Buy Local Challenge

Appley Goodness

October 17th, 2006

I’m starting to feel like Forrest Gump. Apple pie. Apple cobbler. Apple bread. Applesauce.

A few weeks ago, we decided to kick off the fall food season by visiting a local apple orchard–Stribling Orchard (www.striblingorchard.com) in Markham, VA. My parents, my husband, my daughter and I piled into the family van and headed out for some apple-pickin’ fun. My mother, who always likes to be supportive, was a little anxious about the whole trip. She was convinced that apple picking meant actually climbing the trees to pick apples. Now I know my mom thinks that I can do anything, but anyone who’s known me for five minutes knows that I’m not going to be climbing apple trees. Actually, the whole process is pretty cool. You pull up to a little booth at the bottom of the orchard and tell them how many poles you want and what size. Children get the shorter ones, and adults the taller ones. The poles have a little scoop on the end that you stick behind the apple stem. Once you jab at the stem a little, the apple falls right into the little scoop and you put it in your bag.

This was great fun as we went from tree to tree, trying a few for taste as we went. That day, Granny Smith, Macintosh and Red Delicious were ripe. By the end of an hour, we had each filled two large brown grocery bags with apples. We took them down for weighing and headed back home. It wasn’t until we arrived with our dozens of apples that we realized that we didn’t have a plan for what to do with them. I had planned to make applesauce, but 10 apples make enough sauce for 8 people. I had enough to make sauce for 80 people. We could freeze it, but I suspected that we would never have the appetite for that much applesauce. We could eat the apples as snacks, but none of us likes to bite into a cold apple, so you have to remember to take enough out to get to room temperature, but not so many that they rot before you eat them. That’s the trick about real, fresh produce–it’s alive, which means when it dies, it becomes inedible very quickly.

I say all of this because I think planning is one of the absolute keys to successfully eating locally. When you go to a grocery store, you might stock up on 20 or 30 cans or bags of frozen vegetables. The theory is that you’ll always have enough around to fix whatever you want. But in order to eat really good meals, you need to plan every week. It’s not so hard, I’ve discovered. It’s just as easy to buy 4 potatoes that you know you’ll eat on Wednesday as it is to open a box of the fake stuff and wait for it to look like mashed potatoes. We were recently watching a video about life for families in Russia. The family they profiled shops for local food EVERY DAY. While most of us can’t manage to fit that into our schedules, it does seem like frequent trips to the farmer’s market with a meal plan can make a difference about how much good food gets cooked versus thrown away.

I often get distracted from my resolve to eat locally. I think we all do. We’re very busy, and we want to spend time working, with family, or having fun. But I realized recently that, if you think about it, food is the key to all of those things. Good food, well-planned and well made, can lead to quality time with family and friends. I had as much fun playing at the apple orchard as I do going to a movie. I have a great time cooking with my daughter. And I know that, if I can stop going through the fast food drive through and start eating good, pure food, I will have a lot more time in my life to spend doing the things I love.

By the way, if you have a craving for applesauce, I’m your girl. And to my friends at work, help yourselves to some apples. They’re in the kitchen.

Entry Filed under: Blog