It is the perfect time to make plans for eating more sustainably over the next 9 months or so when good local food is easy to come by. I’ve got my resolution – more like a master plan – for this year already.

In the past, I’ve always tried to go to the farmer’s market every week, and that’s where we get most of our produce and eggs during the local growing season.  My favorite market, in Takoma Park, has a huge selection including almost every kind of vegetable, eggs, dairy, meat, and a handful of specialty items. If you can make a farmer’s market or farmstand part of your weekly food shopping, or even go a couple times a month, that’s a good resolution for eating more locally.

Or, you could try a CSA.  CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and it’s a system where you can sign up with a local farm (most are run by individual farms) to get a weekly box of whatever’s good.  They vary in length (most run from spring through early fall) and in the details. Most have a set of pickup times and locations, and you just need to find one that’s convenient; but some will do an extra dropoff if you get together a bunch of interested neighbors or coworkers, and a few will even deliver to your house.  Some will let you sign up on a week-to-week basis (good if you’re traveling a lot), but in most cases you’ll subscribe for the full season.

The challenge of a CSA is that you can’t usually choose what you get.  Your box will contain whatever is ripe that week.  If the farm has lots of tomatoes, you’re in luck.  If this week it’s kale and collards, you may find yourself flipping through cookbooks trying to find something, anything new to do with greens.  And if, for example, your whole family hates zucchini, there may be a few weeks when your CSA share will make you sad and you have to force most of it on your unsuspecting neighbors.  But it’s a great way to challenge yourself to cook more (you’re more likely to cook vegetables if you have them on hand), it can be convenient to pick up your weekly share, and you’ll be surprised with new, exciting, and sometimes unfamiliar foods.

A CSA isn’t for everyone (it’s not really for me), but if it sounds appealing, now’s the time to sign up.  A lot of CSA’s fill up long before the season starts.  While farmer’s markets aren’t even open yet, it’s the perfect time to research your CSA options.  For DC-area CSAs, check out this listing from the Washington Post. If you live elsewhere in the US, Local Harvest is a great resource for local foods of all sorts, including CSAs.

Then there’s the home garden.  There is no more local food than what you grow for yourself.  If you’re concerned about staying organic, your garden is the only place you have complete control.  And the vegetables will always be fresh and delicious.

It isn’t always easy to garden in urban areas.  Until we moved last year, we had zero outdoor space for growing.  But if you have even a little outdoor space, you can grow something in containers.  And if you have none at all, you can try for a community garden plot, or borrow space in a neighbor’s backyard.  If you really want to garden, there are always options.

Our food resolution this year is to grow as much food as we possibly can on our 8×15, partially shaded patio.  We tried to grow a number of things last summer, after we moved in, without much success.  I blame the rain, which started the same day as our hasty post-move planting, and lasted for a month without pause.  If I can blame it on the rain, it makes me feel better about my chances this year.

Despite (or perhaps because of?) last year’s failure, I feel compelled to go overboard this year.  Since we’re not in the middle of moving (yay!) we can actually plant things at the appropriate times, plan out the layout of our garden, and even start seeds indoors.  And we’re doing it all.  It may end up being madness, but hopefully the madness will give us a decent harvest of our own food. I want nothing more than to get up in the morning and pick some lettuce and a tomato to go on my sandwich for lunch.  Or to come home and pluck fresh herbs and a head of kale for dinner.

We’ll see how it goes.

That’s my resolution.  What are you doing to eat more sustainably this year?  Have you tried a CSA?  Are you starting a garden?  Tell us in the comments!

Sign for the Austin Farmers' Market

Hands-Free Cooking has been quiet over the past week, but my life has not!  I’ve been off at South by Southwest (SXSW), hanging out with some very cool geeks and spending so much time talking and thinking about blogging (along with the rest of that social media stuff) that I haven’t had any time to blog!  But, as I was surprised to discover, there are tons of sustainable foodies at SXSW and in Austin, and I got to meet a lot of them.

