My dad and step-mom visited us on Thursday and Friday, so Saturday was the real first day of our latest foray into local eating.
Breakfast
For breakfast I made a cheese omelet for Dawn and scrambled eggs for myself. In addition to local eggs (from Bear Creek Farm & Ranch in Palmer), we had 3 non-local eggs to use up, so each dish was a mixture of local and non-local eggs. When I cracked open one of each type of egg, I noticed the significant difference in the two. Take a look:
Can you tell which is which? Here's a hint: The local egg has a much richer yolk and a more clear white. Now can you tell? Yes, the one on the left is the local egg.
That's apparently a common thing: Eggs from chickens that are raised in what we think of as the more "traditional" way (i.e. true free-range chickens, roaming outside in the pasture) tend to have eggs with a darker, more distinct yolk. Eggs from chickens that are raised in what are commonly called "factory farms" (i.e. inside, eating grain) tend to have eggs with a paler yolk that doesn't sit high in the skillet.
That's what I'd heard, but I'd never had one of each for a side-by-side comparison.
Oh, and the local eggs supposedly taste better, too. I mixed everything together, so I didn't have the opportunity to do a blind-folded taste test!
Lunch
We went to the annual Springfield Area Highland Games, which meant bagpipers, Scottish dancers, and fair food -- funnel cakes, brats, potato chips, sodas. Not a local food item in sight!
Just as we did last year, we're allowing ourselves a "social exemption". This means when we're out with friends or attending events, we'll eat what's available. Part of our motivation at eating local is to deepen ties with the local community, so it wouldn't make sense to declare that we can't eat out with friends!
Unfortunately, it was rainy, windy, and cold -- typical Scottish weather, perhaps, but it did put a bit of a damper on our fun!
Dinner
For dinner we had non-local pasta with our Brandywine pasta sauce. Last year's garden yielded lots of Brandywine tomatoes, so we froze quite a bit, which we periodically use for pasta sauce.
Dawn sent me out to the garden to harvest some of our volunteer basil to add to the sauce. I came back with several leaves, which I handed to her. "That's not basil," she said after she had sniffed them. "That's mint!" Sure enough, it turns out the numerous volunteer herbs we saw coming up (where we had planted several varieties of herbs last year) were not basil, as we had thought, but were instead peppermint! Oops! Oh well. Dawn used them to make a quick peppermint tea.
We also had a salad: mesclun mix, waldmans dark green lettuce, cherry belle radish (all from Oak Tree Farm in Ashland), and colby cheese (from Ropp Jersey Cheese in Bloomington), with non-local dressing.
Challah bread (from Central Illinois Event Catering in Elkhart) and strawberries (from Livesprings Berries & Produce in Chandlerville) completed the meal.
So that was day 1. Not 100% local, of course, but a pretty good start!
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