100 Mile Diet: Installment 5

Day One


So I'm back from vacation, recovering from a crazy weekend of work, and guess what? Today is day one of our 100 mile challenge. Guess what else? There is nothing to eat in our house. Okay, that's not totally true. There are potatoes and beets and honey and bread. Therefore, first 100 mile breakfast is toast (I just wasn't up to beets before 9 am). I did want to impress you all with my 100 mile cooking prowess, but this is the reality of it: I'll probably be eating a lot of toast. (The bread is awesome by the way: Nature Bake Oregon Grains Bread, using grains from the Willamette Valley Seed and Grain Project. I got it at Harvest Fresh!)

Erik and I had once last pint and burger last night, and now we've arrived: one month on 100 mile food. Really, as we discussed over dinner last night, we already do pretty well on this front. The only food in our kitchen that is really illegal for this challenge is our fall-back food: dried pasta, beans of unknown origin, and those meals out when we're too lazy to cook. Mostly we do pretty well. Because of that, I'm not freaking out about this month any more: I'm really pretty excited. I am intrigued to see how I'll do with baking when I only have eggs and sourdough as leavening. I'm curious as to how many salad-and-egg meals we'll have. And how many potatoes we'll eat.

For those of you who have read Plenty, you might remember J.B. and Alisa talking about being hungry for the first few weeks of their 100 mile diet (and about how many potatoes they ate). After all, when you're used to carbo-loading with huge bowls of pasta on a regular basis, salad and other vegetable-based meals will leave you with some pangs. Erik and I are resigned to this fact. The real challenge will be resisting the last remnants of easy food that are in our kitchen or on our fridge shelves. Since we're only doing this for a month, we thought it would be best not to let ourselves have that "anything still in the kitchen is fair game" clause. Especially since I tend to stock up on staples, that would mean this month would be far from a challenge: we'd just coast through and clean out the pantry in the process. Instead, I (the cook), and Erik (the meal police), will do our utmost to remain honest and not sneak mustard or ketchup or secretly boil that last bag of pasta shells because we got home late from work.

Today we're going grocery shopping, and to our sadly neglected garden row, to restock our kitchen for the week. We'll let you know how we do.

Beth