Local Bite – Week One Reflection

This first week of our Local Bite Challenge has been filled with good food, moments of panic and more reflection on our food systems and our personal habits than I anticipated. Oh, and headaches. The literal headaches.

We can talk about headaches in a bit, but first, let’s talk about grains for a little bit though, shall we? First, my partner and I have both been told by our doctor to lay off the gluten due to the various ill affects we were experiencing. This change by itself has been difficult (old habits die hard) but coupled with this challenge? Oh man, has it been hard! Because, even though we were both feeling poorly due to the gluten, breads and pastas and the like allow one to feel full! Imagine that!? So, we’ve been dealing with the challenge of just getting enough food to feel full, plus the cravings for all of the things we shouldn’t be eating.

Gluten aside, the mental shift of going from a our normal eating habits (whatever we want, whenever we want it with lots of eating out) is crazy!  We’re in sink or swim mode here!  So, here are some of the mistakes we made over the last week:

• We didn’t make a meal plan. Truly, we just thought we could wing it. Now it didn’t end horribly, but we made it much harder on ourselves than was necessary.
• We didn’t account very busy days. Mid-week we forgot about an exceptionally busy day and didn’t plan for lunch, so we wound up running to the Co-op and searching out some bread (I know!), cheese, greens and hummus, 75% of which was local. I guess in hindsight it was better than running out for fast food, right?
• We didn’t account for Kim’s work lunches which will just have to become an exception since she does not normally get to pick the restaurants they go to and they will almost never serve locally sourced meals.
• On Friday, we found ourselves out running errands longer than intended and wound up hungry again with still more errands to run. Luckily, we were able to stop in at The Real Butcher Shop and split a 100% locally grown sourced and lamb burger. Even the bun was made from various grains (mostly heirloom) sourced locally. It was expensive, but it was delicious.

The moral of these mistakes?

Plan in advance!

Yeah…hot mess, right?!

So, mistakes aside, how did we actually do with the purchases we made and the meals we made and ate at home? Well, despite our stumbles, I think we did pretty well:

Local Ingredients Purchased This Week

Farmer’s Market ::: Sunflower sprouts ::: Raw milk ::: Goat cheese ::: Kale ::: Kohlrabi ::: Bunching onions ::: Swiss chard ::: Carrots ::: Radishes ::: Honey ::: Ground pork sausage ::: Fancy Leaf Lard

Co-op ::: Peanut butter ::: Blue corn posole ::: Pinto beans ::: Pork stew meat ::: Blue corn polenta ::: Asiago cheese

* We were also (very kindly) given two turkey sausages at the Farmer’s Market by The Real Butcher Shop.

Local Ingredients on Hand (currently in production or preserved by us previously):

Eggs (from our chickens) ::: Blue corn meal (from our CSA 2 years ago) ::: Apple sauce (from our friends trees in 2012) ::: Dried Herbs (thyme, rosemary, oregano…)

Non-Local Ingredients:

Plain yogurt (for cultures to start making our own)

Exceptions:

Salt, pepper, baking soda, baking powder, 2 avocados that were in our fridge, pecans from our pantry, half a stick of butter left in our fridge

Total spent: $99.69

Lunch mistakes/additional costs: ~$30 (Mistakes are expensive!)

Meals made at home:

Breakfast – scrambled eggs with spinach ::: quiche with a sweet potato crust, sausage and spinach ::: blue corn polenta (savory with asiago cheese, or sweet with Apple Pie in a Jar and milk) ::: omelette with greens, onions and asiago cheese

Lunch – leftovers, every day. Plus an egg salad.

Snacks – hard boiled eggs ::: tablespoons of peanut butter ::: apple sauce

Dinner – turkey sausage, roasted radishes, blue corn muffins ::: blue corn posole (which was my One New-to-me Item this week), salad ::: beans and pork sausage, salad ::: spaghetti squash with green chile pork sausage and tomato sauce canned from our garden last year with asiago cheese

Dessert – apple sauce

There were many conversations about what to eat since we didn’t have a plan, which meant lots of debating and guessing. We will absolutely have a better plan for next week! Maybe even an actual Meal Plan 🙂

Staples made at home:

• Rendered a pint of Fancy Leaf Lard
• A small batch of butter
• A quart of raw yogurt (check out the Raw Milk Recipes & Resources post I pulled together for inspiration on this Local Bite raw milk journey we’re on)

Oh, and the headaches? Yeah…I do believe I am detoxing. Maybe I should have planned better, but I didn’t. See, I have a morning ritual of drinking tea. A very large mug of strong, black Irish Breakfast loose leaf tea with milk and honey. I usually follow that up with an espresso drink of some kind on my way into work. These rituals and habits have been replaced by a very large mug of loose leaf mint tea from last years garden with a bit of honey.

While this new ritual is delicious, it also does not contain any caffeine. Now, caffeine doesn’t affect me the way it affects most. It doesn’t wake me up or give me a boost of energy or anything like that. I simply drink black tea out of habit as an early morning ritual and coffee/espresso because I have grown to like the taste of it. My body, however, has grown accustomed to having caffeine in the mornings. So, I have woken up every single morning for the past week with a headache.  Not fun, but it’s giving me a new perspective on how some of my habits have a negative impact on my body.

So, all in all, I think it was a relatively successful first week. I knew we would run into stumbling blocks, I just didn’t know what those blocks would be.  This week has been enlightening and, yes, challenging and I am grateful for it. No, it wasn’t perfect, but I think that’s OK. I didn’t stack the deck here, we’re learning as we go, and I trust that this 100 day challenge will change the way we look at our food and our food sources for the rest of our lives. One small step (and stumble) at a time.

So now, please tell me how your first week went?

xoxo,
M

P.S. Care to join us on Facebook in the Local Bite group? There is so much inspiration and support there from people doing their best to eat locally all over the world!  I promise you’ll enjoy it 🙂