Eating Local with a Job?... Mrs. Kingsolver?

So I have quickly realized that living up to Animal, Vegetable Miracle and Plenty
can sometimes be a little difficult. I don't remember either book discussing whether or not they held jobs besides being free-lance writers.

This past week I was pretty much away from home for 3 straight days attending two births. The day I returned home I was starving. I was so tired after finishing up birth #2 that I just needed to come home instead of eating something at the folk's house. So I came home and declared we needed to go to Sidetrack for a bowl of chili. I wolfed that down, came home and slept for 5 hours. Woke up at 7pm, ate some scrambled eggs and went back to bed at 9pm to sleep through the night.

Since I'm the more at-home parent around here (but one that could be called away at any time), I'm in charge of meal planning and daily bread making. When I'm not home, meals usually turn into scrambled eggs (always at least 6 dozen in the fridge at any one time)and local bacon on toast (if there's any bread left over).

My mom helped watched the kids during my absence this week, so they ate a lot of Flavor-Ice popsicles, hot dogs and beans, lemonade, etc.

I was feeling like a sellout for already being so lax when uber tired, but I can't be hard on us. Eating out here and there is forgivable, in my book. I fight feeling guilty about a lot of other things in my life, what I eat isn't going on the list, damn it.

In the meantime, on the good days where I have had more than 2 hours of sleep, the food is local and very, very tasty.
This weekend at the Farmer's Market, I realized that the real-deal farmers with greenhouses already have items for sale that won't be ready in my garden for at least another 6 weeks. Things like gorgeous tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, baby onions and baby garlic. Other things that are ready now without the help of a greenhouse are sugar snap peas, strawberries galore, every green spring green imaginable, rhubarb and more.

Last Monday, G, little E and I went strawberry picking. The strawberry farm also had sugar snap peas for picking. We picked a bushel of peas and 40 pounds of strawberries. Very yummy, sweet strawberries. My daughter made a slightly snarky comment about how small they were in comparison to the big ones that are shipped to Michigan from California that are commonly sold in grocery stores here.
Then she tried one and noticed how amazing they taste. So different from the big ones that are always hollow; pretty and red, but hollow and tasteless.
The strawberries picked from the next town over are small, red, and so sweet. We used to going picking when I was a kid, but I haven't been since that time. It needs to become a yearly trip for our family.

The sugar snap peas were also yummy. So sweet and crisp! The only problem was picking up the strings and stems all over the house and back deck as the kids ate them and put their left-overs where ever they happened to be ("I was gonna throw it away later Mom!").

We froze a lot of the peas and strawberries. I attempted making strawberry jam, but I don't think I let it cook down enough. It never thickened up like jam should. Instead I have 9 jars of really tasty strawberry syrupy stuff. We've been using it on pancakes, waffles and on our strawberry shortcake. (Bought an awesome angel food cake from some Amish kid on Saturday at market. Again, I'm sure their ingredients weren't 100% local, but I wanted that cake and I'm allowing these sorts of things from the farmer's market.)

Other things bought at the market: bacon, ham steak, Polish sausages, spelt flour (locally grown and milled), broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes and that awesome Amish angel food cake.

Alright, they kids are awake and I need to make our daily bread, literally.