June 25, 2012 (ShapeShiftas) -- Yesterday, the Garden Goddess Suzanne gave me two beautiful heads of Napa cabbage that I bet would go for $10 each in Whole Foods.
She claimed that she has so many she'd give them to her chickens unless I took them. I had to save them from that fate, they were too beautiful to get pecked apart, and I thought I could figure out what to do with them after I got them home.
Looks like romaine, but you can cook it. It's also called Chinese cabbage, and it's really good in a stir-fry.
So I was faced with a crucial challenge for a Localvore -- what do you do with what you've so locally got? The cabbage was ready, how shall we eat it?
I had never bought Napa cabbage before; I usually use the conventional heads, though sometimes will jazz things up with red. (BAM!) If you go to one of the luxury grocery stores, you will probably see at least six different kinds of cabbage -- bok choy, (both baby and would it be adult?) savoy, Napa, and Brussels sprouts* (perhaps the most reviled of cabbages, by all kids and most adults -- nassssstiesssss, as Gollum might say) -- but they will have been flown in from all over the world so that they could all be there on the shelves at the same time. My Napa cabbage was here, now, as organic and fresh as it gets, thank you Garden Goddess!
Good thing Suzanne has a "Gardener" kneeling pillow to help out in her beautiful gardens.
There are plenty of articles, blogs, and books written about eating what's fresh and locally sourced, being a Localvore. The best book I've read on the subject is "The Omnivore's Dilemma," although I also want to read the biography of Alice Waters. Both these authors are accomlished cooks.
Every year, two students at our local alternative school try to eat totally locally (man), and write an article about it in their Food Newsletter. They discover that, depending on the radius of what you consider "local," it's entirely possible to source all ingredients from here in VT, although you won't get sweet corn and strawberries year-round, and you'll have to bake the bread and the pizzas yourself. (There's even a few commercial greenhouse growers here in VT, like Pete's Greens, so you can get your veggies locally even in February.)
Even if my locale were just this remote gravel road, I could get almost anything I might need (in the coming zombie apocalypse, say), except citrus, which is crucial to cooking up all these beautiful vegetables. We'd have to put in the grains, because people here use those kinds of fields for hay for their horses, but everyone on the road has chickens, and has done some slaughtering of the meat birds, so we would have eggs and meat.
This summer, one neighbor has added two cows and some goats, so we will (eventually) have some dairy on the road; goat cheese perhaps, maybe the coveted-by-some raw milk. We could live here without ever going to a corporate Supermarket, a worthy goal -- perhaps an eventuality?
The Shaw's, our closest Corporate Grocery Store, ranked #8 on this list of the 10 worst grocery store chains.
I think that that cooking as a Localvore is something like designing a dress. You start with the ingredient, fabric, and build your shape around what the fabric will do. Two meals took shape around the cabbages I had received. Instead of deciding on a recipe to make, and then getting ingredients, I had the main ingredient but had to come up with the dish. Bottom-up rather than top-down sourcing, something the world could use a little more of.
When I brought them home, someone said "What's that????" I said it's like bok choy, I'm gonna stir-fry it, I think. "Yum," they said, "but what's it called???" Napa Cabbage, Suzanne grew it, or maybe I'll make a slaw? "Yuch," they said. "I don't eat cabbage."
peace, Deborah
* I happen to love Brussels sprouts. Try them roasted, or even better, pickled, with a Martini!