Shopping List

Before we get to my shopping list, I have to do the 12-step thing and declare my addiction: I am now a political internet Junkie with a capital J. I used to get my news from the local newspaper plus the Washington Post online, but now I am actually trolling the web to find out what the McCain campaign has to say about Sarah Palin's clothing budget. I swear I am going to give it up after November 4th. I truly hope this is reversible.

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I always take Grandma shopping on Thursday morning. We go to the supermarket--Fry's, which is a Kroger store--and then Sprouts, a store which is like a Wild Oats for poor people. It has great produce.

Dad does most of the other marketing, going to Trader Joe's for wine, cheese, and certain things that are best at Trader Joe's, like peanut butter and wine vinegar; Food City for Mexican groceries and produce; and occasionally 17th Street Market. Together we occasionally go to the Middle Eastern Caravan store, for dates and olives and so forth.

I never have made good shopping lists. We try to jot down things we have actually run out of, but are very poor at menu planning. So here is tomorrow's list as of 9:00 p.m., even though we are having guests on Sunday:

quinoa
baking potatoes
olive oil
club soda
garlic
Evan Williams bourbon
rice vinegar
parmesan cheese

Despite, or because of, the economic troubles, there are two new wine-and -liquor supermarkets opening near us this week. They sound very tacky (one is named Bevmo) but we will take a look.

Day 4: Carolina Food Only

I'm settled in now after a few days of tumult. Tonight we ate:

• Biscuits made from Adluh Self-Rising Flour, Caw Caw Creek bacon drippings, and Happy Cow Creamery milk
• Pink eyed peas, already hulled, from Rosewood Market. I cooked them with a little bacon fat, a garden okra pod, and water, with a piece of bacon crumbled on top at the end.
• A caprese salad of garden tomatoes, garden basil, and Happy Cow Creamery mozzarella

Lawson thought the biscuits tasted too bacony, but I thought they were fine -- I've not eaten a lot of biscuits in my life, so I don't really have a standard. I'll eat one tomorrow with fig preserves and decide whether the bacon interferes with that treatment.

Last night we drank a bottle of Biltmore Estate red table wine, which was actually really decent. At $11, however, it was way out of my wine price range. You know those lists of The Best Wines Under $25? Yeah. I have a personal cap of $8, with occasional forays up to $10 if I balance those out with enough $4 bottles. Do I appreciate fancier wines? Yes. Are some of those $7 wines really good? Yes. $25 my foot. But anyway, yes, North Carolina wine was pretty tasty.

Day 3: Carolina Food Only

Here's where everyone else is posting about their week of local food.

Today I was significantly less lame than earlier in the week. I worked at home, so I was able to make a decent lunch:

• Slices of goat cheese rolled in Adluh cornmeal and fried in some bacon drippings
• Chopped garden cucumbers and tomatoes with salt and dill seeds. I remembered early this morning that the dill seeds in the pantry were harvested from the garden a few years back.

Tonight's meal was a shrimp purloo. The local shrimp I bought at Publix were a bit past not very good, but we decided to eat them anyway -- I just didn't use the shells for stock, and I rinsed the shrimp and boiled them quickly before sautéing them. It seemed to kill off the yuck. I'm cavalier about bacteria and food safety, and I'm sure someday it'll bite me, but I hate the idea of throwing away food that someone carefully caught or harvested.

I used summer squash, okra, bell peppers, and a Big Jim chile from the garden -- a little unorthodox for a purloo, but both local and historically Southern. I used Carolina Gold Rice, too, and Caw Caw Creek bacon. And I used a bottle of Thomas Creek Multi Grain Ale, and some garden thyme, parsley, and chives.

Since I haven't been able to find local onions, the purloo was missing that all-important oniony flavor structure. In a rich, savory dish, it's almost like the other flavors hang on the onion -- it kind of stretches everything out and makes it more available for tasting. I'd thought about that before, but tonight it was dramatic. The chives did nothing -- added at the end, they made the dish oniony but didn't add anything more the way real onions would have.

Black pepper would also have been good. And vermouth. But it was fine.

Anyway, those tortillas I so optimistically mentioned last night? They were very much like tasty, crispy chapatti. Because they lacked baking soda or baking powder, they were not soft or pliable.

So today I was finishing up a call to the Adluh Flour company for a totally unrelated reason (Free Times cover story -- watch for it) and nearly slapped my forehead: Adluh Self-Rising Flour. Carolina-grown wheat milled in Columbia fits the challenge guidelines just fine, so those extra ingredients in there can sneak right by the censors. I found it at Bi-Lo, the third grocery store I visited. Honey-sweetened blueberry cobbler, here I come.

Day 2: Carolina Food Only

Today I got HUNGRY. Again I took a South Carolina peach and a big container of cornmeal mush (made with Anson Mills blue grits) to work, and though the peach was lovely, the two-day-old mush wasn't so good. Without any fat to make it keep longer, it tasted both bland and overripe. Things that aren't fruit shouldn't taste overripe.

Some emails from this afternoon:
Me: Do you think Taco Bell uses local products? Grass-fed Carolina beef? Piedmont beans? I'm huuuuuuungry.

