New rules

For the past week we have been taking a mini-break from our strict regimen as we decide how to move forward for the long term. We ate bread, chocolate (fair trade organic dark chocolate) and sushi (more on that later) and each indulged in non-local treats almost daily. Chris ate out twice for lunch and once for dinner (he had pizza, which he had really been missing), and I had coffee three times. I also ate some Skittles at work where people seem to be incessantly stocking every corner with forbidden treats. But even with all of these deviations we are still eating a mostly local diet. And we are extremely happy to continue with our experiment, especially since our “treats” were mostly disappointing and expensive.

We fully expected to be reluctant to return to our local diet after reminding our taste buds how the other half lives. I was looking forward to eating Asian food as much as Chris was looking forward to pizza, but both meals were unsatisfying. I don’t know the details of the pizza fiasco, but I do know why Sushi Ten disappointed me: The iceburg lettuce salad was sadly devoid of color, nutrients, and flavor; the miso soup tasted old and drab; and the soba noodles basically tasted like undercooked pasta with overcooked vegetables drowned in soy sauce. The squid salad tasted fresh and yummy, and Chris’ salmon roll was satisfying. But overall it was not the party our taste buds were anticipating. We have been far more impressed with our own cooking than with Sushi Ten’s offerings that night. And it’s not that we’re spectacular cooks (although I’d argue that Chris is a spectacular cook); it’s just that our food is fresh and actually tastes like food. The flavors in our home-cooked meals are diverse, distinct, and rich, unlike the conglomerate of meek tastes and textures dictated by restaurant foods that are either harvested too early so they can weather the 2,000 mile journey to Tucson, or are produced en-masse days, or weeks, before being served.

I’m not saying that all processed, non-local foods are unappealing to us. We fully enjoyed the chocolate bar, for example. We don’t intend to deny ourselves every luxury in the long run, and as we determine how we will redefine the rules of our experiment we are allowing for regular special treats. The following is a description of our modified rules for the experiment for the near future.

We will be allowing ourselves balsamic vinegar (eventually we hope to start making our own), yeast (until we have both a steady source of flour and a working sourdough starter), and spices (in moderation) on a regular basis. We feel that these items will greatly enhance our enjoyment of our food without compromising the spirit of our experiment. We will allow ourselves to eat the food that we still have in our fridge and freezer from before we started the experiment. Also, if someone visits us, bearing gifts of food local to their point of origin, we will gladly accept- and eat- the food. For example, my parents gave Chris a lot of organic honey from near their home in L.A. We will be devouring that honey! In addition, we will allow ourselves one treat each (i.e. a chocolate bar, a cup of coffee, a danish) every week. And we will occasionally eat a non-local meal if we are invited to a friend’s house or feel the deep desire for a night away from the stove. It should still be easy to eat at least 95% local foods, which is our long-term goal.

Now that we know we can thrive on a 99.9% local diet we don’t see any reason, save convenience, for eating any other way. Of course, sometimes convenience speaks louder than good health or flavor. But generally speaking we are proud to have successfully shifted the focus of our eating habits away from international corporations and toward the people in our community. We are excited to seek new food items from our region, and we look forward to experimenting with making our own vinegar, ice cream, dried fruit, yogurt, and sourdough starter. We’ll be continuing to blog as we make new discoveries.

Strange Times in Willcox

Yesterday we decided to drive to Willcox to pick apples and get some organic veggies and wine. Our friend Kim joined us for the trip. Willcox is about 75 miles southeast of Tucson, and is where much of our local produce comes from. We got to Brown’s Orchard (the organic you-pick apple and veggie farm) while it was still fairly cool outside, and were excited to spend the morning frolicking among the trees. Unfortunately, Brown’s Orchard was closed. Since we’d expended all that gas to get there, we decided to backtrack toward Apple Annie’s, another you-pick orchard that is not organic. Although we didn’t like the idea of supporting a non-organic grower, it seemed like a good opportunity to see a local apple orchard up close.

