Living Healthfully: When in Michigan {Eat Local Challenge - two}

A few weeks ago when we began packing for our vacation in lovely southwest Michigan, I began to panic a little about how we'd adhere to our Eat Local Challenge while there.

Because you know -- not only do vacations normally include eating out; they also typically don't feature kitchens with lots of room for cooking. They do, though, include things like campfires, and my kids don't think campfires can exist without s'mores and where on Earth do you find things like local marshmallows? {Answer: um, you don't. Those fall under the 20 percent of foods during this challenge that don't come from local sources as well as the 20 percent of our 80/20 rule regarding eating healthy foods versus, um, food that is only very loosely considered food. Blech.}

So there you have my train of thought leading up to vacation regarding our food challenge.

In all honesty, the marshmellow thing wasn't really my big take away while in Michigan; rather, I realized how heavily I rely on our weekly, local farmers market to supply us with the bulk of our food needs for the week; I mean, I don't just buy veggies and fruit at our market. I also buy pork, beef, chicken, eggs and honey. If we indulged in bread and pasturized cheeses, I'd be able to purchase those from our market as well.

Our bounty from the Grayslake Market: $67 for:
3 pounds of green beans
kale
2 onions
2 garlic bulbs
2 pints of blackberries
1 quart of peaches
1 dozen eggs
3 pounds of ground pork
1 pound of ground beef
2.5 pounds of porkchops
2 pounds of pork loin
1 zucchini

The Grayslake Farmers Market has really become my go-to place for local food, so much so that I began to wonder if I needed to stock up on food to take on vacation.

Until John gently reminded me that this was the Eat, um, Local Challenge.

Which naturally means, when in Michigan ... eat Michigan peaches! And eggs! And whatever else you can scavenge!

You get where I'm heading. Or maybe you don't. I'll spell out how we sought to eat locally without totally knowing where to go.

1. We purchased as much as we could from the small farmers market in the closest town

2. We consulted Google and made a stop at the People's Food Co-Op, which is a local health food store that features many locally grown and produced foods

3. Instead of driving past the little roadside food stands and wondering about them, we stopped at little roadside stands and talked to the farmers about their produce and farming practices

4. We visited a raw milk dairy farm we found at the Real Milk site {more about this later! It was awesome!}, and we purchased some delicious meats while there as well as yogurt {that was pasteurized and} cultured locally with the milk from the pastured cows at the farm

This pretty pastured lady produced the milk used to make the yogurt we enjoyed in Michigan. She's from Moonique Farm in Vandalia, MI. 

5. We looked for items at the regular grocery store bearing signs saying the foods were grown locally or locally sourced

Overall, we fared pretty well, ate delicious and healthy food and ended up eating about 70 percent of our food from local sources.

Marshmellows not included.

Living Healthfully: Simply Cucumber and Tomato Salad

During August's Eat Local challenge, I'm sharing my favorite simply delicious recipes made from local foods.

Cucumbers and tomatoes are in abundance in my garden; seriously, I could have a road-side stand.

Or we could just eat our weight in cucumbers and tomatoes, which sort of goes along with our challenge, so that's what we're doing.

Here's our favorite way to eat the two together.



Ingredients:
Two cucumbers
As many tomatoes as you'd like
3 Tablespoons of Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1.5 Tablespoon of Raw Apple Cider Vinegar or juice of half of a lemon
Sea salt to taste
Pepper to taste

Directions:
Mix well.
Gobble immediately.

Living Healthfully: August Eat Local Challenge {Week One}

A few months ago I began feeling like I needed a Ph.D. in biology, botany and chemistry to simply meal plan for my family.

There were so many varied and extensive and conflicting {and funded!} reports about what food is good and what food is bad and what food must certainly be harvested by the devil himself, that it's amazing any of us who are health conscious even eat anything at all besides, of course, kale and dandelion greens grown in our backyards.

As I thought about it and continued trekking on in our health journey, I stumbled across the Real Food Summit and happened an epiphany of sorts: just keep it simple.

And keeping it simple when it comes to food means eating

food that doesn't boast an ingredient list on the package because clearly it doesn't need a piece of paper declaring itself a pepper or a green bean.

food that doesn't come shrink-wrapped in plastic and bound up in a cardboard box.

food that can be traced right back down the street to the farm field or right out my backdoor and to my garden.

You know, in real simple terms, real food.

When I haphazardly stumbled upon Donielle's Eat Local Challenge, I knew that taking it would simply simplify meal planning, prep and so many of my swirling thoughts about food.

After all, if I didn't have the Internet telling me what to eat and not to eat and what's secretly terrible and secretly wonderful and secretly wonderfully terrible or grocery stores selling me every kind of food possible, I'd be doing what everyone for thousands and thousands of years has been doing when it comes to dining; I'd been eating locally and not even giving this food stuff a second thought.

We don't need a PhD to figure out how to best feed our families; we just need to remember a little bit of our high school history lessons and be reminded of how we've always fed our families: with locally and seasonally available foods.

I live in the real world, though.

I do.

And in my real world there are grocery stores. And there are restaurants. And, in my real world of suburbia Illinois there are avocados and bananas, neither of which were grown locally but both of which are huge staples and hugely adored in my house.

Also, I live in the real world of going to Target to buy toilet paper and passing those bananas and avocados while two little monkeys oooh and ahhh for them. And because bananas and avocados have nutritional value, I'm not willing to wage a war about not buying them simply because they are not locally grown.

So I decided that for the Eat Local challenge to work in my family, it had to follow the 80/20 rule by which we normally abide when it comes to eating endeavors. {Yes, children, you can have that icky terrible rice krispie treat at that birthday party, but darlings, it's best we eat this burger, these green beans and this zucchini for dinner instead of the box of Star Wars Hamburger Helper that's calling your name on aisle five. {WHY did I go down aisle five?! Short cut to the bathroom not worth it!}}

I digress.

So we're focusing on eating about 80 percent of our food from locally grown farms -- within about a 150 mile radius from our house here in the northern suburbs of Chicago. The rest -- the avocados, the bananas and all the foods that have traditionally been imported like spices and citrus -- fall under the 20 percent. Anything pre-existing in the pantry or freezer is also fair game. We're also supplementing with locally grown fruits we've frozen from earlier harvests and the tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers from our garden.

Week one began August 1 with a trip to the Grayslake Farmer's Market, which featured an amazing array of farmers and produce.

Here's the bounty:


*one pint of Michigan cherries
*two pounds of green beans
*three organically grown ears of sweet corn
*two pounds of pastured ground beef
*two dozen pastured eggs
*three pounds of ground pork raised in the great outdoors of McHenry County
*two zucchini
*one yellow squash
*six Michigan peaches
*one pound of kale

And all this {cherry-thieving toddler excluded} for $56.50, which is way less than what I used to pay in the grocery store.

So far, my family has happily obliged and delighted over the foods on which we've been feasting. Fresh kale sauteed in pastured butter with homemade ground pork breakfast sausage and fresh cherries for breakfast was a huge win!

Probably this week, we'll have to hit a few different area farmer's markets to keep up with food demands, but it's not really been too terribly difficult to eat mostly local.

And it's been a lot easier than going back to school for a few extra degrees.

It's early in August still! Want to join us for the rest of the month? Perhaps start where you can and build from that point each week? What better way to eat healthfully and deliciously than eating locally during our peak growing season here in North America?

Want to see what we're eating? Follow along on Instagram!
Want locally inspired recipes, be sure to connect via Pinterest and Facebook!