I’m a person who likes to eat.

One look at me, and you know I’m a person who likes to eat. A lot. So Kim and I were a little concerned that we would have to forego our hearty red meat, potatoes, fry or die ways. Not so! For our first Buy Local meal, at which we hosted our long-time friend Rosemary, Kim concocted a tomato-cucumber-onion in vinegar salad — all local (right down to the White House Vinegar from Winchester, Va.); local corn on the cob; locally baked French bread; and crab cakes made with local Chesapeake Bay crab meat. (The recipe called for back fin, but at $30 a pound; we opted for the $15 a pound claw — trust me, Rosemary’s a good friend, but not worth $30 a pound.) Anyway, the crab cakes were just as good as Clyde’s, Johnny’s Half Shell or Kinkead’s, and Rosemary was impressed.

For our next Buy Local meal, we did BLTs. Yes, Virginia, you can buy local, free-range bacon from Virginia at the Court House Farmers’ Market on Saturdays. Local tomatoes were easy to find (we bought the orange ones — sweeter than the red), as was local bakery bread. But local lettuce? No dice. And bacon-lettuce-kale sandwiches just didn’t have the same appeal, so we had to cheat at Safeway. Our side dish was local cantaloupe. Very good, but we both kind of preferred the nitrite-laden Oscar Mayer bacon.

But the BEST was last Saturday. With a day of rain in store, what else to do but cook? And what to cook but something hearty? So I headed out to the Court House Farmers’ Market, where I picked up 3 lbs. of free range beef stew meat, 1-1/2 pounds of baby sweet yellow onions and some fresh garlic — all of which went into a Belgian stew with some fresh herbs from our herb garden, some beef broth and two bottles of beer. I served it with sliced heirloom tomatoes (from the farmers market) on the side, along with some of the leftover local French bread we had frozen two weeks earlier. Kim was stunned that I cooked, and it was the perfect dish for a rainy day (it takes about two hours to prep and another three hours to cook). So what’s the moral to my blog? Buying local doesn’t mean you have to give up the food you love! ~Richard