Robin Mather - 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 $40 a Week)

Copyright 2011 by Robin Mather
Illustrations copyright 2011 by Barry Fitzgerald

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mather, Robin.
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 $40 a week) / Robin Mather.
p. cm.
Summary: A charming ode (with recipes) to eating well and locally, on $40 per week, from a recently unemployed food-journalism veteranProvided by publisher.
1. Low budget cooking. 2. Cookbooks. I. Title.
TX652.M2958 2011
641.552dc22
2010045085

eISBN: 978-1-60774-041-4

v3.1

For my mother, Jane Bobby Hughes Mather (19211999),who taught me well and truly about everything that matters;and for Boon, who was a Good Dog.

I N A PRIL 2009, my husband of twelve years told me that he wanted a divorce. Less than a week later, the Chicago Tribune, where I worked as a staff reporter for the food section, laid me off, effectively ending my lifelong career as a newspaper reporter. Equipped with skills the imploding newspaper industry no longer needed, I was too old for hiring managers to consider me seriously, at a difficult age to launch an entirely new career, and too young to simply give up. I found myself without income, heartbroken, and terrified.

Battered by life storms, I retreated to my lakeside cottage in western Michigan. I hoped that the contact with so much native beautya life embedded in the rhythms of the natural worldwould salve my spirit. There I settled with my standard poodle, Boon, and Pippin, an African Grey parrot. The animals are a very large part of my life; they are as much a part of this story as the weather or my acts.

Of necessity, I had to live on a very strict budget, limiting myself to just forty dollars a week for foodall food, including spices and coffeebecause as a freelancer, I couldnt count on a guaranteed income.

For more than twenty-five years, Id sampled the finest foods and wines the world has to offer. The late Julia Child prepared lunch for me at her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. I ate foie gras five days in a row while spending a week at Paul Bocuses culinary academy just outside Lyons, France. I had insider access to the exhibitors booths and their samples of spectacular specialty foods and fine wines at the biennial Slow Food gathering in Turin, Italy. My work took me to South Korea, where I tasted food all day, every day, for more than a week with Korea-born chef Bill Kim, and to Chiapas, Mexico, where I traveled with Mexican food authority and restaurateur Rick Bayless. I won national prizes for a story that followed a silverbritea shrewd marketing term for chum, or dog, salmonfrom its home waters in remote western Alaska to a Kroger market in suburban Detroit and was a two-time James Beard journalism award finalist for feature writing.

Those days were gone. Still, eating well had become my habit. I was unwilling to compromise on that matter.

So, following the conclusions I drew in writing my first book, A Garden of Unearthly Delights: Bioengineering and the Future of Food, I determined to spend as many of those precious food dollars as I could with the people who grew my food.

This book reflects what I did over the course of a year in following that disciplined regimen. You will find recipes for the foods I ate, together with essays that follow my thinking as I lived out that year. The book begins in spring, because spring is the beginning of the growing season and because spring is the season of rebirth; this recounting is also about a season of rebirth in my own life. It may be read as a cookbook, as a collection of gastronomic writing, or as a history, a peek into the heart and mind of a middle-aged woman determined to resurrect her life. The recipes are all kitchen-tested by me, an experienced but not professionally trained home cook, using simple kitchen equipment. The recipes are not gourmet or high-end, but rather the kind of food that satisfies the spirit and nurtures the body. They draw inspiration from my twenty-five-plus years of food writing and travel and are grounded in sound nutritional principle. Although I live alone, the recipes are geared to serve four to six people. Sometimes I froze surplus servings or ate leftovers for a day or two, but more typically, I invited someone to share my table. Having enough to share is one definition of wealth for me.

The concept of eating locally and sustainably has gained broad interest since I advocated for it in my first book in 1995. It put Michael Pollans books on the bestseller lists and has catapulted Barbara Kingsolver into wider audiences than just those of us who love her fiction.

Its relatively easy to be a locavore if you live in a major urban area like Chicago. There, farmers markets operate nearly year-round and are prosperous enough to draw growers from four states. But critics of locavore subsistence often snipe about its cost. Throw in budget constraints, and the prospect of eating locally looks much tougher. A weekly budget of forty dollars for a woman my age falls a little more than halfway between the United States Department of Agricultures thrifty food budget of $34.80 per person and its low-cost budget of $43.20. But the USDAs suggested shopping lists for those budgets involve a lot of squishy white bread and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, powdered milk, and instant orange drinks. Menus like that may provide enough calories to sustain life but theres little there to please the inner woman. I wanted to look forward to meals, to have enough good food at hand to keep my spirits high. Because I live six miles from the nearest village and more than ten miles from the nearest town of any size, I needed to keep a well-stocked pantry; the several times I was snowed in for two or more days at a time proved the wisdom of doing so.

Eating locally requires, almost by definition, some compromises. Coffee doesnt grow in the Great Lakes region and neither do chocolate nor olives for oil or table. Eating locally meant more work: Id have to commit to canning, freezing, and dehydrating the surpluses of the season. It meant prowling farmers markets for bargains and figuring out what to do with them once I got them home. With no sunny spot in my shady lake-lot yard for a garden, I couldnt grow much myself.

I decided early on that I couldnt limit myself to organically grown foods. In some cases, it turned out not to be an option, and with my budget, I couldnt always afford to seek out organic produce. Moreover, some of the growers I befriended through weekly purchases were still transitioning to organic, or were unable or unwilling to do so; I wanted to support those growers who are my neighbors. I considered joining a community-supported agriculture, or CSA, endeavor, but couldnt afford the up-front costs and needed more produceto can and freezethan a weekly share would bring me.