So we did it! Part One: The Apology
Hello Faithful Readers,
We would like to apologize for our lack of postings during the past 7+ months. We apologize for slowly stringing you along with the posts we provided, giving you just enough of a glimpse into our locally living lives to get you hooked. And then snapping away your front row seat into our lives at the source. And all without warning. I’m sure it was tough for many of you, checking everyday, only to be disappointed time after time after time. I especially apologize to the people who asked us personally “When will the next post be up?” and we straight-faced told you, “oh I’m sure we will get one up this week.” Yes, we lied. I apologize for the withdrawal, the sweats, the aches. But mostly I apologize to those who have learned to carry on without us, those who have become functioning members of society once again. The people who are driven to push the economy forward by buying useless Chinese made products at the Dollar Store. I apologize to you most of all, for with this post we offer you the mother of all relapses. For the drought has ended and now comes times of floods. We have finished our trial year. Today I offer you an outline of our adventures, our accomplishments, our challenges and mostly our plan for the future. Shortly Kyla will offer a post with our favorite local items from the past year.
The main reason we started this project was more of a curiosity. We wanted to see if we could do this, and to see if it would be hard. There were obvious benefits from the start; less impact on the environment, and supporting the local economy. But there were also a lot of hidden benefits. We are both healthier and in better shape today than when we started a year ago. This time last year I weighed 25 pounds more than I do today. This was done without a reduction in the amount I eat or in my lifestyle choices. Now this might be a different story had I lived in Hershey Pennsylvania and decided to do a local living project. But, for the most part the foods available to us locally were much healthier than the foods not available locally, and eating fresh in season produce is much healthier than eating processed or canned variations of the same food that is available in the supermarkets. To top it off, the food tastes better, which is my next hidden benefit. By eating locally we are forced to eat seasonally a lot more. By eating seasonally we got to eat fresh food. If you compare a tomato or strawberry picked in your back yard to something that is grown in California or Mexico you will notice the difference. How can something that has been picked early, sprayed to keep from rotting and spent a week on a truck be as good as something is fresh. I won’t even go into all the negative externalities of the large agricultural industries. It is no wonder that all the top chefs believe that having quality fresh ingredients is the most important aspect to making good food. Another great thing has been having to improve our variety and not cook with common foods. Finding replacements for rice has lead us to using Barely and Spelt, which we will be using lots more of in the future. We have also been able to find great/new uses for things like Daikon, Celeriac, Kale, Sunchokes all of which will become staples for us in the future. One of my favorite benefits has been getting to know the people who grow our food, and happily supporting them. There is nothing better than going to the farmers market or bakery or local Pizza place and buying great food or goods from nice people who live in our community who we get to know and they get to know us and mostly who are happy to have our business.
This post will be continued…. I Promise
Preserving the Early Bounty
We’re back! Well, technically, we haven’t gone anywhere, but for most of you who haven’t heard from us in a long while, you’re probably starting to wonder if we’re even still sticking to our Local Living. The answer: a resounding yes!!
The last few months have been very busy with a trip, a move, lots of Ulti, the Hunger Games (I blame them because they were what first derailed me a few months ago!), and, of course, planting a garden. Lots has happened but lots more is yet to come and I figured we’d better get back on track to tell you all about it.
For starters, today we did our first canning of the season! We canned a lovely rhubarb and apple sauce for use on ice cream, French toast and in crisps. Up until last week, I thought we’d probably do most of our canning in the fall, however Adam and I have been faced with culinary abundance lately and we got to talking about how to spread the bounty across the year. So we decided to can a little bit of everything as we go. We also bought extra asparagus (even though we’ve been eating fresh asparagus practically every second day since it’s been in season for the last 4 weeks), and we plan to pickle some of it as well as make an asparagus soup with the ends. (I’ll post that recipe after we try it out- it was a gift from our lovely basement dweller, Amanda.)
