(NOTE: I'll be spending time spiffing this post up in the future by adding recipes and organizing it by month. Stay tuned...)
Spending time with farmers, something you learn is that fast food and pizza are often on the farm table. Not exactly in keeping with our common notions of the country life, but it makes perfect sense, since farmers are businest during the growing season, leaving little time to prepare meals.
On top of that, much of our inherited European "culinary technology" is out os sync with North American reality. Gazpacho and Salsa make great cold dishes for hot climates, but in Michigan the ingredients rarely come together in time for the heat of our summers.
Even if that weren't the case, so much of our culinary technology has developed around staple grain crops that require heavy processing. Cobbling together functional meals without these is quite a challenge. That means the bulk of most gardeners', farmers' and homesteaders' calories come from grains grown off-farm. As it turns out, the production of grains tends to be the highest impact and most exploitive of all crops, requiring frequent tilling, heavy spraying, and lots of fertilizers.
So, one of our major projects at Lillie House is to crack that nut, sometimes by litterally cracking nuts. We eat a lot of meals grown almost entirely from our garden and aim to get as high a percentage of our caloric and nutritional needs from our home-grown fair as possible.
These recipes are truly "in season" in Michigan, come largely from the garden or local sources and are mostly easy peasy, saving us time during the busiest part of our year. Most importantly, they're high on tastiness. I've got a reputation to protect as an outright a food fanatic. I won't do you wrong.
I figure if they work for us, they'll probably work for other busy people who want to eat restaurant quality local food in season.
Recipes (and other food-related posts:)
No comments:
Post a Comment