Get Physical With Your Food: A Simple, Hands-On Meal

We'll start today with a shout-out to the Mass Farmer's Markets and their loving local blogathon going on right now! Click on the previous link to find a lot of local bloggers who are sharing recipes and other ideas from their findings at local Massachusetts Farmers Markets. I've found some delicious recipes I'd like to try in the near future from my fellow bloggers out there, including this delicious looking Spanish Tortilla recipe I have got to try when I get my tomatillos from my Silverbrook Farms CSA this week!

Today, I'm talking about getting physical...with your food. We get so separated from our food, especially our meat. We can buy melon cut up into perfect cubes, chicken that looks nothing like the bird they came from, and the list goes on. But someone out there cuts that melon, someone out there kills that chicken (or runs the machine that does so.) I think it's only fair that once in awhile, we get our hands dirty, get a little more involved with where our food comes from.

This dinner was ALL HANDS ON; we had to work for all our food, but it was worth every effort.

The physicality is why I LOVE lobster. You have to work for your meat, but it is so worth it to bite into that juicy, briny flesh. For those living in New England, take advantage of lobster as a special occasional treat! We're lucky to have world-class seafood, the kind people will get shipped all over the world, right here and local. The Sustainable Seafood Watch has Maine Lobster as an acceptable seafood choice as well. Lobster is expensive, but not that expensive when it's local and you're buying from a Lobster Pound, which specializes in Lobster and buys direct from lobstermen. Our lobster were 6.99 a pound in Southern Maine.

I have no problem boiling my lobster, but I don't have a pot big enough. Thankfully, most places will cook your lobster for you for free. Make sure you have lobster crackers on hand!

You can dip your lobster in clarified butter, but I like olive oil, garlic, and some fresh local basil (from the CSA) instead.

Boil some farmers market-fresh corn for a delicious, messy, hands-on meal.

This is an expensive meal by my standards. It works out to a little under 10 bucks a person with the lobster and the corn and dippings. But this would be a great way to have a romantic meal, very Like Water for Chocolate. It's also a great way to celebrate a special occasion with your family. Lots of kids love taking their food apart and giving the lobster and autopsy!

Don't live in New England? If you live near the coast, try some local seafood, perhaps even a whole fish baked with lemon and herbs! Don't like seafood? Try some melon, corn, or other fruit or veggie that needs your hands-on work. You'll have fun with it!

Faux Pho Failure

I apologize for the delay since my last post. My husband and I have been eating on other people's dime for the last week or so, and there's no cheaper meal than a free one!

I would like to admit our first real meal failure. I will explain what we did, how it went horribly wrong, and how we realized it could actually be delicious next time.

Crockpots and soups are good ways to stretch a dollar, but it is the summer, so we didn't want anything too heavy.

I decided we should try to make Pho. Which, in making the link to Wikipedia to explain what it is, I realized I have always mispronounced. (I guess it is "Fah"). Pho is a Vietnamese soup with lovely cilantro and lime flavors.

So we set some organic and free range chicken broth chicken broth in a crockpot with some water in it as well. We used about one carton. We then put in two free range chicken breasts. Then...this is where we went horribly awry, we decided to "flavor" the broth all day. In went a ton of chopped cilantro, and a lime: chopped in half, but the whole thing, rind and all. Mistakes one and two right there.

We get back, and we add ramen last minute to our individual bowls. A pack each, at .10 a pack. What a bargain! Then we took a sip.

BITTER. Our Pho was a Bitter failure. Instead of the bright, citrus broth we had hoped for, the rind of the lime and the cooked down cilantro made the soup have such an aftertaste that we couldn't drink any more of it. We ate the noodles quickly and dumped the rest of the crockpot out.

However, I think this will be a success next time if we flavor the broth at the end, at the same time as adding the ramen. So, a successful faux pho recipe looks something like this.

Add chicken broth and chicken breast to a crockpot. Cook all day on low. Come home, spoon into bowls, add a package of ramen per bowl. Offer fresh lime, cucumber, and cilantro for flavoring. Enjoy.

Price per serving if this meal had been successful? About $1.50

I'll try again soon, once the bitter agony of defeat is out of my mouth.

The Uncompromising Banana

This commercial gets me every time. It's super-cute, that's for sure, but it also highlights a pretty obvious problem with bananas. They travel a very long way to get here. Bananas are one of those never was, aren't now, and never will be local foods that we probably shouldn't be eating. But Americans sure love their bananas, in vast quantities. Americans, on average, consume more bananas than apples and oranges combined.

To quote from the previously-linked NY Times Op-Ed piece:

"That bananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They’re grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they’re cut off the tree. Apples, in contrast, are typically grown within a few hundred miles of the store and keep for months in a basket out in the garage. Yet apples traditionally have cost at least twice as much per pound as bananas."

But I love bananas! And so does my husband! They're delicious by themselves, with peanut butter, or honey, or chocolate...

When Barbara Kingsolver set out on her Animal, Vegetable, Miracle project, trying to live completely locally, each member in her family got to pick a free pass item: something that they would get even though it wasn't local. One chose coffee; another chose chocolate.

If Kingsolver can do it, so can I. I choose bananas (and, okay, chocolate too maybe.) Why do I think it is okay to continue to include these items? The help me stick to my resolve to eat more responsibly.

That said, if I'm going to eat bananas, I better eat better bananas, more responsible bananas. I would like to get fair trade bananas, but I haven't found anywhere in Boston yet that stocks them. Whole Foods, however, does sell their "Whole Trade" labeled bananas, and we have begun to buy those. While they do not go through the Fair Trade Certification process, Whole Foods does promise to meet certain standards about the sourcing of its products.

Yes, they're nearly twice as much per pound, but if I'm going to eat a food product with such an enormous carbon footprint, the least I could do is spend the extra money for a product with a better grower-justice history.

For a list of where to buy various fair trade certified products, including coffee, fruit, and chocolate, look here.