Day One: Eating All Local

Morning comes, and the grocery order of the day before is safely stored in my refrigerator. The sheer amount of produce and meat that came from local sources is somewhat hard to believe even after a delicious spring and summer farmer’s market season with other vendors in Green Bay. Produce with Purpose Farm has a strong variety available for the time of year, and access to humanely raised and butchered meats propelled them up the list of my favorite places to shop in the last month. It only made sense that I would eventually set up a farm box pick up, and here we are using it as a challenge opportunity.

​I’m not a breakfast person during the week. I probably should be, but even working from home, I don’t make the time to make my own breakfast. I’ll boil eggs for my husband every day of the week, but I move on with my own life. The first time I used our local goodies was on a beef stock for the rest of the week using the beef knuckle bones, onions, and carrots from our order. I supplemented the flavor of the stock with some dried thai chilis from my pantry and a head of garlic from the grocery store in a previous week.

I learned through this process that these sorts of bones give off a lot more of the grey floating scum to the surface of the broth than some others, and that’s okay. It didn’t take on a ton of color from the meat that I can tell, but rather the vegetables contributed a good amount. Still, I’d rather see these off cuts be put to use than wasted. If I can put them toward new uses in my food, then that’s awesome! I’m thinking some kind of veggie stew this weekend, maybe?

I literally ate a baked potato for lunch with a healthy slathering of the hand rolled butter I got from them last week, and that’s it. Work days are sometimes hard since I can’t spend a ton of time cooking, but a baked potato gets me through the day.

The real star was dinner: Rick’s Foraged Pizza Kit. These are offered as part of the weekly farm boxes through Produce with Purpose, and for what comes inside, they’re a major bargain. This one specifically cost us only 11 dollars for enough dough to make 2 relatively small personal pan pizzas with fiddlehead ferns, green garlic, wild spring onions, and hedgehog mushrooms. It also came with a lovely red sauce and mozzarella.

He also includes a very simple recipe for you to follow, which is really just how to prep your pizza dough that is included as well as the temperature and time to cook it at. You can build the pizza however you want and be assured that the timing is going to work out. The only real responsibility on you as the cook is to chop up the toppings to the sizes you prefer, which I did. I also stretched out both sections of dough, but my husband joined me to top his own and watch it cook.

My husband is a chronic tomato hater, so we made his blanca with just a drizzle of olive oil underneath the toppings and cheese. He was a big fan. I had mine with the sauce, and while I accidentally made the middle of my pizza too thin and wound up sogging it out, what I salvaged for myself was absolutely delicious.  I know in my heart of hearts that this was entirely cook error because my husband's pizza didn't have this problem. Woopsie!

These meal kit offerings through the farm box options all appear to be great value, and if this pizza is any indicator, super delicious.

Day one of this eating local thing has been delicious and productive. Let’s see what the rest of the week brings!