COURTESY: ICANHASCHEEZEBURGER.COM

We all are being affected by the high cost of groceries these days. And many of us worry about where our food comes from and what hidden ingredients it might contain – chemical-laden vegetables, hormone-filled meat, factory-farmed chicken and produce from as far away as Chile.

Eating locally grown fruits, vegetables and meat, and enjoying the benefits of a backyard garden are just a few of the ways to guarantee that your dinner is made up of healthy ingredients. One way to save a few bucks on groceries is by exploring the exciting and untapped world of Found Food. It’s free for the taking, and fun too!

A few months ago, I wrote a blog on Collecting Windfall Apples, basically foraging for free food. Of course, this is the most basic of human ways to gather food for the larder, but  few of us in the 21^st century engage in the process.

So, in an effort to broaden your culinary options and suggest possibilities for spending less at the market, here are some found foods that might be available in your neighborhood.

Vegetables

Carrots, potatoes, asparagus and eggplant are all familiar foods, but what about Queen Anne’s lace roots, cattail roots and shoots, and cactus pads? While they might not be as quick and easy as bags of pre-washed carrots and potatoes, the results of collecting and preparing them will be worth the effort. I have, in fact, eaten Queen Anne’s lace roots, which are related to modern-day carrots. They’re quite sweet, with a strong carrot flavor. And while I haven’t tried cactus pads, I have eaten the ripe fruit of prickly pear cactus, which are refreshingly juicy and have the tartness of an apple.

Protein

I guess this category of found food – meat and seafood – is fairly obvious: trout, crawfish, venison, rabbit, turkey … the list goes on. But did you know that you can eat some barnacles, and that groundhog is considered a delicacy in some locales?

Perhaps you are wondering what all this has to do with the blog’s title word – Bugs! I was hoping that by now you would be enticed into considering wild food foraging and might not remember that headline buzzword: Bugs! (The apparent misspelling in the headline is related to the kitty photo's website, icanhascheeseburger.com.

So, there is, in fact, another whole category of wild-food critters that may contain more protein than chicken – yup, bugs! Termites, grasshoppers and beetles all have a higher protein density than that roast chicken your family dines on at the Sunday noon dinner.

Creepy crawlies are highly prized delicacies in many parts of the world. I recommend you read this article, and then hop down to your local bookstore or library and pick up a good insect identification guide. Of course, most Americans are averse to eating raw bugs, so collect a few flying or crawling specimens, give them a quick once-over in the sauté pan and enjoy a nutritious and unique gourmet treat.

The last entry in this list of unique protein sources – organ meat – may not be free, but is a good alternative to the usual meat-counter fare. Organ meat is considered by many cultures to contain the attributes of the organ: eating brain will make you smarter, heart will give you strength, etc. But the major reason these meats are revered is that they have strong, unique flavors, and may contain more nutrients than the muscle cuts we’re accustomed to eating. You can find heart, kidney and liver (and tongue, which is a muscle meat) at specialty stores and meat markets.

So think found-food. And when you’re out in the field pulling tasty wild carrots, don’t forget to check under the dead logs for a nutritious hearty treat!

Finally, the wine you made last summer is still. There hasn't been a bubble in the bung for weeks, so fermentation is complete.     

It is time to bottle.           

And then bottle some more. It was a great fruit year at my house, so we turned lots of apples, plums and Asian pears into wine. We will be bottling it all in the next few weeks, which sounds romantic until you do it. Here's an intimate look at what home winemakers really do during the dark days of late winter.

1. We soak off labels.

One gallon of wine fills 5 standard wine bottles, so there never seems to be enough of them.Re-used wine bottles provide cool variations in shape and color, and they're free. To soak off the labels, stand the bottles in a cooler or other deep container, and fill both the bottles and the cooler with hot water. Patience pays: wait at least 3 hours to start peeling.

2. We scrub out bottles.

Only uncompromising cleanliness will do, so no bottle gets by without a stiff swish with the bottle brush. We get cross-eyed from looking down bottle necks for lingering bits of anything.

