We returned from our visit to my parents' late Wednesday, so my eat local challenge started in earnest yesterday. A rather dismal start it was. I had some apples left from Indiana, and had one for my breakfast. Lunch was homemade bread. Jimmy Lowe's was out of goat's milk, so the only thing I picked up there was some Mississippi sweet potatoes. The fish market supplied Gulf shrimp for dinner. I've been out of honey, and I can't go to the farmers market until tomorrow, so I had nothing to put on my bread and produce options are limited (REALLY limited).
Today has been a little brighter, however. I take my daughter to school on the west side of town, and every time I'm out there I pass a little market that sells landscaping plants and has a sign advertising local honey. I stopped in today, and while the owner wasn't there I did find a man waiting with fresh seafood. If you've never lived in a seaside community before, you quickly learn that it's common practice for men with pickup truck beds full of iced-down coolers to set up in a convenient parking lot, selling fresh seafood, most often shrimp, sometimes oysters, crab, or fish. As far as I can tell they're usually resellers, as was this 70 year-old man, who told me he drives over from his home near Lucedale, Mississippi (close to the state line) to pick up his wares at Bayou la Batre, the biggest fishing community on the Alabama coast. When I pulled up he was packaging shrimp, gorgeous big Gulf whites with shiny shells, iridescent green and blue still on their tails, and a pure, briny smell. He said he'd had to wait for the boat to come in this morning. 10-15 count, $5/pound (head-on), which is cheaper than the price we pay for the inferior browns at the nearest fish market. (Save those heads, by the way, and use them with the shells to make shrimp stock.) I bought oysters too, which my husband loves; they're in season now and the man said they're working all night to unload them from the boats. He had crab meat as well.
I always have mixed feelings about buying shrimp, since their harvest damages the sea floor and produces wasteful bycatch. But I do love to eat them, and they're relatively low in contaminants. Faced with a limited local foods diet, it's hard to pass them up, especially when I won't be able to get my only other planned source of meat (free range chickens) until some time next week. While $5/pound is very affordable and in this economy I'm thankful for that, I almost hate to pay so little for them, especially with the cost of fuel so high. It's hard to imagine how anyone is really getting the true value, not to mention that, as with conventional agriculture, that price doesn't account for the environmental costs of shrimp trawling.
I did get some local honey at the market, at $4.50/pint about the cheapest I've seen. The market owner had a big freezer where she kept shelled beans and peas, which the fish man delivered from Mississippi. He didn't grow them himself but got them "from someone else." She's sold all her small portions and only had 10 pound bags left. Since barely one of them would fit in my freezer I asked her to make some small bags for me and I'll get them next week. She also had some frozen shelled pecans from last year, and I bought a package of those. Though we'll soon have this year's harvest, my own stock of frozen pecans was gone long ago and I'm happy to have more.
My Indiana apples were starting to go soft, so this afternoon I baked them with some honey and cinnamon, and reduced the liquid in the pan to a syrupy glaze. I was hungry, and they were delicious!
I'm looking forward to the market tomorrow, hopeful at this point to add some variety to my diet. I may drive over to Elberta for cheese and the market there, as well.
Oh, and for the lesson of the title, around here it's best to carry a cooler in the car to capitalize on the unexpected opportunities presented by roadside stands and folks selling out of the back of their trucks. Cash only, of course.
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