Finding key ingredients for local week 3

Had a great time at the State Farmers' Market in Raleigh yesterday. It was Peach Day, so Lumpy's Ice Cream was there giving out free samples of delicious peach ice cream. I also found two hard-to-get items: butter and peanut butter.

Butter
The tub of salted butter comes from Jackson Dairy Farm in Dunn, available at the Roberts Family Farm stand in the Market Shoppes building. Jackson Dairy Farm follows the balanced philosophy I love to see in modern, sustainable farms. Their website describes how they use the best of the old and the new:

Jackson's Dairy is a modern, state of the art production facility. However, due to our belief in the all natural concept, we choose not to use hormones on our dairy cattle or herbicides on the crops that we feed them. We employ more natural production methods.

Our label stating milk from non rBST treated cows is the first and only label registered with the NCDA and DEHNR making this claim. In the event sickness or injury should occur and medication is recommended by a trained veterinarian, the cow is isolated from the rest of the herd and milk is discarded twice as long as the FDA recommended discard time to be sure you have the purest product available. Unlike most of the competition, all milk produced for PURE FRESH dairy products is from cows owned, fed, cared for and milked daily on the Jackson family farm.

The Roberts Family Farm stand also carries excellent, hormone-free Ashe County Cheese. I got another block of their Super Sharp Cheddar to see how local I can take my pimento-cheese recipe.

Peanut Butter
I got the only tub of plain peanut butter at The Berry Patch stand, also in the Market Shoppes building. They also had a tub or two of hot peanut butter and honey-roasted peanut butter, a relative bonanza after being out of stock all last week. The peanut butter is tasty, but I don't know anything about the way the peanuts were raised. It's certainly easier to spread than the slightly bitter and sandy peanut butter I made last week. I left the skins on the peanuts, which must have soaked up the oils. On the other hand, peanut skins have high levels of anti-oxidants, according to NCSU researcher Wanida Lewis.

Lessons So Far
In two weeks, I've been able to find local sources for the vast majority of ingredients. Cooking from scratch lets me use these ingredients to make meals that largely from my local food shed.

• Pro: going local just takes the desire and some initial label checking. Once you've found a good local source, you don't have to check every time.


• Con: supplies can be limited. And while some local ingredients meet my "green" menu criteria, like the milk and cheese in this post, other ingredients either don't or don't say, like the peanut butter.

All the more reason to support whatever sustainable practices you can find in your community, to help encourage producers and vendors to provide a stable stock at good prices.