Friday, June 29, 2007

Food!

No time for posting lately, wow. I should be better about this.
So, anyways, one Saturday morning last summer, I woke up at 7am and my right wrist and hand hurt REALLY BADLY. So badly that I took asprin (which I rarely do out of principle), wrapped it in an ace bandage, and had the fiancé drive me to urgent care when it opened at 8am.
On a Saturday.
They told me it wasn't broken and just badly bruised - let me just say I have NO idea how it happened but I have been known to sleepwalk when stressed. Perhaps I got into a tussle with the boogyman or something.
Anyways, I was up, it was 9am on a sunny Saturday morning, we were on the beltline - so I thought hell, why don't we go to the Farmer's Market downtown for the first time?
So we did, and spent oodles of money on yummy food.
This year there haven't been any bruised body parts to wake me up early on Saturday, and so we haven't gone to the market since then.
But Witty lent me her book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and reading it has totally changed my opinion on food and such. You need to read this book - I'm only halfway through and can't wait to see what else is in there!
1) The fiancé and I hit up the Hilldale market before work last Wednesday and we will continue to do so all summer on a weekly basis. We hope to buy ~75% of our food there instead of from the grocery store (at least in the summer).
2) Most wine/beer that I buy will now be Wollersheim or New Glarus - both this and #1 are to promote small, local businesses and reduce the shipping costs of food.
3) I ordered a kit to make your own mozzerella and hope to ease off my dependence of store-bought cheese (and if it works, this summer I'll have home-made mozzerella with tomatoes and basil grown on my own deck............heaven!).
4) For food bought at the grocery store, we will try to buy local/organic/etc.
I'm beginning to learn a lot more about sustainable living, and it all makes sense. I don't think I could do what Barbara Kingsolver did - eat only things that were produced near them - because I love things like fruit in the winter, I could never kill my own meat, and I don't know much about canning/preserving. Plus I just don't have time to maintain a whole garden and menagerie of animals.
However, there is a lot the average person can do without much effort to really change the way they eat and live to make this world a better place for small farms - who make the best food anyways.
I'm trying to get the fiancé on board. I think he is about halfway. I'll have to work harder to get him to explore this with me.
On another totally unrelated note, I FINALLY (pretty much) finished my scrapbook of the 10 day cruise that we took last October. It's really huge and I only have about 30 more minutes of work to do on it after I get what I need from the store - so yey!

3 comments:

11frogs said...

I'm so proud, and I can't wait to eat your mozzarella. ~sniff~

loud said...

It's great to be inspired. Molly is changing the world one friend at a time...

Lucia said...

so true.

also funny how one of those books can really capture your imagination and steer your life.
I read this book called Whale Island (I don't own it, it was one of my mother's audiobooks) and it made me want to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine for a year. I didn't. but I did spend more time alone to test it out.