Simple Weekend Breakfast

I've been slacking.

I had great intentions this week but got slammed on the work front and so I ate more takeout than I would like.

The good news is the food I bought last weekend will wait for me. I did use up the ground beef making spaghetti sauce - which went into the freezer so no review of that yet.

Every time I've opened the fridge the thick cut applewood smoked bacon from Creswick Farms has been taunting me. If bacon could talk it would say "cook me, I'm delicious".

So I did. (Finally)

I was hungry so I didn't go for anything fancy. I pan fried four strips of the bacon, fried two of the farm fresh eggs in butter with a splash of the bacon grease, and briefly toasted - also in the bacon grease, isn't it wonderful stuff - a buttered slice of some bread that I made mid-week.

That's how breakfast is done.

And how it should be done more often.

It wasn't perfect - I overcooked the bacon slightly - but it was still very tasty.

If you wanted to assign some kind of score for being local, sustainable and otherwise "good" this meal would rate pretty high. The eggs and bacon are local. I haven't found a local source for butter yet and the same for the flour in the bread - it's just King Arthur organic all purpose. I don't expect to find truly local sources for oil, yeast or pepper (duh) but only small amounts of each are involved.

What's up for this week? Well, I have lots of ingredients left from what I bought last weekend. Time permitting, I think I'm going to try oven baking most of the rest of the bacon - I'll probably freeze a few slices. I'm thinking I might make scrambled eggs with salsa tomorrow. I need to bake another loaf of bread - stupid easy when you have a bread machine - and hmm, maybe I'll have a grilled cheese with some of that local cheddar for dinner tonight.

Downside to posting this stuff: It makes me hungry!

Future Projects File: Sourdough Bread

I've always been a huge fan of sourdough bread but have never tried to make it. I think there's something about the process - having to make a starter and then keep it going - that has kept me from doing it.

{insert joke about guys being afraid of commitment here}

Which is dumb.

This isn't rocket science, and if you screw up all you're out is a few cents worth of flour.

I picked up some inspiration yesterday by reading this 10,000 word post on sourdough over at Sour Salty Bitter Sweet. It's worth the read if you have time.

Even after that, though, I'm not motivated enough to get started just yet. Instead I'm happy to file this away as something I want to try.

A Trip To The "Market"

Saturday usually means grocery shopping. I still have to go to Meijer for some things later - oh how I dread going there - but I decided to kick things off by visiting a local farmers market.

"But wait," I hear you saying, "a farmer's market in February?"

Yes. We're lucky to have an organization called the Sweetwater Local Foods Market that puts on a market year-round. It's only every other week during the winter, weekly during the summer. It runs Saturday mornings until 1 pm. Check out their motto - it ties absolutely perfectly into what I'm trying to do:

The Sweetwater Local Foods Market is Michigan’s first farmers market that exclusively sells locally grown animal products and fruits and vegetables raised in a manner that enhances biological diversity, builds soil health and promotes animal welfare. Our message is, “Healthy. Humane. Homegrown. Local food you can trust at the Sweetwater Local Foods Market.”

Local, fresh, sustainable. Perfect. About the only thing that isn't perfect is the timing - I always have other things going on Saturday mornings during the spring, summer and fall. But that's on me, for most people Saturday mornings are perfect.

I went this morning and was pleased to see that it was busy. Busy with normal people doing the same thing I was doing, buying real food. It'd be real easy to stereotype this as a hippie venture (nttawwt), but no, things were very normal.

I picked up several items:

* A pound of applewood smoked bacon from Creswick Farms ($5.50)
* A half pound of organic raw milk cheddar from Grassfields ($6.50)
* A pound of grass fed ground chuck ($4.50)
* A dozen eggs from Happy Hill farm ($3.25)

and a total splurge, a package of malted chocolate chip oatmeal cookies from Earthly Kneads bakery in Muskegon ($4.50). More on those in a separate post.

Hopefully I'll have a picture to post here shortly of the stuff I got. (edit: Here it is)



I didn't have a real list of what I planned to get - other than the eggs - so I wasn't as prepared as I hope to be in coming weeks. Most of the vendors had whiteboards with a list of the products they had for sale and prices. I took a few mental notes and hope to be back in two weeks with some menus planned and ready to go.

