I hope everyone had a great Halloween! This week’s treats in our boxes: Russett potatoes, carrots, sweet corn, cauliflower, broccoli, apples and green cabbage.

CALLING ALL BOXES!

We are gathering boxes in anticipation of the last delivery on Monday Nov. 24th. Please return all boxes that you may have. Also, it will make things a lot easier if all participants bring a bag to the pickup this week to haul home their veggies, leaving this week’s box behind.

A special word for the folks from Tikvat: Please have the boxes (and any egg cartons) out of the storage closets and outside near the delivery door, and please also point them out to the driver.

Recipes: A Cabbage Cornucopia!

I had a love affair with cabbage last winter when I was learning to cook with winter vegetables. One of my favorite recipes is cabbage and potato croquettes, which are tasty either as a side dish or as a main dish in a meal. Last year, I fried up some bacon and made bacon gravy to go with these lovely croquettes – and I froze several croquettes to pull out as quick meals for the family when I didn’t have time to cook. Yum! Another interesting cabbage recipe that I haven’t made myself yet, but which looked like fun, is easy cabbage with apples.

I could go on and on, but don’t want to overwhelm readers with my cabbage love song. Anyone who’s interested in my special recipe for stuffed cabbage leaves (which I plan to make this week, along with mashed potatoes for all the delicious sauce that goes with it) can check my blog.

Here are some more recipe ideas, straight from Farmer Pam:

“We made a huge pot of corn/potato chowder today for lunch – yum yum! Yesterday we baked green cabbage and apples. Try stir frying your cauliflower with herbed bread crumbs – delicious! A cream of cauliflower soup with a dash of curry is also good.”

Pam also offered an interesting glimpse into farm life this time in the season:

“Our work continues. We are busy planting garlic – this crop takes 9 months to maturity and then 4-6 weeks of hanging to properly cure the bulb. We will also be planting onions next week – these will be for spring onions in April and May. Spinach is another fall planting for early eating in the spring.”

I love that the CSA provides me with an ongoing food education.

Food For Thought: The Hundred Mile Diet

What if you had to get all your food locally? Could you get by?

Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon provided a fascinating glimpse into this world of local-food-or-bust when they gave themselves a challenge: the Hundred Mile Diet. For one year, they promised, they would eat nothing that they could not find within a hundred mile radius of their home.

When a friend sent me a link to their first article, I was hooked. Could they do it? Would such a thing be feasible for them? For me?

Their experience is now a book, a website, and a phenomenon: hundreds of others have signed on for their own versions of the Hundred Mile Diet. (Check out their website for some great local eating tips!) Just reading their first article got me reading the food labels in my local supermarket: where did my food come from? I started shopping more and more at local farmers markets, and asking the vendors there where their farms were, and whether all their produce was local, and just where was this fish caught, anyway?

I also started thinking: if higher oil and gas prices would eventually necessitate a change in how food was shipped across the country (and the world!), what would that mean for my family? Being able to buy all our food locally might mean anything from lower prices to food security. Would moving to a Hundred Mile Diet now help guarantee that the small local farms and their food variety would be there when we needed them?

In case anyone is curious, the Local Harvest website lists 437 farms within 100 miles of my Silver Spring zip code. Using their farm products search engine to search for food needs beyond just fruits, vegetables, meats, and milk (all of which I already knew I could get locally), I found whole wheat flour, wheat, corn, oats, dry beans, walnuts, pecans, peanuts, honey, maple syrup, and vinegar within the 100 mile limit. (I’ll list specific farms and distances separately for anyone who’s interested.) For pressed oil, I would have to travel 120 miles, and for rice, 150 miles. And although the search engine did not list white sugar at all, I found out that I could get brown sugar and molassas locally processed (if not locally grown) in Silver Spring itself!

We live in an area of unusual bounty. What can we do to keep it that way? This is the question that continues to float at the back of my mind as I begin to bring my family slowly closer to the Hundred Mile Diet. I may never arrive there, but I am finding the journey itself fruitful – and delicious!