3 days to go...!

Well, I'm a bit tardy with entering my first blog but better late than never! Been too busy cooking local food, doing dishes, cleaning the kitchen floor and back at work so now it's time to blog!!

I am very glad to say that I have eaten 100% local since the 24th December. Well, maybe I need to qualify that - the salt and pepper have not been local (Australian though) and I have snuck in a few cups of tea and coffee! Sheldon has staunchly stuck to mint tea (we bought a tasty Moroccan mint plant from the farmer's market) since the 24th. I started with the mint tea too but found that when I got back to work bright and early on the 27th I just HAD to have some caffeine! I have now been having green or black tea everyday but this (apart from the salt and pepper) is still my only deviation away from 100% local food. Oh yeah, nearly forgot about the "choc attack" that I had one night... we have these dark chocolate buds we keep in the pantry for cooking and they just suddenly seemed irresistible so I downed quite a few of them. But that's it!

3 days (or 2.5 now) to go and will stick to the local challenge for each meal. This morning we had pancakes with fruit salad and yoghurt, lunch was an omelette and about to start cooking dinner - which will be vegetarian shepherd's pie.

What has this challenge meant for me?

Lots and lots of very yummy food, new skills and recipes in my forte but a very large increase in our food bill and many more hours of food prep and clean up that we wouldn't usually have. The more expensive food items seem to be the dairy: B-D Farm Paris Creek butter and milk are waaaay more expensive than I would usually buy and all the various cheeses that we have had are often 2-3 times more expensive than we would usually go for. Local garlic also seemed to be very expensive. But it has all been worth it!

It will be interesting to see much how local food will continue to be consumed by us when the actual challenge has finished. I am fairly confident that we will still have a reasonably high percentage of local food in our diet however we will definitely be including non-local caffeine and chocolate!

Time to go and make my local vego shepherd's pie.

Hope you are all eating as locally and wonderfully as possible! And may 2008 be the year of the local food revolution...