay, was the cheese. I spent the morning researching local cheeses, only to find one dairy within my purchasing area, Rinconada Dairy, that raises the animals, makes the cheese, and is sold here in town. I bought 2 types of the Rinconata Cheese, ‘La Panza’ and ‘Chaparrel’ at C’est Cheese on Santa Barbara St. (sidenote - I could spend all day here). Although the cheese was delicious, at $28 a pound, not the type of everyday cheese I was looking for.

Artisan cheese from SLO. This is what $28/lb cheese looks like:

I was invited over to my friend Blair’s mom’s house for dinner. Blair's mom, Leticia, is a local-eating guru. She doesn't waste anything, down to rabbits that her cat Mocha drags into the house. She and her husband Tim grow most of their own food. They had fig, orange, lemon, grapefruit, and pomegranite trees, peppers, corn, fennel, tomato, brussel sprouts, lettuce, etc, etc, etc. I was really happy to see jars and jars of home-canned fruits lined up in their kitchen. This is something I've been meaning to learn how to do. Now isn't this a good way to lessen the cost of eating local? Unfortunately not all of us have such nice, lush gardens, but most of us do have a little room enough for a tomato bush or herbs, right? Also, canning that leftover fruit and vegetables from our CSA boxes will be great in the winter when the variety is limited.

Leticia and Tim's Garden:
Fig, Honey, and Cheese plate (fig compliments of their garden):
Something exciting about eating locally is the wine! Lucky for us we live in one of the best places in the world to buy local and organic wines. I'm using this challenge to my full advantage and am planning on sampling a number of them.

Pigeon feathers stuck in the label of one bottle made me smile. This wine must not have travelled far to get to my glass.

What did I eat?

• 2 Peaches from an organic farm in Lompoc (54)
• Free-Range chicken (44) from Healthy Family Farms cooked in Leticia's lemon (0), rosemary from our yard (0), avocado blossom honey (9.5) from San Marcos Farms, and mmmm my favorite local olive oil (34) from Olive Hill Farm
• Santa Barbara Pistachios (64, farm in Maricopa)
• Santa Barbara Winery Chardonnay - (51, grapes grown in the Santa Rita Hills, made in Santa Barbara)
• Rinconada Cheese (104) with Leticia's figs (0) and honey (counted above)
• Mill Rd. Apple Cider - oops! This apple cider was over 100 miles, from Paso Robles - minus points! (123)

Grand Total: 483 miles

Day 1 - Gluttony v. Grapefruit

October 1 came fast.

Last night my husband and I decided to celebrate my last day of distant-cuisine by ordering 4 gigantic sushi rolls at Shintori Sushi. We couldn't just go for local-ish food with Mexican or even divulge in the European cuisine. No, we had to go all the way to Japan and stuff our sacks full of unsustainable fish, enriched sticky white rice, tofu made with soybeans most likely from Brazil, topped off with a big, fat beer produced in the oldest brewery in Japan by a German.



It was dericious.

This morning, however, reality hit. I was completely unprepared. It was time to get smart or starve. Lucky for me I work at the Foodbank. The Foodbank has a little program called 'Backyard Bounty' where volunteers, led by our fearless BYB Coordinator, Doug Hagenson, harvest fruit and vegetables from local estates, orchards, etc to bring back and distribute through our warehouses to those in need. The produce sourced through the Backyard Bounty Program is extra-special because not only is it local and organic, but it is DECLICIOUS produce that would otherwise go to waste. This morning I was lucky enough to find grapefruit samples from last Saturday's harvest. This grapefruit was heavy, juicy, and overall a lovely breakfast.

If you're interested in the program, you can find out more here: http://www.foodbanksbc.org/backyardbounty.html

Doug will also be at the Sol Food Festival this coming weekend to promote the program.

Here is Doug with his grapefruit:

Here are the volunteers kind enough to harvest it on a 100 degree Saturday:

I ate it without sugar, in case you're wondering, because a) that would be cheating and b) it didn't need it.

