Leda’s Urban Homestead

Whether you’ll be growing food in a big backyard, a community garden plot, or in a small windowbox, now is the time to plan  what you’ll grow this year.The goal is to transform this

into this.

But whether you’re an experienced gardener or a novice, there are certain “laws of the land” that you just can’t mess with. So before you decide what seeds to order, i.e. what you’d like to grow, let’s take a look at what you can grow. You need to think in terms of edible sunlight.

Plants turn sunlight into the sugars and starches through photosynthesis. If you try to grow a full-sun crop like tomatoes in a shady spot, it will be starved for those sugars and starches, and you’ll be disappointed in your harvest no matter how carefully you water and compost. Other plants are more efficient photosynthesizers, and can withstand a little shade.

If you have a full-sun (6 to 8 hours of direct sunlight every day) garden, you can grow pretty much anything. For those plants that actually prefer a little shade, you can use tall crops such as corn to provide it.

If your garden gets only a few hours of direct sunlight, don’t despair. Some crops that would prefer full sun actually can do quite well with less light. These include all of the leafy greens and most root crops. Your yield won’t be as big as if the plants were getting more light, but still worthwhile.

If your garden is really shade-challenged, look to woodland crops such as ramps and fiddlehead ferns. These evolved under forest trees, and so are perfectly adapted for dappled light and shady conditions.

The next thing you need to think about is timing, and what kind of growing space you do (or don’t) have indoors to start plants from seed. Read the fine print in the catalog descriptions. If you live in a region where winter temperatures regularly drop below freezing, then anything that takes longer than 60-70 days to maturity needs to be started indoors and transplanted outside once nighttime temperatures are warm.

That bit about “nighttime temperatures” is important. Too often novice gardeners get energized on the first warm April day and think it’s a good time to start planting outdoors. But those pansies blooming in your neighbor’s windowbox are cold-hardy, and your tomato plants are not. How warm it gets during the afternoon is not important; how cold it gets at night is. Many plants, including tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, basil, eggplant, and peppers cannot survive outdoors until the night temperatures are reliably above freezing.

If you have lots of sunny (8 hours of direct light or more) windows, or plant lights, you can start your frost-tender plants indoors from seed. If you don’t, you’ll need to buy starter plants later in the spring and skip the seed planting.

Okay, so now you’ve narrowed down your list from what you wanted to grow to what you actually can grow, and decided whether you’re starting your plants from seed or seedling. Before you send in that plant and/or seed order, let’s make your edible garden list even more efficient (and ultimately more gratifying).

What can’t you get via your farmers’ markets or community supported agriculture (CSA) share? Or what is costly there?

If you’re a CSA member who gets tons of leafy greens in her share, then there’s no point in planting kale in your garden. I grow asparagus, rhubarb, and raspberries in my shared apartment garden because we get little if any of those from my CSA and they are pricey at the farmers’ markets. I also grow chervil, ramps, and red currants because either they don’t turn up from other sources or are too costly for my budget when they do. Shallots, heirloom tomatoes, pinkie-finger sized cucumbers (for pickling) are also in my garden for the same reasons.

Then there are the herbs you only need a little of at a time. The recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of fresh sage leaves, but the smallest bunch for sale at the market is many times that. Well, you could dry the extra, or you could grow a sage plant and just pick what you need (and dry some for winter, at a fraction of the cost).

While light, temperature, and indoor seed-starting constraints may seem restrictive, if you pay attention to them they will be the difference between a disappointing edible garden and a harvest worth celebrating. Here’s a toast to the latter: may our 2010 gardens be worth bragging about!

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Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

Before I left for this trip I did a little research. I looked up the official tourism web site for the town I’d be staying in. Under “many fine dining opportunities” the site listed Applebee’s and Arby’s. Ouch.

I packed lots of tasty, healthy, homemade snacks for the eight-hour bus ride and resigned myself to mediocre, environmentally disreputable road food for the rest of the trip.

I’m in Erie, PA for the Northeast American College Dance Festival. I’m here because A) I’m the official faculty chaperon for fourteen students from Adelphi University and B) because the university chose to present a piece I choreographed at this year’s festival. If you’re wondering what a locavore, writer, gardening and foraging teacher is doing choreographing for a dance festival, check out my other life.

