Day 4 – 100-mile Diet: Trip to the downtown farmer’s market and home made PIZZA!

Yesterday, right after work, I took the bus and met my husband downtown for a discovery trip of the farmer’s market. We found so many things:

• Fresh veggies
• Fruit port wine
• Fresh cheese
• Legumes (red and white beans, split peas)
• Live herbs (so we could repot them at home for the fall)
• Strawberry flower Honey
• Bee pollen (which apparently is a very energizing supplement so we thought GREAT!)
• The season’s first pears

Came home and decided to make home made 100-mile pizza. How? Here is our recipe:

Crust: My husband’s flat bread recipe with a bit more oil, rolled out a bit thicker and kneaded with fresh basil, thyme, oregano and rosemary. Roll up the sides and bake in the oven for about 15 minutes at 350’F. Just enough to have it rise a bit and firm up.


The sauce: I made a quick little blender sauce with 5 roma tomatoes, fresh herbs, garlic and a splash of oil. Then I simmered it until the liquid was mostly evaporated.



The pizza: We topped the whole thing with red and green bell peppers, red onions and fresh mild cheddar made right there at the market cheese shop!



We sent everything in the oven for 20 minutes at 350’F.

Tada!

Oh, we also made oven baked garlic fries.



I will be honest; the one thing that has been hard is seasonings and spices. You don’t realize how much you depend on them to flavour your foods until you can’t use them anymore. And how I missed ketchup for the fries! For npw, we decided to go with sour cream that we had in the fridge. But I’m planning on trying my hand at home made mayonnaise here soon so that could be a great alternative! I will let you guys know how it goes.

Hope all of you are having a great Friday night! Thanks for stopping by…

Day 3 – 100-mile Diet : A wonderful discovery!

Yesterday was day 3 of our little 60 day venture.

During our preparations, we have been very good about getting all the information we can about staples and things we know we need everyday from local producers through our farmers markets (we have access to 2 wonderful ones) but sometimes, the short hours aren’t always easy on our schedules so we decided to take a peek inside the big store…

We arrived at our local supermarket (IGA Coop in Sainte-Foy, Quebec) and were immediately assaulted by smells, sights, and cravings that we are not to satisfy for quite a while.

Automatically thinking that this was a terrible idea, we headed to the produce and cheeses, which were the purpose of the trip, and tried our best not to let it get to us. You just don’t realize how much you love Asian, sushi and pasta until you can’t have it!

Back to the mission : We were looking for a local cheese, hard enough that we could grate and have be a replacement of parmesan. As we were looking through the counters, we started seeing a small logo appearing on many of the products :

“Saveurs d’ici” in French means “Flavours from here” and the lady at the cheese counter explained that all the products in the store (whether it be produce, cheese or prepared products) come from less than 100 kilometres (60 miles) and have come straight from the producer to the store. So no transit mileage.

We were THRILLED! Now of course, some of the prepared products have ingredients that are not 100-mile, so that will have to wait, but to be able to walk into our local grocery store and pick our cheeses without having to wonder is a wonderful gift! We stepped out with two cheddars (aged 6 months and 1 year) and wonderful goat milk brie. And it only cost us a few dollars ore than it would have for more commercial cheeses.

Truly, a wonderful little treasure of a big box grocery store we have! Who would have known…?

Have you been around your grocery store? How locavore friendly are they? I’d love to know…

Day 2 – 100 mile diet: Making bread without yeast!

So, day 2 was a bit better. Caffeine headaches are slowly going away and we had a bit more to eat today than yesterday so that always makes us happier. The day was filled with fresh eggs, cheese, milk, fruit, soup, fresh cut veggies. Dessert tonight was the best: Strawberries with granulated maple sugar.

But we were in the mood for a bit more tomorrow so we made bread! Okay, maybe they look more like a cross between a tortilla and a pita, but they smell so good. (We are planning our starting a sourdough strain this coming week-end. More on that later!)

My husband’s recipe was easy:

2 parts flour to 1 part water and a few table spoons of oil.
Make a ball and let sit for about 1 hour.



Roll them out into thin tortilla looking disks.



Then pop them in the oven at 400 degrees for 6-7 minutes.

Voilà!



We used local organic whole wheat flour (about 100 kilometres / 60 miles). We made them plain today but are planning on trying to mix some flavours in the next few times: Maybe basil and garlic, green onions, rosemary or even leeks.

