Map Wars and Phantom Roads

When I was researching my post of November 29, I found myself on Google Maps. There was one nagging detail that I didn't report that time, which was that there was a distinct difference between the lay of the land as reported by my Delorme atlas, and Google Maps. On Delorme, Hayden Hill Road goes through, and on Google Maps, it doesn't (I kind of hid that fact by sending you to the "hybrid" map... sneaky sneaky!).

But this fact has really been irking me ever since. I really love Delorme maps, and I was upset that I had found a fault. Once upon a time, back before Delorme had published all 50 states, I refused to vacation in states that didn't yet have a Delorme map! (Vermont was not among them, in those days, but Virginia was). What Michelin maps have been to me for France, allowing me to cut cross country and discover new places, Delorme was for the US. Delorme was really crucial to this whole "new road" project. So how could Delorme have let me down?

So I've been haunting the map sites, and testing hypotheses out there on the road ever since. Google Maps, Mapquest, Yahoo, and the USGS maps that are available here. It's been absolutely fascinating, and I've learned that there appears to be no real consensus at all about which roads "go through," and which don't. At least not in this area: Starksboro, So. Starksboro, Hillsboro, Little Ireland and Hanksville are all connected by a relatively dense web of "roads" or "not-roads" or 4 WD tracks or simply trails, which sometimes have names, and sometimes don't, and sometimes go through, and sometimes don't.

Historically, I'm sure, they all "went through." You could take a horse or a donkey or a mule through on any of these roads. You could probably even take a cart, though I suspect a buggy might be pushing it (certainly wouldn't be a very comfy buggy ride). They were a means of communication among all these hill farms, bringing Little Ireland close to Hillsboro which was close to the farms on Big Hollow Road, and even Hanksville. In an era when no roads were paved at all, there may not have been that much difference between what is now route 116 and the rutted track that now leads past the Hillsboro cemetery. Now, however, it's like night and day.

But not quite like night and day, because the shadow of these roads endures on the ghostly virtual maps of Mapquest. I've found that the most accurate map (in terms of which roads are navigatable and which are not) is the USGS. Let's take a look at the USGS map for the approximate area of Hillsboro (we may zoom in on this later):

Look at the area where it says "Lewis Creek State Wildlife Mgmt Area." This is Hillsboro. You can see where the road that leads off from route 116 in the bottom left hand corner very quickly deteriorates into a "4WD" track -- not a road anymore. Though there are connections to roads leading south from Big Hollow Road (not labeled on the map, but it's the road that leads off from "Starksboro" at a steep upwards angle), they are clearly dotted lines (trails), not solid lines indicating actual roads.



Now, take a look at the next map, from Mapquest:


None of the roads are labeled at this scale, but you should be able to see the Hillsboro Road leading out from the bottom right corner (near the red star), and Big Hollow Road, leading out of Starksboro. Here, there is no indication that the Hillsboro Road is little more than a track, and there is a very clear indication of an actual road that leads through to Big Hollow Road. Moreover, you can follow the network up towards Hanksville in the upper right corner, and in the lower right, there are connections to yet another set of roads (which is the Ireland/Little Ireland network).

Let's try one more, this time, Google Maps, which is ultimately the most deceptive to those of us who travel by Subaru Forester. If you look carefully (and have excellent eyesight!), you can read the names of these phantom roads: Crowley Road (where the green arrow alights) going through to Brown Hill West, and Little Ireland Road (just on the bottom edge). Both hook up to the Hillsboro Road.

And yet, I must assure you, gentle reader, they do not, at least not with my car. I took a look at Brown Hill West yesterday, and there is a sign stating clearly that this is a Dead End, and that the road ends on private property. Though "Crowley Road" may exist in actual fact (and I have yet to check -- this will be my next "new road"!), I do not believe it goes through to Hillsboro.

Of course, all these "roads" are accessible and navigatible on foot, on horseback, by ATV and in season, by snowmobile. It is merely for the ordinary road vehicle that they are off limits and impassible. And yet, don't Mapquest and Google Maps provide driving directions? I tried for quite a while to force either the one or the other to take one of these "roads" in directions but had no luck. Though the roads appear on their maps, they apparently do not appear on their database of possible addresses.