For lunch I had this dish made from a neighbors' avocado tree and organic tomatoes from Lompoc:

I'm looking forward to expanding my shopping list outside of just produce. Tomorrow's going to be a big day for keying in to where I can find more local food types. I'll be attending 3 local food events; the Santa Barbara Fishermen's Market to get some local-caught fresh fish, the Santa Barbara Farmer's Market for some eggs, oils, and hopefully dairy, and the Sol Food Festival, which will be a great kick-off to my month-long endeavor.

For being totally unprepared, day 1 was a success. I will celebrate my great, procrastinator's fortune by picking up some Santa Ynez Valley red and heartily gulping it down.

What am I getting myself into?

31 days of eating ONLY organic foods grown or produced within 100 mile radius. Why?

A million tiny hints pushed me into this challenge came about during the month of September, but here are the top 3:


The Spark


My book club chose Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver for September/October, a book about the rewards and challenges of growing your own food and depending on your community for what you eat. Barbara describes of her work, "Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, this book (released May 2007) tells the story of how our family was changed by one year of deliberately eating food produced in the place where we live."

Barbara and her family keep a webpage devoted to local eating and info on their experience, which you can find here.

I suppose my quest is sort of a mini Kingsolver journey. Certainly I'm not moving to a different state (what better place to be than California for local eating), and I can't exactly afford a farm in Santa Barbara, but my husband and I have a small garden, we subscribe to a CSA, and generally do without most processed foods so I'm not taking a huge leap. And that's what it's about, right? Making small adjustments towards the better.

The Challenge


Another reason for taking on this endeavor -I was challenged to.

I have spent my life involved in food. From waiting tables to moving to Italy with a bohemoth of a culinary student, from gardening (watching my husband garden) to working at our local Foodbank, food has been a part of my life. All this plus I like eating. I like it a whole, whole lot (see more about this in the third section of this post).

About a month ago an email came accross my desk with a link to the Edible Santa Barbara's Eat Local Challenge. Didn't I want to first hand find out how to source local wheat? Don't we want some chickens in our yard? How in the world do you can produce? Of course there are the obvious environmental concerns as well as my own selfish curiosities about using, making, and preserving local foods. No better way to satiate my curiosity and simultaneously help the envirnoment than to try this out.

For more on environmental benefits of eating locally, check out Janice Cook Knight's article here.

October is Santa Barbara's local food month. There is the SOL Foods Festival, a great kickoff and learning event for anyone embarking on the challenge. The more I dug around about what other people were doing, the more I wanted to dive in head first.


The Dividends



The last and final reason, the junk in the trunk.

In a grand love affair with all things sugar, salt, and all things fatty, I have literally become a human Peep.

When I first moved to Santa Barbara from the Central Valley I weighed an embarassing 210 pounds. Lack of exercise, a 2 am diet of taco bell, and loss of motivation had packed on the extra 65 pounds over the recommended 145 lbs for my height (5'8").

6 months in Santa Barbara, diet, exercise, a bad breakup, and 3 gall stones later, I was down to 140 lbs. I had lost an incredible 60 lbs in 6 months. I kept it off, too, for a while....

Somehow you stop looking, you get married, get comfortable, and you work long hours. You forget about your health. 4 years after I lost all that weight, I'm back to 183. As hard as it is to say that number out loud - there it is. Erin Wilson, 5'8", 28 years old, 183 lbs.

I see this challenge as a way for me to start utilizing our garden and CSA box, an encouragement and guideline for eating better. I don't think I'm making a rash generalization when I assume that eating local and organic also means that I'm eating more healthfully.

If you are what you eat, and I'm eating Santa Barbara, won't I just automatically turn out beautiful?

I'm not going to be joining any marathons or starving myself. In fact, I'll probably try and get away with trying as much food and drink as possible while on this adventure. If I happen to shed some weight while I'm at it and become a healthier person (and I think I will), great.