On the way, we stopped in at Visser Family Farms for some local grass-fed meats. As we drove up to the farm we passed happily grazing sheep feeding on grass. They truly were grass-fed! The woman who greeted us was cheerful and helpful, and led us to the barn where she stored cuts of lamb, pork, beef and chicken. Many of the cuts were “from the butcher” and were not local. We picked out some locally raised, hormone and antibiotic-free ground beef and a lamb shoulder roast.

Then we got back on the road toward Apple Annie’s. I was very excited to pick apples. My experiences with apple-picking are of beautiful, mature orchards in Vermont where we climbed the trees and enjoyed the comforts of a fall day in a shady, peaceful grove. The moment we entered the parking lot for Apple Annie’s I knew this was not going to be a serene Vermont-like experience.

There were about 100 cars in the dirt lot, which led to several tents and a 2-story building. Vendors were selling their salsas, Kettle Korn, cider, jam, trinkets, burgers, ice cream and baked goods. There was a gift shop inside the building, too, but we didn’t see what they had for sale. There was a small group of people with empty buckets waiting to board a tractor-pulled wagon, so we got our buckets and joined the brigade. The tractor took us on a slow, gas-guzzling journey around a small orchard filled with dwarf fruit trees. The driver announced that the second stop was where we could pick Fuji apples and Asian pears, which was what we wanted. We had noticed that there were vast quantities of fruit on the ground, and we asked the driver if we could harvest some for our chickens. Unfortunately, it is now illegal to collect fruit that has touched the ground for fear of E. coli. It seems that somewhere in California where cows were grazing among the fruit trees their dung harbored E. coli and some people eating fruit from the ground got sick. So no ground-fruit for the hens.

The apple-picking itself was fun. It’s always nice to harvest your own food, even in the company of 100 eager tourists clamboring for chemical-laden bounty. We filled a bucket with apples and then moved on to the pears. Asian pears are very sweet and crisp, and they were surprisingly refreshing in the heat of the shadeless dwarf orchard. When we had gathered all we wanted (and unwittingly left about the same amount of fruit on the ground to rot), we headed back toward the entrance to the orchard. It was only about 200 feet from where we had been picking, so there was truly no need for another tractor ride.

Apples rotting on the ground at Apple Annie’s

We waited in one of several lines to pay for our harvest. In all, we got 12 pounds of apples, 16 pounds of pears, a bag of 6 peaches, and 2 half-gallons of apple cider, and spent about $45.

Our final stop was a winery. I had been looking forward to getting some wine for quite a while since we had not had any since our first local meal. The winery (I can’t remember the name of the place) looked quaint from the outside. But as soon as we stepped in the door, we were struck by the frigid air, the extravagent decor, and the old-fashioned farm-wife outfit our hostess was wearing. It was a surreal scene. We got a taste of red wine made exclusively from local grapes (most of the wines were processed locally, but from grapes grown in vineyards in California and northern Arizona). The wine was tasty but expensive, and we opted not to buy any. It was better just to get out of the weird zone and head for home.

We learned a lot from our trip to Willcox. The farming practices at Apple Annie’s confirmed our belief that local is not always better: It takes a huge amount of resources to keep apple trees alive and producing in the arid southwest, and it might be better to abstain from eating apples altogether or find a slightly more distant but far more efficient source. We found a great source of local meat, and feel good about the farming practices and the people at Visser Family Farms. And we decided that we would really like to go back to Willcox to experience apple-picking at Brown’s Orchard when they are open.

Two things really struck us about this experience. First was the extravagant waste of fruit at Apple Annie’s. Frankly, we thought it was a travesty. We’re betting that probably at least half of the fruit produced by their trees never gets harvested, except by ground squirrels and skunks. It seemed like the “you-pick” approach was not the way to go, since inexperienced pickers like us ended up inadvertently dropping as many fruit to the ground as we managed to successfully harvest. In our opinion such orchards should have professional pickers who know what they’re doing and don’t waste huge amounts fruit. All of that wasted fruit represents an enormous amount of water, fertilizer and pesticide.

