DAY SIX - SATURDAY Two days left and little produce left in the house, I drove to work wondering about what to pull together for tonight's local dinner. Sean wasn't working so I asked if he could spend some time going to the Brattleboro Co-Op to see what they have to offer. Never a man to avoid a challenge, he said sure. What I didn't realize was that his plan was to include our daughters in his quest, turning their privileged adolescent perspective into a new kind of work et

DAY FIVE - FRIDAY Friday is usually pizza day here at the Kirby compound. When I have time, I make pizza dough and sauce in advance and then purchase mozzarella and toppings with the girls on our way home from school. Or, as a break from cooking, I buy a 'veggie pie' from our local pizza shop. This Friday, I chose a simpler route. Realizing that I had spent a considerable amount of time this week shopping, planning, cooking and downright obsessing about eating locally, I need

DAY FOUR - THURSDAY I make the best White Bean & Kale Soup in the world. No lie, it's sooooo good, and it's vegan. My family requests it for dinner at least once per week, alongside homemade bread. As you probably noticed, we still haven't found a local option for our superfood staples, kale and garlic. So far, we've been to the mega grocers, Shaw's & Price Chopper, our two local markets, River Valley and Blue Mountain Produce, and have raided our neighbor's freezer. We hav

DAY THREE - WEDNESDAY A sad heart, and a refrigerator full of produce, Sean again offered to cook his mystery dinner. When I arrived home from another per diem day, Sean whisked me out of the kitchen while he was prepping and asked Camille to tell me the story of their search for a local snack in the Price Chopper close to her school. Camille has Type 1 Diabetes and is an avid dancer. Periodically, her blood sugar is low after dance class and she needs to consume a glucose so

DAY TWO - TUESDAY Still without a sufficient amount of produce in the house, I awoke thinking 'How am I going to find the time today to allocate to my quest?' Still many steps away from being self sufficient, Sean and I work away from our homestead at varied intervals in order to assure steady cash flow. I have two per diem positions at a local mental health facility and Sean travels far and wide as a freelance cinematographer. Today was my day to get up early, get the girls

DAY ONE - MONDAY Logic told me to create a weekly menu and a shopping list, generated from a mental picture of what we assumed we could find during a snowy March in Vermont. As a starting point, we decided on fish tacos (crazy, I know), white bean & kale soup, pasta with red sauce and vegetable curry with rice. Easy choices, except for the fish, but river trout is caught regularly in these parts, maybe we can find a frozen one? I started by shopping at a large retailer, Shaw'

I then raised the question, how do our local farmers survive during the dark days of winter if their immediate communities don't buy their products year round? Ivy, my quiet though astute vegetarian noted, 'we should buy maple syrup from the Browns, we haven't done that since last spring.' Absolutely! Now you're on the localvore bandwagon. My other daughter, Camille, a true omnivore, stated, 'so we can't have grapefruit juice???' Not wanting my teens to hitchhike back to NYC,

Flat landers the locals call us. Transplants from New York City to rural Vermont with dreams of living off the land and learning how to become self-sustaining. My little nuclear family consists of myself (a former administrator at a not-for-profit, turned adolescent farmer), my husband Sean, (a traveling cinematographer and our property maintenance guru), and our twin 15-year-old daughters, Ivy & Camille, wonderfully creative souls without a lick of interest in getting dirty