This is it! Day 100 is here!

Wow! This is day 100 of our 100 day, 100-mile challenge. For the last week or 2, both my husband and I have been getting a lot of 'are you going to back to eating the way you did before now?'. Since doing this for the last 4+ months, it seems like kind of a weird thing to ask. After learning about all of the local families and business around here working hard to make healthy food, after moving towards buying more organic and fair trade food instead of conventionally produced products, I don't think we could just go back to shopping 90-100% supermarket food.

As I'm writing this, I'm sipping from a large glass of apple cider from Martin's Family Fruit Farm, and thinking there's no way I'm going back to no name apple juice again. Or non-local cheddar, or non-organic milk. Sure, there will be some things that we'll go back to buying that we didn't all summer, but even those are a little different. When I ventured into the grocery store yesterday to pick up some things for this week (the first time I'd done an actual 'grocery shop' rather than running in to buy toilet paper or something), my cart definitely looked different. Instead of cereal, we're sticking to our Oak Manor oatmeal and maple syrup, (although I bought organic ground flax seeds and cinnamon for it). I did buy canned beans (we never did get the hang of cooking the dried ones properly), and some other things- but they were mostly organic, with no added weird unpronounceable things on the label. There was no produce, since we're sticking with our well-loved Kitchener Market-Bailey's Local Foods- Herrle's triumvirate for as long as possible.

So, no- we're not going back to what we ate before. Because once you've had fresh, natural food- how can you go back?

Harvest Home

With October here and a definite chill in the air, you can say without a doubt that autumn is here. Fall's my favourite season by far- no boots & heavy coats yet, but sweaters and warm socks get to come out of the closet. I've also found that this is the time when my taste buds turn from sweet, lighter foods towards warm and savoury fare. Pumpkin, squash, sweet potatoes and apples- yum!

All week as I've been finishing off the last of my late summer borscht, I've been craving something more thick and creamy, so today I (and my very helpful assistant Rick), made 2 batches of yummy soup. Our house now smells delicious thanks to the black bean soup and squash, sweet potato and apple soups which are cooling on the stove. Tomorrow's plan is to add some crock pot chilli as well with the last of our Stemmler's ground beef. Yep, we're still eating our way through our 50lb box of freezer meat we bought right before the challenge started. Still probably 3 or so weeks worth of meat still too.

Speaking of yummy fall treats, I had to make a recommendation for my new favourite snack- toast & apple butter with pumpkin from Hergott's Cider Mill which I just bought recently at Seven Shores. It's so good!