Dark Days Week 19 - Midwest represents!

I wrote this March 29.... but had a heck of a time posting it.... so here it is, rather late - but better than nothing! 

Is this the last week?  I think it is... but I'm not sure.  I was totally planning on going out with a bang, but things have sort of fizzled around here.  Most people have claimed they are too busy preparing their gardens and seedlings for spring - but we haven't even done that!  Working a lot of nights has been a major issue for me.  Preparing for vacation was another.  In our stage of life, vacation means going to visit family in Omaha.  Both my husbands family and mine live there, and would like us to visit often.  We would like to visit often as well, but it really makes me mad that a pair of non-stop tickets to some place AWESOME like San Francisco are cheaper than flying to Omaha.  So we don't really vacation... we just visit family.  Some day this will change, but that's what it is now.

I did go on a local food buying adventure, however.  I was curious, now that we've made all our SOLE finds in Baltimore... how easy it would be to find local produce and meats in Omaha.  You'd think that a city surrounded by a bunch of farmland would have a good system set up, but I know better and was doubtful that there would be an abundance of anything that I could directly eat (Nebraska grows mostly corn and soy feed for cows).

I was pleasantly surprised.  This place called Tomato Tomato (I don't know how to type the markings that make those two words get pronounced different - long A for the first word, short A for the second) was a store my mother in law has been telling me about forever, so we checked it out this past weekend.

Here was my haul:  LOCAL BARLEY (yeay - I can finally make that mushroom barley soup!), ostrich jerky things, tomatoes (heavenly), english cucumber and kale.  Oh yeah, and that little tube is honey-lavendar lip balm... yummy!

I immediately turned the kale into kale chips for my in-laws to snack on:

An now the rest of the haul is sitting untouched as we prepare a not-so-local Passover seder meal at my parents house.  Although I'm very excited to eat a cucumber tomato salad tomorrow for lunch.

All in all I really enjoyed this challenge.  Even though there were weeks where I got to Sunday and had to scramble to put my meal together, I know for a fact that our cupboard has a much higher percentage of SOLE items than it did when we began, and I also know that most my meals all week long had at least one SOLE ingredient.

I have decided that I like the challenge of this so much that I am going to go right into another challenge which requires weekly posts (and has to do with food, of course!).  More on that later (I'm almost late for dinner!).