Springfield Locavore

Urban Fruit Foraging in the Illinois Times

Did you notice the article Free food can be yours for the picking in the July 23 edition of the Illinois Times? Here's an excerpt:

"Urban fruit foraging" is a grassroots phenomenon that has arisen spontaneously as local folks have taken a look around their neighborhoods and suddenly noticed that yard after yard contains all sorts of trees bearing a cornucopia of apples, plums, pears, oranges, peaches, loquats, pecans, avocados, lemons, mulberries, pomegranates ... and so much more. The "aha" moment comes when these folks realize that most of this abundance goes unpicked.

So, rather than just let it rot, why not find new ways to gather, distribute and share this free food with the larger community? From coast to coast, people are doing exactly that, with each group finding their own clever ways to spread the concept of "public fruit."

One of the simplest is in Oakland, Calif., where neighbors created a small exchange they call Forage Oakland. Some 200 people have signed up — those with lemon trees, for example, open their yards for harvest when the fruit ripens; in exchange, they get access to other yards when their fruits come in.

We don't have any fruit trees on our property yet, but it sounds like a great idea! The best part, in my mind, is the effect of reinforcing a sense of community, since people will actually (*gasp*) talk to people!

(Oh, and in case you're wondering: loquat. No, I'd never heard of it before, either!)

Fresh Produce - Use It or Lose It!

A coworker mentioned the other day that he had some fresh green beans recently, but that they weren't as good as the ones that came out of a can! They were leathery, and he had to throw out about a quarter of them!

Then he told me that they were about 3 weeks old. Ah-ha! I think we've found the problem!

That's one thing that takes a little getting used to when switching from processed food to fresh food. Fresh food doesn't stay fresh! You have to prepare and eat it soon! With processed food, we're used to things keeping for weeks, months, even years! (All those preservatives in the ingredients list? Now you know why they're there.)

Even fresh produce from a supermarket tends to be varieties that were bred for their durability and extended shelf-life. The fresh produce you get from the farmers' market — or your garden — tends to be varieties that were bred for their taste!

We have a book, From Asparagus to Zucchini: A Guide to Cooking Farm-Fresh Seasonal Produce, that provides plenty of useful information about what to do with fresh produce after you bring it home — how to clean it, how to store it, and how quickly to use it! We've been putting our produce in Ziploc bags, marking the date on each bag with a Sharpie so that we know which is the oldest.

We've been feeling guilty about going through so many plastic bags. True, we could wash out the bags and reuse them, but finding room to prop open the bags so that they could dry was a challenge. We recently bought some reusable plastic storage containers which we'll be trying out, in the hopes that those will work better.

Another book, Keeping the Harvest: Discover the Homegrown Goodness of Putting Up Your Own Fruits, Vegetables & Herbs, is a great resource for learning how to store produce for later use. It covers freezing, canning, drying, root cellars, and more. However, even if you aren't going to eat those green beans until months later, you still need to freeze or can them while they're still fresh!

In the case of sweetcorn, it is particularly important to process things quickly. The sugars in an ear of sweetcorn start changing into starches almost as soon as it is picked, resulting in a less-sweet taste. If you're blanching sweetcorn for freezing, it's best to have the water already boiling when you go to the garden to harvest!

When you go the the farmers' market and buy stuff, you should use it as soon as possible. Because we have farmers' markets on 3 days during the week (Wednesday morning, Thursday afternoon, and Saturday morning), you don't need to do a week's worth of shopping. Our great-grandparents would have bought food multiple times during the week, particularly in the days before refrigeration!

If you can, try planning meals in advance, then buying what you need for those meals, rather than just buying a bunch of whatever is there, then trying to figure out how to use it all up before it goes bad.

For example:

• At Wednesday's market, you could buy the food for Wednesday's lunch and dinner; and Thursday's breakfast and lunch (4 meals).
• At Thursday's market, you could buy for Thursday's dinner; Friday's meals; and Saturday's breakfast (5 meals).
• At Saturday's market, you could buy for Saturday's lunch and dinner; Sunday's meals; Monday's meals; Tuesday's meals; and Wednesday's breakfast (12 meals).

By planning and buying smaller quantities, you'll have fresher food!