Thus, I leave you with the Google Maps "hybrid" view of the same area. (to help you orient yourself, the green arrow is in the exact same position as before). You can see Big Hollow Road above, and you can relatively easily distinguish the cleared fields that run along various parts of Ireland and Little Ireland Roads. You can even just barely see Brown Hill West as it pulls away from Big Hollow Road. Crowley Road, however, is nothing more than the shadow of a line, gone like the farms that once pastured Merino sheep. But I'll bet you anything the apple trees are still there!

Not All Roads Go Through

This seems a simple truism, and, of course, it is. There are lots of dead end roads in the world; I even grew up on one (it might be amusing one day to wax lyrical on the obscene phrase "cul de sac" that my mother unwittingly liked to use to describe Oak Knoll). There are dead end roads and roads to nowhere all over the place.

But the Delorme Vermont Atlas let me down today. Not all roads go through -- not even those that look like they should. Usually, Delorme is precise: if you look carefully, for instance, you can see that Buck Hill Road East and Buck Hill Road West in Hinesburg Do Not Meet -- you can't get there from here. But Hayden Hill Road? It ought to have gone through. And if it had, I would have come out on the other side of Hayden Hill on Texas Hill Road, neatly on my way to Huntington.

Instead, I had an adventure. When I got to the big broad stretch of the road where the schoolbuses, snowplows and mailmen turn around, I just kept on going, blithely and quixotically trusting in my map. Besides, there were tire tracks! That meant people had driven this way. The road (such as it was) kept going, down, down, down, getting more and more rutted, and rocky. It wasn't long before I was in first gear, threading my way gingerly among the ruts and the (large) stones that were scattered here and there. Down, down, down... I laughed nervously as I heard the alarming sound of small rocks bouncing beneath the vehicle. Down still more.

Suddenly, I looked ahead and spotted two things. Up ahead, the texture of the road seemed to change as it turned to the right -- and was that a house through the trees? Maybe! I must be approaching the other side of the road, Hayden Hill East. But not yet. I wasn't there yet, alas. Closer at hand was a creek. And yes, it went right across the "road." Uh oh.

Now, I've always been completed fascinated by fords. I find the idea that I could just drive my car across a stream bed completely irresistible. I remember using a ford in Owings Mills, MD once, with Margery, and Robert and Pat and I drove across at least a couple of fords out in the back country of New Mexico, visiting Riley. I also used to drive regularly across a small ford in Simsbury, CT, except when the road was closed for flooding. So exciting! The drama! The danger! So naturally, I forged ahead.

Crunch. Whirr. Whirr. Oh, shit. The bottom of the Subaru was stuck on the edge of the creek. Whirr. The tires were racing. So was my heart. Oh, shit! In a total panic, with a rush of adrenaline, I threw the car in reverse and held my breath. Puh-leeeeeeeeese.....

Phew. The car sailed back UP and over the hump, and blessedly, blissfully, thankfully, there was a space right there to turn around in (I was NOT looking forward to backing up). I should have stopped and taken pictures, stopped and enjoyed the stream, stopped and listened to the silence of the woods, stopped and rested the poor car... but no. I was too shit-scared for any of that. I high-tailed it back to Hayden Hill Road West, and headed straight down the hill towards the paved roads of civilization.

Not all roads go through. I could probably have gotten through this one with a jeep or an ATV or a Hummer or something, but the Subaru Forester was just not going to cut it. And maybe, just maybe, those tire tracks I noticed were from idiots like me, who innocently trusted their Delorme atlases ,and then had to turn around just before the creek, just as I did. Not all roads go through. Nope. You can't get there from here. Not no way, not no how.

The Day Before Deer Season

Come this time tomorrow, and I'll feel like I'm living in a war zone. I drove by that hunting camp up on Quaker Street yesterday (a hunting camp on Quaker Street... oh how ironic!), and it was buzzing with activity: three pickup trucks, and the neon Budweiser sign lit up like a Christmas tree. I heard from Meg and John that the busiest day in the local liquor stores is the day before deer season starts. Scary.

Fortunately (or not), I finished my new hat. It seemed like such a good idea! A lovely pattern called the Clapotis Cap, knit in double stranded Lion Brand Microspun. But... well: I think the results speak for themselves. Is it a bathing cap from the '60s? a beauty salon hairdryer hood run amok? A poisonous mushroom? I doubt anyone is going to mistake me for a deer, which is, of course, the main point -- and I will roll up the brim so I can see.

