Body & Food 24 Jun 2006 01:39 am
One Local Supper
Another Eat Local Challenge has gone by, and again I’ve sort of felt like maybe it would be fun to join in. But I’ve never quite taken the plunge.
But One Local Summer I can do. Every week, one supper made with local ingredients? Heck, I did that last night, if you count gorging on fresh snap peas until I was too stuffed to eat anything else. Instead of a 100-mile as-the-crow-flies radius, I’m choosing 200 miles of travel — the Cascades make a simple radius seem a little goofy to me. Why 200? Because it lets me get wheat from Bluebird Grain Farms and peanuts from Alvarez Farms. For everything else, close-in farms can have priority.
And hey, if this works out this month, I might tinker with it: tighten up my personal rules, or have more local meals.
To compound the trick, I’m going to do it without a car. No driving out to Woodinville for apple cider or scouring the countryside for some local equivalent of Joel Salatin. That’s the plan, anyway: just local stuff easily available to a carless resident of northeast Seattle. Though I might cheat and ride with Josh in our cranky rustbucket down to the U District market if my knee does not improve tomorrow morning.
I took a yoga workshop on supported backbends a few weeks ago, and it was more vigorous than I’d hoped. That particular instructor has a good eye for alignment and is a beautiful practitioner, but she drives me up the wall with her smirking and her craptastically visually-oriented teaching style. (This is the chick who last year inspired my hope for an Experiential Learning Center for Disabilities Awareness, the one in which learning is facilitated with lead pipes.) I was taking the class to try her out again and find out if she’d matured as a teacher. She has come a long way, but she still makes me grit my teeth hard.
In my grim exasperation, I wasn’t listening to my body very well at all. A few hours after class, my right knee had a garland of bruises and started becoming stiff; a few days later, it was buckling under me with sharp pain. (Weird.) It’s better now, but not 100%; I challenged the knee a little today, and it’s complaining a bit, so we’ll just see how it goes tomorrow. Knees are tricky.
on 24 Jun 2006 at 4:03 am 1.Liz said …
Glad to hear you’re participating in my hare-brained scheme.
I was hoping it would attract people like you who may have been intimidated by the Eat Local Challenge, and I love your “no car” approach.
on 24 Jun 2006 at 6:54 am 2.Mia said …
Do you know anything about the Samarya Center? They look interesting. The thing is, they’re in Pioneer Square.
Also, if you’re so inclined, feel free to get in touch if/when you plan to head to the Farmers’ Market. I always like going, but it’s intimidating and overwhelming to go on my own.