We also greatly improved our preservation abilities yesterday by buying a deep freeze and another dehydrator. I’ll share more on the dehydrator in July when we pull out all three of our dehydrators to put away as many apricots as possible. The freezer was a steal we bought second hand (70$ including delivery) and it is the perfect size!
The garden is in bloom and we’ve been enjoying VERY local salads from our garden on a near daily basis. I think the garden itself deserves a full post so I’ll be sure to keep up now that I’m back on track but for tonight, take a peak at the pictures of our rhubarb sauce in jars and the first of our greens in the garden.
(P.S. There is a jar of this stuff up for grabs for anyone who has additional rhubarb for us. I want to make some rhubarb syrup to add to drinks throughout the summer but we used up all our rhubarb today! Send me a message or comment on the post if you are local and have rhubarb for us!)
Here is Adam’s Rhubarb sauce recipe:
3 parts rhubarb (diced and then put through the food processor)
1 part apple (chopped)
Sugar to taste (our is quite tart still)
A small amount of lemon juice
Put all this in a big pot and simmer on low for about 20 minutes. This will give you a slightly lumpy sauce with delicious taste and can be used throughout the season!
If canning, sterilize the jars in the oven for at least 20 minutes and then place hot sauce into hot jars and boil jars in boiling water that covers their lids by a few inches for 15 minutes.
Enjoy!
How to feed the world?
Here’s a cool video Adam found the other day. Check it out and let me know what you think:)
Living Local with Ben and Courtney
At the risk of outing myself entirely, I have to confess that I caved to popular demand and watched the Bachelor tonight! I just had to find out what the deal was with this Courtney girl and if she was for real. I’m still not convinced but I have to admit I feel a bit bad for them being through so much.
My compromise for allowing myself to watch such girly fodder was to get something done during the show. The fruits of my labour will take months to emerge: I spent the commercial breaks sterilizing soil and planting my first of the early season vegetables!
Let me start by warning all readers that any information I share about gardening on this blog is very likely the same BS that could be used to describe the Bachelor. I am not a good gardener and everything I do is because I read it somewhere or “just have a feeling”. This year Adam and I are trying for success by drawing up a garden plan (and of course a spreadsheet 🙂 and we hope things turn out for us. I am so excited to see what comes of this experiment. I guess we’ll have to wait and see which will blossom more, our garden or Ben and Courtney’s relationship. 
PS. Don’t tell anyone I watched the Bachelor!
A little economics
Ok here is a bit of economics for everyone, since I know how much people love numbers and economics. Canada has a 100 billion foreign debt; that is about 30,000 per capita. At first glance that looks like every Canadian has consumed 30,000$ worth of stuff paid for by foreign investors, but really it’s more like our Grandparents bought stuff on a credit card and passed that credit card to our parents, who in turn bought more stuff on that credit card and then passed it down to us. All the while no one has paid anything off but instead let interest grow and add on to the total debt. We now have this debt and are doing the same thing. Now to put this in perspective the 100 billion is about 64% of our GDP meaning if we all sacrificed 64% of our income this year we could pay off our foreign debt. To compare to other countries: Greece has 47,000$ per capita foreign debt which is 174% of GDP, US has 48,000 per capita foreign debt which is 99% of GDP, and China has 396$ per capita foreign debt which is 5% of GDP.
How do we accumulate a foreign debt? There are many different economic/accounting identities but the main thing is that if we as a country consume more than we produce we have to get that extra consumption from somewhere. It is the same as on an individual level, if you spend more than you make you need to borrow money and go into debt. More technically it is if we import more than we export plus the addition of any interest we have on outstanding foreign debt we get this foreign debt. So wouldn’t it make sense that if we didn’t import as much we wouldn’t borrow as much? This is where local living comes into this post; by consuming locally (in this case just in Canada) we will reduce imports and put Canada in a better financial position. More importantly maybe we can pay some of this debt off before passing it on to our kids.