Astro and I have been taking some really nice walks recently, and I finally got around to taking the camera with me. He's definitely ready for deer season, with his spiffy little bandanna on! Though since he's only about 12 inches high, I don't worry TOO much about him being mistaken for a deer. But you can't be too safe, especially when the hunters are fueled primarily by Budweiser.

A lot of our walks have taken us out through the neighbor's sugarbush. We bought our house from Mahlon Norris' granddaughter, and "Norris Sugarworks" is right next door. Kelly and Kathy tap thousands of trees, and sell their maple syrup and other goodies at the Jerusalem Corners Country Store, about three miles away.


It's a beautiful place to walk -- a clear road, open woods, and now that the leaves are gone, you can see so far through the trees. I used to think I was hearing birds in the trees, but recently I've begun to realize that some of the sounds I hear are actually chipmunks, who see Astro coming, and send out a warning to their fellows!

During my first walk through the sugarbush, I was so surprised to realize how close we are to the hills behind the house. Our house is really on the very edge of civilization, with nothing much beyond us but mountains until you get to Huntington.

It's hard to imagine what this land was like, once. Hard to imagine what it was like to have to farm it, especially. Now, I imagine that this area here was always the sugarbush, or nearly so, so the early settlers of So. Starksboro probably didn't try to farm right here. But not too far away, they clearly did. Just out the back end of the sugarbush, we come to what I have taken to calling "the silent meadow." If the wind is right, you can't hear a single sound down there. It's like a deep secret of the woods, a treasure that no one knows is there.

It's not empty or wild: in the picture, the equipment you can see down at the bottom of the meadow is logging equipment: a wood splitter, a tractor, and some trailers. And you can see the electrical fencing around the edge. There aren't any animals in there right now, but clearly, someone was pasturing horses in there this summer, because there's a lot of poop in the meadow (which Astro found very, very interesting...). And, of course, all along the left side of the meadow are the traces of Kelly's taps: the long plastic tubing that leads back to the reverse osmosis thingamajiggy that is the first step in modern maple sugaring.

But what I really like are the older traces of occupation in the meadow. When you walk around old roads and meadows in New England, you notice rustic stone walls around the edges. They have a very practical origin: this is very rocky land, and you need to do something with the rocks that will otherwise break your plow! I grew up with just such an old stone wall in my back yard in Lincoln, Massachusetts: it used to seem so strange to me that my back yard, covered now in century-old oak trees, used to be someone's field or pasture.

Here in Vermont, there's another sign that I never noticed back in Lincoln: apple trees. I've learned a lot about apples and the uses of them in colonial New England recently, mostly from Michael Pollan's fantastic book The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World. Apples weren't just a snack, or even a component of pie, they were a crucial part of the colonial diet -- as cider, alcoholic cider. When Johnny Appleseed was planting apple trees from seed all over America, he was not growing Macintoshes or Macouns or even my beloved Cox Orange Pippins. Because apples do not grown "true to seed," he was necessarily growing bitter cider apples, not sweet eating apples. And whoever used this meadow once upon a time planted apple trees along the edges: shade for hot laborers on a summer day, and cider for the cellar. I tasted these apples, and they weren't bad, actually, though I couldn't identify if they were any particular varietal. Now, I suspect this tree provides a useful draw for deer hunters. It's now illegal to "bait" deer with apples, but it is legal to shoot deer who flock to the apples fallen under a tree (and we saw some deer poop, so I know they flock here). So I suspect that early tomorrow morning will see a deer hunter up in the seat I saw in a tree across the meadow from this one, waiting for the deer to come looking for the apples (and if he's extra smart, he'll probably shake the tree tonight!).

There's another sign of old farms that is less concrete than apple trees or stone walls, but it's so clear nonetheless. I almost can't define it, but I can easily tell the difference between a new logging road and an old farm road. I think it has to do with the trees that grow along the edges of the old farm road. Look at these, for instance, on the road that leads from the silent meadow down to the farm:

There's a thin line of trees "of a certain age" that grow along the edge of the road, clearly delineating the difference between road and old meadow. On the left, there is still a meadow (though it is quite overgrown), but on the right, it's now woods (part of the sugarbush). But the straight line of trees is still there. A logging road doesn't have that distinction, and the trees seem to be more organically, randomly, placed. Here, the randomness of nature has been replaced by the orderliness of the New England farmer. Sometimes, you come across a giant, centuries-old maple tree, like the one my neighbors call "The Mother," sometimes an old apple tree with just a few pathetic old apples lurking in the boughs, but more often, it's a mix of trees, but always in that straight line.

