I recently read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a book about her family's quest to eat locally and sustainably for a year. It was an enjoyable and thought provoking read that made me reconsider how and what I eat. While I'm not ready to raise chickens or grow most all of my own food, it did get me keen to put a bit more energy into eating seasonally and locally. I want to become a locavore, or at least more of one.
My first step was to sign us up for a weekly local, organic, seasonal food bag from Wild Organic Foods in Woodstock. For R150 (about 20 American bucks) we got a big bag of fruit and veg grown in the greater Cape Town area. This week we got our first bag and I was delighted by the contents.
In addition to the butternut, beets, celery, baby leeks, carrots, sweet potatoes, satsumas, and mushrooms you see above we got a packet of herb salad, 1 kg/2 lbs of apples, a load of green beans and these little babies...
Gooseberries! Cape gooseberries are a real treat to me. I grew up in a place where the native gooseberries are very sour and totally inedible unless a horrific amount of sugar is involved (or at least the ones that grew on the bush in front of our house were like that; my brothers and I used to dare each other to eat them). I'll admit the gooseberries in our bag are a little on the tart side, but I think they will bake up nicely with some of the apples. I smell an apple gooseberry pie in the making.
I ate a satsuma as soon as I got home. They are delicate, sweet, and (best of all) seedless. Fruit with seeds that get in the way is pretty high up on my list of ridiculous things I don't like, along with meat on bones. We are cooking dinner with friends tomorrow night and a beet and satsuma salad is on the menu. Yum. For dinner last night we combined the lettuces, half the beans, half the celery, and a handful of the carrots along with some other veggies lying around to make a salad with prosciutto, goat cheese, and a poached egg on top. We are WAY into poached eggs at the moment, and have declared this our "winter of the poached egg"...but that is a whole other blog post.
Here's my take on all this: Could we have gotten conventional versions of all these fruits and veggies at the grocery store for less? I'm pretty sure of it. And while I'm not an organic food nut, I like that these veggies are organic...it is better for the soil they are grown in and better for our health (mostly in cases where we are eating the skins of things). It also just feels pretty stinkin nice to support local growers. Perhaps most of all, I like the challenge of getting a bag of whatever is in season now and making a plan with that. I love beets, but I never buy them. Now I have them and have to make a plan to eat them. And if I get a repeat veggie, I need to come up with ways to prepare it to make it novel. It's all a really fun, culinary game to me. Next week's bag will include pears, satsumas, bananas, avocados, oranges, salad mix, parsley, spring onion, rocket/arugula, swiss chard, sweet potatoes, red onions and turnips. I'm thinking there will be a roast chicken with turnips, onions, and sweet potatoes, and maybe a savory tart with swiss chard and caramelized onions...I can't wait.
My first step was to sign us up for a weekly local, organic, seasonal food bag from Wild Organic Foods in Woodstock. For R150 (about 20 American bucks) we got a big bag of fruit and veg grown in the greater Cape Town area. This week we got our first bag and I was delighted by the contents.
In addition to the butternut, beets, celery, baby leeks, carrots, sweet potatoes, satsumas, and mushrooms you see above we got a packet of herb salad, 1 kg/2 lbs of apples, a load of green beans and these little babies...
Gooseberries! Cape gooseberries are a real treat to me. I grew up in a place where the native gooseberries are very sour and totally inedible unless a horrific amount of sugar is involved (or at least the ones that grew on the bush in front of our house were like that; my brothers and I used to dare each other to eat them). I'll admit the gooseberries in our bag are a little on the tart side, but I think they will bake up nicely with some of the apples. I smell an apple gooseberry pie in the making.
I ate a satsuma as soon as I got home. They are delicate, sweet, and (best of all) seedless. Fruit with seeds that get in the way is pretty high up on my list of ridiculous things I don't like, along with meat on bones. We are cooking dinner with friends tomorrow night and a beet and satsuma salad is on the menu. Yum. For dinner last night we combined the lettuces, half the beans, half the celery, and a handful of the carrots along with some other veggies lying around to make a salad with prosciutto, goat cheese, and a poached egg on top. We are WAY into poached eggs at the moment, and have declared this our "winter of the poached egg"...but that is a whole other blog post.
Here's my take on all this: Could we have gotten conventional versions of all these fruits and veggies at the grocery store for less? I'm pretty sure of it. And while I'm not an organic food nut, I like that these veggies are organic...it is better for the soil they are grown in and better for our health (mostly in cases where we are eating the skins of things). It also just feels pretty stinkin nice to support local growers. Perhaps most of all, I like the challenge of getting a bag of whatever is in season now and making a plan with that. I love beets, but I never buy them. Now I have them and have to make a plan to eat them. And if I get a repeat veggie, I need to come up with ways to prepare it to make it novel. It's all a really fun, culinary game to me. Next week's bag will include pears, satsumas, bananas, avocados, oranges, salad mix, parsley, spring onion, rocket/arugula, swiss chard, sweet potatoes, red onions and turnips. I'm thinking there will be a roast chicken with turnips, onions, and sweet potatoes, and maybe a savory tart with swiss chard and caramelized onions...I can't wait.
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