Anyway, my first meals of the trip reminded me that it wasn’t just the food I had to worry about, but the trash. The only milk or cream for coffee option at the hotel restaurant came in those miniature plastic cups I’d hoped had become obsolete. I was pleasantly surprised to see what appeared to be simple vegetables and legumes at the all-you-can-eat buffet, but everything tasted like the same jar of Liquid Smoke had been shaken over it, and everything came in disposable containers.

And then there was the popcorn the nice guy at the front desk microwaved for me, after taking it out of its cellophane wrapper. I ate it while watching a movie, and noticed a not-quite-right aftertaste. A look at the bag revealed that it boasted “94% fat-free butter.” Fat-free butter? What does that mean? No, never mind. I don’t want to know.

On the way to the college where the festival is being held, I saw a sign that read:

“Big Woodie’s Fireworks: Peppergas, Stunguns, & Sugar-Free Fudge”

(I am not making that up. I wish I had. It would be truly funny writing, but sadly the authors’ comic genius appears to have been only semi-intentional.)

When we got to the campus, one of the first things I saw was a bunch of french fries lying on the ground.

Clearly my food horizon was bleak for the next few days, and I should just focus on the students and their dancing and forget about anything else. They are having a good time on this trip, and I don’t want to spoil it for them (by the way, they brought LOTS of their own food with them. I think the point was more to save money than anything else, but whatever the reason, in this case it seems like a good impulse).

Today I went into the Mercyhurst cafeteria for lunch. The first thing that greeted me was a poster celebrating the fact that the college gets as much of its food as possible from within 125 miles, serves milk from local cows, and has renounced styrofoam and reintroduced dish washing as a job.

Wow.

Alas, by comparison, the school I am here to represent has a long way to go when it comes to the food choices it offers the students, not to mention the environmental impact of its disposable serving containers. Partly because of that, many of my students still cheerfully do things like toss their paper coffee cups into the trash without a second thought (yeah, even though they have me as a teacher. I’m working on it).

But Mercyhurst surprised me with its example of a school that has already taken the initiative and made significant changes that support local farms, reduce environmental impact, and through educating by example teach students to value things such as “local” and reject “disposable.” There is hope.

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Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

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This past Wednesday’s storm found me dreaming about spring. Here is what the stairs leading down to my garden looked like this week.

And, for inspiration’s sake, here is what they looked like from the garden’s eye view last summer.

While I was daydreaming and making garden plans, I got an email with the subject line “Small Farmer Needs Help.” It was from Mihail Kossev, a young farmer in the Hudson Valley asking me to spread the word about Collect Seed Farm. The farm offers a CSA, and also sells mail order open-pollinated seeds. They are offering a 50% rebate and free shipping on seeds until March 1st. I looked at their online catalog, and they have some excellent varieties. I’ll be placing an order, and hope some of you will, too.

Meanwhile, I’m living mainly from my “pantry” of preserved foods. I put “pantry” in quotes because if you’d ever been to my apartment you’d know that I don’t have enough space for a dedicated pantry. My preserved food is stashed wherever I can make room for it, including under my bed.

I  recently wrote a piece for Farm to Table about how food preservation is a crucial part of the locavore life (at least if you live in a cold winter climate). It includes suggestions for using winter storage fruit such as apples that are past their crunchy prime. You may have already tried the chutney recipe, which I posted here first, but I also include instructions for oven-drying in case you don’t have a dehydrator. You can read the full article here.

Hope you’re staying warm, making garden plans (even if all you’ve got is a window box), and keeping it local.

Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

Last night I had six friends over for a local foods dinner that included a lot of wild edibles.

There were many reasons to celebrate. Two friends had recent birthdays and for a third it was his actual birthday. I was also showing off last month’s apartment renovations and saying thanks to Bill, who did a lot of them.

I was also introducing several people to my cat Ella, who moved in with me last fall. And it was Imbolc, give or take a day.

Imbolc is the pagan holiday halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It is that time when the first promise of spring shows even though there are many weeks of winter ahead: the witch hazel is blooming, the leaf buds on trees are swelling, and the lengthening of the days is tangible (no more heading to the subway in the dark on my early teaching mornings!).

