Locavore Challenge Days 1 and 2

I am attempting to be a locavore for an entire week. I’m on Day 2 and it is HARD! I am partaking in the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA)’s Locavore Challenge. It’s happening for the entire month of September. You can choose to be a locavore for a day, a week, or a month. When I first learned of this challenge back in July, my intention was to do it for an entire month, but then I remembered that I had the Montreal Marathon in September. There’s no way I’d be able to melt into the magic of Montreal if I had to scout out only local food. Brent and I opted the challenge for a week.

If you would’ve asked me a week ago how much of my food is local, I would’ve confidently replied “About 90 %.” Wrong! I’m only now realizing this. So, for this challenge, we’re allowed to select five non-local foods to have in our food repertoire. That was easy for me: quinoa, brown rice (as athletic as Brent and I are, we need grains to sustain us), tea, my gluten-free chocolate chip cookie mix, and chocolate.

Day 1:
So yesterday, I started to prepare a homemade tomato soup. This was my first time peeling tomatoes! Oh my goodness, I was like a kid tying her shoes for the first time! Success! But then I started adding ingredients and looked at my spice cabinet, dismayed that so few of my spices are local. Fortunately in the locavore challenge, spices don’t count; they have a Marco Polo rule. After cooking though, I had to expand that rule to include ANYTHING that I use to season my food with (and sadly it’s a long list: vinegars, several spices (like asafetida powder), lemons, broths, yikes! At any rate, my homemade tomato soup was so delicious with a dozen fresh, local heirloom tomatoes (thanks to Wyllie Fox Farm). I wanted to have grilled cheese sandwiches with the soup. Ugh—Bread! And I can only eat sourdough; I get hives when I eat any other type of bread. Brent and I scoured the market looking for sourdough bread with flour that was made locally. The closet we could get was Vermont, but the vendor made us aware that there “could be some North Dakota flour mixed in there.” We’re trying. We used a local sharp cheddar cheese. Yum!

Day 2:
Breakfast was easy. We had local eggs, with local goat cheese, with chives from my herb garden and leftover local eggplant parm (oops the tomato sauce was not local, but I guess that can count as a seasoning?), and the semi-local sourdough bread toasted. Lunch was my yummy quinoa, corn, cucumber salad. And the corn and cukes were local! Dinner is cooking in the crockpot right now. Homemade chicken and rice soup with a local organic chicken, wild rice, local carrots, celery (shoot that’s not local either, but it is organic!), local garlic, and lots of chives and parsley from my herb garden!

Two days almost done! Five to go! Stay tuned! Definitely contact me if you’re up for this challenge!