Via Bookslut (a favorite literary blog of mine) - The Haphazard Gourmet has a good time pairing foods with books that have been banned in celebration of Banned Books Week.

When my sister gave me a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for my birthday last May, my initial reaction was mixed. I did enjoy her novel The Poisonwood Bible, though not enough to go out and buy every other book she wrote. And I fancied myself a reasonably informed Locavore, and not in need of a sermon on the benefits of eating locally. Didn't I already participate (however feebly) in an Eat Local Challenge in 2006? (Was it really that long ago? Gulp.) Wasn't I already fairly vigilant about buying food in season and at the very least grown in France? I kept bananas and exotic foods to a minimum and gardened as best I could on my terrace. I was pretty smug actually. But the description of the book intrigued me nevertheless: Kingsolver and her family moved from Tucson Arizona where "Virtually every unit of food consumed moves into town in a refrigerated module from somewhere far away. Every ounce of the city's drinking, washing and goldfish-bowl-filling water is pumped from a non-renewable source..." to the Appalachian mountains, where rain falls and plants grow. Her voice pulled me into the narrative in spite of myself and I was hooked. On page 11, I put down the book and went to my computer to send a message to my big sister to thank her for giving it to me, even taking the time to type out a quote. I put my big brother on copy too and told him he should get a copy. On page 12, I decided that Barbara of Tigers and Strawberries had too much in common with Kingsolver not to be aware of the book, so I wrote her too. The convert had turned to proselytizer.

The thing is, Kingsolver's arguments made so much sense. And she put them so beautifully. What's more by the time I finished the book, I was armed to do more than I thought possible to minimize our family's impact on the environment and improve our diets. I'd love everyone who reads this blog to go out and buy a copy, but for those who don't have the time, here is a breakdown of some of her points:

Buying your food locally is good for...
- the environment, because a minimum of fossil fuel is needed to transport it
- your tastebuds, because freshly picked seasonal produce has more flavor
- your local economy and the small business person
- your budget, contrary to what you might think.

Growing your own food is good for those reasons (well, perhaps aside from the local economy) as well as...
- your mental health
- your physical well-being
- the world, especially if you avoid genetically modified seeds and favor heirloom varieties

But the part that was a real revelation for me was the idea that anyone who has access to locally grown fruit (and providing you don't live in Tucson, it probably includes you) can cheaply put aside vegetables and fruit for the long winter months when they are no longer in season. For some reason, perhaps too much Little House on the Prairie when I was younger (yeah, I blame a lot on those books), I have always had it in my head that when you preserve it should always be your own produce and in large quantities. But what is more logical than to buy vegetables locally in season when they are dirt cheap and can them? You know the end product has no preservatives, you know it hasn't travelled thousands of miles to get to you and - what's more - you know it's good. Because you made it. So in addition to the £13 box of organic vegetables that I order each week for our family's consumption from a local organic farm, I also have topped up each week with a request for tomatoes and apples. I've been making small batches and we now have 20 jars of tomatoes and tomato sauce and a dozen applesauce jars. I also foraged enough blackberries from the local hedges for five jars of jam. In addition, I've preserved fruit and vegetables from our usual orders that I wasn't going to be able to use before they went bad: a bag of frozen broad beans and a beautiful jar of preserved plums. I am channelling Laura Ingalls Wilder.

There is nothing I like better than a good caprese salad with fresh mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes. I make it all summer long, or whenever I can get good quality tomatoes. I've made it straight up when we visited friends in Chicago a couple weeks ago (as seen here) with some farmer's market heirlooms and tomatoes straight from our friends' garden.

This last week, at the mini-farmer's market outside my office (at Tide Point - Hull Street at Key Highway, 4-7pm, Thursday afternoons), I bought some basil, some very fresh mozzarella (the vendor claimed it had been made just three hours prior to my purchasing it) and some delicious Irish sandwich bread (not soda bread - the name was something like "Cuane" or "Culane' - I'll write it down next week).

We had heirlooms unused from the Sunday Baltimore Farmer's Market under Interstate 83 at home. It occurred to me that one ought to be able to put together a pretty delicious sandwich with good ingredients like the ones I had. So.. I did.

If you make this sandwich, have napkins ready and expect the oil to migrate through the bread. Also expect to want more of everything when you're done - even if you're stuffed to the gills.

This is a very simple sandwich and it depends entirely on the quality of the ingredients. If you use hothouse tomatoes, low moisture part skim mass-produced mozzarella and Wonder bread, you WILL be disappointed. The olive oil will be swallowed up in the bread's flavor so if you need to skimp somewhere, that's the place.

Mmm... kale. What? You don't get that immediate association?

Kale has an image problem. It's dark green like spinach, it's tough like the bushes in your front yard (and might be a decorative plant if your landscaper has a penchant for frilly greens), and it takes a mess of it to make a full meal. Yet, kale in all it forms is a wonderfully tasty way to get iron and calcium, and with a little oil, a little garlic, some eggs and cheese - you can make anything outstanding.

