Bonus Local Meal

The thing about eating one local meal a week is that you wind up having a fridge stocked with local foodstuffs. I guess the real challenge is in keeping the meal entirely local without folding and including something from halfway across the world. I had been planning on making a local meal for lunch, but the day was so dark and dreary that I wound up having this instead:

It’s the last of the bean soup I made from a local mix. I can’t remember if I mentioned this already, but the soup was very strange in that it had absolutely no flavour of its own but was super spicy. It’s like there was just pure capsaicin in it. I didn’t mind, because it allowed me to figure out my own blend of garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, chili powder, etc, but I thought it was pretty funny.
I had the soup with a quick quesadilla made with the goat’s cheddar. It tasted slightly more goaty when it was warm and melted, but it was still really delicious. It’s more like American-style cheddar than the real stuff — I think British cheddar must have more fat in it than what they make here. That would explain the oily cheese sweat that appears when you make cheese on toast. Mmmm, oily cheese sweat.
By the by, I’m going to start eating soup in this cup from now on. I always get greedy with the amount of soup I eat, then feel uncomfortably full and am still hungry an hour later. This was the perfect amount!
Since I had bought more local Yukon Golds at the co-op this morning, I moved my local meal to dinner (although the only non-local part of lunch was the tortilla):

I prepared the potatoes the same way I did for the first week of OLS, and they were even better this time. If you’re ever walking around with your pockets full of money, wanting to buy the best plate of potatoes possible, but for some reason you’re in north Minneapolis — come on over. These might be my new specialty.
I also had asparagus (a given), and a salad with greens and radishes from the garden plus some hot house tomato (the co-op had signs saying that their tomato growers had been tested and are salmonella-free!), mixed with a dill balsamic vinaigrette. It was tasty.
I’d love to hear about what you people out there think about eating locally — what counts as ‘local’ to you? I know a lot of people adhere to the 100-mile diet, and I think that might be the official definition for One Local Summer, but I don’t feel like that’s very useful to me. A lot of the farms that my co-ops consider local are about 150 miles away, and the pasta comes from 370 miles away!
Most of what I’ve been calling local comes from within a 150-200 mile radius, I would say. But, really, I would personally consider anything from Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Iowa to be local. I think my ideal lifestyle would include 85% of food coming from Minnesota or one of its neighbouring states, with things like chocolate, tea, spices, and olive oil (all things that have been imported since looong before globalization) coming from wherever makes them best. And peanut butter. Mustn’t leave that out.