Food Challenge 1

These are all the ingredients:

 Salad – three type of lettuce (garden), carrots (garden), Hawaiian salt (gift -Lori)

Main dish – cowpeas (garden, preserved), onion (garden), oregano (garden), thyme (garden), butter (oil exemption), smoked salt (gift -Lori)

Dessert – organic Greek yogurt (single store- bought item exemption), strawberry jam (local, canned by us), blueberry peach syrup (local, canned by us)

Drink – mint (garden), honey (exemption)

We both had fun with it.  We ate at the table and talked instead of watching TV, which was novel. The lettuce was crunchy. The carrots, though small, were super sweet and delicious. Mint tea was refreshing.   The beans were surprisingly good, seeing that they are over a year old, and the salt gave them a hint of smokiness which gave the illusion of meat flavor.  You can’t go wrong with strawberry preserves and Greek yogurt.

Dried beans are amazing. This year we are going to try to put away a lot more beans.  And lots of other things as well.  I am regretting not canning any tomatoes this past year. It would be nice to get a pressure cooker and can things other than jam, tomatoes or pickles.

It was odd to have such a simple meal.  Our dinners are pretty complex on average, with lots of ingredients and several different dishes cooking at once. It was a little weird without pasta or potatoes.   I love carbohydrates, so I miss them anytime they are absent.   I should really try harder to grow potatoes this year.

This meal was also way more healthy than we normally eat.  Much lower fat than normal, since the only fat was less than a tablespoon of butter and the full fat yogurt.  So many different veggies too; I bet we got lots of vitamins and minerals.

For the next one, I hope someone wants to join us.  This would be much more fun with friends, and there would be more food!   I don’t have any worries about next week”s since we have a different sort of dried beans, but after that it will pretty much just be salad.   Next month the salad will start getting better, since radishes and celery should be coming up any day now.

Having this much good fresh and preserved food at the beginning of March makes me feel pretty good about the work we have done in the last few years, and it encourages me to try harder for the future.