- 1
- 2
- next
- | single page
Finding community and proving a locavore can succeed on a tight budget. (Bill Hogan/Chicago Tribune) |
Robin Mather would be the first to tell you that "almost my entire life is driven by my hunger" — and she means the kind that growls from not-so-empty belly, the kind that maps a trip around the world on what might be served for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
A longtime food writer and editor, she once sat down to a lunch of deviled eggs and salade compose in Julia Child's Cambridge, Mass., kitchen and ate foie gras five days in a row at Paul Bocuse's culinary academy just outside Lyons, in France.
And when she left the city a few years back, bumping along a dirt road that dead-ended at an itty-bitty cottage along the shores of Stewart Lake in western Michigan, she knew one sure thing about how she'd survive: She'd shell out no more than 40 bucks a weeks for food.
And that'd feed herself, her pooch and her peanut-loving parrot.
What Mather — who'd retreated to what some might call the middle of practically nowhere, "battered by life's storms," a job lost, a marriage ended — didn't yet know, was that her strict fiscal policy would easily fill her plate and her pantry, but more than that it would fill her life with friends aplenty.
They included Tom Otto the Turkey Guy, the Kendalls with their fat tart blueberries and Nathaniel the Mennonite farmer who grew her strawberries and carrots. The Cotants, whose orchard offered up Northern Spy and Gala apples for her pies, and Steve who grew her greens. And she'd never leave off Wally, who showed up one day with a box full of chicks and thus all the eggs a hungry girl could want.
Such is the triumphant thread in Mather's recently published "The Feast Nearby: How I Lost My Job, Buried a Marriage, and Found My Way By Keeping Chickens, Foraging, Preserving, Bartering, and Eating Locally (All on Forty Dollars a Week)" (Ten Speed Press, $24).
It's part memoir, part cookbook, and at heart, it's a survival guide. One that, plate by plate, lays out a recipe for healing a broken heart. And, surely, it's a primer for eating local on an uber-tight budget, one that makes us believe we can all afford to find foodstuffs from closer-to-home farmers and producers.
"When I moved to the cottage, I knew no one. Just a few names, was all," recalled Mather in a recent phone call from Topeka, Kansas, where she is now a senior associate editor at Mother Earth News. (Mather is a former Tribune food writer.)
"As I began to commit to eating local, I connected to growers," she explains. "It's a pretty short leap from, 'Hey, Steve, how's your kale?' to 'Hey, Steve, how's your wife?' That's how eating locally embeds you in your community.
"You're connecting to people in one of the most visceral ways. When I take a bunch of beets from a farmer's hands, that is absolutely a moment of communion."
But it's not a communion that comes free of effort, Mather reminds. Not for farmer, certainly. And not for hungry shopper.
"Part of your responsibility as a buyer is you have to have the conversation. It doesn't serve the purpose if all you say is, 'I'd like six tomatoes and two heads of lettuce, and here's your $6.50.' You want to talk to these people like you'd talk to someone you'd go to church with. That overarching conversation is a form of church."
Marinated grilled leg of lamb
Prep: 30 minutes
Marinate: 8 hours
Cook: 20-30 minutes
Makes: 8-10 servings
Note: Robin Mather shares this family recipe in "The Feast Nearby." "You will have some well-done, some medium-rare, and some very, very rare meat, the way I like it," she writes.
A longtime food writer and editor, she once sat down to a lunch of deviled eggs and salade compose in Julia Child's Cambridge, Mass., kitchen and ate foie gras five days in a row at Paul Bocuse's culinary academy just outside Lyons, in France.
And when she left the city a few years back, bumping along a dirt road that dead-ended at an itty-bitty cottage along the shores of Stewart Lake in western Michigan, she knew one sure thing about how she'd survive: She'd shell out no more than 40 bucks a weeks for food.
And that'd feed herself, her pooch and her peanut-loving parrot.
What Mather — who'd retreated to what some might call the middle of practically nowhere, "battered by life's storms," a job lost, a marriage ended — didn't yet know, was that her strict fiscal policy would easily fill her plate and her pantry, but more than that it would fill her life with friends aplenty.
They included Tom Otto the Turkey Guy, the Kendalls with their fat tart blueberries and Nathaniel the Mennonite farmer who grew her strawberries and carrots. The Cotants, whose orchard offered up Northern Spy and Gala apples for her pies, and Steve who grew her greens. And she'd never leave off Wally, who showed up one day with a box full of chicks and thus all the eggs a hungry girl could want.
Such is the triumphant thread in Mather's recently published "The Feast Nearby: How I Lost My Job, Buried a Marriage, and Found My Way By Keeping Chickens, Foraging, Preserving, Bartering, and Eating Locally (All on Forty Dollars a Week)" (Ten Speed Press, $24).
It's part memoir, part cookbook, and at heart, it's a survival guide. One that, plate by plate, lays out a recipe for healing a broken heart. And, surely, it's a primer for eating local on an uber-tight budget, one that makes us believe we can all afford to find foodstuffs from closer-to-home farmers and producers.
"When I moved to the cottage, I knew no one. Just a few names, was all," recalled Mather in a recent phone call from Topeka, Kansas, where she is now a senior associate editor at Mother Earth News. (Mather is a former Tribune food writer.)
"As I began to commit to eating local, I connected to growers," she explains. "It's a pretty short leap from, 'Hey, Steve, how's your kale?' to 'Hey, Steve, how's your wife?' That's how eating locally embeds you in your community.
"You're connecting to people in one of the most visceral ways. When I take a bunch of beets from a farmer's hands, that is absolutely a moment of communion."
But it's not a communion that comes free of effort, Mather reminds. Not for farmer, certainly. And not for hungry shopper.
"Part of your responsibility as a buyer is you have to have the conversation. It doesn't serve the purpose if all you say is, 'I'd like six tomatoes and two heads of lettuce, and here's your $6.50.' You want to talk to these people like you'd talk to someone you'd go to church with. That overarching conversation is a form of church."
Marinated grilled leg of lamb
Prep: 30 minutes
Marinate: 8 hours
Cook: 20-30 minutes
Makes: 8-10 servings
Note: Robin Mather shares this family recipe in "The Feast Nearby." "You will have some well-done, some medium-rare, and some very, very rare meat, the way I like it," she writes.
