The best way to enjoy the local bounty

I ran across this article on the best way to prepare vegetables (New York Times), and thought it had a lot of good information. Fresh fruit and vegetables hold valuable and important vitamins and minerals within their bodies, but how can our bodies most efficiently make use of the available nutrition? The raw food movement is gaining steam (especially in the Eugene area), but perhaps raw is not always the best and most efficient use of fruits and veggies. It’s an interesting read, and (forgive the pun) good food for thought. One of the most interesting statistics is that microwaving some vegetables allows the veggies to retain 90% of their nutritional value compared to steaming or boiling. The microwave method is my personal favorite, both for speed and flavor, so it’s great to be “vindicated” a bit.

When we started this blog, one of the stumbling points that we wanted to tackle was how to prepare and enjoy the local bounty. The Willamette Valley can grow a lot of standard delicious fruit and vegetables, and we are quite privileged to live in such a great food system; but, not everyone was raised on an organic farm with good information and ideas of what to do with Swiss Chard, or the deliciousness of beet greens.

If you have good recipes for non-mainstream foods, please write them in a comment or shoot me an email with your contribution (photos always welcome).

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