The other thing that struck us was how silly it was for us to drive an hour and a half to pick fruit. Part of the reason we went was to get a better idea of what Willcox was like, since that was where a fair bit of our local food has been coming from. However, it is extremely wasteful for three people to drive 150 miles round-trip to pick 30 pounds of fruit. It was a good lesson in how important efficient local food distribution networks are.

Hearty pie

In response to my craving for chocolate, Chris helped me make a pie. We decided to use some of our oat groats, cooked until soft and blended until somewhat creamy, along with wheat flour and mesquite meal, for the bulk of the crust. The recipe is as follows:

Preheat oven to 350° F

Crust

• 2 cups whole oats
• 4 cups water
• 30 pecans (shelled)
• 1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup mesquite flour
• zest of one grapefruit
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• pinch of salt

1. Cook the oats in water until grains are soft and chewy. Then blend until somewhat creamy.
2. Crush the pecans and add them to the oats.
3. Mix the whole wheat flour, mesquite flour, salt and grapefruit zest together and then add to the oats.
4. Add the olive oil to the oats.
5. Mix thoroughly.
6. Put the dough into a pie dish and spread it along the bottom and sides until it is 1/4-1/2 inches thick.

Filling

• 2 medium apples
• 2 peaches
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1 tbsp wheat flour

1. Cut up fruit into small chunks.
2. Mix with the honey.
3. Add flour to the fruit.
4. Pour the fruit filling into the crust.
5. Crumble additional crust mixture on the top so that the fruit is concealed, and pat this down lightly.
6. Bake until done (1 hour)
7. Drizzle honey on top

The resulting pie is very filling, somewhat tasty (Chris thought it was very tasty), and handsome. The crust held its shape surprisingly well, and we could actually serve nice wedge-shaped pieces of pie. It’s the dessert equivalent to Essene bread: It really sort of tastes good, it fulfills a need, and you know it’s good for you, but it’s not quite the same as the “real thing”. The pie was better the next day after the fruit soaked the crust a little bit more, making it softer and less dry. We think a few minor changes would make a huge difference: Add 1/2 cup (instead of 1/4 cup) of honey to the fruit; add more fruit; substitute wheat flour for some of the oats in the crust; and top it with homemade local ice cream!

I WANT CHOCOLATE!

Okay, we’ve been on this local kick for just about 2 weeks, and an intense desire for chocolate just posessed me. I’m not normally a sweets freak, but I can’t stop thinking about (and whining about) my absolute need for chocolate. This craving is motivating an interest in making some sort of dessert. I’d love to make a pie, but we don’t have enough fruit to make a filling. I’d love to make oatmeal cookies, but I have a feeling they would taste exactly like my breakfast (cooked oats with honey) since all we have is oats, wheat flour and honey. We started cruising the web in search of possible dessert recipes and I got excited when Chris told me that we could make apple cobbler. Then he said, “We don’t have raisins, brown sugar, bisquick or butter, but we have apples and oatmeal”. Great. I might just get desperate enough to try something, but for now I’ll just whine to Chris and the world that I would trade my left arm for some chocolate.

One week later…

Well, we’ve been eating locally for a whole week. So far it’s been both easier and more difficult than we thought. It’s been easy to find all of the essentials for eating satisfying, healthy meals. We were happily surprised to find wheat flour, olive oil, and goat cheese, all of which we anticipated would be a challenge to get ahold of. We have found tasty ways to prepare the foods available to us, and are getting used to having very little salt. And our stomachs are generally full at the end of the day. It has been difficult, however, to quench all of our cravings for the foods we are used to having in our daily lives. At first, we were craving crunchy snacks and chocolate. Chris was jonesing for a soda and some bread, and I would have given anything for some olives and anchovies (yes, I’m a salt fiend). We felt hungry, even after a good meal.

But now, after only a week, our bodies seem to be adjusting to a new normal. Snacks come in the form of fruit, roasted squash seeds, goat cheese on homemade (tougher than nails) crackers, and popped amaranth seasoned with olive oil and chile powder. Our refreshing beverage of the week is prickly pear juice.

