If I had been born with teeth, they all would have been sweet. My sugar preference (read: addiction) could have started in-utero; my mom is as madly in love with sweets as I am, if not more. It certainly started early, as seen in this photo of me at 1 1/2, in the process of sucking down my first ice cream cone.
So when I took on the Eat Local Challenge, my biggest concern was how I would fare without sugar. Would I have nagging cravings? Would I be grouchy and irritable? Would life seem empty and meaningless?
Fortunately, we humans plunder a delicious sweetener from thousands of fuzzy, winged, hardworking little ladies: bees. Thank heaven and earth for honey. Honey is one product that is available locally almost anywhere. And one thing I have in common with Winnie the Pooh is my opinion on honey and how far I'll go to get it.
Given my sweet tooth and my interest in local food, beekeeping was a natural fit for me. I tried it for a couple of years, a few years ago, and I still have a little bit of honey left from the few hundred pounds I harvested. The stuff keeps forever. Rumor has it honey has been found in Egyptian tombs, still edible. I highly recommend beekeeping to anyone who has an interest--it's extremely rewarding, though hard work.
To get my sugar fix, I've made several local desserts so far this month. My favorite (naturally) was the honey ice cream. Its pure creamy goodness brought out the smooth honey flavor.
Here's my recipe (yields a quart):
a little less than 2 cups cream (from Straus Family Creamery) (I already used a little earlier--mmm)
1 cup milk (also Straus)
2 eggs (Marin Sun Farms)
3/4 cup honey (in retrospect, I could have used less. Also, use a mild honey unless you want a strong honey taste).
Whisk it all together and freeze in your favorite ice cream maker-- mine is an older version of this and I love it!
Like most dogs and small children, I get a sense of gleeful anticipation when I hear the word cookie. Forgoing cookies would make the Eat Local Challenge dreary indeed, so I set out to make some all-local cookies. This is no Neiman-Marcus cookie, but it's tasty and very emotionally gratifying.
I'm not sure how accurate my recipe is--I adjusted it a couple of times and promptly forgot the amounts--but here goes:
1 cup whole wheat flour (Full Belly Farm)
5 tablespoons butter (Straus again)
1 egg
1/4 cup honey
some salt
Mix, adjust as needed
Top each cookie with 1/2 strawberry (mine were from Ella Bella Farm)
Bake at 350
Made a little over a dozen cookies.
I also did some spelunking in the freezer and found some boysenberries from last year's U-pick at Smith Family Farm in Brentwood. I made a mushy but tasty berry crisp (no cornstarch or arrowroot--should have been called a berry sog). The lessons I learned there: to pick way too much fruit at the U-pick and to clean out my freezer no more than once per year.
One more thing: I could almost call sugar local. Sugar beets are grown in many counties in California, including nearby Solano and San Joaquin. Several sugar refineries around the state, owned by Imperial Sugar, are still in operation, as far as I can tell. I don't know whether they still make the Spreckels line of sugar (which they bought several years back). I decided that purchasing that sugar, while it may technically be almost local, was not within the spirit of my Eat Local game, since it's a nationwide company that may source its beets from all over the world. So, until I've done some more research, I'm sticking with the sticky stuff.
Julie Cummins lives in Oakland and is Director of Education for the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA).
