Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble

Its day 2 and my confidence continues to grow; I successfully made a strawberry rhubarb crumble and homemade whipped cream. I think I burned enough calories whipping the cream by hand to justify all the sugary goodness of the crumble. The recipe for the crumble can be found at http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Rhubarb-Strawberry-Crunch/Detail.aspx. I only had about 2 ½ cups of strawberries and even less rhubarb, so I made mine in an 8x8 baking dish and it worked quite well. It’s a little bit juicy when you cut into it, but I think it tastes great. The rhubarb is especially nice because its tanginess cuts the sweetness of the strawberries and crumble topping perfectly. As for the whipped cream, I just used 1 cup organic heavy cream and then added in a tablespoon of powdered sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla extract just before the peaks began to form.

Overall I’m finding it fairly easy to stick to eating local organic food and I haven’t purchased anything with more than four ingredients. Since the point of this whole experiment is to use what is close by, I have been using the non-organic/local ingredients that were already in my kitchen including pasta, bacon and raisin bran. Here is an outline of my meals yesterday and today (the asterisk indicates an item already in my pantry and the “o” is for things that are organic but NOT local):

Day 1

Breakfast: 3 scrambled eggs with green onion and tomato, homemade bread, strawberries, coffee(o) with half & half(o)
Lunch: whole wheat pasta* with bacon*, rainbow chard, tomatoes and parmesan*
Snack: 1 slice homemade bread with peanut butter* and strawberry jam*
Dinner: leftover lunch pasta
After dinner: several glasses of chardonnay which led to my abuse of the restaurant exception because I was hungry and sitting in Kevin’s restaurant waiting for him to finish his shift. I couldn’t drive home to get food, so I ate some Rueben eggrolls and spring rolls.

Day 2

Breakfast: raisin bran* and milk(o), coffee(o) with half & half(o)
Lunch: homemade bread sandwich with melted cheese from Mountaineer Meadow (a dairy in VA), lettuce, tomato and cucumber; salad with lettuce, tomato, cucumber and goat cheese from MD and balsamic vinaigrette*
Snack: strawberry rhubarb crumble with whipped cream!!

Also, I bought:
organic powdered sugar – 3.99
organic toasted oats – 2.89
organic heavy whipping cream – 3.19
cow cheese from VA – 12.39
goat cheese from MD – 13.99

With a .10 bag credit and tax my total was: $37.26