Lawson: Sorry, baby. When you get home you may have some crusty salt and whole milk.*

Me: Mmmm! Maybe I'll float an egg in it. And a tomato chewed by a local rat.**

* That Celtic Sea Salt I bought is in huge, crunchy crystals. I keep meaning to crush some up in the mortar and pestle.

** Rats have been putting big old ratty teethmarks in our garden tomatoes by night. Grrr.

So I drank a lot of water, and when I got home I fried a few pieces of Caw Caw Creek bacon to fix me up. After that I was fine. But still I feel unprepared for the rest of this week and somehow deprived, even though the only things I really miss so far are vinegar, lemons, chile powder, and olive oil. I guess that's a lot of things.

Dinner tonight is burritos:

• tortillas made from Anson Mills biscuit flour (not ideal gluten content, but all I had), grease from Caw Caw Creek bacon, and water
• sausage from Caw Caw Creek
• eggs, scrambled, from Wil-Moore Farms
• salsa made from tomatoes, poblano chiles, and parsley, all from the garden

It's funny, this experiment. I was just telling Lawson that I don't have any food restrictions -- not a vegetarian anymore, no major financial limitations (several years out of school), not afraid of any particular cooking method or ingredient -- so it's interesting to have some again. It's good to think about food differently for a while.

I found a good South Carolina beer: RJ Rockers Pale Ale.

Day 1: Carolina Food Only

The Eat Carolina Local Food Challenge crept right up on me: starting today, for one week, I've agreed to eat only products grown and/or processed in North and South Carolina.

So I'm going to post my daily updates here.

I went to Rosewood Market yesterday and found myself in the odd position of worrying how I would get enough fat this week. I'd intended to buy some local butter, but the Happy Cow Creamery's butter only comes in giant quantities, like five pounds or something. I probably should have sprung for it and made a few cakes later this summer, but it just seemed excessive. Funny, considering I had no problem buying the gallon jug of olive oil from World Market a few months back.

On a semi-related note, here is my dog inspecting a large garden zucchini.

Anyway, here's what I ate today:

• coffee - Sumatra Mandheling, roasted in our backyard
• whole milk - Happy Cow Creamery, Pelzer, SC

• peach - SC grown, from Rosewood Market
• cornmeal mush made with Anson Mills blue grits, City of Columbia tap water, and Celtic Sea Salt

• French rolled omelet with eggs from Wil-Moore Farms, goat cheese from Split Creek Farm, and basil from our garden
• Tomatoes from our garden
• Cucumbers from our garden
• Beer - Thomas Creek Pilsner and Multi Grain Ale -- the former of which is TOTALLY FOUL. Seriously, do not drink the Thomas Creek Pilsner.

For the omelets, which need just a tiny smear of cooking fat, I ended up rendering a little 1/2" square piece of Caw Caw Creek bacon -- we got a deal and bought far too much of it a few months back, so I guess I'm all set for fat for the week after all.

Tomorrow's dinner will involve ground pork. First I have to get through lunch, though. I'm dreaming about the leftover cornmeal mush fried in bacon grease, with cherry tomatoes cut up on top. Maybe some chives scattered over the whole business.

Saturday Morning Marketing

It’s cold here today—what Katherine charitably calls “cooking weather.” Dad and I were inspired to visit two ethnic markets this morning and we’re thrilled with our purchases. We are really rich in food resources here.

At the Caravan Middle East Market, for $24, we bought:

a little jar of mastic (the pitch of pistachio trees, for Greek recipes)
yellow split peas
red lentils
frozen fava beans
canned fava beans “Palestinian style”
Medjool dates
little pears
Persian cucumbers
tomatoes
a bunch of fresh dill
bulk green olives with Tunisian seasonings
bay leaves
a dark chocolate Lindt candy bar named “Intense Pear”

Then we proceeded on to Food City, the Mexican grocery chain, and spent $22 on:

3 pounds freshly roasted green chiles
poblano chiles
jalapeno chiles
tomatillos
kiwis
a pineapple
5 cans salsa
a wedge of cotija cheese, sold in bulk
a piece of Oaxaca cheese
Gala apples
avocados

It’s hard to decide what to cook first, but I would like to use the mastic, which is wonderfully aromatic. Watch this space for details as they develop.

The Pala Fruit Market

On our way from San Diego to the Anza-Borrego Desert we stopped at a roadside fruit stand in the tiny Pala Indian reservation. For $3.10 I bought:

a small red onion
1 honeydew melon
3 large Big Jim Chiles
2 Haas avocados
2 kiwis
1 pound tomatillos
3 Gala apples
1 green bell pepper


Driving through the Imperial Valley I was excited to see so many crops. Is everyone thrilled to see an acre of Swiss chard? We saw vast fields of chard, artichokes (by far the most beautiful!), lettuce, spinach, oranges, grapefruit, lemons, tangelos, and acres and acres of dates. We visited the Oasis Date Farm and sampled black, Noor, Deglet, and Medjool dates.

I always read with great interest the park regulations wherever we visit. The Salton Sea State Recreation Area is the first I have seen where nudity is specifically prohibited. Parks in other states generally concern themselves with fishing regulations, hours of quiet, trash disposal, and fussing about alcohol consumption.