2. We cook corks.

Corks go in easily if you soften them in steam for 3 to 4 minutes first, which releases a distinctive aroma. Wood for dinner again? 

4. We try not to make a mess.

Old towels come in handy for wiping up sticky drips, and finished bottles deserve a good wipe-down with a clean cloth before they're labeled. We keep the bottles upright for a few days, to give the corks time to dry into the necks. Then they are set to rest on their sides. 

5. We practice patience.

The little tastes we take each time we rack or bottle remind us of how far the wine still has to go. But all is well, because we can tell the wine is getting better. Three more months and it should taste good. Six more months and it should taste great.          

And then the trees and vines bear their fruit, and the cycle begins again.

Somewhere between private chefs and in-home help are personal chefs. During my days as a personal chef, I would enter my clients’ kitchens with armloads of fresh ingredients and, several hours later, leave their freezers full of healthy heat-and-eat meals.

I hung up my chef’s coat long ago, but in order to live affordably and eat as healthfully as I want, I often dip back into my old bag of tricks. By following these tips, you, too, can transform an afternoon in the kitchen into weeks of healthy frozen dinners.

1. Plan. I generally shoot for five to seven meals, with no fewer than four servings each, for one cooking day. It’s important to balance labor-intensive dishes, like lasagna, with throw-together dishes, like roasted vegetable sides. Remember, it takes less time to make more servings than a greater variety of meals.
2. Organize. I can save an hour or more on the back end if I spend a few minutes upfront mapping my day, everything from how many cups of onions to chop for all the recipes to when to put the water on to boil.
3. Cook (maybe). Because all of these meals will be reheated, I do as little cooking as possible. I cook vegetables halfway, so they don’t get mushy upon reheating, and walk the line between scary raw poultry and rubbery reheated chicken puck. I assemble casseroles and baked pasta dishes but freeze them without baking. Finally, I prepare pasta sauces and fish sides but wait to cook the spaghetti and fish until it’s time to eat. They cook in a flash and there’s a clear difference in taste and texture.
4. Cool. Food maintains the best flavor and texture if they’re perfectly cool before freezing. I divide everything into portions that make sense for my family of two and cool them on the counter for an hour or so. I chill them further in the fridge before moving them to their place in the freezer.
5. Thaw. I usually move a few days worth of food to the fridge at once. With the exception of fish, meals will generally stay fresh for three to five days once thawed and this gentler thawing method means no microwave-induced gumminess.

Soups are easy, but roasted veggie tacos freeze beautifully, too. What are some of your frozen meal successes? Tell us about them in the comments section below. 

Trendy’s not usually my thing. For more than 30 years, I’ve worn the same outfit of thrift store overalls colored with Rit Dye. My hairstyle has been pretty much the same since eighth grade; when it gets so long it hangs in the toilet, I whack off a few inches. So to find myself part of the hottest new food trend is unsettling. I’m a locavore, the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2007 word of the year. Furthermore, since I was chomping local long before it was cool, you might say I’m a trendsetter. This is heady stuff for a person who has marched out of step and in the wrong direction most of her life.

For example, there was a year in the ’80s when we lived on a tiny hammock in the Everglades. Hunters stopped by our primitive camp site where we weighed carcasses, pulled jawbones from deer and measured antlers for wildlife biologists. The nearest supermarkets were a world away on the outskirts of Miami, but that doesn’t mean we went hungry. We feasted on local tomatoes, green beans, avocados, citrus fruit, game and fish.

The fish were hand-sized sun perch caught by our son Brint. Several times a week we’d roast a batch of them in a long-handled basket over the campfire. No plates required, we just nibbled them off the tiny skeletons. One night we were late starting supper and had to roast them after dark. Not only did they get too brown — charcoal comes to mind — but by the time we finished eating we were smeared with essence of fish from slapping at mosquitoes with our greasy hands. It seemed like a good night for a bath.

Most evenings we washed quickly at the artesian well that bubbled up in our yard. To take a real bath with hot water involved hauling a battery to the park ranger’s cabin for charging. While waiting for the battery, we carried buckets of water from the well to a propane water heater. By the time the 12-volt pump chugged the heated water to our bath tub, we were giddy with anticipation.

