342 animal, vegetable, miraclethe year right about where we’d weighed in, and hoped to remain—
except for Lily, who had gained twelve pounds and grown nearly fi ve
inches. Obviously we never went hungry, and you can’t raise that much
good kid on potatoes alone. The Canadians had been purists, though, and
really we weren’t; we’d maintained those emergency rations of mac- and-
cheese. (And anyone giving up coffee gets a medal we weren’t even in the
running for.) But frankly, any year in which no high- fructose corn syrup
crosses my threshold is pure enough for me.
Our plan to make everything from scratch had pushed us into a lot of
great learning experiences. In some cases, what we learned was that it
was too much trouble for everyday: homemade pasta really is better, but
we will always buy it most of the time, and save the big pasta- cranking
events for dinner parties. Hard cheeses are hard. I never did try the
French- class mayonnaise recipe. I’d also imagined at some irrational mo-
ment that I would learn to make apple cider and vinegar, but happily sub-
mitted to realism when I located professionals nearby doing these things
really well. On the other hand, making our daily bread, soft cheeses, and
yogurt had become so routine we now prepared them in minutes, without
a recipe.
Altered routines were really the heart of what we’d gained. We’d
learned that many aisles of our supermarket offered us nothing local, so
we didn’t even push our carts down those: frozen foods, canned goods,
soft drinks (yes, that’s a whole aisle). Just grab the Virginia dairy products
and organic flour and get out, was our motto, before you start coveting thy
neighbor’s goods. A person can completely forget about lemons and kiwis
once the near occasion is removed.
As successful as our sleuthing into local markets had been, we never
did find good local wheat products, or seafood. I was defi nitely looking
forward to some nonlocal splurges in the coming months: wild- caught
Alaskan salmon and bay scallops and portobellos, hooray. In moderation,
of course. I had a much better sense of my options now and could try for
balance, buying one bottle of Virginia wine, for example, for every im-
port.
The biggest shock of our year came when we added up the tab. We’d
fed ourselves, organically and pretty splendidly we thought, on about fi fty