Last day

We are nearing the end of the Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge week. I've been figuring out what our costs have been, which I'll post later. (As near as I can figure at this point, we came in well under the $121 allotted for the week.)

Breakfast this morning was the apple crisp from last night. It was pretty good--we added a little more honey after tasting it--but not as filling as it could have been. By the end of church we were both pretty hungry. Ben had put a loaf of sourdough in to rise before we left, so when we got home we baked it. I fried some onions and tofu and made a barbecue-esque sauce: tomato juice, honey, sauerkraut juice, salt, and a bit of flour to thicken it. We ate it with the bread and some of our canned sauerkraut. We also drank mint tea that I made from our small chocolate mint patch.

For supper I made something I'd been wanting to try all week: pizza. Or a varient of pizza, anyway. I had finally finished another small batch of cheese--it came out sort of like ricotta this time--and we had some bread left from lunch. I boiled down some of our canned tomato juice, added a bit of honey and salt, and spread it on slices of bread. I topped that with green onions, fresh oregano, frozen basil and peppers, and the cheese. After it was baked it looked like something out of a gourmet magazine, if I do say so myself. (The peppers were yellow, orange and red, the basil and onions were green, and the cheese was in little white lumps on top.) It tasted pretty good too. We had it with some of the salad from yesterday and cider.

At supper Ben and I were discussing what we liked about this week, what we had missed most, etc. I have missed peanut butter, beans, and some of those more filling foods I usually eat. Eggs fill that role, but I do get tired of them after a while. I also missed being able to cook with the spices I normally use (curry powder, cinnamon, black pepper), but what I missed most, surprisingly, was vinegar. Throughout the week I experimented with strawberry, tomato, and sauerkraut juice, cider, sorrel, even the leftover whey from cheese making. Nothing had that truly sour flavor I wanted for my salad dressing. The thing is, we live within walking distance of an apple orchard--there has to be a way to get local vinegar. We didn't find any, but if we do this again I'm going to make it a priority.

We also discussed what we would like to continue. Both of us would like to keep experimenting with the sourdough. Each of our attempts has improved, but it's still not quite where we'd like it to be. We do like baking with it though. We also discussed expanding the produce we grow. We could grow soybeans and other dry beans. That would have given us a lot more food options this week, and we'd like to try it.

Ben has been threatening to convert to Judaism for the evening so that he can end the day at sundown and eat his popcorn, so I'm going to go check on local snack possibilities to forestall this.