Fresh, seasonal food is my focus this week.
How did you do with the intention you set for last week’s Mindful Monday? My intention was to get our summer sleep schedules back on track after they’d majorly derailed. We’re still staying up a little later than I’d like, but we’ve made some great progress. At the very least, I’m no longer gritting my teeth through a two-hour “bedtime.”
It’s amazing how effective it can be to hone in on a single, simple goal for a week. It really helps me prioritize so that the dozens of other things that come up don’t crowd out the important thing I need to pay attention to, and as a result I’m able to make a lot more focused progress on that one goal than I would if I was trying to accomplish too many Big Ideas all at once. I hope you’ll join us in setting a Mindful Monday intention this week!
Here’s mine:
Who: Mostly me, with a little help from the rest of the family
What: Rethink our summer food plan
Why: Our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) delivery starts this week, and I need to be ready! The great thing about joining a CSA: I’ll get an abundance of fresh, in-season, local (including lots of organic) produce each week at a fair price while supporting a farmer in my community.
The only downside? Dealing with large quantities of produce, including things I would rarely otherwise buy like turnips or beets, could be a recipe for a big green mess if I don’t get on top of my menu plan.
How:
- Revisit the Six-Meal Shuffle to include more opportunities to use seasonal produce. I’ll probably have to keep re-visiting it throughout the summer as new fruits and veggies come into season, and figure out new ways to incorporate fresh greens into our several-times-a-week summer grilling lifestyle.
- Recently I’ve started buying fewer groceries at a time than I usually would, and so far the results are what I hoped for – less food waste, more judicious use of leftovers, a more organized fridge and a cheaper grocery bill. A weekly influx of greens will challenge that system, but I plan to deal by further cutting my grocery shopping to exclude almost all grocery-store fruits and veggies, and coming up with more breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner ideas that are heavy in seasonal, local produce. I figure this will be good for our health anyway!
- Learn about freezing and canning various types of produce and then come up with a plan for storing extras to last through next winter.
- Talk to my kids about food: where it comes from, why it’s important, and why we’re making the choice to get our produce this way. Hopefully a little education will help them adjust their eating expectations. For example, my youngest son is a huge fan of apples; but this is just a bad time to buy them from the grocery store and of course, they won’t be available from the CSA until fall. Instead of framing this change as “depriving” him of apples, I need to think of this as providing him opportunities to eat better, fresher food: instead of always reaching for that apple, he will have more chances to eat a juicy peach at the height of freshness or enjoy a bowl of sweet, just-picked strawberries.
This all sounds like a lot to do in one week, but for me thinking about food can be really fun, and it’s something that’s important enough to me to dedicate some time to. And there’s no need to re-invent the wheel, here: mostly what I’ll be doing this week is scouring the web and library for recipes, ideas and inspiration to help me incorporate a much more seasonal way of eating in our home. Anyone have a great resource to recommend?
What’s your Mindful Monday intention this week? I’d love for you to join me in coming up with a summer strategy for eating more fresh, seasonal foods!
We bought a chest freezer last summer, and it’s been tremendously helpful–it more than doubled our freezer space, and lets us buy in bulk for later. I highly recommend them to anyone who has room for one.
For the weeks that you get overwhelmed with all of that spinach, can I recommend spinach pesto?
Spinach Pesto:
2 cups fresh spinach leaves, washed and de-stemmed
1/2 cup fresh parsley [I didn’t have fresh, so I used dried parsley]
1/2 cup walnuts or pine nuts, toasted [walnuts are cheaper, so I used those]
1/4 cup parmesan cheese, fresh and not canned [umm… totally used canned]
3 garlic cloves
2 tb extra virgin olive oil
1/4 tsp sea salt
1/8 tsp ground pepper
Blend the heck out of it all in a food processor. Taste it, add a pinch of that, a touch more of that, etc etc. Store in the fridge with a thin layer of olive oil to prevent discoloration, or freeze.
And for kale, try kale chips. Tear your kale into bite-sized pieces and spread it out on a baking sheet. Drizzle with evoo and bake at 375 for maybe 15 minutes, until you can shake it around on the pan. Crunches like a chip! We top ours with a little sea salt and parmesan or Nutritional Yeast (kind of cheesy flavored).
