When All Else Fails Turn to Butter and Cream

It's been a little over a month since we started our new food lifestyle. I'm a person who likes to master everything within 3.2 hours of trying it for the first time (see the abandoned bicycle, Yoga mat, wake board and Spanish Cd's in my garage for reference). Having stuck to this program for a month, by my calculations I should be an expert at organic, locavore eating and giving inspirational lectures at the community college.

Except, quite frankly, everything is so darn complicated.

In an effort to explore as many options as possible, for the time-being I've abandoned the farmers' market for a CSA (community supported agriculture). It's practically the same thing as a farmers' market, but you bypass the middle man and interact directly with the farm. You give them $35 and they give you a big box of whatever they harvested for the week.

The particular program I joined lets you pick what to include in your basket. Which is great if you have a fiance who cringes at the sight of broccoli. Simply don't click (oh yeah, this is all done on the interweb; I'm loving web-savvy farmers) on broccoli , even though it's delicious and good for you. Here's the CSA we are auditioning this week: Moore Farms and Friends.

There I am; happily clicking on this and that and studiously checking up on the farmers growing my food when I see it. You know what's coming...pastured poultry. Chicken Tikka here I come (see my last post if none of this makes sense)! I click over to my shopping list ready to order as many chickens as possible...but they're not on the list.

In a disappointed frenzy, I e-mail the farmer to ask where the chickens are. You should probably read that sentence again to make sure it sunk in. I e-mailed a farmer. About chicken.

She sent me a very detailed explanation. The short story: life sucks. The slightly longer story: there are no chicken processing plants near Atlanta so there are no local chickens. For about 20 minutes I considered going into a new line of business since there is a high demand for local chicken. But the thought of killing and packaging chickens all day is gloomier (but only by a hair) than crunching numbers all day.

Jen, we're about 100 paragraphs into this story and you haven't mentioned butter or cream once. Your title is false advertising.

We're getting there, I need to get this off my chest first and my blog is all about chicken therapy for me. Enough interruptions, back to the chicken dilemma.

Do you know I spent the next 3 hours researching pastured chicken and plotting out how far I would drive to go get fresh chicken from a farm? Turns out, I'm totally willing to drive 3 hours to get chicken. Now I just need to find the time.

ANYWAY. Butter and cream. Since we've started this lifestyle we've found beef and pork to fit our standards, but there is only so much beef and pork you can eat before you have a heart attack. We enjoy the vegetarian lifestyle as well, but I need to do more research on how to eat a balanced vegetarian meal (more to come on this in another post). Right now, Michael and I are exhausted by the end of the day when we go veggie.

Enter seafood. Dressed with butter and cream. Doesn't this look delicious? Looks do not disappoint.


Crawfish Monica. The recipe can be found on our other website here. I've been posting a bunch of recipes here in case you haven't found them already. I typically link to them within the posts.

I know this post wasn't necessarily a how-to, but it does share the experience we are having. It's not an easy shift, but there are ways around the obstacles. More practical posts on deck:

* Making the most of eating local: farmers' market (and CSA) recipes for the season
* Balancing out the vegetarian diet: getting your nutritional needs
* Finding your local resources: websites for CSAs, farmers' markets and restaurants
* My crazy bachelorette party in New Orleans and Austin