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If you're hungry and willing to fork over the cash, there are plenty of companies that will be willing to deliver you a meal. MSNBC recently noted a few companies that are now bringing their goods right to your front door (or, in some cases, your kid's school).

• For $100, California-based RAWvolution will send you a box filled with two soups, four entrees, four side dishes and two desserts, all - you guessed it - raw and organic.
• For parents who are way too busy to throw an apple and a pb&j in a paper bag for their kid, they can schedule to have Freshlunches deliver Junior a healthy, organic lunch (about $4-$7 per day), just like mom would make. Except...she didn't. Some company did. Oh, well - guess it's better than Lunchables, right?
• Three Potato Four will send you a week's worth of food (or so they say), which includes four organic vegetarian entrees, two side dishes, soup, salad, dessert, and bread. Heck, they even throw in some flowers for ambiance!
  

Now, these options are all well and good, but if you want healthy food delivered to your family, why not join a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) program, and support your local farms while going easy on transportation emissions in the process? And if you need some company to make your kid's lunch every day, maybe you should re-assess your super-busy schedule, no?

Source

Published in 1991, the Farmhouse Cookbook by Susan Herrman Loomis is a hefty paperback filled with recipes that Loomis spent two years collecting. She traveled the country, visiting family farms and small towns, eating amazing food and compiling those dishes into this book. I picked my copy up at a local thrift store about a year ago for $.89 and it has become one of my favorite cookbooks to read novel-style. Loomis is an engaging writer and never presents a recipe without giving a little history about it the people who shared it with her.

Another thing I find interesting about this cookbook is that Loomis writes it with an eye to local and sustainable farming, shopping and cooking. That wouldn't be surprising if she had written it in the last five years, but being that it is nearly 20 years old, I look at her perspective as something akin to visionary.

This is a cookbook I recommend for people who want a good read and inspiration for fairly easy, tasty dishes that take into account issues of local and seasonal eating.

I've been reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a book extolling the virtues of eating locally (and the horrors of eating veggies trucked in from California, Chile, and other places far afield). Beyond simply pushing organic food or a vegetarian lifestyle, Kingsolver suggests that eating foods grown locally, in season, by farmers using sustainable practices can, basically, save the world -- not to mention, be delicious. I've swallowed her pitch hook, line, and heirloom potato, and have begun deeply rethinking our family's grocery lists. Starting this process in the dead of winter is a challenge, and "the sustainable food project" is my way of sharing the struggle with you.

The sandwich, a staple of my family's diet, is a particularly interesting problem. Were I to open a pictorial culinary dictionary under "S," I'd imagine a photo of bread, meat, tomato, lettuce, mayo. But fresh red tomatoes and leafy green lettuce are anything but in season in Oregon, where I live -- and the vast majority of the U.S. and Europe for the next several months. Because it's easy to find a sustainably-farmed source, we've been eating lots of beef, ham, and crusty local bread, but what else?

I've been able to find lots of delicious, flavorful options utilizing local, organic produce.

Recipe and photos after the jump.

Yep, you read that right. There's a new "low carb" diet being touted out there, but thisone has absolutely nothing to do with your health. It has everything to do with the health of the environment.

Instead of calories of carbs, this diet has you counting carbon. That's right. The Low Carbon Diet is one in which you calculate the "carbon cost" of your food to help reduce the emissions that cause the greenhouse effect and global warming. The goal of the diet, which is actually a program that is being tested by a company called Bon Appetit, is to make people "realize that their food choices can have an effect on climate change."

What does this mean for us? It means that instead of eating a tropical fruit that took a lot of energy to transport to your grocery store, you go to your local farmers' market and buy what's been grown locally.

Hey, now that's a diet I don't mind at all!