As Sunset's One Block Diet experimenters point out this summer, eating locally doesn't get much more adventurous or satisfying than home-grown. On their grounds, the equivalent of one city block, they have room for some edible landscaping, a beehive, garden patches with an abundance of produce, and even a coop and yard full of happy laying hens.
My space for a victory garden is limited to some containers and a small shared patch on land. But from these, we are celebrating summer with caprese salads several times a week. The basil is thriving in a pot on the sunrise-side deck, planted there after I found organic basil sold with intact roots at the San Carlos farmers market. And the tomatoes are happily growing upside down, hanging in special planting bags from posts off the side of the house. There they enjoy plenty of light, shelter from afternoon winds, and radiated warmth from the house in the late afternoon.
What's missing from the local list is home-made mozzarella. After learning from Barbara Kingsolver about "the Cheese Queen" and buying a copy of Ricki Carroll's Home Cheesemaking, I'm just dying to try my hand at 30-minute mozzarella. When the supplies arrive by mail (even the artisanal cheesemakers here order from Ricki, it seems), I'll pop out to the store for some Clover milk, made from honest-to-gosh pasture-roaming cows that live up the coast from me. And then we'll party like it's 1899.
What's missing from the local list is home-made mozzarella. After learning from Barbara Kingsolver about "the Cheese Queen" and buying a copy of Ricki Carroll's Home Cheesemaking, I'm just dying to try my hand at 30-minute mozzarella. When the supplies arrive by mail (even the artisanal cheesemakers here order from Ricki, it seems), I'll pop out to the store for some Clover milk, made from honest-to-gosh pasture-roaming cows that live up the coast from me. And then we'll party like it's 1899.