Austin seems to have a strong and growing local food contingent.  I met someone from the recently formed Resolution Gardens, a local Austin organization which previously planted vegetable gardens in unused space in local families’ yards, and has since expanded into offering gardening classes and helping home gardeners sell their produce to local supermarkets.  This is a great system – it helps families get more delicious, healthy food, makes productive use of land that would otherwise just grow grass, and supports the local food economy.  They have plans to grow and become a really serious resource for home gardeners in Austin.  I wish we had something like them in the DC area.

There’s also a lot of local food pride.  I was out for a walk and accidentally discovered where a farmer’s market is held (though I wasn’t there at the right day or time – and I don’t even know what seasons it runs).  I liked this sign: “just-picked Texas goodness.”  It makes sense: local food should be a matter of local pride, and I don’t know any place with more local pride than Texas.  Maybe that’s a message we should be using more, with a little friendly competition.  If someone claimed that a tomato that travelled a thousand miles from California was better than a tomato grown in your home state, would you be inspired to prove them wrong?

It wasn’t all local to Austin, either.  There are a lot of groups out there using technology to support the sustainable food movement.  One of my favorite examples was Farms Reach, a beta site that’s connecting chefs with local farmers to order and pick up produce online, thus mitigating one of the big challenges of navigating the local food scene if you’re preparing food on a large scale.  Serving local food in restaurants is becoming very “cool”, at least in my area, but the restaurants that do it tend to be high-end and pricey.  Maybe a service like Farms Reach will bridge the gap and make it possible for more restaurants to feature local produce.  They’re just working in California now, but planning to spread to other areas soon.

One challenge I heard discussed was the problem of compiling a full, public list of farmers’ markets and other local food resources.  There are some pretty decent ones, but none are complete or make the data available to coders.  It’s tricky: there are thousands of small farmers’ markets around the country, and they’re constantly changing.  Still, it would be very cool if we could pull this data together and make it open for use on the web.

I also spent a lot of time learning and thinking about blogging – in general, as well as specific to this blog.  I’ve got a lot more thinking to do, and I won’t write here about the technical things that I learned, but you’ll probably see some changes here over the next few weeks.

Michelle says:

“A real delicious heirloom tomato is one of the sweetest things that you’ll ever eat,” she said. “And my children know the difference, and that’s how I’ve been able to get them to try different things.

“I wanted to be able to bring what I learned to a broader base of people. And what better way to do it than to plant a vegetable garden in the South Lawn of the White House.”

Very cool.  Can’t wait to see pictures!

It is indeed spring: this is the second week there have been greens at the market, and this week we even got asparagus! There’s also a new vendor selling artisan goat cheese, so I splurged on a tangy cheese ripened in ash. Very classy, and very good. It made me aware of cheese as a singular entity; this was “a cheese” in a way that slices of american cheese, or even wedges of Jarlsberg off the wheel, are not. It was satisfying to have in my hand a little ball of cheese, rind intact, and know that it’s spent its entire life evolving towards this state.

I’m not such a locavore that I measure how much of my food is locally produced; I just try to buy locally when I can. But today, my lunch was 100% local: fresh baked rosemary Italian bread, artisan ash-ripened goat cheese, and asparagus that was probably picked yesterday. The asparagus was sauted in olive oil until tender (I know olive oil isn’t local, but it’s a small, essential piece of the meal). Good bread, cheese, and veggies makes a simple and delicious lunch, something that feels rustic and elegant at the same time. It’s a combination that is as old as civilization (which perhaps began with the invention of bread, cheese, and agriculture) and yet will never grow old. It was really tasty, and a great counterpoint to a rainy day.

Not this week, at least.  A number of people had daffodils, which gives me hope, but there are still no new items.  Once the spring produce comes in, to me, that is when cooking season starts.  In my efforts to eat local, I’ve been eating mostly canned and frozen vegetables all winter, and I’m getting tired of it.  So I will go next week, and cross my fingers extra hard.  It must be getting close, now.