Michael Ruhlman recently wrote about the difference between foodie and cook. I am definitely a cook and only sometimes a foodie.
Someone asked me today why it matters to us where our food comes from, who grows it, makes it, sells it, why we host the Dark Days Challenge. Around here we care about where our food comes from because the only way to make seriously simple food delicious is to start with the very best ingredients, whether you grew them yourself or looked the person that did in the eye and shook their hand. We haven’t met everyone that grows the foods we eat regularly, but we know that if we took a short drive we could.
Edited to add: If we took that short drive, it’s important to us to know that our foods were raised responsibly. That their impact on the environment is minimal, that the inputs were natural, that we would be proud to produce them the same way in our backyard. It’s common in marketing to remind people not to say anything that they’d be ashamed to have their mother read on the front page of the paper. Well, to us, same goes for the foods we eat. We want to be proud of the way they were grown and how we prepared them, not have to make excuses and look the other way hoping that conditions and inputs were better than we know they were.
Sometimes a weeknight meal comes together that’s beyond the effort you’d usually go to. Tonight was one of those nights. We pulled out all the stops to make one of our most simple meals, with the best ingredients around – ones that we grew.
a home raised chicken brushed with olive oil and dusted with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper then grilled on indirect heat for an hour.
homegrown potatoes and onions boiled and mashed with butter, milk and garlic.
carrots fresh from the ground roasted with a bit of butter and a dash of dark brown sugar.
a glass of a new-to-us Washington red table wine.
crisp white cabbage stored in the tack room since early September shredded and tossed with carrots, chives, cider vinegar, oil, salt, pepper and cayenne.
All coming together on our plate for a meal so simple, so seasonal and so satisfying.
This post was feeling familiar, then I realized that I did one that was similar in September. Oh well, it’s written so up it goes…
*****
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Oh yeah! That is what it’s all about!
A very good way to explain/think about why eating locally makes a difference. A fully home-grown meal is so satisfying, and I love how cozy your post is.
Did you grow the cayenne? Are you hot enough on the West Coast? It’s always the pepper that gets me when I’m trying to be totally local. I am so happy to be able to go dig up what I want for dinner from my own garden. People just haven’t experienced the difference truly FRESH food makes to flavor and texture.
Laura,
This looks absolutely fantastic. I hate that its 8:50am here, and I’m salivating for this.
M
What an awesome meal. Someday I’ll be in a position to raise my own chickens… until then, I’ll live vicariously through you!
We recently took that short drive and bought some food from the farmer himself. He raises his animals in the field, humanely harvests them in the field, and sells them right on his farm. Organic and grass fed bison. I have lived almost exclusively lacto-ovo vegetarian for several years due to food chain safety issues, and I will only compromise when I can visit the farm, shake the hand of the farmer, and see and know exactly how the meat was raised and fed.
Given that we humans must eat several times per day to survive, it is a wonder to me that we collectively give so little thought to how we fuel our bodies. Until I opened my eyes, I was duped into believing the rhetoric I had been fed my whole life. It is SO important, and I believe it is important that we have discourse about it so others might awaken also.