We started out with some pickles–carrots, cherries, bread ‘n’ butter cukes, as well as watermelon radishes, and hickory nuts. Then we moved on to a roasted butternut squash and apple soup with field garlic and Old Chatham blue cheese, served with acorn bread. The main course was freekah (sometimes spelled freekeh) grain from Cayuga Pure Organics with wild mushrooms I foraged last fall and lamb’s quarters (a wild green, Chenopodium album), and crepinettes. We finished up with strawberry sorbet made with local strawberries I’d stashed in the freezer and cookies made with wild ginger and spicebush. All washed down with plenty of wine, including a homemade pyment that Ellen brought.

Here are Ellen and Jenny catching up after not having seen each other since, well, I think the last time I threw an Imbolc bash:

You may be wondering what a crepinette is.

A crepinette is a sausage patty wrapped in caul fat. For the sausage part, I used a mix of ground pork and ground turkey seasoned with minced onions (cooked in oil until translucent), garlic, sage, nutmeg, cumin, salt and cayenne.

I got the caul fat from my CSA “extra product” order. It was cheap, and I was curious, and I had a crepinette recipe that called for it, so I bought some. I have to say, this is one of the weirdest (and, it turns out, tastiest) ingredients I’ve ever worked with.

Caul fat looks like a block of lard when you get it.

Then you soak it in water for ten to fifteen minutes and it falls apart into lacy layers of fat and membrane.

You wrap your meat mixture in those lacy layers, which act like sausage skins to hold the ground meat and other ingredients together, but also infuse the final dish with, well, pork fat.

Which, once cooked, is really, really tasty.

Here’s a pic of me, Jenny’s husband Sean, & Ellen at the party.

Good company and good food. Happy Imbolc, everyone!

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Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

It’s right at this time when there are at least two more months of freezing temperatures ahead and the landscape has been brown, gray, and white for a couple of months already, that the colorful seed catalogs start arriving. Filled with promises of abundant summer harvests, they lure us into dreams of this year’s garden.

That’s a good thing. It’s time to take a look at my notes from last year, what worked and what didn’t (ugh, that tomato blight, and what about that pesky squirrel who ate the few tomatoes I did get?) and start planning.

A media kit I received from one seed company had the tag line, “Feed the Edible Garden Explosion.” Beyond the advertising intent, the sentence is a nice confirmation of the fact that there is an edible garden explosion going on. Seed companies for home gardeners report record sales on vegetable seeds in the past two years, and I can vouch for the fact that any food-related class I’ve taught at the New York Botanical Garden or Brooklyn Botanic Garden has had double the students the same classes were getting five years ago.

I think the interest in homegrown food is sparked by the convergence of several factors: increasing awareness of how our food choices impact the environment (including local vs. imported and organic vs. conventional), the lousy economy and the possibility of saving money by growing (or foraging) some of your own food, and the intense interest in the deliciousness of local, seasonal food spurred by celebrity chefs and authors.

One company, Hometown Seeds, has  put together a package it calls “Survival Seeds.” The seeds are specially packaged to guarantee viability for up to five years if properly stored (instructions come with the seeds), and all are non-hybrid and non-GMO so that home gardeners could start saving their own seed from the first crop to plant the following year.

All of the company’s seeds are non-GMO, but not all of them are non-hybrid. The ones in the Survival Seeds kit are, so that as Scott Peterson from the company says, “You can save seeds from your harvest and they will grow producing plants the next year.  So rather than have one seed for one year, you can see many harvests from the original purchase.”

Scott says that he “grew up with parents who were very prepared. We kept up to a year’s supply of the non-perishable foods we ate the most.  This was our first line of preparedness.  The second line were seeds we kept were for an extended need. My parents kept a seed bank for the possibility of a personal financial crisis where our family could garden intensely to reduce food costs.”

Hometown Seeds is offering a 10% discount on their seeds to readers of this blog now through February 28th. Just enter “thanks” as the coupon code.

Another seed company I like a lot is Pinetree Gardens. Their premise is that home gardeners don’t need the 100 or more seeds that are in most seed packets, and shouldn’t have to pay for what they don’t need. They offer packets containing fewer seeds at lower prices than most other companies.

Here’s to our 2010 gardens: may they thrive!

Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

As the “wolf months” of winter progress, long before we’ll see any signs of spring, I am seeing signs of progress for the local food movement. My neighborhood coffee shop, Ozzie’s, now has a sign outside advertising that they use local milk.

the sign outside Ozzie's coffee shop

A new indoor winter farmers’ market has opened five blocks away from me.When I first arrived it looked as though I might be the only customer

but the place quickly filled up.