I made one other stop on the way home. Sunflower Gourmet carries milk from Hilhof Dairy, which is relatively local. It's organic, straight from the farm and packaged in glass bottles. I don't drink a ton of milk, but it's nice to have a quart on hand.

Link Love 1

Whenever possible I plan to link to websites - sites for merchants that I patronize, resources that help with the quest to eat local, inspirational material. I think I'm off to a good start. Obviously a lot of my links will be local to West Michigan - and that won't do you much good if you stumbled across this blog from California. Oh well. This isn't rocket science.

While I'm thinking about it, here are a couple other links for your perusal:

Epic Organic: My invisible internet pal Shelly also has a blog about quest to eat organic and local food. She's definitely part of my inspiration for blogging on this subject - if only so I don't clutter her blog with too many comments. I don't know about her quest to add pureed veggies to everything, but hey, to each their own! Go read.

Life is Fare: I randomly stumbled across this blog, written by Marcia Davis of Grand Rapids. She's a writer, a self-described foodie and she has posts on a variety of subjects related to the local food movement. Also very much worth the time. Her post today links to a seasonal ingredient map put out by epicurious - how useful!

West Michigan Co-Op: The site of an idea that should exist everywhere. A co-operative of local farmer and producers. You place orders from a huge list of products on offer and on the designated pickup day (I think it's once a month) you pick up your goodies. Simple. Easy. I don't belong - YET - as I live 45 minutes away and for now I can get what I need at the Sweetwater market. But I may try it out this summer once Saturday mornings become impossible.

Malted Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

I picked up a package of these cookies from Earthly Kneads today. It was a total impulse purchase and I have to say that I'm glad I made it. Okay, I've only had one cookie so far, but they really are very good.

Look at that ingredient list. There is not a single 2,4 maltohydrodexetrone-type mystery chemical anywhere to be found! I suppose this means that they won't last forever like a Twinkie would and that I'll have to eat them in the next couple of days ... but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

I plan to try and make more of my own bread and baked goods, but it's nice to know that there is a bakery not that far away that makes the kind of stuff I'd actually want to eat.

From their website:

Unique Bread, Cookies, Granola, and Pastries baked from scratch using local, organic, and sustainable ingredients.

We use:
- Michigan flour that is stone-ground, certified organic, and NEVER bleached or brominated.
- Pastured chicken eggs from Creswick Farms.
- Dairy products from farms that practice sustainable and organic farming.

No funny stuff! Our ingredients are minimally processed. We take special care to make sure that there are no artifical colors, flavors or sweeteners and no GMO ingredients in our baked goods. We never use high fructose corn syrup in any of our products.

Sounds good to me. One of these days when I'm in Muskegon I think I'll stop by the bakery and check out the full complement of offerings.

A New Focus

You have to love the fact that Blogger isn't quick to delete inactive blogs. Let's give this one another go, shall we?

There will be a slight change of focus. I still hope to blog for accountability - to myself that is - but I probably won't be posting everything I eat or pictures of every meal. That's too much of a commitment. Instead, I'll just post things as I feel like it. I think that's doable.

The new focus will be on the following:

1. Trying to choose local and sustainable foods.
2. If those aren't available, trying to choose organic over chemical/factory farmed.
3. Making it myself. I spend way too much of my food dollar on drive through and takeout "meals".

In any event, not a tremendous amount has changed in the three years it's been since I used this blog for anything. My eating habits haven't improved much, but I have a new interest in working on them. I read a lot and a couple of my recent reads have been The Omnivore's Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle -- both highly recommended. Even if you don't agree with every last detail, the overall logic is inescapable: Our current food system is crazy. Crazy in many ways - in its incredible dependence on oil, in the lack of care taken to ensure quality, in its lack of respect for the soil, in the way it diverts money away from the people that actually grow the food.

That won't change overnight, and let's get some things out in the open.

I'm not a revolutionary. I'm focused on improving things for myself.

I'm not a purist. While I will be trying to "do better", I will probably still eat the occasional Big Mac. And I will not be beating myself up for doing so.

I'm not interested in criticizing the food choices other people make. If Kraft Mac n Cheez works for you and your family, great.

I'm not a vegetarian or vegan. It doesn't work for me. See the above points.

With that out of the way, I'm going to try and have some fun with this.

The End

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