This time of year, a weekend without big plans dictates how home gardeners will pass their time: keeping pace with the harvest, of course. Sunday saw me concocting a big batch of salsa with home-grown tomatoes and chilies, enough minestrone (containing my own carrots, potatoes, green beans, zucchini and more tomatoes) to freeze several quarts, [...]
I figured at least a few of my newspaper colleagues would be skeptical of a story dedicated to raw food. Instead of critiques, however, this week’s A la Carte section drew raves for the colorful photos by Denise Baratta that apparently made even raw food look good enough to eat. Given my previous experience with raw food, I [...]
If you think you cook up a prize-winning chili, there’s still time to enter yours in the Jackson County Harvest Fair’s Chili Cook-Off. This year’s event features two separate divisions, one for amateurs and another for professionals, meaning chefs, caterers, restaurant owners or others in food service. Individuals or teams of up to four people [...]
I have to suppress a groan when my husband says he’ll “just have a peanut butter and jelly” in response to my predictable “What should we have for dinner?” For a brief moment, I think he must be joking. How can he be satisfied with just a sandwich? His perfect peanut butter in jelly, in [...]
Sunday’s return to the grocery store was a little strange after I had avoided it for almost two weeks, depending instead on farmers markets, my own garden and items already in the freezer and pantry. But this year, instead of the relief I felt following last year’s Eat Local Challenge, I was looking at every [...]
Apparently, I didn’t know how hungry I was until the refined, white-flour goodies were right under my nose. One benefit of eating local is cutting out — by default — so many of the processed products combining flour, sugar and fat that physicians and nutritionists are starting to decry as culprits in obesity and diabetes. [...]
It should come as no surprise that food marketers are looking to latch onto “local” as the next industry buzzword. Witness Wal-Mart’s recent declaration that it would start stocking local produce, meaning it was grown in the same state as customers’ purchase. The move is supposed to save customers and the retail giant money. But [...]
If you tuned into “Jefferson Exchange” at 8 a.m. today on Jefferson Public Radio, you likely heard my comments on the Eat Local Challenge and issues around local food. If you didn’t, consider downloading the station’s podcast. Since the show only scratched the surface, I thought I’d share a few more thoughts in this blog. [...]
The homemade peach jam was so perfect that I made yet another concession to localism to enjoy it. Yesterday’s lunch married the jam with Franz whole-wheat bread (Portland) with my usual Adams all-natural peanut butter (Ohio). I tried on the peanut-butter front to purchase Ashland’s Maranatha brand, but my grocery store was out. Must have [...]
This weekend’s eating was full of highs and lows, in terms of staying local. That’s because at least one previously planned event gave me the (almost) equally repugnant options of eating highly processed food from who-can-only-guess-where or simply not eating. I knew that Friday entailed dining out for a friend’s birthday, which is hardly the [...]
