08/08/2024
By Karen Shughart
My husband and I love living in a village along the south shore of Lake Ontario. Instead of dealing with grid-lock traffic and smog, our streets are mostly quiet, and the air is clear. Instead of factories and office parks stimulating our economy, agriculture keeps us vital, with a short but prolific growing season.
All the seasons are beautiful, but summer is, without a doubt, the most bountiful. We’re surrounded by orchards and vineyards, cideries and apiaries, and farms offering up a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, dairy products; cattle and chickens sustainably and humanely raised.
For the past several years we’ve made a concerted effort to buy local as much as possible. It’s decreased the number of gas-hogging trips to the grocery store, the food tastes better, the shelf-life is longer, and our purchases are much less expensive.
I must admit I shop frequently – the farmstand near our house is just minutes away – and there’s always an abundance of fresh-picked produce, grass-fed beef, organic eggs from free range chickens, baked goods, preserves, honey, cheeses and milk.
Obtaining our food this way is exciting and challenging, I create menus based on what’s available during any given week. If I can’t get spinach, I use kale or romaine. If strawberries are out of season, I buy cherries or berries; peaches and plums. I’ll substitute Swiss chard for beet greens and when I can’t get cherry tomatoes, I buy the large, beefy ones that, just picked from the vine, remind me of those we sliced and ate on white bread with mayonnaise during childhood, the juices running down our chins.
Committing to buying what’s in season and for the most part only eating when’s grown here also means if we want it fresh from the source, we won’t start eating corn, apples and pears until later in the summer, along with winter squashes and root vegetables that will provide us with delicious options into late fall. Sometimes I purchase more than we can quickly consume to freeze and enjoy when the sun rises late and sets early, and the days are cold.
We don’t eat many sweets, but occasionally, especially on hot summer days, it’s nice to have a cold treat. I make homemade ice cream with milk, cream and fruit purchased from nearby dairies and farms. A wine and spirits store, a short walk from our house, carries an increasingly large array of award-winning Finger Lakes wines; and at a shop up the road, we can purchase hard ciders and spirits crafted from regional ingredients.
We’re committed to doing this every year, it works well for us. We like supporting our agricultural community and knowing that everything we eat is fresh and healthy and supplied to us by our friends and neighbors.
Karen Shughart is the author of the Edmund DeCleryk cozy mystery series, published by Cozy Cat Press. She has also co-written two additional mysteries with Cozy Cat authors, two non-fiction books, and is a blogger at Ladies of Mystery, 