Do we do that? Uh... no. We're not that organized yet! But it's a good idea, and I'm hopeful that someday we'll be that organized! I'll alert the media when that happens.

How Quickly They Grow Up!

It seems like only yesterday that this was a small, unnotable zucchini in our garden. Wait... It was just yesterday! What the heck happened?! I know there are larger zucchini than this, but the speed with which it went from "That'll be ready to harvest soon" to "Yikes! Harvest that before it grows any more!" was quite surprising!

The Locavore and Luca Pizza

Last week I discussed how being a locavore helps me lose weight. This morning I weighed 238.3, a loss of another 2 pounds over the last week! Can I maintain that weight loss as we start another week?

• Breakfast: Scrambled eggs (eggs, milk, butter -- all local)
• Lunch: Corn on the cob, broccoli, nectarine (all local)
• Dinner: Umm...

Dinner: Luca Pizza

Dawn was tired of sweetcorn, and I didn't mind saving what sweetcorn was left for tomorrow's lunch. We hadn't been out to eat for awhile, so we decided to do so. I was in the mood for pizza, but our favorite pizza place, Bellacino's, recently closed under mysterious circumstances. (Translation: They didn't tell us why!) Besides, Bellacino's is a chain, and if we're not going to eat local, maybe we should at least buy local.

So we decided to try Luca Pizza. They used to be located in White Oaks Mall, but are now located across the street. So how were they? Here's my mini-review!

Menu: They have a fairly large variety of items on their menu (pizzas, calzones, pastas, subs, etc).

Service: Helpful and reasonably fast.

Atmosphere: Plain. Nothing to entertain a 4-year-old, unfortunately. There was a TV on. Whether that's a plus or a minus depends upon your point of view. It was tuned for Fox News. Your opinion of that will also vary! For me, it was a definite minus. There was some airhead Republican spouting off about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and... Oh! Err... sorry. Where was I?

Food: The food wasn't anything special. Dawn had the fettuccine alfredo, while I had a sausage & pepperoni pizza. In both cases, the food was "eh". Definitely not bad, mind you! Just nothing that blew us away. It was also surprisingly expensive. I suspect he might have figured up the total wrong, but I didn't double-check his math.

Oh, and I did say that I had "a pizza", not "a slice of pizza". They do sell pizza by the slice, but I wasn't thinking clearly and ordered a 10" pizza. That's their smallest size, but still....

I suspect I won't still weigh 238.3 in the morning!

Today's Meals

Life is good!

Breakfast - Cheese omelet

• Eggs from Bear Creek Farm & Ranch (Palmer, IL)
• Cheese from Ropp Jersey Cheese (Bloomington, IL)
• Milk from Kilgus Farmstead (Fairbury, IL)
• Butter from Vincent Family Farm (Rochester, IL)

Lunch - Sweetcorn, with ice cream & blueberries for dessert

• Sweetcorn from the Old Capitol Farmers' Market
• Butter from the Vincent Family Farm (Rochester)
• Homemade ice cream made from non-homogenized milk from Kilgus Farmstead (Fairbury, IL)
• Blueberries from the Old Capitol Farmer's Market
• Non-local vanilla extract

Dinner - Potatoes and broccoli, with bread

• Potatoes from Veenstra & Heck's CSA (Rochester, IL)
• Broccoli from Veenstra & Heck's CSA (Rochester, IL)
• Homemade bread made from Hodgson Mills semi-local bread mix (Effingham, IL)
• Butter from the Vincent Family Farm (Rochester, IL)

Snacks - Nectarines and donut peaches

• Nectarines from the Old Capitol Farmers' Market
• Donut peaches from the Old Capitol Farmers' Market

Oh, and a Coke.

My Locavore Weight Loss Plan

One of my hopes in becoming a locavore was that it would help me lose weight. After all, nutrition experts say that, instead of eating french fries, hamburgers, shakes, cookies, candy, chips, etc, we should be eating plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables. That's pretty much exactly what happens when you become a locavore.

Think about it: If you had to make your own potato chips, how often do you think you would eat them?

Counting Calories

I've always found that it is very difficult for me to lose weight during cold weather. For whatever reason, when it's cold outside, I tend to eat more. So I decided that I would start trying to lose weight on the first day of Spring, which was March 20 this year.

