One Local Summer

Well, in an earlier post I declared my plan to try to eat locally as much as possible, including ice cream. I promptly discovered how difficult this actually is. There are so many food items my family and I have come to rely on that are not local, including pop and carbonated water, salad dressings, nitrite-free lunch meats, ketchup, orange juice, bananas, grapes, lemons, etc.
Fortunately I stumbled upon One Local Summer, a challenge to prepare one local meal each week for the summer. Now this I can do!
Tonight was our first local meal, and boy was it a good one!


Tonight's meal included roasted rosemary chicken, roasted asparagus and spring onions parmesan, local tomatoes, homemade butter biscuits, Iowa white wine, and a salad of lettuce from our CSA, radishes and tomatoes from the farmer's market, radish sprouts from thinning our garden and edible flowers from our garden, including violas and pansies.
We bought the chicken last fall from a local farmer; the parmesan cheese was from a local artisan goat cheese farm; the wheat was from Paul's Grains, about an hour or so from Des Moines; the white wine was from Iowa winery White Oak Vineyards.

Then came dessert:

Rhubarb pie!

So, what wasn't local? Baking powder, salt, black pepper; I didn't make my own salad dressings and the sugar was from Minnesota.

Not bad, huh?

Oh, and what's this?


I just thought it looked like PacMan wanted to eat local, too!