Weekly Roundup and Winners 6/5

You might have noticed I’ve been a bit lax in the recipe department this week. I’m just waiting for my CSA to start this coming week (woo hoo!) so I can dig into the spring recipes. I do have a few recipes from the “winter” and “anytime” sections of Simply in Season, but seriously, who wants to make Vegetarian Chili or Winter Borscht when it’s 90 degrees out? I did hear a rumor that strawberries are ready so I may go hunting for them this weekend.

On Thursday of this past week I had the opportunity to go to Ladies Night at a new D&W at Knapp & the East Beltline. A blogging friend of mine won tickets and invited me. It sure was an eye opener! I realized how much my thinking about food has changed over the past year or two and I hadn’t even noticed. We had to get stamps from five different areas on a little card that went into a drawing, so I’ll explain what I was thinking at each station.

1. Seafood.

At the first station we got a sample of sugar rubbed salmon. It was so tasty! I do remember wondering if it was wild caught.

2. Wine

We sampled some sparkling juice from St. Julian since they didn’t have a license to sample actual wine. They did have some representatives from Sandhill Crane Vineyards, though, and they mentioned that they take pride in sourcing their grapes within Michigan. How cool is that?

3. Dairy

No samples there, but they had a little table with yogurt, a plastic jug of milk, and a container of soy milk. I remember thinking how long it’s been since I bought milk from the store. And if I do buy yogurt, it’s plain Stonyfield. They did have a dietician doing little presentations at each station, and I missed that particular one, but Megan mentioned to me that I would probably have taken issue with the fact that the dietician recommended that people stay away from real butter. Ugh! Good thing I wasn’t there.

4. Pharmacy

They were sampling Burt’s Bees. I remember thinking hmmm, I really need to do more research in this area. I have switched to paraben free shampoo and conditioner and soap, but have not had much luck with eco friendly deodorant. And I don’t want to be a dirty stinky hippie, no matter how much my views might coincide with them.

5. Produce

Standing in the produce section, I was amazed at how colorful and  . . . well, plastic the fruits and vegetables looked. The blueberries were so tempting. And yet . . . it’s not blueberry season. It struck me that I’m used to getting fruits and vegetables from farmer’s markets now, with only the occasional item from the grocery store, and when they’re not from the grocery store they don’t have that waxy perfect glow about them.

I did manage to catch the presentation, and afterwards someone asked if it was true that vegetables don’t have as many nutrients as they once did. The dietician said it is true, and that to help with that you should buy fruits and vegetables either in season or frozen. Someone else asked how you know if something is in season, and if they could just freeze their own fruits and vegetables if they are not in season. Somehow she missed the whole point. Freezing after the fact isn’t going to put the nutrients back in somehow. I also noticed that the store had a fairly large organic section, so that was a good thing.

At first I wanted to sneer internally at the questions, but then I realized that it was only recently that I knew what was in season! It’s just not something we grow up knowing unless we’re intentional about it. And I grew up in a farming community! It struck me that there is so much education to be done. While I can celebrate how much I’ve learned, I also realized there is so much more I need to learn yet.

Garden Update

Well, the bunnies ate my carrots. For some reason they didn’t like the beets or peas so at least those are still growing in my bag garden. Since I am building a small fence anyway to keep the bunnies out I decided to enlarge the garden area a bit and try my hand at a square foot garden; only one or two blocks, since we DO get most of our vegetables from the CSA. There are just a couple of things we could use extras of. DH is about ready to kill me, because I’ve also been thinking it would be nice to expand our flower beds in the front yard, since we need to give them a good cleaning and some fresh mulch (we’ve been putting it off way too long), oh and there are some areas in our backyard underneath the huge shade trees where the grass doesn’t grow so I was thinking about maybe adding some ground cover plants. He swears I have adult onset ADD. I call it just being creative and visionary. First priority is the garden and cleaning out the flower beds, then we’ll see.

Winners

In case you’re wondering how winners are chosen . . . What I do is copy and paste all the comments into an Excel file, delete everything except the names (I’m not computer savvy enough to figure out how to export just the names) and put one name on each line. Your name goes on two lines if you told me that you are a subscriber. That way they are all numbered automatically. I used to do this in Word and type out the numbers next to each name but then I was like “duh,” Excel has numbered lines already! Then I go to random.org, type in the number of entries, and it automatically chooses a number at random! I then look to the corresponding line, and voila! The winner!

This week, Kelly who blogs at Some-things Cookin’ won The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food

Go Kelly!

And, the winner of the Real Food on a Real Budget ebook is Cindy who blogs at FarmGirlCyn . I’m so happy for her, ‘cause she has been SO helpful to me as we’ve gotten to know each other in bloggy land and in real life.

As part of her entry she wrote “I belong to a local CSA, which, tho expensive at first glance, really works out to be a very smart investment. I buy local, when I can. Just purchased local, 100% grass-fed beef, and shop the farmers market at least every other week for odds and ends not available thru our CSA. I am a firm believer in making do, or doing without, and have learned some new skills in the process. Homemade yogurt, sourdough breads, cream cheese…all items that I used to purchase at the grocers are now being made by me. And if I can learn something new at age nearly 58, then anybody can!”

Hence we conclude this week’s wrap up. Thank you for reading and commenting! I learn so much from you.