Molly and me

This is Molly. Molly lives with us and she really IS an old dog. I, on the other hand, am neither a dog nor old (a point which the beloved offspring would surely challenge if they ever read this.) New tricks are highly unlikely to feature in Molly's future. But, I am beginning to learn all kinds of new things, tricks or otherwise. After leaving a 60+ hour a week job as principal of a PreK-8 school and moving into semi-retirement, I am finding that I can still learn lots of new things.

The most recent is that I have become a late entry into the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge. This challenge was issued by Laura at the Urban Hennery blog. (The rules for this can be found at http://urbanhennery.wordpress.com/dark-days-challenge/). My interest in the Dark Days Challenge is to improve what we eat here at our Portland FourSquare house in Ladd's Addition and to be more responsible about the effects of our eating choices. While my school was becoming an International Baccalaureate school, I talked a great deal with staff and parents about the goal for our students to understand that their actions have an effect on people and places all over the world. But, I think I was so busy running the school that I really didn't have time to examine the effects of my own daily choices. You never want to be in the position of telling students to do something you cant really back up in your own life at least in some way.

So, as a small beginning step I signed up today for the Dark Days challenge and prepared a dinner that was somewhat of a warm up for the 200 mile expectation. Tomorrow will be the full-on challenge dinner for this week. Tonight I took a wonderful recipe from the blog of another challenge participant and made "Roasted Poblano and Potato Quiche". I didn't take a picture of it because the photo from the recipe author was much prettier (http://figswithbri.com/?p=73) - I don't have a beautiful fluted pan like hers. The second photo is the gorgeous selection I brought home this morning from the farmer's market. (Being a rookie blogger, I haven't figured out how to move the picture to be next to the relevant text.) This includes the poblanos, walla walla sweet onion, and the German butterball new potatoes that went into the quiche. I used eggs and cheese that were not particularly local because I already had them in the fridge. But it was a positive, and very tasty, start to one of the new things I hope to be learning more about.
Thanks for checking in on my efforts. You can help keep me honest.