You know THAT person…the LocaBore – the one who picks through the scraps from the plates during a dinner party? The one who spend hours prepping their waste – sorting the vegetable matter for composting and then taking bones and meat fat out back to BURY in self-dug micro-pits that dot the backyard landscape — the pits that might break your ankle if you aren’t careful. Some of these extreme enviro-weenies are still enough in touch with the litigious reality of the suburbs that they have at least covered their meat holes with board and heavy rock – a strategy that also discourages fox and dog and possibly coyote from foraging on the tender morsels before the requisite 30 years of aging returns the meager nutrients back to the soil. You know this type, right? These are the friends that Nick and I like to call the “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” locavores – those few radical “ultra-local” eaters whose hallmark is often prominent ownership of the cult back-to-the lander classic, the Humanure book (if you don’t know this one already, you may not have the stomach to learn…research at your own peril.) If you haven’t met someone like this, you obviously have not spent nearly enough time in Lincoln or Lexington or Marin.
It can be quite intimidating to make these folks’ acquaintance and even harder to maintain a friendship. No matter what small victory you may have in your quest for local healthy eating, they have done it all already — more AND better. You buy leeks at the farmers market, they already have them in their very own garden. You eat raw honey WITH the comb, they have an entire beekeeper’s outfit in the back of their shed and bee boxes generating artisanal honey in their clearing. (You must resist the temptation of asking whether you can borrow the LocaBore’s bee keeping outfit for Halloween next year – that request will trigger a whole LONG conversation about bee diseases and hive collapse – as if someone else, from some neighboring hive-owning home, might bump HIS bee suit into YOUR bee suit while out trick-or-treating and thereby cause an inadvertent but deadly cross-contamination bee suit disaster …. trust me on this one!)
If you are tired of being tweaked by the pontifications of your favorite LocaBore, there is a simple solution. And that, my friend, is a $2 basil plant from your local grocery store. You may notice a current that runs through every post in this blog: my caution precedes me and my impulse is to share each thought and idea with the admonition to START SLOWLY… merely dip your toe in to new experiences. EMBRACE your inner hesitancy. DO NOT tax yourself by jumping in whole hog. With irrational exuberance comes some very time consuming and costly mistakes. Remember: tentative hesitancy is what has kept your bloodline alive through famine, war, pestilence and wild bear attacks.
So, just get the 1 potted plant for your windowsill or counter top. The nice thing about a $2 basil plant is that it is meant to be used up – my polite way of saying that the intention is to KILL the basil plant over time – in fact I encourage you to kill it just BEFORE the moment that your lack of watering will have killed the plant anyway (N.B. I have been known to use a few “artisanally dried” i.e. DEAD basil leaves in a pinch.) Over time, use the delicious leaves whole in salads, chopped in salad dressings, ground into pesto, placed under the skin of a baking chicken, or shredded into a chiffonade and sprinkled over tomatoes and mozarella or in a tomato, goat cheese and basil panzanella salad – so easy! Then, when you’ve polished off the leaves, you can either use the stems to flavor a soup stock, or declare yourself complete and pitch the remnant into your compost or even into the farthest back garden where no one ever looks, if you don’t yet have a compost pile.* Then, when the resident LocaBore talks about his leeks, which are probably growing at least 20 FEET from his house, minimum, you can share that your garden is only 18 INCHES from your saucepan.
* PS: DO NOT …and I mean DO NOT EVER … ask your LocaBore friends about compost piles either. That is unless you want a dissertation-length lecture about dry and wet and layering and rain and sun and turning vs. not turning the compostable matter with a pitchfork. You will thank me for this advice … I promise…)
dispatchfromthecave 