I really need to quit the pig licking.

The old man wanted me to post this picture with the caption "The ultimate in local eating." So here goes.

The ultimate in local eating.

This was from the miracle of birth center at the State Fair. Those piglets were something like nine days old. All the mothers were just laying on their sides, half asleep while the piglets furiously rooted and sucked, sucked and rooted.

It made me crave pork chops and bacon.

Fortunately, I was at the State Fair where pork products are abundant. After visiting (warning: gratiutous use of the best beauty contest name ever) Princess Kay of the Milky Way, we headed to the porkchop on a stick stand. Porkchop on a stick was one of the first things I had had at the State Fair many years ago when I visited with my sister, her husband, and our friend, Jess. It was delicious and gave me the impression that every food item at the State Fair is solid, simple, delicious street food. I was mistaken.

Last year I made the mistake of trying something new. The week before I went to the State Fair I had read about the Ufda Brat -- a brat wrapped in lefse (Norwegian potato flat bread) with mashed potatoes and sauerkrat. I love brats. I love mashed potatoes. I love sauerkraut. I love lefse. Why wouldn't I love an Ufda Brat? I wouldn't love the Ufda Brat because it was a bland, flavorless goo. It was as if they thought that because they were packing so much stuff into each Ufda Brat, they needn't use any salt. Big mistake. You always need to use salt.

This year, I vowed to stick with the tried and true. I was not disappointed. Porkchop on a stick is an incredibly simple, spicy, salty porkchop grilled with a jerk-like rub and stuck on a stick for easy, portable enjoyment. Here I am enjoying it in front of the snake zoo.

Eric got a corn dog, like he always does and I had a bite, like I always do. So far the vow to only eat the tried and true was working out.

At the day wore on, I started to feel my defenses weaken.

Perhaps it was my Al Franken sighting.

Perhaps it was the seed art depicting Barack Obama in a quaint Sambo-like way. (Maybe it's just one of the constraints of the art form?)


Perhaps at was registering to vote. (We moved which means we had to re-register.)
Perhaps it was the totally random Loreal tent that was plopped down right next to the eco-building and the church coffee stand and was pumping techno over its totally State Fair inappropriate red carpet.


The sights and sounds of the State Fair must have gotten to me because suddenly I had the urge to break my vow and try something new. We made a beeline for Famous Dave's.

Pig Lickers had been the talk of the State Fair. Bacon dipped in chocolate. Need I say more? Yes I do.

A few years ago, I celebrated New Year's Eve with my friends Yas and Dean in DC. Yas is a pastry chef. A great pastry chef. For dinner they had cooked up a lovely honey baked ham. For dessert, Yas had melted a giant bowl of chocolate and laid out a tray of cut fruit and her amazing olive oil pound cake. We dunked and ate -- lucious chocolate dripping off of sweets -- and enjoyed our 1970s fondue flashback. We ate more and drank more and the menfolk got to talking about how much they love ham and other pork products. Someone pulled the ham back out.

More chaos ensued and in a "your chocolate's in my peanut butter" moment, bits of ham ended up getting dipped and eventually drenched in the chocolate. Most of the rest of the evening consisted of Dean sitting on the floor next to the coffeetable moaning with pleasure over the bowl of the now grease-stained chocolate.

A few years later, I was at another gathering at Yas and Dean's house. I'm not sure if the inspiration was that New Year's Eve, but Yas had refined the bacchanal experience into a neat little truffle. Peanut butter, chocolate, and bacon. In a word? Yum. She'd been making the truffles for the cafe where she worked and they flew off the shelves -- and with good reason. A perfect combo of salty and sweet.

I was hoping too recreate the whole experience at the State Fair with these little guys.
No such luck.

The problem with the ham dipped chocolate of New Year's Eve was that the warm ham grease ended up in the warm chocolate. But on New Year's Eve with a few drinks, no one seems to mind.

The problem with the pig lickers is the opposite: in order to keep the chocolate solid, the whole thing has to be stored and served cold. The result is that the bacon is congealed. It is possible, apparently, to ruin mother nature's candy.

The congealed ham completely threw me off my game because then I went and tried something else new (to me). Smores on a stick are gooey marshmallow and chocolate neatly contained in a graham cracker dough shell. Good in theory. Gross in reality. Nothing redeeming about this. The dough was sour (but not in a good way) and undercooked. I took a bite. And then another just to make sure it was really as bad as I thought it was. And then I threw it away. I should have done what Eric did and just gotten a butter sugar lefse.

