Way too long. Well the past month has been exciting. I went to Oregon. It was fantastic. Drank a lot of wine, sat by the ocean, ate amazing seafood and most importantly relaxed.
Came back home and have been working my ass off. It’s good though, I like being busy. I just kind of wish I had a little tiny bit more time to enjoy the weather, but all in all I can’t complain.
Another big thing I’ve been diving into over the past month is altering my diet a bit. It all kind of started with the whole grocery experiment in April. Slowly since then I’ve been really reading labels, trying to buy more local produce, working on supporting local businesses instead of just going online and buying from bigger superstore types of places.
Last year I did my big olive curing project. I bought those olives from a farm in California. They had kind of a bummer year this year and have posted on their website that they only have about 15% of what they had last year. They lost a lot of fruit to a late freeze. Boo! I’ve been looking forward to this since last year. So I started looking around and found an Italian grocery here in Chicago that carries uncured olives. They have a couple different varieties which is great and we don’t have to buy 10 pounds. We’re going to go out there this weekend and get a couple pounds. We’re going to try out oil curing. Not my favorite but the hubby likes them. I’m excited about that. It’ll be a little easier to experiment with some different flavors and methods on a smaller scale.
The other thing I’m kind of jazzed up about today is finding out that the Wood Street Urban Farm has a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. Why am I just learning about this now?
If you’re not familiar with CSA’s it’s a program where you pay a fee for a season or a set time period and you receive fresh produce from the farm. The money you pay helps the farm cover expenses. The double bonus for the Growing Home’s CSA program is that they aren’t just a farm, they provide job training and assistance to homeless and low-income men and women in Chicago. So you help the farm, you help some people and you get to eat food grown on a farm in Chicago. I’d heard about the Urban Farm before but I didn’t know much about it.