Finding and preparing food has become a larger part of our daily lives than it was before. It takes more energy to hunt down a locally raised organic chicken than it does to buy a Safeway bird pumped full of preservative saline solution, antibiotics and hormones. But we seem to need less food than we did before, and are no longer preoccupied with growling bellies and daydreams about forbidden fruits. It feels as if my body (and surely Chris’ too) is being truly fed, and it no longer needs to remind me constantly of nutrient deficiencies and caloric deprivations. Our diet consists mainly of fruits and vegetables with small quantities of meat and whole grains. We have no unknown ingredients in our food, and no longer consume iffy corporate additives such as cornstarch and high fructose corn syrup. This contrasts starkly with our previous diet, which consisted mainly of carbohydrates and meat, supplemented with veggies, fruits and snacks I’m hesitant to call “food”.

Another major benefit of our new eating habits is the incredible decrease in garbage generated. We are producing almost no trash (I believe that recycling is just another form of trash, especially in Tucson where the city has been known to throw all recycling into the dump), which eases my conscience tremendously. I had been feeling terrible about all the plastic packaging, glass bottles, cardboard boxes, and styrofoam containers we were using daily for our rice milk, ginger ale, Trader Joe’s snacks, takeout food, and breakfast cereal. For me, this is the single most tangible advantage to eating locally so far.

At this point, we seem to be spending about the same amount of money on food as we did before. If we bought our meat, oil, and fruit in bulk we could spend significantly less. This is great news since it means that we can actually afford to eat all natural, organic foods!

Chris and I both feel like we have lost weight in this first week of our experiment. We are both a few pounds over our ideal weight, so this is a good thing as long as the trend doesn’t continue for too long . Eating locally has forced Chris to kick his caffeine habit, which he is very happy about. I have kicked my over-salting-everything habit, which pleases me, too. It’s been fun to experiment with new recipes and to share our discoveries with friends. We are looking forward to the second week of eating locally!

Oops – what’s for dinner?!

We had a wonderful, relaxing Friday at home. Chris did some work on the computer while I read and talked with some friends online. It was a good food day, too. I had oatmeal (whole cooked oats) with honey for breakfast and Chris and I ate a bunch of leftovers for lunch. Then I had the foresight to soak some adzuki beans for dinner. We had all the right ingredients for a good bean stew- onions, chiles, tomatoes, tomatillos, garlic, bell pepper, cholla buds, oregano… When I was about to cook the beans, Chris asked me where they were from. I have no idea where those beans came from! I’m sure I bought them at the co-op, and they’re from nowhere local. Funny how my mind just switched off for a while. I decided to cook the beans anyway (they were already soaked and ready to go) using our non-local salt and chiles. We’ll give them to our friends when we go to their house later this evening.

So now we had a dilemma: We really didn’t have much in the house for a satisfying dinner. We have only gotten two eggs from our chickens in the last two days, and we ate one of them yesterday. But, man, omelettes sounded really good! We called Wild Oats, the Food Conspiracy Co-Op, and Rincon Market in hopes of finding some local eggs and/or meat, but no luck. Rincon Market does carry Hickman’s Farm eggs, but they are from Buckeye, AZ, which is 117 miles from Tucson: Too far! We searched for farmer’s markets open on a Friday afternoon, but found none. Then Chris remembered that our CSA has a pick-up day on Friday as well as Tuesday (when we get our share), and they often have fresh, local eggs. Bingo! We went to the CSA pick-up site and lo and behold, there were our eggs! Five bucks a dozen for local eggs, and well worth it. Even if we ate the entire dozen for dinner we’d be eating for less than $10 total, which is less than any restaurant meal, and would be of better quality. We felt a rush of relief as soon as we knew we’d have a good dinner.

Our omelettes were superb. We filled them with leftover baked veggies (squash, eggplant and zucchini), leftover sauted okra, tomatoes and onions, fresh oregano and fresh tomato. They were topped off with a roasted tomatillo, garlic and anaheim chile salsa that Chris made, and a bit of goat cheese. We’ll be having grapes for dessert.

