Ah, this is the life

Item 1 in today's local food blogging is our summer meal a couple weeks ago, with striped bass caught by a family friend off Cape Cod, breaded and fried by my wife, tomatoes from a gardener in the neighborhood, New England wine, and home-made bread I made with a bread machine (hey, we're making little steps here).

Item 2 is a quick report from the bicycle tour my family of four took for Labor Day weekend. My kids, aged five (on a trail-a-bike) and seven (on his own bike) pedaled the 11-mile length of the Minuteman rail-to-trail, and enjoyed a visit to their grandparents in the suburbs. My wife and I also biked over to visit the weekend and evening garden business of Jennifer Hashley, whose day job is directing the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project at the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts.

At their home just west of Boston, Jennifer and her fiance Pete, who were featured in a great article in the Boston Globe this summer, raise chicken for eggs and meat and are starting up some hogs. Ever since reading about Polyface Farm in Omnivore's Dilemma, I had wanted to see in person these mobile chicken coops that are moved each day to deposit fertilizer in a new part of the pasture. The pigs' joyful meal of tomatoes, similarly, highlights the synergies from traditional diversified farms that get lost in monoculture. My wife and I left with our bicycle pannier full of wonderful produce and eggs and our heads spinning with ideas we look forward to trying.