Bath night also meant we could use the freshly charged battery to watch our little black and white 12-volt television. By 10 o’clock all three of us were scrubbed, dressed in clean t-shirts and perched on the end of the fold-out bed, waiting to connect with the outside world. The screen flickered on, and the first thing we saw was a pitch for paint-on goo that would make microwaved meat turn brown.

There was total silence as we looked at each other, puzzled at first, then gradually realizing we were not watching a comedy sketch but a real commercial. We had tapped into a parallel universe at just the right moment to make an uproarious memory. The story would be told at family gatherings for the rest of our lives.

That night the joke was on us for being so out of touch. Not wanting to spoil the gaiety of the moment, I didn’t mention the sadness I felt that there could be a market for such a product.

Two decades since that night, the pendulum has slowly swung back toward more Americans demanding real food grown close to home. The grassroots movement has been helped along recently by books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore's Dilemma.

The Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program (SARE), where I work in the Southern Region, has funded more than 700 projects supporting local food systems. To read about them, type “local food systems” into the project database. Here are a few ways researchers, farmers and community activists are using those funds:

* The Save Our Seed project used a SARE grant to educate farmers in producing organically grown seed suited to their microclimates. They use the seeds on their own farms or to sell to other organic farmers. The website has seed production guides and other hard-to-find information.

* Another SARE project helped establish the web resource Florida Farmlink to help farmers and consumers find each other. The site also has listings of land and equipment for sale, educational events and jobs related to food and farming.

*  Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project used SARE funds to track the availability and demand for local food in western North Carolina and then went on to promote ways to get farmers and consumers together. Their farm-to-school project Growing Minds creates relationships between kids and food by taking them to farms and into kitchens to help prepare their own healthy meals. (See photos in the Image Gallery.)

I don’t know what the word of the year will be for 2008, but for those of us who know the satisfaction of eating food grown within hollering distance of our kitchens, locavore is good enough to live by for another year.

As part of the Growing Minds farm-to-school program near Asheville, N.C., 3rd grade students from Brush Creek Elementary help prune celariac at R-Farm in Madison County.

Third grade students from Brush Creek Elementary shell corn for grinding at Palmer Ford Organics.

ISTOCKPHOTO/MARCELO WAIN

Happy holidays everyone! I was reading the Healthy & Green Daily newsletter and came across this great recipe for a Thanksgiving dessert — Vegan Pumpkin Pecan Pie. It sounds delicious, so check it out!

Crust
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup pecans (chopped or whole)
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon Sucanat (see notes)
1 cup trans-fat free vegetable shortening (see notes)
3 tbsp ice water

Filling
16 ounces extra firm lite silken tofu
2 cups pumpkin puree (canned, or fresh – here’s how)
1/2 cup Sucanat (see notes)
1/4 cup plus 2 tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1 cup pecan halves

1. For the crust: Pulse flour, pecans, salt and Sucanat in a food processor until ground, then add shortening and pulse until almost combined. Add ice water and pulse until just blended.

2. Collect dough into two balls and flatten each into a disc. Cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate for two hours until firm. When chilled, roll out into a 9-inch circle on a floured board and place into an 8-inch pie pan. Refrigerate until ready to use.

3. Make the filling: Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Place tofu in a food processor or blender, and blend until creamy. Add pumpkin, Sucanat, 1/4 cup of the maple syrup, vanilla, salt, cinnamon, ginger and cloves, and blend well.

4. Set aside some pecan halves for garnish. Toss remaining pecan pieces with remaining 2 tablespoons maple syrup in a small bowl and then place evenly on the bottom of the pie shell. Pour filling into pie shell and bake approximately 1 hour, or until tester inserted in the center comes clean. Set pie aside to let cool. Garnish with remaining pecan halves.

NOTES
Sucanat is a great natural sweetener that you can read about here. If you don’t have Sucanat, you can use the natural sweetener of your choice.