While the omelettes were cooking, our friend called us to tell us that Shamrock Farms (a dairy farm) is local and sells organic products. Indeed, they are located about 70 miles from us. Chris is ecstatic because, as he said, “where there’s milk, there’s the potential for ice cream”! I’m hoping they have yogurt, although we’ll need to figure out if all the ingredients in any processed food like yogurt are acceptable to our local palates.

That’s it for today. Signing off to go eat some Cochise-grown grapes.

Our first local meal

In preparation for the start of our experiment we picked prickly pear fruit (from native Opuntia engelmannii) with friends on Sunday morning. We simply took a bucket and tongs out to the foothills of the Catalina Mountains and plucked ripe fruit from the cactus pads.

At home, we processed the fruit by slicing each one in half and scooping out the insides with a spoon. We then blended all of the pulp briefly and strained it to separate the seeds from the edible portion of the fruit. The end result was about half a gallon of beautiful, thick, crimson-red juice (we had picked about 2 gallons of whole fruit) that tastes like nothing I’ve ever had before except other cactus fruit juice. We used some of this juice in our first local meal (see below) and stashed the rest in our fridge for future treats.

We also went to the local farmer’s market to stock up on fresh veggies, and to buy some meat and honey for the coming weeks or months of local eating. We found tomatoes, green beans, onions, garlic, eggplant, shallots, plums, chiles, zucchini, and yellow squash from Willcox, ground beef from Cochise and agave honey from Freddy Terry, the singing apiculturist from Oracle.

We had invited 6 friends over to a potluck dinner on Monday evening to send us off on our adventure. We decided to bake a chicken and make beans, and everyone else was to bring a side-dish. One of our friends generously gave us the local, free-range, natural (no antibiotics or hormones added) chicken she had bought from our CSA (community supported agriculture).

We prepared the chicken by placing it in a baking dish, pouring about 3/4 cup of prickly pear juice over it, lightly salting it, and then spooning about 3 or 4 tablespoons of honey into the baking dish. As the chicken cooked the honey melted and we basted the chicken with honey-cactus-chicken juice frequently. We also cut up some sweet potatoes from last week’s CSA share and put them in the baking dish around the chicken. The oven was set for 350 degrees, and the chicken cooked for just under 2 hours. The chicken turned out to be absolutely delicious- I’d cook it again this way in a heartbeat! The honey acted as a glaze, so the chicken not only tasted good, it looked pretty too.

We decided to cook tepary beans as another main course. The beans are very slow-cooking, so they had to be soaked overnight. Even so, they took over 3 hours to fully cook! We cooked the beans with onion, garlic, purslane (picked from our organic community garden), cholla buds (the flower buds of another local cactus species- we had harvested, processed and dried these a few months ago), roasted green chiles and a pinch of salt. The beans were very tasty, but more salt would have made them tastier.

As a side-dish, we prepared wheat groats, also from our CSA. These are simply the whole, unprocessed seeds of wheat. We cooked them as if they were rice- 2 cups of water to one cup of grains. They were chewy and tasty, and were great for soaking up beans and/or prickly-pear honey sauce from the chicken.

One of our friends brought a veggie dish. She had chopped and baked sweet potatoes, green beans, bok choy, bell peppers, red onion and a pinch of salt. It was a colorful, delicious addition to the meal.

Other friends (the ones we picked prickly pear fruit with) contributed a prickly pear “refresca”, or refreshing beverage. They simply mixed prickly pear juice with spearmint leaves, grapefruit juice (from a grapefruit they picked in downtown Tucson), honey (from bees that they raise) and water. It was surprisingly subtle tasting, and very refreshing.

Our dessert was fruit salad- local apples, nectarines, and watermelon mixed with a bit of honey (also from the singing apiculturist)- made by our other friends.

As an appetizer we had pecans (from the CSA) still in the shell, and watermelon.

Dinner was served at 6pm with red wine from Elgin and lots of good conversation. We were off to a grand start on our local journey.