NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Our past two columns—picking apples in Julian and buying a heritage turkey from a local farmer—have led up to today’s column. Vic and I cooked a dinner for friends last week, all from locally grown, fresh foods. Even the wines were local. We wanted to promote being healthy “locavores”—people who eat locally-grown, fresh, organic foods.

Barbara Kingsolver’s, “Animal, Vegetable and Miracle,” has changed our lives. I read her book a couple of months after I had renewed my interest growing fruits and vegetables in my yard, and going to farmers’ markets. Her book spurred me on to even greater efforts.

To promote sustainable living, Kingsolver and her family moved from the dry Arizona desert to a small farm in southern Appalachia. “We wanted to live in a place that could feed us,” she wrote, “where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground.”

Once settled in, the Kingsolvers decided to live for one year on only what they grew and preserved themselves, plus whatever they could buy from their farming neighbors. They put their kitchen back at the center of their family life, making most things from scratch.

This book came at just the right time in my life to catalyze a paradigm shift in how Vic and I shop and eat. I’m still an old Hoosier gal at heart, raised on the philosophy of “make do” and “waste not, want not.” My Grandma Wilson grew her own vegetables and “put food by.” My dad would bring home fresh stewing hens from his cousin’s farm and green beans that needed to be stringed and snapped.

Today’s factory farm-raised food can’t compete with the flavor of those heirloom vegetables and heritage livestock raised the slow, old-fashioned way on family farms.

By the time I was 19, I was gardening, canning and putting up preserves for my own little household. Vic and I grew a garden for many years when we lived in Connecticut. I still bake pies and make bread from scratch. I love these tasty ties to a simpler past.

But somehow over the decades, modern life got in the way. Foods became more processed and packaged. Many people today have known only food out of a box, laden with unpronounceable chemicals and preservatives. Americans seems to have forgotten how good fresh, unadulterated food can taste, if they ever knew.

I recently decided I wanted to serve a company dinner that was made from scratch with healthy, locally grown foods. And I wanted to be the farmer who grew at least some of that food. Vic and I worked for weeks on our recipes, trying out different versions of some until we had them perfected. Other recipes were first-time experiments.

We invited our guests for this dinner, Glee Gerde and Phil and Judi Smith, weeks in advance so that we knew for sure they would be available. Phil and Judi had just returned from the Galapagos, Ecuador and the Amazon, and Glee was planning a trip to France and Italy.

The main point of this dinner was to demonstrate how well one could dine using fresh, locally grown foods and wines. As I have repeated over and over, buying local foods helps combat global warming because the food doesn’t have to travel as far and thus less gas is used to get it to your kitchen. Buying organic food saves the environment — and you — from harmful pesticides and herbicides. And finally, eating heritage livestock, such as the Standard Bronze turkey that we cooked, promotes survival of these old breeds. If we don’t eat them, farmers won’t breed them and they’ll go extinct.

Fruit compote

Roasted Heritage turkey with rosemary/maple butter

Gravy

Homemade sunflower and pumpkin seed bread

Medley of roasted root vegetables

Grilled corn on the cob with sage butter

Green beans with almonds

Apple pie

Pumpkin pie

Orfila Vineyards Ambassador’s Reserve chardonnay

Pamo Valley Ramona Trio (a blend of Tempranillo, Malbec, and Sangiovese grapes)

Vic and I started cooking the day before, baking a small pumpkin from our garden to get pulp for a pumpkin pie. We used Granny Smith apples from our yard and a couple of Jonathon apples from Julian for the crumb-topped apple pie.

On the morning of the dinner, I mixed a half-pound of butter with a half-cup of pure maple syrup and a tablespoon of fresh rosemary from my herb garden. Using a spatula, I separated the breast skin of the turkey from the meat and stuffed the butter mixture under the skin. I made broth from the turkey neck and herbs from my garden, and mixed two cups of that with two cups of Menghini Mela apple wine from Julian. That went into the bottom of my roasting pan.

I put the turkey on the rack, covered it with foil, and roasted it at 400 degrees for 15 minutes a pound. Talk about aromatherapy! The house was redolent with the smell of Heritage turkey roasting over apple wine, and bread baking in the bread machine.

For the fruit compote, I rubbed the rims of stemmed compote glassware with lemon and dipped them in washed cane sugar crystals. Into the glasses went blackberries and melon balls, using both cantaloupe and watermelon, all from the farmer’s market.

In the blender I whipped up my secret fruit sauce — three pears from Julian and 1/3 cup of Grand Marnier. I poured the pear sauce over the melon balls and berries, and garnished each cup with three blackberries and a sprig of mint from my garden.

I cooked the medley of organic root vegetables — whole cloves of garlic, quartered onions, sliced sweet potato, Russian banana fingerling potatoes, carrots, California olive oil, sea salt and fresh rosemary—on the gas grill outdoors, in a pan over indirect heat. I slathered the ears of corn with butter and chopped sage from my garden, wrapped them in foil, and cooked them on the grill as well. I steamed the green beans and topped them with California-grown almonds. Vic made the gravy from the turkey drippings, his best ever, and carved the turkey. What a feast.

Obviously we don’t cook this elaborately all the time. That isn’t necessary to enjoy wholesome, natural foods that are prepared at home. We hope that you’ll join us in becoming locavores.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].