Slim Down by Eating Local

This Week at our Oakton Market
Saturday 10 a.m.–2 p.m.
2854 Hunter Mill Road
Map

Finally Crepes de Pouce Gras returns with those great crepes, sweet and savory, for you to brunch on while shopping. And Mabelle is back too! This time she's operating under her own business name, Ma Chef, but she is still bringing a wide variety of Argentine empanadas and pastries. Betty will be with us in person and our new vendors who braved the unpleasant weather last week, the Finger Buffet, will have even more Mediterranean finger foods for you to sample this week.

Don't forget to check out the celery at Heritage Farms. If you missed it last week, you missed a special treat. You may not recognize it as it does not look like the celery in the grocery store, so ask if you do not see it. It's tasty, and you can eat the big leaves too. Add them to a sauté of winter vegetables or a salad for a flavor boost.

Max will have plenty of apples and Asian pears. It's time to make applesauce for the winter and maybe an applesauce cake too. Look for the recipes at the Smart Markets tent.

And it's also time for those wonderful winter-wise cuts of beef, and you would be wise to try them in your favorite stew or slow-cooked roast recipes. I will be looking for Angelic Beef's soup bones, which make the most flavorful beef stock I have ever made.

From the Market Master

I thought this week I would share a personal lesson about the benefits of buying fresh and local. Over this past summer, I have made a conscious effort to make every meal we eat at home a largely local meal and have been planning meals with that goal in mind, but also with a determination to keep within the food budget that has evolved over the years.

As you know if you read my rants and raves, I have never tried to convince anyone that buying local is cheaper. If you hope to keep eating as much local meat as you have probably been eating when you were buying heavily subsidized and unnaturally corrupted corporate meat products, it will cost you more. My strategy was to deliberately reduce the amount of meat we were eating each week. The average American eats 9 ounces of meat per day, working out to nearly 4 pounds per week. And I was hoping to reduce that to more like 2 pounds per week each for my husband and me. But that figure was based on our wanting to eat more locally produced meat while staying within that budget.

It was easy during the summer to do that, and while we did eat wild salmon and Atlantic shrimp during that time, almost all of our meat consumption this past summer was local. I highlighted eggs in at least one meal a week, and sometimes for as many as three meals a week, we ate only vegetables. At least once a week, we ate Cavanna's Pasta — almost always with just vegetables, not a meat sauce. Except when we luxuriated in a really great grilled steak, there were always more veggies on the plate than meat.

The surprise revealed itself this week when we had to pull out our fall and winter clothes — my jeans and jackets and for my husband a sport coat he had not needed in many months. And lo and behold! My jeans are much roomier than they were last spring when I put them away, and my husband's fairly new jacket was also hanging loose from the shoulders. We have both lost several pounds without a serious effort to do so.

Maybe the diet gurus are correct — it can be counter-productive to focus on losing weight, which makes the whole process a negative experience. But a focus on eating healthier can be a much more positive adventure. Buying fresh and eating local certainly involves less angst and agony. And in my family, we didn't even know we were losing weight — we were having too much fun eating well.

See you at the market!

Jean