Dark Days Challenge/Taco potatoes and broccoli

Last night we had taco meat over baked potatoes and steamed broccoli. The ground beef, potatoes, garlic, onions, beef stock and broccoli were all local, so although the corn flour and most of the spices aren't, we think this qualifies as a 90% local meal. I wish I'd taken a photo, but we ate late and everyone was starving.

TACO TOPPING FOR BAKED POTATOES

• 1 1/2 t corn flour
  
• 4 1/2 t chili powder
• 1/2 t onion powder
• 1/2 t seasoned salt
• 1/2 t paprika
• 1/4 t cumin
• 1/4 t cayenne
  
• 1/4 c grated onion
• 1 garlic clove, pressed
  
• 1 pound ground beef
  
• 1 cup beef stock
  

1. In a small bowl, combine the corn flour, chili powder and spices.
   
2. Crumble the ground chuck into a large skillet over medium heat. Add onions and garlic. Cook, stirring, until browned.
   
3. Stir in contents of seasoning bowl and beef stock. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until most of the liquid has cooked away, about 20 minutes.

To serve, pour over split baked potatoes. If desired, top with sour cream or shredded cheddar.

Find your 100-mile diet

This cool little mapping tool from the 100-Mile Diet site will let you enter your zip code and click to see a map centered on your zip with a 100-mile radius drawn on it.

Defining local and regional foods

There's an interesting post by Gary Paul Nabhan, one of the earliest proponents of local eating, in the must-read blog EatLocalChallenge. He offers suggestions on how to define local and regional foods:

1. Local means from a farm, ranch or fishing boat that is locally-owned and operated, using the management skills and the labor of local community members. A farm that is owned all or in part by an extra-local corporation, and which uses migrant workers who live outside the community does not benefit its community economically or culturally as much as it should.

2. A regional food is one that has been tied to the traditions of a particular landscape or seascape and its cultures for decades if not for centuries. If the same mix of mesclun greens is grown in greenhouses across the country and sold in every farmers market from Maine to New Mexico, it is more like a franchised product (from a seed company) than it is a local or regional food. Yes it may be produced five miles from your home and thereby reduce food miles, but its seeds are not saved and adapted to local or regional conditions, they are bought from afar every year.

3. The miles a food travels (“food miles”) must be placed in the size and volume of the mode of transport, its source of fuel, and its frequency of travel. Using biodiesel in a larger truck may be more efficient, and leave less of a carbon footprint than using leaded gas in an old clunker. One in every five kilocalories in the American food production and delivery system now underwrites transportation, as well as packaging and cooling while in transit, so this will be an increasingly important issue to solve by using alternative fuels, cost-efficient volumes, and ensuring that vehicles holding their full capacity in both directions, perhaps by carrying compost back to farms where the vegetables originated.

4. On farm energy and water use matter. If a farm near Tucson Arizona is irrigated from a canal that transports Colorado River water hundreds of miles (and at high ecological cost to wild riverine species), or if it uses fossil groundwater set down during the Pleistocene pumped by fossil fuel set down in Iran during the Pennsylvanian era, what is to be gained by promoting its food?

5. Other on-farm inputs matter just as much. Where are the sources of hay for livestock, compost for garden crops or nitrogen for field crops? They should be locally if not regionally-sourced. Why call lamb locally-produced in Idaho when its flock has wintered part of the year in California and its hay comes in from southern Colorado?

6. Fair-trade with other cultures, localities and regions is fair game. Circumvent they globalized economy for the items you truly need from other regions by establishing fair-trade exchanges. It is not that we don’t care about farmers and ranchers elsewhere, we simply don’t wish to see middlemen gaining more of each consumer dollar than the producers do. Producers inevitably plow money back into their communities and lands, intermediaries seldom do.

7. Invest in the foods unique to your region that cannot or should not be grown anywhere else. The attached RAFT map (pdf) reminds us of ancient food traditions based on climate, soil and culture, involving both native and immigrant foods that have adapted and been integrated into particular places. Because the U.S. currently lacks the geographic indicators such as denominations of origin that reinforce the links between place, culture and genetics of a particular food, these place-based foods are truly threatened by globalization. Invest in them and their original stewards.

2007 Farm Bill -- this time with feeling.

I know I've already mentioned this, but it's important, and here are three really easy links you can click to and send a message to your Senators and the Senate leadership. It's really important, and you can do it in about three minutes. Please do it. If you truly want local sustainable foods, this is one of the easiest ways you can help.

Issue: Leadership Support for Farm Bill Reform
Sign your name to an already-written message to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today. Or edit the letter any way you like -- it's up to you. Urge him to support the efforts of reform-minded Senators to bring meaningful payment limits, and increased resources for conservation, rural development, and beginning farmer programs to the Farm Bill. Click to write now It really will take 2 minutes! I promise.

Issue: Your Senators' Support for REAL Payment Limits
Whether or not the Senate Farm Bill includes real payment limit reform that finally brings an end to the million-dollar payments to the nation's largest farms could very well come down to an important vote on the Senate floor. Every single Senator will cast a key vote, and every single one will be important. Every. Single. One. And this year, there's an Ohio Senator on the committee. Write to your Senators today.

Issue: Support Rural Development in the Farm Bill
The Farm Bill should support all of rural America, and one way it can do this is by putting more resources into rural microenterprice development that will help entrepreneurs start and maintain businesses up and down main streets across rural America. This kind of help encourages young people to go into farming. Urge your Senators to support this legislation today!

Cincinnati Locavore at yahoogroups

I've just opened a yahoogroup for Cincinnati Locavores. If you live in or near Cincinnati and are looking for local food sources (or if you are a farmer or producer of local foods) please join us and let's see if we can bring the food and the consumers of it together!