I came to fritattas late. Like two years ago late. For some reason, when I was making fast dinners for myself and later for myself and Rebecca, the idea of putting an egg dish into the oven to finish just never occurred to me.

Well, it occurs to me now, and kale is probably the vegetable I make fritattas with the most. But what I make is an EXTREME fritatta. What? The whole extreme fad is over? Oh.

Well, it's a fritatta with a ton of kale and garlic in it - one pound before cleaning, to be exact. and I do take the time to clean it up. Those stems can be OK if you cook them forever, but by that time you've lost a lot of the subtleties of the leaf's flavor. Better to just chuck the refuse and stick with the good stuff.

There are lots of different types of kale. I used baby Red Russian kale for this dish because that's what was on at the farmers' market in Baltimore Sunday. It's relatively tender (as kale goes), but even tender kale needs a lot of heat to break down the structure. If I'd used green kale or adult Red Russian kale, I'd have boiled the leaves in heavily salted water before sauteing with oil and garlic. Adjust the recipe accordingly.

At the farmer's market in Baltimore, this last Sunday, we finally hit the bean stand at the right time to get a bunch of fresh beans without having to wait in line for an hour. Usually, the line for the bean stand is the longest one - longer even than the one for the freshly made doughnuts or than the line of semi conscious drones shuffling toward the coffee stand.

We didn't waste the opportunity. I would have liked to pick up some lima beans, but the Redhead finds them slightly less appealing than whale snot, so we ended up with a pound of butter beans that I made a too-sweet baked bean casserole out of and four pounds of delicious, fresh black beans.

I don't know about you, but if I'd never seen black beans fresh before. I've used them from cans and from packs of dried beans, but to see them as they come from the field was something special. Of course, they tasted NOTHING like I was used to - fresher, crisper, a little less flavorful, and a bit... uncooked.

So I hit the web and the books and found practically nothing about how to use fresh black beans. No one's seen these things! We're so far removed from the production process that people only ever reference dried or canned beans.

Well, here's you recipe for a simple fresh black bean salad. I kept the ingredients to a minimum (ha! - No really). You could add diced mango or papaya or tomato or avocado to this salad to give it a slightly fresher feel, but as it sits, this is a nice way to use black beans of any sort and to make a big mess of them with whole grains, vegetables, and a little fat that you can take as lunch for a week.

Eggplant is one of my favorite vegetables and I buy them with surprising regularity, given the fact that I am the only member of the family who actively likes them. The Critic will tolerate moussaka, as will Big Brother on a good day. Little Brother will sometimes eat my leftovers on the rare occasion there are any, but even I have to agree it rarely looks appetising when you whizz an eggplant dish into baby food. But I love picking out a firm, glossy, purple eggplant. I love the nuttiness of its flesh. And I love how soft and sweet it becomes when you cook it until it collapses in a delicate mound.

What I don't love is how hard it is to reach that perfectly cooked state. Cook it too little and it remains bitter, chewy and tough. Cook it too much and it becomes slimy. As a result, there only seem to be two practical ways to cook an eggplant: drown it in oil or bake it until it surrenders. The former has obvious drawbacks, both on a health front and from a textural standpoint as the eggplant easily gets slimy. And the latter leaves you with flesh that is really only fit for baby food or an eggplant caviar.

My solution? I like to brush slices of eggplant with a touch of olive oil and grill them - either on a barbecue or simply on a cast iron grill pan. If you get the temperature right the slices will be tenderly cooked through and you'll have beautiful charred lines across the flesh. If I want the eggplant to be especially tender, as in this recipe, I will also cover the pan for the first half of cooking to essentially steam the slices as they grill. (For a salad, I prefer my slices a bit "meatier" and don't bother.) So this is my secret for Eggplant Parmesan. It's my favorite vice, the dish I make at the end of the summer when I have a handful of tomatoes from the garden and the Critic is away for the evening doing his thing. The smell of cheese and tomato and eggplant (and garlic, always garlic) wafting from the oven is enough for me to move the children's bed time forward half an hour in the hope that I can enjoy it in peace and quiet with a good book, all alone with my beloved dinner.

I always think that I have made enough for dinner and lunch the next day. And yet somehow that pan is always empty when I go to bed at night.

1) Manx kippers. I'm hoping to buy a lot more food locally once we are living in rural England but as a treat (and it is a fantastic treat) we will occasionally be ordering a box of smoked fish from the Isle of Man.

2) Local beer.

3) Local organic meat and vegetables.

4) Pubs. Gastropubs. Independently-owned-pubs-with-local-ales. Pubs with outdoor play areas where you can keep an eye on the kids while you enjoy a warm, flat beer. (Okay, the latter is going to take some getting used to - I might have to stick to cold cider initially.)

5) Great Cheddar and Stilton.

6) The Borough Market (which I have not yet visited, by the way).

7) Cheap beanz.

8) Clotted cream, cottage cheese and cream cheese.

9) The space to grow my own vegetables.

10) Sausages and bacon.

What have I missed? Those of you who love England and its much maligned cuisine: what do you love about eating in England?