Eat Local KC

September Eat Local Challenge

September marks the third annual Eat Local Challenge for the month of September. The focus of this year's challenge in on how to can and freeze the summer bounty for the coming winter months. If you would like to participate, you can find details here.

If you are a Kansas City area resident and want to participate locally, please post a comment for me that you would like to blog about your participation and I will get you set up to share your experiences with our community.

September is one of the best months of the season for local produce. It offers the best of late summer tomatoes and corn along with fall favorites like winter squash and sweet potatoes, plus a second round of lettuces and greens! It's a fantastic month to try the Eat Local Challenge!

No Logic Here

In reading a New York Times article about the coming ethanol boom, it occurred to me that this whole approach is short-sighted and makes little sense. Here, an excerpt from the article:

"In short, the ethanol boom is accelerating the inequity in the rural landscape. The high price of corn — and the prospect of continued huge demand — doesn’t benefit everyone equally. It gives bigger, richer farmers and outside investors the ability to outcompete their smaller neighbors. It cuts young farmers hoping to get a start out of the equation entirely. It reduces diversity in crops and in farm size."

By removing diversity in crops and turning over our farms to ethanol production, we are only trading the import of fossil fuels for importing foods. And, we've seen from China, our third largest imported food source, what that means for food safety and quality.

It's not a valid solution: risking your health and relying on imported foods so you can keep driving a Hummer to the grocery store that is a half mile away where your food has been shipped from thousands of miles away. There's just no logic here.

Roasted Ratatouille

No, I haven't seen the movie. But I've known about Ratatouille for a lot longer than the Pixar version. It's one of those long-standing classic dishes, but until recently, I could not tell you why the dish made so much sense. Not until last summer at the farmers market while I was shopping what was fresh and in season for mid-summer.

Consider what is in season right now: tomatoes, peppers, onions, eggplant, okra, zucchini, yellow squash, garlic. All in season, all together, all in the one recipe. Makes perfect sense to build a dish around those ingredients, right? I just never got that point. The recipe existed before the corner Megamart with anything and everything regardless of season. It was built around the vegetables that were available, fresh, and in grown in one's garden. Simple. Rustic. And delicious. Recipes follow ...