Citrus-Avocado Salsa

Avocado anything is bliss.
Fresh salsa of any kind is bliss.
Citrus in the fall and winter is bliss.

Hence, this is an irresistible combo.

We used "game day" as an excuse to run this recipe in print because this is Alabama, land of living and breathing and eating Roll Tide/War Eagle/anything and everything football.

But in my "counter culture," we ate our fresh and fruity salsa amongst three people, miles from a game,  with no thought of turning on a television. That's the icing to my true food bliss.

Ratatouille: A last summer veggie hoorah

According to Slate, the movie had it wrong. Ratatouille is not fancy French fare but rather a stew that originated with peasants who were trying to get a less-work meal out of as many late summer veggies as possible.

And indeed it was quite doable and, better yet, delivered delish summer freshness in a warm hint-of-fall package, all the more glorious when shared with crusty bread on a late summer evening filled with crisply cool air. Even my friend on a quirky diet for health reasons could fully enjoy it in all its strictly vegetableness. And we topped it with some chicken and Parmesan for a little added flair and protein,

So what was the ratatouille inspiration? None other than result number four of a Google search for "eggplant zucchini tomato" (my local food booty for the week). 

Slate also noted that the key to the dish is that all the veggies have to cook for different amounts of time, so I made sure to study up on some recipes and their order.

Bonus: Buy Ratatouille ingredients, plus grab pizza dough (love me some Publix bakery!) and mozzarella (and goat if you like) cheese, and you can have this pizza. I topped the dough with (in this order) olive oil, chopped garlic, sliced fresh mozzarella, a sprinkling of crumbled goat cheese, tomato and zucchini slices, a drizzle of olive oil and dried basil.

A new (old) kind of farm life

So lately summertime busyness happened. Cakes happened, cookies happened, party planning happened, trying new foods happened. Blogging did not happen. But now I am back, with the caveat that face-to-face relationship time can always gets prioritized above my self-imposed weekly blogging schedule (thanks to thinking on the role of technology inspired by this talk).

As of late I have been hearing about farms and how they ain't around the state of Alabama like they used to be. Farmers' kids grew up and moved to the suburbs. Farming got more commercialized, and the the lifestyle and profession became less popular and less profitable. So said Nick Pihakis, founder of the Jim 'N Nick's empire (below on right), when I walked around a farm with him. And so said Andrew Grace in Eating Alabama, his new documentary about the year he and his wife exclusively ate food farmed in our fair state.

Photos taken for 280 Living. 

Nick doesn't dream small. He has a vision for family farm that can be sustained by selling produce to restaurants like his, and where the family who lives on that farm eats off the land. He's testing out this idea on a plot in Mt Laurel in the Birmingham suburbs, as pictured. With this model, he has hopes to rebuild the agricultural structure of the South. Learning all this on a farm tour with the equivalent of a movie star in the Southern food world (and sharing the story with the community around the farm) made every drop of sweat on that day so worth it.

As for Andrew, he get major points for lengths to which he traveled to keep his eat local goal, but he didn't end things as optimistic as he began. Times have changed. The farm system is really messed up.  We can't live in a seemingly more idyllic time when we ate off our land. His conclusion, or at least the version of it that stuck with me, is that we can do little things to reclaim that ideal though. 

Andrew maintained much of his new local eating lifestyle: keeping up gardens in his front and back yards, buying farm shares, hanging out with farmers. It's the image he captures of a long table of farmers and friends outside at sunset passing dinner dishes, presumably made from locally grown foods— a glossy magazine image that we can in fact practice on a smaller scale with friends and food and the land around us, whatever it might look like.

Photo from EatingAlabama.com

Evidence I am prideful: I got pretty excited when in Eating Alabama (trailer below) Andrew visits the Mt Laurel farm I wrote about. Only when he filmed it, it was just a teaching farm and Nick's experimental working farm had not been started, so in some ways I felt like I wrote an addendum to the film.