Mac Net Journal

After coming home and taking the dog with me on a 4-mile jog around the north end of Tacoma, I settled in the kitchen to make a simple local soup and biscuits for dinner. The soup was a way to use some of the plethora of potatoes we have from our weekly garden share from Terry's Berries in the Puyallup River valley, along with a leek from last week's share, an onion and our only non-local ingredient of the night - organic beef broth.

In a week we will embark on a year of local eating, and we will start writing about our explorations soon on a new Web site. Our experiment is not as hard core as the popular 100-mile diet. Instead, we are trying to take a more sustainable approach - to eat foods grown in Washington state for the entire year. On the surface it seems like it should be an easy year. We already pick up a weekly garden share from Terry's Berries - something we have done for at least two years now - and we buy our meat from a local farmer who is best known as Cheryl the Pig Lady. The photo above was taken on her farm a couple of weekends ago when we stopped to pick up some of our meat. I couldn't resist taking a shot with my iPhone of piglets that could become our future bacon or tenderloin in a few months.

It is a simple meal to start a year of local eating - a year that we plan to start on April Fool's Day. How fitting...

Happy spring!
Thursday, March 20, 2008, 9:26 AM

To those in the Northern Hemisphere, happy spring! The sun is shining this morning in Puget Sound country and birds are singing, as you would expect on a cliche spring day. Now bring on the longer days!