Cooper Jackson

I eat myself to sleep last night. After an amazing dinner. Some quick highlights: Veggie chili, squash soup and zucchini cake (my brain exploded it was so good). After 3 helpings of food I went out to play with the kids in the backyard. After everyone left I passed out on the couch. Now time to gorge on leftovers today!

Plate filled with local food

We had our first Locavore Wednesday! With our first basket of produce from Cold Water Creek Farms CSA we decided to organize a dinner the next day with the things we got from the basket. It was so much fun and the food was so good we decided to make it a weekly thing! This week we had zucchini bars, pasta with kale or swiss chard, grilled veggies with cheese, two types of pesto made from garlic scape, kale chips and probably some other things I have not remembered. We had four families each brining a dish or two and that made a feast.  Not sure which was better the food or the excitement everyone had.

Locavores!

We received our first basket of produce from the membership to Cold Water Creek Farms CSA. We are so excited we have fresh swiss chard, eggplant, garlic scape, cucumbers, yellow squash zucchini, kale and patty pan squash! So now we just have to make a bunch of stuff out of it! I am going to try some pan fried squash all olive oiled and spiced up with the garlic scape. Melissa is going for swish chard recipe. Any suggestions are welcome.

Also today our neighbor took our potatoes and made potato chips out of them. Best darn potato chips we have ever had!!

Aaron Newton talks about A Nation of Farmers

Aaron Newton (of blog Powering Down and Hen and Harvest) talked about his book A Nation of Farmers. Last December I help him with his website. I just got back from a talk he gave which is an overview of the book he co wrote. He has really inspired me to keep working on our local food efforts. He is on his way to changing the world.

When I got some poison ivy on my hand last weekend I had to sit out Saturday yard activities while the medication healed my hand. I could however dream up what the patio is going to look like when I get done. So I spent some time with google sketchup. Luckily I spent some time in autocad class when I was in high school and now this is really paying off.

Patio design from roof perspective

The fireplace / bbq and pizza / bread oven I took from an existing model. Mainly as place holders because I will be using different materials mainly scraps to build mine. However I needed to get the spacing right. I am also planning on surrounding most of the patio with pergola and grape vine growing up it. That is really a fall project and the patio is this summer.

Patio from the kitchen window

The other important view is from the kitchen window. Melissa wants a view of the far back yard. This is probably going to mean that the pergola can run on the right and left side of this view. And the back will need to stay open. I have some ideas on how to make this cool. Also wanted the pergola to provide some amount of shade so it is more critical for the pergola to be on the left side than the right.

Any feedback?

Melissa's New bike Trek 7.3

We just got a new bikes. Lateef’s was damaged in shipping but Melissa’s is here and she has been test riding it! We decide to get matching Trek FX 7.3 (Red). We where going to get 7.2 but they couldn’t get Lateef size so we decided to upgrade a bit. We are excited to get out and rideQ

Was picking up some bamboo for tomato stakes with Aaron Newton when I saw a bicycle on the side of the road. We noticed they had a bunch of other stuff piled up for trash pickup. So we though it in the back of the truck and I pumped up the tires, adjusted the seat and took it for a spin. Now I have one extra cruiser..

The Blue Bullet

Wow what a wonderful meal. For the price I don’t think there is another place withing a couple hundred miles that could compete with the Ibis. We made them a website which need a lot of work but will hopefully be better soon. With the lot of local food, organic and plenty of vegitarian food for mj we wish we could go there more often.

Yep, I rode 5 times 20 miles this week. In fact, I rode Wednesday 22 miles in 1 1/2 hours (that is 14.5 miles an hour), which doesn’t sound like much but with traffic it takes almost an hour to drive. Ironically, Friday Melissa met me in Charlotte so we could return to Concord Halloween early, this however did not work out so well. With traffic it took 2 hours to drive home, it would have been faster to bike!

Lucky we built the house with a double door in the back because my head would not have fit though a single door. I strutted for 12 hours before I was smacked down to a pin head. I bumped into Aaron Newton at the farmers market and he pointed out that there is a guy in Washington State who rides 30 MILES EACH WAY TO WORK!! In the rain! Glory is short lived.

What is next? What other goals could there possibly be? Well there are two I can think of. The first is to do the route in 1 hour which would mean biking 20 miles per hour, including stop lights and traffic. The second is to do 200 miles. Both of these will probably not happen in the cold winter months but I can see spring time being fit enough to bike 200 miles. Might even get a better bike by summer so I can pick up the speed a bit.

Some time in February we decided to start cycling for our food. We have surpassed the 6 month mark without even noticing it. Some strange things have happened over this time. First let me clarify we are not getting paid to cycle with potatoes or anything. We just decided if we needed food from the grocery store we would ride our bikes this year to get it. So far it has worked pretty well. Side effects include we are buying less food. The constant reminder to buy healthy food is also hard to avoid since you think about the performance of your various muscles and body parts for the 15 minutes it takes to get there. It takes maybe a couple extra minutes at this point to get to the store and back. There have been a few times that we have thought about taking the car and I think one time we bought some food on the way back from a long trip. At this point it is habit to bike. We are also in better shape for it, I would suspect.

Some friends and neighbors somehow feel we have an opinion or judgment on them because they use the car to get groceries. The truth is we don’t care… we have done this for ourselves and it is great that grocery shopping is actually a pleasant experience now, not just a chore. We generally think guilt is not a motivator.

Our original goal was to go to the grocery store via bike for one year straight. Its been 8 months now, but Melissa is getting a little wary about the final 4 months. This week represented the first dip in temperatures – mid 30′s at night, house temperature hasn’t been above 62 degrees for the last week (house temperature is a different goal, we’ll talk about that some other time). However fun (or not) the last few months may be, I think this activity has permanently changed the way we will be getting groceries from now on. The first, automatic choice mode of transportation has changed from car to bike. Oh yes, and we calculated fuel/car costs savings for the year: $468. That’s a lot of groceries!