The main problem is this; if posed with the option to consume more today and have someone else down the line pay for you; wouldn’t you choose to consume more? Most people would, but it becomes this moral question of whether it is right or not. By no means am I saying that importing things is wrong; but more that doing so to over consumption like most first world countries have been doing for the last 6 decades is. In fact most third world countries have better debt-service ratios than Canada, and Canada actually has one of the better rates of the first world countries.
There are two good examples that are talked about a lot today, China and Greece. Both are on opposite ends of the spectrum, Greece has accumulated such a debt and can no longer pay it, now look at the trouble they are in (Part of the trouble is due to the Euro as well but that’s a whole other story.) Then there is China an extreme example of how to thrive through lending, they export 190 billion dollars more than they import each year. That means every year they lend out an amount that is almost twice as much as Canada’s total foreign debt. This doesn’t even account for the huge amounts they collect in interest payments on their foreign holdings. This is how China has slowly positioned themselves into an economic power, this is why China owns over 1 Trillion dollars of the US, this is why China owns our oil sands, and why the Government is trying so hard to build a northern pipeline to connect China’s oil to China.
One of those days….
We returned late last night from a week of visiting Adam’s family. After 10 days of eating out, cooking meals and bragging about how easy it is to be Living Local, I was really starting to think we were too easy on ourselves. But today, I had one of those days where I remembered the challenge this could be.
Have you ever found yourself dying to just sit around and do very little? But then your stomach starts to rumble. So you get up and have some fudge you bought in Merrickville Ontario (Local of course) and then sit back down. Soon after the rumble returns. So you ignore it. It’s not that you’re not hungry it’s just that you’re too lazy to cook. So you start to think about what might be in your fridge. Two pears, cabbage that looks a bit old, some sunchokes, eggs; it doesn’t add up to much. So you try to distract yourself with more MLS searching (an occasional addiction of mine). But eventually, you need to eat. Unfortunately, you’ve procrastinated so long it’s too late to go buy anything, not that there’s much local to buy at the traditional stores. So you make do.
I whined a little while to myself but to be honest, it feels good to struggle just a little for our challenge. I ended up with decent falafels with emmer grains and frozen peas. It was great, especially because I finally found something to eat. It was just one of those days.
No Suffering Here!
People keep asking how our “diet” is going, it makes me laugh! If I were dieting, would I be eating all this delicious food?
Honestly, it’s a fair mistake. It does feel a little like a diet in terms of having to think a bit about what we’re eating but in no way do I feel like we are starving. Last week was a great week in The Local Living Project; I stocked up on some amazingly delicious (and nutritious) essentials and had a lot of fun trying to make a few homemade treats I’ll tell you about soon in another post. In fact, I was having so much fun sourcing, planning, cooking and eating that I didn’t have enough time to write a post!
I thought today I’d clarify that we are, indeed eating well, and share a few meals that we’ve been enjoying, if only to satisfy fears that we might be starving. Here’s a sample of what we’ve enjoyed in the past few weeks (and maybe some ideas of local things you can incorporate this time of year as well!) I’ve posted some pictures as well but just remember, I’m no photographer.
Breakfast:
Poached or scrambled eggs on (homemade put poorly made) whole wheat toast
Homemade granola (See recipe), yogurt, frozen blueberries, golden raspberries and black berries
Fieldstone Granary Organic Breakfast mix (See Link to this amazing company), canned peaches, yogurt
Lunch and Supper
Homemade pizza with emu sausage, fresh ricotta-mozza, dehydrated tomatoes and peppers and canned tomato sauce
Endive and micro-green salad with pear, goats cheese and toasted walnuts (ok, I’ve been half-cheating and using my balsamic cream as dressing, it’s SO good and I don’t know what I’ll do when it’s gone!)
Baked chicken, roast potatoes and root vegetables
Spelt Squash Salad (see recipe)
French onion or mushroom soup made with fresh chicken stock
Mushroom barley risotto (See recipe) with salmon and carrots
Snacks
Homemade crackers, cheese and emu sausage (I’ll share the cracker recipe once I’ve perfected it, so far, it’s not great 😉
Nuts and dehydrated apples and apricots
Kale chips! (my favourite!)
