We had a breakfast-for-dinner party before school started this month. The impetus for this celebration was a package of bacon that my sister and brother-in-law got us from a farm near their house. I've been a semi-vegetarian for eight years (vegetarian from 2001 to 2008, pescetarian for the last year), but I decided that this gift of very special meat--local, cruelty-free, organic, reputedly delicious-- constituted an exceptional circumstance. There was far too much of it for Stephen and me to eat on our own in a single meal, though, so we invited a few people over and made a local food feast with sliced cantaloupe and roasted onions and red potatoes from our farm share. The waffles weren't local, but they were heart-shaped and delicious, thanks to Stephen's waffle iron and the apple pie spice our friends brought for the batter.
The drinks weren't local, either, although the limoncello was organic. This is one my favorite warm-weather drinks: limoncello with cranberry juice, lemonade, and soda water. Something with coffee might have been more thematically appropriate, but the menu was thrown together with what we had in the kitchen an hour before dinner, so we didn't have time for too many artistic flourishes. We covered the table with butcher paper and lit beeswax candles in jelly jars for atmosphere. I love the smell of beeswax.
I'm surprised to see us eating different foods out of our farm share this year. Last year, we tried (though didn't particularly like) the kohlrabi and fennel, but ignored a lot of the boring staples. This year, we've given away a lot of our weirder veggies (yes, I do think fennel is weird--that licorice smell!) and feasted on the everyday stuff: carrots and carrots and more carrots, eggplant, kale, garlic, potatoes and onions. Mark Bittman has helped us out enormously with thinking of new ways to cook the same old stuff. We've had fried brown rice with bok choy, stuffed kale leaves with fresh mozzarella, baked quinoa with potatoes and whole cloves of garlic. We're definitely not true locavores, but we're doing what we can here and there. I'm glad that the modern sustainability movement is becoming more moderate in its demands: eat less meat, eat local more often, buy organic when you can. It's a lot easier to adhere to guidelines like those than to cut whole swaths of the supermarket out of your life. I do try to avoid the Cheetos aisle, though.
