I love Mondays. I make a habit of saving Mondays from work and using them for weekend recovery. I stay home to catch up on life, sustainable living, and the joys of mothering my son Clayton. And I try to stay off the computer.
We had a fun and busy weekend. Saturday started with an essential trip to the farmer's market (now that we are officially locavores, we must not miss the market), then joined a political puppet parade and pageant for May Day, followed by a few moments in the sun pulling crab grass from the asparagus patch, chatted with a visiting friend from Colorado, and ended the evening with ceremony. Sunday morning we woke up late and rushed out the door for a cheesemaking workshop in Estancia, NM at Old Windmill Dairy, followed by a blessed hour on the couch doing nothing, and another attempt at dinner without a recipe to guide me in preparing the day's local fare.
One of the greatest things I have heard yet this year was when Sir Kennith Robertson asked the audience I was sitting in to consider for ourselves
how we are creative rather than how creative are we. Think into that for a moment, it is quite profound given western culture's view of creativity as exclusive to a gifted few.
I'm a recipe girl. I play my guitar by reading music, I sew using patterns, I do Yoga with an instructor, I follow directions when building things, I check my books often when gardening. My creativity does not flow from practical things until I have year's of experience at it that I can stop thinking about it. My more natural creativity comes from the universe, through the soft spot on my head, straight to my intellect. I create and manifest what is not tangible. I take a vision of the future and make it a reality. But not a practical reality - an educational, social, cultural, political, paradigmatic reality. This necessitates that I keep my hands in the dirt often, otherwise my head gets so heavy it knocks me over.
Cooking is not yet a successful creative experience for me. So, when cooking I prefer to follow a recipe or things turn out pretty bland. My joy in cooking comes when I follow the Joy of Cooking for great tasting meals. The stuff I make up on the fly usually doesn't inspire great complements or sparkling reactions from my pallet or my husband's.
This is turning out to be my greatest challenge so far in being a locavore. For years I really haven't done a whole lot of cooking. I'm only just getting to know how to cook meat after years of being a vegetarian. And while I was a vegetarian I mostly ate grilled cheese and lasagna. Seasonal recipe books for my agro eco-region are in short supply. Most American families don't really study the art of cooking I've noticed. I've thought about taking a cooking class at the college to give me more of a foundation to work with, but I haven't determine where that fits into my full-time working and mommying schedule. So, learning what goes together to conjure up flavorful inspirations without guidance from one of my many cookbooks is a big challenge for me.
As my pallet slowly adjusts to local, seasonal-only fare, I have begun to realize that with local food, I can rely more on the natural flavor of things. Things that go from garden to plate in a matter of minutes don't need a lot of accoutrement of any kind. My experience with the first asparagus of the season from my garden clued me into that secret kept from me by my global-industrial-food system-adjusted pallet.
That said, local flavors in April are in a bit of short supply thus far in my experience. This Saturday I bought a pound of spinach, seven over-wintered potatoes, five overwintered apples, the first tiny beets and carrots of the season, white radishes, sunflower sprouts, arugula, salad greens, greenhouse-grown heirloom tomatoes, Nativo (all local ingredients) bread, bacon and some beef.
All good stuff. But not great. Except for the radishes that did surprise me with their zesty spring-time bite. But as for the rest, I have to say I excitedly await July when the full flavor roles in and returns to these sorry step-cousins of the glorious summer time vegetables!
Don't get me wrong. I am grateful we even have a spring time farmer's market in Santa Fe. And I am especially grateful for the heroic efforts our local farmers are making to extend the growing season in this desert that makes being a locavore even a remote possibility. But I LOVE the summer farmer's market and its abundance of flavors. Nothing makes my taste buds ring like Gemini Farm's beets, or the short-lived onslaught of japanese turnips sliced and tossed with their own greens in homemade vinegrette. Yum! It makes being an untrained American home cook a lot easier.
In the meantime, I'll continue to be grateful for the peach colored carrots and the fact that we are still draining my cupboard of leftover non-local items that add a little extra something in a season of arriving but still scarce flavors.
On another note, chesses never cease to fail this time of year. Flavor may change slightly on some dairy farms in winter or mating season (I'll blog later about what I learned at the cheesemaking workshop about why that is). But the high buttermilk content of Ed and Micheal's nubian goats at Old Windmill makes for some delicious chesse varieties anytime of year. Especially the incredibly delicious blue cheese they make. At $20/pound it doesn't necessarily fit into my budget. But given all the challenges and costs of running a small local dairy farm, their seven year-old operation is not even turning a profit yet. The local consumer vs. local farmer buget is a conversation for another blog. Right now I'm happy to give my support and anty up for the flavor rockin' blue as long as I have the dollars in my pocket. It is every bit worth the price.
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