My neighborhood supermarket now stocks Ronnybrook milk (they don’t take the bottles back or offer the bottle refund though. For that I still have to go to the farmers’ market).

It’s getting easier and easier to be a locavore in New York City.

In my last post I mentioned that a financial crunch had inspired me to live primarily out of my pantry for the month. Despite an unexpected and very welcome contribution from a concerned blog reader (thank you!!!), I have stuck with The Pantry Challenge for the most part. Honestly, it’s turning out to be not that different from how I’d be eating anyway. I have cheated once: I bought some flour at the farmers’ market. I’d run out, which meant that I was also out of bread. I did without for a week and then decided to give in and do some baking.

I’ve learned that if I was really going to eat exclusively from my stored foods, I’d have to blanch and freeze a lot more greens. I didn’t worry about this too much last year, mostly just froze whatever I couldn’t keep up with in my CSA share. There are some hardy greens (kale and the like) available year-round at the farmers’ markets here. This month, though, the spinach and tatsoi in my CSA winter share from Farmer Ted’s unheated greenhouses were especially welcome.

On a different note, here’s a recipe. I’ve fallen in love with lacto-fermented chutneys, so much so that I’m considering turning all the vinegar-based chutneys I canned into ketchup (ketchup is basically just pureed chutney). The flavor of these fresh chutneys is so good that I could (and do) eat them straight out of the jar, plus you get all sorts of health benefits that aren’t in the vinegar versions (lacto-fermented foods have good-for-you bacteria in them–think yogurt).

The recipe below is a Northeastern locavore’s variation on one by Sally Fallon (I swap in just a little vinegar to replace non-local lemon juice, and local honey instead of Rapadura). This chutney is an especially good use up for the storage apples and pears we’re getting at this time of year.

The only downside is that lacto-fermented foods take up refrigerator space. You could process them in a boiling water bath to make them shelf-stable, but don’t because that kills off those healthy bacteria.

Apple or Pear Chutney

Makes approximately 1 quart

3 cups fresh pears or apples, peeled, cored, and finely chopped

1/2 cup filtered water (the chlorine in straight tap water can halt the fermentation process)

1 tablespoon vinegar

2 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons whey* (if you’ve got yogurt in the house, you can make whey, see note below)

2 teaspoons sea salt

1/2 cup raisins (I used some that I got at a farmers’ market when I was in California, but other dried fruit would work, too)

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1/2 teaspoon ground spicebush berries (or black pepper)

1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds

1 teaspoon coriander seeds

Combine the water, vinegar, honey and whey. Mix with the other ingredients and pack firmly into a quart-size glass jar, leaving at least an inch of head space. The liquid should come up to the top of the fruit. If it doesn’t, add a little filtered water.

Cover and leave at room temperature for 2 days. Refrigerate and leave for another week before eating. Will keep in the refrigerator for 2 months. Serve with rice, meat, cheese, whatever suits your fancy. I’ve been putting dollops of it on top of butternut squash soup, and that’s a heavenly combination.

*Whey

If you drain yogurt through cloth or paper filters over a bowl, the liquid that separates out is whey. Drained yogurt is thicker than regular, and delicious. If you let it drain in the refrigerator for 24 hours you have something with the exact consistency of cream cheese, which is delicious on toast topped with some of that chutney you used the whey to make.

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Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

Happy New Year!

The January chill means I think twice before carrying my compost pail out to the bin. I look out through the window and think, surely I could cram a few more scraps in before I need to empty the pail?

I am starting the new decade with several challenges on my plate. A commission I was counting on for next month’s rent fell through at the last minute. The pipes in my apartment froze last night (tonight I’ve got running hot water but no cold) and I still haven’t heard back from my landlord. And so it goes.

Lost jobs and frozen pipes notwithstanding, there’s a reason January, February, and March have traditionally been called “the wolf months.” If the wolf is going to show up at your door, this is the time you’re likely to hear his noisy breath and his scratchy pawing. There are no new crops coming in now if you live in a cold winter climate. (Well, there might be some greenhouse and cold frame stuff, but that’s limited.) Mostly what you’ve got is what you got last year during the growing season.

I’d be living out of my pantry for the most part at this time of year even if I wasn’t in a financial crunch. I’ve decided not to spend any money on food this month except for milk (which I also turn into yogurt and cream cheese), coffee (not remotely local, I know, sorry), and what I already prepaid for my monthly CSA winter share.

