365: Only in Chico

I love this sign at the Farmers Market. I'm actually surprised it doesn't have more animals listed. There is a guy who walks around town with a bird on his shoulder. We saw him at Walmart once. And a few different people with different reptiles. That's just how we roll around here.

And then we cry?

Sometime earlier this summer my mom bought me a Chicken Soup for Pet Lover's Soul book at a garage sale. In case you didn't know, I'm totally a sucker for the Chicken Soup series. Something about sad/cute/sappy stories just get me. And clearly you know I love animals. So Chicken Soup about pets? Forget about it.

Like many things, I threw it in my backseat and kind of forgot about it. One Saturday Ange and I were driving to the Zionsville Farmer's Market and I for some random reason picked it up and was like "Hey, let's have a little read aloud on our way to the market!" Totally bad idea.

I start reading the very first story in the book and I only get a few pages in before I start sniffling. Ange is a little teary eyed but not as much as me. As the story progresses I start crying so much I can't even finish reading. Ange is dying to know the end of the story but I just couldn't do it. So she pulls off into a parking lot to finish the story and as she struggles to finish the story we're both crying our eyeballs out. The story was about a developmentally handicap boy who is homeless and rescues a dog. There are a ton of other little parts of the story that make it even sadder/sweeter but that basically sums it up.

So we're sitting in this parking lot, crying our heads off, and trying to pull it together so we can get to the Farmer's Market without it looking like we just got in a knock down drag out fight. After we finally pulled ourselves together we decided we should NOT read Chicken Soup for Pets in the car ever again, particularly if we'd like to not crash or sit on the side of the road like weirdos, and we are two of the most tender-hearted people on the planet. So ridiculous!

Farmer's Market, Part 2

Ange & I did some more Farmer's Marketing yesterday evening and this morning. She did a smash up job of describing what we bought and the run down of where we went. Check it out here: http://angesnutshell.blogspot.com/2009/07/eating-consciously.html

On a side note, I will say this: shopping farmer's markets is a learning curve. Last week we tentatively went into the project and bought a few things, but definitely ran out before the week was over. This week I think we went a little wacko-y-wacko and will have to have some major cooking days and freeze some items. We also spent a crap load of money this weekend. But that's ok, but it is stuff that is good for our body and we will make sure it won't go to waste! (I hate waste)

And just an FYI...not everything at Farmer's Markets is great. We learned our lesson the hard way. We're pretty much shying away from most dairy products. Cheeses are ok, but today we spent $5 on a tub of sour cream that was H I D E O U S. It smelled like rotten intestines. Seriously. Ange was brave enough to try it. Sadly I didn't have the camera ready to get a picture of her gagging over the garbage can and scrapping her tongue like a crazy person. Milk is hit or miss as well. We got some whole milk (ick) at Trader's Point. Ange likes it, but I think it looks disgusting. It has some chunks in it that she tried convincing me were delicious, but since I'm not a huge milk fan anyway I couldn't be swayed. We figure as long as we scout out organic dairy products at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods that's a step in the right direction.

So hopefully we'll find a happy medium next week. And for sure...no sour cream. Yick.

Farmer's Market!

So Ange & I recently read a book called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. I had received the book for Christmas last year (I always get TONS of books and it usually keeps me busy over the course of the year) and had dedicated it as one of my summer reads, so it was prominently displayed on my bookshelf. I am a reading fanatic and I've been trying to encourage Ange to become more of a reader. So one day Ange was checking out my books and saw it and thought it sounded pretty cool. She read it while I was in Senegal & The Gambia and absolutely loved it. So as soon as I returned home she urged me to move it to next on the list. So I started it slowly between my two trips and brought it with me to Nigeria where I whipped through it. Besides the fact that it was a fantastic book, it was also fun to read it together so we could both learn from it and share the experience.

Basically the book is about eating locally produced food. The Kingsolver-Hopp family moved back to their family farm and decided to embark on a family mission to only eat locally produced food for a year. They grew a lot of their own, but also participated in the local economy of farmer's markets and local dairy farms, etc. Barbara (a highly acclaimed writer of several popular American novels) wrote the main narrative, but her husband, who is a professor of biology, added small snippets throughout that reflected on some facts of the global business of food and its impact on the environment, economy and other things, and her daughter, a college student interested in dietetics and biology, wrote about her perspective as a teenager embarking on the journey as well as including menus and recipes. It was a great book that we both loved, and it also inspired us both. We are both into healthy food and the book brought up a lot of good points about why local is better. To summarize, the food is healthier, it's better for the environment (in several ways), and it's better for communities (by way of supporting farmers directly rather than big agro-business).

While the Kingsolver-Hopp family did the "extreme" end of things, she makes it a point to say that not everyone needs to have their own farm and go as in-depth as them (and acknowledges not everyone could even if they wanted to) but even small changes can be good for all of the above summary points. Ange and I both support this point so we have decided to undertake a small project of our own. As much as we can we are trying to buy our food at local farmer's markets. We certainly aren't going totally nutso, but we are trying to build our menus around the food that is in-season and available at the market.

Last weekend was our initial weekend and we visited the Zionsville Farmer's Market. We had so much fun visiting all the booths and seeing what was available. We spent about $40 and bought enough food for about half of what we ate that week. Plus some items that will last for longer than a week. Take a look at the spread (click to zoom in):

We were a little timid this first week, not knowing what we'd need and not really having a plan of action. We just browsed around and grabbed whatever we thought might be good. Based on this experience we were able to start thinking about it a little more and have come up with a better plan for this weekend.

The added bonus is that we got to spend time together and we were so excited about the whole thing it was better than going out on a fancy date!