Saturday, July 07, 2007

The Bounty of the Harvest

Food from the St. Norbert Farmer's Market

I've just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life" and found it very inspiring. In her book, Kingsolver and her family have committed to eating locally for a year. This involves raising their own turkeys and chickens for meat and eggs, growing huge vegetable gardens, and even making her own cheese. It helps that she's living in a rural, agricultural area in a moderately temperate climate that makes this type of living feasible, but there are a lot of ideas in it that are pretty viable, even for an urban dweller living in a part of the world where winter lasts for 6 months.

The idea of primarily eating food grown in our own community is an goal that we've been moving closer towards for a few years. We've been members of the Wiens Shared Farm, a CSA based out of St. Adolphe for about four years or so and have really enjoyed eating food in season. We've also been buying a majority of our meat in the last year direct from local sources - organic pork from La Broquerie, chickens from New Bothwell, and the odd package of grass fed beef from those who bought a quarter and didn't have the storage space to keep it all.

This year, the Hundred-Mile-Diet is getting a lot of buzz in the media. There are groups being formed here in Manitoba that are promising to stick to a rigid 'locavore' diet for 100 days this autumn. I like the idea of food challenges, and this one sounds interesting, but the idea of forgoing coffee or the odd citrus fruit for 3 1/2 months will make me say no thanks to the 100 day promise. Instead, I'm doing what I can now to buy my food from farmers markets to supplement our CSA share (very wet fields this year - lots of kale, green onions and lettuce so far) and I've decided to plant peas, beans, tomatoes and herbs in my front yard this year instead of begonias and petunias.

My front steps garden - tomatoes, green beans and peas.

My herb garden - thyme, oregano, basil, sage, chives, sorrel, and some more green beans.

Check out http://100milemanitoba.org/ for links to lots of local Manitoba food producers.

Warning! Lewd Content!

We've been making our own sausages for about four years now. I'd always liked Italian grocer's fresh lean sausage and it seemed like it would be easy to make. Simple as that.

This is how you make sausage:
Take meat, grind it if it needs to be ground, add spices and then stuff into casings. Then you're done. This time around we started with pre-ground organic pork from La Broquerie. We made two flavours - a spicy Italian with lots of red pepper flakes, fennel and sambuca, and a chipotle pepper fresh chorizo style sausage. Once the meat and spices have been mixed and taste-testing is successful, it's ready to stuff into casings.

Making sausage enriches our marriage. (Tee Hee!)


Stuffed and ready to make into links.

Linked, vacuum packed, and ready for the freezer.