Usually I’ve looked at my food preservation hobby as, among other things, a way to add variety to my winter diet. Can it also keep me alive if I’m counting on it as my primary source of food?

So far, so good. Here’s what I ate today:

Fried egg, toast with butter and peach marmalade. (Made the bread with a combo of Wild Hive Farm’s Bread Flour and Cayuga Pure Organic’s Half White Flour)

Apple (last one I’ll be munching fresh. Apples are starting to lose their crunch after months in storage, so I’ll be moving on to dried, applesauce, etc.)

Sausage-kale-white bean soup (kale was from blanched and in my freezer, sausage and beans in freezer as well)

Wild mushroom “risotto” (used Cayuga Pure Organic’s freekah grain instead of rice. Mushrooms were wild, foraged ones I dried last fall)

Salad with blue cheese and pumpkin seeds

Popcorn

I’m granting myself one more food shopping exemption: there’s a new indoor winter market starting next week just a few blocks from me and I want to show up and support. Just a cabbage or some such, okay? There might be a new winter venue for local foods near you. You can find out more here.

As for how my wolf month pantry adventure turns out, stay tuned…

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Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

I’m in California for the holidays visiting family. I started out in San Francisco, where I visited Crissy Field with it’s awesome views of the SF skyline, Alcatraz, and the Golden Gate Bridge (which you can see behind my dad in this pic):

We visited his neighborhood weekly farmers’ market on Fillmore Street, where I sighed a little over the crops we can’t grow back East, including citrus and almonds. However, I also noted that there were several things I haven’t found at NYC farmers’ markets that could be there, including persimmons and dried fruit. Persimmons grow on the East Coast, and we’ve got plenty of fruit that could be dried as a winter market offering. (Let me know if you spot either in an NYC market and I’ll not only become a grateful customer, but I’ll add the info to The Locavore’s Guide to NYC)

From SF, we headed north to Yreka in the Mt. Shasta region, which is where my mom lives these days (yeah, I know all this traveling negates some of the good my locavorian diet does as far as my carbon footprint. My family is scattered between multiple locations, but they’re my family, what can I say? I need to hang with my folks now and then).

My mom doesn’t have room for guests where she’s living, so she arranged for us to stay at a friend’s and take care of the friend’s cat, Gus, and dog, Tommy.

Tommy lives outside 365 days a year even though the winters get pretty brutal here. He’s in a penned area. It’s large, but it’s fenced, and apparently Tommy is not completely reconciled to his situation. Yesterday morning when I went to feed him he bolted and ran past me fast as a race horse, disappearing across a field.

I called his name for about half an hour to no avail, starting to panic because “I lost your dog” was not a phone call I wanted to make. Fortunately, Tommy eventually came home on his own.

Last night my dad, pianist Kelly Johnson, played a wonderful concert of Chopin, Debussy, and other romantic composers. My Grandma Nea, 97 years old and a lifelong music lover, was in heaven.

Today my mom’s husband Frank is cooking up a Mexican-style Christmas Eve feast. Tomorrow we’re doing the whole traditional holiday thing, including a local free range turkey. One thing on the menu that is not local here is the cranberry sauce my dad made–the cranberries are from Massachusetts. It makes me smile, actually, that even here in Californian agricultural nirvana there are a few things from Back East that are special occasion treats. When I make cranberry sauce in Brooklyn, the cranberries are local but the orange that I like to add comes from California or Florida. I have no problem with either the west or east coast version. The holidays should include a few extravagant indulgences.

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Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

Recipes became precisely measured and formulaic during the past sixty years because they could: with the rise of so-called conventional agriculture and the choosing of food varieties for uniform shape and size and shelf life, it became possible to publish a recipe that assumed your egg was the same size as my egg.

This point came home to me when I spent Thanksgiving with my friends Scott and Todd just outside Ithaca. My former Brooklyn neighbors are raising three kinds of chickens.

They have more eggs than they can keep up with, and sent me home with 1.5 dozen in various sizes and colors.

Contemporary recipes start with a list of measured ingredients followed by a numbered list of steps. That’s fine if your egg is an industrial ag supermarket egg and your onions are all the “medium” size required by the recipe. But what if you’ve got tiny pullet eggs or smallish CSA onions or huge garlic cloves or a bunch of kale that may or may not be what the recipe’s author meant by “a large bunch of kale”?