I leave you with a final shot of the paddock at the bottom of the road, warm in the late afternoon sun, with long shadows leading towards the mountain. Happy Deer Season. Run, little deer, run! run and hide!

Today's Road: Hillsboro

I've started a "thing" of trying to drive down one new road every time I'm driving somewhere. That's getting a little challenging when I'm headed down to Middlebury (though still far from impossible), but easy as pie when I'm headed north. Recently I've checked out Little Ireland Road, Lafayette Road, Belden Falls Road and today, the road that leads to Hillsboro.

I'd always wondered a bit why the sign on rte 116 read simply "Hillsboro," and not "Hillsboro Road," but I guess it's because Hillsboro was considered a neighborhood of Starksboro, and this is merely the access road? The other day, I was really surprised by how far up Little Ireland Road (and then Ireland Road) continued, with houses and farms and more houses and farms -- the most beautiful farm was located way up Ireland Road. But the Hillsboro road was quite different. Though both roads are dirt, the Ireland Road is wide and clear and well-graded. The Hillsboro road was not: 2 ruts, with broken branches frequently strewn across it. I wouldn't much like to be going up there during Mud Season -- and I very much doubt it gets plowed in winter. After a mere 3 or 4 houses and camps, it's clear that there are no more utilities going up the road -- no electricity, for example. It almost seemed like a private road, really, but there were no signs telling me to stop, so I didn't.

Though I passed a sign on the left saying "Starksboro Municipal Forest," things didn't get interesting until a couple of miles in. And then, I realized I was in old farm land. There's a certain look about Vermont roads when you're in the vicinity of an old farm. It's unmistakable -- I spotted it on my walk around the woods here the other day, too, just up from the paddock where the Norris horses are. The road runs carefully between banks on either side, usually with classic New England stone walls. But even when there aren't the stone walls, it's still clear. Is it the banks? the mature trees? the occasional enormous maple tree? I'm not sure. But suddenly, through the seeming wildness of the woods, you know that people used to live here, farm here, work here.

I say "seeming wildness" because Jan Albers' wonderful book Hands on the Land has taught us all that Vermont was not always so wild, that all or most of these forests and woods, sylvan idylls now, were once fields and pastures. In the nineteenth century, many of them were homes to merino sheep (ah, happy sheep, and happy shepherds!). But the bottom of the market fell out on merino wool with the growth of the Australian market, and merino sheep were seen no more. Moreover, upland farms, with their shorter growing seasons and rockier soil became less practicable, so people moved down -- or out. And the woods moved back in.

Hillsboro, sadly, is clearly no more. Once there was a community large enough to have its own cemetery up there, and now, there is nothing I could find but trees. The cemetery was not as large as the So. Starksboro cemetery, but it wasn't just a single family affair either. It was certainly dominated by Hills, however! Lots of them. The saddest tomb was of someone named True Layn and his wife (Anne?). Four of their children were buried with them, and three of those died by age 8. The fourth, a daughter, died when she was 21. I wonder if they had other children. I hope so.

When I came home, I checked out Bertha's Book, the indispensable compendium of Starksboro history, to see what Bertha Hanson had to say about Hillsboro. Hillsboro was actually one of the first little communities she wrote about, back in 1957, but she didn't have too much to say, except to tell the story of the four Hill brothers who settled in various parts of Starksboro (not just Hillsboro) in the years around 1800. Heroic Samuel Hill hauled all his worldly goods from Barrington New Hampshire by dragging them on a hand sled in 1798! But by 1870, there was only one Hill family living up there, though once there had been a schoolhouse, a society of Baptists and other families, of course. As Bertha wrote: "changinge social and economic conditions led many of the second generation to move away from the hill farms. Some went west, some went to other towns, others bought land in the valley." (p. 14)

And thus, Hillsboro became the quite place in the woods that it is now. From the cemetery, I could look off to the south and see what I assume was Little Ireland Road in the distance. But once upon a time, the land must have all been cleared, just as it appears in the cheerful photo on page 15 of Bertha's Book: "Haying in Hillsboro."

I suspect that the road continues well beyond the cemetery, but I wasn't able to follow it, alas. One of the super-centenarian maple trees had fallen just across the road about a hundred yards further on, blocking my way. Perhaps the approach of hunting season will inspire someone to clear the road. I'll certainly go back and check again.

