Eatin' Good in the Neighborhood

I was going to post this yesterday, but then them coons got to fightin' and I found that much more entertaining. So here, let me show you part of our dinner from two nights ago, because that is . . . also entertaining?

This photo documents the beginning of garden produce season. Here we have some volunteer lettuce that sprang up out of a completely forgotten and neglected planting last fall, and radishes. It'll probably be awhile before we have much of anything else edible, but when the tomatoes come ripe, they'll all come at once and we will GORGE. I can't wait.

I didn't take a picture of it, but along with this salad we had an Atlantic salmon caught the day before and thoughtfully supplied to us by A.'s friend J., who is the most obsessive fisherman I know. No, really. Most guys are out every weekend fishing, right? Yeah, J. is out every day he's off from work, and also most nights, fishing in the dark until 3 a.m., then sleeping a few hours in his truck before going back to work. He is DEDICATED, y'all. The salmon was the result of one of these overnight expeditions.

Because J. fishes ALL THE DAMN TIME, he almost always catches something. No one at his house really likes fish (how is it possible to not like freshly caught salmon? HOW?), so he'll often just drop some of his catch off here. It's awesome. We love J. I always feed him when he comes over, because I want him to keep coming and bringing us fish. And plants. He brings us a lot of plants, because he works at a farm store. And he's also a landscape architect, so we can ask him what to do with the plants, too. We believe in having multi-purpose friends.

But this post was not meant to be an homage to J. (who doesn't even know about this site, so all the flattery is totally wasted). The point I was going to make before I got off on the most random tangent ever is that we are beginning our locavore season. Locavore means someone who eats food grown close to their home. We're sort of default locavores in the fall and summer, because there's just so much garden produce, fish, venison, etc., that the supermarket becomes kind of extraneous. This dinner I've been talking about (when I wasn't talking about J.) is a good example. I didn't plan on having all local food, but well, we had the fish, and the salad was right out in the garden, and the roasted potatoes came from our bag of extra seed potatoes . . . it just kind of works out like that.

I'm all about social consciousness, especially when I don't have to actually be, you know, conscious about it. :-)