February 2010

For lunch today I ate:

• Salmon salad
• Sprouted grain toast with butter and homemade fig spread
• Mixed Greek olives in spicy marinade

In case you are wondering, it was delicious! Also, because I’m sure you’re curious, I did not make the fig spread, it was a gift from a very talented friend who has also bestowed upon us blueberry jam, salsa, and grapefruit-ginger marmalade. Oh, yeah.

Salmon salad is one of my go-to meals when I need something quick. It takes 5 minutes to whip up and the ingredients aren’t set in stone so you can really make it with whatever you have lying around. Because this is the inaugural What We Eat post, you also get a recipe! So here it is, even though you probably don’t need one for this dish:

Salmon Salad

1 7.5-oz can sockeye salmon, drained
3/4 cup chopped red bell pepper
3/4 chopped green bell pepper
1 scallion, chopped
Dill (1 tbsp if using fresh, 1 tsp if using dried)
Juice from 1 lemon wedge
1 tbsp olive oil
Salt & pepper to taste

Toss the ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Enjoy!

Other vegetables that work well in this dish are tomato, cucumber, red onion, and radish, but you really can use anything you like. Fresh parsley is nice, as is fresh garlic if you are feeling crazy. If you want your salmon salad to resemble more of a traditional seafood salad, dice your veggies up small and mash everything together with slightly more olive oil and lemon juice than is listed in the recipe above. Just please don’t add mayo, it makes salmon sad. Lastly, I drain off the juice/oil that is in the can and give it to Cooper, but Brian prefers his canned salmon with all of the juice, it’s really a personal thing so try it both ways and see which you like better.

I feel it necessary to note that the deliciousness of your salmon salad is directly related to the quality of the canned salmon you use. Please don’t use that nasty Bumblebee stuff, okay? We buy ours from Vital Choice and get the salmon with the bones & skin–it tastes much better and is way more nutritious. We eat the skin and the bones, except for the little salmon vertebrae because they totally freak me out.

I also feel it necessary to note that the photo above is in fact NOT an iPhone photo. I don’t believe this is the first “real” photo to appear on this blog, but it’s certainly the first one in a long time. I deserve a pat on the back!

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I get a lot of questions from readers about what we eat. I made the switch to whole, organic, sustainably-raised foods 13 years ago this year, and to local foods about 6 years ago. This is not to say that every morsel of food that passes my lips fits neatly into these categories, but the bulk of what I eat does. And Brian has come along for the ride since I do the meal-planning and most of the shopping and cooking. Sometime I’ll write about what inspired these changes, but that is a much larger topic that will need to be addressed separately. While organic foods have been getting a lot of press for several years, I’ve noticed in the past year or two that people are staring to pay significantly more attention to the concepts of eating whole foods, or local foods, or sustainably-raised foods.

Unfortunately these terms can really just be a lot of jargon. Who defines what food is “whole,” “organic,” or “local” anyway? For me, it all comes down to eating real food: something that has recognizable origins and is minimally processed if at all. I also try to choose foods that are grown near where I live because they are fresher and thus more nutritious, and because they have a much lower environmental impact than foods that are shipped from far away. Eating local foods also ensures that we eat seasonally, which I personally believe is better from a health standpoint. Organic is probably another topic that deserves its own post (I actually did an independent study on organic foods my senior year of college!) but the short, very general, answer is that it means the food has been grown sans pesticides and in an environmentally responsible way. Sustainably-raised, the way I use it, refers specifically to meats, fish, and eggs–are the animals raised in ways that are healthy for them and limit the negative environmental impact?

Where am I going with this? Well, something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time is use this blog as a way to disseminate information that could help other people live more consciously and healthfully. Eating is a huge part of everyone’s lifestyle, so it follows that if you want to change your lifestyle, altering your eating habits is part of puzzle. Because I get a lot of questions about what we eat, how to eat healthier, or how to eat whole foods/local foods/etc., I thought it would be fun to start a regular feature here that would highlight some of our meals. Hopefully the photos and descriptions of what we’re eating will inspire you to try something new, or at least entertain you a little bit. I am also going to be posting a lot more recipes here, and while I already have several requests please leave a comment if there is something you want to know how to cook!

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We joined a CSA here in Austin recently and got our first box of food last week. It was very exciting for me, as I am still unfamiliar with the seasons of food in this strange climate. In DC we bought all our food at the Dupont Circle farmer’s market and thus became very familiar with what was in season when. Austin has unpredictable cycles of warm and cold, which, combined with my limited knowledge of edibles, means that I don’t really know what is in season at any given time aside from the very obvious stuff. Our box contained a typical mix of winter veggies as well as some fruit:

Carrots
Radishes
Collard greens
Kohlrabi
Cabbage
Parsley
Spinach
Broccoli florets
Scallions
Green garlic
Lettuce
Oranges
Grapefruit

Kohlrabi

The quality of the food was incredible. It was picked the morning that we received our box and was clearly extremely fresh. When Brian came home with the box he set it on the floor and Dylan immediately crawled over, pulled himself up to standing using the side of the box, and began playing with all of the food inside. Somehow he snuck part of a spinach leaf into his mouth. We noticed something in his mouth 10 minutes later and fished out the little piece of spinach, which was not chewed up or anything (the kid only has two teeth!) but was thoroughly slimed. He must have learned that trick from Cooper, who was notorious in his younger days for carrying things like a blueberry or an acorn around in his mouth for long periods of time without chewing them. You’d give him a blueberry and he’d be all like, “Thanks!” and you’d think he had swallowed it until two hours later when it rolled out of his mouth and onto the rug. He actually did this recently and our baby helper had the misfortune of sitting upon the blueberry; luckily she was wearing dark pants.

Thumbs up for super fresh, still-dirty veggies!

Supposedly one box is enough to feed a family of 2-4 people for one week, which is pretty much a load of crap as far as I can tell. We eat a lot of veggies around here, but not an obscene amount, and have had to supplement with non-local veggies and fruits from the grocery store (a travesty, really). But of the veggies we received, nothing went to waste. I am actually quite proud of myself for figuring out how to use everything we got, including things we’d never eaten before like kohlrabi. Oh, it was all so delicious! Here’s what I made:

Sauteed radish tops, kohlrabi bulb, & green garlic
Carrot-quinoa soup (using both the roots and the tops)
Pureed carrots for Dylan
Cole slaw (cabbage, carrots, parsley)
Sauteed collard greens & kohlrabi greens
Spinach salads with radishes, scallions, and carrot tops
Steamed broccoli
And of course we ate the fruit straight-up as snacks

Sauteed radish tops, kohlrabi bulb, & green garlic with cole slaw

We have three more weeks in our 4-week CSA trial. I would like to continue with it because the quality of the food was so good, and because it is very important to me to eat local, sustainably-produced food, but we will need to see if the cost comparison comes out in favor of the CSA or not. I don’t mind spending a little bit more for quality local organic produce, but with my nursing-mama appetite it’s a challenge to keep our food costs under control so we’ll need to see how things shake out.

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Remember those Madewell boots I was lusting over a while ago? Thanks to the miracle of Christmas and birthday money and after-holiday sales, they are now mine. Yay! Aren’t they cute? I know, they are so cute. Maybe it’s hard for you to tell how cute they are because of the crappy iPhone photo above, but you can just take my word for it. Alright!

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