He's so much happier with his sweet treat than I was with mine. Even the guy behind him covets the lefse. At least it looks like he's coveting something.

Next year I'm sticking to: porkchop on a stick, walleye on a stick, corndogs, lefse, and honey ice cream and maybe mini donuts. I promise.

Locavore Experiment Might Be Over FOREVER.

So technically my month-long eating local experiment is over (more to come on that), but I was hoping that I would be able to continue to imbue my daily eating habits with some local treats. Now The Man wants me to stop eating local. What a jerk that guy is.

In her Minnesota Monthly column, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl (our local James Beard awarded writer and all-around Minnesota food champion and critic extraordinaire) has come across at least one restaurant that is being told it can't buy its food directly from the farmer's market or from the farmer. They MUST buy from distributors.

She's following up on what's going on and I'm going stay up to date on what she finds out. I'll post update here so the outrage can commence.

Making Pickles

My nephew, Desi, didn't have summer camp or any other plans for this last week of vacation, so his negligent parents left him with me. I had a giant sack of cucumbers that needed pickling.


Desi and I spent the afternoon cleaning and chopping and boiling and packing and all the things that are required to make the sour treats. Here's Desi having at a head of dill.

Many hours later here's the product.

They all appear to have sealed properly, which I was psyched about because it was my first canning experience. The one thing I'm wary of is that there were some air bubbles in there after I processed them. I might not have done a good enough job getting them out before sealing them. Also, I'm not positive about how good they'll taste. These ones are supposedly ready to eat in 24 hours, so I'll find out this evening. At least if they're not good or they harbor some kind of bacteria, I have a seven year old scapegoat.

Update: I went ahead and cracked open one of the jars. The good news is that the seal was good and the pickles tasted great (dilly and spicy and just a little salty). The bad news it that they are soggy, soggy, soggy. Maybe I'll make them into some kind of relish? (But who eats that much relish?)

In the meantime, after a little research on the world wide webs I think I've found one of my problems and one good piece of advice. Next time I'm going to soak the cukes in water in the fridge overnight before I can them. Also, I might have overprocessed them this time (perhaps a typical novice fear of botulism mistake alongside not being absolutely sure that I started the timing at the right point). Next time I'll be more careful with the processing time. If anyone out there has some good tips or knows of anyone in desperate need of some relish, contact me here...

Hop on Board the Locavore Train!

Probably one of the best things about doing a project like this is that people around you start to get into it.

My sister has been almost more obsessive about it than me. She likes to invite me over for dinner and have her husband cook beautiful meals full of local fare. (Just kidding, she actually cooked the meal of local brats, green beans with tomatoes, bread and a corn flan that I brough along last night.)

My family has a running joke that my dad started where we price different meals based on what we might pay for it in a restaurant (it must be a left-over habit from the days when my parents were restaurateurs and, I know, not very funny to the outsider). Now in addition to naming the price, my sister seems to enjoy calculating what percentage of the meal arrived at our plates from a local farm.

This Saturday, my brother-in-law, Mike, cooked up a juicy beer butt chicken. (I think it must be a midwest thing 'cause I never heard of it before I moved back here. Basically you cook a whole chicken on the grill sitting upright on top of a beer can that's been stuck inside its cavity. It is delicious and moist.) The beer can chicken was the centerpiece of a local meal including green beans and bread and a salad (my sister snuck in some grilled California figs, which I happily gobbled up) and orzo. I was afraid to ask if the orzo was local. Their next door neighbor even brought over a six pack of Summit beer. I came with some treats from the Salty Tart at the Midtown Global Market.

More recently, my mother in law brought me some local cheese after a trip to the Lake Pepin area for me to enjoy with my local beets from the farmers market.

My mom tries to thwart my local eating by sending me undeniable treats like this banana bread. She included a note saying she knew it wasn't local, but that maybe Eric would like it. Did she actually think that a NOTE, a tiny piece of paper with a few words scribbled on them would stand between me and this?

I think not. I include my mother's baking in the whole "don't let this experiment stand in the way of socializing or cultural experiences" clause.

Locavore Experiment: Will No One Think of the Ethnics?

I have not recently commented on the whole locavore experiment. The old man was out of town, so things got pretty easy for a while there. You know, since he's always over my shoulder demanding bananas and avocadoes. Seriously, I don't know why it's been much easier -- just one less person to worry about, but I've also gotten into the swing of things, plus the farmer's markets are so lush right now it makes it easy to find things to eat.

