Family & Home

Just last week, Congress voted its support for the current agricultural appropriations bill, HR 2997, reauthorizing, among other things, funding for school lunch programs.

I supported the bill because, as I was told by the head of nutrition for my kids’ school district, the lunches served in school cafeterias are the only daily meal that millions of American children can count on.

If you’re a regular visitor to this web site, we'll assume you enjoy the health benefits, as well as the sensual pleasures, of eating fresh, wholesome, locally grown, sustainably sourced food: real food.

Last May, in my family's backyard garden, we planted five varieties of tomatoes, three varieties of lettuce, plus fennel, squash, cucumbers, beets and onions. Oh, and one pumpkin seed that our daughter found on the floor of her first-grade classroom.

The first thing to ripen, the lettuce, was fantastic. The cool weather was perfect for nurturing those tender leaves. But the tomatoes were a major disappointment; not enough heat and humidity for them. And neither the fennel, the squash, the cucumbers or the onions had a great year. The beets, the last I saw of them, were just one day away from being picked when some nighttime visitor – a raccoon? an opossum? – got to them first.

Not all locavores live in the cities. There are plenty of suburbanites, like me, who appreciate the benefits of buying and eating locally grown, sustainably harvested food. That’s why so many of us suburba-locavores (New word! Are you reading, Merriam-Webster editors?) shop at Lakewinds.

My kitchen counter, covered with this week's farmshare bountyWhat am I going to do with all of this stuff? It's taking over my kitchen! My fridge is still nearly full from last week's Harmony Valley vegetables! My fruit share includes an entire bag full of apricots! I've been eating salad greens and sautee mix non-stop for weeks! I don't know if I can eat another basil vinaigrette. And now that there are tomatoes - blessed, delicious tomatoes - it occurs to me that nobody else in my family will touch them.

I've written glowingly about the past about A Backyard Farm, a company started by Joan James and Coleen Gregor this summer to help people construct, start, and farm raised beds on their own yards (You can read my previous post on A Backyard Farm here), so I decided it's time to update you on our garden's progress, and our experience with Joan and Coleen. Here goes:

When it comes to making and preparing food, you can’t get much more local than homemade. When your food is prepared, cooked, and served all in the same factory – a home kitchen – there is a sense of ownership over the food. It’s not just the sense of accomplishment, but also because it is so much easier to know your ingredients. There are tons of prepared, cured, and processed foods on the shelves of grocery stores that used to be made at home - they’d be much better tasting (and better for us) if they still were. It may seem like a lot of effort to make your own ketchup, jam, cake, or bacon; but it doesn’t need to be. Bacon is one of those foods that is processed to death in grocery stores and is so delicious homemade.

Despite my crushing love for good food and an ongoing affair with Williams-Sonoma, I’m actually not much of a kitchen gadget fan. I’m a firm believer in getting the best kitchen basics you can afford and using them to death. Why do I need an asparagus stripper thing when I have a perfectly good, sharp knife? Or a flour sifter when a basic strainer does the same job? On the other hand, there is a time and a place for certain gadgets and appliances.

This is an excerpt of an article I wrote for Live Green Twin Cities. To read the entire article, click here.

Shari Manolas Danielson is a Minneapolis writer, editor, information designer, wife, mother, educator, coach, trainer, and friend. Her Writing Blindly blog is terrific, thought-provoking, and inspiring. This is Shari’s first post for Simple, Good, and Tasty, and I’ll do all I can to talk her into more.

The phrase “Grow your own” used to mean what your friend in college did when he turned his dorm room into a very specialized (and highly illegal) greenhouse.