Major progress this week!

After taking on the "Dark Days Eat Local Challenge" I realized, too late, that we'd mostly eaten all the local meats I'd bought this fall. Ooops. So, yesterday and today I got on the phone to some of the folks I'd bought from earlier in the year and asked them if they still had any meats for sale. I also went to work online, trying to dig up some new suppliers. Long story short - I scored! We have one humongous roasting chicken and two nice pork roasts sitting in our freezer right now, plus some elk burger and elk stew meat on the way. What I managed to round up in the last 24 hours will be enough to make about 30 local meat meals!

As an added bonus, while searching I discovered some information that should help me track down some Idaho-grown wild rice, and perhaps even some more locally produced cheese! It turns out there is a large commercial cheese plant in Twin Falls that uses milk from local dairies to turn out all sorts of every day cheeses like cheddar, jack, and colby. I'm going to call their office tomorrow and see what brands their cheese is sold under so I can look for it in grocery stores here in town. This company is a subsidiary of a national cheese and dairy company, but the plant is here and they use all locally produced milk, so I'm counting it as local. We're making cheese here at home, too, but our first wheel of farmhouse cheddar won't be ready for another three weeks or so. (Yes, that red thing in the picture is it - lopsided and waxed rather awkwardly, but we hope tasty nonetheless!) It will definitely be nice to be able to get local ready-made cheeses to fill in the gaps between homemade batches.

The next major challenge is finding cooking oil...