Dark Days Challenge/Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and salad

I just realized it's the end of the first week and I've neglected to post this week's official 90% local meal. I also neglected to take a photo, but next time I make this particular meal I'll photograph it.

Thursday night, we had:

Meatloaf (local ground beef, ground pork, eggs, onions, garlic, parsley, yogurt, and bacon, along with non-local pantry items: olive oil, chili sauce, brown sugar, cider vinegar, dried thyme, Dijon, Worcestershire, hot pepper sauce, panko bread crumbs. I ought to be able to find a local source for the chili sauce, vinegar, thyme, Dijon, hot pepper sauce. Not sure about the sugar -- do they make brown sugar from beets? I could also use locally-produced bread and make my own crumbs, but I really like the panko crumbs in this particular recipe, so I'll keep using them. And Worcestershire -- no idea, there. I know it contains anchovies, though, so I'm thinking not.) The meatloaf was out of the freezer, and it was my last one, so I need to make up a new batch of five. I'll take pictures and post the recipe.

Mashed potatoes (local potatoes, butter and cream.)

Salad (local lettuce and microgreens)

Salad dressing (locally-bottled, don't know any more about it. I should try making my own. I make my own mayonnaise, how much harder can it be to add yogurt and herbs?)

Today we freeze...ONIONS?

Yes, onions in the freezer. One of the nice things about onions -- an ingredient many of us use for nearly every meal -- is that they freeze beautifully with minimal processing. Unlike many vegetables, they don't need to be blanched before freezing. The thawed product can't be substituted for onions eaten uncooked (frozen and thawed onions have a texture similar to that of onions that have been sweated briefly) but the difference is imperceptible in nearly all cooked dishes.

We're nearly at the end of onion season here in Southwest Ohio, so this week I went out to Greenacres and bought all they had. The gardener said they might have a few more, so I'll probably head over again in the next few days and see what I find. In a month or so, when my fresh onions have reached the end of their storage life and everyone else is buying onions shipped from Texas, I'll still be using Ohio onions.

ONIONS FOR THE FREEZER

Peel and chop the onions into whatever size you find you use most often -- I generally do a 1/4" dice, as that's a fairly versatile size. Spread in a single layer on a foil-lined cookie sheet and slip into the freezer for several hours or overnight.

When they're frozen solid, pack the frozen pieces into bags. If you use gallon bags, you can simply take out the bag, remove what onions you need (freezing them before packing means they don't stick together in a solid lump, which facilitates the removal of the exact quantity required) and put the bag right back in the freezer.

I like to vacuum pack whatever I can because removing the air means less freezer burn and in turn longer storage life. I've never vacuum packed onions before, though, so I'll have to see how it works. They may end up sticking together a bit, but maybe if I slam the bag on the counter that'll break them up. I used a 6" vacuum bag rolls, cut a long bag and sealed one end using my handy-dandy Seal-a-Meal. Stuff it full of onions, seal the other end, and place it in the freezer. When I cut open the bag to take some out, I'll end up with a smaller bag but fewer onions and (I hope) have enough room on the new open end to make a fresh vacuum seal. (Sealing requires about 2" of unpacked bag end.)

I'm also saving and freezing the ends of today's onions for the end of next week's roast chicken. When the carcass is clean and I'm ready to make stock, I'll pull the onion ends out of the freezer. How frugal am I?

Eyes on Iowa

There's an argument to be made that as Iowa goes, so goes the future of American farming. Iowa produces more than its fair share of our feed crops and industrial food inputs. Nowhere has industrial agriculture been more important in changing the face of the countryside, and yet fewer Iowans than ever are actually farming, and diversified farms have for the most part gone the way of the VCR.

In a series of reports, Grist investigates what's happening in Iowa and what Iowans are doing to get Iowa -- and perhaps all of American farming -- on a different track.

Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN) thinks we're just dumb.

Rep. Collin Peterson, Chair of the House Agricultural Committee, doesn't think farmers raising organic produce and grass-fed beef for local consumers needs any federal help. ‘It is growing, and it has nothing to do with the government, and that is good,’ he told a reporter for Financial Times. ‘For whatever reason, people are willing to pay two or three times as much for something that says ‘organic’ or ‘local’. Far be it from me to understand what that’s about, but that’s reality. And if people are dumb enough to pay that much then hallelujah.’

I went to Rep. Peterson's website to explain in words of two or fewer syllables that when we eat local and organic, we're supporting local small farmers and sustainable ethical food production, which in turn helps our community thrive and helps protect the environment. But he doesn't take mail from nonconstituents so I guess he'll just have to keep on thinking we're dumb.

Finally, the rain we needed in August and September.

It's raining again today, hooray! I've been assiduously watering my trees since mid-August and anxiously watching those trees that had no one to water them as they slowly turned brown. According to CincinnatiGreen, a blog written by a local arborist, trees can go dormant in a severe drought but whether the tree has gone dormant or has died won't be apparent until the next spring when the tree either leafs out or it doesn't. And even if it does survive, the effects of the drought on that tree can be felt for a decade after.

Here's a fascinating animated map showing the progression of this year's drought week by week. (If the animation doesn't work, click refresh to get it going.)

Well, fascinating to me, of course. To local farmers, it's just plain depressing. I have heard of local grassfarmers having to sell off their pastured herds because there's no pasturing left and the costs of bringing in organic hay are prohibitive in a down year. Other farmers simply gave up on entire crops this year, or opened dying crop fields as pasture for foraging cattle. A year like this can provide a final blow to a struggling small farmer, so it's especially important to buy local whenever we can.