This oughtta be interesting...

My interest in eating locally came about slowly, at first from a desire to avoid factory-farmed food (due to animal cruelty and environmental factors). I started out with a produce CSA, and really enjoyed it, then started buying grass-fed beef from a local farmer. That all worked well for a year or so, but my family and I were still eating crappy crap from the grocery store, because local produce dries up in the winter, and grass-fed beef is wonderful and affordable, but you can't eat beef every morning, noon and night.

Then I wrote a paper for a college class about the local food movement, and through my research found a 'whole diet csa' option about to begin at a farm only 20 mins from my house: voila! ah-ha hahahahaha COUGH COUGH CHOKE SPUTTER!!!

Silly SILLLY me! How naive I was back then (3 weeks ago)!!!!!

"The ego is a self-justifying historian which seeks only that information that agrees with it, rewrites history when it needs to, and does not even see the evidence that threatens it." Said Anthony G. Greenwald (no clue, found this in a book of daily affirmations), and right he was.

It seemed so simple, the idea of a the whole diet csa: once a week, take a trip to the farm and shop through the 'farm store' for whatever we need, all natural, pastured beef, pork, veal, and chicken, raw dairy, produce, stone ground wheat grown on the farm and baked into bread-stuff at the farm's organic bakery, plus value added items like goat's milk soap and honey.

Easy enough, eh? Uh, no. You see, I am not a single, college-student hippy chick, but a nearly 40 yr old mother of 2 teenage boys and a wife to a hard working, hard eating man! Him I figgered to be a lesser obstacle, I have powers capable of bending his mind to my will (laughs evilly), but the kids I knew would take some convincing. They were raised on grocery store fodder, and they LIKE Doritos, Gatorade and frozen pizza, and LOVE Hot Pockets (gag!), ramen noodles, and any kind of Pillsbury refrigerated dough product!

But I bent the image of them in my mind to fit what I wanted it to, I dreamed of them in perfect health at age 105 due to my feeding them an all natural diet, I imagined them offering their friends my roasted chick peas as a snack.....-HUH? Where the hell am I???? What just happened??? (Shake it off girl, just shake it off! Everything is gonna be alllrightttttttt........)

Anyway, to make a long story short, we joined the csa and had our first pick up Friday evening...
now I have 6 months during which I must convince them to drink raw milk that comes in mason jars, eat home made all natural yogurt out of mason jars (made from raw milk), eat hard boiled free range eggs for snacks instead of Combos, make their own butter, and in general make them hate me!

Bwahahahaha, hey, they frequently hate me anyway, even with their faces stuffed full of chemically processed junk, so I can live with that! I predict alot of bread in their futures....

So the trick will be to somehow manage to keep them from starving, but also to not give in and buy crap from the store for them because it is "easier". This will be made possible by the fact that the csa is taking up nearly my entire grocery budget, so whatever $ is left will have to be used VERY VERY carefully, so i don't have to ask my hubby for mo' money (he no likey spending mo' money!), since I am a full-time student and 'home-maker' (depending on your definition of the word 'home-maker'...) with no J-O-B. (me no likey worky!).

Up to this point, I have been a very frugal grocery shopper, and with coupons, doing alot of cooking at home, and buying meat in bulk from a farm, plus the produce csa, I have managed to feed everyone pretty cheaply. This year I am growing my own garden as well, but it seems to be mostly tomatoes and peppers at this point hahaha! Actually I planted some heirloom fingerling potatoes the first week in April, and they are going CRAZY right now, still, apparently potatoes take a while, and won't be ready to go til fall??? Also I have some herbs and strawberries, zucchini, peas, carrots and string beans sprouting up now, so we will see what happens.
I plan to can tomatoes and salsa, and pickle peppers, and to freeze zucchini, peas and herbs for the cold months, but obviously that won't feed a family of four, so I gotta figure out what to do with the stuff that I get from the farm, and make it work somehow!

This blog is going to be about my family making the conversion from grocery store to farm, and how it goes for us, because I strongly believe that alot of our country's problems can be helped by the local food movement.
Time to get LOCA-L!!!! (Get it? It's a play on the Spanish word for crazy? Get it? Huh? Huh?)