Spread Fred and the Woodcarver of Lympus

It's Day 2 of eating locally, and we've been cheating like undergraduates. First, I ate the granola for breakfast that was labeled as "local" at the Coop but which obviously can't be local because it was composed of oats and peanuts, two not-local crops. But I ate it anyway, because what else was I going to have for breakfast? Then, we both put Hellman's mayonnaise on our leftover Fred sandwiches because what is a chicken sandwich without mayonnaise? Laurie Colwin taught me well about how to make the perfect hen sandwich, and it always means homemade bread, mayonnaise, and celery salt. (I wouldn't have been able to make my mayonnaise, either, because I don't have any local oil!) I added some tomato and a little baby fresh green spinach from Lewis Creek to my sandwich... heaven.

And dinner tonight is bound to be full of cheating, too. But being the geeky historian that I am, I've even found ways to rationalize it. And it all has to do with the Woodcarver of Lympus.

You've probably never heard of the Woodcarver of Lympus, even if you're a Vermonter. But if you've driven across the Bethel Mountain Road on your way to Boston (and who hasn't?), you've probably spotted the sign pointing to Lympus, and thought "Lympus??? what the heck? Shouldn't that be O-Lympus? and what's Lympus, or Olympus doing in Vermont anyway?" Well, once upon a few years ago, I was driving home from Rutland or somewhere, and stopped at a now-defunct antique store in Pittsford. And there, on a shelf, was a book with that magical title: The Woodcarver of Lympus, by Mary E. Wallace, published in Boston by Little, Brown in 1906. And it was a mere $5. Here was my chance to learn what the heck was Lympus!

I don't remember learning why it's called 'Lympus, but I loved, loved, loved that book anyway. Sentimental? Yes. But so what? A young man is felled and paralyzed cutting down the winter's firewood. He falls into despair, while his poor family struggles, until, eventually, he begins to carve, so that his fame eventually spreads far beyond little Lympus and his relative fortune saves them from poverty. There's love (both requited and un-), lovely descriptions, and a fascinating depiction of rural Vermont in a much more isolated time. The opening scene is all about the stagecoach coming -- not to Lympus itself, which is too isolated for that, but to somewhere close by. It's an event!

There's a scene from the book that keeps coming back to me while thinking about eating locally. It marks the moment when our woodcarver realizes how very badly off the family is -- something that they have been trying to hide from him. If I remember correctly, he discovers that while his aunt puts regular old sugar in his morning coffee, she puts maple sugar in hers, and tries to explain that she prefers it that way. He is not fooled (we all know that maple has its place, but coffee is not it!), and realizes that he has to do something to help his family.

What can we learn from this story? (told you I was going to be a geeky historian!) a) They have coffee. They are very, very poor, and very, very isolated, but they do have coffee (not exactly a Vermont crop); b) They also have sugar (cane sugar? beet sugar? it's not clear). It is a sign of abject poverty, real destitution, to have to use a maple sweetener instead of the other kind in one's coffee.

Over our Fred sandwiches (Spread Fred!), we talked about food in pre-modern times, and mused over the fact that networks of food transportation are hardly a modern phenomenon. The Romans got their grain from Egypt, after all (and Sardinia, of course). Trafficking in salt is one of the oldest trades around, because everyone needs salt, and you either need salt deposits or a salt ocean to get it. And I thought of a document I have students read, a list of the tolls at Colibre (Collioure) in 1252. Lots of spices and exotic commodities, yes -- what we've always been taught that people traded in long distance. But there's a surprising number of food items on the list: grains, different types of figs (do you prefer your figs from Alicante or Mallorca? Alicante figs are more expensive, and thus, perhaps, tastier), dates, peas, oats, tuna-fish in barrels, cheese, oil, artichokes, and a blanket category of "vegetables." Food traveled. A lot, sometimes, even in 1252. I have an article somewhere about cheese from Crete being eaten all over the Mediterranean. Think of the Romans and garum. Making garum is a smelly, smelly business, and not everyone wants to do it (certainly not me!), so it was imported from wherever small fish and salt were cheap. Your average 13th-century traveler was doing a fair amount more carting to and fro of foodstuffs than we might imagine.

