There's more to life!

Although the main focus of this blog is the written word, there is more to my life than writing and reading. More than walking, too, though it does take up 1.5-2 hours of nearly every day for me since I joined a few friends last year in an online walking blog. I'm currently about 2/3 of the way north on the Appalachian Trail!

I've talked a few times about the farm, about the garden, about healthy eating. A few years ago I dabbled in a recipe book project but realized after a few months that I didn't have the drive to make that succeed. I've recently moved the recipes out of the closed forums and into a publicly accessible wiki: Healthy Recipe Box. If you'd care to browse through the recipes I've got stored there and use them, go ahead. You don't have to sign up for anything, and I won't even know you're there unless you wish to comment, in which case you'll have to join the wiki so that I can grant you the power to comment.

Most of the recipes there are fairly low G.I. (glycemic index), and most of them are ones we eat fairly regularly. I keep adding recipes as I come across other family favorites. I hope you enjoy our *down-home* recipes.

But that's only part of the story, of course. Where do the ingredients come from?

In our case, a lot of our food comes from our farm and garden. Jim and I grow our own beef and many of our vegetables. We live in a fruit-growing area: apples, cherries, peaches, pears, apricots. In the summer we don't spend a lot on groceries. We watched the back-to-the-land movement in the 70s and 80s from our rural background, wondering how folks had gotten so far away from knowing where their food came from.

In the past few years, since the books 100 Mile Diet and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle came out, there's been a huge resurgence toward local, organic, sustainable eating. That's a good thing. We haven't jumped on this thing with whole abandon, but are definitely increasing awareness once again, thanks to our kids. We're also looking at more ways to use the forty acres we have to contribute to our own food and that of other local residents. If this is the type of lifestyle that interests you, you might want to follow our new blog, Scratch. I won't be talking about most of those issues here much, so don't expect cross-posts.