This Wednesday I went over to my sister's place for dinner. She's been very supportive of the locavore experiment. Although, she seems to view it as something of a charity month. I am Oliver Twist, but I can only eat local and it's her duty to give me bread, yogurt, and tomatoes.

Her husband was cooking that night using chickens and broccoli that my sister explained to me, in a very loud voice, "THESE WERE BOUGHT LOCALLY." Not really. But they were local.

The catch was that my brother in law was making mee fun, a family favorite that my dad taught him to make many summers ago. "Mee fun" is just a general word for thin chinese rice noodles. My dad and now Mike make it with a chicken and vegetable stir fry with a salty gravy reminiscent of Thai radnaa. We eat it with lots of white pepper and spicy goodness. Total comfort food.
The catch is that it's made with rice noodles and shitake mushrooms, neither of which are made locally. Besides which, I like to throw lots of sriracha (my sister calls it Asian ketchup) on it and last I checked, sriracha is a province in Thailand, not southern Minnesota. Of course, the irony of the fact that my brother in law, the only white guy in the house that night, was the one cooking the Asian food was not lost my my sister and me, who are also conveniently caucasians and are therefore excused (at least in our own minds) from being able to cook this Asian dish.
So this is the problem. A lot of my comfort foods (pad thai, fried rice, pad krapow) are "ethnic" and therefore contain many ingredients that are hard to come by locally. There are a few really great Asian markets in Minneapolis but, trust me, none of them carry anything that hasn't been shipped, at a very minimum, across at least one major body of water. Will I make it to the end of the month? How would I make it for an entire year without these foods? Do I have to learn how to make rice noodles from scratch? Will no one think of the ethnics?

Eating local is great because it has allowed me to become more aware of local Minnesota cuisine and what's available here and when, but I doubt that I'll be able to give up my jasmine rice for much longer than a month.


PS Today is technically supposed to be Feature Friday, but the item I was going to feature has not appeared in the mail, so I might have to make it a Feature Monday or just skip a week.

Locavore Experiment: I am shamed

This weekend I took a spur of the moment solo road trip to visit my friend Sarah in Lawrence, KS. She was celebrating her birthday and a kick-ass new job and I wanted to surprise her. The seven plus hour drive was totally worth the look on her face when I walked up to her at her party (and the chance to see a really cool part of Kansas).

So, of course, before I left Minneapolis for KS I was having pretty typical unprepared locavore difficulties. I figured I'd need to eat on the way down, so I decided to stop by the co-op to pick up some local corn (that I peeled in the parking lot and then ate raw, which I love), some dips and pita chips made at a local restaurant (although I'm pretty sure it's impossible to get chickpeas locally), and some chocolate covered raisins made locally. I loaded up my water bottle from the tap and was on my way. I was feeling pretty good that I had planned that far ahead.

I wasn't hungry before the party, so I just headed over and decided that, locally made or not, to not accept the cans of Budweiser that Sarah was plying me with would just be looking a gift horse in the mouth. The party was in the back alley of a downtown bar. It was lit with strings of white lights in the way that all alleys should be lit and a country band was on the stage. I was having a great time chatting and comparing accents with her friends, when I met a friend of Sarah's from high school and her husband. I was dumbly rambling on about the differences in the landscape from Minnesota to Kansas and the striking beauty of wind turbines in Iowa (which I then photographed from the moving car on the way back), before I finally started to get around to talking to them about what they do and where they live. I should be prominently featued in the magazine "Modern Jackass" (thanks, This American Life, for coining that phrase).

Turns out that this couple, Gretchen and Randy, are living the life I want to live but will probably never have the guts to live. They have a farm with chickens and sheep and a garden. They bake their own bread and make their own yogurt and sell the wool and the lamb meat and trade chickens with other farmers for dairy and other basics. Of course, they both have to still work full time and they wake up at four in the morning to to the chores, so maybe I'm romanticizing things a little bit, but still.... Part of their reasoning is that they know where pretty much all the food they eat comes from. In fact, they eat out every once and again, but said that it makes both of them feel sick because they're not used to processed foods.

The duo has big plans -- bees and doing pressed cheeses and spinning their own yarn and eventually getting their gumption up to do their own slaughtering. They think they have little gumption.. while I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to go the next 24 hours eating local.

Later on, Sarah was talking about how great it was that Gretchen and Randy were doing this. She had also grown up on a farm but, looking back, is amazed at the disconnect in the food chain that she experienced growing up eating wonder bread even though she was on a wheat farm. She then dragged me off for egg and chorizo burritos at the local Mexican stand. Oh, Sarah, how you thwart my thoughtful eating at every turn!

