Lent starts with something-less-than a bang.

Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent and our 40 days without olive oil, or raisins, or sugar, or coffee, or tea, or oranges, or bananas, or kiwi, or berries, or, or, or...But at this point I don't really care. I spent a long wakeful night next to our sad little Luke who was throwing up pancakes and ham, all night long. This kid is a puker. He has never had an ear infection, has never been prescribed antibiotics, but tummy troubles are a regular occurrence. So I'm off to the grocery store for juice (not local) and Pedialite (definitely not local).
Luke will try again tomorrow.

For today, I'll let y'all know a bit about what's in our pantry. Our starting point. We did this last year so we've tried to use that experience to help us get a little better prepared. We froze every spare vegetable from last summer's farmers' markets. So there are a few bags of frozen tomatoes, blue berries, and peaches. We also have some frozen apricots from various neighborhood trees (everyone seems to have a forgotten apricot tree around here). I also have to mention that we have a whole goat (formerly named Bullseye) in our freezer. I was vegetarian for a long long time, but I've recently come to believe that being a meat-eater and a responsible part of the food chain are not mutually exclusive. We know where our animals were raised, what the animals were fed, and that they were, in fact, treated kindly like animals not like crops. Bullseye lived within 10 miles of our dinner table. How's that for low food-miles?

I discuss my conversion from vegetarian to conscious animal consumer in last year's blog (www.localeatsinoregon.blogspot.com) in the post entitled "Love and Evolution." Check it out if you're interested.