Great goal!
Love this goal. We’ve recently started a weekly visit to the farmer’s market to buy most of our produce, meat, and eggs. The added bonus (besides all the real benefits you already mentioned) is my grocery trips are shorter and sweeter — and since I hate the grocery store this is good motivation to me.
Last week my goal was to add some stretching/yoga into my daily routine. I did OK – room for improvement, but off to a decent start. As this Monday intention thing is resulting in a bit of to-do list for me (good habits), I think I will change gear this week and focus on relaxation – so my intention is to start reading a novel this week. I use to love to read, but now only take time for non-fiction. Somehow I have a hard time gearing my mind down for fiction. So, this will also mean turning off the TV or computer & heading to bed earlier (also will be good for me), and reading for enjoyment before bed.
I’ve been thinking of trying the CSA in our area. Thought it would be a good alternative to the fact that our farmer’s market doesn’t actually carry produce – HA!
We have a chest freezer that has helped a lot. Too much of anything gets washed, cut up, and frozen for later. We also buy large quantities of fruits during the summer to freeze and use for smoothies. (Add a cup or two of spinach to the smoothie – you’ll never taste the difference and you get some greens along with your fruit!)
We did this years ago in Chicago – it was a farm called Angelic Organics. They included a newsletter with their deliveries which included news from the farm and, more importantly, recipes for the seasonal foods.
My mindful monday intention is to make a list of things to do this summer. On that list will be to eat peas from the pod that we grow in the backyard. We are trying to cultivate our backyard so we have some fresh vegtables and fruit – I want my daughter to know where food comes from – and I don’t mean a super market! My mindful monday post is at http://mahsliceoflife.blogspot.com/2011/06/mindful-monday.html
Last year I canned corn, tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, jam, broth, applesauce, and peaches. I froze more corn, green beans, strawberries, kale and an entire hog we purchased from a friend. I dried zucchini, summer squash and tomatoes. I plan to do the same this year except do more, because we are out of mostly everything. It took a lot of time over the summer, but it has really cut our grocery bills. We don’t do CSAs, but put in an extensive garden with an acre(ish) of sweet corn and 50 tomato plants, kale, green beans, swiss chard, lettuce, peppers, eggplant and herbs. We buy our apples and peaches from a friend and our strawberries from our dentist.
I have several books on canning and seasonal cooking. For canning, I recomment “Putting Food By” by Ruth Hertzberg and the Ball Blue Book. I also have the “Big Book of Preserving the Harvest” by Carol Costenbader, but that is more a preserving recipe book if you want to go beyond the basics. For seasonal cooking, there are several good recipes in “Serving Up the Harvest” by Andrea Chesman and I just ordered “Simply in Season” by Cathleen Hockman-Wert.
The smoothie idea is a good one, because frozen fruit never thaws quite right. I also preserved and froze a lot of veggies that were designated as future soup ingredients and they seemed to get used up.
Can you take your kids out to the farm where their veggies come from? If you haven’t…it’s really fun and fascinating for kids. We went to our meat farm yesterday – so much fun! And really helped my 4-year old get his dinner even more in perspective.
I tell my son that it isn’t healthy for his body to eat the same thing every day – that different foods have different vitamins, and that is why we can’t have pbj for every meal, or even for lunch every day. Maybe that would help with your apple-loving child? Also, there is a great book called “apples here” that we love, and it details the way that apples grow, from blossom to finished product, and maybe pointing out what stage apples trees are in (if you can find one in someone’s yard near your house, or at the CSA) will help him to understand that they aren’t ready yet? It’s worked here, anyway. 🙂 http://www.amazon.com/Apples-Here-Will-Hubbell/dp/0807503975/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308687676&sr=8-1
I want to also put a plug in for the cookbook, “Simply In Season.” It is very well organized (by season) and there is a nice variety of recipes for each season. I use it often.
A book I have recently found, though with many new ingredients and forms of cooking that I am not used to – but which is seasonal and healthy – is Clean Food by Terry Walters. The recipes I have done were gorgeous. Good luck!