Food Stuffs

One day's garden bounty

We've been enjoying some pretty amazing food around here lately so I thought I'd share for anyone who's interested. For the most part, we've gone vegetarian for meals at home. I'm no longer buying meat at the grocery store unless it's from a source I feel good about. If we go to a Trader Joe's I try to stock up, but normally we're eating vegetarian with the occasional seafood thrown in. *A* loves shrimp and they both really love fried tofu. After seeing many trucks of animals on our trip to and from Michigan, *A* has been more sensitive about eating animals, although she has always sort of been a vegetarian anyway.

We've been so excited that many of our meals lately have been almost totally local. We like to call it "Everything Local but the Starch". Between our garden, the wonderful online local farmer's market, and the CSA we joined, we have lots of local produce to choose from. We also bought a herd-share from a local goat farm so that we can have local goat cheese each week. Unfortunately we don't yet have a local resource for flour or other starchy foods, but we do enjoy a few things that are totally local like a frittata with local eggs and veggies. The other night we had pasta with local vegetables and goat cheese topped with homemade pesto (made with basil from our garden). Lunch yesterday was a bagel with goat cheese, tomato and basil leaves and an apple; again, everything local but the starch.

I'm all about the pesto right now, we're putting it on everything. I used this recipe from my neighbor. Although I did use pine nuts because I had some on hand. My kids love pesto and they really love basil, they will eat basil right off the plant while I'm watering the garden!

We're also all about the granola this summer. This is our favorite recipe. I've tried many others, but this one is the best. I'm not a big fan of granola with molasses and this one uses honey (we use local). It's definitely not a healthy granola recipe, it's pretty full calorie, but it's homemade so no preservatives and it's cheaper! I can't tell you how much I love being able to completely pass up the cereal aisle at the store! We like this granola with milk of course, but also with yogurt, in pancakes, and even on ice cream!

My next culinary adventure is to try making our own crackers. I'm so annoyed at the amount of "stuff" in a box of crackers and now with a school lunch to pack, I'm having a hard time finding snack-type foods I feel good about sending. So, I'm hoping this weekend to experiment with graham crackers and another wheat type of cracker. Although I have found that Triscuits are the best bet on the cracker aisle with only wheat, oil, and salt listed in the ingredients! It's been fun trying to figure out interesting things to pack in *A*'s lunch. I want her to be more interested in what I pack than what's offered in the lunch line so it takes some creativity. So far she's not interested in what they are offering at school because it's very meat-based, but I know she'll enjoy buying her lunch some days. I will do another post sometime with some of the ideas I've come up with for packing lunches.
Ok, sleeping kids are up and it's time to go register *A* for soccer. Happy weekend!