The next day we met up for a bite (I had a great Turkey burger -- no idea what the origins were, but it was good) and then walked around downtown Lawrence. It reminded me a little of Madison, WI -- only a little more "grown up" somehow -- as in you'll probably see fewer people vomiting into the gutter in Lawrence.

After painfully parting ways with Sarah, I had to stop at this fabric store. It had an amazing selection of fabrics and was, appropriately named Sarah's Fabric Store -- as if she had set up the whole thing as a very-nearly-successful ruse to get me to move there.


OK, so I was less than adherent in my locavore experiment this weekend, but I'm not quite willing to give myself more allowances on this one and I'm definitely not willing to make some sort of "rules" I have about eating get in the way of traveling. Granted, I don't usually take off for last minute road trips and I think that that was my main lesson this weekend. With a little bit more planning and forethought I think I could have been more of a localist even while traveling. I could have easily brought a cooler to stock up on healthier foods. There was a farmer's market in Lawrence the morning I was there -- I just didn't make the time to get there -- and there are certainly restaurants that focus on local food. It was a trip, after all, through the country's bread basket. Eating food raised right there shouldn't be that hard, right?

Locavore Experiment: Day 4 (ish)

Yesterday my nephew (4) and neice's (1) day care was closed -- or "shut down" as my nephew said-- so my sister foisted her kids off on me for most of the day.

We made a last minute decision to go to the Minnesota Zoo. We packed up some snacks and water and juice and drove the 30 minutes to the suburban locale. It was a really nice day - beautiful weather, kids mostly under control and excited to see the sharks and bison.

The kids had their snack mid-morning and then lunchtime rolled around. I knew that walking all the way to the eatery would put us dangerously close to low sugar level meltdowns and so we ended up stopping at a little stand that had hot dogs and sandwiches and pizza. I sorted out what Gus (the four year old wanted) and what I could order that Addie (the one year old) would be able to eat. They were out of chocolate milk so I got Gus regular milk and hoped he wouldn't notice. They were out of fruit cups, so I placed "potato chips" into the "vegetable" category. I didn't think the food pyramid would mind.

It wasn't until I was a good bite or two into my sandwich that I remembered this locavore experiment that had been occupying my every thought for the past three days (and truth be told many thoughts in the months leading up). The moment I stepped into kidland, however temporary it might be, all thoughts of where the food came from and the economic and environmental and social implications of food consumption flew right out the window. I had one thought "Get food in their bellies and hope that they're getting some basic nutrients."

Therefore, it is my belief that having children (and perhaps more so having them suddenly and unwittingly thrust upon you) exempts you from ever having to follow any of these silly food movements. More power to you if you can manage it, but I will not judge you if you can't.

We now have three exemptions: "Marco Polo exemptions," "I have kids exemptions," and "my husband makes killer chocolate chip cookies exemptions."

Locavore Experiment: Day 3

Yesterday I went to the Midtown Farmer's Market. I bought some corn, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, and raspberries. The raspberries were from Peter's Pumpkin and are shown below.


There are some questions as to whether or not buying from your local farmer's market is more eco-friendly in terms of the energy required to transport the goods, but more on that in another blog entry.

I also picked up some almonds. They were flavored with a tangy bbq spice by a local family. The almonds themselves come from California, but I bought some raw ones before I asked where they were from. I feel like such a sinner.

The almond guy said that he had found some almond trees that supposedly grow in zone 4. We're in zone 5 -- although we used to be zone 6. Thanks, Global Warming! He said that he would soon be trying to grow some here in Minnesota in which case they will be the first almond farmers here.

Is it cheating to buy almonds when they come from California? What if they are roasted locally? They are really good for you. Does that make a difference?

A similar conflict arose when my husband wanted to bake some cookies. He's started to just starting lumping various items that he doesn't want to give up under the "Marco Polo Rule." He makes really good cookies and they require a lot of ingredients that can easily be obtained locally (eggs, butter, flour) and some that cannot be (white sugar, brown sugar, vanilla, chocolate chips). I have to admit that I am reluctant to try his cookies with maple sugar or molasses or any other sweetener that we can get locally. Would you be able to give these up?



