Wednesday: No shortcuts or time-savers

Today was about learning the hard way that the key to local-food success is in the planning and preparation.

I normally already have a sense of that, which is why I spend a little time each weekend planning the menus that I post weekly on a chalkboard in my kitchen. It’s written in chalk, and there are inevitably changes throughout the week, but at least it gives me an idea about what to shop for and also warns family members against making a snack out of any essential ingredients.

But somehow I had a lapse. It was not smart of me to go to bed last night without an idea of what I was going to make today. I am finding that trying to eat entirely local (other than my few allowed exceptions) requires considerably more advance planning than what I ordinarily do. The main reason for this is that I cannot rely on pantry items as time-savers. Some of the quick fixes I occasionally fall back on during the week – a bottled spaghetti sauce I can doctor up; a jar of Trader Joe’s curry to cook a chicken in – are off limits this week.

Some of these shortcuts might be considered local by some standard because they are made here in the Rogue Valley: the tamales, handmade and sold by my friend in Talent, that I keep in the freezer; fresh pasta in a package, made in Ashland; the fresh pico de gallo made for Quality Market in Medford. But the way I’ve chosen to approach the challenge requires that I not use food products if I can’t identify where each ingredient came from. If a cookie is made in a bakery in Ashland, but the flour comes from Montana, the eggs from Washington, the butter from California, the cocoa from somewhere in the tropics before being turned into chocolate chips in Pennsylvania and so on, then it seems to me that little chipper has got an awful lot of miles on it, and I can’t legitimately call it local. This necessitates making pretty much everything from scratch myself.

Before you write me off as a hopeless over-the-top fanatic, let me explain that for me this is much of the value of the challenge: it raises my awareness of just how tangled up I personally am in the complex system of food production and transportation that we depend on. It’s an eye-opener for me, a person who thinks of herself as a “slow-food” home cook. If I let myself "cheat," then I lose the opportunity for that insight. The inconvenience makes me look for other possibilities – for example, delicious as it is, I really am awfully tired of lamb and beef right now. That made me want to get on the telephone today to see what else I could find that’s local. I searched again for poultry, with no luck. (If anyone knows where to get a chicken this week I’d love to hear about it.)

But realizing how unavailable that commodity is as a local product has inspired Andreas and me to look into raising some of our own; by next year’s challenge, our eggs and the occasional chicken should be available right in our own back yard. If we weren’t missing chicken so much this week I doubt the idea would even have occurred to us.

I also looked (briefly) for fish today. The manager at The Wharf was extremely helpful. They had nothing today, but she called her supplier and got back with to me with the promise of some local tuna for tomorrow. There is still further hope on the fish front, as Andreas is talking with friends who fish local rivers to see if they would be interested in selling some of their frozen catch.

After my lack of success in the fish and chicken department, I finally settled on a meatless dinner menu plan that was probably overly ambitious even before circumstances conspired against me to make it impossible. I had figured that if I started as soon as I got home from work, I would be able to make gnocchi with walnut pesto (no cheese, for Nik the non-dairy guy), pumpkin ravioli with brown butter and sage (for the dairy people), roasted tomatoes, bread and green salad.

I started off by harvesting the garden as soon as I got home (more zucchini and a big bowl of tomatoes) and was just drizzling the sliced and seeded tomatoes with olive oil when my daughter asked me if I was ready to leave for parent night at her school. Aargh. Here was something I had forgotten about completely but would never miss for anything.

So the seasoned tomatoes went into the oven (they need to cook at 250 for three hours, so that part worked out OK) but all my elaborate pasta plans went out the window. After the excitement of parent night, my answer to “what’s for dinner?” was "make it yourself." It is very rare that my whole family does not eat together family-style, but I could not think of anything in the kitchen that satisfied all three criteria of a) local, b) something everyone could and would eat and c) there was enough of it for all five people standing around the kitchen.

Fortunately, I have a spouse and kids who all know a shallot from a scallion, and each made his or her own mostly local dinner. The youngest made pesto with (non-local) pasta and a green salad. Andreas built a chef’s salad of lettuce and garden vegetables (with foreign salami – he’s on a high-protein program). The Iron Chef prize goes to Nik and company for their homemade tomato sauce with ground beef and a pan of sauteed squash (with more non-local pasta). Me, I had home fries with onions and an egg on top. I don’t like breakfast in the morning, but I love it for a comfort-food dinner when my day doesn't go quite right.

And the best part is that I also took time to roast and puree the pumpkin, cook and rice the potatoes for gnocchi, set up a batch of bread dough to rise, steam some fingerling potatoes for a salad, bake some rounds of goat cheese to go with salad greens for lunch and put the roasted tomatoes in the fridge, all so that later in the week I’ll be much better prepared.