The Challenge

Greetings! Welcome to the Mid-Willamette Valley Eat Local Challenge.

What does this mean?
Basically, I was inspired last year by the One Local Summer challenge and thought how cool it would be if our community did something similar. After all, we have great farmers’ markets & farm stands, neighbors selling eggs from their driveways, u-pick farms, co-workers sharing the bounty from their gardens… I’ve been dreaming of compiling all this information since I moved here almost two years ago.

What’s the challenge?
The initial challenge is this: Every week, from Memorial Day to Labor Day (May 26 to Sept 1), try to work local ingredients into your meals. There are no hard and fast rules. One idea is to make one meal a week that is comprised mainly of local ingredients. Another is to try to work local ingredients into all your meals — local eggs for breakfast, local leeks in your soup at night, that sort of thing.

This challenge is only for fun and to get people thinking about their local resources… and sharing that info with their neighbors. If you miss a week, just try again the following week!

Then what?
If you have a blog, then write about your meal and efforts each week, along with any challenges you faced. We’ll do a weekly round-up here and link back to you. We want to inspire your friends and neighbors and show that “local” doesn’t have to always mean “too expensive” or “too difficult”! (If you have a blog and intend to participate, please send me an e-mail by May 19th to let me know. Address coming up.)

Oh! I almost forgot the best part… take photos of your lovely creations & post them! That’s a surefire way to get mouths watering. Well, mine, anyway.

If you don’t have a blog, we’d still love to talk about what you’re doing — send an e-mail to mwvlocal at gmail dot com and tell us about it. We’ll include you in the weekly round-up. And the comments will always be open for you to add your notes from the week.

What else?
I hope that this blog will evolve and grow as people start sharing information here. I want to populate the resources page, and I’m hoping to find a couple of people who will give us some nifty prizes for a drawing or two at the end of summer. It’s just me right now, so I most definitely welcome input on how we can make this a great site for everyone to enjoy.

Bye for now!

P.S. Got appropriate links for me to add to the blogroll? Put them in a comment, please!