See, we’re not starving at all. But I sure do feel like I’m getting a little healthier! Enjoy!
Pre-Loved Lovelies
My infatuation with thrift stores started long ago as my mom could embarrassingly tell you. I had a god-awful collection of felted sweaters and my beloved surfer tank (which, coincidentally I just agreed to part with this past weekend as a de-cluttering exercise since I realized that shoving myself into a child’s tank is a lot less fun as a grown adult with a slowing metabolism than it was as a spindly, “pre-development” teen- but that’s a whole other story!). After a phase of extremely poor fashion choices I moved away from the thrift stores, due in most part to my professional career and a perceived sense of wealth until a certain vintage hound friend re-introduced me to the joy of pre-loved. This past summer I was again hooked after a single morning of garage saleing resulted in the purchase of one of my current favourite items in my home: my dehydrator which I bought for a mere $20. (If you continue to read this blog you are sure to hear more about my dehydrator because I LOVE it!)
So up until recently, this has been my best “score”. But now I’m here to announce, that I have a new favourite “score”: My awesome new prayer bells! (See photo) These probably don’t excite many people but I have been looking for a similar item that could be used in my facilitation work to gather the attention of a group without being too intense. I promised myself that I would wait until the right item jumped out at me and just after Christmas, I found these. I bought them at the Salvation Army Silent Auction which is hosted at the local sally-ann every couple weeks and I paid just $17 for them! They have worn down etching in them and probably have an amazing history. I am so excited!
I realize it is possible that there are people reading this that are neither excited by dehydrators nor prayer bells and as difficult as I find that to believe, I concede that you may require slightly more motivation to check out your local thrift store. Therefore I’ve made a list of all the cool or useful items I or my close friends have recently bought second hand:
– A scale (that was much cheaper than brand new and works just fine)
– Clothes hangers for dirt cheap that are actually very good quality
– Picture frames
– Kitchen gadgets including a decent juicer I bought for $5.99
– A wicked Mad Men bar set purchased by Amy
– Too many awesome finds to list by Laura (although the $40 over-sized leather chair that basically is a perfect match for her couch is a start)
– Knitting bits and bobs for cheap
As you can see, I’m already converted. That could be why every time I think of something I “need”, I first think that I won’t be able to buy it, and then remember with glee that I may just find the perfect item second hand. And my new philosophy is, if I don’t find it used, I probably didn’t need it that bad to begin with.
Am I cheating??
I had this thought the other day; am I cheating? Have I bought something against the rules without even thinking about it? Have I fallen into old habits? I must have, because this seems too easy. But I honestly can’t think of how I might have cheated. Not that I’ve had to, the first few weeks (or less!) haven’t been that bad. For one, I was on the road for work a few days which afforded me a break on the food front as I didn’t have access to a kitchen and therefore had to eat out. Also, I still a few green items in the fridge that I bought right before we started. Those should be gone any day now. And I’ve been out lots at social things which feels like a guilty pleasure! It almost feels too guilty….
When we started out I thought this would be much like doing a cleanse; that I’d have to consider everything that goes in my mouth at all times. Instead it’s like the best part of a cleanse: mindful healthy-ish eating with treats in moderation and less of the socially limiting and awkward “I’m sorry, I can’t eat that”. So, compared to no alcohol for 12 days, this is a piece of cake! Which brings me back to feeling guilty. Should we make this tougher? Is eating out too big of a cheat? Is this meant to be a real challenge or does it say something about the whole process that it actually isn’t that difficult? Or will I learn in a few months how difficult this really is once the honeymoon phase wears off? Perhaps, as a few people have reminded me, the “cheats” we agreed on will help us get through a whole year of this! What do you think? Do our rules seem strict enough?
The Local Living Project 