Month 3 - Handling Unusual Situations

Two things came up in January that required a little maneuvering. The first was our trip to New York to visit my son Eric and his wife Aileen (see post "Two Locavores on Vacation"). Our guide on vacation: explore for some local food, but don't be rigid about it; after all, you're on vacation.

A few days after we got home, my husband came down with the flu. He just wasn't hungry for a day or two, then wanted very mild foods. I suggested chicken soup. To give him something quick while I defrosted and cooked a local chicken, I bought a can of organic chicken soup, and another of chicken broth, plus a head of (California) celery. I's still using the celery, a stick at a time, in other dishes. It is a nice flavor we haven't had for a while. Next year, I will try to find some and dry it for soups.
Our guide on illness: just do the best you can. Try to stay away from junk foods (they're pretty indigestible anyway); go for real food, organic if possible, and don't sweat it. (If I got too sick to cook, we'd have to make some accommodations too.)

And in early February, we had our countertops done, replacing an old DIY blue tile installation with Formica and a new tile backsplash. Very nice; much easier to clean. This meant the kitchen was unusable for lunch on two days. We ate a simple lunch at a restaurant, and didn't worry about it. I really felt OK about this, because we're usually having homemade pizza on the Saturday nights we could have gone out; we're way down in restaurant meals since the 100-mile changeover.

Other than this, we're eating probably 90% local foods--meat, poultry, eggs, dairy products, fruit from our yard (apples, dried peaches and plums, plus a little frozen fruit I bought last summer), and the wonderful winter veggies from Cresset Farm. Maybe 10% is On Hand items. I'm rapidly running out of pantry items: various flours, beans, and grains; commercial canned tomatoes are gone; commercial frozen vegetables are gone. I still have a lot of lactofermented pickles on hand in the frig; they taste very good in the winter.

Maybe 1% is Exceptions. In the Exceptions, I bought a bottle of California olive oil (not Italy), and a pound bag of Utah salt (Real Salt) in January.

I also bought some bulk herbs to make herbal teas; these are items I will be able to grow this summer, when we can retire the exception. I make a nice teapot full of "soothing tea" with a teaspoon or so of chamomile, and a little less of dried lemon balm and peppermint leaves. Better than those commercial teabags, and much cheaper. The spent leaves go out onto my dooryard shrubs, with a little water.

Things I'm not counting: yeast, cheese/yogurt/kefir cultures, and baking soda. I bought one jar of commercial yogurt this month to restore my yogurt culture, which was getting a little tired. Whole milk, with NOTHING added other than the culture. Now I've got fresh culture to use for the next couple of months (making the new batch from a little of the old). Kefir also has to be restored after 7 batches, with a new envelope. Kefir is a combination of culture and yeasts, which gives it the special flavor. After a number of batches, the critters get a little unbalanced, and you have to start fresh.

Baking soda is bicarbonate of soda, produced from natron, of which 95% of the world's supply is in southern Wyoming. Amazing, but true. It's a chemical, actually, and at my present rate of usage, the box I have will last a year.

February food is looking pretty much like January. Lots of soups and cooked vegetable dishes. I'm digging into my recipe books to find new ways to prepare the winter vegetables. We'll have pretty much the same ingredients to work with until the early greens show up in April and May (and will they taste good!).