Local produce

I'm a lazy localvore. I can conceptually get behind supporting local farmers and making sure my food hasn't consumed huge amounts of fossil fuels in reaching me, but the truth is that I like things to be easy and cheap. I was trained to go to farmer's markets while growing up, but that was as easy as taking the road past the strawberry fields on the way home from church or girl scouts. Going to a farm stand here takes a bit of planning to not get stuck in a huge traffic jam, but it's worth doing once or twice a year.

I'm an amateur in the kitchen, and a bit tempermental about cooking.

Some days, I'm all gung-ho about spending the entire day in the kitchen. It's thoughtlessly easy to drop by the local farmer's market and get a whole bushel of tomatoes to skin for the freezer. I can take a bag of dry beans and make them into chili. At times, I'll even try some strange and fussy recipe that I found on someone else's blog.

Other days may find me using the easiest recipes available, breaking into my canned goods, and turning the burner to low so that I can spend two hours ignoring dinner without actually burning it.

The cool-weather goal of this blog is to post once per week. Sometimes it will be a double-post about two nights of actually cooking dinner with notes about leftovers, sometimes it will be a single day of dinner set-up for the entire week with the occasional "fussy but unsatisfying" attempt at making pretty food.

Since my specialties are stews and casseroles, and judging by how hard it was for me to come up with summer-appropriate foods, I plan to spend next June-July-August with only monthly posts.

At times, I'll also be posting about my husband's kitchen exploits. He's the better cook, but he also has a lot less time to spend in the kitchen.