The other question that came up was the flour issue. Minneapolis was originally a milling town. In fact, Gold Medal flour was one of the products that was originally milled on the banks of the Mississippi here.
The mills are all shut down now, but General Mills is still headquartered here. I haven't been able to find out where Gold Medal Flour is milled now or where they get their wheat from. But let's say that the wheat isn't from here and that the flour isn't produced here, does it still count as local because the company is based here? Aren't I still supported some sector of the local economy by buying the flour? Or does buying local mean necessarily supporting local farmers and small business and NOT supporting larger companies like General Mills that distribute goods all over the world and get their raw materials from all over the place?

I'm hoping to track down more information about Gold Medal Flour, but in the meantime, I'm wondering if even if it is from local farmers and produced locally, using their flour might not be in the spirit of the localist movement.

Locavore Experiment: Day 1

Inspired by an Adam Gopnik piece in the New Yorker last year, I've decided to venture into a little bit of social experimentation. For the next month, I'm going to try out the locavore lifestyle. Doing this is based on three reasons/assumptions: eating local is better for the environment, eating local tastes better, and eating local supports the local economy. Hopefully over the next month, I'll see whether any of that is true and whether any of that really matters.

Initially, I was going to try to get my daily grocery bill to be 100% local (the co-op we used to go to regularly before we moved had receipts that noted what percent of your purchases were local items), but after seeing that the bloggers over at "Splendid Table" are only shooting for 80%, I decided to loosen it up a bit. I don't have a specific number in mind, but I'm shooting for at least 80% local (not including salt and spices as per the "Marco Polo" allowances). Since I'm terrible with remembering how far away different towns are, I've decided to define "local" as coming from Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, or either of the Dakotas. (I know, I know, why don't I just include Jamaica and Belize while I'm at it?)

Even though I live in Minnesota, a place where the black earth offers up abundant local nutrition, I decided to stack the deck even further in my favor by doing this little experiment in August, the month that gives us the greatest cross section of late summer and early fall harvests. Perhaps one day I will try this experiment in the dead of winter in Minnesota, but not, perhaps, before we have a large deep freeze that I can spend the summer months stocking or before I figure out a way to turn potatoes into blueberries.

I also knew that this month I would be just returning from a trip to the east coast where I would have enjoyed loads of seafood and various other cuisines (like sushi and dim sum), the consumption of which this experiment would severely limit.

I just got back into town, so today was my first day. This morning I ventured to the local coop for my first entirely local purchases for breakfast and lunch. Last week, I had tried the Birchwood's Granola that my sister had brought along on our trip back east. It was delicious and local, so I knew that that would be an agreeable way to start my morning. It's also berry season here and raspberries and blueberries make the perfect topping to this treat.


Getting local milk in the upper midwest is pretty easy, but I'm lactose intolerant. I typically eat my cereal in and my cookies with soy milk. Right away, I was having a hard time finding a local non dairy alternative. I made a new rule for myself -- anything already in the fridge or pantry is fair game. If eating local is, in part, motivated by the desire to limit one's ecological impact, wasting perfectly good food already in one's home seemed to be utterly counterproductive.

As luck would have it, I had some soy milk in my fridge -- enough to tide me over until I can find another local option.

At the coop, I also bought a nice loaf of hearty, grainy bread made in St Paul and some Wisconsin cheese and sprouts. I had my breakfast and lunch lined up.

I was feeling pretty good about my purchases (in spite of the fact that the granola was $7), but when I went to double check the ingredients, I remembered that one of the things that makes the granola so delicious is the coconut. I was somewhat sure that the grains had all come from Minnesota or at least nearby (the packaging includes a thank you to Whole Grains of Welcome, MN), but I was also pretty sure that the coconut could not possibly come from, well, pretty much anywhere in the continental United States.

It made me wonder about the bread. How many of the ingredients had come from the five state region I had restricted myself to? Even if the food I buy is made locally, how I can be sure that the ingredients came from local farms? Does it even matter if they do or don't? If part of the reason behind this is to support the local economy, aren't I doing that by supporting the local restaurant that's making the granola or the local bakery that's making the bread?

For dinner, I was largely able to put those questions aside. We had enough patty pan squash from the most local place I could get it -- our backyard garden. I stuffed it with some pantry bread crumbs, the cheese I'd bought, and some bacon from Kerkhoven, MN that I bought that the Farm in the Market at the Midtown Global Market and had some tomatoes from the garden on the side.

Admittedly, some of the greater challenges came from the back and forth with my husband. The Global Market had a great deal on rainier cherries, one of my husband's favorite summer-time indulgences. Picturing them being driven half-way across the country, I passed them up. My husband was not pleased. I'm finding it's easier to convince myself to go without than to force this experiment on others.