Weekend Farm Trip

On Saturday my daughter and I drove over to Baldwin County to pick strawberries at “BJ Farms”:http://gulfcoastlocalfood.org/2008/04/bj-farms.html and get some cheese at “Sweet Home Farm”:http://gulfcoastlocalfood.org/2008/03/sweet-home-farm.html (they’re about a mile apart). We picked about 12 pounds of berries, and also bought some broccoli, onions, and tomatoes from their store front. (The tomatoes came from Florida, but the rest was grown on the farm.) My daughter showed the classic three year-old enthusiasm; at first she was excitedly picking strawberries and proclaiming these were ‘the best strawberries ever,’ and gradually began losing energy, claiming that her basket was too heavy, and then that she was too tired to walk (all this in about 15 or 20 minutes). In the end she said she enjoyed the tractor ride out to the fields best of all.
We bought about two pounds of cheese: some Elberta (creamy and soft), Montabella (firm and a little tangier), and Duet, which we hadn’t tried before, an amazing sharp, drier, cheddar-y type. I look forward to baking some nice crusty bread and feasting on cheese, bread, and salad for dinner.
It never ceases to amaze me how good, fresh, but simple ingredients can make me feel like I’m eating like a king. Chris made some garlic shrimp bruschetta (Gulf shrimp and home-grown garlic), as well as the traditional tomato-basil-mozzarella version (with the Florida tomatoes, and home-grown garlic and basil), and we ate on the deck under the blue sky. I could not have asked for better.
The berries, alas, are half-gone already! For the ensuing 24 hours after returned my daughter would eat almost nothing but strawberries, and we’ve enjoyed them plain, sugared, in yogurt, and with homemade shortcake and real whipped cream. I guess I won’t be making quite as many smoothies with them as I thought! BJs will be open for another couple of weeks, weather permitting, so if we’re lucky we can make it back and pick some more.
The thing I don’t like is that getting food this way – by going straight to the source – is not very fuel or cost efficient, and it also effectively prevents people without access to transportation from getting there. For us the trip to Elberta is about an hour and 20 minutes, and at today’s prices that’s about $15 worth of fuel. One trip a month, if that, would be my max.