Eating Green - Take 1

Having taken stock of my current habits, I was excited to begin the challenge to be more thoughtful in my food choices.  I would focus on eating more seasonal, locally grown, organic, and pasture-raised foods. Notice my goal is to eat more green foods. That phrasing is key to my motivation. More should be easy when you are starting from virtually zero. Plus, more is a goal that can grow with me. There will always be room to improve.

I headed to Stop & Shop with a mission, but no list or menu plan. Anyone surprised by that? I always start my shopping trip in the produce aisle. The aisle starts with fruit and there was nothing in the first two rows that fit into my green food criteria.  The vegetable section didn't offer much more promise. I was beginning to question the logic of beginning a challenge like this in the dead of winter. "It's more," I reminded myself, "not all. Don't get stymied." Buoyed by this self-pep talk, I forged on, tossing a small bunch of bananas into my cart. 

In the vegetable section, I got pulled in by a head of cauliflower. Is cauliflower seasonal? I don't think so, but I am suddenly inspired to make a cauliflower gratin. This is something I have never made before and for which I have no recipe, but it struck me as a brilliant idea for a meatless entree. I tossed the cauliflower into my cart. The next row over I spied spaghetti squash - seasonal!!! I tossed the squash into my cart and thought about how much more fun this challenge would be if my cart came with a little video game screen that awarded me points and rang bells when I made good choices. Someone should really work on that.

At the end of the aisle, I grabbed some Gruyere cheese from the specialty cheese case and surveyed my progress: bananas - fail, cauliflower - fail, shredded European cheese in the convenient stay-fresh packaging - mega-fail. Perhaps that video game idea is not such a good one.  I forged on.

I stopped by the specialty meats case and picked up an organic, free- range chicken. It was not locally raised chicken, but on my video game it would earn me two out of three possible points (ding! ding!). My next stop was the baking aisle. When the Kingsolver-Hopp clan took on their locavore challenge they began baking all their own bread. As I listened to them describe their busy kitchen with the multiple bread machines whirring in the background, it had occurred to me that I had one of those gadgets. I hadn't seen it in ten or more years, but I had one. I picked up some bread flour and surveyed the package for a recipe that might tell me what other ingredients I would need. I grabbed the yeast the basic white bread recipe called for and made my way to the dairy aisle.

In the dairy aisle I scored major points for the Farmer's Cow milk I purchased: local, organic, and pasture-raised (ding! ding! ding!), but I didn't find a suitable cream option. I can't have my coffee without cream, so it looked like cream would not be part of the more equation. I picked up some eggs that were organic and from pasture-raised chickens (ding! ding!), but they were not local. Local seemed to be a real sticking point at this store. I finished up by picking up a big container of orange juice (Too bad! Thank you for playing) and headed home.  I had been modestly successful, and my failures had motivated me to do some research on where I could find more green food choices.

But, the next adventure? Bread baking!