I've never done any sort of fad diet (e.g. Atkins, South Beach, etc). All I do is count calories. It works pretty well.

On March 20, I weighed 256.2 pounds.

By May 20, I was down to 248.2 pounds, a loss of 8 pounds over the course of nearly 9 weeks. I'm 6'1" tall, so my BMI went from about 33.8 to about 32.7. I averaged a drop of 0.9 pounds per week.

I steadily lose weight when I count calories, but the actual mechanics of counting calories is a pain! Inevitably, I always eventually stop counting. Have I found a better way?

Not Counting Calories

May 20 was the official beginning of our locavore challenge. From that point on, I stopped counting calories. By June 20, I was down to 241.2 pounds, a loss of 7 pounds over the course of 4½ weeks. My BMI dropped to about 31.8. I averaged a drop of nearly 1.6 pounds per week.

In other words, I lost weight at nearly twice the rate without the tedium of counting calories!

Of course, whenever I would "fall off the wagon" — going to a picnic, or travelling out of town — I would gain weight. And unfortunately, there have been 2 picnics and 2 trips out of town over the past 3 weeks! If not for them, I would probably have lost another 8 pounds by now! Instead, I'm only down to 240.3 as of this morning, a drop of 0.9 pounds over the course of 16 days.

Even with the non-locavore setbacks, since May 20 I've lost an average of nearly 1.2 pounds per week. And I haven't exactly been starving myself — eggs, sausage, broccoli, green beans, tomatoes, potatoes, salads, homemade ice cream, cherries, strawberries, blueberries, peaches, sweetcorn, whole milk, butter, etc. Do you think you could survive on that?

The lesson I would draw from this is not that you can stuff yourself and still lose weight. Rather, it's that by becoming a locavore, it's easier to avoid stuffing yourself, which allows you to lose weight without the tedium of counting calories!

Tomorrow the boss is bringing pizza to work. No, it's not local. I think I'll be bringing some local blueberries to share, but I'll also be eating some pizza. (I never turn down pizza!) And I know I have some other non-local eating in my future as the summer activities get underway. However, if I can keep the non-local eating to a minimum, I hope to be back to losing over 1½ pounds per week soon — without counting calories!

What We've Been Eating Recently

We just got back from a trip, visiting with friends and relatives in my old hometown of Centralia, Illinois over the July 4 weekend. As usual, a trip out of town means plenty of non-local food. Worse than that, it means plenty of processed food – potato chips and McDonald's in the car, hotdogs on the grill, sodas with every meal. We should get organized and be better prepared, so that we can eat more local food and less processed food on these trips!

When we're home, we've been eating well! Local potatoes, broccoli, green beans, sweet cherries, sweetcorn, peaches, cheese, milk, butter, blueberries, radishes, garlic, onions, carrots, tomatoes, even homemade ice cream -- we're definitely not starving!

Alas, when I bought cherries at the farmers' market on Thursday, I learned that they were probably the last sweet cherries of the season. :-(

However, to make up for that, I also bought the first sweetcorn of the season! :-) Ah, the excitement of eating seasonally! I love sweetcorn! We'll be eating plenty, of course, but I also need to research what is involved in preserving some for eating this winter.

I also bought one each of about 6 varieties of heirloom tomatoes. Nice! That's another thing we need to research – how to preserve tomatoes and how to make tomato sauce for eventual use on homemade pasta, homemade pizza, etc. I'm sure our friend Patty can tell us plenty about how to can tomatoes.

We also need to research preserving green beans, broccoli, potatoes, peaches, cherries -- lots of stuff! I've got a book, Keeping the Harvest: Discover the Homegrown Goodness of Putting Up Your Own Fruits, Vegetables & Herbs, that I need to start reading. Plus, for some of this stuff, we'll need to buy some equipment, so we'll need to make some decisions soon about that. I guess it's time to get busy!

Today's Lunch

Peaches and the first sweetcorn of the season! Yum!

Incidentally, a good way to cook sweetcorn quickly is to leave it in the husk and microwave it for 2-3 minutes. The husk keeps it moist and (I think) adds additional flavor.