Tomorrow means bread with 100-mile jam I made a few weeks ago for breakfast and lunch will be salad and bread with local goat milk brie. Not sure what dinner will be yet.

Off to bed!

Day 1 – 100-mile diet: Back from vacation and going locavore

So yesterday (September 15) was the first day of our 100-mile diet challenge. Having just gotten back from vacation helped a lot since we had pretty much emptied the fridge before we left for 10 days so very little temptation there. Unfortunately though, having had very little time to prepare more filling foods, our first day was a bit of a sparse one. We had tons of veggies and fruit from the local farmers market, so our lunches were really pretty much that. I had a simple cabbage and veggie soup with a tomato broth, tomatoes and cucumbers cut up and a nectarine for a snack. Okay, the nectarine was local when we bought it in Virginia, but we thought throwing good food out wasn’t very green either.

Dinner was wonderful though : My mom (being very supportive of our decision to do this) had prepared for us a yummy spaghetti squash, stuffed with all local produce like carrots, peppers, zucchinis, onions, garlic, etc. She was honest with us about the butter, although local, being salted. But we thought that on the grand scale of things, that was alright until we get ourselves organized. We bought amazing local sharp cheddar and top the spooned out spaghetti with it and had a feast!

We went shopping for supplies last night, so our second day should be a better fed one for sure!

Hardest challenge of Day-1 for both of us: No caffeine… Not that we drink that much coffee on a day-to-day basis, but we do drink a lot of tea and neither are 100-miles. You don’t realize the effect caffeine has on your system until you are trying to get through your day without it at all. Hopefully our bodies will get used to it soon and the rest of the week will not feel so sluggish.

If any of my readers have ideas and suggestions about herbal coffee and tea replacers, I’m all ears! We are planning on going wild chickaree hunting tonight (they grow all over the field by our house) and will hit a local Amerindian herb garden this week-end.

So that was our first day. I will try and keep a daily diary of our experiment in local eating. I will be better about posting images as well. Hope to ear from you guys for ideas, encouragement and comments. I’d love to know what you think.

Change the World Wednesday Challenge - Say NO to Styro!

So here we go for another challenge! Thank you to my readers (TC and Daisy Soap Girl) that stopped by and shared their eco-friendly ways!

So this week's CTWW challenge is as follows :

For one week, say "NO" to polystyrene foam (commonly known as Styrofoam). This means ... don't buy it (no Styrofoam coolers, cups or toys), don't use it and don't buy anything that comes in it. At restaurants, should you have leftover food to take home, ask the server to put it in something other than Styrofoam. At fast-food establishments, refuse to buy any products which come in it. Just Say No!

Or ...

If your life is already Styrofoam free, then write a post about why Styrofoam is so bad for the environment.

Although we are living pretty much Styrofoam free a lot of the time, the one time it's really hard is when you are eating out. Just last night, we took home leftovers and Tada! we have a nifty little Styrofoam plate in our fridge. Leaving on vacation in just 2 days, this week's challenge will definitely be a challenge, but we are ready.

So why is Styrofoam so bad for the environment and for us?

• Well first, of course is the obvious : It does not biodegrade. It will stay in landfills for hundreds of years.
• What about the ones with recycling symbols? Well, most of them carry the number 6 symbol which is very rarely recyclable by municipal facilities. So people put them in the recycling bins thinking they are doing a great thing. But they will end up in the incinerators and release ridiculous amounts of toxins into the atmosphere.
• Polystyrene leaches which means that food and drink in contact with it will absorb toxins that we then eat and drink.
• Styrofoam is very light which means that as it breaks down into small pieces; it gets blown away into water systems and the ocean. It costs millions in clean-up for cities and kills fish and marine wildlife who see it floating and eat it, thinking it is food.

Here are a few facts I found on canada.com :

" According to the French ministry of ecology, more than 14 million tonnes of polystyrene are produced every year around the world. Given its light weight --Styrofoam is 95 per cent air -- the volume it represents is huge.

Americans throw away an estimated 25 billion Styrofoam cups every year, or about 82 cups per person.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says of the three million tons of polystyrene produced in the U.S., 2.3 million tons end up in landfills, with much of the remainder finding its way into waterways. "

Will you take the challenge? So sounds off here! How do you say no to Styro?