For vegetable shortening, try Spectrum Organics which is trans-fat free and made with 100 percent organic expeller pressed palm oil.

This recipe was reprinted with permission by Care2 Inc. Care2 is an organization that strives to provide “powerful tools to make a difference in your life, community, country and world.”

It's been getting around the playground at my son's school that I bought a $95 turkey for Thanksgiving this year. The consensus has run somewhere between general disbelief and the statement that my turkey sure better be laying some golden eggs to justify the expense. So, let me back up and explain.

Late last spring I heard a local farmer discussing his pasture-raised beef on our local NPR station. The farm, Thundering Hooves, also offers pasture-raised, heritage turkeys, but you'd better get your act together because they sell out as soon as they go on sale in July.

Who wants to think about Thanksgiving in July? Well, I for one, and it certainly appears that plenty of others do as well. So, we dutifully ordered our turkey as soon as we could and have been diligently waiting ever since. The turkeys were processed a few weeks ago and we picked ours up last weekend. We'll be roasting it rather simply since we want to be able to really taste the meat and see how it compares to the standard breeds.

How's it Heritage? 

This bird is a rare heirloom Unimproved Standard Bronze. Thundering Hooves keeps their own flock so the eggs are produced and incubated on site (rather than chicks purchased from another grower). According to their website:

"There are extremely limited numbers of breeding flock [of unimproved turkeys] left in the country. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy estimated that in 1987 there were 'less than 300 breeding hens' found in America with the possible exception of a limited number of turkeys used by hobbyists and show goers."

These birds are becoming endangered simply for the fact that turkey growers are breeding birds that have larger amounts of white meat. I'm sure you've heard of some commercially grown broad-breasted birds that are so busty they can barely walk and are so far removed from nature that they don't know how to mate and must be artificially inseminated in order to breed. A more thorough examination of the issues with commercial turkeys is made in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Out to Pasture

Most commercially grown turkeys are raised in confined and cramped quarters, given little access to the outside (if at all) and are fed a limited and unnatural diet. This makes for a very low-quality life for the turkey and some argue that it results in a less flavorful and nutritious meat.

Pasture raising is a method of raising flocks that is more than just "free range," which generally means that the birds have access to a small outdoor area that they may or may not actually use. On the other hand, our pasture-ranged turkey roamed freely in the fields, eating bugs, grasses and vegetarian feed. The birds on the farm are free to roam about as they please and their roosts are periodically moved throughout the field. This is generally referred to as pasture rotation and it allows the birds access to new areas of grass and bugs for their dining enjoyment.

Eat Local for Thanksgiving 

Not only was it important for us to purchase a turkey that is raised sustainably and preserves a heritage breed, but it was important for us to buy local. Each year I host an Eat Local campaign urging individuals and families to choose local foods for their Thanksgiving table. Not only does it help support local farmers, but the reduction in transportation of foods also results in lower carbon emissions, some say as much as 2.2 lbs of CO2 per plate of local foods chosen.

So, if you are interested in joining the movement to Eat Local for Thanksgiving, stop by and sign the pledge!

OK, some of you make it all from scratch, right? But others who generally stay away from the oven all year decide to fire it up for that one special something. And the holiday just wouldn't be the same without it, right? Or maybe you have a great memory of making something from scratch and sharing it with someone else for Thanksgiving. (Are you the guest who always brings the best made-from-scratch take-alongs even when you've been told not to bring anything?)

At our house, everyone goes crazy if my dad doesn't make his famous apple-oyster stuffing with homemade cornbread. Hey Dad, you remembered to put fresh oysters on the grocery list this year, right??? Mother Earth News contributing editor Barbara Pleasant remembers fondly making a pecan pie just for herself even when she was living alone: "and it was wonderful!"

So how about you? Please share your "wouldn't be Thanksgiving without it" and "just gotta make it from scratch" stories, as well as your stories about filling Thanksgiving needs through generosity, by posting them in the comments section below.

If your Thanksgiving repertoire could use some new ideas, too, then we've got a seat for you at our table.