After all, food and where it's grown isn't static. Teaching the course on the Mediterranean has made me think so much more about how foodstuffs in the Med have changed. We all know that they didn't have tomato sauce in pre-modern Italy (don't we?) because tomatoes are a New World plant (ditto potatoes, squash, maize and peppers). But that's not all. For quite some time now, Clifford Wright has been performing an admirable public service of trying to inform us all about other ways in which the Mediterranean diet is not what it used to be. First, you should read his 900-page book, A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrate Cuisines of the Mediterranean from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs (William Morrow, 1999) and then you should check out his website, replete with articles on the origins of the artichoke and the like. You'll learn a lot about how food migrated from place to place: the Phoenicians and the Greeks brought crops from place to place, then the Romans, and most famously, the Muslims. We even call it the Islamic Green Revolution, without which I would never have had spinach to put in my quiche this evening.

Here's today's menu:

Breakfast:
coffee and Domino dots
not-so-local granola with local yogurt for me
homemade bread with butter and honey for Stefano

Lunch:
Fred sandwiches, with Hellman's mayo, local tomatoes and spinach

Dinner:
Quite a Quiche: crust made with Lewis Creek spinach, and Gleason's Grains flour and Cabot butter, filled with local leeks, bacon from Maple Wind Farm, local zucchini and tomato, milk and cream from Monument Farms, and Cabot Seriously Sharp Hunter Cheddar. Delicious!
Salad. Now here, we cheated. The lettuce was local (a freckled Romaine from the Midd Farmers' Market), but how could I make a dressing with no oil? So I decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and used a bottled soy ginger vinaigrette. Good stuff!
Stefano finished off the meal with a pile of cheese from Twig Farm, and more bread.

Eating a Local Chicken

Ok, the chicken (let's just call him Fred, for ease of reference) was delicious. Even if I couldn't cook him stuffed with two lemons, as is my wont (thanks to Marcella Hazan), he came out juicy and tasty. Instead of two lemons, I stuffed Fred with a "Sops of Wine" apple, herbs up the wazoo, Eugenie's garlic, and a wee bit of butter, just for fun (I was really nervous about him getting dry). Not as copious a harvest of juices as usual, but tasty. Stefano couldn't taste the apple, but I could - and I'm not sure I liked it as much as lemon.

But there are a TON of leftovers (5 lbs is a big bird for 2 people). Not quite sure what I'll do with them, yet, but the bones will make a tasty broth -- to freeze for another "local" meal down the line (though what will I do for pasta in the soup!! ack! a crisis!). Astrolabe was disappointed, though, because there were no giblets in the cavity for treats for him. Luckily, the "eat local" thing does not currently apply to beagles, so I'll just give him an extra treat treat. And he'll get to lick the chicken platter in the morning, lucky dog!

Bill McKibben notes in that Gourmet article that:

"I've had to think about every meal, instead of wandering through the world on autopilot, ingesting random calories. I've had to pay attention."

He's exactly right. It's like keeping kosher, really. Back in the days when I was sharing an apartment with my friend who's now a rabbi, I thought a lot about keeping kosher (we kept a kosher home, more or less). I have friends who don't like the whole idea of keeping kosher, and are happy to quote Leviticus about mixing fibers or burning witches, but I actually think I "get" kosher: it's about being conscious of what you eat, and making conscious decisions. When you're keeping kosher, those restrictions take you back to God, a tangible reminder of your religious nature. When you're eating locally, the restrictions take you back to why. Why does it matter if I pull out a bottle of Sardinian olive oil out of my cupboard? how did that olive oil get all the way here to Vermont? Is it really right to eat something that has traveled so far? Could Marco Polo have carried olive oil with him to China??

And I hate to say it, but my attitude towards cheating is similar in both instances. It didn't bother me if I mixed my meat with my dairy (though I was careful to do it in my specially reserved pan, and to eat it on my specially reserved plates). So I'm just not going to worry too much about the olive oil we fried those delicious porcini we found at Breadloaf in. Well, I'll probably feel guilty about it. But I wouldn't be me if I didn't feel guilty about something.

And Fred was really, really tasty. I just think he'd have tasted better with two lemons stuffed up his wazoo.

Localvore Links

The term "localvore" is a little problematic... I feel like we're eating the locals.

