Facing down a mutiny

Feed dog, crank crank. Cut up apples for kids’ snacks, crank crank. Look up how far the guy selling his Toyota Tacoma lives from us, crank crank.

It’s 6 a.m. on day four of Eat Local September, our family’s self-fashioned locavore challenge, and I’m making ice cream for dessert tonight. The 80s-era hand-crank doodad we picked up on the side of the road says to give a couple cranks every few minutes, so I’m crank cranking between morning chores.

The challenge: For the month of September, we eat only food grown, raised or foraged within 250 miles of home. Spices are “free,” and each person gets to choose five exceptions (e.g. coffee, olive oil; the kids prefer chicken nuggets, sugar).

So far, the challenge is going – medium. I hadn’t done much stocking up beforehand. Maybe I’ve gotten complacent in six years doing this, but I figured we could scrape by the first week with what we had on-hand: venison and chicken in the freezer, eggs from our flock, garden veggies, raw milk and yogurt from a nearby farm, local flour, orchard fruit, cheese.

Then husband Joe’s car died, ratcheting the stress level from “heads above water” to “uh-oh.”

But as soon as we get him a new (to us) set of wheels, we’ll be back on track, my cheerleader-on-my-shoulder reassures. Crank crank. We’ll go on a stocking-up blitz, plus we can pay back all the rides we’ll have to beg in the meantime. It would work itself out! the voice whispers.

By the time the first kid emerges, sleepy-eyed, the ice cream is in the freezer, ready for tonight’s dessert. An auspicious start to the day, my cheerleader commends as I head out to the garden. (She’s always peppy after coffee and before the chaos.)

When I come back inside, I’m surprised to find my middle child, 8, usually my most easygoing, seething. Why had I made the ice cream without her?

Because she has soccer tonight, her sister has dance, it’s meet the teacher night and we won’t have time to do it, and I’d promised them ice cream. Plus I’d only made half of the prepared mixture; the other half, she could help make tomorrow. That sounds like a multi-part, full-credit answer to me, but when we pile into the car to get to the bus stop, she’s still glowering in sullen silence.

“What?!” I ask, not intending to yell but yelling. “Is your problem?”

“I’m hungry!” she yells back. “And I don’t like anything that’s in the house!” Ooph.

Before CPS gets involved, we had fed the kids, or at least offered them food and assumed they’d eaten some: Joe’s breakfast “tapos” (homefry-style potatoes), peaches and milk. Were our homegrown potatoes weird somehow? Or was our daughter just mutinying – already! – against the chafing prospect of limited variety?

Humans are so high maintenance. For my part, I’d already found myself beating back tomato fatigue, which didn’t bode well one-tenth of the way through the challenge.

I put the car back in park, stomped inside, opened the fridge and grabbed a clamshell of leftover chicken tenders from an August diner outing (which I’d intended to feed the dog), slamming every door along the way. I tossed the clamshell into the backseat, where my five-year-old did not look a gift horse in the mouth, launching into a cold chicken tender with perfect equanimity. The mutineer at first looked like she might milk her hunger strike all the way to school, but eventually relented, eating one tender, then two. By the time the bus pulled up, she was fed. Sigh.

And now, I needed to focus on this challenge of my own making. Step up your game, my cheerleader demanded, bitchier now. The ice cream that night went over well, lifting spirits. But to keep the kids onboard – and in a livable mood – for the next 26 days, our farm market blitz needed to start yesterday.

First, we needed staples. On our way to check out a used Tacoma, Joe and I stopped at Great Joy Family Farm in Pine Bush, NY. At a farm stand in the middle of nowhere, we found a remarkable operation offering wheat, millet, corn flour, peanuts and rice – six varieties, including “forbidden” black rice – grown along the Wallkill! We could relax; we were out of scarcity mode. (Though it turned out the pickup wouldn’t pass Pennsylvania inspection, so we couldn’t relax relax).

Staples obtained, it was time to tackle the next rung on the hierarchy of needs. Apparently, it wasn’t enough to keep the kids fed. These little people living in my house also insisted upon being surprised and delighted every now and then.

Mission: Treat brought me to a farm stand in Milford, Pa. I’ve passed a hundred times. How had I never stopped? Aside from ice cream made with milk from the family’s Sussex County, NJ farm (an extravagance to pull out around week three), in the fridge, next to Amish-style roll butter, was the je ne sais quoi I’d been seeking: honey-cinnamon butter from round about Lancaster (local milk and honey, cinnamon and salt).

Gobs of honey-cinnamon butter melting on toasted zucchini bread turns out to be a satisfactory breakfast for even our most particular clients. Add to that an occasional well-timed honey stick, and my cheerleader is pleased to report we’ve gotten halfway through Eat Local September with nary a whisper of another uprising.