Since joining our CSA and reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable,
Miracle, I've been mildly obsessed with the local food movement.
By making the effort to buy locally grown and produced food products, I
am trying to help the environment (reducing fuel used to ship goods from
far away to me), help animals (supporting small farms where the animals
lead relatively normal lives before becoming dinner -- I have never felt
it was intrinsically wrong to kill an animal for food, although I have
cut back on meat consumption), and help my tastebuds (local = fresh =
delicious). I try not to get all high and mighty about it, because I'm
certainly far from perfect in my buying habits, but the concepts make
sense to me, and as a bonus I've been inspired to explore more of my
neighborhood and meet some interesting farm folks.
So, anyway, we split our CSA share with another couple. They recently joined yet another CSA which does a meat share. I wasn't as into this idea, since we only eat meat about once a week, but I did ask if they could procure some local ground pork for me. Local ground beef was already freely available at our farmer's market. With their powers combined, I made local meatloaf!
For the last few weeks at farmshare, we've been getting the first of the
winter squash: a butternut and two white guys with green stripes called
delicatas. Since it's been a bit warm to bake squash lately and I didn't
have any other good ideas, I've just been socking them away in the pantry.
Then the other day I came across this recipe for spicy squash soup. Since I'm blogging about it, you can assume it came out pretty well.
The late summer farm share has only brought more delicious vegetables to our household. So many that we had enough in the house to cobble together tonight's meal even though we didn't get to do our shopping as usual this week. The menu consisted of a tomato salad (aka, sliced tomato topped with salt, pepper, a little olive oil, and fresh basil), oven-roasted baby pink potatoes, a zucchini casserole, and frozen veggie burgers (not from farm share, okay). Everything was very simple, but we decided to make the zucchini into a casserole to do something a little different from the standard saute.
I looked up some zucchini casserole recipes online to get ideas, and I was a little dismayed to see how many of them centered around pre-packaged, sodium-filled ingredients like "cream of celery soup." Who has that on hand?! I improvised, searching the fridge for something creamy to take its place, and for a few other ingredients to add texture and flavor.