Find your 100 miles here (US and Canada only, I'm afraid)
Addison County Localvore Project: plenty of good links here to information about local found in Addison County
A fantastic article by Bill McKibben, who ate locally all through a long, Vermont winter, and lived to tell about it (originally in Gourmet magazine)

Eating Locally, Part I

Today was the first day of our "eating locally" escapade. A group of Middlebury-based "local-vores" has declared September to be "eat local" month, and we took a partial challenge: we'll be eating locally for at least one day a week, and also trying to increase our consumption of local products in other ways. It's all part of the 100-mile-diet idea: try to source your food within 100 miles.

In some ways, this isn't that much of a change. That is, at this time of year, we already buy all our fruits and vegetables at one of the local farmers' markets or farmstands. There's Middlebury on Saturday morning (and Wednesday morning), Bristol on Wednesday afternoons, and Lewis Creek Farm up the road any day until 6 pm. And even at the Coop and the other "natural foods" store, much of the produce is locally sourced (and labeled). Ever since my childhood when my mother and I would roam the back roads of Lincoln and Concord visiting farmstands, I've loved buying vegetables directly from farmers. So that's not a change for us. And the vegetables here are so delicious! Heirloom tomatoes and yellow carrots and "Fairy Tale" eggplants, to name only three wonderful things I've bought recently at a local farmers' market.

We also buy local dairy products (milk from Monument Farms, butter, yogurt and cheddar cheese from Cabot, and some of the above from either Vermont Butter and Cheese or Butterworks, too). And there are a pile of local artisanal cheeses that we love, too: Blue Ledge goat cheeses, mozarella from the guy in Vergennes, Orb Weaver cheese, and Twig Farm. Not to mention 3 Shepherds over the mountain in Warren: cheese made by the youngest cheesemaker in America, featured in Gourmet Magazine, no less!

There are real challenges to this eating locally thing, however. Obviously, there are products that we will never, ever find locally. Citrus. Olives and olive oil. Seafood. We can do without those temporarily, but not eternally (certainly not with a Sardinian in the house!). We're taking advantage of what Bill McKibben called the "Marco Polo" exemption: being able to use small amounts of things that Marco Polo might have been able to squirrel away in his saddlebags. We're interpreting that fairly liberally, actually: I just can't live without coffee!

There are other small challenges, though. What about cooking oil? I've heard a rumor that someone in Vermont makes sunflower oil -- but I haven't seen any. Yes, we can cook everything with butter (or lard), I suppose, but I'm not sure my cardiologist would approve! And there are precious few "convenience" foods available made from Vermont ingredients. So Stefano baked bread yesterday. No cereals, besides some granola that Stefano picked up at the Coop. No crackers. No pasta -- what???? no pasta!!!??? can't live without that. I am also simply Not Willing to put maple syrup or honey into my coffee. No.

And another shocker was the price of local meat. Yesterday, I bought a chicken from a lovely farm in Hanksville at the farmers' market to roast tonight. 5 lbs: $18.36! Yes, 5 lbs is big for us, and yes, we'll get at least three meals out of that (and stock), but it's still a lot more than I'm used to paying for a chicken -- just about exactly three times as much, actually. We also bought lamb sausage, and a shank steak, and spent a total of $48. Yikes. Ordinarily, we'll buy the occasional lambchop at Lewis Creek, but otherwise, we buy our meat at the supermarket or at Costco. I'm wondering if we shouldn't look into buying a half cow to see if it would be cheaper that way.

Still, it's an adventure. And here is the menu for today, with ingredients (and where we cheated):

Breakfast:
Coffee (with one Domino dot of sugar for me, and 2 for Stefano...)
Pancakes, with local flour (Gleason's Grains), eggs, yogurt and honey. We had to cheat on the baking soda and a little bit of cooking oil. The maple syrup was local (Billy Norris), obviously, as were the berries in the jam I ate mine with (Norris Berry Farms) -- but the jam was made with sugar!

Lunch/snack:
Cabot cheddar with homemade bread made from local flour

Dinner:
Roast chicken from Maple Wind Farm in Hanksville, with Eugenie's delicious garlic from Last Resort Farm, Costa Romanesca zucchini from the farmers' market (can't remember who was selling them...), cauliflower from Golden Russet Farm, and porcini mushrooms found by us at Breadloaf. But we'll be using olive oil to cook the mushrooms in, I'm afraid.
A bottle of Arctic White wine from Shelburne Farms


We're going to try to eat local again tomorrow. Pizza, maybe?