Eating Local

What with the media hype about E.coli and salmonella in produce these days, the idea of a 100-mile diet seems like a smart idea. But yesterday, we managed to go a couple orders of magnitude better than that.

After a quick Saturday morning fence repair, Mrs. Fetched’s mom handed me a plastic bowl. “Can you grill this catfish?” she asked. “[someone] caught it out of the pond down below the house. I don’t want to heat up the kitchen but it needs cookin’.”

I thought for a moment. “I can give it a try,” I said. “I'll wrap it in foil with some onion and peppers.” She handed me a big bell pepper from the garden, and I took them home and added some basil and oregano from the front yard. If I had to do it over again, I would have used more foil and sealed it properly, but I had two pairs of tongs and didn’t lose anything. The body cavities were a little smaller than I expected, so I ended up putting stuff around the fish more than in it.

Side dishes were fresh corn and fried squash, both from the garden. In fact, the onion was the only ingredient that didn’t come from the farm. Next year, we might get the onions from the garden too.