The recipes of earlier generations were gentler in so far as they did not expect an exact match between the writer’s kitchen and the reader’s. They were more demanding in that they assumed some basic cooking knowledge on the reader’s end, which today may not be a safe assumption. But at least they took into account differences in cooking equipment, as in this footnote to a recipe for pancake batter in Elizabeth David’s Summer Cooking: “Quantities given make eight to twelve pancakes according to the size of your pan.”

I find that nod to the likely differences between her kitchen and mine much more civilized than today’s recipes that tell me exactly the size of the pan I need (and if I don’t have that particular pan I am left with the choice to toss out the recipe or go shopping for that particular piece of equipment).

I think that if the local food movement continues to grow, and as consumers choose flavor and environmental merit over uniformity and shelf life, our cookbooks will need to go through yet another transformation. Your butternut squash may not be the same size as my butternut squash, even if we’re getting them from the same farm. So a recipe calling for “1 large butternut squash” won’t mean much. Of course, this means we’ll have to experiment a bit, make some mistakes, learn how to eyeball amounts. To me, that’s what really learning to cook is all about.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that yeah, there are some recipes in my new book, The Locavore’s Handbook. And yeah, I had a few tussles with my editors when I wanted to use ratios instead of measurements (for example, 1 part salt to 4 parts minced vegetables and herbs for the preserved veg. recipe called verdurette. How many servings? my publisher wanted to know. Well, that depends on how many vegetables and herbs you started out with…). So some of the recipes ended up in the list-of-measurements-followed-by-numbered-steps format, and some in the use-what-you’ve-got format. I like to think the mix is respectful of both the reader and the food.

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Botany, Ballet, & Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith (foreward by Ellen Zachos) Book signing and party with lots of fun eco-minded folk this Thurs. Dec. 3rd with Green Edge NYC!

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget by Leda Meredith (foreward by Sandor Ellix Katz)

Flour. Whole grains. Dry beans.

When I did The 250-Mile diet year I encountered some challenges tracking down these ingredients and learning to cook with them (they don’t cook up identically to their standard supermarket cousins). I wrote in my book about illicit (by Greenmarket rules) flour deals, and twenty-five pound bags of Cayuga Pure Organic’s dry beans arriving at my one-bedroom apartment.

This past Saturday, after a foraging expedition with Liz Neves, Meredith Modzelewski, and Liza de Guia,

I stopped by Cayuga Pure Organic’s stall at the Grand Army Plaza farmers’ market. CPO wasn’t a regular at any farmers’ market when I did The 250.

The Grand Army Plaza market

is walking distance from home. CPO had four varieties of dry beans, several kinds of flour, and freekah (a whole grain that is harvested green and roasted and makes a beautiful replacement for rice since there is no locally grown rice here). Where were you during The 250? I wanted to shout.

If you ever saw the movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks, you may remember the scene near the end when after having seen him go through much effort and suffering to get a fire started when he was marooned on an island, we see him back in civilization flicking a lighter on over and over again. It’s as if he’s trying to reconcile that easy, instant flame with his memory of trying to get a fire started on the island.

That is me standing in front of the CPO stall at the farmers’ market, memories of hours spent researching where to get locally grown beans, flour, and grains playing counterpart to the easy abundance in front of me.

I feel a bit guilty admitting that CPO’s “Half-White” flour has become my go-to, all-purpose and bread flour. I love Wild Hive Farm’s flours, and they were my mainstay during The 250, but they aren’t at my local Brooklyn market and CPO is. Convenience motivates a locavore as much as anyone else. But I’ll be supporting Wild Hive whenever I’m not being so lazy.

This is all good news: It means that a greater variety of locally produced ingredients has become available in my area in an ever-increasing number of markets and stores.

On a different note…

No, that’s not a seasonal tabletop display. It’s an overflow of CSA abundance (I just picked up the first of the monthly shares yesterday). You may notice that the butternut squash is starting to get ahead of me. Not to worry. Butternut-Pear (or Apple) Soup garnished with a little Old Chatham Ewe’s Blue cheese is one of the reasons to look forward to fall.

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Botany, Ballet, and Dinner from Scratch: A Memoir with Recipes by Leda Meredith

The Locavore’s Guide to NYC (an ever-growing online directory of when and where you can get locally produced products)