A Week in Food Life

Warning: the following week of blog posts may not interest anyone but myself, but well, it interests me.

Food is important to me. Food and water are everything we are. Beautiful, wonderful nourishment is one of the glorious things in life.

I have certain food ethics. I don't always follow them and they have morphed greatly in the last five years. I do not believe that everyone needs to follow the same food ethics that I do. I do not believe that everyone has the money to buy organic food or even local food because of the way our food system is set up. I believe this is a great sadness about our world. People can't afford healthy food and advertising markets horrifying food as healthy. The last 150 years have not been good for our ecosystem. I do what I can, in my small way, to try and help.

My basic food ethics are fairly rudimentary. 1) Try to eat local whenever possible. 2) Forage as much off the land as my time and life allow. 3) Support farmers. 4) Eat real food, not things that are so processed that I don't even know what food group they came from.

In Alaska, this has been a tricky adventure. Grocery stores here are ridiculously expensive. Finding good fruit in Alaska is almost laughable unless you find it on the mountainside or in your backyard. The growing season is about 4 months and meat just can't be completely grass fed because of the whole 7 months of winter situation.

Nevertheless, we have tried. We belong to a farm share called Full Circle Farm which is out of Washington. I know that is far away, but honestly for Alaskans that is more local than most things on the shelves. And it is organic. And it tastes better. And it is cheaper. This summer, we also belong to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). We bought a share in a farm and each week from June-mid October we receive a bundle full of vegetables. In the vein of full exposure, this share cost us $500. Our Full Circle share costs $50 per box. Not everyone can afford this. I am grateful that I can, but food is a major priority in our budget. So during the summer we only get Full Circle boxes bi-weekly and I fill them with fruit instead of vegetables. So we buy dairy, grains, beans, and not much else at the grocery store.

For the next week I am going to write about what we eat, what our menu is, and show pictures of our food based on our vegetable share. I don't even pretend to be a food blogger. My photos aren't great. For me, though, food is a beautiful part of life. Food is a gift, not something to be scarfed in a car or shoved in while watching bad television. Food is for enjoying, for giving life, for loving those closest to you.

Today, Thursday, is the day we get our farm boxes. This is what the good looked like today:

Here they are, spread out. We received: dill, basil, parsley, oregano, thyme, sage, mustard greens, kale, beets, beet greens, zucchini, corn, lettuce, edible flowers, romanesco broccoli, broccoli, green onions, snap peas, avocado, plums, pluots, grapefruit, oranges, nectarines, kiwi, mango, apricots, black grapes, and rainier cherries (a majorly expensive treat). All of these items are organic, because our farm shares are organic.
Based on these items I make a menu plan. When all was said and done I only need to purchase the following items for the next week: bacon, eggs, goat cheese, milk, and garlic.

Since we have 29 whole salmon in the freezer we strive to eat salmon twice per week, so that goes into the menu plan first. Then, one meal is required to be beans/rice based. After that I usually add a soup because you can eat soup here year round. Breakfasts are required to include protein. Lunches are leftovers. This week we are going camping, so I had to plan 2 days of camping acceptable foods. And, just for information, I plan the menus because K doesn't like to, that's it.

For supper tonight we had Chard Soup with lemon, rainier cherries, and honey-pecan salmon.

This is a photograph of most of the ingredients. Isn't that a monstrous pile of chard? It was leftover from last week, as were the potatoes.
This is supper in its finished form. The drink is kombucha tea, which we recently started brewing at our house. We're still experimenting, but the experiment is to see if the carbonation in kombucha can help me get over my soda cravings. So far, so good.
Again, this may not matter to anyone but myself. However, I want a record of our life. A remembrance of the green vegetables of summer in the dead of winter. A reminder of why I am thankful for our farmer. A memory of the fish that we caught even though we despise fishing.

Supper was beautiful.

I hope you are okay coming along for the ride this week. I hope to share some more reasons why we eat what we do, but the honest truth is that it tastes good. But there are always lots of dishes. So. many. dishes.