by Birdsong S.
It has been a beautiful spring day here in the neighborhood, and tomorrow is my local community's annual plant sale, so I have been thinking a lot about the garden, including the lovely heirloom tomato plants I can look forward to buying. If you didn't read Jack and Joanne's post about organic gardening, do! I was excited that some of my rambles took me to yard sales and thrift stores yesterday and today, so that I found a fun book by a local garden author, Maureen Gilmer, on gardening on a budget (for fifty cents). I also was reminded by one of the yard sale offerings that I wanted to share with all of you one of my favorite and most essential pieces of cooking equipment for eating locally, the salad spinner.
If you are trying to eat local almost anywhere in the country this month, you will be eating a lot of greens. You may have already noticed that these greens arrive much grittier than that organic salad-in-a-bag stuff, hence the essential aspect of the spinner. I have learned over the years that this is the best way to get clean but dry greens for a salad, and can also come in handy if you want to wilt your greens a bit to use in a frittata, casserole, etc, just by using hot water to wash them before spinning.
Another exciting development in the Eat Local Challenge for me was to get emails from two blogfriends I write back and forth with, fellow knitters who decided to join the ELC! Stacie is a Berkeley transplant and former vegetarian chef, living in the Midwest where she keeps a garden... her entry about her decision to join in the fun is both inspiring and useful to those in her area, and she addresses her fears about leaping in as well... excellent reading.
My other friend, Sallee, decided she would plant a balcony garden as part of the ELC challenge this month, and begin using her local-est farmer's market (I can't imagine living somewhere that has several farmers' markets to choose from), although she was bummed to learn that the Roanoke (Virginia) Strawberry Festival this weekend was importing strawberries from here in California (what's the point in a festival if your town didn't produce the food itself?). Sallee has some good things to say about the difficult decisions in trying to eat a "heart-healthy" diet and live in the ELC... she suffered a heart attack in her mid-forties, and is very conscious of keeping her cholesterol down and eating within the healthy food boundaries that work for her, as well as living on a budget.
I am highlighting these two friends because they are real, ordinary people who had never heard of the Eat Local Challenge until a few weeks ago, and have thought about it and come up with great steps to take this month. So can we all!
Birdsong lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, where she blogs about her passions at A View from Sierra County.
