Bird is the Word

Some pics from the Becks' Thanksgiving feast!

As part of our CSA, we got a whole chicken, and it's been hanging out in our freezer for several months. So, we decided to enjoy that free-range, organic, dandelion-and-rainbow-fed chicken for Thanksgiving.

Flame was very helpful in guarding him/her and making sure it didn't run away.


Hey wait, it ran away!


Straight into the rotisserie! Drat, foiled again.


Tasting the veggies and making the obligatory Friends "Umm!" face.


Our Thanksgiving table: rotisserie chicken, candied brandied sweet potatoes, garlic ginger green beans and a bottle of Chianti. (Don't judge, we were out of chardonnay.) Needless to say, it was delicious and we were quite pleased with our culinary skills. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

CSA Week 1

We received our first batch of delicious local goodness from our CSA last week!

In addition to sausage and eggs, here is a list of the produce in this week's allotment:

• Arugula and mixed salad greens
• Green garlic
• Kohlrabi
• Lettuce
• Parsley
• Radishes
• Strawberries
• Sweet Potatoes
• Tatsoi

Suffice to say, we have been feasting this week! Our CSA membership came with a cookbook as well, so we've been trying new and exotic recipes to go along with our new and exotic foods. Last night we had sweet potato risotto, and tonight we had fresh greens over pasta. Later this week we're making a sausage pizza, and we're enjoying plenty of fresh salads and berries as well.

So far we're big fans. My only concern is that we may have too much food and not be able to eat it all! Oh, and the occasional garden slug, but I guess that's the price you pay for going organic.

One Step Closer to Hippietown

I was all set to post a quick update when I logged on and saw that it has been exactly one month since our last post! Now I feel pressured. Well, since I'm concrete-sequential to the max, here's the down and dirty on life right now. Ak is working for the man to the tune of 58+ hours per week, and I'm still showing up everyday and learning the ins and outs of office politics. We're T-7 from closing on our house and T-10 from moving! Now, don't you feel bad for judging us? Oh wait, no one was judging? My bad. Add paranoid to our list of flaws these days.

Because we didn't feel like we had quite enough going on, we decided to try something new this year -- we joined a CSA! CSA, for you grocery store purists, stands for community-supported agriculture, defined by Wikipedia as "a socio-economic model of agriculture and food distribution." Nobody panic, I think that makes it sound much more extreme than it actually is. Basically, we pay a local farmer, who in return provides us with weekly produce and meat and bi-weekly cheese and eggs. I'm psyched about this on so many levels. Assuming nothing crazy like a drought happens, this will save us tons of money on food. I'm also pretty sure that local food will taste better than stuff that was picked weeks ago and shipped in, and the environmental side of me likes buying local. I'm also a pretty big fan of Durham, thugs and all, so I like that we're doing something tangible to support the Durham economy.

Now, those of you who know what I do for a living may be scratching your heads a bit here. Yes, it's true, my day job is promoting the biotechnology side of an agribusiness giant, so perhaps there's some irony that I choose to get my food from a CSA. Honestly, this wasn't so much a political choice for me as a general distaste of food that is supposed to be fresh but was grown in Chile or California. I'm too tired to going into all the ins and outs of this... so let's just say eat local, but feed your cows and hogs genetically-modified corn!